RESISTING GRACE
Lecture for the UU Christian Fellowship Revival 2006
Friday, November 3rd, 2006
by Jim Mulholland
co-author with Phil Gulley of "If Grace Is True" and "If God Is Love."

Introduction

It is a real joy for me to be here with you today. It’s not often that I get a chance to preach to the choir. Though people are seldom rude or obnoxious, Phil and I are more accustomed to speaking before hostile and resistant groups where people sit with their arms crossed and glares on their faces.

I remember our very first speech after the release of If Grace Is True. We were asked to speak at the Plainfield Public Library – a large, state of the art facility in a suburb outside of Indianapolis. Though the book had just been released, people in Indianapolis had been critiquing the book for months. An Indianapolis newspaper had printed an interview with Phil where he’d explained why his Christian publisher – Multinomah – had fired him. They’d fired him because he and I were writing If Grace Is True.

In the article, Phil spoke of our belief that all people will be saved. Within days, the newspaper was inundated with angry letters to the editor. Phil soon faced an effort by some Quakers to see his credentials as a Quaker pastor removed. One Quaker leader distributed a letter in which he suggested Phil and I should be taken outside the meetinghouse and horsewhipped – harsh words when you remember that Quakers are supposed to be pacifists. Long before the book was released and we spoke at that library, most of Indianapolis had an opinion about our writing.

As I speak across the country, I’ve discovered people on the coasts are sometimes surprised by the energy Midwestern folks give to the questions of hell – which is precisely why most Midwesterners believe the people on the coasts are headed there. In the heartland of America, where Phil and I were born and raised, questioning hell isn’t a religious discussion, but a battleground in a cultural war.

So Phil and I entered the Plainfield Library with trepidation. The Library had received several threatening phone calls and were warned that some “good” Christians would be picketing the event. (When we told this to our editor, he was ecstatic. He said, “Don’t worry. There is no such thing as bad publicity in the book business.”) Of course, he wasn’t speaking that night. The Library wasn’t nearly as excited. They hired extra security and announced that no public statements or questions would be allowed after the lecture. When Phil and I rose to speak, it was clear that many were resistant.

Today, I’m not going to give the lecture we gave at the Plainfield Public Library. I don’t expect I need to. Most of you are convinced of God’s commitment to ultimately redeem, unite, and reconcile all of creation. I don’t need to talk about the Biblical inferences, the prominence of early Christian universalist thought, or the theological reasoning that makes universalism so attractive to many of us. I don’t need to mention Origen or John Scotus, Ballou or Murray. I suspect many of you are more knowledgeable about the theology, the history and the tradition than I.

Instead, I’d like to speak about a subject on which I am an authority. I’d like to explore the reasons people resist the good news that God will ultimately reconcile every person. I am an expert on this issue for two reasons. First, because I have responded to hundreds of hostile questions and dozens of disgruntled letters. I’ve heard all the spoken and figured out many of the unspoken reasons people find univeralism offensive. Second, I am sympathetic to such responses since I once resisted as well. I seldom hear a question that I haven’t asked.

My Resistance

I wasn’t born a universalist. Indeed, until I was 30 years old, I was a convinced and ardent fan of dualism – the theological construct in which some are saved and destined for heaven and others are doomed for hell or destruction. My conversion began on a spring night sitting around a campfire with my friend, Phil.

Phil and I were in seminary together and had become fast friends. In 1990, we were in our third year and getting tired of the academic demands. We decided to take a tent and camp in the woods. We pledged to limit our conversations to non-theological issues.

This turned out to be much more difficult than we expected. At some point during the evening, we discussed a heinous crime that had been plastered across the Indianapolis newspapers. Phil asked me what I thought of the perpetrator and I said, “Hell is too good for some people.” To which Phil responded, “I’m not certain I believe in hell.”

Within seconds our pledge was broken. Phil and I spent several hours stoking the campfire as we talked about the fires of hell. On that night, Phil returned often to this question - “How could a God of love condemn so many of his children to pain and destruction?” In response, I asked Phil all the questions he and I hear – what about the Bible, what about tradition, what about justice, what about holiness, and on and on. At the end of the night, I told Phil I wasn’t convinced, but that I would commit to reading the Bible from cover to cover and see if there was any hint of what he suggested.

