Cole J. Banning

After spending two posts in a discussion on orthodoxy and heresy inspired by an exchange between Roger Olson and Eric Reitan on the orthodoxy of universalism, it seems that it makes sense to say a little bit, however briefly, about that particular test case.

First off, no, universalism is not a heresy--at least not by any meaningful standard. (Which is to say, "doctrine that Roger Olson thinks is wrong" is excluded as a workable definition of heresy, for the reasons given in my post Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Truth and in Reitan's On Heresy and Universalism. Although Olson does gives a more comprehensive and coherent, if still not totally persuasive--is there really a consensus, even just among evangelicals, that universalism is heresy?--account of his position from which universalism counts as heresy in a more recent post, Some random thoughts about that awful but necessary word "heresy") Robin Parry does a good job of working through the question of whether universalism is heretical in a series of posts (1 2 3 4 5), and persuasively comes to what seems to be the unescapable conclusion that the Church Catholic has never denounced universalism as such, although it has denounced the teaching of some particular universalists, such as Origen, while praising others, such as St. Gregory of Nyssa.

For reasons about which I've posted before, I am not a universalist, or at least don't identify as such. Indeed, my reasons are more or less the same as Olson's (rooted in an account of human freedom), so it could be said that we share the same position: that universalism can be put forth as a "pious hope" but not a "confident belief." But Olson comes off as almost stridently anti-universalist, while I am deeply sympathetic to universalism.

Why the difference? It seems to be a disagreement over what, exactly, a "pious hope" looks like. For Olson, it almost seems to be little more than wishful thinking:

Of course, someone might argue that, in the end, every creature will freely offer love to God and be saved (e.g., Moltmann). I would just call that optimism. There’s no way to believe that true other than a leap of optimistic hope.

Whereas I would find that claim quite likely, given what we know about God's nature from scripture, reason, tradition, and experience, while at the same time agreeing with Olson that asserting as fact that everyone will be saved goes beyond our possible knowledge. But I'm a skeptic in general: asserting as fact that the sun will rise tomorrow goes beyond our possible knowledge. (For one thing, we might blow up the world in the meantime.) As the great author Robert Anton Wilson said, "I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions."

So the question becomes: how confident is overconfident?

Do I believe that, if there is a an afterlife, then everyone will experience salvation within it? At the end of the day, the answer to that question depends upon an epistemological dilemma: what separates a belief from a mere suspicion on the one hand and an overconfident assertion of knowledge on the other?