Dr. Tom Talbott posted a brief reply last week to Dr. Michael McClymond’s interpretation of the end of Dr. T’s The Inescapable Love of God, as part of the main Dr. M vs. Christian universalism thread (which member Arlenite started, with helpful links, here.)
Tom’s original comment remains in that thread, but I thought it would be more convenient for [tag]Dr Mike[/tag] to reply to it here if he wanted to, without having to churn through the rest of our comments over there.
To Tom’s reply I would add that the final chapters of his book talk a lot about God pressing on the impenitent in various ways with a purpose of shattering their illusions of self-sufficiency and of sin being preferable to good. But the context is simply the same as often found in the OT, with some NT followups: God does this to lead the impenitent to repent of their sins, return to loyalty to God, and do justice instead of injustice to their fellow creatures. Dr. T presents this as being a mode of God’s grace to the sinner, so he is not arguing for a salvation apart from God’s grace; and he absolutely DOES NOT argue or even claim that sinners pay for their own sins, or even just serve out an allotted time in proportion to the sins they’ve done.
I could quote extensively on this. But I assume most of us have a copy of the book already and can just go look at it.
As to the quote from page 106 of Inescapable – just after the middle of the book, not at the end – context as usual shows what Dr. Talbott is talking about, and it isn’t about people earning escape from hell or paying for it by their punishments. Nor is it about people being permanently impenitent, or about God saving them without at all forgiving them:
, pp 103-107"]Just what does it mean to say that God will never forgive or pardon a given sin? Does it mean that God no longer loves the person who commits the sin in question? – or that he no longer seeks to reconcile this person to himself? – or that his attitude towards this person is no longer one of forgiveness? Not at all. The idea that Jesus seems to have in mind (and the Gospel writers signify with the Greek {aphimêi}) implies far more than an attitude of forgiveness, which in God never ceases; it also implies a release from some obligation, or a canceling of some debt, or a setting aside of some prescribed punishment. It is very close to our idea of forgiving a debt or pardoning a criminal. If a debt is unforgiven, then it must be paid; and once it is paid, it no longer exists. Similarly, if a criminal is unpardoned, then the criminal must serve his or her sentence; and once the sentence is served, there is no longer any need for a pardon. An unforgivable or unpardonable sin, therefore, need not be an uncorrectable sin at all; it is simply one that god cannot deal with adequately in the absence of the appropriate punishment.
This is probably where the idea is coming in that Dr. T means people can just pay their punishment and earn their way out of hell without God forgiving them; but that’s only if the first part is ignored where God’s attitude toward the sinner is always one of forgiveness which never ceases. This is saying nothing even about the goal of the punishment yet, only that if God sees that punishment is best for a person then the person won’t be spared the punishment: a concept even non-universalists agree with in regard to people God successfully saves from sin. God can be seeking to forgive the persons from sin while still punishing them.
Which fits entirely with the idea that God is still in the process of forgiving people of their sins when punishing them. They are only unforgiven in a very secondary sense, not in any primary sense.
And here Dr. T includes mercy from God under the purview of God’s punishment with an attitude of forgiveness from God toward the sinner, even though the sinner (being impenitent so far) isn’t spared from the punishment.
But keep in mind this is in context of Dr. T’s position that God doesn’t have to be convinced to have a different attitude toward sinners; when He forgives someone it isn’t because God has changed His mind or attitude toward that person, which is always aimed at saving the sinner from sin. And Dr. T immediately reminds the reader of this context.
But by previous context, Dr. T clearly indicates he DOES NOT regard the two strategies as contradictory; they are complimentary within the sacrifice of Christ, which Christ voluntarily shares with sinners and which sinners are called to voluntarily share with Christ. The difference is on the human side, of cooperation or not, not on God’s side.
And now at last we’re coming up on Dr. Mike’s brief quote, itself partially sheared by Dr. Mike from context. I’ll bold the part quoted by Dr. Mike, and underline the part he leaves out.
The action is still primarily and first and foremost on God’s part; it isn’t a question of the sinner paying off some legal satisfaction, though (per Dr. T’s previous context) the sinner is expected to pay WHAT WE’RE ALL EXPECTED TO PAY, namely repentance from our sin in cooperation with God’s authoritative empowerment and leading. This is not apart from Christ; we’re all expected to volunteer to die with Christ. Even Calvinists allow that a person may be potently called, empowered, and led by God to do this without necessarily doing it immediately, meanwhile being goaded by God where and how God sees fit for the sake of a person as a child. The cooperation of the child doesn’t earn any salvation from sin, and doesn’t change God’s attitude toward the child; it only changes the mode of the child’s experience of God’s merciful love toward the child.