Friends, the Bible is a dangerous book. Once I read it with a new question – does God want or intend to save every person? – I discovered passages and verses I’d never heard preached. Though dualism was still the prominent position, I began to hear the discordant minority voice.

I also began to study the tradition. I read the early Church fathers. I realized many early Christians would have thought dualism a heretical position.

In the midst of this exploration, I was asked to do a funeral. It is the funeral described in the opening story of If Grace Is True. One of the deceased woman’s children asked me, “Where is my mother?” In the past, I would have judged her damned, but answered that she was in the hands of God. But, for this first time in my life, when I used those words, I didn’t use them to camouflage bad news. Being in the hands of God was suddenly a wonderful and redeeming situation. My heart was changing even though my mind still resisted.

I told Phil that I wanted to believe he was right. Phil and I hear that often. People will stand in our audiences with tears in their eyes and say, “What you describe is so wonderful and I want to believe it, but I can’t.” Today I want to talk about the reasons that people can’t believe. Why was it so difficult for me to believe what seemed to be such good news?

Theologies of Fear

Looking back, the greatest obstacle was my upbringing. I was taught to fear God. Now I want to be careful when I say this. The churches I grew up in were gracious places. The nurseries were immaculate and the children deeply loved. My teachers and preachers were gentle people. The problem wasn’t the churches or the people, but the stories they felt compelled to tell.

Think about it. At a very early age, I was taught stories like the story of Adam and Eve – how they made one mistake and God kicked them out of the garden. I was taught the story of the flood, where God killed millions and only saved a few. Story after childhood story emphasized this dualistic theme.

When I was in junior high, Mr. Rice – a wonderfully gracious man who let us set up a tent in his backyard on summer nights – taught us the story of Uzzah from II Samuel. If you don’t remember the story, I can understand. It’s a minor story.

In the story, King David is bringing the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem from its hiding place. They load the ark on a wagon pulled by oxen and start their journey. Somewhere along the way, the wagon tips and it looks as if the ark will tumble from the wagon. Uzzah, one of David’s men, reaches out to steady the ark. And, according to the Bible, when Uzzah did this, God’s anger was kindled and Uzzah was struck down dead. This is the story Mr. Rice taught to his sixth grade boys.

Now, in fairness, having taught sixth grade boys myself, I can understand why someone might want to teach the lesson that touching anything off limits can have dire consequences. Sixth grade boys want to touch everything. Unfortunately, the hidden message was the same message King David got – God is to be feared.

What puzzled me about that story at the time was that I didn’t think Uzzah did anything wrong. It would be years before I’d find any explanation for God’s harsh response. In college, I came across this story again and began to study the commentaries. I found two primary explanations. The first was that Uzzah’s act demonstrated a lack of faith – that he didn’t trust God to protect the ark, and that his death was a warning. The second was that the ark was supposed to be carried by eight men on two long poles and that David has disobeyed God by using the wagon. Neither of these explanations made much sense. In the first, Uzzah was an object lesson. In the second, he died because of a bureaucratic error. In either case, God was presented as capricious and easily angered and junior high boys learned to fear God.

God was always the heavy. In my childhood, God was to be feared and Jesus was to be loved. Though they were partners in saving the world, they served very different roles. Jesus was the good cop and God was the bad cop. Jesus would plead with you to do the right thing. He loved and cared for you. He’d take a bullet for you. He wanted to save you. But…if you didn’t respond to Jesus, you had only to look over your shoulder to see God standing in the corner, arms crossed, cracking his knuckles, with a glare on his face. You didn’t want to be left in that room with God.

For years I feared God. It wasn’t until I was thirty and exploring the universalist question that I stumbled upon a verse I’d never heard taught or preached. The passage in I John 4:18 reads, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” In that moment, I realized my love for God had been very imperfect.

Unfortunately, in my experience, there are many gracious churches and Christians who have been teaching this imperfect love. I did. Years ago, when I was a youth minister, Billy Graham brought his crusade to Indianapolis. Part of the crusade was a large youth rally. Excited, I brought nearly 20 kids from our inner city church to the rally.

It was a typical youth rally. There was loud music with Christian words. There were beach balls bouncing through the crowd. There were a series of speakers. And, finally, there was the altar call. A man explained to these kids that only those in right relationship with God could ever hope for heaven. Those you rejected God were doomed to hell. He said, “If you have any doubts about God love and acceptance tonight, you need to come to this altar and give your life to Christ.”

