Luke: It’s probably a common reaction because it’s a valid argument against Universalism.
Tom: That’s not a valid conclusion in itself. Common responses (or arguments) are not by definition (or even probably) valid by virute of being common.
Luke: In traditional Christianity there remains the option of repenting on your deathbed as illustrated by the the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Luke 20:1-15). However both Talbot and Parry downplay the urgency felt in much of the New Testament for salvation this side of death. An urgency that would be rendered peculiar if a second chance existed after death.
Tom: It might not be the sort of ‘urgency’ some prefer, but universalists are not required to surrender all sense of urgency (or even all meaningful or motivating senses of urgency). UR by definition entails a denial of all ultimate urgency, viz., the urgency that follows upon the threat of an irrevocable loss one’s self. But since whether there is such an urgency taught in the Scriptures is the point under debate, chiding universalists for denying it isn’t an argument against UR. So there’s no urgency regarding the possibility of an irrevocable loss of one’s self–so what? I take that as good news–not good news for those who think it license to sin, but good news for those who believe God deserves all the praise and glory creation can sing.
The sense of urgency UR folk attribute to post-mortem suffering would have to be a peculiar (or specific) sense of urgency. That goes without saying. But you take its being “peculiar” as evidence against it. Why is that?
Luke: Adam and Eve in the best possible communion with God, choose the worst horror.
Tom: The ‘worst horror’ wasn’t the ‘object’ of their choice. They weren’t choosing the consequences of their disobedience per se. Eve saw that the fruit was “good for food, pleasing to the eye, and good for gaining wisdom.” THAT is what she was choosing, even if the conseqences were other than she believed.
Luke: Unthinkable that they would knowingly choose filth in the face of glory. And as the Apostle Paul points out people get what they want, they get their desired estrangement from God.
Tom: Nobody’s denying that they get/experience the full consequences of estrangement from God. The question is whether this is an irrevocable state. Another question is whether it’s meaningful to say that a fully informed person can reasonably make irrevocable torment an object of choice.
AllanS: I want to love God because I find him supremely beautiful, not because he scares me witless.
Tom: I’ll second that Allan, along with others. In fact, I think this (the worth and value of God) is where a conversation about motivation and urgency ought to focus its efforts.
Luke: But what does “God is love” mean? Love is a description but God is first a foremost a being…
Tom: All our God-talk is descriptive. Even in your “God is first a being,” the term “being” is not LESS than a “description” of God. Our language can’t cross the metaphysical divide between created and uncreated being (and ‘being’ isn’t univocal even here). So we’re all on THIS side of that divide describing God with our language.
Luke: This confusion has come up before, love does not describe the essential essence of God, it is an attribute.
Tom: But it doesn’t follow that what is an attribute of God does not describe God essentially. There are essential attributes after all. And when it comes to te belief that God is essentially loving or benevlnt, UR folk are pretty well grounded (philosophically, theologically, and historically as well). It could all be wrong, sure. But it would take arguments nobody’s put forward yet to make sense of denying the sort of essentially loving God that, say, Jason has summarized re: the Trinity (and which is solid patristic belief).
Luke: Frame then continues “But these theologians are wrong to think that the centrality for their favorite attribute excludes the centrality of others. These writers are right in what they assert, but wrong in what they deny. Ritschl is right to say that love is God’s essence, but wrong to deny that holiness is. That that kind of error is sometimes linked to other errors. Often when a theologian makes God’s love central, he intends to cast doubt on the reality or intensity of God’s wrath and judgement - contrary to Scripture. That was the case with Ritschl and is the case with some modern evangelicals.” (page 393)
Tom: I wrote up most of my response before I read the second page and wanted to make some comments about ‘love’ and ‘trinitarianism’. Then I saw Jason beat me to it! I can’t improve upon his comments, so I’ll just leave it there.
Frame’s comments entirely miss the point. Make God essentially BOTH loving AND holy. It remains the case that all God’s actions equally embody those attributes—love AND holiness. So how do UR proponents compromise either love or holiness? How is God less than holy if he continues to pursue the wicked in hell? Quite the contrary. One could make a good argument that a God who let finite cretures suffer irrevocably is unjust and therefore neither perfectly holy nor perfectly loving.
Tom
I really don’t see how anyone could think that I was saying “God” is reducible to simply the statement “God = Love”, after reading those complexly detailed comments I wrote. I rarely if ever do anything simple, and certainly wasn’t doing any simple theology back up there.
Like we will probably have to do when our children become teenagers!
. It’s as if the only thing holding them back from all that stuff is their decision to be Christians. Scripture, however, seems to indicate that the sanctification process writes God’s laws on the heart of the believer which should result in them genuinely not wanting to do any of those things mentioned. Yet to an outsider like me it seems that their faith is just another kind of ‘law’ that curbs their natural tendencies rather than purging them away by turning the person around to the place where there is no desire to do those things.