00:00:00 Jeromy Johnson: For centuries, Christians have wrestled with the same questions who gets saved, who gets left out, and what kind of God decides the difference? This is the heart of a two part series I'm calling evangelicalism versus universalism, a conversation about love, justice, and the future of faith. In this first episode, I sit down with David Hartman, the author of Grace Saves All, as well as the podcast host under the same name. He's going to talk about his journey towards Christian universalism, the belief that grace is not limited to a few, but destined to reach all creation. We'll explore how our understanding of hell, judgment, and salvation shapes the way we see God and the way we see each other. This isn't about choosing sides. It's about asking whether love really can have the last word. I'm your host, Jeremy Johnson, and you're listening to slutty Grace. Hey. Welcome, everyone. I am very privileged to have this guest on. This is David Hartman, and he is the author of Grace Saves All. I have a friend who, uh, read your book and said you finally cleared up in his mind and stated stuff so clearly about grace and a more universal reconciliation. But you're also the host of the Grace Saves All podcast, which I believe launched during Covid. Like twenty twenty, right? Yeah. So you got you got bored staying at home and thought, I'm going to be one of the original gangsters of, uh.

00:01:44 David Artman: No, you know, universal Grace podcast. No, I mean, uh, I was kind of coming toward the end of my stint in pastoral ministry, and I knew I was that that was that that was coming. And I'd already written the manuscript, and I knew I wanted to publish the book. I knew I, I really felt like I wanted to get involved in this conversation. I wanted to have the I wanted to do that. And then it just so happened that then Covid came along and that kind of gave me the time then to get started on the podcast, which I wanted to do. But, uh, before Covid came along, I just sat down and I asked myself, what can I do in order to fix Christianity? And I just came up with the idea, well, I'll just write a book that will solve all of Christianity's problems. And then, uh, and then I can do that. And then I wrote the book and I thought, well, now I need to do the now I need to do the podcast. That'll be the icing on the cake. And then I was just sure that, uh, as soon as the world found out about it, that it would resolve all theological problems, and I'm just sort of waiting for that moment to occur. And I want to thank you for being part of the inevitable, uh, transition of the world to this, to this theology.

00:02:58 Jeromy Johnson: Yes. Well, thank you. And for those of you that don't know, David, he is oozing with sarcasm right now.

00:03:05 David Artman: Well, I am, you know, I feel comfortable with you. And I have done two hundred episodes now of the Grace Saves All podcast. And recently I did some episodes with a guy named JD Lionheart, and we had fun disagreeing agreeably about theology.

00:03:19 Jeromy Johnson: That's rare.

00:03:21 David Artman: And it really JD really bothered me because I realized he was having more fun than I was. And I think that for the first two hundred episodes, I was pretty serious about.

00:03:32 Jeromy Johnson: But wait, what's this podcast called?

00:03:34 David Artman: Spiritually incorrect?

00:03:35 Jeromy Johnson: Yes. And they kind of jab at each other, right?

00:03:38 David Artman: Yeah, they jab at each other and they had me on. And then I jabbed at them and we all jabbed at each other. And it was a lot of fun. And so I think at this point I still take the theology seriously, but I'm having a little more fun. I don't take myself as seriously anymore, and I'm having fun. My natural, my natural state of existence is kind of silly, funny, a little bit sarcastic, and I really sort of had to put that in a box for the first episodes of the Grace Saves All podcast, because I knew this is a serious topic. People's lives are impacted by all this. I didn't want to come off as a goofball. Yeah, but now that I have, now that I have established my credentials, I'm just ready to let my hair down and be more the kind of person that you would interact with on a personal basis, and not so much the, um, I don't know, the kind of reserved person that was that's just kind of trying to talk theology and. Yeah, and just have a little more fun.

00:04:39 Jeromy Johnson: I appreciate that, though, because it makes it more approachable. You become more human, less of a talking head and more of someone.

00:04:45 David Artman: I think. so.

00:04:47 Jeromy Johnson: No. Like I said, yeah, I do appreciate your spirit. And you've done two hundred episodes. I've done a millionth of that. Um, right.

00:04:55 David Artman: You're just a baby. You're just getting started.

00:04:57 Jeromy Johnson: Just getting started. Just putting my toes in the water. But I'm really, really enjoying it. Um. I am seeing more and more people embracing this grace. A lot more people are feeling. I don't know if they're just feeling more comfortable with this or just tired of of the old religion, the old answers. But I feel like we're all eventually heading towards that space of grace. And I really appreciate you doing the hard work for these last five years, for the last two hundred episodes.

