Doctrine
Calvinists
Arminians
Universal Baptists
God loves all
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The objects of God’s love will come to salvation
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God desires to save all
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All God’s purposes will be accomplished
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Christ died for all
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All for whom Christ died will be saved (his blood was not shed in vain)
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We Universalist Baptists, he said, simply affirm beliefs that mainstream Protestants hold, so why are we considered heretical?
As Winchester saw it, the problems generated within both the Calvinist and Arminian systems stem from the conviction of those on both sides of that divide that eternal hell is a nonnegotiable first principle, requiring them to sacrifice other doctrines to accommodate it. Universalism, he believed, has the strengths of both sides but the weaknesses of neither.
One common eighteenth-century objection to universalism was that it encouraged licentiousness. Winchester denied the logic. The theological principles that undergird universalism—that God created all people to “glorify his name, and enjoy him forever,” the love of God for his creatures, the death of Jesus for all, the unwavering love of God even in the face of our rebellion—in no way encourage sinful living (UR.III.A1). On the contrary, they encourage lives of holy devotion and gratitude. After all, who would reason as follows? “I know that God created me, seeks to do me good, sent his Son to die for me, and that he will always love me . . . so I must hate him!” Rather, the revelation of divine love solicits our loving response (1 John 4:19). Winchester claimed that his own experience over the years suggests that universalist belief “causes benevolence, meekness, humility, forbearance, forgiveness, charity, and all goodness to abound and increase” (UR.III.A2). In fact, belief in eternal torment does not seem to have restrained evil very well over the centuries. Indeed, it appears to be a chief reason that many reject Christianity (UR.III.A3).
Winchester represented an American, Evangelical version of universal restoration in the European Pietist tradition. But this was not the only version to appear in the second half of the eighteenth century in the British colonies in America. Alongside it we find a rather idiosyncratic Calvinist strain in the preaching of John Murray, who was a follower of the teachings of James Relly, a London-based minister. It is to them that we now turn, and in order to do that we need to look back to Britain.
166. Also like Sterry, he is commemorated by a stained-glass window in the college chapel.
167. A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729).
168. His first book in this new theological venture was The Grounds and Reasons of Christian Regeneration (1739).
169. Wesley was deeply impacted by these texts and recommended his Methodist leaders to read them, though he later came to see them as erring too much on the side of law rather than gospel, with a tendency to legalism. He considered the later works to be unintelligible nonsense (and published an open letter to Law in 1756 arguing this point). Alan Gregory argues that Wesley actually made little attempt to understand Law’s later works, let alone offer to offer a substantive response to them (Quenching Hell, 8–9). On Law’s appropriation of Böhme, see also Gregory, “No New Truths of Religion.”
170. The Spirit of Prayer (1749–50), The Way to Divine Knowledge (1752), and The Spirit of Love (Part I in 1752 and Part II in 1754).
171. Law misunderstood the classical Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo, taking it to imply that the connection between God and creation was entirely arbitrary so that creation was not a manifestation of God’s glory in finite reality. The doctrine does not in fact imply that, but given that Law thought it did one can understand his passionate rejection of it. Böhme, who also rejected the doctrine, will have encouraged Law’s rejection of it. For a detailed outline and interpretation, see Alan Gregory’s Quenching Hell, which has been the main source for our own outline. Gregory is sympathetic to Law, but unafraid to critique aspects of his theology.
172. Law, Serious Call, 423.
173. Law, Serious Call, 393.
174. Law, Serious Call, 366.
175. On creation out of nothing and Law’s misinformed rejection of it, see Gregory, Quenching Hell, 112–15.
176. It is also worth saying that Eternal Nature (and consequently the actual created world) is a manifestation of the unity and triunity of God in the form of fire (corresponding to the Father), light (corresponding to the Son), and spirit (corresponding to Spirit). Fire is the life and cause of motion in creation; light is the love, beauty, understanding, and wisdom in creation; spirit is the unity in creation (allowing us to speak of “nature” and a “uni-verse”), that which binds things into an environment. These three creaturely realities are not material, though they have material forms (e.g., Law associated electricity with fire). Every possible created reality manifests these three aspects in dynamic interplay and unity, none existing apart from the others. What he is reaching for is a vision of creation as in some way necessarily mirroring the glory of the Triune God. In this way, while avoiding pantheism, Law sees that “God is breaking forth into visibility.” (Law, Way to Divine Knowledge, 145).
177. Law’s theology of Adam and his embodiment is problematic in several ways. On which, see Gregory, Quenching Hell, 127ff, 139–41. Law sees sin start to appear when Adam, whom Law considers an androgynous individual rather than a male, starts to look away from God. God’s response is to divide Adam into two creatures—one male and one female. This is actually an act of mercy, giving Adam a second chance. (The androgynous Adam interpretation of Genesis 2 is an ancient one, recurring especially in esoteric traditions like Jewish Kabbalah, alchemy, and, of course, Jakob Böhme, finding defenders today among Old Testament scholars such as Phyllis Trible. It remains, however, a minority report.)
