His Tulsa megachurch may have shrunken to the size of a country chapel, but Pentecostal universalist Carlton Pearson is convinced that his "new" take on hell will eventually be adopted by the rest of the church, as he claimed at the end of his appearance last Friday on Dateline.
The crazy thing about Pearson's theology is not merely that he thinks he has come up with a revolutionary revelation: Pearson joins the ranks of various Christians who taught an "alternative" view of eternal punishment--from 2nd-century church father, Origen, to 20th-century religious philosopher, John Hick. No, the strange thing about Pearson is how he claims he came up with the belief system he calls "inclusionism." (Interestingly, he avoids--or is unaware of--the theological terms "inclusivism" and "universalism".)
For instance, although misled in his exegetical method, Origen was at least careful in applying it to Scripture to concoct his own version of universalism. Likewise, Hick painstakingly dissects philosophy to defend his brand of universalism. In contrast, Pearson's method is a liberal application of old-fashioned, homespun horse sense--perhaps attractive to those who would sniff at Origen's complicated exegesis or Hick's cerebral philosophizing.
Questioning Pearson's universalist worldview, the NBC interviewer asked, "Is Hitler in hell?" and Pearson replied, "You think Hitler’s more powerful than the blood of Jesus?" With this line of reasoning, we're led to believe that it is denigrating to the power of the cross to suggest that Hitler could be in hell.
Another of his methods is to poke fun at his legalistic upbringing: "We were told not to laugh. Stop all the jesting and joking. ... God gonna get you. The devil gonna get you. ... So we had all that mentality. Be good. Be godly. Be right. Be holy. ... Or else you go to hell." Here, he wants us to think that, since his parents were wrong about why people go to hell (i.e. not being good enough), they must have been wrong about a lot of other things (e.g. hell existing in the first place).
Then the clincher: Pearson recalls watching TV reports of suffering Rwandan refugees and thinking, "God, I don’t know how you’re gonna call yourself a loving God and allow those people to suffer so much and then just suck them into hell." Apparently, Pearson believes that we can somehow atone for our own sins and avoid eternal punishment through suffering here on earth.
These "common-sense" objections to the traditional view of hell may resonate with the secular skeptic, but Pearson's noticeable avoidance of a coherent biblical argument should strike any thoughtful Christian as bizarre. If you intend to dismantle a cardinal doctrine built on two millenia of church history and Scriptural interpretation, you need more than a handful of witty one-liners. It's like trying to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a butter knife.
At the end of the interview, Pearson is shown promising his congregation that "a great shifting" and "a great anointing" will make the church more open to his teachings. Then, he explains to the interviewer the process whereby he believes this shift will take place: "First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." If he's right, and our core doctrines are vulnerable to these inch-deep objections, then maybe we're in worse shape than I thought.
Before the age of the microscope allowed us to see that maggots actually came from eggs laid by flies, people thought that flies "spontaneously generated" from rotting meat. Similarily, it's long been one of my contentions that heresy does not generate spontaneously--it is germinated, incubated and hatches in environments most conducive to its growth. The problem is that we often ignore the warning signs and then act like we've been taken by surprise when someone falls headlong into error. I've got my own ideas, but first I'm interested in hearing some of yours. What constitutes an environment conducive to heresy--and could we have predicted Pearson's theological drift by observing other aspects of his life and ministry before he announced his embrace of universalism?
by Matt Green
from The Ministry Report
August 15, 2006
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