It's no secret that since the mid-20th century, Christianity has been in a state of global decline.

And while there are signs this may be reversing, we need to ask what caused this collapse so we can better respond to it.

While there are many modern theological and moral errors that have weakened the church in the past 80 years,

there's one heresy that turned a church which fearlessly preached Christ to the nations

into one that barely raises a peep

about saving people from sin. And that is the heresy of universalism. In today's episode, we'll take a

closer look at universalism and how to respond to it. But first, we need to be careful when using this

term because it has a lot of different meanings. Some universalists believe that after death,

every single human being immediately goes to heaven, and so hell doesn't really exist, or it's

completely empty. Others believe that every human being will eventually spend eternity in heaven,

but some will go to hell temporarily, and so under this view, hell gets reduced to a kind of

purgatory.

Finally, a common belief among some laypeople is that only a few truly evil people will go to hell,

but regular good people will all go to heaven. However, this view is unworkable because it's impossible to adopt a non-arbitrary standard for who is a good person that deserves heaven and who isn't.

As I know it in my previous episode on this fallacy.

Heaven is not something we can earn through good works.

It is a gracious gift of God we receive by faith working through love.

But universalism turns heaven into something a good God must give his creatures, which contradicts what the church believe for 2,000 years.

According to New Testament scholar Richard Bacham, quote,

Until the 19th century, almost all Christian theologians taught the reality of eternal torment in hell.

Here and there, outside the theological mainstream, were some who believed that the wicked

would be finally annihilated. Even fewer were the advocates of universal salvation, though these

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