Posted: 07/11/2010 at 5:55pm | IP Logged

Maurice Smith - I’m pretty patient. I like to stay out of things, but finally I just kind of went, 'Enough’s enough.'

Maurice Smith Combats the Suicide of Christian Theology with Facts and Humor

by Steve Eastman, OpenHeaven.com TOP News

SPOKANE, WASHINGTON – A fresh wave of universalism is intent on seducing the church through the belief that all men will be saved, period.  For those who have not studied theology, it is brand new.  For those who have, it goes back nearly two thousand years.  Maurice Smith has taught in seminary.  But he is also a house church person.  Recently he spoke with OpenHeaven.com about his new book, All Dogs Go to Heaven … Don’t They?

Steve:  Many of us do not consider Universalism to be a big issue until it hits close to home.  And there’s probably coming a time when it will.  What led up to your writing All Dogs Go to Heaven … Don’t They??

Maurice:  Well, I didn’t have any plans at all to write that book, and then I got included on a chat group among some folks who were discussing Universalism.  Their discussions ranged all over the place – is Scripture really inspired … and what do we base our doctrine on … church teachings … we’ve been lied to.  It was a mish-mash discussion among people who were professing believers.  There was an awful lot of anger and woundedness.  I think you probably could have gotten a counseling degree just studying some of the folks who were on this discussion group.  But what I realized was this was a serious discussion.  They were taking this stuff seriously and there were somewhere between seventy-five and one hundred people on this discussion group. 

I said, “Okay.  I’ve got to respond.”  I’m pretty patient.  I like to stay out of things, but finally I just kind of went, “Enough’s enough.”  ‘Cause nobody was really trying to stand up for what I would consider a traditional, Biblical view on the issue of conscious, eternal punishment.  So I dove in.  I took their primary arguments and outlined them and wrote a six-page response to it and I entitled that paper All Dogs Go to Heaven.  I tried to throw some humor into it to lighten the discussion a little bit.  I kind of challenged people.  And, of course, I got an earful in response.  “Oh, you don’t understand.” Yeah, I’ve got a degree in systematic theology.  I think I understand.  And the more I thought about it, it just became a burden.  And the more I reflected on it, if universalism is true, or if it’s not true, but it takes root in the Christian community, it really represents the death knell of evangelical theology. 

Steve:  It would nullify the Great Commission and a lot of other stuff. 

Maurice:  Well, yeah, it has several very negative defects, and I try to outline those in the book.  I want people to understand the “whys” of the argument as well as the argument itself.  And so I dove into explaining the impact it is going to have.  I call it the suicide of Christian theology. 

Steve:  That’s a good term.

Maurice:  I stole it from John Warwick Montgomery, who wrote a book by that title back in the 70’s (published by Bethany Fellowship in 1970).  He was saying the same thing about theological liberalism, that it represented the suicide of Christian theology.  And I realized, that’s universalism.  It if takes root, it will be the suicide of Christian theology.

Steve:  Universalism is basically the belief that everybody will be saved.   But in recent years, it’s taken a slightly different tack with ultimate reconciliation.  Would you explain what that’s about?

Maurice:  It gets a little complicated, but old-style Universalism says. “Look.  There are passages in Scripture that say Jesus died for all.  And all means all.  Therefore the Atonement, Jesus’ sacrificial death, has universal application.  He died for all.  Therefore, all are saved.”   That’s classic, what I call old-line, traditional Universalism.  And that’s how the Unitarian/Universalist church got started. 

The new wrinkle on that says, “God wants everything to be reconciled to Himself.  That obviously doesn’t happen in this life.  Therefore, it has to happen sometime, because if God sets out to do something, He can’t fail.  And since God has set out to reconcile everyone and everything, and it doesn’t happen in this life, therefore there must be some kind of post-mortem reconciliation that takes place.”

Steve:  So I guess you can call that Universalism Lite?

Maurice:  Ultimate Reconciliation, I suppose, is the new catch phrase.  I just call it post-mortem salvation. 

Steve:  I was especially surprised that some of the Universalist authors you spoke of considered themselves evangelicals and were published by well-known evangelical publishers.  We’ve touched on this some, but do you think it is possible to be deceived about Universalism and still be in the evangelical camp?

Maurice:  That’s a good question, and that’s really what’s being debated right now. 

