What to Expect from Exclusivists
In the spirit of these respectful conversations, I will resist the temptation to be put-off by Karl Giberson’s less than generous claim that exclusivists are “driven by some sort of jingoistic pathology—a defensive need to be a member of the one true tribe that holds ‘absolute truth,’ and maintains its hold on that truth by excluding others.” I choose to take Karl as being a provocateur rather than as unkind. I also take his statement as an honest indictment against some exclusivists for only half-believing what they say they believe. For if exclusivists truly believe that Jesus is the only way to God, they would exhaust themselves, their time, and their resources to reach those who have never heard the good news that in Jesus they can have forgiveness of sins and the hope of life everlasting. And, furthermore, they would preach the gospel in tears, pleading that their hearers might be saved.
Rather than being haughty and triumphalistic, we would expect earnest exclusivists to go out of their way to share this good news,
“with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?
If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed forever, knows that I am not lying. At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands” (2 Corinthians 11:23-33 ESV).
We might expect them to leave the comfort of their common trades, sell all they have, and live among people groups who have never heard of Jesus. They might, say, leave the shoe repair trade in England to go to India, where they would learn the language of the people, translate the Bible into that language, work to overcome the inequities of the caste system, bury their wife, and finally die on the soil of the people they had come to love so deeply as William Carey did in Serampore, India, in 1834.
Or, we could imagine someone who is an exclusivist believing fervently that God loved the word so much that those who believe in Jesus might have eternal life. And because they believed that, we could imagine them leaving New England on a dangerous voyage to Burma to plant their lives among the people, accommodating in many ways to their lifestyles. If they really believed what they said they believed, we would expect them to persevere for forty years, even through tremendous hardship, like the death of a child, the death of two wives, and twelve years with no convert. Such was the life of Adoniram Judson who gave his life for Christ and died in the Bay of Bengal in 1850.
Some exclusivists might even move to China for half a century, devote themselves to learning several dialects of a notoriously difficult language, adopt the dress of the Chinese nationals, lose several children to death, and give themselves to establishing a mission organization to reach a people they came to love deeply in Jesus. This was the work of Hudson Taylor who said, “The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed.”
We might expect an exclusivist to at least be cautious about the implications of universalism, religious pluralism, or latitudinarianism. For if the good news is true, then not to believe it or not to urge others to believe it would be dangerous and foolhardy.
“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error” (1 John 4:1-6 ESV).
Now, I will agree that these stories may not represent every exclusivist. But they could be repeated over and over down the ages of church history. Pathological jingoists? Hypocrisy? That would be a terribly cynical and uncharitable reading of their lives.
Although I do not have time to develop the argument, it seems to me that some forms of inclusivism are even more authoritarian and mean-spirited than most exclusivists’ claims. What would be more authoritarian than to tell the late Christopher Hitchens that he would have to spend eternity in the presence of God whether he wanted to or not? And what would be more mean-spirited than to consign Richard Dawkins to a blissful immortality with the Jesus he so adamantly denies?
My comments are motivated by my interaction with mainstream evangelicalism today. I acknowledge the heros of yesteryear, who seem to me to be quite different than the movement that has succeeded them. I have many close friends who were victims, with me, of witch hunts by inquisitorial protectors of a singular truth. I have friends languishing in forced retirements, sadly unemployed after giving decades of service to evangelical colleges.There is something wrong with communities that act like this.
Thank you for that Karl. I share your lament. I, too, have friends who have been hurt by doctrinaire evangelicals. But I'm not sure the problem is unique to exclusivists.
This is a more carefully edited and inadvertently lengthened version of my previous comment. Sorry! Please substitute it or delete the other if it's too long.
=========
Karl's point is well taken. I do not think Ben has truly engaged with it or the common lived experience of American evangelicals and religious conservatives in general where exclusivism does seem to drive all kinds of dysfunctionally authoritarian and uncharitable behavior. For Evangelicals identity is always based on a more or less emphasized and archly dualistic view of humanity. One is either "saved" or "lost." Taken as a point of important and reliably certain knowledge we may apprehend ourselves, this dualism becomes the basis for maintaining group cohesion through the threat of shame and rejection. The church — in a typically local and sectarian sense — is where the saved are, and outside it there is no salvation. I recently heard an 8th grade graduation sermon/speech from a pastor who made exactly this point: stay in the church, stay in the faith, or this may be the last time you all are together.
