More on Universalism

Having mentioned the book by David Bentley Hart, here is a portion where he argues for the Universalism of St Paul, this based upon chapters found in Romans. It is pretty deep, but Mr Hart knows his stuff, having translated the original Greek into English in his very own translation of the New Testament.

I don't really expect anyone to actually read this (least of all those who support the dogma of an eternal hell of conscious torment for any human being) but in posting it here all I need do in future when bumping into the Vulture Evangelists is to give a link to this thread, thereby saving myself any time and effort - which is actually wasted on such people. They can merely ignore the link and I can think "job done"....😀

[i]I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace—starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say—that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the gospel. Aboriginal guilt, predestination ante praevisa merita, the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of “vessels of wrath,” and so on—all of these odious and incoherent dogmatic leitmotifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet each and every one of them not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul’s proclamation of Christ’s triumph and of God’s purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion. Consider, for instance, the ninth through the eleventh chapters of Romans, which for Augustinian tradition provide the locus classicus of its theology of “grace.” From very early on in Western Christian history, these admittedly complex but hardly hermetic pages came to be misread in two crucial ways: firstly, as an argument regarding the eternal discrete destinies of individual souls rather than as a contemplation of the relation between Jews and Christians within the covenant; and, secondly, as a collection of declamatory statements rather than as a continuous discourse upon a single, explicitly hypothetical question. And the result was something atrocious.
This is all fairly odd, really. Paul’s argument in those chapters is not difficult to follow, at least so long as one does not begin from defective premises. What preoccupies him from beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that (so he believes) the Messiah of Israel has come and yet so few of the children of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so many from outside the covenant have. What then of God’s faithfulness to his promises? How can the promised Messiah of Israel fail to be the savior of, quite specifically, Israel? Paul’s is not an abstract question regarding which individual human beings are the “saved” and which the “damned.” In fact, by the end of the argument, the former category proves to be vastly larger than that of the “elect” or the “called,” while the latter category makes no appearance at all. His is a much more general question concerning the two communities of Israel and of the church, and the answer at which he ultimately arrives is one that he draws ingeniously from the logic of election in Jewish scripture.
He begins his reflections, it is true, by limning the problem that torments him in the starkest terms imaginable; but he does so in a completely and explicitly conditional voice. We know, he says, that divine election is God’s work alone, not earned but given; it is not by their merit that gentile believers have been chosen. “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (9:13) (though here, recall, Paul is quoting Malachi, for whom Jacob symbolizes Israel and Esau symbolizes Edom, which would seem to be, if one imagines the point to be merely the separation between the damned and the saved, the very inverse of the typology Paul is employing). For his own ends, Paul continues, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. He has mercy on whom he will, hardens whom he will (9:15–18). And if you think this unjust, who then are you, O man, to reproach the God who made you? May not the potter cast his clay for purposes both high and low, as he chooses (9:19–21)? So, “then, what if” (εἰ δέ, ei de) God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the gentiles alike (9:22–24)? It is a terrible possibility, admittedly, and horrifying to contemplate, but perhaps that is simply how things are: The elect alone are to be saved, and the rest left reprobate, solely as a display of divine might; God’s faithfulness is his own affair. Well then, so far, so Augustinian. But then also, again, so purely conditional: that “what if … ?” must be strictly observed. For, as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will not require the surrender either of Paul’s reason or of his confidence in God’s righteousness. Hence, contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God’s justice; and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer (the “vessels of wrath” hypothesis) altogether, so as to reach a completely different—and far more glorious—conclusion. And, again, his reasoning is based entirely upon the language of election in Jewish scripture. Throughout the book of Genesis, that is to say, the pattern of God’s election is persistently, even perversely antinomian: Ever and again, the elder to whom the birthright properly belongs is supplanted by the younger, whom God has chosen in defiance of all natural “justice.” This is practically the running motif uniting the whole text, from Cain and Abel to Manasseh and Ephraim. But—and this is crucial—that pattern is one not of exclusion and inclusion, but rather of a providential delay and divagation in the course of the natural “justice” of primogeniture, as a result of which the scope of election has time to be immensely widened, so that ultimately it takes in not only the brother originally and “justly” excluded by the law of primogeniture (Jacob, for example), but also the brother (Esau, for instance) who had been “unjustly” pretermitted by God’s subversion of custom. There is, it turns out, no final division between the elect and the derelict here at all, but rather the precise opposite: the final embrace of all parties in the single and inventively universal grace of election. This is why Esau and Jacob provide so apt a typology for Paul’s argument. Esau, we must remember, is not finally rejected in the story of the two brothers; he and Jacob are reconciled, to the increase of both, precisely as a consequence of their temporary estrangement. Indeed, when they are reunited, it is Jacob who says to Esau (not the reverse), “Seeing your face is like seeing God’s.” And this is the pattern Paul explicitly invokes in his argument. In the case of Israel and the church, moreover, election has become even more literally “antinomian”: Christ is the end of the Law (in the sense both of its purpose and of its conclusion) and for precisely this reason all persons may attain righteousness; with the fulfillment of the Law’s righteousness, its prescriptions and restrictions have been set aside, the wall of separation between peoples has been removed, and any difference between Jew and gentile has been effaced; thus God blesses everyone (10:11–12). As for the believing “remnant” of Israel (11:5), it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the “saved” within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved (11:26); they are the part that makes the totality holy (11:16). And, again, as was continually the case in Genesis, the providential ellipticality of election’s course vastly enlarges its embrace: For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the “full entirety” (πλήρωμα, plērōma) of the gentiles enter in. The unbelievers among the children of Israel may have been allowed to stumble, but God will never allow them to fall. And so, if their failure now brings enrichment to the world, how much more will they provide when their own “full entirety” (plērōma) enter in? Temporarily excluded (like Esau) for the sake of “the world’s reconciliation,” they too will at the last be restored to God’s grace; and this will be nothing less than a “resurrection from the dead” (11:11–12, 15). This, then, is the radiant answer dispelling the shadows of Paul’s grim “what if” in the ninth chapter of Romans, its clarion negative. It turns out that there is no final illustrative division between vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy; that was a grotesque, all-too-human thought that can now be chased away for good. God’s wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends. He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone (11:32): all are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. As I say, not a difficult argument to follow, if one has the will to do so.
Not that one can ever, apparently, be explicit enough. One classic construal of those glorious closing reflections in the eleventh chapter of Romans, particularly in the Reformed tradition, is to claim that Paul’s seemingly extravagant language—“all,” “full entirety,” “the world,” and so on—really still means no more than that all peoples will be saved only in the “exemplary” or “representative” form of the tiny number of the elect. But this is absurd, of course. Paul is utterly and unwaveringly clear that it is precisely those not called forth, those who are not the “elect,” those who have instead been allowed to stumble, who still will never be allowed to fall. Those whom he identifies as “elect” do not constitute the whole number of the saved; they are merely the firstfruits of the grand plan of salvation. The “derelict” too will, at the close of the tale, be gathered in, caught up in the embrace of election before they can strike the ground. And this is, of course, the only conclusion that can deliver Paul from his fears. If he were not able to reach it, and not able to argue it through to his own satisfaction, he would end his contemplations in the same darkness in which he began, his glorious discovery would be reduced to a dreary tautology, and his magnificent vision of divine love’s vast reach would be converted into a ludicrous cartoon of its squalid narrowness. Yet, on the whole, the late Augustinian tradition on these texts has been so broad and mighty that it has, for millions of Christians, effectively evacuated Paul’s argument of all its real content. It ultimately made possible those spasms of theological and moral nihilism that prompted Calvin, as I have noted, to claim that God predestined even the fall of humanity, and that he hates the reprobate. Sic transit gloria Evangelii. This is perhaps the most depressing paradox ever to have arisen in the whole Christian theological tradition: that Paul’s great attempt to demonstrate that God’s election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject. [/i]

