No Other Name by John Sanders
by Luke Randall
A friend recommended to me the book “No other name,” which explores different views down the centuries and across different denominations on how wide the grace of God extends.
This is a well-researched book of over 300 pages and hundreds of references. It is biblically based but considers the views from Catholic and Protestant perspectives. Before reading it, I had no idea what “restrictivism,” “universalism” and “a wider hope” meant in this context.
Not a light read, but a thorough review of this difficult topic. Whilst the author does not claim to have proved any of the “wider hope” theories in any hard sense of the term, this is the view he believes is more biblically warranted and theologically plausible than either “restrictivism” or “universalism.”
Recent well-known Christians who share the “wider hope” view include John Stott, who was an English Anglican cleric and theologian noted as a leader of the worldwide evangelical movement. In 2005, Time magazine ranked Stott among the 100 most influential people in the world.
Billy Graham said of John Stott “He represents a touchstone of authentic biblical scholarship that, in my opinion, has scarcely been paralleled since the days of the 16th century European Reformers.”