Neiman is firmly on the Left, McDonald is an unapologetic conservative, and the Primitive Baptist Universalists who I have had contact with identify with libertarianism for the most part. Dodson writes from a place of love for the environment and creation and has an all-embracing respect for spiritualities. Parker breaks universalist concepts down in ways that I wish I could through short stories that remind me of the conversion efforts made by some fundamentalists when I was young and living in a rural region. I think that he is a strong writer and I very much appreciate his using "the victorious gospel" in place of "universalism" when that works. One of his short stories is posted on this blog. McLaughlin is one of those dear rural American theologians who really go to work on interpreting Scripture and working from certain keys and questions that emerge from the text. In this he has much in common with my Primitive Baptist Universalist friends. Yes, I believe that this hard work and Dodson's poetry all come from divine inspiration even when---or especially when---they contradict one another. I have not been given these gifts. Pastor Sena Norton may or may not be a universalist, but she has greatly influenced my thinking and direction over the past year and her sermons and prayers warm me and encourage me. All of that said, the errors below belong to me and to me only.
Starting over?
I stopped doing this blog in January of 2023 because I hit a dead-end. Readership fluctuated from day to day, doing the blog began to feel like work, the blog succeeded when I was advertising what others were doing and it lacked originality. More seriously for me, the world situation seemed to be vindicating a hard-hearted and cynical or pessimistic view of things and this went very much against the grain of my hopeful universalism. I restarted the blog last week because there is little in my politics and theology that will allow me to give in to the evil and the despair that it brings. And in the past year I was with three people in their final days and saw or felt something of their passing on. Those experiences filled me with questions, the partial answers that I am finding to those questions give me both hope and fear, and that hope and fear cause me to want to explore what I'm thinking with others.
Something else matters much to me here. The experience of being isolated during the worst of COVID, ageing, and reflecting on my past added much to my longing to once more share the joys and sorrows of the parts of Central and Northern Appalachia that I love so dearly. I was not born there, but I lived in and near the eastern coalfields and did much work there for many years and learned many of life's hard lessons there. Much of my extended family is buried in what were the anthracite coalfields. I "got religion" there. I felt and feel Appalachia as I feel no other place. There are people there who are closer to me than family. It is the only place this side of heaven that feels like home to me. My first work on this blog was to explain some of the features of living and working and resisting power there. The experiences of living, working and resisting in Appalachia and returning whenever I can for visits are experiences of faith, repentance and salvation for me.
I stopped doing this blog in January of 2023 because I hit a dead-end. Readership fluctuated from day to day, doing the blog began to feel like work, the blog succeeded when I was advertising what others were doing and it lacked originality. More seriously for me, the world situation seemed to be vindicating a hard-hearted and cynical or pessimistic view of things and this went very much against the grain of my hopeful universalism. I restarted the blog last week because there is little in my politics and theology that will allow me to give in to the evil and the despair that it brings. And in the past year I was with three people in their final days and saw or felt something of their passing on. Those experiences filled me with questions, the partial answers that I am finding to those questions give me both hope and fear, and that hope and fear cause me to want to explore what I'm thinking with others.
Something else matters much to me here. The experience of being isolated during the worst of COVID, ageing, and reflecting on my past added much to my longing to once more share the joys and sorrows of the parts of Central and Northern Appalachia that I love so dearly. I was not born there, but I lived in and near the eastern coalfields and did much work there for many years and learned many of life's hard lessons there. Much of my extended family is buried in what were the anthracite coalfields. I "got religion" there. I felt and feel Appalachia as I feel no other place. There are people there who are closer to me than family. It is the only place this side of heaven that feels like home to me. My first work on this blog was to explain some of the features of living and working and resisting power there. The experiences of living, working and resisting in Appalachia and returning whenever I can for visits are experiences of faith, repentance and salvation for me.
Dr. Ralph Stanley is one of my favorite Primitive Baptist Universalists.
I listen to his music most nights as I do the dishes. I don't
know who to credit the photograph to. Listen to this.
Where to begin?