This is by no means all. Mr Hart knows the NT and cites many other books, verses and passages.

But alas, the Hellfire Prophets will continue in their shame and folly in refusing to HEAR such matters.

Proverbs 18:13 "Those who answer a think before they hear it, it is a shame and a folly to them"

And finally a few words of the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, from his book "That All Shall Be Saved", a book in which he lists 23 New Testament verses/passages that support the Universalist position. Mr Hart has himself translated the New Testament from the original Greek and therefore knows the text in detail.

His words, from the Introduction to his book:-

[i]In truth, the notion of eternal torment is so unquestionably, resplendently warped and irrational that every defense of it ever made, throughout the whole of Christian history, has been a bad one. We may deceive ourselves that we have heard good arguments in its favor, but only because we have already made the existential decision to believe in hell’s eternity no matter what—or, really, because that decision was made for us before we were old enough to think for ourselves. Even many otherwise competent philosophers have, under the impulse of faith, convinced themselves and others of the solvency of arguments that, viewed dispassionately, scarcely rise to the level of pious gibberish. It has always all been a mirage. So, if one can make oneself retract that initial surrender to the abysmally ludicrous, even for only a moment, one will discover that all apologetics for the infernalist orthodoxy consist in claims that no truly rational person should take seriously. Every one of them is an exercise in self-delusion, self-hypnosis, pacification of the conscience, stupefaction of the moral intelligence—and nothing else.[/i]

Mr Hart pulls no punches.

What is it that turns people away from Universalism? Why do those who insist upon the realities of perpetual conscious torment for others who reject their own theologies refuse to actually take a look at the many books nowadays written by [i]biblically based[/i] Christians who support the Universalist position?

Possibly some people actually relish the suffering of any who disagree with them? Others maybe like the thought of being specially chosen - if eventually ALL are chosen it takes something away from their sense of satisfaction. Others obviously equate salvation with their own "decision" for Jesus, thus trust in effect a salvation by "works" - the [b]causal basis[/b] of salvation becomes not Grace but their "decision". Then we have the fearful, who claim to love God but in fact - identifying their own salvation with correct belief - are too afraid to question their current beliefs in any way, having long thought how much God loves them for "believing in his true word"?

Then of course their is peer pressure. In their very own congregation to question anything believed would be to perhaps bring censure upon them. They fear such and are not prepared to pay such a price. They prize acceptance by others above the actual pursuit of truth, of God.

Who knows? Whatever. Grace is being denied.

Well, the hounds of hell (aka the Protestant Lunatic Fringe) have let themselves loose on another thread.

It really is pointless continuing this.

I think maybe I will retire once more and resurface under a new identify - maybe as Father Christmas.

😀

Here is a recent article about Universalism =

[b][c=BF0000]The culture wars dividing America’s most liberal church Long a beacon of progressive values, Unitarian Universalism has been convulsed by pulpit politics [/c][/b]
https://www.ft.com/content/ec58bccb-668b-445f-ba7c-824297eb885d