No One Left Behind: Is Universal Salvation Biblical?

By Darrell J. Fasching

1. You have heard it said that on the day of judgment only Christians will be saved and all others will be consigned to eternal damnation, but I say to you that the gospel proclaims salvation for the whole human race.
2. You have heard it said that non-Christians are strangers who will not enter the Kingdom of God, but I say to you that God enters our lives through the very presence of the stranger.
3. You have heard it said that heretics and sinners will have no place in the Kingdom of God, but I say to you that to reject even the least of these is to reject God and Gods messiah.
4. You have heard it said that human beings can be saved in no other name than that of Jesus, but I say to you that the name Jesus means we are saved in the name of a God who cannot be named or imaged.
5. You have heard it said that only a chosen remnant can be saved, but I say to you that a saving remnant saves not itself but the whole human race of which it is a part.
6. You have heard it said that in the final judgment many will be consigned to the eternal fires, but I say to you, Gods judgment is a refining fire which transforms and saves rather than destroys. The final truth is that our God is the savior of the whole human race and especially all believers (1Timothy 4:10).

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462031412

Darrell J. Fasching

About the Author Darrell J. Fasching is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa Florida, where he has served in the past as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. Before coming to the University of South Florida he served as Assistant Dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University. He is the author of four books on theology and ethics and co-author of three text books on world religions and on global ethics. He is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and lives with his wife Laura in Lutz Florida, where he worships at All Saints Lutheran Church. By the author: The Thought of Jacques Ellul (1981); Narrative Theology After Auschwitz: From Alienation to Ethics (1992); The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia? (1993);The Coming of the Millennium: Good News for the Whole Human Race (1996). Co-author of: Religion and Globalization (2008) with John Esposito and Todd Lewis; Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics (2011) 2nd edition,with Dell deChant and David Lantigua; World Religions Today, 4th edition (2011) with John Esposito and Todd Lewis.

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Copyright © 1996, 2011 by Darrell J. Fasching.

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Contents

Preface

Prologue

The World as We Know It Is Passing Away

Chapter 1

Waiting for the Millennium

in an Age of False Prophets

Chapter 2

Babel — The Gospel of Hospitality to Strangers

Chapter 3

Peniel — Wrestling with the Stranger

Chapter 4

Golgotha — The Stranger as Messiah

Chapter 5

Pentecost — The Church as Communion with Strangers

Chapter 6

The Apocalypse — Good News for the Whole Human Race

Epilogue

Evangelism as Hospitality — Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Spiritual Adventure of the New Millennium

Notes

About the Author

In Memory of

Jacques Ellul, 1912-1994

who taught me to understand

that evangelical theology means

good news for the whole human race.

Orignally published as The Coming of the Millennium: Good News for the Whole Human Race

Trinity Press International

ISBN: 0-595-16850-7

copyright 1996 by Darrell J. Fasching

Republished as The Coming of the MIllennium: Good News for the Whole Human Race, Authors Choice Press, 2000

Republished with e-book availability under the title: No One Left Behind: Is Universal Salvation Biblical?, Authors Choice, 2011

We have put our trust in the living God and he is the saviour of the whole human race but particularly of all believers. This is what you are to enforce in your teaching.

Paul’s advice to the young preacher, Timothy:

1 Timothy 4:10-11

New Jerusalem Bible

About the Cover

The cover photo is a silhouette of the Christ the Redeemer statue that overlooks the City of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. From a distance it appears to be a giant cross but as you get closer you discover that it is a statue of Jesus standing on the mountain top with his arms wide open in a gesture of welcome and embrace for the whole human race and all of creation. It is a fitting expression of the theme of this book — God’s crucified love which reveals itself in the life and death of Jesus as God’s hospitality for the whole human race.

Preface

This book is dedicated to the distinguished French Protestant theologian, Jacques Ellul, who died on May 29, 1994, leaving us with over forty books relating Christian faith and ethics to the challenges of our modern technological civilization. My own theological career began with my book The Thought of Jacques Ellul (Edwin Mellen Press, 1981). I was drawn to Ellul’s work initially because I was interested in his work on Christian ethics and technology. However, he won my heart when I discovered that he was theologically committed to a vision of universal salvation. Ever since encountering the work of Christianity’s first great systematic theologian, Origen, who wrote in Alexandria Egypt in the 2nd century, I had been taken with such a vision but I was not convinced that it could be reconciled with the Christian scriptures. Then I read Ellul and my reservations disappeared. The turning point was reading his book, Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation. It is simply the most stunningly insightful exegesis of that mystifying book that I have ever encountered. Christians would do well to spend their time reading this profound work instead of Hal Lindsey’s interpretation, The Late Great Planet Earth or the more recent Left Behind writings of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

Unfortunately, Lindsey’s interpretation, The Late Great Planet Earth, and LaHaye and Jenkin’s series capture only too well the vengeful spirit of far too many Christians who seem to be looking forward to the coming of the millennium with the hope that God will finally bring the world to an end, get rid of all those troublesome non-Christians (as well as most Christians who don’t meet with their approval) and give the world over to them exclusively. In their view, the gospel is good news for a few true beliveres and bad news for every one else in the human race.

