The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Fact Checking--Ancient Christian Schools Taught Universalism

Evangelical Universalism
#87

I’ll just clarify this one for the time being.

What occurred to me when you highlighted the doctrine of reserve is that it still appears to be a part of the pastoral pedagogy of Christian universalists with teaching authority in the fourth century (the least reserved, in your face teacher of universalism in the Partistic period - as far as I know - was Isaac of Nineveh; but he’s later. Your example from Gregory Nyssan is a case in point of fourth century reserve. However, Christian universalism - according to its detractors - was a widely held belief by the fourth century. The only explanation I can think of is that it is not only the official teachers who pass on religious doctrines. These are also passed on in families. So when Christianity had taken hold as the dominant religion cathechumens were no longer being taught their faith for the first time by approved teachers. They had already been brought up in that faith in the family and parents who were ‘advanced’ Christians may well have told their children about universal restoration (children have always wanted comfort). All of this would have made the doctrine of reserve redundant - but institutional practices often continue in an organisation long after they have ceased to be useful.

And my final thought is that if the doctrine of universalism was widespread in the fifth century (which the evidence suggests) I’m not sure that ‘reserve’ can be seen as a factor contributing to its decline. However, it could be taken as a factor contributing to the slowness with which it spread in the first place.

All completely non-dogmatic and hypothetical thoughts. Comments appreciated :slight_smile:

OK Here’s another thought. The proponents of universalism in the Middle Ages - and also in the early modern period - who did not publicly promote or discuss their beliefs were not so doing this out of follwing a paedagogy of reserve I reckon. I think they kept the teaching secret because they rightly feared being persecuted for it and/or feared causing scandal and divisions in th Church. That’s another qualification I’d make at the moment but which I’m happy to be shifted on :slight_smile:

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#88

Gregory of Nyssa’s statement could imply that Universalism was so well known in his day that everyone would already know what happened to those in Hell, which is why he didn’t even need to continue explaining.

#89

LOL So true. The sheer lack of logic and reason in their arguments is startling. I wonder how I would have approached the argument when I was 25, still believing in ETC.

#90

Gregory didn’t seem to think that everyone knew that. The following comes from the Chapter VIII. of his Catechetical Oration that he delivered to the catechists (the teachers of catechumens): “[I]n the ailments of the body there are sundry differences, some admitting of an easier, others requiring a more difficult treatment. In these last the use of the knife, or cauteries, or draughts of bitter medicines are adopted to remove the disease that has attacked the body. For the healing of the soul’s sicknesses the future judgment announces something of the same kind, and this to the thoughtless sort is held out as the threat of a terrible correction, in order that through fear of this painful retribution they may gain the wisdom of fleeing from wickedness: while by those of more intelligence it is believed to be a remedial process ordered by God to bring back man, His peculiar creature, to the grace of his primal condition.”

Gregory’s approach seems basically the same as Origen’s – “the thoughtless” are to understand hell differently that “the intelligent”. Clearly, Gregory counted his audience at the time – the religious instructors – among the intelligent. It is then no wonder that the Catechetical Oration is the work where in another chapter he strongly suggests that even the devil will be saved. I suppose he wanted the instructors to have a full grasp of the theological system, but expected them to reveal to catechumens only as much of it as will be appropriate. Perhaps when the instructors saw that their catechumens lived godless, dissipated lives, they would focus on the fearful aspects of the judgement and pass over its restorative function in silence. But if they recognized that some of their students were already in control of their passions and perhaps even troubled by the idea of other people suffering hopelessly in hell they would explain to them privately the universal restoration.

#91

I can sure empathize with that statement!

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#92

The idea that “advanced” parents comforted their children with the idea of universal restoration is an interesting one, and now that I think about it, almost certainly true in some cases. Sadly, I know of no way how we could find out how common this was. Also, we don’t know how many of these parents were advanced. It depends on how great a percentage of the pupils of universalist teachers like Origen were deemed worthy of being taught universalism. Can we determine how many believers Origen put to the “mature” or “perfect” category?