As you’d expect, hundreds went. About ten of those kids were mine. Initially, I was excited. But then I noticed an alarming phenomenon. The kids still in their seats were from my most stable and loving homes while the kids at the altar were from my most dysfunctional homes. The kids who were being loved by parents and friends weren’t worried about the love of God and the kids from homes where love was conditional and tenuous were convinced God must be equally fickle. On that night – even before I became fully convinced of God’s unconditional love – I sensed that love and fear are incompatible. Those of us – and we are many - who were taught to fear will have great difficulty believing in unconditional love. We will say, “I want to believe that God can save every person, but I can’t.”

Theologies of Favor

Of course, fear isn’t only obstacle to believing in God’s love. I was also taught that God was about favor and reward. This is an age-old problem. The gospels report James and John sidling up to Jesus one day and asking, “Jesus, when you come into your kingdom, grant us the thrones on your right and left hands.” They, like many of us, had assumed religion was chiefly about self-preservation and promotion. The other disciples – once they hear of James and John’s request – are indignant. The Bible doesn’t say why, but I don’t think it was because they were disgusted with James and John’s theological assumptions. They were just upset James and John asked Jesus first.

It would be easy to suggest theologies of reward are the domain of prosperity preachers on late night television, but this theology permeates our religious culture. Whenever Phil and I speak, we invariably have someone say, “I’ve been a good person all my life and now you’re telling me everyone is going to get in. I guess I was wasting my time.” I’ve learned to ask, “Why do you serve God? Is it for the reward or the relationship?”

Most of us were tempted and manipulated with the reward long before we were invited to a relationship. When I was a youth minister, I inherited a Wednesday night children’s program that had about a dozen children attending. The church asked me to expand that program. So I did what was done to me as a child. I created a point system where the kids could earn certain points for bringing their bibles, other points for behaving or memorizing verses, more points for special tasks, and the most points for inviting another child. Each week, those with enough points could turn them in for prizes.

Within weeks, that program grew from a dozen to as many as a hundred. The Church was excited, I was proud, and we even had articles written about us in denominational papers. Other churches copied our plan. In the midst of that program, I heard a child invite another child with these words, “If you come to our church, you can earn prizes.”

At the time, I winced, but convinced myself that saving souls – at any cost – is still saving souls. Looking back, I realize I was teaching children that God and the church is all about prizes. Later, when I read books on church growth, I learned that most church growth programs are a variation on my children’s program – only the prizes have to be more sophisticated – an aerobics class, a ski trip, the best daycare in town. My children’s program was preparing children to be religious consumers.

It wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. In both the examples of the youth rally and the children’s program, I was doing what had been done to me. I was teaching children and youth to be either cowering supplicants or religions gold diggers. I was teaching them to understand life as either earning heaven or escaping hell. For many, this indoctrination makes us very resistant to universal hopes. We can’t believe that everyone can win the prize.

Theologies of Hate

As much as I regret learning and teaching these lessons, there is one more lesson that makes it very difficult for us to believe God will save every person. Many of us have been taught by the church to hate.

Whenever I say this, people cringe. They suggest I’m being too harsh. The church – even the most judgmental ones – often remind people to love their enemies. I agree, but I would suggest that dualism almost always leads to hate. Once we identify someone as an enemy, the battle to be gracious and compassionate is largely lost.

Phil and l laugh about our upbringing. He and I were both born in small, county seat, rural towns. We both have three brothers and a sister. We both have a parent who was an educator. We both attended church faithfully as children. The only difference was that Phil was raised Catholic and I was raised Protestant. Yet even there the message was the same – we were both taught the other was going to hell.

As a child, I was a member of the CYC – the Christian Youth Crusaders. Every Wednesday night, we’d gather in the church basement and earn points and win prizes. We’d wear uniforms and have sword drills. (if you don’t know what that is, I’ll explain it later.) We’d sing our theme song, “I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery. I may never fly over the enemy, but I’m in the Lord’s army.”

It all seemed innocent enough until you realize we were being taught that we were in a religious war. We were the good guys and they – non-Christians of every stripe – were the bad guys. It was “us” against “them.” Dualism was not simply a theological construct to help us understand our ultimate destiny. It gave us our marching orders in the war against our enemies. Our enemies were to be loved until they rejected our message, but then all bets were off. Like the God we feared, we were free to harm and destroy. Indeed, we’d be rewarded for such behavior.