I did not notice Karl making a theological defense of some kind of non-exclusivist position, but if he did it would not be meaningfully challenged by characterizing it as authoritarian and coercive for seeming to require convinced atheists to hang around with Jesus in heaven for eternity. This image is funny but not a good illustration of the implications of irresistible grace applied universally. By definition irresistable grace cannot be had and simultaneously refused. So when Ben imagines a comic scene where an atheist persists in disbelief despite being in the presence of God, grace has not been received at all, but its putative benefits (like a climate controlled eternity) are reaped anyhow. That's not any theologian's idea of universal salvation is it? The real question is whether grace can be refused. Most western theology under the influence of Augustine says grace can't be refused. This perhaps opens the door to the non- or less exclusivist views from Origen to Balthasar and Barth. The sovereignty of God and the unlimited, all-sufficient grace of Christ creates an irresistible force nothing can be unmoved by. Neither God nor man can limit it. Grace becomes like the hypothetical stone God can create but he makes it so big he can't lift it.
Karl obviously did not intend to start some armchair theological analysis, but it strikes me as significant to this conversation that Ben's exclusivist perspective on salvation and grace is radically voluntaristic — as his grace-forced-on-an-atheist illustration implies. In this view we have a radical freedom where only a "personal choice" for salvation through an elective faith is salvific and real. People need to make a decision to escape hell, but first they need to understand it.
This is a commonsense view in much evangelical "street theology," and it does motivate evangelism out of concern for "the lost," yet it tends to appeal mainly to evangelicals who have had a conversion experience yet also have no significant intellectual or institutional tie to what might be called more the historic or canonical traditions. The Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformation traditions have a completely different understanding of salvation, grace, and human freedom that privileges the former over the latter. This probably gives more latitude for non-exclusivism than the idea of "free will," especially in the west after Augustine.
In the older churches the zeal of the convert has to exist in a big tent, pluralistic, multi-generational, institutional context alongside people who were "born and raised in the church." This context passively but strongly disciplines any tendency to see one's own experience and purview as authoritative for identifying "the saved" versus "the lost." If it's not a matter of enthusiasm being squelched by frozen pew-sitters, this is a good thing, yet is precisely what is lacking in much of the evangelical world. For evangelicals the dominant models seem to be doctrinal or charismatic conversionism — often because this is what animates escapees from dead, old formalized Christianity.
Unfortunately this means one is either a member of a confessionally (intellectually) "correct" community or one that focuses more on the "correct" experience — authenticity and sincerity of spiritual life. Both models are primed to strongly regulate who is in or out by means of some type of moral, spiritual, or intellectual "error checking." This error-checking always has a more or less explicit excommunication function, and at least older evangelicals seem to reflexively equate error and being "outside the/ir church" as tantamount to being damned. That is the true problem Karl has been describing.
I grew up and have lived among evangelicals and missionaries in a broad range of churches all over the US and outside of it. Very, very few of the people I have known and encountered (even those in missions) engaged in evangelism primarily out of concern for "the lost." That is something people would pay lip service to but hardly anyone lived by, and not because they were insincere or unserious. I think it simply becomes absurd to count souls saved or lost in a presumptive and literal way. People are forced to abandon or de-emphasize this thinking, but they find nothing to replace it as an evangelistic motive. Missions turns into being about providing material assistance or a way to inoculate or cure people from Islam, Communism, etc. Much official fundraising during the Cold War was done with the explicit message that the gospel was fighting a political enemy, and the same thing has come about in the post 9/11 worth of American Evangelicalism.
Whatever the reason, Evangelicals who persist in trying to see themselves as going up against a world where millions go to hell daily are ineffective even if they get past the tendency to scorn, fear, or patronize their "lost" neighbors. They will burn out or can only exist within the special, socially marginal world of shoeless street preachers, tent revivalists, and other "fools for Christ." Their particular gifts and value can't be scaled up or made "successful" (i.e., polished up and institutionalized to sustain as a big church/business) without absurdity if not corruption. Their kids can't go to a decent college and retain their parents' kind of faith. This is why we have so many Christian colleges that more and less openly promise to close that generation gap, denying or distracting attention from troublesome facts and perspectives, no matter how established they may be.
