Christian universalism

Yeah

... it's something like Grace Saves All, The Necessity of Christian Universalism, and I went, "Christian universal, what the heck is that?" And I started to kind of learn about what that was, and then I started listening to David's podcast, and I started to hear all these peop- guests he had on.

And he had, like, I don't know how many pod- a- at that point, like, a lot, and I listened to them all, like, twice through.

Wow.

Yeah

... realize there were many different streams.

But I like what you say when you say, use the word Christian universalism because-

Yeah

And

so that's what makes it hard, because if you ever try to do a theology, a coherent theology, you're going to run into a situation when it seems like although you're deriving your theology from scripture that there's some passages of scripture that seem at least on the face of it especially in english translations that seems to go against it so right sometimes um if somebody says you know like about my christian universalism what about the what about these scriptures and i'm going to say well it's a problem you've got two There's no escaping this problem.

If you want a theology that has no scriptural problems, at least on the face of it, you know, good luck.

Yes.

As a matter of fact, it was interesting.

Two weeks ago, Phil Snyder, the minister at First Christian in Brentwood, invited me to do a dialogue sermon where the two of us just sat in front of the congregation for about 25 minutes.

And he asked me some questions about Christian universalism.

And then we had it to where people could text in through their phones, could text in questions.

Last week, we covered Pelagianism, the belief that good people go to heaven.

But today, we're gonna talk about Christian universalism.

And I know some of you might be thinking, wait, isn't that pluralism? No, they're actually different.

They're kind of like cousins in the same dysfunctional theological family.

But this one we need to hit at because Christian universalism is promoted by so-called Christians.

And it's the claim that Jesus did die on the cross for your sins, but you don't really need to repent because Jesus saves everyone, not just believers.

That's the claim.

Now, if you've listened to the podcast before, you already know David.

He's a husband, musician, minister, author, podcaster, and in my opinion, one of the leading voices in Christian universalism.

He's the author of Grace Saves All, The Necessity of Christian Universalism, and host of the Grace Saves All podcast, which was probably the biggest influence on me as I walked through and came to embrace this truth.

Now, the last time David was on, we played a little game I called Stump the Universalist.

I came armed with some of the scriptures that are often considered the toughest passages for Christian universalism, and David took on the challenge of explaining how he understands them.

The only problem was, we ran out of time.

David had done all of that preparation, I still had scriptures left on my list, and so apparently I owed him another podcast.

Okay.