Little did I suspect when we walked toward King's Chapel in Boston on a hot and steamy Sunday morning in mid-July, that our few steps to the pew would take me back to the fourth century. As my wife and I approached King's Chapel, I scanned the church sign and noticed it was Unitarian. Architecturally, the church building looked Anglican. The stone church, made of Quincy granite, was opened in 1754.
Being vaguely familiar with the rise in the 1800s in New England of Unitarian Universalism (that is, all are eventually reconciled to God), I knew enough to know that there was probably a lot more to learn about the dichotomy between the sign and the structure. I sensed that there was a story within its walls.
The reason we selected this church? Pure convenience-it was across from our hotel. After a moment of indecision on the threshold of the entrance, we decided to go in. False teaching redoubles our efforts to affirm what is true and to cast down that which is false. Sometimes hearing other religious perspectives-although errant-can be instructive and educational, allowing us to delve deeper into what we believe and why. Other perspectives may also spur a healthy self-examination of many of the inconsistencies in our own understanding of Truth and our own falling short of the biblical ideal.
I learned later, through my study after the service, that King's Chapel was the first Anglican Church in Massachusetts. It became Unitarian (the first in America to do so) in the early 1780s when the acting minister, James Freeman, refused to read the sections from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer that prayed for the English monarchy (the Revolutionary War had left many of the ecclesiastical questions between the American and English Anglican church unresolved). He added, at the end of his statement, that he also could no longer assent to the Athanasian Creed: Jesus is both God and man and the sole way of salvation.
In short, Freeman was a Socinian who believed-in genteel and eloquent defiance of Holy Scripture-that Jesus was a man, a great moral man, but only a man; not a mediator between a holy God and sinful humanity. Instead, Jesus was a model of who we can become. (Arians believe that Jesus was neither God nor man, but a special created being who is also an example, but not our God/man savior who died as a substitute for our sins.) The end result of both postures? Self-deification-becoming God-determining ourselves what is true, the oldest temptation in the world planted in the Garden of Eden. Essentially agreeing with Satan, "Did God really say…?"
King's Chapel then edited and published their own edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer with all references to the British monarchy and the Trinity removed. In 1785, the congregation assented to the changes. Thus, King's Chapel broke free from both her earthly and eternal king-and yet kept its name, which left me wondering who the king was/is.
After Freeman's heterodox views reached his fellow clergymen, they implored the presiding bishop Samuel Seabury not to approve his ordination. Bishop Seabury agreed with the clergy's concerns; and on November 18, 1787, Freeman was ordained by the senior warden of King's Chapel. This created an unusual combination of King's Chapel being Anglican in liturgical style/service, Congregational in governance, and Unitarian in belief.
The service at King's Chapel on that hot Sunday in July was conducted by a visiting woman pastor whose bio in the church bulletin noted that she was "a lifelong student of comparative religion who has studied Sufi mystical Islam for 18 years." I therefore anticipated a sermon based on some Sufi Koranic text. Instead she preached from the Bible. I was surprised. The title of the message was "The Fire of Love" with the references for the sermon coming from Jesus' teaching about the saved and the lost, heaven and hellfire, eternal salvation and punishment:
- Matthew 13:24-30 (wheat/tares)
- Matthew 13:36-43 (wailing and gnashing of teeth)
- Matthew 25:31-46 (sheep and goats: "Then he will also say to those on his left hand, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels'")
These are the most challenging verses to Universalism outside of Revelation 20:15: "And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the Lake of Fire" where "they will be tormented day and night forever and ever" (Rev. 20:10).
What made the sermon so excruciating to hear were her attempts to affirm that these words were authentic to Jesus, yet she interpreted them in a way opposite to what orthodox believers have declared throughout the centuries. We believe there is a judgment coming, with the lost going to hell/Lake of Fire with the devil and his angels for eternity. The converse is also true: that God is redeeming a people from all the nations. It is Good News and Bad News-the goodness and severity of God (Rom. 11:22).
I have never watched someone trying to put a square peg into a round hole, but on this day (theologically speaking) she pounded away essentially to the conclusion that none are lost, all are saved. It just wouldn't fit the verses. She did grant that some would have to be in the fires an "awfully long time" before God would grant them deliverance from their own internal torment of soul-dis-ease and/or the external purifying flames of God's Dr. Benjamin Spock-like pseudo-discipline: "Stay in the corner of Hades until you are sorry." I thought, "Would not Jesus mention that the torment would end if it were the case?" Adding to and taking away words from the Scripture is dangerous business (Rev. 22:18-19).
