I Have Come To Set The Earth On Fire: Universalism of Judgment and Salvation in the Old and New Testament and Second Temple Judaisms - Part 1

Today we have a guest post from Chris Criminger. Below is a short bio from him along with Part 1 of the post (Part 2 will be next week!). Enjoy!

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BIO:

I am a retired minister and currently a chaplain in a nursing home. The past fifteen years of studying church history, patristics and Second Temple Judaism has expanded my vision of scripture and my evolving understanding of how God relates to us in this present life. The ancient Rabbis have taught me the beauty of diversity, the mystery of revelation and an expanding consciousness on a relational loving God. 

Christian Universalism is such an important topic because it guides us into a more compassionate view of other people as well as a sacramental view of all reality. Everyone and everything is interconnected and love is the spiraling center of existence. I’ve learned more in the past decade by Jewish Rabbis on the meaning of my own faith and the faith of Jesus as well as being surprised how many are Rabbinic universalists. Great biblical scholars and writers like Abraham Heschel, Jonathon Sacks, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, and Amy-Jill Levine (who should be a universalist?) to name a few.

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“As I passed the fire I did not know whether it was Hell or the furious love of God.” 

— G. K. Chesterton 

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When one studies history, one finds history full of mystery and messy, victors and victims, evil and evolution, mistakes made and miracles marveled. There is so much to learn from the pre-modern past and much to be unlearned from the modern present. The history of man’s inhumanity penchant toward violence has destroyed and burned up so many treasures of past civilizations. 

The whole history of humanity has been one of destruction and reconstruction, retrieval and renewal. Even the Scriptures people hold in their hands has been touched by ancient scribes, prophets, and communities of editors and redactors.1 The saga of the Spirit working through the thoughts and cultures of Israel’s checkered history has slowly evolved from nomadic tribes to empire building to Rabbinic Judaism today.2

The histories and development of both the newer Testament of Christianity and the Talmud of Judaism follow similar time sequence of Second Temple Judaisms and nascent Christianty/s where both grew and evolved from the same religious soil and reconstructed their faiths after the destruction of the Temple in 70ce.3

History reveals diverse tensions and differences within the development within Scripture itself with contrasting Jewish Midrash calling for wisdom and discernment between dueling prophets and progressive revelation of Israel’s divided and reinterpreted history.4 The Bible itself has gone through many additions and subtractions, lost books and restored parchments as new archeological discoveries have shed new light on ancient texts.5

Jews and Christians often remain divided over listening to their religious tribal leaders rather than learning how their cross pollination histories has changed each other over the mountains of time. The stark reality that no monolithic religion of Judaism nor Christianity ever existed to this day is often suppressed or ignored by many in their respective religious traditions.

Another difficult problem to overcome is the many competing varieties of universalism that exist today6 and how detractors or subscribers attempt to reframe ancient history with proof texts or partial quotes to deny or privilege their current position. As one who has been greatly influenced by the modesty of some Eastern Orthodox scholars on this topic as well as learning much from Patristic universalism, it is my goal to attempt to show some of the actual historical evolution of this seed idea of universal judgment and universal restoration freedom m both Testaments and Second Temple writings of that time. 

Secondly, there has been some over steps or missteps by some modern Christian universalists. It is important to do self-critique as well as challenging popular studies and books on Patristic or Christian universalism. Many Christians have deconstructed or evolved out of their Evangelical faith without realizing some of their engrained Evangelical assumptions exists which still seeks forced harmonizations of Scripture, selective readings and dubious secondary readings of history7 all the while not doing the hard study of primary works of religious history, particularly, Second Temple Judaism and Jewish hermeneutics in interpreting the Jewish context of the New Testament.

THE FIRE OF UNIVERSAL JUDGEMENT 

There are conflicting biblical images of judgment within the Scriptures like darkness that has no light and fire imagery that gives light. The parabolic and metaphoric language of the Bible (both testaments) should cause people to pause rather than trying to assimilate these competing images into some kind of literal meaning or systematic understanding of reality. 

The Scriptures and their ancient interpreters had subversive texts that challenged the religious status quo as well a plurality of textual meanings and hidden insights Jewish readers explored to relate the Scriptures to their own cultural context.8 There is both a fluidity and liminality to truly be wise in understanding the many different depths within God’s sacred Word. The Hebrew language for Jews is to see meaning in word plays, vocalization of the words, spaces between words, significance in numbers and their spiritual meanings and even each alphabetical letter had spiritual significance.9

Fire as Judgment is alluded to in the Hebrew Bible which Jesus and Paul and other Apocalyptic literature picks up on in Second Temple literature. Some of the earliest Jewish universal statements are expressed in the latest strata of the Hebrew Bible. 