00:05:27 David Artman: Yeah, you know, it wasn't. I will say writing the book was hard because it was just because I was thinking, how can I put this together? I don't want it to be too long. I need to I need to set the argument out quickly. I need to get the biblical basis out there pretty quickly. I can't spend too long. I don't want to have any extraneous words. I need to make sure I put this correctly. I was kind of imagining being, you know, like once you put your book out, I was like, well, you're gonna that's out forever. I mean, I'll be judged. You can't take that back. Yeah. Once you publish, like I published with Wipf and Stock. Once you publish with them, they own the book. You get a little bit of royalty from it, but they own it. And if you want to correct yourself, you can't go back to them and say, hey, I'd like to put some corrections in my book. You have to write another book.

00:06:16 Jeromy Johnson: Gotcha.

00:06:17 David Artman: When I put the book out, that just felt like that's going to be something that's going to be out there. And I really wanted that to to be well done. And something that I would that, that I would really feel proud of for a long time. Then starting to do the interviews and the podcasts and having these conversations, that this feels a lot more relaxed, a lot more informal. It's like the party after the hard work was done.

00:06:39 Jeromy Johnson: I can imagine being an author where, okay, so you've written something, and for you, it was five years ago. For some people though, it was like like if you had written something when you were twenty five years old and now you're looking back at that book and what you had said and what your theology was and what your thought patterns were, you can't take it back. And so I imagine some authors, as people read their older works, they're like, yeah, I did write that a long time ago. I have changed in my feelings and thoughts and philosophies. Yeah, but yeah, it's out there and it's never to be taken back. Could we spend about five minutes kind of getting to know the younger David like. And we won't spend much time on this, but this gives us kind of some context of who you are a little bit where you're from. So what would, uh, what would the twenty five year old David believe?

00:07:25 David Artman: Okay, well, first of all, I'm an only child, so everything I ever did was the first best. The last. The picture was taken. My mom didn't didn't work. My my dad kind of was a conservative kind of person. Believed that the wife should be at home, take care of the family. So I had a full time human being looking after me the whole time I was growing up. And so I just had this feeling that I was enormously valuable. Wow. And when I was little, I had flying dreams, and I had I didn't go to church, but I had this I had this sense that somehow God was there was a God, and that if I died, that I would just go up and be with God and I would fly and everything would be wonderful. It wasn't until later on when I went to church, my mom took me to church, and I found out that God was actually well, it was weird because at church, God seemed really angry and scary. And so my immediate impression was there was something wrong with the church people.

00:08:17 Jeromy Johnson: What what what what church was this? What what flavor?

00:08:20 David Artman: Well, mom, we were in Irving, Texas, and my mom took me to one of the local Baptist churches, and it was a sermon about these, uh, kids that were drunk, and they got in a wreck, and they they weren't saved, and they went to hell.

00:08:33 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.

00:08:33 David Artman: And then the people all left, and it just seemed the whole thing just seemed horrible to me. And then later on, growing up, I was there were kids that were trying to save me in their youth groups and different types of things, and I was resistant to that. And then when I got into college, my parents went through a divorce and I went through kind of the young adult existential crisis, you know, does life mean anything at all, or is this all just meaningless? And I started thinking, maybe I do want some kind of spirituality. And I found out about C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity and the Great Divorce and The Chronicles of Narnia. And I began to realize that there was a much kinder, gentler version of Christianity.

00:09:14 Jeromy Johnson: Are.

00:09:15 David Artman: In the West. That I had been exposed to was something called fundamentalism. It wasn't the whole picture. It was it was kind of a mean version of Christianity that I had been exposed to. And I and then I found out there was this really nice, very beautiful form of Christianity. C.S. Lewis thought that the gates of hell would only be locked from the inside, and the only people that would ever possibly be lost would be those people who, in full knowledge, just wanted to reject goodness and love and mercy and that. Yeah. And then I found, uh, first Christian church. I was at Texas Tech, Lubbock, Texas. Found First Christian Church, and they were very loving, open. We had communion every Sunday. They said, come and and pursue your best understanding of who God is. They didn't they didn't weren't threatening. They weren't yelling.

00:10:01 Jeromy Johnson: They said they welcomed you to the communion table regardless of.

