[quote]
I think none of us *deserve *God’s love (do we *deserve *anyone’s love? e.g. I don’t *deserve *my wife’s love, although I’m very grateful for it) and therefore in one sense we should be surprised by His love and that we don’t end up annihilated or in ECT.
While I would agree with the first part of Alex’s statement – that we don’t *deserve *God’s love, just as we don’t *deserve *the love of a wife or husband. However, I don’t think the conclusion – that simply because we don’t deserve to be loved, and by extension, saved, we should therefore be surprised that we don’t end up annihilated or in ECT – necessarily follows. For not deserving love is one thing, but being cast into ECT simply for being what we are, is another thing altogether
I’ve spoken of this before, but I think a helpful analogy here is the Biblical one of parent and child. Does a child ‘deserve’ a father’s love? In some senses no, she doesn’t. But is she entitled to a parent’s love? Does she have a right to expect love from the father who chose to bring her unbidden into the world? Indeed, does that father have an obligation to love his child? Along with Thomas Talbott I’d answer yes to all those questions. Talbott talks of God’s “freely embraced obligation” to love His children, and I think that’s spot on.
We didn’t choose to be born. As Adam says to God in Milton’s Paradise Lost
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man? did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me”
But God freely chose to create us, knowing full well that we would turn out to be the sinners we are. That is why traditional doctrines of annihilation and ECT don’t work for me. Only if EU is true, and God is one day going to heal and reconcile all sinners to Him, can God be ‘justified’ in creating us in the first place. At least that’s how I see it.
What do you guys think? I’m sure that Calvinists, with their doctrine of sola dei gloria, would probably take issue with me, and say that I have an overly anthropocentric view of Divine love. They would probably want to assert God’s ‘right’ to be sovereign, and to do as He pleases with His creation. But you won’t be surprised to learn that I reject that view, heretic that I am.
[quote=“johnnyparker”]
Alex and I have touched on this topic on the ‘Conference Elective ‘Responding to the new [E} Universalism’ thread Conference Elective “Responding to the New [E] Universalism”, but it struck me that it was worth a thread on its own.
On that thread Alex said:
While I would agree with the first part of Alex’s statement – that we don’t *deserve *God’s love, just as we don’t *deserve *the love of a wife or husband. However, I don’t think the conclusion – that simply because we don’t deserve to be loved, and by extension, saved, we should therefore be surprised that we don’t end up annihilated or in ECT – necessarily follows. For not deserving love is one thing, but being cast into ECT simply for being what we are, is another thing altogether
I’ve spoken of this before, but I think a helpful analogy here is the Biblical one of parent and child. Does a child ‘deserve’ a father’s love? In some senses no, she doesn’t. But is she entitled to a parent’s love? Does she have a right to expect love from the father who chose to bring her unbidden into the world? Indeed, does that father have an obligation to love his child? Along with Thomas Talbott I’d answer yes to all those questions. Talbott talks of God’s “freely embraced obligation” to love His children, and I think that’s spot on.
We didn’t choose to be born. As Adam says to God in Milton’s Paradise Lost
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man? did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me”
But God freely chose to create us, knowing full well that we would turn out to be the sinners we are. That is why traditional doctrines of annihilation and ECT don’t work for me. Only if EU is true, and God is one day going to heal and reconcile all sinners to Him, can God be ‘justified’ in creating us in the first place. At least that’s how I see it.
What do you guys think? I’m sure that Calvinists, with their doctrine of sola dei gloria, would probably take issue with me, and say that I have an overly anthropocentric view of Divine love. They would probably want to assert God’s ‘right’ to be sovereign, and to do as He pleases with His creation. But you won’t be surprised to learn that I reject that view, heretic that I am.
Shalom
Johnny
Amen Johnny!
P.S. I like your new avatar pic better than the last one. We’re we going through a dark night of the soul for a bit
I don’t like to talk about whether we “deserve” to be loved and even saved by God, because people tend to have an idea of deservedness which involves appeal to an overarching standard to which two people are ethically subject, which is ontologically not true of God. Relatedly, “desert” tends to be connected (naturally enough in our natural world between creatures) with earning consideration from other people–which can only be feasible if there is an overarching standard to which both people are subject, and once again this cannot apply ontologically to God.
Thus we don’t earn God’s love and don’t earn God’s salvation–which Calvinists usually agree with in principle. Even Arminians typically agree with this in principle, although because of the emphases of their soteriology they then have trouble explaining why God stops acting to save some sinners without appealing to the notion that, in effect, the sinner didn’t do enough to earn God’s continuing persistence or success.
