In the same way, Paul says that the few Jews who currently believe in Jesus as Messiah (including himself) are a firstfruits offering on behalf of the whole of Israel, consecrating the whole of the harvest (the nation of Israel) to God—“for if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy” (Rom 11:16). The fact that the number of the saved within Israel is small—a mere remnant—does not mean that God has abandoned the rest of the nation. His calling and election are irrevocable and the time is coming when “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26).
Now the church is that which is foreshadowed in the firstfruits of Pentecost—the day on which the church was birthed as God poured out his Spirit. Thus, James speaks of believers as “a kind of firstfruits of all he has created” (Jas 1:18) and Revelation talks of those “redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb” (Rev 14:4). Again, the idea is that the elect are not chosen instead of the non-elect, but on behalf of them, to be a means of ministering blessing to them and as a promise of the fuller harvest to come. Jukes thinks that God has blessed the church in Christ (v. 3) “that in the dispensation of the fulness of time He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are in earth, even in Him” (1:10, KJV)
To Jukes, the church will serve as priests into the age to come, ministering to “the spirits in prison.” But there is always hope for the damned: “the first-fruits [the church], being safe, the harvest [the rest of humanity], already sanctified by the first-fruits, shall also be gathered in” (37).
Being one of the firstfruits is not easy, but a narrow way that few find. It is to be offered as a sacrifice, to take up one’s cross, to give oneself for the service of others in service to God.
Here then is the key to one part of the apparent contradiction between “mercy upon all,” and yet “the election” of a “little flock”; between “all the kindreds of the earth blessed in Christ,” and yet “a straight and narrow way” and “few finding it.” . . . The first-born and first-fruits are the “few” and “little flock”; but these, though first delivered from the curse, have a relation to the whole creation, which shall be saved in the appointed times by the first-born seed, that is by Christ and His Body, through those appointed baptisms, whether fire or water, which are required to bring about “the restitution of all things.” (38)
Thus does the microcosm foretell the fate of the macrocosm. (48)
All this contrasts with the traditional view in which Jesus saves and blesses the firstfruits and “leaves the rest to torments endless and most agonizing” (39).
2. The truth that God works for redemption across successive ages (41–55)
God’s purposes in Scripture are worked out across numerous ages, both past and future. And those who enter into the life of God do not do so all at the same time, but over an extended period of time. He sees these ages figured in the Old Testament in the division of time into periods of seven days, seven weeks, seven months, seven years (when debts among Israelites were forgiven), seven-times-seven years, the latter climaxing in the Jubilee Year in which all debts (Israelite and non-Israelite) within the land are cancelled. Jukes sees the different periods here as types of the different ages in the divine plan of blessing, with the final being the “ages of ages” after which all debts are wiped out.
Jukes illustrates the differences in the ages from the biblical teaching on Ammon and Moab. These nations were under a curse, cut off from the congregation of Israel: “No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever. . . . You shall not seek their peace or their prosperity all your days forever” (Deut 23:3, 6). Thus, Ezra and Nehemiah forced any Jews with Ammonite wives to put away those wives and any children they had with them (Ezra 10:2–3, 44; Neh 13:1, 23, 25, 30)! In addition, the prophets speak of the coming utter destruction of Moab and Ammon (Jer 48; 49:1–5; Ezek 21:28, 32). Yet, they then promise the post-annihilation restoration of those decimated nations (Jer 48:47; 49:6). The same pattern, says Jukes, can be found in God’s dispensations with Egypt, Assyria, Elam, and Sodom. God “works, not in one act, but by degrees, through successive days or seasons” (47).
All the ages (aeons) of which the Bible speaks, both past and present, are periods of time, none of which are eternal and all of which come to an end.468 By analogy with all previous ages, we cannot presume that the ages to come will be everlasting. Indeed, Jukes revives a teaching we found in various church fathers and eighteenth-century universalists, i.e., that the handing over of the aionial kingdom by Christ to the Father so that God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:24) marks the end of all the ages. Throughout these ages, God is working out his redemptive purposes; once he has completed his battle with sin and evil, the ages will come to a close. This is the Jubilee Year.469
3. The truth that the way to life is through judgment and death (55–73)
According to Jukes, one central error in common Protestant views on the cross of Christ is the belief that Christ died instead of us—sparing us from dying. This, he thinks, is to miss the meaning of the atonement. Rather than being delivered from death, Christ delivers us by death and out of death. Christ does not die instead of us, but on our behalf, as our representative. His followers do not—indeed, must not—avoid death, but instead should take up their crosses: “for whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25). Death is now the way to life. In baptism, we are united with Christ in his death (Rom 6:3–4). We are crucified with Christ (Gal 2:20), and if we die with him we shall live with him (2 Tim 2:11–12). So Christ enters into our human condition, as prisoners of sin and death, and embraces it to the full. Then God raises him from the dead, breaking the prison open, and enabling us, in the Spirit, to turn our deaths from a prison into a gateway to life. Death—Christ’s death and our deaths in Christ—becomes the way back to God.
