This is the first of several posts about universalism.

I started writing this, not in my blog software, but in a word processor, so that I could take my time with it. It’s gotten so long that I will need to break it up into manageable sizes.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll define universalism as the belief that all, or at least a large number, of religious beliefs are of roughly equal validity, on the presumption that each is an expression of some deeper truth, whether that deeper truth is metaphysical or simply a mythology representing some subconscious elements of the human psyche.

There may be a better and more academic definition, but I’m just a layman.

Universalism bothers me for several reasons. I would point out that several of the major faiths make a claim to exclusivity, including the one in which I personally believe. In John 14:6:

“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”

That’s one verse, to be true, and there’s quite a lot that can be distorted by taking one verse out of context. But I believe that the whole sequence of the Bible, taken in context, is a claim of objective truth and a rejection of polytheism. Why should Paul bother to convert people if the Roman deities were just as valid as Christianity? Why are so many Old Testament kings said to have fallen because they allowed other religions to co-exist with the worship of Jehovah?

So, if we’re going to accept Christianity as just another flavor in Baskin-Robbins’ freezer case, we are, almost by definition, rejecting part of it, or at least re-defining it or re-interpreting it so radically that we seem to be making it into something entirely new. But that, in and of itself, is another thing that our society seems to do on a regular basis. We think of religion as a tool with which to achieve happiness, and so we’ve given ourselves permission to customize it to meet our needs. We believe in the aspects of a religion that make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and yet if a particular directive offends us, we cast it aside as just another relic of the past.

In Robert Bellah’s book “Habits of the Heart,” he talks about a woman named Sheila who says she has chosen her own belief system, which she playfully refers to as “Sheilaism.” There are a good many “Sheilaists” and “Bobists” and “Frankists” and “Sallyists” in modern society, whether they will admit it to themselves or not.
Obviously, there are aspects of the Christian faith that have changed over time. There is an entire book of the New Testament that advises a slave to return to his master and the master to treat him ethically. Christians now understand slavery to be wrong. There are passages about the role of women in the family and in the church which most of us believe applied only to Paul’s time, not to our own.

Responsible Biblical scholarship can help us to understand how a particular passage was read by its original recipients and what significance it had to them, which helps us understand what significance it has for us today. I believe that responsible Biblical scholarship, informed by faith and church tradition, has helped us to re-evaluate passages about slavery and about the role of women. In many of those cases, the Bible passages which we now see as oppressive or misogynistic actually advise better treatment of women or slaves than was the norm at the time those passages were written. We have interpreted those passages in the light of other parts of the Bible and have moved forward over the centuries to a better understanding of the role of women and of the evils of slavery.
But there is a grave danger – a fine line between responsible scholarship and self-serving revisionism.

I don’t believe universalism is in any way consistent with the stated intent of the Bible or with the way in which the individual scriptures which make up the Bible were written and originally read. And I suspect that it would also be inconsistent with the foundational scriptures or documents of other religions as well. I see universalism as another form of “Sheilaism.”

In the next post, I’ll talk a little bit about the Golden Rule, and what we might learn from the fact that different religions have similar-sounding rules for how we are to treat one another.