Second Meditation
What Is Judgment?
A Reflection on Biblical EschatologyINeedless to say, the question of Christian universalism, or at
least of its theological liceity, cannot be addressed without a
long, perhaps even interminable contemplation of the escha-
tological language and imagery and promises of scripture. I am
not very tolerant of what is sometimes called "biblicism" -
that is, the "oracular" understanding of scriptural inspiration,
which sees the Bible as the record of words directly uttered
by the lips of God through an otherwise dispensable human
intermediary, and which entails the belief that the testimony of
the Bible on doctrinal and theological matters must be wholly
internally consistent- and I certainly have no patience what-
soever for twentieth-century biblical fundamentalism and
its manifest imbecilities. Neither, however, am I so recklessly
speculative as to imagine that Christians are allowed to make
any theological pronouncements in total abstraction from or
contradiction of scripture. And, while I dislike the practice of
reducing biblical theology to concentrated distillates- "proof