The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Anyone want to reply to: An Open Letter To The Universalists

Evangelical Universalism Arguments against Evangelical Universalism
#21

In other words, when I read Rom 11:17-24, I don’t only stop with those being grafted into the vine freely by grace through faith (although strictly speaking there is nothing here about people freely grafting themselves into the vine). Those who are rejected for rejecting the stumbling stone, have by their rejection of the stone led to the reconciliation of the whole world and their own eventual acceptance in life out from the dead ones; for if the first piece of bread be holy, so shall the lump; and if the root is holy, so shall the branches be. Nor are we to disregard those who have been grafted out of the vine, for God can and will graft them back in again, just as God has grafted us in (and without violating our free will in any intolerable way) – and if we are not kind to those outside the vine, graft us back out again!

Consequently (going on past verse 17), I am no longer uninformed about this mystery, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in, and thus all Israel will be saved from their sins at last, just as was written in the prophets: from the standpoint of God’s choice, they are beloved for the sake of the fathers, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. They did not stumble so as to fall; neither have the Gentiles; but God has imprisoned all into disobedience that God might show mercy to all: for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things!

The surety of salvation (not necessarily from punishment, but from sin) is preached just as much as the scope of salvation from sin in Romans 11.

No doubt (as you reference from John 15:1-7), those who removed from the Vine will be burned. But Paul warned us not to give up hope on them; and Jesus did, too, in His own way, for He issued this warning to the apostles themselves, that those who do not keep His commands and who do not bring forth much fruit are not loving Him. This command must (at the least) include the “new commandment” Christ already gave them earlier in this discourse (13:34-35) about loving each other as Christ loves them, by which people would know that they are His disciples, and which Christ reminds them of again here (15:12-14), “This is My precept, that you be loving one another in accord with how I love you” etc. Christ also reminds them that no man has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends; yet Christ has already told them long ago (during the Sermon on the Mount) that He expects them to love their enemies and sacrifice themselves for the sake of their enemies – which Christ Himself is about to do! Similarly at that time Christ wryly observed that if they do good only for each other, what more are they doing than pagans and traitors!? (Matt 5:38-48)

What then is the new commandment? To love their enemies, too, as Christ loves them and will not stop loving them once they become His enemies later that night. That means loving Judas Iscariot, too, who had departed to betray Jesus a little earlier that night (though no one but Jesus and the Beloved Disciple know this yet).

God’s love is greater than merely human love, for (as Paul says in Romans 5) hardly anyone would dare to die for a good man, but Christ showed God’s true love by coming and dying for us while we were yet sinners. Apostles who loved Judas Iscariot self-sacrificially would be staying in Jesus’ love and would be loving one another in a new way that the world would not conceive of by itself, the way Jesus loves them. But apostles who do not self-sacrificially love Judas Iscariot are under the same warning as what happens to Judas: being thrown out to be burned! Yet by the same token to interpret such a burning as hopeless would be for them to refuse to love their errant brother. St. Paul in Romans 11, in applying the same metaphor, emphatically insists that those who are currently grafted into the Vine should not be hopeless for those who are currently grafted out of the Vine, for God can graft in and out as He wishes and can graft back in whomever He has grafted out!–and can graft out those who insist on disparaging those who are currently grafted out!

Combined with Jesus’ remarks that those who bear little fruit (expecting evangelism to be few) are not remaining in Jesus’ love, the contexts add up to a warning against expecting hopeless punishment.

Relatedly, at the start of the High Priestly Prayer at the end of this discourse, 17:1-2, Jesus starts by praying, “Glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You; just as You gave Him authority over every flesh, so that He may give eonian life to everything You have given Him.”

By those explicit terms, the only way that the Son and the Father may glorify each other is if the Father gives all authority to the Son so that the Son may give eonian life to everything over which He has authority. That’s the context in which Jesus says He isn’t praying for the world but for His immediate disciples: He’s asking that they should be preserved as witnesses to the world, but it’s still the same principle because everything the Father gives the Son belongs to both Persons and must not be finally lost.

By the same token, this means that although the “son of perdition” given to the Son to be guarded will perish, so that the Scripture may be fulfilled, he still was also given to the Son and so shall not be finally lost; Judas isn’t among those whom Christ is praying will stay true for evangelizing the world, but he is among all those over whom the Son has been given authority for the purpose of giving them eonian life. “To Him be the glory into the eons amen!”

#22

Thanks for responding to it guys, I didn’t have the time/headspace to!