00:10:04 David Artman: Yeah. Ask good questions. Ask good questions. Well, the communion table really was it was understood for those who have who have made, uh, have accepted Jesus as their Savior. But accepting Jesus as your Savior was an invitation to begin a long journey where you would grow in your own understanding of what this meant. So they didn't, you know, it was a very collaborative, very open kind of experience. It wasn't threatening at all. And, um, I was having some good feelings. I had some good prayer experiences where I experienced God's love. So I just felt like there was this loving God. And I got encouraged to go to seminary, which I did so. But when I was in seminary, I would say that I was believing that God was love and that God was good. God cared very much about the poor and the oppressed and the suffering, and that God would not lose anybody over some kind of theological misunderstanding.

00:10:58 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.

00:10:59 David Artman: That was kind of where I was. Then later on, I did a doctor of ministry in preaching, and as part of that doctor of ministry, I did a paper on the history of hell in preaching, and I looked at the different ways that hell had been used in preaching from hell as eternal torment, hell as annihilation, and hell as restoration. So that was but that was back in in nineteen ninety six at that time. Yeah. There wasn't as much specifically Christian Universalism out there. What I mostly ran into was a kind of like pluralistic universalism, like of John Hick. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he had the idea that of God, not particularly Christian understanding of God, but that God was a God of love, who in this creation was drawing All Souls to himself. So it wasn't a specifically Christian Universalism, and I was still concerned at that time that a full blown universalism might cause certain problems with free will. So anyway, I was I began that was kind of an introduction to it. And then it wasn't until later in twenty eleven when Rob Bell's book Love Wins came out. I started rethinking all of this stuff again, and I came across more distinctive, better, more distinctive arguments for Christian universalism in Thomas Talbott's Inescapable of God Robin Perry's Evangelical Universalists, Brad Jersak wrote a book called Her Gates Would Never Be Shut, which wasn't specifically a Christian Universalist book. But as part of my process and I began to be aware that there was there was a lot that I could develop a thoroughgoing Christian universalism. I started getting interested in the work of David Bentley Hart. He made a specific argument that that the end of creation is not just the consummation of creation, it's also the revelation of the moral character of God, so that if there's anything in creation that is finally a residue that is unresolved of death or despair or evil, that tells us something about the character of God, that tells us that there was something unresolved in the creation at the very beginning that never then resolved at the end.

00:13:06 Jeromy Johnson: Hmm.

00:13:07 David Artman: I just began to feel like there was a moral imperative to the creation finally, uh, resonating with the goodness and the light of God supremely. And I just became really excited about all of that. And I thought maybe I could write something. You know, if I'm being a little more serious about this, I could maybe I could write something that would help people get them an introduction into this world, and that might be a stepping stone. Yeah. If somebody is like, well, I grew up evangelical, I don't know if I can do this. Does it? Is it have any biblical credibility? Has it has it been in the history of the church? What about free will? What about can I write something in roughly a hundred One hundred pages that somebody could sit down and think, oh, you know, I think this might be able to hold together. And then there's an appendix at the end of it that has, uh, other books that and gives a little introduction to the other books that could help people go on a deeper, maybe a scholarly level.

00:14:01 Jeromy Johnson: So this is like a this is like a taster, more than a taster. This is like a broad overview.

00:14:07 David Artman: Yeah. My Grace Saves All book is a it's a thin little book. So it's not you know, it's you could read it in an afternoon.

00:14:13 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. But then if they want more here are some good sources of some people that have come before me.

00:14:19 David Artman: Yeah. And then the podcast would be a chance to fill out further conversations about all those things.

00:14:25 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. So your journey was a kind of a slight slope journey. It wasn't like, you know, some like mine, it was like, you're on this evangelical journey. And then all of a sudden, bam, the floor falls out from underneath you because you've grappled with this theology and everything you've ever known and thought of as, like, coming apart.

