Happily Ever After (Part 04) – The Biblical Argument for Universalism: New Testament

The story of Jared and Tyler Duncan’s conversation about universalism continues.  This time, they will be taking a look at what the New Testament has to say about the doctrine.

Juice Fast: Day 04

I’m on the verge of completing my fourth day of the juice fast and I have to say that’s it’s gone pretty well so far. The first day I had an energy surge that was out of this world. I was on top of everything that day and was focused in on what I had to do. The second and third days I felt a lot more sluggish and weak. Today, however, it’s picked up a little bit again and I haven’t felt the hunger that I felt on days two and three. It’s funny because I dream about food at night. I’ve dreamed about cheeseburgers and Pizza at least once each. Talk about your mind being zoned in on certain foods and addicted! It’s been taking about an hour and a half to make the juice for the day every morning. My Omega Juicer is amazing. Right now I’m just updating you all on how the fast is going and will be going to bed shortly after celebrating the New York Giants’ win over the Green Bay Packers in today’s Divisional Playoff game. HAHA! Oh, and by the way, I’ve lost 8 pounds over the first three days. If I end up doing the full 60 day fast I hope to lose 66 pounds. That’d be about a pound a day from here on out and would put me under 200 at 199 for the first time in six and a half years. From my experience fasting (I’ve done a complete fast of seven days twice – with water), the fifth day usually sees an energy burst as your system is finished cleansing itself. I don’t know what’s going to happen this time, but I’ll be sure to update you on everything in a few days.

Why I’m About to do What I’m About to do

Tomorrow, I will begin doing something that is going to change my life.  I am 32 years old and grossly overweight.  I believe God has been making the possibility of health problems in the future a reality to me in a way I’ve never before considered.  My sister and her husband are both raw vegans and, over Christmas, they showed me two videos that shocked me so much that I’ve decided to join their ranks as a raw vegan.  The two videos are Forks Over Knives and Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead.  My first thought with this whole thing was, “There’s no way I can do that and live without meat and dairy.”  However, it dawned on me that I could hold onto my addiction to the American diet and likely get sicker as I age (I already have high cholesterol, gall bladder problems, and am a pre-diabetic) or I could make a spiritual decision to leave behind this body-destructive lifestyle and seek holiness not just of my spirit, but also of my body, the temple of the Holy Spirit.  Physical wholeness is the same thing as holiness.  Notice how the two words are spelled almost the same.  They are essentially from the same root word and both mean “separate from anything that would make one sick or impure.”  Holiness is the idea of holistic living in all spheres of our lives.  So, tomorrow, it begins.  I am starting with a juice fast.  The man in Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead did a juice fast for 60 days and lost 87 pounds, ALL of which he kept off by eating a whole foods, plant-based diet.

I’d like to do 60 days myself, but I need to monitor how my body reacts.  I will be juicing with my new juicer starting in the morning and imbibing the “mean green” juice drink four times a day.  It is made from kale, spinach, cucumber, celery, green apples, and ginger root.  It will provide me with all the vitamins and minerals I need each day (less the B vitamins for which I will need to take a supplement).  After I’m done with my juice fast, I will be eating a 100% raw vegan diet with the occasional cooked vegetables.  I am posting this here to share my journey with you.  I will do periodic updates during the juice fast and let you know how my body is reacting.  I also want to fill you in on how it affects me spiritually.  Again, this is not just some fad diet, but a lifestyle change toward holiness of body.  I want to be public about this, because I want to be held accountable.  Now that I know that all of my dear readers are aware of what I’m doing, I am spurred on even more to succeed and, perhaps, to inspire you, too.  Wish me luck and say a prayer for me as I undertake this huge change in my life to better my health and spirit!

The Search for Original Christianity

I left the evangelical movement for good in 2008, though a great number of loved ones still reside in their churches.  I grant to each person the freedom to determine what they believe is the truth.  Since the time of my departure I have been on a mission.  I want to get back to ground zero.  I want to find the original teachings of Christ and His apostles.  I am no longer interested in debates over eternal security, substitutionary atonement, and the rapture.  These are all doctrines invented in the centuries since the Reformation and, as far as I’m concerned, are non-issues.  I am interested to know what the early church, especially those just after the apostles passed away, thought about the cross, the divinity of Christ, the nature of the gospel, the purpose of the sacraments, and its understanding of life in the age to come.  My research of the past three years has netted what is to me overwhelming evidence of the pervasive belief in universalism among the early Christians, attested to from the mouths of even Augustine and Jerome.  I am starting to see my faith in a whole new way.  I feel like I’m connecting with what the Spirit of Jesus was doing among the early disciples in what was called “The Way.”  It’s been so refreshing over the past months to dig in and find the true essence of the gospel being about loving one’s neighbor and the nature of salvation not being about getting out of literal hellfire for eternity, but about being transformed into a person of love like God the Father.  Those who live lives full of love for neighbor enter the kingdom in the golden age to come after this one while those who live selfishly and destructively will enter an age of chastisement meant to purge them of self and transform them into Godly men and women.  I’ve purchased a large volume set of the writings of the early church fathers and I intend to start reading a little bit every few days to get a feel for what was going on in the early second to mid fourth centuries.  As I have searched, I have found Eastern Orthodox Christianity to be a great resource of early Christian thinking and, except for a few hang ups I have with that church’s way of doing things, I am seriously considering what it would look like to be an Orthodox Christian.  If you are frustrated with the seeming powerlessness of today’s shallow consumer Christianity and are looking for something to refresh your faith, I invite you to join the search with me for original Christianity.