I was discussing EU with a friend on FB & he posted this link to Brendan’s open letter & said

#23

George MacDonald answered this. I’ll produce his quotes below, but his main point was - so long as the creature is, God will do all that he can to bring it freely into himself. He cannot stop, nor will he ever. For God himself groans infinitely more for the distance between himself and his creature than does any created being. God wants the creature to become, itself, the free son or daughter of his heart.

What if the person will not come out of his prison of self? There awaits for him Hellfire; and perhaps the outer darkness.

Is such a one forever lost - hopeless?

So long as there is existence, there is God’s power giving being and life to his creation. And so long as God is operative in this way, there is goodness, light, and hope.

But alas! How far we all are from the light!

#24

I’m no Biblical scholar and I don’t know Greek or how to exegete scripture but for someone to torment people in pain forever is just bizarre and insane to me. It’s clearly not love as I understand and experience Christ.

#25

Michael,

Brendon (the Arminian who wrote the paper) wasn’t actually arguing that God was tormenting anyone (forever or otherwise), although he verges close to it when appealing to God’s “perfect justice” to explain why God doesn’t keep going after the lost sheep. Eventually Brendon falls back on Lewis’ notion of the sinners perpetually tormenting themselves. And then eventually falls back on the idea that God authoritatively refuses to even provide them with a capability of repenting, since even Brendon eventually sees that if maybe the sinner freely chooses perpetually to sin, then maybe no sinner ever chooses that either.

A lot of his argument is highly hypothetical: it’s possible X might happen, and maybe Y happens (together or instead of X), therefore universalism is certainly wrong. :unamused:

Still, for most of his argument (up until near the very end) he manages to avoid the argument endemic to Arminians that God authoritatively allows or even punitively inflicts the destruction of a creature’s free will out of God’s high regard for the importance of creaturely free will.

#26

Jason P:

Wow. That was a quite a reply to the letter :smiley:

I am perplexed/intrigued about a “permanent ongoing stalemate” being technically universalism. I understand scope and persistence (though these words sometimes are used differently); yet, isn’t success a necessary pt of univ’s definition? That is, to me, the saving grace of Calvinism, that the salvation of the Elect is secure. Wouldn’t a “permanent ongoing stalemate” be akin to the tragic Lewis novella “The Great Divorce”?

An example: non-deterministic universalism - it is logically possible that all will come to the faith. It has scope and persistence. Yet, it is impossible to know if that salvation will happen - unless you hold some sort of Molinism that at least God knows that all will freely come to God (maybe that is an arg in Molinism’s or compatibilist favor). But “pure-Arm” universalism, w/o foreknowledge or determinism, is sort of a contradiction - just a hope. Maybe it is sinful or presumptuous for us to want that certainty, but logical possibility doesn’t seem enough.

Anyway, maybe the answer to this is embedded in your metaphys. analysis and I just didn’t come across it… It seems like you r arguing that an endless rebellion is metaphysically impossible given the Trinity’s omnibenevolence?

#27

Hey Jason,

My God isn’t like that though. He is all-powerful and has the ability to save, purify, and cleanse. He changes hearts. He doesn’t allow people to suffer forever. This would destroy His happiness because He is love. My friends call me Cole by they way.

#28

WHY do your friends call you “Cole”? Isn’t that your surname?

#29

Hey Paidion,

No, it’s my middle name.

#30

The technical difference is that God stops trying to save sinners in TGD (and Arminianism broadly). That isn’t an ongoing stalemate, that’s an outright final defeat.

Obviously the Calvinistic security of salvation of the elect is based on God’s competency (where not also on a notion of freedom to mean mere capability), and I appeal to that competency, too – but in concert with a more Arminian notion of free will. Even so I only acknowledge a theoretical possibility of ongoing stalemate. Metaphysically I bet on God’s omniscience and omnipotence; scripturally I appeal to various revealed data about final victory.

Unless God reveals the final outcome, which I don’t think requires a Molinistic middle-knowledge (which isn’t omniscience of the quality required anyway – which is exactly why middle knowledge is deployed to protect Arminianistic failure from God’s foreknowledge of that failure, so to speak. I have another thread on that topic I ought to be working on. :wink: )

Of course I appeal to scriptural as revealing the outcome; but from the metaphysical side of the argument I can’t even imagine why anyone would regard an appeal to God’s omnicompetence as “just a hope”, particularly when the goal is directly connected (via ortho-trin) to God’s own ongoing self-existence. I don’t “just hope” God won’t decide to stop working toward fulfilling fair-togetherness tomorrow or a thousand years from now, even though I acknowledge it’s technically possible for God to do that. I infer He won’t despite acknowledging the technical possibility, because I wouldn’t be here to even ask the question if God ever did do or had done that.

