Shadowlands

  I see my loved ones becoming universalists one after another. Universalism is one of those doctrines that keeps coming back around, partly because it offers a kind of moral relief. The idea is that in the end, God will save everyone, believers and non-believers alike, because His love will not allow anyone to be lost forever. I understand the impulse. I am tempted by it. If you care about God’s goodness, if you’ve sat with the brutal realities of human suffering and human blindness, it is not hard to see why many would want this so much to be true. But when I try to approach this by turning to the Scripture and focusing on its narrative logic, I keep running into a different theme. The Bible does not merely portray sin as a mistake that eventually gets corrected. It portrays sin as a posture: a self-exalting refusal to worship God. And it portrays judgment, often, as God confirming what a person has chosen to become. In C.S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain he wrote, “the doors ...