There’s been more about Rob Bell and Universalism around the blogosphere, and once again I felt that some of it deserved to be shared and brought together.
The title of the post comes from Andrew’s post and is actually the name of a blog he linked to. But it was sparked in conjunction with Hemant Mehta’s paraphrase of what he perceives to be going on around the Christian blogosphere: “Is Rob Bell a heretic? Or worse, a universalist?” Some remember a time when universalism was “just” a “heresy” and not something worse. That isn’t as long ago as Origen (who was the subject of a cartoon by NakedPastor).
But it isn’t even heresy universally (pun intended) in Christianity. Karl Barth is a famous recent exclusivist universalist, and that viewpoint has continued to find supporters in the Eastern Orthodox churches. Pithless Thoughts today offered a cartoon depicting “An Orthodox View of Salvation” – perhaps closer to “generous orthodoxy” than strict universalism.
Otagosh suggests that the real reason Rob Bell is the recipient of such ire is not that he is a universalist per se – plenty of Christian thinkers have been and continue to be – but the fact that he is spreading such views to a wider public, beyond the domain of an educated elite. But as Rachel Held Evans indicated recently, there is a generation that is asking questions about such traditional doctrines. It isn’t just any one person. And of course, when it comes to the things labeled “heresy”, it rarely is.
Then there’s the latest in the series on “Baptist Distinctives” on the blog Stuff Fundies Like. It focuses on the doctrine of “soul freedom” or freedom of conscience. And that leads to the irony one finds in fundamentalist baptist churches, that “there has never to my knowledge been a recorded case of a fundamentalist actually being caught practicing soul liberty and living to tell the tale.”
Just in time to get included here, Hacking Christianity posted a primer on universalism and other key terms in these discussions, while Jason Boyett interviews himself on this topic.
Is there any orthodoxy that wasn’t once heresy
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