I’d say it’s not a matter of more than one God, but of more than one understanding of God that shows through the text – a conflation of numerous views rather than numerous entities. It’s pretty clear early on that the Hebrews conceived of God as a war deity, something that brought baggage with it; a good example is king Saul’s victory over the Amalekites where he and the army decided to keep livestock alive – that was how one dealt with a war deity, by wiping out the enemy and keeping the spoils, including keeping the very best as offerings of thanksgiving. Saul hadn’t gotten the point that Yahweh wasn’t that kind of war deity.
It’s a different kind of power – the kind of power of the Cross, one that doesn’t crush but surrenders. It is after all the kindness of God that leads to repentance, not harshness.
That isn’t relevant for universalism, which isn’t limited in time. If this lifetime is all there is, then the critique of the Pharisees over the Sadducees that there is no real justice is true, and the same could be said about love.
In the world as it is, anyway – yet even here a lot of things get learned without mistakes being made.
Generally I think most here subscribe to the Trinitarian view of God. Personally, I do as well, though I also believe God the Son is not “limited” to human (homo sapien) incarnation of Jesus Christ, but can be generalized to the expression of Love that chooses to take on a finite form so that Love can reveal itself to, and redeem fallen creatures.
If we consider earth to be the only planet in existence, then these two descriptions are one and the same. But I like to describe it this way since I believe there is life beyond earth.
But as was made clear with that incident in the show The Chosen, forgiving was not for the benefit of the other, it was for the benefit of the one doing the forgiving. That’s a different matter than God’s forgiveness, which isn’t for His benefit but for that of the one forgiven.
He wasn’t saying what there “has to be”, he was giving a definition. Whether it’s a good definition is a different matter; consequences can be unjust not least because they aren’t consistent – one man may leave a heater running and his electrical bill gets ridiculously high, another leaves an identical heater running and his house burns down.
The whole notion behind Christianity is that God is perfect and needs perfection to have a final relationship. The only way that can happen is for God to forgive and cleanse. So it is definately for His benefit.
The fact that we consider the result to be to our benefit as well is beside the point,
Yes there is certainly a different use of the word “power,” such as when we talk about the power of Jesus to change lives. But I don’t think this is a use of the word “power” which supports Rob Bell’s argument comparing the different powers and saying one must be stronger. This use of power is the opposite of that – it is not about comparing which is the bigger stick (about being the stronger power). It is more like the greatness in being a servant.
No but it goes to the whole argument of love being the stronger power. The problem is that universalism is trying to make everything about God alone, when it simply isn’t about God alone. People can be irrational and often are.
I don’t find your suggested fantasy as being even remotely believable or desirable. It suggests to me a world where people have been turned in docile sheep. Not interested.
A fascinating aspect is that the Cross is portrayed as a machination on the part of Satan and his ilk. I keep thinking about that while re-watching episodes of The Chosen, seeing Jesus do some things in order to avoid the dark powers figuring out what He was up to, indeed even some prophecy serving that function (e.g. “Zeal for your house will consume me” – think about it). So the Cross wasn’t just the result of human sin, it was a plan that the “principalities and powers” hatched to do away with God, totally failing to understnad that getting crucified was the point.
Not just seemingly; there are instances where He overturned it. My favorite is where Torah says to take an eye for an eye, but Jesus says “No”; yes, we take it as a limit on what could be done, but that isn’t how the Hebrew reads – it says “you shall take”.
It can be generalized because it was specific. Theologically the difference is incarnation vs. incarnational; God always acts incarnationally because He became incarnate (and yes, that can go circular; God became incarnate because He is incarnational).
Whether or not time exists is a different issue – what matters here is that God, like the ultimate artist, takes the flaws in His material and still makes beauty; that is to say, even the “failures” get included in the design, to the point that it becomes hard to tell failure and success apart.
I was pondering this last night in connection with Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem failing to see “the things that made for peace”. The odd thing is that if they had seen those things, the Cross wouldn’t have happened – so was that a failure or a success . . . or both?
I think that is as much a limitation as saying that He is confined to acting within time. All we can say is that He experiences time differently than we do.
You may be willing to make this bit of rhetoric an excuse for abandoning your humanity in pretense to some kind of divine superiority when it is convenient for propping up dogmas, but I am not.
Thank you. I will not argue with you. Naturally we look at things differently and I don’t expect or need that to change. But for some things you say I have a comment in reply.
This is evidence that we can hold contradictory views even if it is difficult. Yes we should consider when this is the right thing to do, but we should have good reasons when we do so.
In that regards, the most I manage is to sing at church. I am good and math and science… (shrug). No I don’t think it makes me smarter or right about things. Though it is certainly a lens for my thinking about many things.
I would disagree with the first but agree with the second and disagree with the third. Modern scientists have discarded the idea of absolute time. There are many measures of time and while God is not bound by time, I think He can and does use it as He chooses. And no I don’t think God annihilates time. And no I don’t think God collapses the superposition of possibilities which the future consists. I think God participates in our lives to write the future together with us. To see the future as already written only works for a Deist God who does not participate but only watches.
Never fails at what?