It ought to be obvious that by “the final payment they owe” Dr. T means what he said, but which Dr. M didn’t bother to quote him on, namely that the sinner must and shall enter into the forgiveness of God through Christ, this being precisely described by Dr. T only a paragraph earlier in the same words. There are NOT TWO SEPARATE strategies, but only a secondary strategy that leads nowhere other than to the primary strategy.
It is not “instead of being forgiven”: God continually acts to lead them to accept the forgiveness He never ceases having toward sinners. How could this in any possibly logical world amount to “some people never being forgiven at all” when the only two options are people being forgiven through Christ and people being forgiven through Christ (the difference being only in how much goading a person insists on to get there)?
It is not “rather than through divine forgiveness” when “the payment they owe” is precisely their acceptance of divine forgiveness – a point (inadvertently?) obscured by Dr. M’s selective quotation.
It is not “apart from a Savior” except by neglecting to quote Dr. T saying it is by and to the Savior Jesus Christ.
It does not “deny that forgiveness/grace is necessary” except by selective quotation ignoring the parts where Dr. T stresses that the grace is not only necessary but inescapable by people trying to get by without accepting the grace.
It does not involve an issue of “the unbended knee” except by selectively ignoring the parts where Dr. T stresses the bended knee is the only way, whether sooner or whether later.
It does involve Dr. T using the word “absurd” to describe Dr. M’s descriptions of his position; but I expect Dr. T will be able to elaborate on that in more detail than I have done.
Let me quickly add that I DO NOT think Dr. McClymond was really trying to claim something about the final pages of the book, got caught on that, and retreated back to the middle for another try. The evidence indicates he simply forgot where the material was that he was specifically thinking of, but did remember that Dr T returns to the topic in the final pages, so he not-unreasonably referred there.
Leaving off the end of his quoted sentence, which if included would show Dr. T couldn’t possibly mean the various things Dr. M critiques him about, is much more of a problem.
Wow, Jason, what a monumental task you have undertaken on my behalf! How could I possibly thank you enough for this? Last night I tried to get on the site and found it virtually impossible to do so. But I am now grateful for that. For today I find that you have already done my work for me and have thereby saved me a lot of time. Accordingly, I shall here emphasize a single point that you have already made on my behalf.
As I suspected, Michael, you have taken a sentence of mine—the final sentence in the section entitled “Are Some Sins Unforgivable?”—completely out of context. As Jason has already pointed out, you did not even quote the entire sentence, which reads as follows:
By leaving out my own explanation of what it is that sinners owe, you make it look as if, on my view, sinners “atone or compensate for their own sins by suffering—and so they get saved apart from a Savior.” But I have never said anything even remotely like that. To the contrary, I have consistently rejected the idea that punishment in the form of suffering has the power, in and of itself, to make up for, to compensate for, or to atone for even the slightest of sins, and I have consistently held that repentance is a necessary condition of salvation. Apart from repentance, in other words, no amount of suffering that a sinner might endure will suffice to save the sinner.
Still, we often do pay for our sins in a perfectly ordinary sense that has nothing to do with making atonement for them. A man who commits adultery may thus pay for it with an unwanted divorce from a woman he genuinely loves, and, similarly, Hitler no doubt suffered greatly at the end of his earthly life after all of his evil plans and ambitions had come to ruin. The point is that sin can sometimes carry a heavy price, and we are sometimes required to pay that price; indeed, as Paul himself put it, “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Such death may be an unavoidable consequence of sin—that is, the price we must continue to pay so long as we remain unrepentant—but it hardly qualifies as something that atones or compensates for the sin itself.
So no, Michael, I have not changed my mind, at least not since 1999, concerning this: God has already forgiven all the descendants of Adam, which explains why he sent his Son into our earthly realm in the first place. I also continue to believe that God’s justice is altogether merciful even as his mercy is altogether just, that his justice and mercy are in fact the very same attribute, and that even his severest acts, as Paul explicitly stated in the eleventh chapter of Romans, express his boundless mercy and unfathomable forgiveness of us.