178. Law, “Spirit of Prayer,” 27.
179. Law, Serious Call, 407.
180. Law, Serious Call, 445.
181. Law, “Spirit of Prayer,” 23.
182. Law, “Appeal to All That Doubt,” 65.
183. Law, “Spirit of Prayer,” 108. Italics ours.
184. Law, Serious Call, 463.
185. Law, “Spirit of Prayer,” 264.
186. Law, Address to the Clergy, 64. According to Thomas Langcake, before he died, Law claimed that even fallen angels would be “delivered out of misery,” because creation would be incomplete without them. See Gregory, Quenching Hell, 186.
187. Often confused with Rev. James Stonehouse.
188. Stonehouse matriculated from Pembroke College with a BA (1729) and an MA (1736). At least one source declares him a member of the Holy Club. Whatever the case on that score, he was certainly friends with Whitefield and the Wesleys in Oxford, as his subsequent relations with them demonstrates (see the diaries of John and Charles Wesley and Whitefield).
189. The source is a pamphlet called “Pre-existence of Souls and Universal Restitution, considered as Scripture Doctrines, extracted from the Minutes and Correspondence of Burnham Socie
ty, in the County of Somerset.” It is quoted by Mr. G. S. Bromhead in The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 13 (Jan 1, 1818).
190. Charles Wesley, diary entry for 27 April 1739.
191. Mary died in 1751, and Charles Wesley performed George’s marriage to Molly Stafford in 1755.
192. Quoted by Mr. G. S. Bromhead in The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 13 (Jan 1, 1818) 565.
193. All page numbers in this section on Stonehouse, unless otherwise stated, are from this book. A second shot at setting out a positive case for universal restitution is found in URFD, in which Stonehouse seeks to defend five key claims from Scripture: 1. It is Christ’s avowed purpose to restore all people (Letter III); 2. Christ promises to restore all people (Letter IV). 3. Christ’s death is efficacious for all (Letter V); 4. It is Christ’s declared will to have all people restored (Letter VI); 5. Christ is able to effect the restitution of all (Letter VII).
194. For example, there are numerous biblical instances of things so designated that clearly have an end and are neither eternal nor everlasting.
195. On the descent, see Letter III.
196. Stonehouse’s Christology was orthodox, but he appears, very idiosyncratically, to have been a binitarian, rather than a trinitarian. Letter V conflates the Spirit and the Logos. The Spirit simply is God the Son, the Logos (80). Knowing that he was consciously rejecting the faith of the church, he was a heretic on this matter.
197. Siegvolck had earlier offered similar qualifications:
That economy, I say, will certainly have an end; namely, at the period when Christ’s aim in obtained, and the Son himself shall be subject to Him that put all things under his feet. But hereby is not meant that the kingdom of Christ itself shall cease, which according to the word of God is to have no end. St. Luke i.33. But it will rather, through such subjection of Christ under God his Father, get an infinitely greater lustre. So that we must distinguish between the particular government of Christ and his elect, and the kingdom of Christ and his believers as one with the kingdom of his heavenly Father. The first will certainly cease, and consequently the eternities of eternities, or ages of ages, appointed for it will end; but the latter is to last for evermore, or to all eternity. (Everlasting Gospel, 63–64)
Siegvolck is clearly trying to find a way of distinguishing different aspects or modes or phases of Christ’s kingdom reign—one of which shall end and the other of which shall not.
Elhanan Winchester was also careful to say that, while Christ’s mediatorial kingdom, which is aionial, was completed once Christ handed it over to the Father, Christ continues to reign, as a person in the Trinity, from the throne of God forever and ever. See Process and Empire, poem 12, lines 264–71; Restitution of All Things, 7, 9.
198. Stonehouse was well aware of the works of Origen (he quotes from them) and there are numerous parallels (as well as some key differences) between his thought and Origen’s.
199. In URFD (Letter V), Stonehouse argues for the very unusual view that Christ’s death fully “disarms” the wrath of God for all sinners, so that none will ever have to face it, but that the wrath of the Lamb remains an issue for those who reject the gospel. For all people are now Christ’s, bought with his blood, and he will deal with their sin.
200. In one of his many extensive footnotes, Stonehouse speculates something similar for Satan: “When satan’s hatred of GOD is heightened to so exquisite a degree of it, as that he should hate even his own existence; dissolution may be at last his choice, and that wherein his desires may concenter. And in this situation his disease may possibly be advanced and ripen’d to its true, intended and necessary crisis or point of change” (335).
201. Slightly unusually, Stonehouse believes that gehenna is a part of Hades, rather than an equivalent to Revelation’s lake of fire, and that it will come to an end after the judgment day when Hades is cast into the lake of fire (URFD, Letter II).