But I certainly don’t think that universalism was uncommon in the 4th and 5th century among those who could read, even if they weren’t top theologians. When people diligently read the Scriptures (which weren’t yet so distorted by translations), they would know that aionios/aeternus is sometimes an attribute of things that are by no means infinite. No doubt they also noticed passages like “baptized by fire”, “saved by fire”, “few stripes and many stripes”, or “till you have paid” (this one is used in three places as I pointed out earlier). I think that many were able to put 2 and 2 together.

The belief in eternal torment was perhaps forced on the people mainly from above so to speak. Chrysostom and Augustine pushed it on them very strongly. Later theologians would then imbibe the ideas of those two and didn’t become familiar with the thoughts of earlier writers that much. Some anti-universalists managed to pass condemnations of universalism. At the same time, the percentage of people who could read was declining. Later, it wasn’t even thought appropriate that laity should read the Bible and the rest is history.

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#93

Questorius :slight_smile: Fair points about my hypothesis. I’ve not really thought hard about the doctrine of reserve before. But perhaps the doctrine for the many that Origen and Gregory teach it not one of eternal hell but rather a doctrine of terrifying retributive punishment in the age to come; this does not deny universal salvation. The secret doctrine seems to be that God’s punishments are not retributive. ’In “On the Soul and Resurrection” Macrina tells Gregory Nyssa the full secret –

‘’…it is not the case that God’s judgement has as its main purpose that of bringing about punishment to those who have sinned. On the contrary…the Divinity on its part does exclusively what is good, separating it [the soul] from evil and attracting it to beatitude’…it seems to me that the soul too must suffer whenever the divine power, out of love for humanity, extracts for itself what belongs to it from the ruins of irrationality and materialism. However, it is neither out of hatred nor for a punishment of an evil life, in my view, that those who have sinned are inflicted suffering by the One how claims for himself and drags to itself all that which has being thanks to it and for it, but the Godhead, for its part, as its principal and better attracts the soul to itself, i.e. the source of every beatitude; however, as a side effect, there occurs necessarily that aforementioned suffering for the one who is pulled in that way’’ (translated by Illaria Ramelli – see Apokatastasis p. 379)

So I need clarification about exactly what the doctrine of reserve originally kept back for those who were being perfected. If it is simply the truth about the real purpose of otherworldly pain as opposed to the duration of the pain then there is no problem in explaining why universalism was so widespread in the fourth century.

But of course the doctrine of reserve would play out differently in culture where hellism is the dominant form of belief and the faithful cannot read Greek. I have remembered since writing my last post that belief in Universalism died out in the Dunkers – now known as the Brethren of Christ – in the course of the nineteenth century because universalism was only taught to the ‘advancd’.

And Brian :slight_smile: It seems that the doctrine of reserve was also practised in the Nestorian Church, Solomon of Akhlat, a Syrian Bishop of the Church of the East, writes in Syirac around 1222 in the final chapter of his Book of the Bee:

‘’SOME of the Fathers terrify us beyond our strength and throw us into despair; and their opinion is well adapted to the simple-minded and trangressors of the law. Others of them encourage us and bid us rely upon Divine mercy; and their opinions are suitable and adapted to the perfect and those of settled minds and the pious.’’

#94

I am indebted to David Bentley Hart for clarifying what I have come to believe after the very personal experience I went through (described elsewhere in this Forum) and which changed my entire position on the subject of hell and ultimate salvation of all. Here are a few quotes from his book “That All shall be Saved”:

“For the less learned, less refined, less philosophical Christians, it was widely believed, the prospect of hellfire was always the best possible means of promoting good behavior. Even among those who believed in an eventual salvation of all souls, there was perhaps an overly pronounced willingness to indulge in a hint of holy duplicity, if that was what it took to inspire spiritual sobriety in the more obdurately cruel and brutish of the baptized.”