00:14:45 David Artman: Yeah, I went from I went from thinking, you know, salvation is ninety nine percent grace, and God is going to save ninety nine percent of humanity to believing that salvation is one hundred percent grace, and God's going to save one hundred percent of humanity. So it was really just this slight movement, but that little slight movement made a big impact. Yeah, in my theology. And it raised a lot of questions because it's that it turns out it is that one percent of humanity that people are a little concerned about. Like, you're telling me Hitler's going to be in heaven? You're telling me Osama bin laden is going to be in heaven? You're telling me that, you know, fill in the blank is going to be in heaven? Now, that wouldn't be fair. Uh, and how could how could. You're right. How could I enjoy heaven if I knew that X and Y was there and they got away with it? So what I discovered is, is that that most people are really happy with God's salvation, being very wide and very broad. But once you say God's going to save everybody, then it's like, uh oh, well, sorry. Yeah, yeah. You were it was it was sounding good. It was sounding good. Then you went off the edge over there. So why do you why does God have to save everybody? Like my mom said? My mom said to me one time, she said, uh, you know, David, I'm not going to sit here and I'm not going to lose sleep over some, uh, whether or not some person that murders and rapes little children is going to go to hell or not.

00:16:12 Jeromy Johnson: Okay.

00:16:13 David Artman: And I my answer to her was, well, mom, what if it turned out that that person was me? And she said, well.

00:16:20 Jeromy Johnson: That's different.

00:16:21 David Artman: That would be different.

00:16:22 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.

00:16:23 David Artman: But that's a hard place to get to you when somebody sort of instantly agrees with my Christian universalism, I want to say, really, really. You're good with the I mean, imagine the worst people you can possibly imagine and that those people are going to be saved and those people are going to be just as happy and just as ultimately just as happy and just as included as you are. Do you really? How do you really feel about that?

00:16:48 Jeromy Johnson: Mhm.

00:16:49 David Artman: That's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow, especially people who have been really abused to think that they're going to share somehow some heaven with their abuser.

00:17:02 Jeromy Johnson: Yep. And that's a little bit of what their journey would look like. It's not easy. And that's something that definitely has to be sensitive. People who really get in touch with the love of God and the grace of God. Sometimes the most horrific things can happen to them, and they're one of the first people to say, yeah, I forgive that person. I give grace and love to that person.

00:17:25 David Artman: Yeah. Charlie Kirk's wife.

00:17:27 Jeromy Johnson: Very, very recently and.

00:17:28 David Artman: Forgave. Yeah. The the even though I didn't, you know, I'm. I disagreed with much of what Charlie Kirk said. Assassination is horrible. Charlie Kirk was. I mean, from my point of view, he was a young, young person who was probably following at least what appeared to him to be the right. The righteous path. Yeah. You know, and I know that I've changed a lot over who knows? As he matured and, you know, I don't know, it just we don't I don't. Assassinations are horrible across the board. I don't celebrate that at all. But I did note that his wife was able to to make that make that statement. And I thought that was a profoundly Christian moment.

00:18:08 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. And there's a few things that will happen to people quite like that, where it's so public. It's the father of your kids. Your kids see that, and you have to wrestle with that. And it's now in the public eye and the public conversation, and there's all these things back and forth where Charlie was Jesus and Charlie was the devil. And there's like, all the things in between. And you're dealing with the loss of your own, your own husband. And then to come as the first words out of your mouth, yeah, I forgive and I love. Yeah, that's a place that, that we can get to.

00:18:40 David Artman: Well, you know, I'm enjoying how nice we're being to each other. But you promised me that you were going to debate me and that you were going to. Well, you said you were going to put on the the hat of the, you know, the evangelical. That was a little disturbed about what I was saying, that you were going to get after me on this podcast. I'm kind of I'm ready to go.

00:19:01 Jeromy Johnson: I will do that. And it's a hat that I wore for a very long time. It's well worn hat. Uh, I even got a I even got my bachelor's degree in that hat. Uh, and you had texted me. You said I was basically like, hey, where do what conversation do we want to have? And, uh, you said, let me read it verbatim. Yeah. I would like to talk about why I think Christian Universalism is the only kind of Christianity that is morally and philosophically defensible. I like to talk about why I think it's necessary. So you believe in a necessary Christian universal universalism that is the most morally and philosophically defensible theology and stance that you can have. And so that's what got me thinking was like, okay, cool, let's do this then.

00:19:47 David Artman: It's actually the it's not just the most, it's the only.

00:19:50 Jeromy Johnson: The only okay. Right, okay. But you're not being sarcastic with that. You believe in your heart like it really is the the only and the most defensible stance when you look at God and everything else. So yeah, let's let's do this. So I'm going to put on my old my old hat and see you believe that everybody gets saved. Everybody.

00:20:17 David Artman: Yeah I would say everybody. Yeah. That, that um why. Well I believe the Bible says it.