Often, Phil and I are asked why our books matter. People suggest – rightly – that no one really knows what happens after death. It’s all speculation. I agree. However, I believe what we think about our final destiny has a tremendous impact on how we treat one another. If we believe we will one day sit across God’s banqueting table from our enemies, we will approach them in hope of reconciliation. If we believe they will one day be burning in hell, we will approach them less compassionately.

Dualism always allows me to identify someone as unacceptable, unlovable and therefore subhuman. Universalism robs us of this justification and implies a connection to all. No wonder we resist.

Clarence Jordan once explained why Jesus was so adamant that we not call each other “fools.” Jordan writes, “Calling your brother a fool, enemy, heretic, or a host of other epithets is the first step toward eventually justifying their murder and destruction.” Calling someone unsaved or non-Christian is the first step to dehumanizing them.
Matthew Fox, in his book Original Blessing, writes, “The sin behind all sin is dualism. Take any sin: war, burglary, rape theivery. Every such action is treating another as an object outside oneself. This is dualism. This is behind all sin.”

Friends, no wonder so many of us find it difficult to believe in God’s unconditional love. No wonder many think it impossible for God to reconcile the world. We’ve been taught to fear and not love, to seek reward and not relationship, to hate rather than seek reconciliation. When people say, “What you write about is so wonderful and I want to believe it, but I can’t” many of them are expressing the difficulty in unlearning these lessons, taught to many of us from our earliest childhood.

However, if our resistance is merely theological, I’ve discovered that resistance will eventually break. As I look back on my life, though I was taught to fear, to seek reward, and even to hate, I experienced unconditional love. My father and mother showered their children with such love that when I began to think of God as such a parent then my theology had to begin to change. I understood that whoever and whatever God was, God must be superior in quality and characteristic than to my father and mother. This meant God was impressive indeed. I realize I was fortunate.

The Power of Pain

Not everyone has had my experience. It has taken me some time to discover that the greatest cause of resistance to God’s grace is not theological. It is emotional.

I want to return to that speech Phil and I gave at the Plainfield Library. When Phil and I arrived that day, there were no picketers, much to our editor’s disappointment. The room was full, but security was unnecessary. People were attentive and polite. They listened and wrote down their questions. At the end of our lecture, Phil and I were given the questions and Phil stood to answer the first one.

It was a question about how we could reject the historic witness of the church. However, before Phil could actually answer the question, a woman stood, red faced and angry, and said the question was hers. She immediately began to attack Phil personally, judging him heretical and dangerous. As Phil tried to respond, I watched the woman and listened. At some point, she said something like, “Hell is too good for some people.”

As you can imagine, those words caught my attention. I remembered the heinous crime that Phil and I had debated around that campfire and I realized that someone had done something horrible to this woman and that her response to us was not theological. It was emotional. What Phil and I threatened was her hope that the person who had hurt her would someday experience her pain. Hell was a comfort to her – a comfort that we were threatening.

I’m so glad she stood that day and spoke. Phil and I have learned the primary reason people resist the message of God’s universal forgiveness is because they aren’t ready to forgive. They refuse to allow God to do what they are yet unwilling to do. What they need from us is not our theological arguments, but our patience and compassion. There is pain in them that needs to be healed. More important, they are a gift to us.

Phil and I have discovered that our speeches go much better if someone like that woman stands and confronts us. When that happens we are given the opportunity to be gracious rather than to talk about grace. Their resistance tests our commitment to grace. An impatient universalist is someone who has not fully embraced the unconditional love of God. Grace must overcome resistance; not mock or ignore it. It must trust that the same passion with which people resist can someday be the passion with which they love.

Recently, a woman came up after and speech and asked to speak to me alone. She explained that she had read If God Is Love and hated it. She’d told people that it was because of the theology, but that wasn’t true. What she hated was a story of someone forgiving the person that molested them.

She went onto explain that her father had molested her as a child. She’d never told anyone, pretending it never happened. Then her father had become senile and she was forced to put him into a nursing home. Visiting him was pure misery – he was combative and mean and she was finding her long buried anger growing and growing.