202. To explain the in-text reference system: UR = The Universal Restoration; III = Dialogue III; A2 = The answer to the second question posed in the dialogue.
203. Winchester, “Reigning Abominations,” 27n.
204. Winchester, “Preface” to UR, x–xi.
205. Winchester, “Preface” to UR, iv.
206. Winchester, “Preface” to UR, viii.
207. Winchester, “Preface” to UR, xii.
208. Winchester, “Preface” to UR, xv.
209. Winchester, “Preface” to UR, xviii.
210. Winchester, Letter to De Coetlogon, 3–4.
211. Winchester, Letter to De Coetlogon, 35.
212. Winchester, Letter to De Coetlogon, 216.
213. Winchester’s beliefs about the future are spelled out in great detail in his A Course of Lectures on the Prophesies That Remain to be Fulfilled (1789), and more briefly, and in third-rate poetic form, in his The Process and Empire of Christ (1793).
214. Winchester discusses at some length whether “all” literally means “all” (UR.I.A9). He argues that “all” means “all without exception,” except when the context indicates that it does not (e.g., 1 Cor 15:27).
7
Calvinist Universalism
Relly and Murray
We have already considered how the mystical universalist thinking of Jane Lead was mediated to the American colonies through the influx of German Pietists. We have also seen how the English Moravian James Stonehouse’s books were being read by some of the colonists. But it was not only mystical and Pietistic strands of Restorationist thought that made an impact. The Reformed tradition in Britain also generated its own version of universalism, which made its mark in America.
James Relly (1722–78)
The story
In the second half of the eighteenth century a new and unusual version of universalism appeared in the ministry of a Calvinistic Methodist preacher named James Relly.
Relly was born in the county of Pembroke, Southwest Wales, in 1722. He is described as a physically strong, “wild ungovernable youth, addicted to bad company.”215 In 1741, at the age of nineteen, he and his friends decided to attend a local religious service being conducted by George Whitefield, the Evangelical revivalist, with the intention of causing trouble and disrupting the gathering. However, Relly unexpectedly found himself entranced by the preaching and within a few days was converted. James and his brother John then took up vocations as evangelistic preachers in Wales, associated with Whitefield.
Relly seems to have been a hardworking and trusted preacher ministering on behalf of Whitefield over the next nine years in both Wales and England. Then, in 1750, the two parted company, apparently at Relly’s initiative, and almost certainly over a theological difference that had arisen between them concerned the “Freeness, and Extent of Grace.”216 By this Relly meant that he had come to believe that salvation was completely free and not in any way conditional upon what we do, not even upon our repentance and faith. Furthermore, he now claimed that this saving grace extended not simply to a small group, the “elect,” but to all mankind. He had become a universalist, but of a very distinctive and unusual kind. Despite this parting of the ways, Relly continued to regard Whitefield with “The love, the rev’rence, to a father due.”217 However, he seems not to have had such high regard for Whitefield’s followers.
The divide between Relly and the mainstream of the Evangelical movement, in both its Calvinist and Arminian forms, caused considerable bad feeling.218 He was accused by them of being antinomian, of various kinds of greed and immorality, and of encouraging treason.219 In return, Relly accused them of teaching salvation by works—thereby undermining the gospel—and of doing the work of Antichrist.220
Relly continued travelling and p
reaching his gospel message in various cities around Britain until 1757, when he settled in London, renting various meetinghouses in which he would regularly preach (1757–78). While in London he also published a number of books and pamphlets, the most influential being Union; Or a Treatise of the Consanguinity and Affinity between Christ and His Church (1759). He died in 1778, at the age of fifty-six.
Without their inspirational preacher, the congregation petered out within three years, and with it Relly’s message faded from the British scene.221 However, as we shall see, it continued to exercise influence in America through one of Relly’s converts, John Murray.
The “freeness and extent of grace” in Relly’s Calvinist universalism
To understand Relly’s idiosyncratic universalist views, we need to appreciate how he arrived at them. In the preface to Union, he explains how one day, in his work as an evangelist for Whitefield, he met with a man who challenged his account of the atoning work of Christ. Relly taught the mainstream Evangelical penal substitution theory of the atonement. According to this view, a holy and just God cannot simply overlook sin, but must punish it, as justice demands. However, the just punishment for sin is everlasting death, so how then can anyone be saved? The answer, given in the gospel, is that we can be saved because God sent Christ to take our place and God punished him in our stead. In this way justice is satisfied, because sin has been punished, yet sinners can go free. Such was the theory. Relly’s interlocutor, however, was having none of it. How, he asked, can justice be satisfied if the one who commits the crime is not punished, but instead an innocent person is punished in his place? The Bible itself teaches that the innocent or righteous must not suffer for the sins of the guilty (Isa 3:10–11), and that the guilty should pay for their own sins (Exod 32:33; Deut 24:26). So the atonement, said the man, rather than satisfying justice, seems a prime instance of injustice.222
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