MacDonald provides at least five starting points for this post. One is that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Another is that reason is a friend of interpreting and reinterpreting Scripture, and is not Scripture's enemy. A third point is that God doesn't do retributive justice or punishment. The fourth point is that universalists do not have to argue, or should not argue, that there is no hell, but should be about the ideas that there is no eternal and everlasting hell and that persons in hell can be saved from that condition. The final point that I want to bring forward is that we need not, or should not, argue that Scripture makes our case or does not support what others claim, but that Scripture and reason, taken together, allow for a diversity of valid opinions and inspirations.
In concluding this section I want to assure doubtful readers that I do hold to a form of Christianity and that I believe that universalism was present in the early Church and that it has developed and come down to us in theory and practice through Orthodox and mainstream Christianity as well as through sects and tendencies that have not been thought of as mainstream. I accept that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life and that no one comes to God except through Him. But accepting that is a very different proposition than coming to Christ out of fear of punishment and hell, and our traditional ways of "coming to Christ" do not account for a variety of diverse experiences and often reflect our very limited ways of knowing Christ.
I hold to the historic Christian idea that original sin as we commonly think of it is in error, or that Scripture at least allows different approaches here. It seems more reasonable to accept that sin is something inherited or communicated as if it were a disease or condition than as something in our natures, malleable as we are.
I also want to put forward a counter-opinion on human depravity. I don't want to blame "human nature" for our sins and transgressions because I am not sure that it exists except as a way of assigning blame or as a way of saying that we don't understand one another. I do want to suggest that every human being carries within themselves a very tarnished icon or image of God and that bettering the human condition and assuring our salvation is largely a matter of reordering social priorities, healing and of cleansing and polishing off that icon and letting it be seen by others.
MacDonald provides at least five starting points for this post. One is that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Another is that reason is a friend of interpreting and reinterpreting Scripture, and is not Scripture's enemy. A third point is that God doesn't do retributive justice or punishment. The fourth point is that universalists do not have to argue, or should not argue, that there is no hell, but should be about the ideas that there is no eternal and everlasting hell and that persons in hell can be saved from that condition. The final point that I want to bring forward is that we need not, or should not, argue that Scripture makes our case or does not support what others claim, but that Scripture and reason, taken together, allow for a diversity of valid opinions and inspirations.
Reason gives us the ability and drive to apprehend that there is something beyond us, and I will say that reason and divine inspiration work together within us by driving forward practice-thought-reflection in ways that can compel us to go deeper and that enrich our understanding. The "can compel" is important because we have free will to stop, turn or return at any point in our journey. The practice-thought-reflection process births contradictions in our thinking and in our relationships, and resolving these contradictions requires new practice-thought-reflection. We can't go through this alone with any hope of success, but growth won't come by following others without clear and independent action and thought by us.
God is so great that omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence are just the beginnings. MacDonald, conservative that he is, may contradict himself by leaving these qualities of God where they are as basics of Christian theology while also giving God the glory for going beyond these. MacDonald believes that we are depraved in our natures, I think, and that we deserve or merit some kind of non-retributive hell, meaning cleansing of relatively short duration and being overwhelmed and saved by God's love and grace. On the other hand, a test for my universalism is in believing that other religions---most notably Islam in this case---have something good to say about the attributes or qualities of God. I think that both MacDonald and many Muslim scholars will agree that God's punishments or justice are fundamentally acts of kindness, although they will disagree over God's ends and means. The main difficulties that we have here are that grafting religions or divergent expressions of faith on to one another rarely works well, many cultural and religious appropriations can and should be offensive, and that we can enter into disputes with others from different faith communities over the reality or non-reality of an eternal and everlasting hell when our starting point was to do something quite different.
Whatever the difficulties, and if we only struggle with and begin to internalize God's omniscience and omnipotence and omnibenevolence, we will come to a very different form of Christianity than the forms we are now most familiar with. Universalism can be simpler in form by being decentralized, more hopeful and more rewarding, more joyful and less driven by guilt, and more the projects of liberation and healing and less the projects of protecting and reproducing the status quo and privilege. Such a Christianity might also be more complicated by holding on to the legacy of Calvinism and the idea that human beings exist in a state of depravity, the tendencies toward Preterism and supersessionism, a partial universalism that puts Christianity in competition with other faiths, and feeling less need for clergy and higher education.