In addition to dying with Christ to the power of sin, restoration to our human destiny requires that we also share in Christ’s resurrection life. In Christ, crucified and risen, humanity is remade and restored. “But whether in Christ, or in us, the work is only wrought through death. Man to be saved must die to that which keeps him far from God. And the way to bring about this death is God’s judgment, who, because He loves us, kills to make alive” (61). Thus, “Christ is and must be the one and only way, by which any have been, or are, or can be saved” (77).
The condemnation of God’s holy law slays us, but it is a necessary part of God’s redemptive work in us. God judges us so that he can save us, because our salvation requires the condemnation and destruction of that which is evil in us. Then God brings new creation. We can accept God’s judgment in this life, allowing our sinful selves to be slain, and thus enter into new life now. Alternatively, we can resist divine judgment here and now, but then we “have to meet it in a more awful form in the coming world” (63). As Jesus said, “everyone will be salted with fire” (Mark 9:49, italics added), there is no avoiding it. This purificatory salting will either take place in this life as we die to ourselves, or in the fires of gehenna. But this second death is also a means to an end, and that end is the restoration of those experiencing it.470
In some ways, Jukes’s universalism seems different from some of the other universalisms that we have considered. His argument for it certainly has a distinctive shape, and he is more concerned with explaining the teaching of Scripture than many of the other nineteenth-century universalists. Yet, his mystical bent and his rejection of penal substitutionary atonement as missing the life-transforming point of the gospel make his work resonate in many ways with Erskine, Maurice, MacDonald, and others.
Samuel Cox (1826–93), Universalism, and the Baptists
Baptists were, for the most part, Evangelicals who maintained the traditional view of hell. In 1812, the New Connexion of General Baptists (Arminian)471 and the Particular Baptists (Calvinist) decided to join togeth
er for the gospel cause, and in 1813 the Baptist Union’s constitution was published. Among its resolutions was the following: “That this Society of ministers and churches . . . maintaining the important doctrines of . . . the eternal misery of such as die in impenitence.” However, Baptist ecclesiology—which insisted on the autonomy of individual congregations—opened up space for diversity. The Baptist Union could provide guidelines “but never laid out concrete statements of belief that demanded assent from its members.”472 Nevertheless, it would be true to say that Baptist churches and publications were dominated by the theology of eternal conscious torment in hell, and dissent was not welcomed.
Nonetheless, dissenters started to arise, the first being the Rev. John Foster (1770–1843), who argued against the eternal duration of hell, maintaining that the punishment must be proportioned to the severity of the offences.473 (It is of interest to note that John Foster had been an influence on the early Thomas Erskine.) Further dissent arose with the defense of annihilation by Rev. Henry Hamlet Dobney and of salvific inclusivism with an article in The Baptist Magazine (1866) by a C. Carter. But it was Rev. Samuel Cox who went the extra mile and embraced a full-throated universalism.
Life
Samuel Cox was a Londoner and apprenticed at the London docks, where his father worked, before training for the Baptist ministry at Stepney Academy, as John Foster before him, and being ordained in 1852.474 He ministered at various churches before settling down in 1863 as the pastor at Mansfield Road Baptist Church in Nottingham. Cox was minister in Nottingham for twenty-five years, until 1888.
Samuel Cox was a high-profile leader in the Baptist Union and President of the Baptist Association in 1873, and served as the founder and editor of The Expositor from volume 1 to volume 20 (1875–84), a respected and academically informed theological journal aimed at ministers and lay people. Cox himself also wrote thirty books and edited another twenty. His services to scholarship were recognized by the awarding of a DD degree from the University of St. Andrews in 1882 (with Aberdeen and Edinburgh also offering to confer DDs on him).
In 1869, Cox published The Resurrection, in which he took a similar approach to the notion of the “firstfruits” as Andrew Jukes had.475 Cox’s debt to Jukes is explicit in his later work, and it is certainly possible that he was already under Jukes’s influence at this point. Whether or not that was the case, this publication certainly makes very clear hints in universalist directions. Further expressions of his dissenting views were published under a pseudonym (Carpus) in The Expositor in 1875, an article on heaven that he republished in 1877 in his Expository Essays and Discourses. Here he challenged the notion of death as a radical break and presented the idea of purifying divine judgments.476 The notion of “the larger hope” was also introduced in Expository Essays (Cox, as others, had been influenced by Tennyson). However, amazingly, this book did not attract criticism. That brief calm preceded the storm created by his next book, published in the same year—Salvator Mundi, Or, Is Christ the Saviour of All Men? This was an in-your-face argument for a confident belief in universal salvation. The preface opens with the words, “The main object of this book is to encourage those who ‘faintly trust the larger hope’ to commit themselves to it wholly and fearlessly” (vii). Cox’s fellow-Baptists were less than enthusiastic about his new book, and from 1878 various negative reviews appeared in Baptist periodicals. Cox responded to his critics in some expositions in The Expositor in 1881 on “The Sin unto Death—I John 5:16” and “The Sin against the Spirit” and in his subsequent book The Larger Hope, published in 1883. However, Cox’s views were simply too far out of step with the mainstream of Baptist thought and Cox’s “heretical” theology led to his forced resignation from his role at The Expositor in 1884, though his own church in Nottingham kept him on.477
Cox was not, however, without his sympathizers and admirers (like John Clifford, editor of the General Baptist Magazine, F. W. Farrar, and Thomas Allin) and Salvator Mundi remains one of the classics of nineteenth-century universalism.