Somebody like Thomas Talbott, out of Willamette University, professor of philosophy, who is a professing evangelical, but on the issue of Universalism is espousing Ultimate Reconciliation, that everyone eventually gets reconciled, either in this life or in the next life.  And then Clark Pinnock has been going in that direction as well, although Pinnock’s theology, probably the last fifteen years has become a moving goalpost.  About the time you think you’ve kicked the ball through the upright, you discover he’s moved it.  He has advocated both Annihilationism and Universalism.  But those are some of the names that are being attached to it.  And there’s a small, but growing cadre of evangelical scholars who are talking about it.

Where I see it taking root is not in the scholarly circles, but at the grassroots.  The Internet is absolutely rife with websites promoting Universalism, and the arguments being made are just nonsensical. 

Steve:  One thing I got out of the book is that Universalism has been remerging throughout the centuries.  Historically, when was the belief first put into words?

Maurice:  I suppose you could go back to Origen.  The early church father Origen is one of the names that modern day Universalists like to appeal to and say, “Look at Origen.  He believed this.”  And the problem is that Origen believed it, and he promoted it.  Now we’re talking in the neighborhood of 185 to 250 AD, so you’re looking at third century.  For those who aren’t up to speed on church history, don’t feel bad.  I had to look it up myself.  Origen taught a form of Ultimate Reconciliation that even Satan and the demons would ultimately be reconciled to God.

Steve:  But he was in the vast minority of the church fathers.

Maurice:  Vast minority.  In fact we have a whole chapter in the book called So, What Did the Early Dogs Believe?  Basically, Origen was the only bright light of the pre-Nicene era that taught Universalism.  Everybody else, almost to a person, taught some form of conscious, eternal punishment. 

Steve:  One aspect of the book that I found very helpful was its discussion of philosophical arguments to support Universalism.  Would you explain that for us?

Maurice:  One of the goals of the book was not just to give people answers, but to try and help them think how to think.  And so we teach about the four different types of arguments.  And they’re basically philosophical arguments, historical arguments, theological arguments, and then what I call etymological arguments (arguments over the meaning of words).

A philosophical argument is one that argues a point, but it’s not necessarily a Biblical point.  For example, somebody says how can people in Heaven be really happy if they knew that their loved ones were experiencing torment in hell.  You’d be surprised at how often that argument comes up.  My response to that is, number one, we don’t know what people in Heaven remember of this life.  Now this is an argument from silence.

Steve:  And it’s an argument with no reference to Scripture.

Maurice:  Exactly.  There’s no Scriptural argument there.  We don’t know what eternal life is like in the Kingdom of God and what we will remember of the shadowlands, as C. S. Lewis once described it.   And even if we did, we don’t know what it’s going to be like once we see Jesus and once we see God in all of His fullness.  We may not want to remember anything else.  Those are philosophical arguments.  They are arguments over arguments.  It’s not an argument over specific Scripture.

Steve:  Probably one of the trickiest arguments the Universalists use involves the Greek.  They assign meanings to words that most scholars would dispute.  Please tell us how you traced one word that meant rehabilitative punishment long before the first century, but meant punishment as a legal penalty in New Testament times.

Maurice:  It does get a little bit confusing, and, as I point out, and advocates for Universalism point out, that the King James Bible uses the English word Hell to translate four different Greek words.  My response to that is never do your word studies in English.  Always do word studies in the original language. 

For example, they make a big deal about the word kolasiV (kolasis), which is the word for punishment in Matthew chapter 25, verse 46 where it talks about eternal punishment versus eternal life.  And the word for punishment there is kolasiV.  And they get this from William Barclay.  And Barclay says kolasiV always meant a form of discipline in classical Greek.  It referred to the pruning of trees and, therefore kolasiV is redemptive punishment.  There was a Greek philosophy behind that ¾ that all punishment by the gods was intended to educate.  And God is the great physician, and his goal is to heal our souls, therefore all punishment is not really punishment.  It’s a form of discipline and redemption. 

Steve:  But classical Greek was several centuries before the New Testament era.

Maurice:  And what got my attention, finally, was I was researching the word.  I went back and took the early church fathers before 300 AD and looked at every time they used the word punishment, or kolasiV, and lo and behold, they used it interchangeably with words that mean torture, punishment.  There was no distinction by the time of the first century between kolasiV and timwria (timoria), meaning torment. 

