Nothing, of course. But my point was that you seemed to keep talking about the nonsensicality of something that is “immortal” ceasing to exist, per annihilationism. (You had recently written, to give a pertinent example, “The point I was trying to make and one which I have confronted annihilationists on, is the impossibility of annihilating that which is immortal.”) But any “immortality” we have is totally dependent upon God, Who is the one doing the annihilating (per annihilationism.) There is no intrinsic impossibility involved in God annihilating that which is dependent on Him for its existence.
I am not sure what part of my “other point” required the persons in the sheep and goat judgment to be ‘spirits not people’. (Or not resurrected, for that matter.)
Nothing at all in what I wrote ever claimed that the sheep represented the visible church. (Though Christ obviously considers them to have been acting as proper representatives of the family of God; in that regard they’re obviously His ‘little ones’, too.) On the contrary, I have consistently claimed that the sheep were not even expecting Christ to be judging them.
I was however arguing that the goats must have known about Christ already and were expecting to be judged by Him according to what they thought was proper ‘service’ rendered to Him. The goats, consequently, aren’t His ‘little ones’ at all (yet). But they must have considered themselves to be believers and followers of His in some regard.
I reiterate, also, that this parable caps off a running set of parables that have all already involved lazy and uncharitable ‘servants’ of Christ being zorched. Identifying the goats as lazy and uncharitable nominal servants fits this paradigm perfectly. Nor does it go against the notion of a general resurrection of the evil and the good occuring after a more limited resurrection/transformation/rapture of God’s true followers. It only is (yet another) warning that Christians had better take seriously, that we might find ourselves in the category of the unjust despite our putative “Christianity”.
Well, the sheep pretty obviously aren’t being locked out of the party in any regard. But I can certainly agree that the goats are “the sons of the kingdom” who are “being cast out into the outer darkness” (per 8:12) where there is both weeping and gnashing of teeth. In fact, I’ve been saying this all along. The sheep would be those from the east and the west, perhaps.
The particular parabolic imagery you reference doesn’t have anything about nobility being invited and accepting an invitation; but in the parable of the wedding feast (Matt 22:1-14), all the ones who were invited refused to come and treated the king with grave and murderous disrespect. (The Lukan parable is similar although the extent of the grave disrespect is less obvious to people unfamiliar with ancient Near Middle Eastern culture.) “Those who were invited were not worthy.”
Interestingly, in the Matthean version, the non-nobility who are then invited (in Luke’s version they’re practically compelled to come!) include both evil and good; and one of the evil ones gets thrown out again with the rebel nobility for showing disrespect to the generosity of the king.
Not entirely sure where you’re getting that; but in the Gospel materials I’m familiar with, I keep being strenously warned not to think of myself as nobility (per se) with special privileges as such. Those who are ‘elected to nobility’ tend to turn out to be the worst rebels! (Or, if there are such distinctions between noble and common in the kingdom, which I suppose there might be, it sure as heck isn’t my place to be considering my standing in rank. Recognizing the nobility of other people, yes–whether or not there is some kind of exclusive distinction between nobility and commoner in the Day of the Lord to come. Thinking of myself as one of the ‘nobility’, no.)
Jason, thats my point exactly. Outside of God’s grace upon the sinner there is nothing there to inform them that sin is NOT beneficial. In fact it is the lack of God’s grace which drags them further into their disobedience. I’m not saying God remains to withhold his grace for all time from them but I am saying that those who are disobedient due to their agreement with sin is not because they KNOW they will die but quite the reverse, because they KNOW (think) they will not die.
For each of us the wage of sin is death but in our minds we rectify this as metaphorical and convince ourselves that we can sin and not die. This I believe is due to the fact we are irrational and lack the knowledge of God.
So when I say sinners do not I do think God can change them but it does not mean it’s up to them to figure it out. God, I believe drags them when he wants to unto himself.
I have no quarrel with that statement. I agree. When I say “the problem” I don’t mean “The ONLY Problem”. I do see the fact that sin has a tendency to be like fatty foods which for a while provide some benefits but in the long run kill. They may taste wonderful but in the end will DEVESTATE. There are many aspects to “the problem” with sin and I’m touching on the fact that before God breaks us of arrogance (which is a process) or shall I say “softens” our hearts and GRANTS repentance, the unbeliever is BLIND which to me coincides with exactly the way Jesus renders the world; blind, dead, deaf, captive, lame.
I’m not so sure of that. He created the universe out of nothing - the string theory guys have reduced it to a point - we go beyond a material point to thought. A fiat.
I don’t see anywhere in His Word (which self-proclaims to BE eternal) that He can or will un-think anything. If He annihilates part of those created in His Image then His Word is not eternal - for what is His Word - but revelation to His Image? It’s an eternal verb dependent on a likewise eternal experiencer of that revelation. Is there any hint in scripture that His Word is only eternal for some?
You are using ‘Word’ in a few ways. Capitalized, it usually refers to Christ. Annihilation does not imply that Christ is non-eternal. Specificity of terms here would be useful.
