by John H. Gerstner

Edwyn Bevan, in his book Christianity, says that some modern Roman Catholics, speaking off the record concerning their official doctrine of the endless punishment of the wicked, "teach that the punishment involves real pain, but that it is not forever; others that the punishment is really forever, but that it is not torment as pictured in the old view."

This observation is even truer of the thinking and teaching of many Protestants. In other words, the tendency of modern times has been to take punishment out of eternity, or eternity out of punishment.

Some seem to be trying to take the blessedness out of eternity also. If hell is being changed to heaven, heaven is being brought down to hell. Paul Tillich, in The Meaning of Joy, finds joy and pain apparently inseparable. Moreover, for multitudes of thinkers, heaven must be presently, at least, a very miserable place or state of mind; for God, some say, suffers because of the sins of His creatures. Being an infinite Being, He must suffer infinitely, and being omniscient He must suffer every moment. If He who is the glory of heaven is infinitely miserable, it is difficult to believe that creatures who find their joy in Him could avoid being miserable also.

The traditional churches have not changed their creeds, but there can be little doubt that they have changed their preaching. Walter Lingle once wrote about "The No-Hell Church," where that doctrine had never been mentioned for more than twenty years. How many "No-Hell" churches there are, no one has dared to estimate. Hell is so dreadful that the very thought of it is well-nigh unbearable. At the same time, the conviction is growing that religion without a hell is not worth much. It seems that the church can neither live with this doctrine nor without it.

If the orthodox have been strangely silent about what they ostensibly believe, the neo-orthodox have decisively committed themselves to universal salvation. It is an irony of history that a movement which is often called Neo-Calvinism should repudiate the doctrine of particularistic election by which historic Calvinism has been distinguished. In Karl Barth's book Christ and Adam, implicit universalism is clear. Romans 5:1-11, Barth says,

only speaks of Jesus Christ and those who believe in Him. If we read that first part of the chapter by itself, we might quite easily come to the conclusion that for Paul, Christ's manhood is significant only for those who are united to Him in faith. We would then have no right to draw any conclusion about the relationship between Christ and man as such, from what Paul says about the "religious" relationship between Christ and Christians. We could not then expect to find in the manhood of Christ the key to the essential nature of man.

But in vv. 12-20 Paul does not limit his context to Christ's relationship to believers, but gives fundamentally the same account of His relationship to all men. The context is widened from church history to world history, from Christ's relationship to Christians to His relationship to all men (pp. 87ff.).

It may be useful to contrast the universalism of Neo-orthodoxy with that of the older Liberalism. According to the latter, men do not deserve to be damned, and therefore they do not really need to be saved. Or, if men do deserved to be damned, a loving God is morally incapable of damning them. So, after their measure of suffering in this world, with or without some further temporary suffering in the next one, all men are "saved."

Neo-orthodoxy has too strong a note of orthodoxy to entertain such a view. It holds that man is sinful and deserves the wrath of God. A reconciliation, however, can divert that wrath. Such a reconciliation has been made in Christ, and it has saved or justified all men whom Adam's sin had damned. Faith is not necessary, according to Barth, to secure justification, but only to experience the fruits of it. All men will sooner or later come to faith, and thereby realize what they have always possessed, but not previously enjoyed.

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This is part twenty-eight of John H. Gerstner's small book entitled Theology for Everyman, originally published in 1965 (Moody Press, Chicago). That book was subsequently republished in 1991. It has since fallen out of print and we thought it would be good to revisit this book here on the blog. Over the past weeks, we've been working our way through the book. Here is where we've been so far: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6 Chapter 7, Chapter 8 and Chapter 9.