00:20:23 Jeromy Johnson: Okay. Well, I believe the Bible says other things that are. Don't say that. Yeah.

00:20:30 David Artman: Okay. Well, do you want to just, uh, talk a little bit of Bible then, or how do you, how do you want to do this.

00:20:36 Jeromy Johnson: Share your stance. Like, I don't know anything about you and you're saying I'll get saved?

00:20:41 David Artman: Right. Well, okay. You know, it helps me to understand a little bit of your background. Are you a Calvinist or an Arminian?

00:20:48 Jeromy Johnson: Definitely an Arminian. Yeah.

00:20:49 David Artman: Okay. So you've. Okay, so you've already rejected the doctrine of grace. You've already then denied the Protestant Reformation because in the Protestant Reformation, the I mean, one of the clear ideas was that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone. So you've already rejected that, right?

00:21:06 Jeromy Johnson: No, it is by grace. But it is a grace that we accept grace.

00:21:10 David Artman: It's not by grace alone. Then you're adding stuff in there. I mean, Calvin would disagree with you. Martin Luther would disagree with you. Martin Luther didn't believe that we could save ourselves, that it wasn't anything that we could drum up on our own. He believed in the bondage of the will. I mean, you're you're already off on. You're already not a good child of the Reformation. You're you're already a part of the resistance of the of the true doctrine of the Reformation. So let's just start right there.

00:21:37 Jeromy Johnson: Well, I mean, things change changed since Luther, right? And I feel like we have evolved. We've evolved. There's a guy as I drive down my road, wears a John three sixteen For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but will have eternal life. It doesn't get any more black and white. There is a a state of belief that you will not perish, and you will have eternal life. When you believe and put your faith in the person of Jesus, the Lord and Savior. And that is how.

00:22:09 David Artman: Everybody will ultimately do that. Every time we'll every time we'll bow, every, every, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Scripture is also scriptural, that God will be all in all. Jesus said on the cross that if I'm lifted up, I'll draw all people to myself. So all I'm saying is, I'm agreeing with you here, that yes, every, every tongue will confess. It will be a glorious confession ultimately, and that there is no salvation ultimately outside of of faith in Christ. That's what I'm saying. I'm a Christian Universalist. So I think we're I think that the problem you're having is that you're just.

00:22:43 Jeromy Johnson: Not my problem.

00:22:44 David Artman: You're just not believing scripture, brother. You know.

00:22:46 Jeromy Johnson: Hebrews says that we are appointed to die once. David.

00:22:51 David Artman: Yeah.

00:22:52 Jeromy Johnson: And what comes at, you know, this and what is after that? And then judgment. Oh, we die. And at that point judgment happens. And at that point the Bible says that Jesus will separate the, the, the.

00:23:05 David Artman: The wheat and the chaff.

00:23:06 Jeromy Johnson: The wheat and the chaff. Yes. I was like I was blending them together like the cheat. The cheat and the math or something like that. Yeah, the wheat and the chaff. And he will separate the goats. And there is a separation that comes during that judgment. Yeah. And those that are do not put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ before they die. It's clear they we are to die once and then judgment happens. If we do not put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ before we die, then we will be separated because of the fall with Adam and Eve in the very beginning that those sins have come down from humanity. So we are born into sin. And because of that, the Bible is very clear that there are two places and we can get into that later. So you're saying after death there's still a chance, because Hebrews clearly states there's one death and then judgment, right?

00:23:57 David Artman: I think you're importing a lot into that word judgment, as if the judgment of God is only for the ultimately to torment somebody forever or dispose of them or annihilate them. Uh, I think.

00:24:11 Jeromy Johnson: That's what the Bible well, the Bible isn't saying. Annihilate it definitely says torture forever.

00:24:15 David Artman: Okay. Uh, I would say that there is also a lot. Yeah. Yes. You're making faces at me right now, but I would say there's an awful lot of, of, of imagery in the Bible that's about destruction. And I think that the destruction that sin leads to is to be taken very seriously. And that and that when the, you know, Jesus uses different analogies it talks about like the they'll be cast into the into the furnace to be burned. You know, the the chaff gets, you know, cast into the furnace to be burned. But there's also, uh, imagery about them going out into the outer darkness. And the thing that happens in the outer darkness and in the, in the burning is that is described. There's weeping and gnashing of teeth. So there's something that's going on. There's some kind of remorse that that people are going into. And early church fathers, they, they read the Bible in the original Greek, and they saw that the language of, of judgment also contained um, uh, hints of restoration. So, like, you get the Matthew twenty five passage, they're going into Ionian Colossus, which they read as judgment or purification in the age to come, because that word Colossus spoke to them from a horticultural background of the pruning of a tree or something like that. They were convinced of the love and the goodness of God, but they were also convinced that that God would judge the nations, would judge individuals, that there would be a hell, except that hell is a word. As an English word, there was a they had the word Gehenna. They had the word Sheol. Those were kind of those had different nuances for them.