(Readers familiar with how I operate may notice that I’m not saying “salvation from sin”. That’s because I found this makes a huge difference, yet Calvs and Arms often end up neglecting this factor, and so I’m approaching the idea obliquely. I’ll be getting back to it eventually, I promise. )
On the other hand, we may ask the question: does that person over there have a right to be loved and even evangelized (toward salvation, to whatever degree we cooperate with God in that) by us?
It seems obvious enough from the New Testament testimony (if not always from OT evidence) that God expects us to love everyone and even to evangelize everyone out of love for them: people deserve to be loved and evangelized by us!–they have a right to be loved and evangelized by us, and we’re the ones who are sinning if we refuse to do that!
Arminians, who believe God acts toward saving everyone (even though for whatever reason(s) He doesn’t persist at it for everyone), usually agree with this in principle. Even Calvinists typically agree with this in principle, although because of how they regard election they then have trouble explaining why even the non-elect deserve to be loved by us even with what amounts to saving love. (The typical escape hatch there is that since we don’t know who is and who isn’t elected by God for salvation, we are expected to treat everyone as elected until we learn differently. But not many Calvinists, in my experience, are willing to go the distance with this concept and acknowledge that if they discover someone they currently love is non-elect they’ll have to stop loving those people, not only with saving love but also with incidental love, or be found sinning against God!–since God sooner or later stops loving the non-elect even with incidental ‘environmental’ love, so to speak, by putting them into hell or annihilating them.)
But if people have a right to be loved, and even evangelized, by us, then why do they not have a right to be loved and even saved by God?!
If it is answered that men are under the ethical standard of God, but God is under no ethical standard, while that’s ontologically true it doesn’t really answer the question without undermining the ground: if God is the ethical standard by which people have a right to be loved and (from a creaturely perspective) saved by us, then to say God behaves antithetically to that Himself is to introduce a schism of intention in God. The standard by which we are expected to behave cannot be fundamentally different from the standard by which we are expected to behave!–that’s nonsense! The only reason why someone has rights that we ought to act to fulfill is because God grounds those rights and gave them those rights! If a Calvinistic non-elect person only has pseudo-rights, the standard by which we are expected to behave (God, Who expects us to treat them as though they have such rights) must be fundamentally different from the standard by which we are expected to behave (God, Who in reality doesn’t give them any such rights at all)! At best, we could only be pseudo-sinning by not acting to fulfill the pseudo-rights of a person. We just wouldn’t be in a position to know if we are only pseudo-sinning or not, if we don’t know whether they’re elect or not.
This all becomes more pointed when the focus of salvation (which must be true per the name of “Jesus”) is salvation from sin. Is it a righteous thing, or an unrighteous thing, for an unrighteous person to be saved from being unrighteous into being righteous instead? Obviously that must be righteous to do!
Does a person have a right to be saved from being a person who does not act to fulfill the rights of other people, into being a person who acts to fulfill the rights of other people? Obviously yes! Someone who denied that such a person had such a right, would be denying that other people have a right to have their rights fulfilled by someone!
George MacDonald once wrote: “I do not call ‘justice’ that which consists only in a sense of our own rights.”
And again:
MacD does deny that people deserve anything from God, but only in the sense of a right proceeding from ourselves.
So far I have said nothing about trinitarian theism, and so unitarians or modalists should be able to follow along so far in agreement. But trinitarian theists ought of all people to be most aware (although usually and tragically we are not) that the eternal active self-existence of the one and only God Most High involves persons fulfilling love in justice to One another, in fair-togetherness with One another. This is the ground not only of God’s eternal never-beginning self-existence, but also of the existence of all created realities, including derivative creatures. This is why created persons have rights at all, and why when we abuse the rights of people we are also sinning against God. It is exactly on the same ground, the ground of God’s own positive existence as love fulfilled in justice (righteousness, fair-togetherness between persons), that we have a right to be loved and saved from our sins by God. God would be sinning against Himself in acting toward fulfilling non-fair-togetherness with any person, just as we sin by so acting, whether that person is created or one of the Trinity.
That is theologically coherent. To say that we have no right to be loved by Love Himself is theological nonsense; to say that we have no right to be saved from unrighteousness by Righteousness Himself, is even worse theological nonsense (if that was possible).
So yes: as an orthodox trinitarian Christian theist, I strenuously argue and affirm that every person, even every sinner, has a positive right, grounded (like their own derivative existence) in God’s own essential self-existence, to be loved and to be saved from their sins, by God. For the same reason I also deny that this right is grounded in a standard more fundamental than God Himself, much less that we can in any way earn such love and salvation from God.
