Soteriological Near-Universalism: Rob Bell Case preceded by Neal Punt Case in Christian Reformed Church

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The blog-entry that follows comes out of my reflections and research on the Rob Bell Case, and my encouragement upon taking notice that reformational scholar Dr Richard Mouw has supported pastor Bell.  To understand Mouw's position better I had to go back to the Neal Punt Case which prepared me to take on Jan Bonda's work as well.  

By way of intro, please note that Dr Mouw tawt philosophy at Calvin College for manuy years. After taking admin positions as well, Mouw was appointed President of Fuller Theological Seminary and continued to write many good books.  Eventually, I hope to get to his book responding to John Piper's book, Desiring God.  The reply is Mouw's God Who Commands, becawz Piper wants to treat the imperatives regarding Joy in the Bible , especially the New Testament, as deontologicals floated up out of their Biblical contexts (Northrup Frye) . In that book, Mouw references "The idea of divine generosity, see Neal Punt, What's Good About the Good News, the Plan of Salvation in a New Light (Northland Books, pp. 87-92)." Mouw says further that his own book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport (Zondervan Books, 2004, p. 130) also advances this idea of divine  generosity. I have these for-me-new sources on the problem being addressed here. As I said in a draft for an email to some friends:<blockquote>Earlier in 1985, while Mouw was teaching philosophy at Calvin College (I believe), the Christian Reformed Church actually put a pastor on trial for heresy.  The Neal Punt case.  The charge of heresy was made by the Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada CRC -- very distant from where Punt was pastoring in the Chicago region CRC (this can be done in the CRC).  Here's the link from a website Neal Punt still maintains today in his retirement. He was exonerated by the Chicago classis (as presbyteries are known in the CRC).  Now, I disagree with Punt becawz I come to this question from the standpoint of the Interim State as the missiological foundation of a soteriological near-universalism (a stance close to but not necessarily identical to Punts own carefully-honed position which he calls "Evangelical Inclusivism."  Punt has used the phrase "biblical universalism" in at least a URL address; but I had had the impression that there was yet another website expressing a related stance on the problem at hand but different from Punt's and my own, a third option for a solution to ruffly the same problem.   







To make clear the various solutions to a common problem, I offer here a link to further a ruffly Consequent Problem-Historical Method (CPHM: DH Th Vollenhoven) to the common problem faced in turn by Punt, Mouw, Bonda,  Gedraitis, perhaps even Bell -- while advising all and sundry to see first:  Albert Wolters. 1979. On Vollenhoven's problem-historical method. In Hearing and Doing: Philosophical Essays Dedicated to H. Evan Runner. John Kraay and Anthony Tol (eds). Wedge: Toronto.


Now see Neal Punt's page that I'm using as the focus of this blog-entry, trying to utilize a bit  Vollenhoven's CPHM as the methodological deep background:

http://biblicaluniversalism.com/posting12r.htm

The approach has been renamed by Punt as "Evangelical Inclusivism" -- where "evangelical" refers to the Gospel, Christ's Good News to all (except a relative few who do not respond to the visit of Christ, Xristos paidwgos as St Irenaeus formulated, Christ the Evangelist Teacher and Advocate who comes to you in your death, holding each of his human creatures together in the individuality of each, even in death, asleep in Jesus -- John Calvin, Geneva Bible in English, and dramatist William Shakespeare where soul sleep is speculated upon regarding dreams in that Interim State sent by the Ascended Lord upon the Throne as I gloss Shakespeare further, emerges to full view in a passage in the character Hamlet in the tragic drama of that name.

Jan Bonda, The One Purpose of God (Eerdmans, 1998). Translated from the original Dutch, I guess.

Neal Punt on Bonda:

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Dutch writer Jan Bonda’s book The One Purpose of God (Eerdmans, 1998) appeared in English. Bonda’s book is a welcome supplement to much of what I have been attempting to say.
     According to Bonda, the one purpose of God is to undo the havoc caused by the disobedience of the first Adam by means of the obedience of the second Adam (Jesus). Bonda presents a scholarly exposition of the book of Romans. This study is buttressed by the biblical portrait of salvation for “all persons” as depicted in the Psalms, the Prophets, and Historical books of the Old Testament. Whether or not one agrees with everything Bonda writes, it is impossible to escape Bonda’s proof for the fact that the Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, teaches that "As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:22).

ALLOWS NO EXCEPTIONS

     Listen to what Bonda says: "The evil that has been brought about by Adam extends to the whole of humanity, without any exception. And the salvation that Christ brings extends to the whole of humanity without any exception, comprising everyone, just as Adam's fall did" (Bonda, P. 107). “Without any exception” is a theme that runs throughout his book. It epitomizes what Bonda means by “The One Purpose of God.”

      Although we can learn much about the Old Testament’s inclusive perspective regarding the plan of salvation from Bonda’s book, his repeated emphasis on “without any exception” is to be lamented. Bonda appears to have failed to recognize that the repeated Old Testament expressions concerning the final salvation of all mankind would still allow for the exceptions that are revealed in other portions of the Old as well as the New Testament. Here Bonda, together with many others, fails to appreciate the legitimate and necessary distinction between universal declarations and generalizations as considered in Posting 3.

SPECULATION ABOUT "THE GREATER HOPE"

      Bonda’s emphasis on “without any exception” forces him to speculate about the possibility of “the greater hope.” This is the teaching that all of God’s judgments have a redemptive purpose. Therefore the hope (and for Bonda the certainty) that even the final judgment of God has as its purpose the restoration of all mankind in the life hereafter.