No, I’m acknowledging, as a function of my argument, that an ongoing stalemate (and thus an endless freely chosen rebellion) is metaphysically possible but only in a trivially technical sense. The only way I would believe the ongoing stalemate happens after all is if special revelation indicated it. And while I would understand the explanation must be God’s regard for human free will, I wouldn’t understand why God’s salvation wasn’t more competent than the derivatively granted abilities of creatures.

Despite my criticisms in my main article, I think Brendon is a lot closer to where I am than he realizes (because I’ve been there before myself). I expect his main difficulty is that he thinks the scriptures testify to some kind of hopeless finality, so he thinks he has to go no farther than a mere ongoing possibility of repentance – except to shut down that possibility after all in various ways (at the tail end of his argument). Notably, several of his quick scriptural prooftext references also feature strong indications of certain victory in evangelism, not only the Arminian scope (though that, too, of course), even in regard to rebel angels. He just hasn’t seen those yet for what they are, much as Calvs would see the promised victory but not the scope (and not in regard to rebel angels).

#31

Jason P:

Thanks for explaining the subtleties of your reply (for instance, I had never heard of God’s “competence”).

I guess Pure-Arm or “hopeful” universalism is contradictory to me. I acknowledge this may be due to sinful presumption or avarice. I would feel terrible sharing universalism w/o being able to offer others true assurance. I know “infernalists” who admit the doubtfulness of their position; yet, they argue that they’d rather preach Hell and save others and themselves than to take the dice roll on universalism. This is to reduce one’s relationship with God to pragmatics, but that argument, I guess related to Pascal’s wager, has a bite. I think that God’s love may make it very likely that all would eventually freely come to Him, but it is still possible that some hold out (e.g. Kierkegaard’s worst category of despair in which a person rejects God simply b/c they can or want do). However, free will is a great good is as well, so maybe an assured or deterministic universalism is contradictory in another sense.

#32

A hopeful universalism is pretty much contradictory to pure Arminianism, yep, because a categorical universalism involves God always acting toward saving sinners from sin until He finally gets it done (even if there’s an eventual permanent stalemate). Arms on the contrary claim that God stops acting, and so attempt a bunch of different explanations about that (up to and including the idea that God stopped acting in regard to everyone after the cross! – He doesn’t keep seeking some people and stops seeking others, He sought everyone and then stopped and doesn’t seek anyone anymore. :unamused: )

Brendon almost argued a perpetual stalemate version of universalism, not Arminianism. It wasn’t until the very end that he realized he hadn’t been talking about whether the stalemate involved God continuing to act toward that goal anyway – and then he collapsed the wave function (so to speak) in favor of God ceasing to act after all.

The assurance in both directions is super-important, of course. I routinely assure people that God isn’t going to give up on them, even if they want Him to, and that to be frank I have every reason to bet on God figuring out a way to save sinners from sin, and no good reasons at all to bet on even one sinner perpetually stalemating forever (even though that’s technically possible).

But I have to be careful talking about that last part, weirdly, not because people panic about the idea that maybe there’s a perpetual stalemate after all (since I always go on to affirm for various reasons including scriptural revelation that that isn’t going to happen) – but because people routinely seem insulted and worried that God might really keep after sinners until He saves them! I mean they seem personally insulted and concerned, like they wouldn’t want God to do that for them but would rather God give up on them eventually!

They really seem to feel like their importance (or the importance of created persons generally) isn’t being affirmed enough by God seeking to save them until He gets it done and never giving up, but only if God has to give up on the creature!

That attitude baffles me. And naturally baffles Calvinists, too; but it’s connected to the idea, also typically shared by Calvinists, that unless at least some sin is hopelessly final then sin isn’t being taken seriously enough yet.

Anyway, I see from my email alerts that several replies have been posted to Brendon’s thread (I don’t know yet whether by Brendon himself, or if in reply to me at all); but I’ve been out of pocket over the weekend and Monday, and I’m rushing around trying to catch up on things at ‘work’ work today. So I don’t know when I’ll get to them. (I have at least one thread on omniscience and supernaturalistic theism I need to be replying to here, too… :frowning: It’s nice to be busy, but it’s also busy to be busy… :laughing: )

#33

I can’t help thinkiing about the movie, “12 Angry Men”, with Juror #3 the last hold out. It took someting very internal for him to finally “come to his senses” (as the prodigal did), but it was a great release from something he’d been personally struggling with for a long time. And it came about quite graciously on the behalf of the eleven other jurors, btw.

That is how I envision the last holdout to God’s grace!

Great movie starring Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb, for those who haven’t seen it.