Someone might be able to coherently argue from a theology less than trinitarian (or even binitarian) theism that a person has no right to be loved, much less saved, by God; but no trinitarian theist can coherently argue this as a trinitarian theist. And, in my experience, NOT EVEN ONCE have I ever seen a trinitarian theist try to argue against a right to be loved and saved by appeal to coherent trinitarian theism per se. Instead, if they ground their position on theism principles at all (and I do see this with some frequency), they will argue such a position based on reference to mere supernaturalistic theism of some sort, or at most with a nod to a merely incidental trinitarian theology which has nothing inherently to do with morality. Nor do I logically expect any different, ever.
Jason: I agree with you 1000% I think. I am not a theological person but I think I understood most of what you said.
I don’t think ‘rights’ enter into love, especially into God’s Love. God is, therefore Love is as demonstrated by the Trinity altho our understanding of it is not complete.
I don’t know why He choose to create people who He knew would sin, but I believe He had His plans ready to get us back from sin—and He loves all of what He created.
Johnny, I was glad you raised this with, Alex. I have similar feelings, but am not equipped to defend them. I tend to think it’s not even possible to really love someone and find them undeserving of our love. It’s almost as if love requires that people are deserving.
Isn’t what matters most is who is God and what does he do? His love seems like it necessitates a loving outcome, which can only be to restore us. When I think about it, it’s like we have a low view of God that we think he finds us so underserving that his plan is to let us rot w/ no purpose. If we’re uncomfortable taking too high a view of ourselves, then let’s take a high view of the love of God.
Thanks for creating a thread about this, it’s worth further discussion. I think there’s two approaches:
God is the source of all good (existence being part of that) & therefore if He wasn’t acting positively towards us, we should expect to cease to exist, or if He only kept us alive we should expect it to an existence without anything good, just the spiralling self destruction of sin, which would quickly feel like ECT (even if God wasn’t directly tormenting us but just not holding back the full consequences of our actions).
Assuming breaking a law requires someone to pay/suffer damages, our ongoing law breaking would require us to pay/suffer damages (this would be the case regardless of whether breaking a single law implies infinite damages or not). So God could’ve just said, “I’m the ultimate Judge, therefore all I’ll do is this ‘legal’ work - making sure each law that gets broken gets dealt with.”
Fortunately for everyone, both the approaches above don’t take into account a few crucial things:
a) God has voluntarily taken on the role of the loving Father, and therefore all the obligations He formed around that role.
b) God has intrinsic worth therefore when He creates us in His image, we get extrinsic worth.
c) God is love, and by His definition, that works for the ultimate best of the other.
Creating us with needs that only He can fulfil instinctively seems at least problematic if He doesn’t fulfil them, however I think that’s because I’m assuming a, b & c i.e. without them we’d be merely clay with no rights to complain.
I think part of the problem is the language. As far as I can tell, I need to be saved, I want to be saved, but without abc, I’m not entitled, deserving, or have the right to be saved. I think the Reformed view wants people to let the weight of being without abc sink in first, before giving the good news contained in abc.
(Btw Johnny very glad God is encouraging you through people on the forum)
I think once we take into account abc, we have a duty (& privilege) to love everyone (which includes telling them the good news).
(Great GMD quotes Jason!)
Excellent curveball! I’ll have to ponder that.
It’s tricky because, as Fred pointed out, passages like Rom 3:12 are pretty hopeless, “All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (I’d say that’s a description of humanity before we take into account abc).
Thanks to all who’ve posted thus far. The more I ponder this subject, the more important it seems to me. My heart is gladdened to hear you all basically endorsing the view that yes, we do have a ‘right’ to God’s love. And I was *thrilled *to read Jason’s erudite theological explanation of why this is the case.
Thanks so much, Jason, for taking the time and trouble to spell out the theology behind all this, and explaining how it flows as a necessity from the Trinity. I’ve always thought such a thing to be the case, but was never able to articulate it the way you have done. If you ask me, your post is as near a cast-iron philosophical and theological ‘proof’ of the truth of UR as it’s possible to get.
Amen! I’m going to memorise this statement and use it whenever I get into a discussion on UR with a Trinitarian who affirms that the love of God is compatible with ECT.