Anyway that is not what my Bible says…
4 Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
I think your translation/interpretation sets people up to lose their faith. Love certainly does fail and it does so a lot in this world. I think the point is that love is the only thing which endures.
I have been researching some of this for a book and am writing.
There are many today that find traditional theology of “everlasting damnation” with eternal torment not compatible with divine mercy and Jesus own prayer of forgiveness on the Cross. Even worse a theology of a select chosen to find salvation and the rest not chosen and therefore damned. .
Granted that some form of reckoning of evil must take place, yet any evils committed by even the most evil people we can think of are finite compared to eternity. How can God “eternally” torment anyone?
Many non-believers are no more evil than those who profess faith. Many non-believers are people of love and charity, but just revolted by evils religions themselves have fostered.
Paul Tillich wrote that the idea of Eternal Damnation implies a split within the character God that is nonsense.
I think Christ re-defined (or more to the point - completely overturned) what victory looks like. Humanity has always admired external things like strength, intelligence, beauty, victory over foes, opponents, and competition (whether in playful arena or in more serious conflict itself) …all the stuff we bestow awards for and that helps anybody climb the world’s career ladders. The love revealed to us in the gospels, in passages like 1 Corinthians 13, and more to the point - revealed by Christ himself, admires none of those things, but celebrates something else instead: victory in the inner parts over one’s own sinful nature. Things like patience, gentleness, and kindness (especially when lavished on enemies) don’t get one ahead in all those external worldly senses. So in one sense love seems to fail almost immediately by the world’s standards. The cross is about as far from ‘success’ as one can get. And yet even all the way to death itself, Christ never allows any of the principalities or powers (or standards admired by the world) to get their foot in the door with him. His love remained unbeaten, whereas we so badly want him to give in and respond to enemies on their own terms: with forceful vengeance. We thirst for them to be put in their place, a thirst that drives the plots of nearly all shows and super-hero plots of the entertainment industry. [Every super-hero ever is just yet another expression of our idea of what we think a real savior ought to look like - what we so badly want them to look like; think about that! - “come down from that cross, Jesus,” we still ask today with the original mockers!] Even in our own modern evangelical/industrial complex (a term coined by Skye Jethani) we have given Jesus a make-over in our creeds and talked ourselves into believing that when he comes back, it will be as a ‘bad-ass’; this time to get the job done right (i.e. - as we would like to see it done). It’s as if we imagine he will be admitting, yeah - I know I said all that stuff about loving enemies, turning the other cheek and all that, but that turned out not to work, so we’ll try it y’alls way this next time around. And we imagine him repudiating his own teachings and lived example. We built an entire dispensationalist industry around that recurring (and always Satanic) delusion. It was Satanic when Cain gave in to it, the same when Peter tried to talk Jesus into living by it, and remains Satanic now as we still continue to fall for it today. Revelation even shows us John’s own vision of the Lion of Judah - and what he’s shown is a lamb, and a slaughtered-looking one at that! The conqueror on the white horse doesn’t come with a sword in his hand like a warrior, but with his weapon being his mouth - or more precisely, the words coming from his mouth! It is truth that achieves the real and lasting conquest. The final conquest of our hearts, which (the military imagery notwithstanding) is not a conquest of domination or coercion at all (like such things always are in the world’s way of doing things.) But is an apocalypse of revelation into our idolatry with the principalities and powers (‘revelation’ being what ‘apocalypse’ really means). The only thing I (and each of us) need utterly vanquished is the sin I harbor in my own heart. That is the true conquest which must (and will) happen if the gospels and epistles are to prove true.
This may not seem to directly connect to ‘universalism’ or those sorts of themes of scandalous grace, but yet I think it kind of does. There is no “out” group like the world (and our political parties and tribes) so desperately want us to maintain opposition towards. Sure - there is much evil to oppose, as always. But it is always first and foremost the evil found in my own heart, and that is where my opposition is required. Not the more sweetly tempting pastime of hating on all my favorite out-groups, while giving myself a pass as an alleged ‘soldier for the right side’. Christ really did turn things upside down - or rather gave us the still-too-rare glimpse of what they actually look like right-side-up.
The problem here is our view of eternity. We live in a linear world where even two minute can seem like an eternity. If God is outside time, and so is eternity, then it is not so much a prolonged torture but an instant of either pleasure or horror.
I realise that this notion of Heaven is not particularly desirable but, it is humans that are obsessed with the afterlife and eternity. Perhaps if Heaven and hell were played down a bit then world might become a better place whereby people are looking to improve it rather than be obsessed with notions of salvation and paradise
I think there is a place for humility and a place for reality. We can be our own worse judges and exceed what God is looking for. God has demonstrated in the cross that perfection is not the point.
It is ironic that many Christians feel that their judgement or condemnation of others is actually both loving and altruistic. We care for their future! Surely they want to be told of the danger they are in? But, in doing so, we contradict God’s principle of not imposing Himself. God wants willing followers not fearful ones or conscripts.