Although I was never quite as vicitimized by an inquisitorial element as Karl describes for himself, I have seen that sort of thing done many, many times. I am accustomed to it being "normal" for 20-40 year-old evangelicals to say their parents think they're probably damned. (Usually over something like evolution, hell, homosexuality, or what "inspired" means.) Much of their religious life seems to be about ritualized conformity for the purpose of family peace-keeping in an arrangement that is sadly like a spiritual Stockholm Syndrome. It is especially perplexing to come from a background of radical free-will conversionistic Evangelicalism and then find one's parents' generation putting the kabosh on the same kind of questioning and seeking they went through themselves.
These problems, as Karl has indicated, are chronic, pervasive, and at the core of fundamentalist-evangelical culture. The most religious parts of this country are still in the grip of a 500 year legacy of sectarian polemic and internal purges. With the contemporary politicization of evangelicals, culture war witch-hunting has probably taken them to the end of the line for the exclusivist thinking that drives it
. Karl has described lived in a world where that thinking had great power over him and his livelihood. For most younger people that has probably been less so, and so it will continue. The cost of simply walking away from abusive or simply closed and fearful religious communities is so much lower now than it was for the boomers and their parents. Ironically Ben's voluntarism is winning out, but because of its emphasis on free choice it should be less willing and able to do evangelicalism on the old exclusivist model, whether that means tolerating a greater range of beliefs or curtailing inquisitorial-prosecutory reactions to diversity, difference, and disagreement.
This is a more carefully edited and inadvertently lengthened version of my previous comment. Sorry! Please substitute it or delete the other if it's too long.
=========
Karl's point is well taken. I do not think Ben has truly engaged with it or the common lived experience of American evangelicals and religious conservatives in general where exclusivism does seem to drive all kinds of dysfunctionally authoritarian and uncharitable behavior. For Evangelicals identity is always based on a more or less emphasized and archly dualistic view of humanity. One is either "saved" or "lost." Taken as a point of important and reliably certain knowledge we may apprehend ourselves, this dualism becomes the basis for maintaining group cohesion through the threat of shame and rejection. The church — in a typically local and sectarian sense — is where the saved are, and outside it there is no salvation. I recently heard an 8th grade graduation sermon/speech from a pastor who made exactly this point: stay in the church, stay in the faith, or this may be the last time you all are together.
I did not notice Karl making a theological defense of some kind of non-exclusivist position, but if he did it would not be meaningfully challenged by characterizing it as authoritarian and coercive for seeming to require convinced atheists to hang around with Jesus in heaven for eternity. This image is funny but not a good illustration of the implications of irresistible grace applied universally. By definition irresistable grace cannot be had and simultaneously refused. So when Ben imagines a comic scene where an atheist persists in disbelief despite being in the presence of God, grace has not been received at all, but its putative benefits (like a climate controlled eternity) are reaped anyhow. That's not any theologian's idea of universal salvation is it? The real question is whether grace can be refused. Most western theology under the influence of Augustine says grace can't be refused. This perhaps opens the door to the non- or less exclusivist views from Origen to Balthasar and Barth. The sovereignty of God and the unlimited, all-sufficient grace of Christ creates an irresistible force nothing can be unmoved by. Neither God nor man can limit it. Grace becomes like the hypothetical stone God can create but he makes it so big he can't lift it.
Karl obviously did not intend to start some armchair theological analysis, but it strikes me as significant to this conversation that Ben's exclusivist perspective on salvation and grace is radically voluntaristic — as his grace-forced-on-an-atheist illustration implies. In this view we have a radical freedom where only a "personal choice" for salvation through an elective faith is salvific and real. People need to make a decision to escape hell, but first they need to understand it.
This is a commonsense view in much evangelical "street theology," and it does motivate evangelism out of concern for "the lost," yet it tends to appeal mainly to evangelicals who have had a conversion experience yet also have no significant intellectual or institutional tie to what might be called more the historic or canonical traditions. The Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformation traditions have a completely different understanding of salvation, grace, and human freedom that privileges the former over the latter. This probably gives more latitude for non-exclusivism than the idea of "free will," especially in the west after Augustine.
In the older churches the zeal of the convert has to exist in a big tent, pluralistic, multi-generational, institutional context alongside people who were "born and raised in the church." This context passively but strongly disciplines any tendency to see one's own experience and purview as authoritative for identifying "the saved" versus "the lost." If it's not a matter of enthusiasm being squelched by frozen pew-sitters, this is a good thing, yet is precisely what is lacking in much of the evangelical world. For evangelicals the dominant models seem to be doctrinal or charismatic conversionism — often because this is what animates escapees from dead, old formalized Christianity.