Steve:  So, the Universalists just know enough Greek to be dangerous.

Maurice:  Basically, that’s it.  And they take semi-valid arguments, as is true kolasiV originally referred to the pruning of trees.  But that was way back in Homeric Greek.

Steve:  Back around 1000 BC.

Maurice:  Yeah.  So, they’re only off by 800 years.  And language changes.  All of the linguistic scholars who do the dictionaries and the lexicons acknowledge the fact that by the first century, this was simply a common word for punishment.  There’s no redemptive value left in it.  And you’re absolutely right.  A lot of the people doing this are not trained linguists.  I majored in Greek in college.  I taught at the seminary level.  I’m not an expert, just an amateur with thirty years of practice.  Once you actually get into studying it, you discover we were right all along.

Steve:  Your strongest argument against Universalism depends on the words of Jesus Himself.  How can anyone take anything as straightforward as His statements and read in the opposite meaning?

Maurice:  I think the reason people wind up reading the opposite in is because they bring the opposite in when they approach Scripture.  When Jesus says the way to destruction is broad and the pathway to life is narrow, Universalism basically says, “Jesus said that, but He didn’t really mean it.  He was being metaphorical.”

And so what you’re practicing what we used to call eisegesis, as opposed to exegesis.  Exegesis reads out of Scripture.  Eisegesis reads into Scripture.  I think the only way you could get a lot of these Universalist conclusions is you bring them with you to the text and you go looking for ways to turn the text to mean what you hope it means.  And sometimes that’s the only way to explain how they reach those conclusions. 

Steve:  The hardest question Universalists ask is “How could a loving God condemn a man or woman to Hell eternally for sins committed in this life.”  What’s your answer to that?

Maurice:  The church has responded to that several times over the centuries.  Augustine used to say murder only takes a second, but we demand the death penalty for it.  You don’t measure a sin or a crime by how long it took to commit it. 

What I look at it is this.  We don’t know, in this life, how deeply the sins of our lives in this world have offended the holiness of God.  And we’re trying to get the prisoner to come up with his own punishment.  The prisoner doesn’t know what’s just or what’s not.  We don’t know what the holiness of God requires for our sin. 

Could it be that the offense of our sin is so great that from God’s perspective and the perspective of His holiness, that’s what’s required.  The only way the sinful man would know that would is by God revealing it to him.  You’re not going to get that from the natural world because it’s fallen in the first place.  Our sense of justice in this life is already skewed and so the idea that we even have a clue as to the punishment that our sin deserves is simply not true.  We don’t.  God has to tell us what punishment our sin deserves.

Don’t ask the prisoner to write his own sentence because he’s going to put himself on probation pretty quick.  

Steve:  You’ve mentioned that Universalism is popping up all over the Internet.  Do you see it rearing its head in any cutting edge Christian movements today, maybe something that’s beyond the Internet that a lot of people have heard of?

Maurice:  There have been some noteworthy examples of large Pentecostal or evangelical churches where the pastor has declared he was a Universalist.  Usually within a year or two, their congregation has disappeared. 

It hasn’t reared its head on a widespread basis.  Heresy, or bad doctrine, almost always shows up on the fringes first and works its way toward the heart. 

I think our biggest challenge is that the average Christian in the pew, the average professing believer, really doesn’t have a clue what he or she believes about God, salvation, Heaven and Hell.

Jim Packard, whom I quote in the book, was asked on his eightieth birthday what the greatest need of the church is.  He said the greatest need of the church is to catechise itself.  Christians don’t know what it is they believe. 

Steve:  I would like to think that if a Christian is really intimate with God, hearing from Him fairly frequently and carrying on a friendship, this would help immunize him from Universalism.  Do you think so?

Maurice:  I think it depends on the person.  One of the individuals I have dealt with, this is the one who really got me involved and got me thinking and writing, has said to me numerous times, “I prayed and prayed and prayed and asked God to keep me out of deception.  That I did not want to be deceived.  I only wanted to know the truth and God led me to Universalism.”

My response to that is that’s kind of like praying whether or not to have an adulterous affair.  I’m  not sure you need to pray about that.  I think that’s pretty cut and dried.  And any prayer answer you might get to the contrary is not the Lord. 