As we make our way into our new millennium there are far too many Christians embracing a view of God bent on destroying most of his creation—a God more intent on eternal condemnation than on salvation. This view seems the opposite of Jesus’ declaration that we are to be like God who loves even his enemies and does good to those who reject or persecute him (Matt 5:38-48). With the Left Behind message, the love of God does not fall upon the just and the unjust alike as Jesus affirmed in the Sermon the Mount. The God who leaves most of the human race behind does not love and forgive those who reject him. Love does not win, forgiveness does not win. Divine wrath wins. The unjust experience only wrath, rejection and revenge. While the Left Behind message first appeared in 1995 (Tyndale House Publishers) and continued the vengeful view of the Hal Lindsey tradition, more recently (in 2011) Rob Bell’s book Love Wins (HarperCollins) has rejected that dark tradition. His book offers an understanding of the gospel message as one of salvation for the whole human race. Bell does much to repair the vision of the Christian gospel as a message of love, forgiveness and good news for the whole human race.

This book, No One Left Behind: Is Universal Salvation Biblical? was first published in 1996 under the title: The Coming of the Millennium—Good News for the Whole Human Race (Trinity Press International). That was the year after Jenkins and LaHaye’s book, Left Behind first made its appearance. Once The Coming of the Millennium went out of print with Trinity Press International, I placed it with Authors Choice Press. And finally in 2011, Authors Choice Press is now publishing an e-book version. I have used the occasion to republish The Coming of the Millennium under a new title: No One Left Behind: Is Universal Salvation Biblical? Here I take a position opposing the views of authors like Hal Lindsey and LaHaye/Jenkins. I find myself on the same side of the fence as Rob Bell. I have made no substantive changes to my original argument. That argument is even more relevant today than it was then. Only a few minor changes in phrasing have been made.

With the new millennium now under way, interest in the controversy concerning universal salvation seems only to have only increased. In this book (which owes a considerable debt to Jacques Ellul) I urge Christians to preach and teach a far different story than that presented by Lindsey and by LaHaye-Jenkins—one that truly promises good news for the whole human race. It is a vision born not only out of my work with Ellul but also out of my work in narrative theology and ethics which has tried to come to understand how and why religions paradoxically seem to foster hatred and violence just as readily as peace and reconciliation.

For me this project began in a confrontation with Christian anti-Judaism and its contribution to the Holocaust, and expanded from there to deal with the issues of prejudice, violence and non-violence, across religions and cultures. This culminated in my two-volume project on theology and ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Narrative Theology After Auschwitz: From Alienation to Ethics (Fortress Press, 1992) and The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia? (SUNY Press, 1993).

In writing those volumes it became clear to me that all religions, including Christianity, have a dark side that is capable of creating hatred and violence. Consequently, if we wish to be able to turn to our religious traditions for ethical guidance in the complex and dangerous world we live in, we shall have to begin by exorcising the demons within our own traditions. After Auschwitz, as a Christian, I was especially concerned to encourage Christians to embrace that task. To put it another way, religious ethics must begin with an ethical critique of one’s own religious tradition and in the process give birth to a new way of telling one’s story; one that does not promote hatred, violence and revenge in the name of the gospel.

In my earlier books I have engaged in a critique of the gospel of hatred and revenge. Out of that critique an alternative understanding of how Christians must tell their story for the coming of a new millennium emerged. In this book, I try to articulate simply and briefly what that alternative way of telling the Christian story might be. I hope that others might find this attempt to tell the Christian story anew useful in their teaching and preaching—and in the conduct of their lives—as we make our way through a new millennium. I especially hope that Christians will come to realize that it is not what will happen to us hereafter that should preoccupy us but what we are expected to do for the stranger in our midst, here and now. If we take care of that, the hereafter will take care of itself.

In criticizing the Christianity of the past two millennia and proposing an alternative way of telling the Christian story for this new millennium, I will be making some very broad claims and generalizations about the nature of Christianity. I am aware that Christianity takes many forms and manifests great diversity. My claims will not fit all instances equally well. My concern is that we apply these criticisms where they do fit and I do believe they fit the main expressions of European and American Christianity only too well.

Before retelling the Christian story anew in the pages that follow, I want to express my appreciation not only for the influence of Jacques Ellul, but also for the preachers who have shaped my own life journey in faith—George Garrelts, Harry Bury, Don Conroy, John McCombe, M. Richard Malivuk and Irving Greenberg. I also wish to thank James Andrews, Christine Beasley, Didier Pollefeyt, Ginny Landgraf, Gerald Iwerks and Richard Malivuk for reading drafts of this manuscript and offering helpful