One striking example is Isaiah 66:23-26a passage that most scholars date to the early decades of the Second Temple period:

For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory, and I will set a sign among them. From them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Put, and Lud—which draw the bow—to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations. They shall bring all your kindred from all the nations as an offering to the Lord, on horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and on mules, and on dromedaries, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the Lord, just as the Israelites bring a grain-offering in a clean vessel to the house of the Lord. And I will also take some of them as priests and as Levites, says the Lord. For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your descendants and your name remain. From new moon to new moon, and from sabbath to sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, says the Lord. (RSV).

But the oracle, which marks the end of the book of Isaiah, ends on a dark note: The speaker predicts that those who rebel against God will die violent deaths:

And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.

The condemnation of all those people who disobey the will of the One True God is not limited to Israelites. In the speaker’s vision of the end of days, all of humanity will be expected to follow God’s will, or suffer dire consequences. (Judgment). Fire imagery is both graphic and captivating to understand actions have consequences and God will judge every deed that people do.

Overall, the oldest testament in Jewish Scripture speaks about Sheol, the place of the dead or grave with little to no evidence of an afterlife except for a few cryptic verses on resurrection.10 Christian universalists not only read universal salvation in the afterlife out of the Old Testament but they believe in the argument of silence that if eternal Hell was so important, it should be in the oldest Testament.11 Never mind that the Oldest Testament does not speak either of heaven or an afterlife at all. What one does find is how these concepts and the idea of resurrection will evolve and expand pregnant with meaning in later second Temple writings from the intertestamental period and apocalyptic literature.

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Works Cited and Read

1.  See Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah (Indiana University Press, 1982); Chapter three on Source Criticism by Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Indiana University Press, 1994); Susan Gillingham shows multiple examples of how biblical criticism reveals the diversity and multiple voices within the Scriptures in her One Bible, Many Voices (Cambridge, 1998).

2. For more information on this point, see Gabrielle Boccaccini, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge, UK, 2002) and Hershel Shanks, ed. Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism (Biblical Archaeology Society, 2011).

3. John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism (Herald Press, 2008). Also see my own, Rabbinic Stories for the Christian Soul (2011).

4. Two excellent books on this topic are Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, God’s Echo (Paraclete, 2007) and F. Timothy Moore, Practicing Midrash (Wild & Stock, 2018).

5. On the Pentateuch, see Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Simon & Schuster, 2019); on the book of Daniel, see John J. Collins, Daniel: Hermeneia ( Fortress, 1994); and Biblical criticism of the Old Testament, see Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation (Baker, 2015).

6. There are so many divergent and overlapping varieties of Christian Universalism. This is not exhaustive list but reveals why there are so many misunderstandings because of so many different perspectives:  Biblical universalism, Evangelical universalism, patristic universalism, Unitarian Universalism, pluralist universalism, mystical universalism, hopeful universalism, post-Barthian universalism, purgatorial universalism, existential universalism, Trinitarian universalism, and perennial universalism. It would take another whole article to expound the many different layers and nuances on this topic.

7. New Herzog Encyclopedia.vol.12, p.96 claims there were six early theological schools in the first five or six centuries where four taught universalism, one taught annihilation and the last one taught endless punishment of the wicked. Popular universalist books quote this like David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism (pp. 226-227); Steve Gregg, All you Want to Know about Hell (pp.128-129); and Keith Giles, Jesus Undefeated (pp.26-27). Yet not one source is given and no one else documents this information before or after him. This does not mean it is false but there is no verifiable way to establish this claim. Most likely, there were proponents of all three views in these schools during this historical period.

An example of secondary quotes out of context by some universalists would be Gerry Beauchemin, Hope for All (2018) where he says, “Accordingly, they saw Gehenna as a place of punishment for those who lead an immoral life. However, the time a person’s soul could spend in Gehenna was limited to twelve months and the rabbis maintained that even at the very Gates of Gehenna a person could repent and avoid punishment. After being punished in Gehenna a soul was considered pure enough to enter Gan [Garden of] Eden.” (Pp.31-32). What he does not do is quote the last part that says, “the very wicked would be annihilated or eternally punished” William Harrison, Salvation after Death (2019) pp.231-232. This kind of proof texting unfortunately is ad nauseum by some popular universalist quotes on the internet. While some universalist books simply cite endless Bible passages saying these all teach universalism whereas most of these scriptures do not (see for example, Keith Giles, Jesus Undefeated who lists 76 Bible verses and tentmakers.org, a popular universalist blog lists 53 verses from the NT and 70 verses from the OT!

8.Judy Klitsner, Subversive Sequels in the Bible (Maggie, 2011).

9. See Chaim Bentorah, Hebrew Word Study: Beyond the Lexicon (Trafford, 2014).

10. Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2-3; Hosea 6:1-2.

11. This is a common argument among universalists that goes all the way back to universalist arguments in the 1800’s. One major example, see Thomas Jefferson Sawyer, Endless Punishment (C. L. Stickney, 1845).

Glenn Siepert