“I am not very tolerant of what is sometimes called “biblicism” — that is, the “oracular” understanding of scriptural inspiration, which sees the Bible as the record of words directly uttered by the lips of God through an otherwise dispensable human intermediary, and which entails the belief that the testimony of the Bible on doctrinal and theological matters must be wholly internally consistent — and I certainly have no patience whatsoever for twentieth-century biblical fundamentalism and its manifest imbecilities.”

This way of seeing the matter certainly seems, at any rate, to make particularly cogent sense of the grand eschatological vision of 1 Corinthians 15. At least, Paul certainly appears to speak there, especially in verses 23–24, of three distinct moments, distributed across two eschatological frames, in the process of the final restoration of the created order in God: Ἕκαστος δὲ ἐν τῷ ἰδίῳ τάγματι· ἀπαρχὴ Χριστός, ἔπειτα οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ, εἶτα τὸ τέλος, ὅταν παραδιδῷ τὴν βασιλείαν τῷ θεῷ καὶ πατρί, ὅταν καταργήσῃ πᾶσαν ἀρχὴν καὶ πᾶσαν ἐξουσίαν καὶ δύναμιν. (And each in the proper order: the Anointed as the firstfruits, thereafter those who are in the Anointed at his arrival, then the full completion, when he delivers the Kingdom to him who is God and Father, when he renders every Principality and every Authority and Power ineffectual.)

Only at the very end of these three stages, then — first the exaltation of Christ, then the exaltation at history’s end of those already fully united to Christ, and then the “full completion” at the end of all ages, when the Kingdom is yielded over to the Father — do we arrive at the promise of verse 28: ὅταν δὲ ὑποταγῇ αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, τότε καὶ αὐτὸς ὁ υἱὸς ὑποταγήσεται τῷ ὑποτάξαντι αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, ἵνα ᾖ ὁ θεὸς πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν. (And, when all things have been subordinated to him, then will the Son himself also be subordinated to the one who has subordinated all things to him, so that God may be all in all.)

As I noted in my introduction, Basil the Great reported that the great majority of his fellow Eastern Christians assumed that the aiōnios kolasis, the “chastening of the Age” (or, as it is usually translated in English, “eternal punishment”) mentioned in Matthew 25:46, would consist in only a temporary probation of the soul; and he offered no specifically lexicographic objection to such a reading.

East Syrian tradition remained especially hospitable to the notion of a temporary hell and of God’s eventual universal victory over evil. In the thirteenth century, for instance, the East Syrian bishop Solomon of Basra (fl. 1220s and after), in his marvelous Book of the Bee, remarked in a quite matter-of-fact manner that in the New Testament le-alam or aiōnios does not mean “eternal,” and that of course hell is not an interminable condition. And the fourteenth-century East Syrian Patriarch Timotheus II (presided 1318–c. 1332) clearly saw it as uncontroversial to assert that hell’s aiōnios pains will eventually come to an end for everyone, and that the souls cleansed by its fires will enter paradise for eternity.

And, lastly:

After all, as so many biblical scholars have noted, the figure of Christ in the fourth gospel passes through the world as the light of eternity; he is already both judgment and salvation, disclosing hell in our hearts, but shattering it in his flesh, so that he may “drag” everyone to himself.

Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest — for, being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to (as Gregory of Nyssa so acutely observes). Hell exists, so long as it exists, only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul.

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#95

Love DBH too :slight_smile: Very good quotations :slight_smile: Happy Easter :slight_smile:

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#96

Blessed Easter to you too, Dick. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fly to the UK later in the year, and equally hopefully the golf courses will be open!

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#97

The golf courses may be open. But will anyone be playing on them? Perhaps these fine gentlemen? :crazy_face:



Happy Easter everyone. :smiley:

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#98

I don’t have time to study this in more depth right now, but it’s definitely true that the doctrine of reserve does not necessarily entail that endless torment be expressly taught. Another good point you made is that retributive punishment does not preclude restoration. After all, endless torment is not so much retribution, but rather diabolic evil or sheer madness. So even if the basis of punishment is not healing but simply paying back, then after the sinner pays for all his crimes, he might be set free.

