The problem with universalism is that that is not the picture Jesus paints. Overall He seems to say that only a minority, even if that turns out to be billions, of people will ultimately be with God. He gives a stark choice - either Him and life, or not Him and death. The wide road and the narrow path. Whilst I do think those who end up being with God forever may be surprised who has been included (I suspect quite a few church goers will not be there), God’s judgement will fall on the rest. Ultimately that judgement results in final death and non-existence. I tend not to believe in the traditional understanding of ‘hell’ though I cant 100% rule it out. But universalism, no.
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Whilst God himself is not bound by time, just as he is not bound by physical space, that does not mean that in the ultimate world to come time, in some sense at least, does not exist. I dont think the saved will be in heaven, but rather on a redeemed earth, and heaven (God’s realm) is weirdly connected in some way. So I think this world will indeed become a better place. Remember Jesus’ prayer, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That is about making this world a better place whilst we’re here.
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Is that Scripture or wishful thinking.
I am sorry but I have no interest in spending eternity nursing a body like this. That would be Hell not Heaven.
As far as i am concerned Heaven is to be with God. and that means to be in his presence and realm. Hell is to be separated from God, having understood what Heaven is.
Still, that is me.
Richard
I dont think that’s right.
The previous parables were all about our attitudes to the good news of the kingdom. This one is no different. I dont know which translation you use, but the NIV states:
‘The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
45 ‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. 46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.’
Both parables are about the value of the kingdom, not the one who found it. The grammar of the text does not support your understanding. This chimes with the calling of Jesus’ disciples whom Jesus effectively asked to give up everything, ie their work, their families etc, and to follow him. For the sake of the kingdom. Similarly the rich young man was asked to give up everything, including that which he held most dear, and then to follow Jesus. For the sake of the kingdom. In these parables, Jesus is emphasizing how much the kingdom is worth to those who find it, compared to other things they have. It should mean everything.
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I suspect you would be quite happy with a perfectly healthy body, similar to Jesus’ resurrection one. More than just physical, and with no disease or death. Jesus’ glorified body was both physical and ‘spiritual’, and Paul made it clear ours will be similar. I think that is why the new earth, which Revelation explicitly refers to, is joined with heaven as our bodies will be a perfect fit for the new reality.
What is the point of making this earth a better place, and praying God’s will be done here, if in the end we just leave it altogether?
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
“For the Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment unto the Son: That all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father.”
“Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.”
“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
It depends on how you read things. In the above I see that Jesus says that He will draw all, and that the purpose of judgment is that all shall honor the Son, that none should perish, and that He does not condemn.
So all the punishment passages can be seen as corrective, continuing until all are in fact drawn to Jesus and honor Him.
‘I think that if every man was created in the image of God, that image is indestructible and eternal’
That’s a presumption on your part, with little to no evidence. God is the only Being who is indestructible and eternal by nature. That is why Jesus could say ‘I am’. Noone else can. Being made in His image does not mean we acquire such qualities.
The impression I get from universalists is that they often refer to generalities, such as ‘love’, rather than what Jesus or the writers of the Bible actually say.
You do not get it. Healthy or not it needs maintenance. I have no interest in spending any of eternity on the toilet, or munching food, even if it was the most delicious ever tasted.
What you envisage is not life, it is existence.
What you fail to see is that life is only worth living if there is excitement, danger, emotions and so on. Remove death and you have nothing at all.
Richard
My brother the mathematician regarded the matter as God being able to use more than one “time axis” just as we can use more than one space axis. In that case He could quite literally stop at one moment in our time and spend ten thousand years there using another time axis, and even stop on that axis and spend a different ten thousand years on those two axes by using a third axis (he stopped at three to match the three space dimensions). At one point he even proposed that God can use the imaginary dimensions, i.e. those that mathematically involve the square root of minus one, to view history unfolding in possible futures, which he said would explain forecasts/prophecies that went awry because things on our real time axis didn’t go quite as foreseen on the corresponding imaginary axis.
And all this before even wondering if God has more real spatial dimensions He can make use of! (He speculated that with a couple of more spatial dimensions to work with, miracles could be explained without resort to breaking any laws of physics.)
Weird stuff, but it gives a flavor of just how different time could be for God!
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I have to say I find your outlook rather odd. You seem to view this current life with contempt. Yet God made it. I didnt say anything about excitement or emotions being removed. I would imagine they will be intensified if God’s presence is continually felt. And death is good?!
You’re not painting the whole picture, that’s the problem.
Interesting – the Greek there can go either way. But–
Here the point is plainly that the kingdom is the one doing the seeking. Given that, with the above verse being not as clear, I would read both in accord with the second. So–
The grammar clearly supports ‘my’ understanding in the pearls parable; it plainly says that the kingdom is like the man, not like the pearls. The one with the treasure can go either way (depending on how you take the passive/middle participle), though I do like taking it with the kingdom being like the treasure since then there are two complementary views: the kingdom sees each one of us as a treasure worth spending everything on, and we should see the kingdom the same way.
Yet Jesus moved first, giving up everything in order to even be able to call disciples.
This also accords with the Gospel better: the Gospel isn’t about how we should be or what we should so, it is about how eagerly God is seeking us – that Jesus came to seek and save, not to show us a path! The Cross isn’t about how hard we have to do anything at all, it is about God giving His all, all for us: He rather literally gave everything to buy us (as Paul and Peter put it later, we were bought with a price, the precious blood of Christ).
Not at all. It is what it is, but you need to have the rough to appreciate the smooth.
Death is neither good nor evil. Death is a part of this life. We cannot live without it, and Jesus said as much.
Clearly you do not see the ramifications of the pipe dream. The only people who can live in Paradise are those without sentience. IOW the only reason you will love Heaven is because you are programmed to. Still, you wont know the difference so it doesn’t matter.
