Saviour of All Fellowship
March 2004 extra

Dear Friends in Faith,
     “To make death endless is virtually to immortalize mortality. To make sin eternal is to elevate the foul monster to the rank of necessary existence. That the Universe in its final cycle must find room for the inclusion within it of some super-Dantean Inferno, is a thought which jars our ideas of a consummated creation. That the completed Universe must contain a cemetery for the dead of the eons does not match with our conception of what completeness means.
     “The terrible dogma of endless torment demands for its acceptance an entire suspension of man’s reasoning powers. It annihilates at once all human conception of final harmony in the universe. It distorts the idea of God into a fearful dream of an omnipotent Ogre. It defies thought. It destroys faith. It creates superstition. It lays a logical base for the heathenish imaginations which peopled fancied hells with span-long babes. These degrading conceptions, which have befouled the fair escutcheon of the Christian faith, will endure just as long as Christians are content to have but the corpse of reason within their creeds.
     “If in the universe of such a Creator such a catastrophe may leap to His creatures, then it must happen by design. It must come from His deliberate intention to produce such a hopeless, miserable condition. The horrid slur which such a thought would cast on the name of God is not involved in the Biblical view of destiny. It distorts the moral features of the Creator into the monstrous likeness of a fiend. We cannot worship where we cannot love, and such conceptions of the Eternal must inevitably sap the vitalities of worship, by lessening the lovability of the worshiped One.” Alan Burns (Unsearchable Riches vol.7, pp.121-123)

     Our first conference of 2004 was held in Nicholasville, Kentucky, February 27-29, hosted by Bob Evely. It was well attended, with much serious and edifying consideration of Scripture and the purpose of God for the ecclesia as well as for all mankind.
Our next Fellowship will be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, March 27 and 28, hosted by Orville Hunt. This will be held at Pilgrim Manor Chapel, 2000 Leonard St. NE.
     Looking further ahead, the Richmond, Virginia, conference is scheduled for April 2-4 at Days Inn, 2100 Dickens Rd. (ph. 804-282-3300).
     Already published in England by Paternoster Press and coming out soon from Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a new book edited by Robin Parry and Chris Partridge, entitled Universal Salvation? (ISBN 1-84227-199-7). It examines Thomas Talbott’s claim that “Scripture teaches the ultimate salvation of all people.” Talbott writes the opening three chapters and is given the last word in the book with the final chapter entitled “Reply to my Critics.” Here Talbott speaks of the good news “that Christ has achieved a complete victory over sin and death, that there is therefore no such thing as a hopeless condition, and that the ultimate truth about the universe is glorious, not tragic.“

Yours in God’s grace and peace,
Dean Hough and Tony Nungesser

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