I hold to the historic Christian idea that original sin as we commonly think of it is in error, or that Scripture at least allows different approaches here. It seems more reasonable to accept that sin is something inherited or communicated as if it were a disease or condition than as something in our natures, malleable as we are.
I also want to put forward a counter-opinion on human depravity. I don't want to blame "human nature" for our sins and transgressions because I am not sure that it exists except as a way of assigning blame or as a way of saying that we don't understand one another. I do want to suggest that every human being carries within themselves a very tarnished icon or image of God and that bettering the human condition and assuring our salvation is largely a matter of reordering social priorities, healing and of cleansing and polishing off that icon and letting it be seen by others.
What about Susan Neiman?
Nieman is receiving lots of criticism for Left Is Not Woke, some of it justified. But what I want to commend here is her political universalism and how she defines it and works with it. These are points that her critics have largely ignored. In the opening to the second chapter of Left Is Not Woke Nieman says
Let's begin with the idea of universalism, which once defined the left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the right, which recognized no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The left demanded that the circle encompass the globe. That was what standing left meant: to care about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican volunteers in Spain, or freedom fighters in South Africa, whether you came from their tribes or not. What united us was not blood but conviction---first and foremost the conviction that behind all the differences of time and space that separate us, human beings are deeply connected in a wealth of ways. To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say that they determine us is false.
Nieman goes on to make a passionate critique of what unites and divides human beings. She makes an unfortunate detour in discussing the pro-fascist Carl Schmitt at too-great length, but her real strength is in criticizing the nihilist Paul-Michel Foucault and his legacies, upholding the positive concepts that came with the Enlightenment, locating the new humanism and universalism present in the writings of many African intellectuals and others from the peripheries, and taking apart what is generally called "being woke." She is good at dissecting language and in discussing how rhetoric can be appropriated and redirected in order to exercise power without falling into deconstructionism and postmodernism. Along the way there are critiques of original sin and human nature and a statement that "Without universalism there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power." That statement goes near to the heart of Nieman's argument that political universalism and the left have historically been more concerned with "a robust idea of justice" and progress than they have been with power.
It can be argued that the matter of who holds political power is also a matter of justice and progress, and that the present-day attack by the far-right on the positive legacies coming to us from the Enlightenment proves this. Nieman holds on to her argument by saying in her concluding pages that there are "three principles essential to the left: commitments to universalism, a hard distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress." Well and good, I think, but there are still dangers in sidelining the matter of political power as not ever being linked to justice and progress.
We should not overlook the possibilities of creating a progressive Christian universalism that is both faith-based and social justice-based and that anticipates Marx's argument that "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusion.” This could potentially be worked with in positive ways. Some of us will come to faith precisely because religion is all that Marx claimed it is, and we will stay there and thrive as activists and believers precisely because of a seemingly heartless world and soulless conditions.
Whew! That was a lot!
I hope and believe, or believe and hope, that we are all headed to salvation, glory and heaven. All of us. I believe that we all live on a spectrum of possibilities and that, for one reason or another, we are going through some hell and some heaven now and that whatever "hell" we experience at some future point will be for our greater eventual good. Hell is real and in the p[resent-tense, but so is heaven. Salvation is real. You're not experiencing heaven or going to heaven or resurrection because you get or got saved; you're saved because you're experiencing heaven and resurrection now and in the future. When were you saved? Two-thousand years ago. What should be touching us now is how our bibles and reason and the Holy Spirit are guiding us to making the right choices on how we live alongside others as we stand on Jordan's stormy banks and cast a wishful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land where our possessions lie. Heaven or hell, now and later? The choices that we make matter. Are you doing justice or are you siding with the oppressors? Is that icon inside of you getting polished or worn? Are you seeing Jesus in others and are you serving Jesus and others or something else?
This is a brief explanation of where I'm coming from these days and what drives this blog. I am trying to be a universalist in religion and in politics. I hope that you will hang on for the ride.
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