You’re welcome, Tom. I wasn’t sure you’d want to type out the extended context or that you’d have it easily available to copy-paste, and due to continuing attacks on our host servers (not against us specifically) connections continue to be spotty for some people – my connection cleared up yesterday but James Goetz for example still can barely get on – I wasn’t even sure when you’d be able to reply.
And I thought visitors and members should have easy access to the context you wrote. And I type fast. So, I typed it out.
Now, I can foresee someone replying that in recent years you’ve moved a lot closer to a more ultra-u position where you have more optimism about God’s initial capabilities of removing problems by eschatological healing, allowing even entrenched sinners so much more opportunity and more rational capability to choose the good that we can expect most or all such persons not to continue impenitently fondling their sins (to borrow that suggestive Johannine phrase) for any eschatological time; therefore not needing punishment from God at all (though maybe still some cooperative disciplinary training).
But, though I’m not (yet) quite that optimistic, I understand how that would only be a shift in the immediate outworking of the same principles you’re talking about here in Inescapable.
Anyway, thank you very much for continuing to correspond with Dr. M. Hopefully each of you can make use of my transcription to easily copy-paste points you want to discuss with each other.
But since I took an hour to type them out, I thought I’d provide a reader commentary to compare with the author’s commentary. i.e., you aren’t going for some suggestive implied mysterious meaning (in the negative modern sense of mysterious) that only you can bring out – anyone should be able to figure out what you’re saying by just keeping your positions in mind and slotting them into your discussion as you develop it.
Appending some further material from the main thread, starting with Dr. Mike’s reply to me here – but only the two final paragraphs involving Dr. Talbott. (The other paragraphs are about other topics.)
In the other thread, while linking back to my transcription (with some commentary) I provided earlier in this thread, so that we can all be looking at the context and details of what Dr. Talbott actually wrote, I had written:
To this Dr. McClymond replied:
I am somewhat fuzzy about whether this indicates Dr. M went back and read the transcription or not – it looks like he is only working from notes he took. He is certainly not replying to Dr. Talbott’s own reply, but he might not understand what hyperlinks mean or do yet and so may not have known at this point that Dr. Talbott had replied (or even where I was pointing to for the transcription so we could all be working clearly from the same material).
At any rate, I took a break one morning to continue thusly:
As of Friday morning 7/18/2014, 7:30 my time, this catches up the thread so far on the Dr. M vs. Dr. T topic.
Thanks for calling my attention to Michael’s reply to you, Jason. I had missed this because it was buried at the end of a post about Gregory of Nyssa. Anyway, in this particular reply Michael wrote:
The way to interpret it, Michael, is in light of what I said about the Greek word “aphiēmi” (to let off) and the distinction I drew between two senses of the term “forgive.” Essentially the distinction amounts to the difference between forgiving a person, on the one hand, and setting aside a prescribed punishment, on the other. As I pointed out in the context that you have so far ignored:
So once again, the problem seems to be that you have not read in full the section entitled “Are some sins unforgivable?” Had you read it, you would have seen that I start off the entire discussion with these remarks:
What it all boils down to, I think, is this: God can sometimes forgive a person even as he refuses to forgive the prescribed punishment for a given sin in the sense of setting the punishment aside. For when a given punishment is just what we need, God will never set it aside—either in this age or in the age to come. The author of Hebrews thus put it this way: “For whom the Lord loves He chastens, /And scourges [or flogs] every son whom He receives” (12:6–NKJV).
I realize, Michael, that a host of important issues here remain unresolved, not the least of which is the nature of salvation itself: whether it is an escape from deserved punishment, as some Christians seem to understand it, or whether it is instead salvation from sin and hence from the very need for further correction, as George MacDonald understood it. In support of the latter view, MacDonald cited, as his text for a sermon entitled “Salvation from Sin,” Matthew 1:21, where we read: “She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins”—not from punishment, but from the very need for punishment in the first place.
I wasn’t sure you’d want to type out the extended context or that you’d have it easily available to copy-paste, and due to continuing attacks on our host servers (not against us specifically) connections continue to be spotty for some people – my connection cleared up yesterday but James Goetz for example still can barely get on – I wasn’t even sure when you’d be able to reply.
So, I typed it out.