Universalism is not about human beliefs at all. It is about a Universal God who loves all, not just those loyal to Him
It’s not an easy thing to translate. The Greek is πίπτει (PIP-tay), from πίπτω (PIP-toe), which is an odd form of πέτο (PAY-toe) which pretty much vanished in its initial form, enduring only as πίπτω and the middle form πέτομαι (PEH-toe-mai), and the forms diverged somewhat in meaning, the latter being “I fly, I alight” and the former “I fall/plunge” or (rarely) “I land (on)”. The first of that final pair is the standard meaning for πίπτω, so literally I Corinthians 13:8 starts out “Love is never falling” or “Love is never plunging”. It can mean to fall in battle, but also is found used of snowfall. It tends to carry the sense of remaining down, as of buildings or merely of stumbling. All that said, it comes down to context counting, and the context here is a contrast with the three following verbs – “done away”, “cease”, “pass away”, and thus the rendition “love never ends” since the falling in context is among a set of verbs indicating the termination of something (so one might even say “Love does not terminate”).
The mental impression I get from the verb is of a boxer down for the count: he has fallen, and he can’t get up. So while love may fall for a moment, it gets back up, or to adopt a sense from other NT writings, love lifts back up.
It should be noted that the passage is talking of things that come from God, so taking it as a person’s own love is a deviation. This is hinted at since it isn’t just “Love” in the Greek, it is “the love”. So this is love coming from God, and since the other verbs indicate things that come from God but through people, so is this love that is being spoken of – it is not mere human love, and though it may fall briefly, it gets back up.
Just BTW when used of a spiritual fall, πίπτω does not indicate anything final, but is soemthing that can be recovered from.
This triggers an urge to dig back through the Fathers and see if there’s a corresponding conception! Maybe there’s an online version I can search; just now I can’t even recall the major universalists among the Fathers.
One ancient writer wrote that “though it take a thousand thousand thousands of thousands” of years, all will be redeemed. We’d multiply it out to a trillion years, but the phrase really means “as long as it takes” – a thousand is a complete period of time, a thousand thousand is complete in all ways, so a thousand thousand thousands of thousands is like Jesus “not seven, but seventy times seven”: a shocking superlative.
Several church Fathers said essentially the same long before Tillich, and it’s a thought the church should never have lost.
And yet the early church saw it not just as victory, but as Christ’s coronation!
I was contemplating this two evenings ago while watching season four of The Chosen, and it struck me that I don’t hate anyone except for moments, that even the worst people I’ve ever met aren’t in a category of “put them in their place” except temporarily; it doesn’t take long for me to start wanting to see them straightened out instead.
The nearest exception I could find in myself is in regards to those in positions of power who abuse it, but even there my thought isn’t so much that they should be “put in their place” but that they should be removed from their places of power so they can’t hurt anyone more.
I pondered this, too! Many Jews wanted a “kick-ass” Messiah, and even those who understood Who Jesus was expected that to happen when He returns . . . yet how would that be consistent?
In terms of universalism, and how hard it will be for many to turn, I think of Peter’s words to Jesus: “Who else would we go to? You have the words of eternal life”. My murky grasp of how all will eventually be redeemed is that eventually it will be recognized that nothing else works, and there is no other place to go, just to Christ with His words of eternal life (and so it will be the same for all: we surrender).
Oswald Hoffman once preached a sermon called something like “Turning the World Right-Side Up”.
There was for a long time a strain in Judaism where Paradise (Eden) was emphasized and the point was to care for the land, to make the world Eden wherever one might be. It wasn’t so much making things so that they pleased the person, but so that things would be delightful for everyone.
In a people where “salvation” meant trampling enemies, and the return of Eden generally conceived as something only Messiah could do, it was never very popular. I found out about it via some medieval Christian mystics’ writings. It also isn’t very popular today, given that money is seen as more important than even hints of paradise here and now.
I like to think that in my conservation work, aimed at restoring native ecosystems after human damage, I’m doing a little bit to restore Eden.
This topic and ethical problematic is a common theme in literature.
As part of a hobby of reading sci-fi (or more widely ‘spe-fi’ - speculative fiction), I have read tens of scifi books of the type ‘space opera’, about space wars between humans and aliens or between different factions of humanity that has spread to space. Although these books sell as ‘action books’ focusing on actions in space war, the ethical questions rise up almost always, as they do in all wars and atrocities done during wars. The hero characters need to wrestle with the temptations of responding to cruelty with cruelty, or taking the judgement to their own hands. The wars with aliens bring up the added question of how to deal with non-humans, those that are not part of ‘us’. Is genocide of non-humans acceptable to protect the interests of humans?
In a series of books, the first books may be just action but towards the end of the series, the ethical questions and the beliefs (faith or lack of faith) of the writer somehow breaks through everything to the surface.
The last ‘space opera’ books I have read are written by Daniel Gibbs. He is obviously a Christian believer and the difficult moral choices and temptations to respond to evil with evil are looked from the viewpoints of different believers (Christian, Jews, Muslims, etc.) as well as agnostics and atheists. Maybe a too black-and-white warfare between the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’ forces but shows well how persons struggling with the losses and atrocities during a war have to also deal with the fundamental moral choices at the level of the heart - what are my motives and choices when facing the cruelty of violence and the losses of my dear ones?