But I would point out that when someone says that sinners will be sent to hell to receive retribution for their sins, there is no suggestion that this will make them better. And if sinners remain unchanged they may continue sinning, their passions are still uncurbed, their hearts without love. Therefore, as you have probably heard from eternal tormentists before, justice will require that the sinners be punished forever because they will go on sinning forever. Now, I’m not saying that everybody who heard that sinners will receive retribution thought of its implications and came to the conclusion that I laid out, but I think that universalism would make little sense if the punishment was purely retributive. Retribution could perhaps lead to annihilation, if we said that sinners are restrained from sinning in the afterlife or that God graciously punishes them only for sins commited in their earthly lives, but they can’t attain to blessedness just because they paid their dues unless they become pure. As for the duration of the punishment, I believe that theologians usually remained reticent about that when they didn’t want to go on to proclaim universalism, the purificatory character of punishment, or at least annihilation.

Regarding the quote “some of the fathers terrify us…”, I think bishop Solomon was trying to make sense of the apparently conflicting accounts of hell he came across in different writers. He was a universalist and so assumed that those who didn’t hint at universalism in their writings probably wanted to terrify sinners. He also wanted to harmonize different authors. That’s what the people who belong to a certain church often do – they try to show that its theologians do not contradict one another. So it seems that it’s just his guess that some of the authors who were dead long before him and whose writings came down to him were practising the doctrine of reserve. It doesn’t seem to me from the context that Solomon was commenting on what was going on in the church of his day.

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#99

Hi Questorius – of course we must chill on this; I don’t have the time to research it either. But what I do take away from our conversation is that there is a seeming conundrum presented by the historical data -

The pedagogy of reserve as practised by the early Christian Universalists means that the teaching was being passed on only to those Christians who had shown evidence of progress towards the ‘telos’. But this would seem to be contradicted by the evidence that the belief in universalism was a very widespread belief by the fourth century. Indeed Gregory – who was writing in the fourth century – still employs the pedagogy of reserve in at least on instance in his writings.

That’s something that we can keep an eye on when as we read around I reckon. I’ll have a look at the paper about Origen and pedagogy sometime (if I can get access to it for free on the Interent) and get back to you here about it.

Regarding the contrast between retribution and restoration you wrote:

‘’Now, I’m not saying that everybody who heard that sinners will receive retribution thought of its implications and came to the conclusion that I laid out, but I think that universalism would make little sense if the punishment was purely retributive.’’

Agreed, it’s impossible to build an adequate theology of universalism on retribution. However, in terms of the pedagogy of ‘reserve’ it was only meant as a provisional teaching. It didn’t have to make complete sense, as long as it terrified people enough to keep them from feeling they had licence to sin.

There are parallels here from piety at a later date which show that undergoing condign retribution can and has been promoted as redemptive in itself (although I would argue that the theology behind this sort of piety is incoherent and just plain wrong). For example, although the concept of Purgatory in Catholicism has been transformed today (and was even slightly different earlier in the Middle Ages), by the late Middle Ages (15th century) Purgatory was often promoted by preachers and theologians as a place exactly like hell in terms of the revolting and terrible punishments meted out and of the despair and terrible anguish of its inhabitants (even Dante in the 13th century had seen Purgatory as a place of hope where sinners lovingly assent to their pains). The sinner – according to late medieval piety -endured the agonising punishments in order to satisfy the portion of God’s wrath against them that had not been covered by Christ’s sacrifice. But Purgatory was unlike hell inasmuch once the sinner had been punished enough they’d be let out and could go to heaven – purely on the grounds that they’d paid their debt. There were no idea ideas of spiritual healing or purification/refinement or reform in play in this concept of Purgatory. It was simply seen as a place of wrath – but not everlasting wrath.

