No wonder I couldn’t find any passages where Jesus said the Earth was round. LOL That was an “analogy.” No… I didn’t get that.
But Dale, Jesus did not say any such words as “universalism is not true.”
Universalism and other theologies usually find other explanations for the words of Jesus and Jesus did not say that these understandings were incorrect.
The most you can say is that it doesn’t look like obvious direction which Jesus’ words are pointing to. The parable of Lazarus and words such as “eternal torment” point in a different direction than univeralism and so explaining these away does sound a bit dubious to me. That much I certainly agree with you. And frankly leaving it at that is a strong argument… certainly enough to shift the burden of proof… leaving us only to point out the flaws in the arguments made for universalism.
So here is the challenge to you universalists out there. Can you point us to an explanation of Jesus words in Matthew 25 and Luke 16? Or are we left to conclude that universalists don’t take Jesus seriously and Dale’s claim that Jesus was teaching “algebra?” LOL
Rauser is a character!! I did listen to the video and peruse some of the comments, etc., related to Rauser’s blog. Just by reading his short comments, I am not sure I appreciate where he is coming from … The comment from the gospel of John that I cited – I am not sure how Rauser would render that. But it does appear, from the context, to have set up a rather specific standard.
Actually, I should say that, in reading some of Rauser’s remarks, I do understand his questions. The things he wonders about (aloud in his case) are probably not dissimilar to what many people wonder about. But the remarks of Jesus still stand as things that Jesus said…
Mitchell, regarding Matthew 25 and Luke 16 from a Christian universalist standpoint, see (for example) Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God and Gregory MacDonald’s The Evangelical Universalist, which each have extended passages on those parables. If I may summarize in brief:
First, these are parables - not literal discourses but imaginative stories to buttress a teaching point. And in each parable, the exact nature, duration and finality of whatever various states there are after death is not the teaching point.
And second, with regard specifically to “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), the Greek wording suggests (a) a state of corrective, not merely retributive, punishment, which (b) is eternal, not in a necessarily temporal sense, but rather the sense of being of the age to come, of having its source in the transcendent (as we might speak of the “eternal” beauty of a remarkable sunset, or of a great composer’s music, or a great artist’s profound work). Thus “eternal punishment” is correction of the age to come, just as “eternal life” is life of the age to come.
Food for thought, offered without further comment or implied endorsement or denial.
Thank you for reading that! You might find his perspective on grace and salvation interesting here If God Wants to Save Us, Why Isn’t Salvation Simple? – Unfundamentalist
Also, was Jesus talking about eternity, or about the earthly Kingdom of God that encompassed most of his ministry and hyperbolic parables, as NT Wright wrote?
You’ve brought up the wide and narrow gate more than once - and it certainly deserves some reflection. That crowds and popular cultural fads are so often (nearly always in fact) stupid and even evil can be fully accepted; yet it does not logically follow that all those in that ‘destruction-bound’ crowd have nothing but permanent destruction in their future. Was the pre-repentant prodigal taking the narrow or the wide way? Obviously the latter. And yes - it led to destruction … destruction of his pride, his ambition, his rejection of his loving father … all sorts of death. And a necessary death it was in order to effect his salvation in the end. So the fact that the world can’t neatly be divided into those who are always on the popular road to destruction and some select few have have never ever chosen any path but the very difficult and right one makes it very unlikely that Jesus’ observation here should compel us to think that God’s grace is so ineffectually narrow. What it means is that sin is easy and attractive and that most of us spend way too much time on such tragically well-trodden paths.
Regarding this threatening spectre of universalism that has so many fleeing for cover, perhaps it would help if, instead of trying to turn it into some (possibly wrong) doctrine that you have been convinced would be a fatal mistake to accept, perhaps it could be seen instead as a sort of “functional universalism”? You’ve heard of “functional atheists”, right? I.e. Those who identify as “Christian” but live as if there is no God? What about “functional universalists”? That would simply involve doubt or agnosticism as to whether it can or should be ultimately true as a doctrine, but then living as if everybody is eligible for God’s grace because even if some ultimately proved not to be, we would have no way of knowing who they were, and no business pronouncing such eternal judgment on them in any case even if we did. In other words, as far as I’m concerned, God’s grace has no limits or depths of human depravity that it cannot eventually reach. So even if you can’t stomach any such thing presented to you as a doctrine, you can still live in the faith and trust that, in the end, there will be no evil that triumphs over God. And yet that is exactly what literally permanent hell fire would do: it would be a defeat of God - a final demonstration that the work done on the Cross was in the end, of only limited value and could only reach so far before finally exhausting itself and saying to the unsaved remainder: “enough - I guess my grace was not sufficient to reach the rest of you after all! Your evil has over-matched my love and proven to be the more eternal of the two.” I cannot imagine a more profoundly anti-scriptural conclusion to reach, Dale! Not to mention anything of where Christ’s Spirit leads us in all this!
