Ran across this nice article over at Fors Clavigera on the emerging hermeneutic regarding God’s judgment. Well worth the read.
Here’s a clip:
No, the motivation for evangelical universalism is not really a close reading of the Bible’s claims about eternity. Instead, it seems that the macro-motivation for evangelical universalism is less a text and more a hermeneutic, a kind of “sensibility” about the very nature of God as “love” (which includes its own implicit sensibility about the nature of love). Two phrases you will often hear from evangelical universalists involve hope and our imagination. (For a sample combination of this constellation of concerns, see Lauren Winner’s essay on Rob Bell in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review.) The concern is often formulated something like this:
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Can’t we just leave this up to God?
This is my favorite piece so far that you’ve shared on this subject.In most of the Calvinist repsonses to Bell, I hear echoes of old disputes on voluntarism shaping the conversation in often unacknowledged and unhelpful ways that make it hard to get behind what forms both modern evangelicalism and the emergent movement in the first place.
Smith is spot on about asking questions about how the shape of the “new universalism” is formed by motives that arise out of a historically located sensibility. I’ve heard “spirituality” referred to as an “aesthetic” in a similar way to how Smith uses “sensibility”. The “new universalism” and the ways that the term “spirituality” are used are part of the same historical soup.
Modern theories of knowledge that root knowledge of the good in the feelings or sentiments (particularly sympathy and compassion) have not lost their cultural authority in the way that the more Cartesian/Scottish Realism approaches to knowledge of the good have. In practice, this creates a loose social unity around vague but powerful words (such as neutrality, love, equality, freedom, etc)that have strong positive and negative associations. We can pour whatever substantive content we like on the words, and experience what we take to be a seemingly universal unity when we recognize the shared positive or negative feelings toward the magic words, but the real differences in whatever substantive content we are putting on the words is obscured. Christian Smith’s “therapeutic, moralistic deism” is driven by this dynamic.
Much of the relativism that we talk so much about in postmodernism is only on the surface. Underneath, it’s the same old modern cosmopolitanism affirming a universal substrate of (benevolent) human nature that supposedly underlies and beatifies all our particular differences and choices.
Smith goes into further detail about sensibility as motivation in his follow up post “Once (and only once) more on the “new universalism”" here: http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/2011/05/once-and-only-once-more-on-new.html
He’s drawing heavily from Charles Taylor, particularly in “A Secular Age”, which Smith is teaching in a Calvin College seminar this semester (see the seminar blog here: http://asecularage.blogspot.com/). I adore Charles Taylor, and I’m revisiting “A Secular Age” right now for my own projects. He’s very helpful for putting the emergent movement in context.