Robin A. Parry: "Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience on the road towards universalism"

This video is my lecture for the Toivo/Hope Conference in Helsinki, October 2020.

A fuller title of the paper is: "The roles of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in journeys towards embracing universalism: An historical exploration of diversity in lived Christian experience."

It does what it says in the title: It explores the varied ways in which (a) human experience (both ordinary experiences and more unusual religious experiences), (b) the Bible, and (c) Christian tradition interrelate—and (d) how reason reflects on all of them—in the journeys of different people towards more hopeful eschatologies.
I argue that all four factors will play an important role in the very varied pathways people have taken towards belief in Christian universalism. However, the ways in which those factors inter-relate will vary from one person to another. The key ideas are illustrated with stories of Christians from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.