So Rauser’s #5 is very significant in the other way too. If eternal hell fire were true - then yes; of course people should not, then, insist otherwise. But what if it isn’t true, and those who insist it is are found to be bearing false witness against God? What a tragedy, then if this is one of the major reasons (and I think Rauser is correct in his observation that it is) that people leave the faith? If people are going to be chased away, let’s at least make sure that the things they find so objectionable are at least true! Christ and the cross is enough of a stumbling block for all of us - there is plenty of offense to be had there without us adding things to it (much less untrue things)! There is no worry here that any “universalism” is suddenly going to make the path to life too popular. None of us runs eagerly to take up our crosses. The well-paved paths to destruction will always be well trodden and maintained right up to the end. You need not live in fear that somehow too many of us will suddenly catch on to that narrow way of life wherein all the righteous “older brothers” and “Pharisees” present begin lamenting “well, there goes the neighborhood!” Christ compels us to pray and rejoice: “would that it were actually so already!” … “There is exactly where the neighborhood is going - so you better get used to it!”
Not at all. That is a man’s-eye-view and a worldly projection, not a godly one – it ultimately makes God merely a benign giant with a penchant for masochism. Do all delinquents always get reconciled? Remember The Great Divorce, presuming that you’ve read it. There is such a thing as spiritual death – if you think that is profoundly anti-scriptural, you have not read well and truly are imagining.
Rauser has a rather philosophical turn of mind, which does lead to his method of reflection. I was intrigued by his remarks – in the above-cited unfundamentalists.com site — about how the birth of his child brought back memories of his own parents’ early insistence that their son make a profession of faith in Christ really really quickly in life…And maybe that impacts his evaluation of #3, #4, and #5 in the list you mentioned originally. Those three things, in particular, strike me as things that people can endlessly debate or ruminate upon. But we are not the ones who ultimately answer them or who can ever fully explain them to our satisfaction.
Interesting, ProDee…I see the book of Jonah as demonstrating how God taught (or tried to teach) one of His chosen messengers (a reluctant one) that even a nation who was the enemy of the messenger’s nation — was still made up of human beings for whose fate God was concerned. It did not, of course, change the nature of Israel’s relationship with God. They still were “chosen” to carry His message to the world. It did not mean that that other nation had quite the same relationship with God — not being “chosen” in that sense–that Israel did. It evidently did not mean that the people of that nation were any less God’s concern…which was what riled Jonah…and it also did not mean (evidently) that God was automatically going to not bring that judgment just because He saw it coming and was horrified enough to commission one of His messengers to warn these people about it.
If God was simply going to relent eventually (or anyway)— then why even mention the need to preach a coming judgement to Jonah? Why send His Son to take upon Himself the sins of all humankind?
It is said that Jesus spoke more about Hell than other things. I will leave that statistic to the bean-counters among us. The biblical descriptions of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth – and their worm not dying — plus other things such as the account of the Rich Man and Lazarus (which some commentators assert describes an actual situation but others see as an illustration of what things will be like, not a description of two individuals)----these things (and others) highlight some unpleasant future without being terribly specific or graphic.
The idea that someone standing in front of God (after death) might be subsequently begging for mercy is not an impossible scenario (among many other possibilities)… But God saying “I never knew you” —that is hardly the language of third or fourth or 80th chances, at least at that point. Lake of fire…weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth…of course you and I do not know all the details about them (ignoring the highly spurious claims of those who claim to have been there and back). But we don’t have to know the details of life in prison or of bone cancer to not want them either. We know enough…
This discussion on this site is great, and the questions are important to ask and to ponder. They do have a limit though. I was in a Bible study group in 2008 with a group of women who were fixated on December 2012. Every time the subject came up, I repeated Jesus’ remark that “no man knows the day or the hour, …” etc…Finally, one day I had frustrated that conversation for the last time with one person. “We may not be able to know the day or the hour, but we can know the year…,” she explained.
Well, no, and evidently we cannot know all the details of a lot of things that are mentioned in the Bible. But we know enough…
Thank you…correct. However, I thought the fact that it does not take much to find an exception to the verse indicates that it is not about salvation in the sense we think historically. Thanks
