The Christian story has one simple, beautiful and extraordinarily powerful claim: despite all the evil, suffering, and pain that grips this creation, the good catches up. That promise is found in the very prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. And it will be done, of that we can be sure.
But that prayer raises a rather glaring question. how can the coming of the divine kingdom — how can the good’s catching up — be reconciled with the eternal damnation of some of God’s creatures?
In this episode of The Tentative Apologist Podcast we sit down with my friend Robin Parry. Dr. Parry is both an editor for Wipf and Stock and an author and editor of several of his own books. He was previously on the podcast discussing demons. In this episode we discuss a topic very close to Robin’s heart and it involves his own answer to what it means for God’s kingdom to come, what it means for the good to catch up.
You see, Robin is an evangelical universalist. That is, he upholds both the doctrines of evangelical Christian faith and a commitment to the belief that Christ’s atoning work will ultimately reconcile each and every one of God’s creatures. The good does catch up, and when it finally does, Robin believes God will indeed reconcile all things to himself, through Christ’s blood, shed on the cross (Colossians 1:20). In this discussion Robin shares the biblical, theological and practical grounds of this belief and hope.
For more from Robin you can check out his blog “Theological Scribbles“. If you are interested in studying evangelical universalism in more depth I highly recommend his book The Evangelical Universalist (written under the pseudonym “Gregory MacDonald”) as well as his co-edited volume Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate.
For further discussion on universalism check out my podcast interview with filmmaker Kevin Miller.
If you like this article, please consider supporting entrepreneurs in the developing world.