       However, those who desire such a "greater hope," including Bonda, can do so only at the cost of giving up the far, far "greater hope" that is expressed in the familiar words of the hymn: "Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe." Jesus bore all the sins of all his people. The biblical evidence for this truth is so extensive that only a fraction of it can be cited here. "The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6). "It is finished" (John 19:30). "The blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin" (1 John 1:7).

       To claim that for some of God’s elect there remains some payment for sin that must still be made after Jesus Christ accomplished his sacrifice is to demean the perfect work accomplished by Jesus on the cross. Think of all the testimony of Scripture that “We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. 10:10) when we considered the reality of objective salvation (Posting 4).

       Why would it be necessary for those whose sin was removed by Christ’s blood to continue to experience the consequence of their sin after their life upon earth? Was there something lacking in the offering Christ made “once for all” for man’s salvation? Is there something that those sinners must do or an attitude they must display before God can or will translate them to glory? If so, then the teaching of Scripture concerning salvation by sovereign grace is compromised.

ALLOWS SOME EXCEPTIONS

        We already noted that throughout his book Bonda insists that these universal expressions allow for no exceptions. However, in the final analysis Bonda concedes that certain exceptions are possible: “Surely, that is possible. God is free to accept this 'NO' of that particular person as his final choice" (Bonda, P. 259). It appears that by this concession Bonda has abandoned his strict view that all the universal expressions of the Scriptures are “without exception.” Bonda can be identified as one who accepts the so-called “universalistic” texts as generalizations (see Posting 3).

        Even without knowing the intricacies of the Hebrew language, one can detect certain broad outlines of the pattern of God's dealing with the children of men in the Old Testament. These are consistent with the premise of Evangelical Inclusivism that all persons will be saved except those who the Bible declares will be finally lost.

                                                  ------ end of quote from Neal Punt -------

For references to Mouw who came to support Punt's ground-breaking work in the community of the orthodoxy of the Reformed tradition, please navigate thru the Punt website from the initial page where Endorsements of Punt's books are overwhelming; including that of Dr. Richard Mouw,  President of Fuller Seminary: "For helpful comments on all of the few-versus-many passages, in support of the idea of divine generosity, see Neal Punt, What's Good About the Good News, the Plan of Salvation in a New Light." Northland Books, pp. 87-92.  Mouw says this in his own book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport (Zondervan Books, 2004, p. 130).  For Mouw, the issue and its problematics all boil down to the question whether we believe, from Scripture, that God is generous or stingy to his creatures, human bengs.


A brief further note about United Church of Canada cleric and University of Toronto literary-science scholar, Northrop Frye who tawt the course on English Bible required of all lit majors at the time; his classrooms were large and loaded with eagre students.  His two works on the theme of the Bible were The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981), and Words with Power:  Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature" [(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovitch, 1990)  first published in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) Winter 1994 and discussed by Stephen Marx online. 

I cite this work of Frye's becawz here he hazards his grand theory of the Bible's system of metaphors,  his theory of the Bible's metaphory where the whole flow of its verbal optics broadly cluster around a primal quartet, 4 metaphors -- 

                         mountain, which clusters Zion, Jerusalem city of David ringing with sung and instrumentalized Psalms, and the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelations come down from heaven to earth with the choirs of all creation

garden, a metaphoric stream which gushes forth from the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1-3 

                 cave, which centers on the Hebrew sheol,  from which the shadowy figures emit briefly from their tombs when the sun darkens at mid-day during the crucifixion -- but sheol is no Greek hades ...

                                    furnace, which clusters with all volcanoes like Sodom and Gomorrah, and  with the Babylonian oven into which Daniel and his Jewish comrades were thrown in the prophetic Book of Daniel, and with the dread prospect in some Gospels of a lake of fire that burns forever, the epicenter of our most fearsome doctrines of Hell   

This insite is extremely helpful in understanding ancillary problems that come with the problem-line of soteriological church-doctrinal options for Christians -- either universalism [often driven by ontological universalism of various philosophical kinds, re which see Vollenhoven in Wolters; or near-universalism (Punt, Mouw, Gedraitis with Shakespearean gloss on Geneva Bible and Calvin, forensic physics of nanoparticles and informatics, a dash of sci fi, etc); which in turn brings into play a third approach based on Arminian free will and no evangelizing-teaching visits of the Lord in the Interim State -- another set of options when the ancillary doctrine of a plenteous hell is addressed as by, for instance, Rob Bell (later; but for now please note that some distinguish sheol -- the Cave, from Scholastic notions of hell in the Augustinian position on this probolem-line, Hell with "the fire that burneth forever") -- namely, the solution-choice of apokatastasis (restitution, restoration, reconciliation) by which this option implies a during-death process of visitation of Christ the King, Evangelist, and Teacher, and Advocate who goes thru with us our sins to help us go humble, to help us whole-heartedly repent, while preparing us for the Judgement [which I think comes in the resurrection (Daniel mentions resurrection (John Goldingay), several Intertestamental rabbis mention it)], and it was a doctrine held to by one of the streams of the Pharisees in Jesus' time, and of course by Jesus himself now the Ascended Lord Jesus Christ, King of Creation who takes away the sin of the world and even the sting of death beforehand, for those who have come to consciously know him before death and resurrection; then there's a parallel option of annhiliation option; and finally, there's the Western latinate option of Augustine which fits the Frygian metaphory in the Furnace cluster.  We will get to the church-doctrine of Hell  around N.T. Wright's very comprehensive and comprehensible views thereof; but only after we move to our next step, the Interim State.


-- Owlb


See also:  refWrite...page2: Pisteutics: Neopuritans and/or Neocalvinists -- let's take Neopuritans first