The Universal Christ

From "The Universal Christ" by Richard Rohr:-

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of." Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply.

Such a way of seeing and being is not a falling away from what has always been believed by the "true Christian" but is in fact simply part of the Great Tradition of the Christian Faith from its earliest days.

This way of seeing, being and knowing represents the fertility of the earth itself and the wondrous, healing, natural power of creation of our phenomenal world. Such seeing is simply a function of the nature of reality, intimately connected with the dynamic support of the earth, space itself, and a multidimensional view of the movements of time. Time and space is a "vital, ephemeral agent of awareness and healing. All spaciality and temporality potentially hold liberative qualities."

Now over to those who wish to jeer, denigrate, call names or simply insist that there is only one truth (i.e. theirs)

Thank you

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SW-User

Of course, such an outlook implies Universalism, which has always been a strong current in the Christian Faith, particularly in its early years. And a current now growing ever stronger as many recover their moral sense after its corruption by dogma and creed.

Universalism, that ALL will eventually be gathered in. A teaching only outlawed and declared heretical by the Roman emperor Justinian (6th century), possible concerned more with crowd control than seeking to truly understand God's love and His plans for the world.

But it was St Augustine (4th century) who truly set the seal on the repugnant doctrine of eternal conscious torment, a man who could not even read Greek and therefore unable to read the New Testament in its original language. Protestant Reform Theology owes much to his influence across the whole Christian Tradition.

So what of those who still adhere to the doctrine of eternal conscious torment? Given that our perfection will in part consist of love for all (to love our neighbours as ourselves) will God perform a lobotomy on the "saved" so that they can forget those they knew on earth who never made it to heaven? Does perfection consist of being in a state of pure felicity when so many will be perpetually in torment? Those we perhaps knew and loved on earth? To have no concern for them, in effect to forget them, is our "perfection"?

But hey! They had their chance! Freedom was given for three score years and ten, they chose wrong - so then "freedom" (so invaluable to God) is then taken from them for eternity! So valuable that it is only ours for a small tick on the eternal clock. No freedom (to be respected by God) to ask for annihilation and thus a peace of sorts.

No doubt there will be an appeal to the "clear teaching of scripture" by those determined to cling on. In fact it is NOT the clear teaching of scripture. It is only "clear" to a particular time conditioned interpretation born of lack of true knowledge of the original language in which the New Testament was written. This made clear by those such as David Bentley Hart who has in fact made his own translation of the New Testament and is a Universalist. The notes contained in his translation explain all the relevant passages in detail. His book "That All Shall Be Saved" is worth a read.

Anyway, enough said. Sighs of relief all around!