Unfortunately this means one is either a member of a confessionally (intellectually) "correct" community or one that focuses more on the "correct" experience — authenticity and sincerity of spiritual life. Both models are primed to strongly regulate who is in or out by means of some type of moral, spiritual, or intellectual "error checking." This error-checking always has a more or less explicit excommunication function, and at least older evangelicals seem to reflexively equate error and being "outside the/ir church" as tantamount to being damned. That is the true problem Karl has been describing.
I grew up and have lived among evangelicals and missionaries in a broad range of churches all over the US and outside of it. Very, very few of the people I have known and encountered (even those in missions) engaged in evangelism primarily out of concern for "the lost." That is something people would pay lip service to but hardly anyone lived by, and not because they were insincere or unserious. I think it simply becomes absurd to count souls saved or lost in a presumptive and literal way. People are forced to abandon or de-emphasize this thinking, but they find nothing to replace it as an evangelistic motive. Missions turns into being about providing material assistance or a way to inoculate or cure people from Islam, Communism, etc. Much official fundraising during the Cold War was done with the explicit message that the gospel was fighting a political enemy, and the same thing has come about in the post 9/11 worth of American Evangelicalism.
Whatever the reason, Evangelicals who persist in trying to see themselves as going up against a world where millions go to hell daily are ineffective even if they get past the tendency to scorn, fear, or patronize their "lost" neighbors. They will burn out or can only exist within the special, socially marginal world of shoeless street preachers, tent revivalists, and other "fools for Christ." Their particular gifts and value can't be scaled up or made "successful" (i.e., polished up and institutionalized to sustain as a big church/business) without absurdity if not corruption. Their kids can't go to a decent college and retain their parents' kind of faith. This is why we have so many Christian colleges that more and less openly promise to close that generation gap, denying or distracting attention from troublesome facts and perspectives, no matter how established they may be.
Although I was never quite as vicitimized by an inquisitorial element as Karl describes for himself, I have seen that sort of thing done many, many times. I am accustomed to it being "normal" for 20-40 year-old evangelicals to say their parents think they're probably damned. (Usually over something like evolution, hell, homosexuality, or what "inspired" means.) Much of their religious life seems to be about ritualized conformity for the purpose of family peace-keeping in an arrangement that is sadly like a spiritual Stockholm Syndrome. It is especially perplexing to come from a background of radical free-will conversionistic Evangelicalism and then find one's parents' generation putting the kabosh on the same kind of questioning and seeking they went through themselves.
These problems, as Karl has indicated, are chronic, pervasive, and at the core of fundamentalist-evangelical culture. The most religious parts of this country are still in the grip of a 500 year legacy of sectarian polemic and internal purges. With the contemporary politicization of evangelicals, culture war witch-hunting has probably taken them to the end of the line for the exclusivist thinking that drives it
. Karl has described lived in a world where that thinking had great power over him and his livelihood. For most younger people that has probably been less so, and so it will continue. The cost of simply walking away from abusive or simply closed and fearful religious communities is so much lower now than it was for the boomers and their parents. Ironically Ben's voluntarism is winning out, but because of its emphasis on free choice it should be less willing and able to do evangelicalism on the old exclusivist model, whether that means tolerating a greater range of beliefs or curtailing inquisitorial-prosecutory reactions to diversity, difference, and disagreement.
This is a more carefully edited and inadvertently lengthened version of my previous comment. Sorry! Please substitute it or delete the other if it's too long.
=========
Karl's point is well taken. I do not think Ben has truly engaged with it or the common lived experience of American evangelicals and religious conservatives in general where exclusivism does seem to drive all kinds of dysfunctionally authoritarian and uncharitable behavior. For Evangelicals identity is always based on a more or less emphasized and archly dualistic view of humanity. One is either "saved" or "lost." Taken as a point of important and reliably certain knowledge we may apprehend ourselves, this dualism becomes the basis for maintaining group cohesion through the threat of shame and rejection. The church — in a typically local and sectarian sense — is where the saved are, and outside it there is no salvation. I recently heard an 8th grade graduation sermon/speech from a pastor who made exactly this point: stay in the church, stay in the faith, or this may be the last time you all are together.