In a telling synchronistic sign between the spiritual and the temporal, as she continued to preach, the church grew hotter and hotter. My wife looked like she was going to pass out, and the man who had ushered us in and had taken the collection had perspired through large parts of his blue shirt. We were in a scorchingly hot church, hearing an apostate sermon where the windows were shut and both the chapel and the minds were darkened-leading to a suffocating and stifling darkened deadness where neither the sun of sound teaching shone nor the breeze of the spirit of truth blew. A parable of hellfire as good as Gehenna.
I admired her courage for taking on these verses; yet I was frustrated and angered that she could literally misread these verses so erroneously. I was also sad for her. I wanted the service to end to put all of us out of our misery.
She stated that in early Christianity (the first four centuries), other interpretations of the Christian faith existed (that is historically correct, although she subtly suggested that these "lost Christianities" had more validity theologically than the orthodox creedal statements and doctrinal decisions of Nicaea and Chalcedon). My argument to her in a subsequent e-mail correspondence was that these "lost Christianities" were lost for a reason; they were wrong. She posited that the "orthodox" perspective prevailed predominantly through raw political power after the Council of Nicaea rather than biblical truth; that primarily coercive means in the process of conversion rather than persuasion were employed by churchmen after Nicaea until today.
James T. Dennison Jr. in his article, "Athanasius, the Son of God and Salvation," provides a more accurate picture of what happened in the bitter fifty-year battle for orthodoxy:
An inveterate defender of the Nicene Creed (A.D. 325), Athanasius has been revered by the church catholic for his unswerving insistence on the deity of the Son of God [author's note: versus the Arians]. This insistence was not without cost. Five times Athanasius was banished from his church. He had to flee for his life, being protected or secreted by his friends. At several points in his career, it seemed as if he alone stood for orthodoxy hence the phrase Athanasius contra mundum (Athanasius against the world)….The upshot of all this revisionist ink is that Nicene orthodoxy triumphed after 325, not because it was biblical, not because it was right, but because of political might. The emperor Constantine was eager to consolidate his Christian political power through the display of his own magisterial theological savvy. Nicaea was the theological tool in advancing the imperial agenda. Revisionists quickly point out that it was not coincidental that Constantine attended the Council of Nicaea. He was there to advance his own "imperial theology."
Dennison concludes by saying:
Here is the fundamental bottom line. How can one who is not God, one who is a mere creature, save a multitude of sinners, or even one sinner? How can a creature satisfy the debt owed to the infinite God? Revisionists may rehabilitate Arius. But the person of the Son whom they represent is incapable of saving other sinful creatures. Athanasius understood this, and so we too stand with the great Alexandrian "Athanasius contra mundum" if necessary.
I think the perspective I heard that Sunday at King's Chapel does legitimately challenge Christians to be exceedingly careful to not marry the gospel to the coercive nature of the state too closely. The separation of powers-what is known as Sphere Sovereignty-is not only a constitutional principle but is biblical. When the church has to resort to primarily political means to promote God's truth, the battle is already lost. We are to be good citizens and participate in the political process. Yet we should also preach truth and practice "good works" in charity and volunteerism, and not think that voting for the "right" candidate, attending church faithfully, and listening to Christian music to be the fulfillment of the biblical imperative of being salt in a rotting world. Our salvation is sure and it helps the biblical witness if we act like it; be as generous, kind, thoughtful, forgiving, and loving to others as God has been to us.
We must not, however, succumb and be seduced by the "idol of tolerance" in our day, where we'd rather not be inconvenienced by the uneasiness of being labeled as a member of the Christian American Taliban who believe in right and wrong and say so; as if to protest the evils of our age, perhaps ungraciously at times, is somehow the precursor of crashing planes into buildings killing thousands. To be silent in our age of rebellion is criminal.
Today, as in Arius's and Freeman's day, religious pluralism reigns. Even among those who attend outwardly evangelical churches, a majority of 57 percent believes that "many religions can lead to eternal life" (Americans Are Not Dogmatic About Religion, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life). How any self-defined evangelical (a big subset of this audience) can believe contrary to John 14:6-"I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me"-bedevils my mind.
In a recent sermon, our pastor cited a quote by Curtis White from his article, "Hot Air Gods" (Harper's, December 2007): "What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere…it is heresy without an orthodoxy. It is heresy as an orthodoxy." The "hot air" of hell is horrifying, forever.
As our pastor preached within the walls of both our sanctuary and presented the "solas"-sola Scriptura ("by Scripture alone"), sola fide ("by faith alone"), sola gratia ("by grace alone"), and solus Christus ("Christ alone")-the sun shone upon my face and a refreshing wind came through the open window and caressed my body and soul. I thought, "Thank you Lord for Athanasius." Soli Deo gloria ("glory to God alone")!
