Sure Jason - with the narrative of the Gadarene swine a real miracle happened and perhaps it is literally true too, but the symbolic truth is also at the heart of it. It clicked for me and spoke to me - to the guts of me - when I started to consider the symbolic truth (which I hadn’t done in my youth). But hey - perhaps I’m a bit of an Alexandrian on the quite.
How do I add a link?
Blessings to you my friend
Dick 
One hardly needs to be a PSA proponent to accept that line of thinking, but it doesn’t matter because even the lightest sin against anyone less than God is the same as sinning against God: one cannot be even slightly unrighteous without sinning against Righteousness Most High.
The point however is not a question of legal propriety, but of acting against the source of our existence: apart from the active charity of the source of our existence, we would immediately and permanently cease to exist (at least as persons) by doing so.
It is even active charity by the source of our existence to allow us the ability to choose to act against the source of our existence at all: any sin, consequently, is an abuse of the grace of God, regardless of the specific person we immediately sin against. Beyond even that, any person is also loved by God into existence, especially into existence as a person at all, thus any sin is also an abuse of God’s beloved. Sinning against God is bad enough, but sinning against someone God loves is actually worse!–in the lowest deep, a lower deep!
(One does not have to advocate PSA to recognize this either, or deny it: the concept is neutral to the question of any variety of penal sub atonement.)
I have no problem with that at all; Jesus didn’t blight that tree out of petty vengeance against something that couldn’t help behaving that way in the first place, either, there were points to be illustrated by doing so.
I just added a link myself; I’m not sure how to describe doing so. Copy the address for the thread, and add it to a url BBCode tag like this but use [square brackets] instead of {fancy brackets}:
{url=https://forum.evangelicaluniversalist.com/t/a-couple-difficult-verses-matthew-12-32-26-24/4014/1 or whatever}write your text description for the link here.{/url}
The result would look like this, which you can check by quoting this message to reply (thus showing the BBCode): write your text description for the link here.
Yes, I had that parable in mind when I wrote the post. 
I was also thinking of Hebrews 10:26ff For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries.
Relating this to the unforgivable sin, it seems to me that so long as we know what is right and do otherwise, God cannot forgive us, because He loves us. The death in us must be purged, consumed by the life of God – the Consuming Fire.
Dan, I think what I’m saying can fit in a PSA paradigm. Would you agree that people have to become or be made repentant as part of their salvation?
Sonia
We can look at this another way.
If a man drops a bomb on my house and kills my whole family, that causes me enormous harm and is very hard to forgive.
If a child slaps my face, that causes less harm, and is easier to forgive.
If a dog nips my heel, that causes even less harm and is very easy to forgive.
If a bacteria irritates a single skin cell, the harm to me is infinitesimal, and talk of forgiveness becomes meaningless.
Being finite, the very worst harm we can do to infinite God is infinitesimal, and very easy to forgive.
(A great king owns a million acres of wheat fields. A child steals a single grain and eats it. She’s caught and executed because her crime is against a great king, and is therefore a very great crime.)
I’m buying that Allan 
touche!
Definitely. Repentance is necessary unto salvation (not a necessary cause, but a necessary result - as a good Calvinist would say). By connection to Christ, we are new creatures. Just like a new born baby will breath, so also a new-born Christian will repent and begin to grow in Christ.
When you said that “The simplest response to the question about the “unforgivable sin” is that, since the sin will not be forgiven, the consequences of it must be suffered. I don’t think the just consequence of any sin is endless punishment” it gives the impression that someone could actually pay all that is required. My response was that it is impossible to pay it. Additionally, if a sinner is in conscious existence, he continues to sin and thus even if he were able to pay for sins, he would still continuously have more sins to pay for and will be paying for additional sins in endless succession. The only hope is by faith in the finished work of Christ.
If I can take your illustration a little farther, before that baby was born and could take that first breath, he had to grow and develop in his mother’s womb and endure the trial of being birthed. So also, there are things, sometimes painful trials, that precede or are part of our new birth and faith.
I agree that our only hope of salvation from the ongoing slavery to sin and death is in Christ. However, I also think it is scriptural to believe that sins can be fully recompensed apart from endless punishment, based on verses such as:
Is 40:2 “Speak kindly to Jerusalem; And call out to her, that her warfare has ended, That her iniquity has been removed, That she has received of the LORD’S hand Double for all her sins.”
That’s pretty mild considering that God promises worse to them here: Lev 26:18 " 'If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over."
Double or seven are not nearly endless. That chapter in Leviticus is very illustrative of the fact that God’s punishments are disciplinary, intended to reform the sinner.
As you say, the sinner will continue to sin, and have more to pay for, so then our only hope is in Christ – the once for all sacrifice which perfects for all time those who are being sanctified. But sacrifices are only acceptable for the repentant.