00:25:57 Jeromy Johnson: Like you look at the King James Version and it is it's hell, right? Hell, hell, hell, right.

00:26:02 David Artman: And I think that was unfortunate because what it did was it took one English word which had already come to have imported a lot of meaning into it as a place of fire, eternal separation. And whenever the King James translators, a lot of times when they saw Sheol or Gehenna, they would just put that word hell, and it sort of left the impression that a uniform hell was all over the place in the Bible. Uh, and so you really lost the understanding of what Sheol meant in the Old Testament or or Sheol in the places where Sheol appears in the New Testament, like for instance in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man ends up in Sheol. Well, that got that got translated hell in the King James Version and in the NIV until twenty eleven, when the NIV changed that translation to show that the rich man was actually in Hades and not in hell. So as as Bible translations have gone along, there's a lot less hell in the Bible where people are using now more the word Sheol sometimes Gehenna now, or the word Hades. And so, um, we're also understanding that when Jesus would have, he didn't have the word hell to use. He used the word Gehenna, which in in Hebrew background would have been associated with a valley of destruction, which would have been associated with the decomposition of bodies and the ultimate ruin, not kind of a place of everlasting torment, which is why a lot of evangelicals who are very serious Bible believers now have started to say, well, actually, the language of the New Testament is much more about destruction than it seems to be about some kind of everlasting, everlasting state.

00:27:47 Jeromy Johnson: But it also says there's a fire that is never quenched, and there's a worm that never stops eating. Like those things really sound like there is this everlasting.

00:27:55 David Artman: Especially if you're raised, if especially if you're raised in an environment where you're told that that's what's going on. But if you look at the actual text, what seems that's going on is that the fire doesn't stop burning and the worm doesn't stop doing its work until it devours and consumes everything that's, you know, to be consumed. Because it's these are bodies that are thrown onto a heap. It's images of destruction.

00:28:16 Jeromy Johnson: Your own personal theory is what ultimate restoration or the language you're using is like, okay, these people that are judged and thrown into a pile, thrown into a heap, eventually they'll just be gone.

00:28:29 David Artman: Well, I think that you can definitely get that impression from the text, but the more that I looked at it, I also saw that that the Greek word that's used for destruction is epitome. And if you look in like Luke fifteen, uh, you can find out that all of the things that are said to be lost or destroyed in there, the the coin that's lost, the the sheep that's lost, the son who's lost, those are all supposed to be those are all said to be in a state of apalutamide, which can also be understood as destruction. And even people who who who believe in eternal conscious torment make this point that something can be lost and destroyed, even dead, be in this state of destruction. Yet it also can be restored and found and brought back home. That's the that's the point in those in those parables. But they want to make the point that that destruction, being in the state of destruction doesn't necessarily mean you're you're out of existence altogether. And so actually, both the Universalists and the eternal conscious torment, people would say the same thing in that.

00:29:32 Jeromy Johnson: What what would I say that agrees with you?

00:29:34 David Artman: Well, you would say you would agree with me that one can be in a state of hell, in a state of destruction, but that doesn't mean that you cease to exist.

00:29:43 Jeromy Johnson: Correct.

00:29:43 David Artman: Okay.

00:29:44 Jeromy Johnson: Because they will keep. Because we're a spirit. The spirit never dies.

00:29:48 David Artman: Right. So what I'm saying, we're both agreeing that life would continue to exist. I'm just saying that ultimately, that life would would ultimately exist in union with God. That it's a that that heaven is that hell is ultimately purgatorial. That's where we would disagree.

00:30:08 Jeromy Johnson: This is just the beginning. In part two, we step right into the tension where theology meets morality, and the idea of eternal punishment faces the scandal of unconditional love. You won't want to miss our debate. Grace doesn't flinch at hard questions, and neither does David. And next time we ask them all. Remember to walk in grace. And if you can, share that grace.