Agree totally, Amy. For me, any outcome other than salvation and restoration for any single person in the history of creation stands as a denial, a refutation, a defeat of God’s love. I think I’m right in saying that that great Arminian, CS Lewis, admitted this, that the final loss of a soul was a defeat of God’s love. Lewis accepted this, reluctantly, largely because of what He believed to be Jesus’ teachings on the reality and finality of hell (I think).
Absolutely, Lizabeth. It’s the ‘no plan B’ view of creation. Our rebellion was always part of God’s plan, and he had the remedy for it - in Jesus - all sorted, as it were, before the world began! ECT theology comes across like God’s plans somehow went unexpectedly wrong in the Garden of Eden. Well sorry, but God’s plans *never *go wrong. They, like Him, are perfect.
@Drew, I would love to read the rest of the article you quote. In making statements like, “Having made us to find our deepest fulfillment in relationship with God, God must do what God can to fulfill this desire (by offering salvation and assisting us to believe)”, it seems to me that James Gould is barely a gnat’s whisker away from embracing UR.
@Alex, I will need a bit more time to ponder your post before giving you my thoughts. I also need to think about how all this fits with Paul’s statement that we are clay pots over whom the potter has absolute rights. (Maybe, just maybe, he was simply mistaken on this one?!)
Exactly! There’s an ancient Christian theory (partially based on higher Greco-Roman philosophy, to give credit where it’s due), that (as I paraphrase it in my third novel) love creates the worthiness in the object of love, and love also truly seeks whatever worthiness is given, which is why love always involves (and even is) loyalty.
That’s true of God, and also true of what is expected from us by God: we’re expected to seek whatever worthiness is given by the love of God to the beloved of God, regardless of whether we happen to emotionally like the object of God’s love yet. We can (and should) expect the emotional liking to follow sooner or later, even if we don’t start with that, but the love comes first and we’re morally expected to cooperate with that.
Calvinists and Arminians both understand and accept this and even stress it, although each in somewhat different ways. Calvs have a tendency to apply it along the line that God doesn’t inherently love every person, though (and so can eventually stop even incidentally loving people)–and maybe doesn’t love some people at all ever in any way. But even then, whoever God does truly (not merely incidentally) love, has a worthiness to be loved granted to them by God, and Calvs strenuously insist that to violate or be disloyal to such a beloved is to sin. Thus we can be sure God will never stop loving whoever He does truly love, and so will persist at saving them from unlove into love in their character and characteristics.
Arms insist that God inherently loves every person, and so every person has a worthiness to be loved granted to them by God, for as long as God continues to love them. But of course some Arms ‘fix’ that by claiming God stops loving various people eventually, in which case they do not deserve to be loved anymore by anyone. (Other Arms agree God never stops loving various people but is impotent to save them from unlove, or “loves” them so much that He stops trying to save them from unlove allowing them to permanently cripple themselves into an unlove that He could theoretically keep trying to save them from except that wouldn’t lovingly respect their choice to be always unloving. Or whatever. )
We definitely have the best and most coherently logical of both ideas there.
, currently unpublished"]“Why will you not let her go?”
“…the only answer I have, is one you will not like.”
“Because he [the Husband of the spirit] told you to love her.”
“I am faithful to him,” he said. “And that means being faithful to her as well. I promised to love her. I promised him. I promised her. And I do love her. I will not abandon her.”
“She is not worthy of your loyalty.”
“Yes. She is. She just… doesn’t…” He sighed. “Love creates the worthiness in the beloved.
“And love truly seeks whatever worthiness is given, too.
When I first read the question my first thought was, “Of course we ‘deserve’ to be loved because we are created in the image of God!” And the phrase “created in the image of God” I understand to be a familial phrase, like, my sons carry my image. Thus we are created as children of God, sons and daughters of the Most High! Thus we ‘deserve’ to be loved by God, saved by God, healed by God because He is Our Father!
Furthermore, a person’s inherent value is not in any way lessened by their sin, the evil that flows from their soul-sickness. In fact, it is the lost son that returns home that is celebrated, the lost goat that the shepherd seeks, finds, and celebrates! It doesn’t matter how dirty a $100 bill gets, it is still worth $100! Humanity being made in the image of God, children of God, makes us all family, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, fathers and mothers in the family of God! Nothing we do, good or bad, can increase or diminish our inherent value because God gave us birth, created us and sustains us!
When we grasp the reality of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all humanity, it changes our lives. We realize our inherent value and the value of every other person. It tears down all racial, denominational, cultural, negative emotional walls that come between us and empowers us to love one another from the very core of our beings!
God is love. We were created out of that love, created to be loved and to love!
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