The Ask Entirite Anything Podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Ask Entryte Anything podcast, the show where we cover your questions on the Bible, theology and the Christian life.

I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm joined, of course, with Tom Wright here in my study in Oxford.

Tom, how are you? I'm doing all right. We're quite busy.

We're recording this right at the end of the university term,

and my wife and I are getting ready to move some of our stuff up to our new house in the Outer, Hebrides, where we're going to be then to and fro between there and Oxford.

So it's an exciting time.

Okay, well, you've had an exciting time.

I've just finished a tour of Turkey and Greece, traveling some of the ancient Bible lands, looking at Ephesus, Athens, Corinth. It was fantastic. It was good. Some of these places I've never been to. And it's a place which left me with a lot of questions about what was it like to worship in Ephesus. What was it like for the Apostle Paul to go, you know, walk around Galatia, Pasadian Antioch,

and all those cities?

And so it was a great thing.

But we've got some people who've got some questions for us, Tom.

The first question comes from Kelly Anderson from St. Charles, Illinois.

And this is about universalism and inclusion.

And here's Kelly's question. Could you explore the concept of inclusion theology, where the cross

resets human destiny towards salvation for all with free will allowing rejection of this gift.

This view is somewhat that represented in CSS Lewis's writing, such as The Last Battle and the Great Divorce.

Does this perspective align with biblical teaching?

Tom, what's your thoughts on that?

Oh my, oh my.

These are huge questions, and we get muddled here because the the philosophical question of determinism and free will, which is a very old question the

philosophers have been discussing for centuries, that is not the same as the Christian question

...