In the case of the unforgivable sin, as I understand it, it cannot be forgiven because it is to be in a state of unrepentance – a state of being willing to say that good is evil, or to be unwilling to give up sin. Therefore, something is necessary to bring about repentance.
Sonia
Pharisees were Israelites, and were being warned by Christ not to commit the unpardonable sin…or telling them they already had.
Paul says in Romans that “all Isreal will be saved”
thus: the Pharisees may need to undergo punishment/correction/chastisement without the same mercy others might get, but once the full measurement had been poured out, they too would be saved.
this seems to fit my idea of the “ages”, that when Christ says not in this age (the age He was active in, that He was bringing to a close), nor the age to come (this current age) they would not be forgiven, that does not mean they could not be saved in the age to come.
Sobornost, SLJ, AllanS in particular have posted some amazing things here. IMO Allan has casually destroyed that argument that each sin is an infinite insult against the infinite honour of God and thus to be punished infinitely. God would not be so silly as to create a system like that. He is Love…and love is injured when those it loves are injured.
the nature of the unpardonable sin however makes it necessary for a longer period of correction (ending at the end of this age, i presume)
Faith in the finished work of Christ is itself a gift from Christ that can only come from Christ (as Calvs are especially insistent on themselves); just as any sinner is in conscious existence (or wouldn’t be responsible for his sins), but does not necessarily continue to sin as Christ empowers and leads the sinner to repentance.
Even in the question of paying the final cent, the unforgiving servant sent to the tormentors isn’t paying for his sin, he supposed to be paying what he owes which is mercy, righteousness and forgiveness. He owes that because God gives him the ability and responsibility to do those things, which he hasn’t done.
It is by the self-sacrifice of the Son that the man exists at all with abilities, including the ability to abuse his abilities if he chooses; he ought to be cooperating with the Son, in self-sacrificial loyalty to the Father; until and unless he cooperates (when he could but chooses not to), the man is sinning; the Son self-sacrificially empowers and leads him to repent and to do what the Son always self-sacrificially empowered and leads the man to do (which free gift the man abused by sinning): to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God, which at bottom is all that God requires us to do (per Micah 6:8) – but He does require it.
Consequently we are to be willingly baptized into the death of Christ (as St. Paul puts it) so that we may be raised with Him into His life.
It isn’t about paying for our sin apart from Christ; nor is it about paying for our sin as though we would thereby change God’s mind about us or (even worse) force Him to treat us better by virtue of appeal to our own righteousness (or even by virtue of appeal to anything at all). We don’t have to convince or force God to do anything, and no one else has to either: He’s already doing it from the beginning. And we don’t have to convince or force God to continue doing anything, and no one else has to either: He continues doing it until He brings about the results He wants.
But the result He wants, which He acts in various ways toward getting, and keeps on acting till He gets it, without having to be convinced or forced to act that way, nor to continue until He gets it, is for the unforgiving servant to pay the mercy owed by the unforgiving servant to God and to his fellow man.
Or, to put it in terms of the original question(s) for the thread, the result God wants and persistently acts toward getting until He gets it (without having to be convinced by anyone to act originally and persistently this way), is for Judas Iscariot to do justice (fair-togetherness, righteousness), and to love mercy and to walk humbly with his God; and for those Pharisees in Capernaum to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God.
Even if their latter state becomes worse than their former – as had also been true about the man whom they accused Christ of healing by the power of Satan! That man’s state was not hopeless, despite his punishment, thanks to the free gift of Christ; the Pharisees and Iscariot’s states are not hopeless, thanks to the free gift of Christ.
But until they agree to stop sinning (as the mute man did not agree and so his state became worse), their sins have not been sent away and they are not yet freed from their sins (both verbs being the common Greek ones for “forgiving” sins), even though God already acts toward doing so, and even though He sees the completed result already from His omniscient vantage point.
This original assurance of victory in God’s intention of salvation is very rightly important to the Calvinistic branches of Christianity. The assurance of scope in God’s intention of salvation, very rightly important to the Arminianistic branches of Christianity, tells us God’s intention includes Iscariot and those Pharisees.
(And the demons molesting the mute demented man! – although most Arminians wouldn’t allow that much of a total scope. Which Calvinists rightly critique them on. 
)
Yes –
Mat 25:40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me.’”
Sonia
Regarding the Sin Against the Holy Spirit and PSA – I’m not knocking PSA. I can see that in least some of its forms it communicates Gods’ unconditional love to people. However, I’m very sceptical about it being the only proper theory of atonement – it was unknown in the early Church Fathers who read the same edible as we do. There may be elements of it in the theology of some the later Latin fathers like Augustine– but they do not express the doctrine in a consisted and developed form. It isn’t really found fully developed before Anselm’s ‘Cur Deus Homo’ in the twelfth century and here the offence is against God’s infinite (feudal) honour. Calvin picks it up again in the sixteenth century and develops the idea of offence so it is against God’s infinite Justice. But I wonder how PSA adequately explains Jesus’ saying about the Sin against the Holy Spirit? PSA is generally theorised in terms of the Son paying the infinite debt humanity (or the elect of humanity) owes to the Father who has been infinitely offended by our sin. Bu in Jesus words here offences against both the Son and the Father can and will be forgiven – but offences against the Hoy Spirit are of a different nature. For this reason I find a contextual exegesis of the saying far simpler and more satisfying than trying to fit it into a theory of atonement.