Thought
Salvator Mundi opens with an extended discussion of an issue raised by Jesus’ comment that Tyre, Sidon, and even Sodom would have repented if they had witnessed the miracles that the unresponsive Galilean towns of Jesus’ day had witnessed (Matt 21:20–24). Jesus was emphasizing just how blind and stubborn his contemporaries were, but Cox’s question is this: why did God not provide those ancient cities with the circumstances in which their repentance would have come about? That is a theological problem—one repeated for every one of the millions of people who die never having had a chance to hear the gospel presented adequately, or even at all. Surely God will do all he can to save people, so why withhold that which he knows will prove effective?
For myself I can only say that I see no way out of the difficulty, no single loophole of escape, so long as we assume what the Bible does not teach, that there is no probation beyond the grave, that no moral change is possible in that world towards which all the children of time are travelling. I, at least, am so sure that the Father of all men will do the most and best which can be done for every man’s salvation as to entertain no doubt that long ere this the men of Sodom and of Tyre and Sidon have heard the words of Christ and seen his mighty works—seen and heard Him, perchance, when He stood and shone among the spirits in the Hadean prison, and preached the gospel to them that were dead, in order that, while still judged by men according to the flesh, they might live according to God in the spirit [1 Pet 3:19–20; 4:6]. (17)
Cox asserts that “a man’s salvation should not depend on the age, or on the moral conditions of the age, into which he is born, and which he has done nothing to determine” (21). He makes no apology for his appeal to “Reason and Conscience” alongside Scripture in his theological musings here. “Doubtless we hear the voice of God in Scripture, and in Scripture hear it most distinctly; but that voice also speaks within us, in our reason and in our moral sense. And he who has drawn a conclusion from Scripture which Reason and Conscience imperatively condemn should need no other proof that he has misinterpreted the Word of God” (24). This hermeneutic, which in some ways echoes that of Origen, albeit in modern Victorian dress, is something that sets interpreters like Cox, Erskine, MacDonald, and Allin apart from the more conservative theologians in their day.
Traditionalists, says Cox, take only one of the threads of teaching found in Scripture (to the exclusion of the more hopeful thread), and even then the texts to which they appeal are capable of being interpreted differently. He argues that, on the one hand, “the Scriptures, when fairly interpreted, do not sustain that theory of the future state which has long found general acceptance” (34). And “on the other hand, we may hope to find that there are great principles, principles that run through the Bible from end to end, which point conclusively to a very different theory. . . . No such words are to be found in the Greek . . . nor any words which convey . . . the conception of a final and ever-during place of torment” (34).
Cox begins by working through texts in which the KJV uses the words “damnation” and “hell.” His argument is that “neither of these words is to be found in any part of the New Testament, or, indeed, in any part of the whole Bible; nor even any word which at all answers to the conception which they quicken in our minds” (39). Contrary to the KJV, there are no instances in the NT in which krinein (to judge), krisis (the act of deciding/judging), and krima (the sentence of judgment) should be translated as “to damn,” “damning,” or “damned.” Similarly neither tartarus, Hades, nor gehenna ought ever to be translated as “hell.” All three, he argues, refer to the intermediate state, not one’s final destiny. Tartarus only occurs in 2 Peter 2:4, and there it is a place in which wicked angels are kept imprisoned prior to the day of judgment. Hades is the world of the human dead to which all go prior to the day of judgment. Hades is divided into paradise and gehenna, in which the righteous and the wicked anticipate the time of reckoning. The valle
y of Ge-Hinnom beside Jerusalem, with all its associations of wickedness and destruction, became an illustration and symbol of the fate of the unrighteous. A study of Second Temple Jewish uses of gehenna, contends Cox, “positively discountenance” using “hell” as the English translation—“That is to say, the uninspired Jewish writings for the six centuries nearest to Christ know nothing, absolutely nothing, of ‘hell’” (72). Some gehenna texts envisage annihilation, while others envisage salvation from gehenna; some envisaged the duration of gehenna as twelve months; some for a day; some for as long as the righteous wanted it to endure. So “‘the propositions which they contain are so variable and unstable’ that ‘no firm and unshifting dogma may be deduced from them’ as to the future punishment of the guilty” (74). However, we can conclude, he believes, that the rabbis did not believe in a material fire, and that they thought this fire would one day be extinguished.
Cox prefers to translate gehenna in the NT more literally as “Valley of Hinnom,” understanding the phrase as a symbol—after all, “how should our whole body, the bodies of English men and women, be cast into a Palestinian valley?” (83). Jesus’ teaching on the punishment of the Valley of Hinnom is harsh and full of figures of speech that need to be read aright. Jesus is “teaching an Oriental people, in the Oriental forms with which they are familiar” (81). If we over-literally interpret the concrete imagery and idioms, we end up with nonsense. If we read them with sensitivity to the cultural context, we end up with the notion of everlasting hell disappearing out of the picture. He concludes:
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