Happy New Year and other Stuff

Happy New Year, friends!  I hope and pray for all of God’s richest blessings upon you in 2012.  As you may or may not have noticed, I have not been able to put together a complete post since May.  I am working on my doctorate in clinical psychology and, between that and my job as a therapist, there has existed little time for pleasure writing, especially since my posts tend to be more like essays.  That’s something I want to change in the new year.  I plan on posting short little ideas of inspiration that I get along the way on a variety of topics germane to this website.  They will be a paragraph or two at most and will reflect ideas that I’ve gotten from reading, daydreaming, philosophizing, theologizing, or meditating.  They will be my thoughts on a variety of things.  This way there will be plenty of material to discuss and ponder throughout the year in addition to the major posts I’m working on in the Christian Universalism series and the devotional series about our loving God.  Those are the changes that are upcoming.  I hope to post at least once a week for you, but forgive me if it’s a bit less frequent with everything else going on around here.  Thanks again for reading and I look forward to your comments!

Yours,

Thomas

Conformity to God’s Will: Why Punishment Doesn’t Work

Church history is replete with examples of power plays and fear tactics to induce people to conform to what some particular authority believes is the will of God.  Sadly, these efforts have resulted, at times, in brutal physical, spiritual, and psychological terror.  Some people never seem to learn the lesson that one cannot be forced to obey God against his or her will.  Perhaps the most famous campaign to terrorize people into correct living and correct believing is the Inquisition, where the church used unspeakable torture or threats of torture to produce conformity.  In this blog post, I want to examine the three ways that social psychologists posit that conformity can be stimulated and relate it to the subject of following God’s will in discipleship.  I hope to demonstrate that the fear of punishment, still ever so popular in many Christian circles, is not effective in producing life-changing results.

Saved from What?

“Have you been saved?” The evangelist thunders from the pulpit. “Jesus Christ desires your salvation and if you will repent of your sin and confess Him as Lord and Savior tonight then you will be guaranteed a place in heaven when you die!” The lights in the sanctuary begin to lower and the organist plays a slow-moving hymn. The evangelist calls forward those who “feel the Spirit tugging at their hearts” and people begin making their way down the aisle, kneel in front, and pray a prayer to receive Christ and salvation from eternal misery.

Signs of the Times?

This week, in an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, the Reverend Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelistic preacher Billy Graham, proclaimed to a national television audience that signs of the nearness of the end times were abundantly apparent in an increase of wars, famines, and earthquakes. Graham asserted that, based on his understanding of Matthew chapter 24 where Jesus speaks of these very events occurring during a time of great tribulation (what he interprets to be the end times), the second coming of Christ is imminent. It is popular belief in evangelical and fundamentalist circles that the many armed conflicts and natural disasters that occur today are divine “birth pains” leading up to the main events of earth’s destruction via God’s judgment and the return of Jesus Christ physically to this world. The only problem with Graham’s assessment, besides what I believe to be a mistaken understanding of eschatology (study of last things), is that wars, famines, and earthquakes are most certainly not increasing in frequency.

Book Review: “Love Wins” by Rob Bell

Rob Bell, author of Velvet Elvis, has produced a masterful treatment of the subject of hell and heaven from the perspective of God’s unfathomable and limitless love.  I read this book in one day!  Bell hits on all the main issues that Christians struggle with in the debate over heaven and hell.  How could God create billions of people only to save a relatively small handful of them?  Bell’s thesis is that God’s love wins in the end.  While he stopped short of endorsing universalism, keeping the door open for one to reject God’s love forever, the book was the best down-to-earth explanation of the universalist arguments that I have seen in print so far.  Most books on the subject tend to treat the subject from a scholarly theological perspective, but Rob Bell is a master of explaining things almost in a story-like manner.

Our Loving God (Part 05) – Humble Glory

If you have come from a spiritually abusive background, you most often suffer with a view of God that is distant, harsh, and arrogant.  God was often depicted as this self-obsessed ego maniac who is hell-bent on forcing everybody to acknowledge how great He is.  We’ve been examining 1 Corinthians 13 to see what the characteristics of our loving God must be.  Already in this series, you’ve probably challenged some of the ways in which you’ve viewed God.  Here we do so again, because, contrary to the fundamentalist portrayal of God as arrogant and capricious, the Apostle Paul writes that love is not proud, does not boast, and that it does not insist on its own rights.  It’s not about oneself.  Yet, for those of us who were exposed to a spiritually vitriolic environment, it may be difficult to look at a verse like Isaiah 48:11, which reads, “How can I let myself be defamed?   I will not yield my glory to another,” and conclude anything but that God is a narcissist.  How do we understand the concept of God being loving and yet someone who, at the same time, seems to be obsessed with His own glory?  You’ll hear many Christians say, “It’s all about God, not you.”  Is this really true?