I do feel strongly, passionately, about this saying that it is important to see it in its context – given that it has haunted people (including children)who are sensitive, or mentally disturbed (for example it drove the gentle English poet William Cowper to despair in his madness), or even driven to despair by poverty and famine . I guess in terms of limited atonement theology (but not hypothetical universalist PSA) the sin against the Holy Spirit is being not born as one of the elect, and therefore being forever a creature of Gods’ wrath. However, when Jesus threatens he never does so indiscriminately – he is never on record as threatening children or the disturbed in mind or the marginalised. He threatens the powerful and especially those who are unjust and are seeking to kill him.
Well Dick given that you’ve mentioned “context” then WHEN LEFT in its historical and biblical context and NOT dragged beyond it, as I share in my article linked above, THEN there is NO scope for this ravenous haunting grief that has pervaded people beyond those times due to the infliction of controlling religious rhetoric.
Davo - that’s an excellent mini-article (IMHO) - a vast improvement on my undisciplined chatty prose. I think I very much agree with the scope of what you say . Still thinking over pantelism - I thought I’d annoyed you (capitalised words etc.) because of speaking about two ages and the age of ages beyond. I’m not a dispensationalist and I agree with your emphasis on realised eschatology; but I still think that while redemption is here and now I look to the ages of ages for its completion (to stop me from being utopian and to be ready to live in an imperfect world that’s shot through with grace). I think I waver between amillennial and preterist views - but I’d not fall out with a brother over this.
I think perhaps people often don’t’ see links to articles within threads here (I missed yours - and if you’d copied and pasted your stuff or at least the relevant bits (which is most of it) I would certainly have taken it on board when writing my posts
On another note -
I also note two terrible ironies here –
First the saying about the sin against the Holy Spirit has been used to drive frail and/or sensitive people mad (or at least used without any regard or compassion for their condition).However in the context in which it is spoken Jesus has just healed an afflicted person and is using it against those who way that his healing comes from Satan.
The Second irony – for me at least – is that I have absolutely no problem at all with accepting miracles (and the supernatural) as part of Biblical faith, absolutely none; and they do happen today too. However, I was shaped and influenced early by a power based fundamentalism that used the idea of ‘fact’ in these specific narratives as a way that miracle simply becomes brutal fact demonstrating the facts of Gods’ overwhelming power (without reference to God’s overwhelming loving purposes). And I think I probably speak for others who are in no way classic ‘liberal’ Christians engaged in a programme of ‘de-mythologisation’ but who at some stage have had to let go of concentrating on the historic level of scripture in certain parts to concentrate on the moral and allegoric/Symbolic levels. Then after a time of waiting we often receive back the historic and literal meaning afresh as a gracious gift.
Thanks for the affirming words and sorry about the capital words Dick, I certainly wasn’t annoyed by anything you said and I should have bolded or underlined them, and I certainly wasn’t shouting, my bad.
Hmm I’ve been a little loathed to cut n’ paste like that as I don’t want to seem to be spamming the site etc hence the occasional link.
Yeah I was brought up amill but after many years gravitated to what I saw as the more positive post mill position. It was only then a step from there to prêterism which I discovered I had been a prêterist for some time without realising it. It was then that I grasped what a paradigm shift I was in as I adhered to a more full prêterist understanding. It then only became a matter of time to where I started seeing the inclusive traits inherent within prêterism itself – and that’s when the poo hit the fan as I was being labelled a universalist etc.
Yes irony indeed. Basically they were attributing these works of divine grace to some other base power.
Again yes Dick… this is where said miracles become an end in themselves. Not much different to where the crowds would happily follow and listening as long as Jesus put food in their belly.
Of course, this line of reasoning does not agree with the character of God revealed in scripture, the God who does not repay a person according to his sins, the God of mercy and grace. That line of reasoning comes from the Fuedal system that was common in the Dark ages where to sin against the king or the baron (land owner) was to incur a greater penalty because of who the king/baron was.
This is not at all the revelation of the character of God I see in scripture. He is our Father, He is love and love is not easily offended. Love (and a good father) is quick to forgive, covers sins, doesn’t get upset with mistakes but in love deals with punishes wrong practices with a goal of bringing positive change to his child. Wise loving parenting includes reality discipline, allowing some of the child’s bad choices to cause them pain, though that pain be mitigated by the grace and love of the parent.