Will All Be Saved? by Blanchard Laurence Malcolm;

Author:Blanchard, Laurence Malcolm;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authentic Media

5.

Robin Parry [Gregory MacDonald]—Return from Exile and the Restoration of All Things

“Gregory MacDonald” is a pseudonym used by the British theologian Robin Parry who has written a book entitled The Evangelical Universalist.142 According to Parry, his penname was formed by making a composite out of the names of two well known Christian universalists—the patristic theologian Gregory of Nyssa and the nineteenth century poet/novelist, George MacDonald.143 Parry chose to use the penname until August 29, 2009 when he revealed his identity to the world through his internet weblog.144

Parry’s explanation for using a pseudonym is two-fold: (1) he did not want to cause his employer—a Christian book publisher—any undeserved criticism, and (2) he did not want the issue of his universalism to distract from the message of his book Worshipping Trinity, which he feels is a more important book.145 The fact that Parry felt the need to use a pseudonym at all is, in and of itself, a timely commentary on the harsh divide that still attends the issue of universalism in our own day, especially among the more conservative enclaves of Christianity. The recent controversy in the United States over megachurch pastor Rob Bell’s book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived is confirmation that Parry is essentially right in his assessment of the evangelical community at large and the fact that the evangelical world is not ready at this point—nor may it ever be—to accept universalism or to abandon the doctrines of hell and eternal punishment.146

Parry’s book, The Evangelical Universalist, is an amazingly compact treatise that bundles a relatively large amount of intricate argumentation into a relatively small space (177 pages—not counting the appendices). It is written from the perspective of a man who claims to be a classic evangelical in all things save for the doctrine of universal salvation.147 In elaborating on what he means by this he affirms that he believes in the inspiration and authority of the Bible as well as “those crucial Christian doctrines such as Trinity, creation, sin, atonement, the return of Christ, salvation through Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone.”148 He also believes in the reality of hell with the exception that he rejects the idea that it will be a place of eternal, conscious suffering. Instead he argues that hell is a “terrible, but temporary fate”149 that is “educative.”150 A place where “God does not torture anybody,” but rather “allows the painful reality of sin to hit home.”151

Parry begins his book on a personal note with an autobiographical account of his gradual embrace of universalism. He describes a time in his spiritual life when he entered into a doxological crisis—a time when he could no longer worship God because he wavered in his belief that God truly loved all people.152 At the heart of the problem was the issue of hell and the implications it had for God’s omnibenevolence. In reading William Lane Craig’s book The Only Wise God,153 Parry concluded that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.