Sometimes in theology, you don’t need to pray over it.  You simply need to look at what Scripture teaches.  Look at the plain meaning of the text, as opposed to the strained meaning of the text, and go with the plain meaning of the text.

When it says these will go off into eternal punishment and these will go off into eternal life, Jesus really does mean that, and he wasn’t just being metaphorical.  I don’t need to spend a lot of time praying over that. 

Canine version of William of Ockham

I’m always amazed at how people wind up where they are.  And how many times have I talked to a Mormon missionary who has said, “Just pray about it and God will give you a burning in your bosom?”  How many Christians do you know, and I know several, who wound up with heartburn and in the Mormon church?

I would like to think that our relationship with God on an individual level would be strong enough to keep us from deception, but I also think that a good, solid theology helps.  That’s why in the book, I’ll say here is a reference to a systematic theology.  Go study this more for yourself.  Don’t just take my word for it. 

We need to be reminded of what the church has historically taught and what the boundaries of historic Christianity are, so that if my relationship with the Lord isn’t up to par, I don’t go wandering out into the “tullies” just because I didn’t feel good that day. 

Steve:  One of the nicest features of the book are those doggie cartoons.  We’ll have to thank your wife, Gale, for that.  It kept things from getting too super-serious.  Was it her idea or your idea to include them?

Maurice:  Both.  I had the title, All Dogs Go to Heaven.  She started working on a cover.  I said why don’t you try your hand at doing some illustrations.  I gave her some ideas, and she started illustrating them, and I was just blown away.  My favorite is the illustration she did for William of Ockham, who was famous for the philosophical principle of Ockham’s razor, which is the argument of simplicity.  The simplest answer is usually the right one. 

And I thought to myself, I wonder what she’ll do with that?  And she came up with a dog illustration of William of Ockam that I thought was absolutely classic, William of Ockham holding his razor. 

A MAJOR MOTIVATION OF MAURICE SMITH’S LIFE AND THAT OF HIS HOUSE CHURCH NETWORK

Steve:  Reading your newsletters that come out every week or so, I believe I understand some of your motivations.  You’re more than an expert on Universalism.  I know your heart’s in house church.  And that’s under attack from without and within.  Your group, the Parousia Network,  once received some warnings from angelic messengers that I think set the tone for a lot of what you’re doing.  What were those three warnings?

Maurice:  We don’t talk a lot about that because people can start getting freaked-out when you tell them that you hear from angels. 

There were seven of us present at the time.  We were having a prayer meeting and it blew us away for a week.  I wept for a week, and I would call up others who were there and say, “What did God just do?”  It was that intense.

The three messages were basically this:

·         Number one, God intends and desires to return holiness and the fear of God to His church.  We have lost our sense of the fear of God and when you lose your fear of God, you eventually lose your holiness, your separation from sin.  This is a problem in the church today and God fully intends to address it.  Any coming awakening or spiritual revival is going to have at its heart a return to holiness and the fear of God.

·         The second emphasis was repentance.  We had a lot of styled, institutional repentance ¾ people on stage repenting for how they treated Native Americans or slaves or any number of things.  My impression is that the Lord is tired of that.  What he is looking for is individual, personal repentance from sin.  One of the things that motivates it, if you look at the history of revival, people usually repent of their sin when God shows up in holiness and the fear of God.  That convicts us of our sin and genuine, personal repentance breaks out.  Because God begins to open the book of our life in a way that we have never seen it before.  I could give you accounts of Korea in 1907 and other places, where the chroniclers of those revivals would say every sin that a man could commit rose up and people were confronted with it by the Holy Spirit, and they were literally on their faces before God, on the floor, crying out for forgiveness.  That’s genuine, heart-felt, Spirit-impelled repentance.

·         The third thing is intimacy with God.  God desires an intimate church.  He wants a church that is in love with Him and is intimate with Him in its prayer-life and its worship and in all that it does.  But I believe that intimacy can only come as the Holy Spirit takes us through this brokenness of holiness and the fear of God, of personal repentance and that those things are kind of the precursors to genuine intimacy, the kind of intimacy God wants His church to have in the coming days. 

Those are the three basic messages.  We have the newsletters posted on the website where people can read them.  Those messages, that encounter has had a profound effect upon me and upon our group.  It is one of those unforgettable spiritual moments where you walk away going, “Wow.  Take you shoes off because this is holy ground.” 

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