Some early universalists in the late seventeenth century like Thomas Burnett seem almost to try and outdo their Infernalist brethren in depictions of retributive horrors of the world to come at the same time as stressing the temporal nature of these enormities. But Burnett was also stressing that everyone would be saved. I’m not aware that he had a higher teaching about the pain in the world to come. (There is a lot about this phenomenon in D.P.E. Walker’s ‘The Decline of Hell’)

Finally, I think there is a lot of merit to your interpretation of the sentences I quoted from the beginning of the last chapter of ‘The Book of the Bee’. Ramelli interprets this as assent to the doctrine of reserve in her latest book – A Wider Hope; Volume 1. But as you’ve noted earlier, she’s not always right (I too have been aware of this in several instances). She’s brilliant – but she analyses such a vast range of sources in her quest to cover everything that she’s bound to mess up occasionally.

Happy Easter :slight_smile:

Dick

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#100

Hi Brian - the point Beecher makes about the Apostle’s creed in Syriac is underlined in the last paragraph of the last chapter of the Book of the Bee - a Nestorian text from 1222 written in Syriac. See here (a link provided by our friend Questorius) -

https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/bb/bb60.htm

(I understand that Syriac is very close to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus. The ‘Pesshita’ Syriac version of the New Testament has been seen by some, for this reason, as the best resource for unlocking some of the idioms used by Jesus).

I’ve read Beecher on the Nestorians now. He’s better informed than Hossea Ballou 2nd who wrote the first history of Universalism in 1828. Ballou often has little more to go on other than the views of celebrated historians of the Church from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (who has very little to go on themselves). Beecher still relies quite a lot on ‘secondary sources’ for his sweeping narratives (these are the sources written by others about the period/subject being studies but after the time). But he has more primary sources to hand (these are the sources that are actually from the period being studied).

But Hanson is the best of the crop in my view. What I like about Hanson - who was writing at the very end of the nineteenth century - is that he really makes a huge effort to sift the primary sources and squeeze out the last drop of evidence from them.

But yes - it seems there is plenty of evidence to suggest that universalism was a widely held view in the Church of the East. This no longer seems to be the case :frowning: I’ve no idea what happened :slight_smile:

Happy Easter to you

All the best

Dick

#101

This is from today’s CAC newsletter. It is food for thought. :smiley:

In a teaching from the desert fathers, “an old Desert Father was asked what was necessary to do to be saved. He was sitting making rope. Without glancing up, he said, “You’re looking at it.” [1] Just as so many of the mystics have taught us, doing what we are doing with presence and intention is itself prayer.

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#102

Abba Anthony was a Univeralist - Ramelli demnstrates this beyondd doubt. :slight_smile:

#104

He’s good for a nineteenth century historial Qaz - he’s loads better than Hosea Ballou 2nd. They do all have an agenda that sshapes their narratives. But Hason is the best of the bunch because you can actually check his sources even when his analysis is faulty - or his sources ar wrong. I think h’s the best of the bunch - but of course he’s no match for contemporary historians of universalism like Ramelli. That’s my view anyway.

However, I think I proably do agree with you in a sense. All of the American Universalist Church Historians were trying to create a narrative about how Universalism was actually the dominant form of Christianity, that it was pagan influences that corrupted the pure universalist faith, that Roman Catholicism had wickedly suppressed this teaching, that universalism was the late but true fruit of the Reformation to which all Christian bodies would eventually assent… I think a lot of this was unconscious process rather than actual spin – but I take your point

That’s the 19th century progressive Protestant narrative in outline (and it was also employed by Unitarians like Beecher against pagan Trinitarians etc…). Things were a lot more complicated than this –

And Happy Easter Qaz :slight_smile:

