After Jesus had delivered
the parable of the tares and the wheat,[1] (Matt
13:24-30), his disciples came to him and asked him what it meant:
37 He answered and
said to them: "He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.
38 The field is the world, the good seeds are the sons of the kingdom, but the tares are the sons of the wicked one.
39 The enemy who sowed them is the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels.
40 Therefore as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of this age.
41 The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness,
42 and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
43 Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!
38 The field is the world, the good seeds are the sons of the kingdom, but the tares are the sons of the wicked one.
39 The enemy who sowed them is the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels.
40 Therefore as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of this age.
41 The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness,
42 and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
43 Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!
The Christian Universalist
(CU) believes, as all orthodox evangelical Christians do, that all men are
saved only through Christ [2]
because of Christ’s atonement for their sin. They also believe that (a) all men
will be saved, and (b) some men will die unrepentant and faithless and
therefore suffer the punishment of hell. The two views are made compatible by
their view of hell, that the punishment is not retributive or eternal, but
rather corrective and temporary. Therefore, all men who die in their sins will
eventually come to their senses in hell and repent and believe. At that time,
the penitent sinner in hell will be rescued and brought into the kingdom and
share its glory and blessing with those who died in faith and received that
kingdom on the Day of Judgment.
How might a CU respond to
the parable of the wheat and the tares? As Christ explains it, the kingdom has
two kinds of members, those who are the sons of the kingdom (the wheat), and presumably,
those who claim to be sons of the kingdom, but in fact are sons of the wicked
one (the tares), having been sown by the devil himself. As such, there are at
work two opposing agents, God and the devil. Both are sowing seed in the
world. The one sows wheat while the other sows tares respectively identified
as the children of God and children of Satan. The one who presides over the kingdom
has ordered that the sons of the wicked one will be allowed to grow up side by
side with his own true children until the end of the age at which time they
will be separated. The destiny at the time of separation for the sons of the
kingdom will be glory as they will shine as the sun in their Father’s kingdom.
The destiny of the wicked is to be cast into the furnace of fire accompanied by
weeping and gnashing of teeth.
I suspect the CU will stand
unflinchingly before this text and deny that it has any power to persuade him away from his universalism.
One response of the CU might
be to accept everything as explained by Christ but ask the question, What
bearing does that interpretation of the parable have to do with whether or not
the wicked will remain in the furnace forever? How does it prove that there is
no redemption from hell for the resident of hell? It explains how they get there
but it does not prove that they will stay there forever.
Another response might be
that of Thomas Talbott who, in his treatment of the parable of the sheep and
the goats, insists that parables are not to be taken in their detail.
“. . . Jesus never intended
for anyone to take the details of a parable literally; the details merely
provided a colorful background for the main point, which itself is not always
easy to discern. So as a first step towards understanding the parable of the
sheep and the goats, we must try to discover its main point.”[3]
Within the context of Christ’s own explanation
of the parable, there are observations that would
indicate the aforementioned CU responses are not adequate to oppose a non-universalist interpretation of the parable.
The first observation is
that Christ’s explanation of the parable takes on great detail. Talbott’s point
that a parable should not be taken too seriously in its detail does have validity to it. Nevertheless, when we see Christ’s own explanation of the
parable, we find that there is much weight given to the particulars. Christ
commences to interpret the parable by identifying precisely what the elements
of the parable represent: the field, wheat, tares, harvest, reapers, and
furnace. None of these details are insignificant. They all must be given their
full force in order to understand the meaning of the parable.
Such details reveal that there
are two agents in opposition to each other and whose purposes are contrary. The
agents are the Father and the devil. The Father’s purpose is to produce sons
who are righteous in this age. The purpose of the devil, who is explicitly
identified as the enemy, is to produce his own sons who are wicked and as such,
oppose the kingdom and the sons of the kingdom. The former’s purpose is to
produce a kingdom of holy ones, the latter’s intent is to infiltrate that
kingdom with unholy ones, thereby undermining its work in this world. The
ultimate goal would be to destroy the heavenly kingdom.
The emphasis on the
distinction between the wheat and the tares at every point of the parable is
given greater relief by the fact that there is no attempt to work out an
arrangement of co-existence. At first, it may seem that that is the very idea
of the Father since he commands to let both grow up together until the harvest.
However, the Father’s purpose in doing so is not to bring the two in a harmony
or peaceful agreement with one another. Rather, it is that the wicked will
manifest themselves as the wicked and thereby become readily identifiable at
the harvest where they are finally separated from the righteous. The contemporaneous
existence of the two is temporary and has always in view the harvest, the time
in which the Father’s purpose toward the true sons of the kingdom are
fulfilled, namely, their confirmation in glory. It is also a time in which the
Father is going to confirm his kingdom collectively in holiness and in doing so
it will require the removal of the sons of the wicked one.
