Christian Universalism is making in-roads within certain sectors of the Evangelical community like never before (as a recent book I’ve done a review for illustrates). Here Christian Kettler comments on theologian, John Hick’s kind of thinking that has led to Hick’s Pluralistic Universalism. In the brief sketch (from Kettler), you will notice overlap between his appeal (to God’s love and mercy), and the Christian Universalist appeal.

[H]ick proposes a “Copernican revolution” in the Christian understanding of other faiths. No longer should we consider religions from a “Christianity-centered” paradigm, but rather from a “God-centered” paradigm. In the universe of faiths, we find differing responses to the same Reality. The Reality remains the same, but the various religions show us that there can be varied responses to the same Reality. This is the basic weakness of the traditional theologies of religions: their doctrine of God. To say that the majority of humanity is bound for hell is contrary to the Christian doctrine of God as loving and benevolent. The other more modern alternatives are certainly better, but lack of a certain respect for the particularity of each religion and the mutual enrichment which they can experience among each other. [Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ and the Reality of Salvation, 68]

‘Evangelical Universalists’, so called, make a distinction from Hick; they press the particularity of the Christian revelation of God in Christ as the only way to eternal life (contra Hick). But if not careful, if there is not a robust doctrine of God (and I mean a Christian Trinitarian doctrine of God) in the background and foreground of the Christian Universalist’s approach; then they will fall prey to the kind of weak kneed “God-centric” proposal that we see described above (pace Hick).

That book I reviewed, by Jackson Baer; his thinking, while very undeveloped, does not have an adequate doctrine of God (in fact I see none that is prominent in his thinking other than sporadic assertions about the Christian God). Baer’s little book falls prey to the kind of “theo-logic” that Hick’s position founders under. An exegete or Christian thinker can’t simply appeal to God’s love and mercy and call it good; they must also attend, in thick ways, to engaging the particularity of that love revealed in God-self in Christ. Without the anchor of Christ’s person, God’s love and mercy becomes a trojan horse for, what is in the end, a Pluralistic Universalism. [In other words, the critique of Hick, or anyone following in his footsteps (and their tribe is legion in the Evangelical ranks today) is; that if we disjoint the work[s] of salvation from the person of salvation (God in Christ), then we have placed a rupture into God’s life from which we will never be able to recover. We will abstract salvation from God and collapse it into creation (or humanity); thus allowing for the kind of pluralism present in Hick; allowing salvation to be understood as the result of a human product. We must maintain, as Christians, that salvation is ultimately interior to God’s life (antecedently so); in this way we will be able to speak in ways that honor the integrity of the Christian’s pedigree to a Christ-centered salvation versus Hick’s “God-centered” approach.]