#105

The paper on Origen’s practice of reserve can be read here. The author is unfortunately one of the many scholars who still don’t acknowledge that aionios doesn’t have to mean eternal, but otherwise a pretty interesting piece. I especially appreciate the quotes from Origen’s homilies that I wasn’t able to find freely accessible on the Internet. I’ll put here a quote from one homily copied from the paper:

Then the devil and his angels will be consigned to the eternal fire with our Lord Jesus Christ sitting as ruler and judge and saying to those who overcame before and afterwards, “Come, blessed of my Father, take possession of the kingdom that was created for you by my Father.” But to the others he will say, “Go into the eternal fire that God prepared for the devil and his angels,” until he takes care of every soul with the remedies he himself knows and “all Israel may be saved.”

I don’t see much of a reserve here. When Origen said “until he takes care of every soul with the remedies” he made it clear to any moderately attentive hearer that hell will have an end and is a remedial process. It almost seems that universalism was so ingrained in Origen’s mind that even though he wanted to practise reserve he couldn’t help blurting it out from time to time :smiley: We can observe his “reserve” (or rather lack thereof) in Against Celsus – at many points he says that he doesn’t want to say too much lest the simple folk would sin, but despite that intimates universalism so clearly that one would have to be obtuse not to understand where he was going.

So perhaps the doctrine of reserve wasn’t as effective in preventing the spread of universalism among new converts as the theologians who practised it wanted it to be because they failed to practise it consistently in their homilies and sermons. Another reason why universalism spread so much may be the one you proposed – many universalist parents would unreservedly share their beliefs with their children. Yet another might be, as I mentioned before, that people were reading their Bible which at that time did not obscure the meaning of aion and aionios; I imagine there were already many copies of the biblical books in the 4th century so middle class Christians could procure them easily (but that’s just a guess, please correct me if I’m wrong). One last reason I would submit for consideration is that endless torment of the majority of humanity was not a very common idea in the non-Christian cultures that the new converts were coming from. I know that universalists and annihilationists often say that endless torment was a pagan corruption of Christianity, but I haven’t seen much proof of that claim. Sure, there are quotes saying that priests and legislators made up the terrors of Hades, but I don’t remember any quote of an ancient source that would corroborate that endless torment was the typical pagan doctrine. I’m aware of the myths about Ixion and Tantalus and a couple of others, but those guys suffering for eternity seemed to be exceptional cases, not the rule. I’m not sure about this at all so I’ll gladly be corrected. But if I’m right, what I mean to say is that although new converts wouldn’t have that much trouble accepting that villains like Nero, Herod, or Judas will suffer forever, they would not be predisposed to believe that all non-Christians automatically go to eternal hell along with plenty of Christians that weren’t Christian enough.

Thanks for the info on Purgatory. I had no idea Dante understood Purgatory as you described. As regards Thomas Burnett I didn’t even know anyone of that name existed :slight_smile: My scope of interest in the history of Christian thought is limited to the Cappadocians and the anti-Nicene period. Just to share something from this period – your discussion of Purgatory reminded me of Tertullian who speaks of temporary stay in hell before the resurrection for those Christians who have some unpaid-for sins (for example here). He refers to this in some other places in his writings as well, but never describes it as a remedial process and so it sounds rather legalistic. So it’s basically like the Purgatory of the late Middle Ages except it’s not separated from hell.

As regards Solomon of Basra, if Ramelli says that he assents to the doctrine of reserve, then I can’t object to that. He does say that the non-universalistic writings of some church fathers (whom he believes to have practised reserve) are well suited for those prone to sin. I would just say that this doesn’t mean he himself practised it when speaking to his flock. I’d guess he didn’t since he himself seemed to be pretty terrified by those hellish descriptions :smiley: “Some of the fathers terrify us beyond our strength…”

Very happy Easter :sunny:

David

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#106

Dear David -

Have so enoyed this converation with you. Thanks so much for the link to the article. Will get back to you in a week or so with any ideas that have occured to me. Blessings to you and to those that you love -

Dick

#107

[After more research, I deleted this post]