Richard
The reality is even the top physicists dont understand time. But it is related to physical space per Einstein. God is not limited or bound by physical space as He existed ‘before’ the universe. I think it is reasonable to say time did not exist until the universe came into being, as time does not exist without space (in our current understanding). Im not sure what you mean by ‘prophecies that went awry’. But perhaps that’s for another discussion.
After one finals week in pre-grad school we went on an impromptu trip to Baltimore (for reasons), and the topic on the entire nine-hour trip was what our bodies would be like in the Resurrection. Having just passed physical education in the first week of classes with an A+ and so been excused from having to attend, I maintained we would have our bodies at whatever peak performance we achieved in this life. The strongest counter-proposal was that we would have our bodies at the peak they could have achieved and so “even better than Roymond!”. A stubborn view was that we would have our bodies as they were at death except that they would function as in the second proposal. A brief proposal was that we would have the potential to have such bodies but would have to work for it.
One comment was that whatever our bodies would be like, they wouldn’t be falling asleep at the wheel "so it’s now someone else’s turn to drive.
At any rate, everyone agreed that just as our spirits would be far better than now, so would our bodies.
This was mentioned, and someone quipped “So we’ll be able to walk through walls”, to which another responded, “We’ll be able to run through walls!”
We wandered far trying to think of what a body like Jesus’ could do, since we are given mere hints in the Gospels.
If you follow one strain of thought in second-Temple Judaism, that’s the significance of the New Jerusalem, which is presented by the language used as a combination of holy city and Eden garden, a place where heaven and earth overlap/intersect. It fits with a theme in the Old Testament that in the summation of things we will get “back to the Garden” (but this time, no serpent). This always makes me think of how in the Narnia stories “Aslan’s country” is bigger on the inside! i.e. the New Jerusalem will “contain” by connection the entire heavenly realm (just as to the inhabitants of that realm it will “contain” the entire earthly realm).
One of the rabbis I knew in grad school had an answer for that, from the Sadduceean perspective (i.e. that this life is all there is): Because this world is still God’s, and that’s how we should treat God’s world.
I couldn’t make sense of that back then, but given how much joy I find in my conservation work I can start to grasp it, that even if this world “is going to burn!” as my Pentecostal friends put it, making this one better is still wroth the effort.
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And a presumption that the image of God has to do with human attributes (which is theologically dangerous when it comes to the value of human life) rather than being a vocation, a responsibility, to which we are called. I agree more and more with the scholars who say we should translate Genesis with “as the image of God”, since that rules out any qualifications or measuring (all are in the image of God, but some are in His image more than others), and because it fits with the fact that Genesis 1 makes use of the temple inauguration genre wherein humans are the “icon” or “idol” at the center of God’s self-constructed cosmic temple.
Ah, the emphasis from the Septuagint rendition, “I am the ‘am-ing’ One”, or as some second-Temple Jews put it, “I am the being Who gives being”, or to stick closer to the Greek tense involved, “I am the Being Who is giving being”.
I like that emphasis to a large degree because it makes the relationship between God and Creation more intimately relational: He is always, even nanosecond (or Placnk second) giving us being – my mind, my emotions, the tip of my left little toe and everything else, are His continual gift.
It’s what is actually said that drags me towards universalism.
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I still disagree.
Matthew chose to put this collection of parables together, and they are ALL about ‘our’ reaction to the good news/kingdom. He put them together for a reason.
Just because a parable starts with ‘the kingdom is like…’ and then refers to a person, doesnt mean it is that person the kingdom refers to! It is the picture that is being painted that is important, which is the whole point of a parable. It is the kingdom that is of great worth, a ‘treasure’ to be found. It is the pearl of great price. It is the thing that changes the world. To say that the Gospel is not about what we should do is ignoring Jesus’ own words. If the rich ruler didnt have to do anything, why did Jesus tell him he did?! And why was Jesus sad when he didnt?You are indeed supposed to count the cost. Without getting into a debate about ‘faith’, it seems to me faith always involves obedience. If when first called, some of the disciples had said, no Im not prepared to stop fishing and follow you and went back to their nets, would Jesus have viewed them as having faith? Even Abraham, whom Paul uses as the great example of faith, obeyed God. If he hadnt obeyed, would Paul have used him as an example? I doubt it.
Have you read Richard J Middleton’s books? He’s very good on the image of God etc.
So Jesus’ resurrection body isn’t good enough for you? or one like it, rather?
Oh ye of little imagination! I say earnestly, if death had been an impossibility, my backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail would have been far more exciting! The possibility of death limits us drastically in terms of excitement and danger! I would have trudged across glaciers, climbed cliff faces, explored streams . . . all things I didn’t do due to concern about death.
I agree. Even without the last, remove death and excitement and emotions can increase!
I’m exactly painting the whole picture! To get the currently held “heaven or hell” view it is necessary to change the meaning of Jesus’ own words. To get universalism it isn’t.
In fact another approach is to consider that Jesus’ words about judgment were given in conformance to the views at the time (on the Pharisee side anyway, since the Sadducees held there is no afterlife) – something I can argue either way.
And the critical part of the picture is the Cross, where God showed that He is all about giving and forgiving, not about condemnation – all His condemning was laid on Jesus, which means He has none left (though we have to be in Christ to experience that, it isn’t His condemnation we suffer, it is our own).
That fits the “already but not yet” theme in so much New Testament theology: all humans are already (potentially?) made alive in Christ, but only those who are now His have that at the moment – but unless all will eventually be His, the verse contains a contradiction (or at least a fallacy by changing the meaning of “all” between the two clauses).
I’ve noticed that in others as well – of the (Trinitarian) universalists I know, they are all more compassionate without prejudice.
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