With tears in her eyes, she told me that on the third reading of our book she finally understood the problem. The reason she couldn’t believe in God’s redeeming love was because she couldn’t offer that to her father. The night of that breakthrough, she went to visit her father. She said, “I told him I remembered the molestation, but that I forgave him. I didn’t know if he even understood me, but when I hugged him he hugged me back.”

Over the next few weeks, her father was a different man. The nurses marveled at the transformation. He was docile and cooperative. One night, he died quietly in his sleep. His daughter said, “It was that experience that changed my mind. I realized what I wanted most was what God wanted – for the relationship between my father and I to be healed.”

Friends, I tell you that story to remind us that what we believe about God and the destiny of human beings is not simply about theological speculation, but about the changing of human hearts, about healing and reconciliation in this life. When hearts are changed, the mind will eventually follow. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once said, “The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” But what Holmes failed to remember that it is usually the heart that convinces the mind to expand. “The heart, once expanded to include our enemies, never returns to its original size.”

Overcoming resistance

In recent months, I’ve been thinking about how we touch hearts, expand minds and change theologies. How do we overcome resistance? This is an important question to me since some in my own family are very resistant to the good news of God’s grace.

My father-in-law is a fundamentalist Baptist. He always worried about my theology, but took refuge in the fact that we agreed on the Christian essentials. When If Grace Is True was released, he was devastated. He was certain that I had lost my faith, was risking the fires of hell, and probably taking hundreds of others with me. He told me that he’s been praying that my next book would be titled I Was Wrong.

Initially, I responded to him with debate. We would have long discussions about theological minutiae and end up angry at one another. For several years, we ignored our differences. Only recently have I changed my approach. We’ve been meeting for lunch once a month to ask each other questions. My father-in-law asks me questions about certain verses. He asks my opinion of theological doctrines. In general, my response is simple – “Dad, I don’t believe that any longer.”

There was a time when I would have peppered him with similar questions. I would have pointed out other verses and suggested alternative theologies. I wanted to change him as much as he wanted to change me. My questions were arguments.

Only recently have I realized that being manipulative and combative – even for the cause of universal love – is to once again see people as objects and not subjects. It is sin. I decided to ask my father-in-law a different set of questions.

I’ve tried to keep it simple. “Dad, you know me well. Do you see the love of God in my life?

He always answers, “Yes.”

I ask, “What does that mean?

I haven’t got him to answer that question yet, but I’m going to keep trying.

Of course, as a Quaker, I know what I believe. The presence of live within me is evidence of God’s presence. Quakers believe this seed of love, of God’s presence is planted in each and every one of us; inextinguishable, eternal, and persistent.

For me, this recognition has altered my approach to my father-in-law. It is not my responsibility to convince him of God’s grace. It is my task to demonstrate its power in my life, to trust that God is at work in every individual drawing them away from fear and self-absorption and hate and toward God’s wonderful light. My father-in-law doesn’t need my theology as much as he needs my love. Universalism, at its very best, is not a theological position, but a lifestyle decision.

Let me close with one of my favorite stories – one attributed to the Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn:

A woman once asked the Teacher, “Which is the true religion?”

The Teacher replied, “Once there was a magic ring which gave its bearer the gifts of grace, kindness and generosity. When the owner of the ring was on his deathbed, each of his three sons came separately and asked him for the ring. The old man promised the ring to each of them.

“He then sent for the finest jeweler in the land, and paid him to make two rings identical to the original. The jeweler did so, and before he died, the father gave each son a ring without telling him about the other two.

“Inevitably, the three sons discovered that each one had a ring, and they appeared before the local judge to ask his help in deciding who had the magic ring. The judge examined the rings and found them to be all alike. He then said, ‘Why must anyone decide now? We shall know who has the magic ring when we observe the direction your life takes.’

“Each of the brothers then acted as if he had the magic ring by being kind, honest, and thoughtful.

“Now,” the Teacher concluded, “religions are like the three brothers in the story. The moment their members cease striving for justice and love we will know that their religion is not the one God gave the world.”

Our problem, today as much as in the day of Jesus and Mendelssohn, is that we consider religion a ring to possess rather than a love to express. We are so obsessed with being right – even about universalism - that we forget to be gracious. In so doing, we make a mockery of even the most wonderful theology. As others resist the good news of God’s grace, let us abandon the arrogance that too often gives others one more reason to resist. May our universalism cease to be a ring on our finger and become the overflowing of our hearts. Amen.