I did not notice Karl making a theological defense of some kind of non-exclusivist position, but if he did it would not be meaningfully challenged by characterizing it as authoritarian and coercive for seeming to require convinced atheists to hang around with Jesus in heaven for eternity. This image is funny but not a good illustration of the implications of irresistible grace applied universally. By definition irresistable grace cannot be had and simultaneously refused. So when Ben imagines a comic scene where an atheist persists in disbelief despite being in the presence of God, grace has not been received at all, but its putative benefits (like a climate controlled eternity) are reaped anyhow. That's not any theologian's idea of universal salvation is it? The real question is whether grace can be refused. Most western theology under the influence of Augustine says grace can't be refused. This perhaps opens the door to the non- or less exclusivist views from Origen to Balthasar and Barth. The sovereignty of God and the unlimited, all-sufficient grace of Christ creates an irresistible force nothing can be unmoved by. Neither God nor man can limit it. Grace becomes like the hypothetical stone God can create but he makes it so big he can't lift it.
Karl obviously did not intend to start some armchair theological analysis, but it strikes me as significant to this conversation that Ben's exclusivist perspective on salvation and grace is radically voluntaristic — as his grace-forced-on-an-atheist illustration implies. In this view we have a radical freedom where only a "personal choice" for salvation through an elective faith is salvific and real. People need to make a decision to escape hell, but first they need to understand it.
This is a commonsense view in much evangelical "street theology," and it does motivate evangelism out of concern for "the lost," yet it tends to appeal mainly to evangelicals who have had a conversion experience yet also have no significant intellectual or institutional tie to what might be called more the historic or canonical traditions. The Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformation traditions have a completely different understanding of salvation, grace, and human freedom that privileges the former over the latter. This probably gives more latitude for non-exclusivism than the idea of "free will," especially in the west after Augustine.
In the older churches the zeal of the convert has to exist in a big tent, pluralistic, multi-generational, institutional context alongside people who were "born and raised in the church." This context passively but strongly disciplines any tendency to see one's own experience and purview as authoritative for identifying "the saved" versus "the lost." If it's not a matter of enthusiasm being squelched by frozen pew-sitters, this is a good thing, yet is precisely what is lacking in much of the evangelical world. For evangelicals the dominant models seem to be doctrinal or charismatic conversionism — often because this is what animates escapees from dead, old formalized Christianity.
Unfortunately this means one is either a member of a confessionally (intellectually) "correct" community or one that focuses more on the "correct" experience — authenticity and sincerity of spiritual life. Both models are primed to strongly regulate who is in or out by means of some type of moral, spiritual, or intellectual "error checking." This error-checking always has a more or less explicit excommunication function, and at least older evangelicals seem to reflexively equate error and being "outside the/ir church" as tantamount to being damned. That is the true problem Karl has been describing.
I grew up and have lived among evangelicals and missionaries in a broad range of churches all over the US and outside of it. Very, very few of the people I have known and encountered (even those in missions) engaged in evangelism primarily out of concern for "the lost." That is something people would pay lip service to but hardly anyone lived by, and not because they were insincere or unserious. I think it simply becomes absurd to count souls saved or lost in a presumptive and literal way. People are forced to abandon or de-emphasize this thinking, but they find nothing to replace it as an evangelistic motive. Missions turns into being about providing material assistance or a way to inoculate or cure people from Islam, Communism, etc. Much official fundraising during the Cold War was done with the explicit message that the gospel was fighting a political enemy, and the same thing has come about in the post 9/11 worth of American Evangelicalism.
Whatever the reason, Evangelicals who persist in trying to see themselves as going up against a world where millions go to hell daily are ineffective even if they get past the tendency to scorn, fear, or patronize their "lost" neighbors. They will burn out or can only exist within the special, socially marginal world of shoeless street preachers, tent revivalists, and other "fools for Christ." Their particular gifts and value can't be scaled up or made "successful" (i.e., polished up and institutionalized to sustain as a big church/business) without absurdity if not corruption. Their kids can't go to a decent college and retain their parents' kind of faith. This is why we have so many Christian colleges that more and less openly promise to close that generation gap, denying or distracting attention from troublesome facts and perspectives, no matter how established they may be.
