I spoke to a lady on the plane partway over the Pacific just before Covid. She had cut short her Australian holiday on the insistence of her doctor-son in Canada. He said the Covid thing was bad and going to get worse. She was staggered that I would be choosing to travel to the US in these frightening circumstances.
“What happens if you get the virus and die over here?”
I told her I have left instructions that I was to be cremated and my ashes scattered over El Morro National Monument in New Mexico.
“Why there?” she asked.
“Because it is the place where I had the most profound insight I have ever had, where all the pieces fell into a beautifully coherent whole.”
I take the liberty here of assuming your curiosity is piqued more than hers was, for she picked up her book and said no more. Ashes in the wind.
Flying high and a long way from home. In more ways than one. You see I was a good church man, elder for many years, well regarded, high profile roles, good children – all the attributes of an AAA rating in a system that values appearance-based righteousness. Now talking about the most profound insight he had ever had, not from the minister but a remote national park on the other side of the world. And cremation to boot.
Leaving the church into which I had been born and raised was also serious stuff. One finds, with considerable disappointment, that some of your friends – even ones with decades of fellowship together – have a different view of friendship. They see it as conditional on your attending church and not challenging the ministers. Break this and the relationship counts for nothing. Or, as in my case, they were instructed to have nothing to do with me as I had become dangerous. Fortunately, some chanced the danger, (and the disobedience) and remain as brothers and sisters – dear as ever.
Within months I found myself on a work party building a health clinic in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, one of the most lawless and ungovernable places on the planet. A place where God chose to answer my questions, on location and so convincing that all I could do was bow my head and worship. And seek forgiveness for having lived with such a limiting and limited view of God. I worked with Christian men of all denominations, brothers in Christ I never knew existed. Clearly, God was at work everywhere and answering my questions.
Well not quite everywhere. The exclusivist religions in the country, all living in compounds, and limiting their evangelism to brief forays to poach each other’s straying converts, were talking about the harvest being over, now just looking after the remnants, enduring, as they put it, the great falling away. All the while, young families from all over the world, living in remote villages, learning the language in preparation for talking about Jesus. I knew of 265 such couples with children, spread all over the country; living testament to the harvest far from over.
Another revelation came when I noticed how many of those I listened to referred to George MacDonald. A mentor to C.S. Lewis, Scottish theologian, de-frocked by the Church and best known for his book ‘Unspoken Sermons’. I wondered why he was put out of the church, until I read these characteristics of his thought:
(God) … looks impartially upon all people and expends all his divine energy to bring men “home’ to himself. He works first through the agency of Christ … But God speaks as well through the entirety of creation and human experience, as his Spirit is resident in all things. People who are receptive to divine influences are in the process of growing to become full sons of God in will and deed; those who spurn God’s loving intentions are diminishing into spiritual grotesques.
(MacDonald) … expresses hope for the eventual repentance of all the inhabitants of hell. He held that, inasmuch as God made man out of his own glory (not ex nihilo), the essential self to each man is divine. All unbelievers will one day be afforded opportunity to see both the hideous realities they had made themselves in God’s sight and the true beauty of divine love. The inevitable result of this vision will be repentance and turning to God. Finally, all nations will worship God as the source of righteousness and strength and divine love will triumph in all.
Elwell. W.A. (Ed) 2001 Evangelical Dictionary of Theology.
Baker Academic. p723
When I first read it, something shifted in my thinking, there was a sense of resolution for long-held doubts, and an embracing of the profound truth in God’s capacity to effect ‘not willing that any would perish’. This shift in thinking was furthered by the variety and calibre of theologians who believe, as MacDonald did that hell is restorative not final nor punitive. The view of hell (Sheol) that was held by the Jews of Jesus’ time was a ‘nebulous state’ of neither reward nor punishment, and a place where resurrection was possible.
The early church held this view up until Constantine, who, with help from Augustine, forever corrupted the beauty and simplicity of practiced Christianity in that unholy mix of church and state. The rest is history. The Reformation, for all its amazing impact on the abuses and corruption of the Church, did little to change the fundamentals of the institutional church, or a doctrine of heaven and hell. Fear of hell was the essential instrument of conversion, which brings me to El Morro.
In 1698 the Spaniards, after the conquering Mexico, continued their search for the fabled ‘cities of gold’. They took with them Franciscan priests, for, in their view, a ‘harvest of souls’ was ready for the sickle. As I contemplated the museum displays, I found myself asking “Baptism or the sword; what sort of conversion was that?” Especially after reading about the priests’ failed efforts in protecting their converts from the massacres that followed a less-than-wholehearted embrace of church and state. The sword was more ready than the sickle.
And a follow-up question, if the Pueblo people were confused, unconvinced and unconverted, that means they go to hell, right? Perhaps not a dangerous question, but God answered it anyway, unmistakably: “They are my children and I have taken them home”. God has them covered, for it is His divine intent to bring all men home to himself. Then it struck me. MacDonald’s view, like that of the early church fathers (some as disciples of the last Apostle) was not just an attractive theological position, it has application in people’s lives.
The idea of restoration of all things shifted from my head to my heart, where it has stayed ever since. Now I embrace a God who in His very essence is love. One who can bring redemption out of the horrors of how men can treat each other – redemption and restoration not judgement and punishment. We are after all, His creation, created for relationship as children with Him. Divine love in triumph over sin and death.
So how do I balance this view with what Jesus said about sheep and goats, right hand and left hand, paradise and punishment, with what He said about ‘drawing all men to himself’ and in the final chapters about the ‘healing of the nations’. And many more. Sufficient to say here, the scriptures can be made to make a case for either position so some other criteria has to used. If a sovereign God could restore all His creation and not let sin and death send more than three quarters of His creation to hell forever, would He? My ‘Yes’ answer is wholehearted, and gives me a sense of ‘pieces coming together’ like nothing I have ever known. Like I said earlier, the most profound insight I have ever had.
I remember, as our travels continued, looking at the ‘Ground Zero’ memorial in New York; the rows of crosses at Gettysburg; the ‘Trail of Tears’ memorials; and even where Robyn’s Great Grandfather came from on the Isle of Mull (Scotland) was a training base for North Atlantic escort crews, many of them among the more than eighty thousand Allied seamen lost at sea. Instead of a sense of despair, a deep gratitude for an understanding of a God who has it covered in His plan for all people.
I have lost friends and many arguments for holding these views. But I have won something worthwhile, the capacity to discard the ‘us-them’ attitude and replace it with a new humility. Where once I had intense feelings of hostility toward Muslims for example, I now see them as part of the ‘every knee shall bow’ scenario. The most strident in-your-face fanatical jihadist, overwhelmed by the glory and majesty of the presence of God, seeing for the first time both the way that they had mis-represented God, and the true beauty of divine love.
For the first time in my life, I can see what sort of view of God is necessary for the Jew, instead of counting the steps under the burden of the Roman soldier’s pack and throwing it into the dust after about two thousand steps, cheerfully offering to go another mile. Or, the first time in my life seeing how Jesus’ extraordinary injunction to ‘love your enemies’ could possibly be fulfilled. A theology that embraces all people as part of God’s creation, one that presents the father and family in relationship despite many being unaware of it. One, moreover, that views judgement as restorative not punitive, changes everything. And, it is a theology that disallows one member of the family saying they are better than another. Or exclude anyone.
While not claiming to be there yet, still part-way over the Pacific so to speak, I am flying high and living in the joy of knowing God as Father, Jesus as friend, and the Holy Spirit as constant companion.
See video: The restoration of all things – an opinion