Another aspect of this
distinction is the obvious. The tares are biologically different from wheat and
cannot be transformed into wheat. So it is with the sons of the wicked one.
They cannot be transformed into wheat. One may argue, Are we not all tares and
some of us have been transformed into wheat? I would say that in terms of the
identity of the tares in this parable, the answer is no. It is true that Paul
says that Christians were all children of wrath by nature when God, because of
his great love with which he loved them while dead in trespasses and sins, made
them alive together with Christ (Eph 2:1-5). But that is not the lesson of the
parable. The parable does not contradict Paul. But its purpose is to show that
from the beginning, there are certain ones whom the Father has planted in his
kingdom, and that they are there because of his doing. If they are not planted
by the Father, they are not his. And it is certain that there are those in the
kingdom who are not there by the Father’s planting. They are not true sons of
the kingdom and never will be because it is impossible for them to be
transformed from sons of the wicked one to sons of the Father. The
impossibility for transformation resides in the fact that the Father’s intent
is to produce no miracle of transformation for the tares. The tares are to
remain tares during this age until they can be purged out of the kingdom. That
is their destiny, not by chance, but by the good pleasure of the owner of the
field, the Father.
The purpose of the separation
at the end of the age is to facilitate the removal of the tares from the kingdom
in such a way that the wheat will not share the same destiny of the furnace of
fire. The wicked will be readily distinguishable at the time of the harvest. As
such, the tares only will be rooted out and banished from the kingdom. This
complies with other NT teaching, particularly Paul who warns that evildoers who
practice all manner of sinful deeds shall not inherit the kingdom of God
This distinction stresses another point. There is absolutely no mention in the parable of its
reversal, not in this age, nor in the age to come. There is not the slightest
hint of delivery of the tares from the furnace. The silence is so potent that it
suggests strongly that the furnace is the final, irrevocable destination of the
tares. As a parable about the kingdom, if deliverance from the furnace were ultimately true, its exclusion here is baffling. Granted, a parable about the kingdom is not expected to say everything there is to say about the kingdom. But the inclusion of such a dimension of the kingdom, that is, ultimate universal delivery from the furnace, if it were true, would fit appropriately, even expectantly.
An argument from silence, it
is said, is not a valid argument. But when there is complete silence, it stands
as a weighty argument. And there is nowhere, in this parable, or the New
Testament that explicitly identifies the children of Satan as ever being
transformed in such a way that they are removed from their condition as
residents of the furnace. If there were such an essential element in the
redemptive historical purpose of God, one would expect at least one overt
reference to it in the body of revealed truth deposited in the scriptures. But there is none. Instead, the book is closed on them, so to
speak, Revelation 20:15.
The universalist would
counter that there is no explicit statement of the Trinity in the Bible. Should
we therefore cast doubt on its veracity? If the CU is referring to the absence
of a formulaic expression of the Trinity or even simply one that covers the
traditional elements of the expression as it occurs in the Church’s creeds, the
answer is obviously not. However, the creedal formulas of the Trinity are
derived from mountains of New Testament evidence that refer to the persons of
the Trinity and their relationship to one another such that the only conclusion
one may come to is that God exists as a Trinity of Persons.
But the CU cannot offer any explicit
scriptural evidence that those in hell will repent and be saved. When the
damned in hell come under the scrutiny of the New Testament, nowhere is there
any suggestion that they will ever be delivered from their condition. There is
always a foreboding sense of finality when speaking of those who are condemned
at the final judgment.
Christ’s emphasis on the
details of the parable informs us that (a) there is a distinction between the
wheat and the tares that persists not only in this age, but also in the next,
(b) there is no intent to transform the tares so that they may become wheat,
(c) these is no suggestion that the tares will ever be rescued from the
furnace. Because of this, the teaching of this parable argues against a
universal notion of salvation.
ILG The
Inescapable Love Of God, by Thomas Talbott. Universal
Publishers/uPUBLISH.com, 1999, 235 pages.
CUCD Christian
Universalism? The Current Debate, Edited by Robin A Parry & Christopher
H. Partridge. Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids , Michigan
EU The Evangelical Universalist, by Gregory MacDonald. Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2006, 204 pages.
[1] The
disciples refer to it as the parable of the field and the tares, Matt 13:35.
[2] “. . .
there is what we would call ‘Christian Universalism’. Although this is a wide
family of views, they share in common (a) the commitment to working within a
Christian theological framework and (b) the claim that all individuals will be
saved through the work of Christ.” CUCD,
p xvii. Gregory MacDonald, a Christian univesalist, writes, "The universalist will happily concur that reconciliation is only for those who are in Christ through faith. There is no salvation outside of Christ, and one is included in Christ through faith. However, the universalist will also maintain that, in the end, everyone will be in Christ through faith." EU, p 47.
[3] ILG, p.
85.