Although I was never quite as vicitimized by an inquisitorial element as Karl describes for himself, I have seen that sort of thing done many, many times. I am accustomed to it being "normal" for 20-40 year-old evangelicals to say their parents think they're probably damned. (Usually over something like evolution, hell, homosexuality, or what "inspired" means.) Much of their religious life seems to be about ritualized conformity for the purpose of family peace-keeping in an arrangement that is sadly like a spiritual Stockholm Syndrome. It is especially perplexing to come from a background of radical free-will conversionistic Evangelicalism and then find one's parents' generation putting the kabosh on the same kind of questioning and seeking they went through themselves.
These problems, as Karl has indicated, are chronic, pervasive, and at the core of fundamentalist-evangelical culture. The most religious parts of this country are still in the grip of a 500 year legacy of sectarian polemic and internal purges. With the contemporary politicization of evangelicals, culture war witch-hunting has probably taken them to the end of the line for the exclusivist thinking that drives it
. Karl has described lived in a world where that thinking had great power over him and his livelihood. For most younger people that has probably been less so, and so it will continue. The cost of simply walking away from abusive or simply closed and fearful religious communities is so much lower now than it was for the boomers and their parents. Ironically Ben's voluntarism is winning out, but because of its emphasis on free choice it should be less willing and able to do evangelicalism on the old exclusivist model, whether that means tolerating a greater range of beliefs or curtailing inquisitorial-prosecutory reactions to diversity, difference, and disagreement.
Thanks, Ben, for your post. I think it's important to keep in mind that there are some exclusivists who care genuinely for people and are concerned for their eternal salvation.
Dan makes some really good points–one of which I want to follow up on briefly with a couple of questions: (1) Regarding the scenario of Hitchens or Dawkins being pulled kicking or screaming into heaven and then pouting thereafter: Do you think Calvinism (irresistible grace) would be just as susceptible to that characterization, since the wills of the elect are bent in a different direction (regeneration) by the Spirit? (2) Should an "intervention" of a drug addict by friends and family be considered a violent act?
In no inclusivist position I know of (even on the universalist or hopeful universalist end of the spectrum) does the scenario of a reluctant, spiteful, or even just disinterested atheist make any sense. They would have seen and understood the glory of God in Christ reconciling the world, and would have repented (perhaps even freely so) and would then be gladly worshipping God for eternity…
Thanks, Ben, for your post. I think it's important to keep in mind that there are some exclusivists who care genuinely for people and are concerned for their eternal salvation.
Dan makes some really good points–one of which I want to follow up on briefly with a couple of questions: (1) Regarding the scenario of Hitchens or Dawkins being pulled kicking or screaming into heaven and then pouting thereafter: Do you think Calvinism (irresistible grace) would be just as susceptible to that characterization, since the wills of the elect are bent in a different direction (regeneration) by the Spirit? (2) Should an "intervention" of a drug addict by friends and family be considered a violent act?
In no inclusivist position I know of (even on the universalist or hopeful universalist end of the spectrum) does the scenario of a reluctant, spiteful, or even just disinterested atheist make any sense. They would have seen and understood the glory of God in Christ reconciling the world, and would have repented (perhaps even freely so) and would then be gladly worshipping God for eternity…
Thanks, Ben, for your post. I think it's important to keep in mind that there are some exclusivists who care genuinely for people and are concerned for their eternal salvation.
Dan makes some really good points–one of which I want to follow up on briefly with a couple of questions: (1) Regarding the scenario of Hitchens or Dawkins being pulled kicking or screaming into heaven and then pouting thereafter: Do you think Calvinism (irresistible grace) would be just as susceptible to that characterization, since the wills of the elect are bent in a different direction (regeneration) by the Spirit? (2) Should an "intervention" of a drug addict by friends and family be considered a violent act?
In no inclusivist position I know of (even on the universalist or hopeful universalist end of the spectrum) does the scenario of a reluctant, spiteful, or even just disinterested atheist make any sense. They would have seen and understood the glory of God in Christ reconciling the world, and would have repented (perhaps even freely so) and would then be gladly worshipping God for eternity…
Trust me, I have experienced my share of mean-spirited, contankerous, and divisive evangelicals. My point is that those vices are not necessarily the consequence of exclusivism. I've also met plenty of vicious inclusivists. We should all beware of ad hominems.
Alas, Dan, it seems that from the beginning the human will was, and is, the problem. After all, Jesus said to some folk in his own day, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life" (John 5:39-40). But to affirm that such a refusal is the problem doesn't mean one is committed to a naive or simplistic voluntarism. Jonathan Edwards' treatise, Freedom of the Will, might be a good place to see a robust understanding of the role of the human will in salvation.