Nothing but pre-Christian philosophy prevents God from changing his mind. We take biblical language like ‘eternal’ or ‘steadfast’ and load it down with foreign connotation. It did not originally mean that God is so impersonal and weak that he can’t change his mind about changing particulars. The idea of a god outside of time who is perfectly simple and creates a pre-recorded universe than need only be played is contradictory to the Hebrew-Christian God. The Hebrew-Christian God created a real world where real people exist and real events occur.
Christ IS the revelation to thought. Define that which is capable of thinking and you define the human being - the experiencer of God. Thought to thought. Where else can the image of God be found?
First, universalism could be taken as a prediction that some day, every person will freely embrace and accept God. I also think that given enough time, God can gradually transform every heart (every will/psyche). I don’t see any reason for thinking that some people are beyond God’s reach
Second and related to the above point, I seriously doubt that anybody can perpetually reject God in a manner that is truly free. As I see it, free will requires a degree of rationality, but anyone with sufficient rationality would have a sense of self-preservation. And given that God is the source of ultimate happiness, (IMO) nobody rational enough to be a free moral agent could freely and perpetually choose misery. I think they would eventually embrace happiness. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be rational. But if they’re not rational, then they’re not moral agents. They would need their free will restored. Have you read Tom Talbott’s work on free will?
Third, I take Phil 2:9-11 to mean that a time will come when every single person (even those we now call evil) will bow and confess Jesus’ lordship. The word for “confess” in that verse is used for voluntary action in every other usage and in the NT it most commonly refers to giving praise. (have you seen discussions of the passage by Gregory MacDonald and Tom Talbott?? Those guys go into more detail)
Pat,
Talbott has certainly influenced me on the very grounds of which youu speak. At this time I agree with him that irrational creatures do not have a total will which is completely free.
I see scripture supporting his ideas that when we are in sin there are two principals at work.
bondage- Sin has a way of keeping the object from suicide of it’s nature. In other words it will not allow the person to reject it (sin).
It’s confusing - Sin confuses it’s object so that no. 1 is ensured. By making the irrational person think it is beneficial to choose sin, the object thus continues in sin and no 1 is secured.
Thus scripture seems to support we are blind and in bondage.
Jesus comes along and he is Rational and FREE. You might call him the one free man. Able to resist sin for because of his rational nature (divine) which keeps him on guard from the traps of sin. Thus he masters sin where we do not and thus he does not become subject to it but makes all things subject to himself.
Thus I endorse at this time that the unbeliever is irrational and the believer is being transformed (in his mind) back into the image of God and becoming more rational.
For what it’s worth I’m a fan of the analogy of God and a human in a chess game where the human is a novice and God is a grandmaster. The human is completely free to make any move but the grandmaster will ultimately win the game (don’t worry I can see the imperfections in this).
biblical examples - Pharoh having his heart hardened, or all being locked up in disobedience so God can have mercy on all. Vessels made for honour and vessels made for dishonour.
As Paul says (Romans 6) you are either a slave to righteousness or a slave to sin . A slave has some measure of free will but cannot override the will of his/her master.
As earthly parents, who here never overrides the will of their child in far less weighty matters than eternal damnation? Isn’t God described (I admit this is a loose translation) as like an earthly parent and then some
In the OT to be redeemed by a near kinsman did not set you ‘free’ it merely placed you in servitude to a blood relation as opposed to a stranger. However in the year of Jubilee all debts were cancelled and all returned to their inheritance. Some redeemed persons would have earned enough by working for their kinsman redeemer to pay the debt on their land quite quickly. These can be seen as Christians perhaps. Others had not finished paying their debt by the year of Jubilee (every 50th Year) but they were set free at that time regardless (perhaps a shadow of universal reconciliation).
Jeffa,
I agree a good parent does not simply allow his “free” child to do things which would bring irreparable harm.
But on this same note when a child does something wrong we can often scold, spank or discipline the child, YET we know that the child does not have a full grasp of the decisions he is making. In other words, if we know the child lacks the intelligence to make informed choices such as reaching up onto the stovetop while it is flaming, we can often react with a harshness which is meant to protect the child rather than abuse. This raises the issue that the child therfore is not completely free in the manner we say “he made a free choice”. Libertarian free will seems problematic to me in the extent that God lets men choose a destiny, of which they are not even sure of it’s reality, which MIGHT drop them right into the lake of fire to burn forever.
Men are like the child mentioned above. Blind of realities and risks which revolve around us. We do the best we can with the IQ we are born with or devolope.
I have no problem with the wrath and anger that may be necessary in short bursts as part of the loving parental process. The heart of the problem is repentance - i.e. the child/human not just being sorry for what has been done but turning 180 degrees from it. If human parents will try again and again and again to correct a fault then how much more should God (if there is one he hastily adds - ) .
Sorry to sound like I was arguing with you. I wasn’t, I was actually agreeing with some points you alluded to. Yes I understand your point. I too struggle with the traiditional ideas of “repentance”. There is so much to say on this subject it’s hard to really start.
Sure I agree with the U or EU on these grounds. If you’ve read Talbotts paper or interchange back in the 80’s with Piper it’s very interesting. He argues often men are more loving than God.
I’ll upload the articles in the articles forum so you can d/l them and give them a read.
Sorry to give you the impression that I thought you were arguing - I didn’t (oh the joy of the written word eh? . I would be very interested in the Talbott paper and would be grateful if you could point me at it.
Thanks for the pointer to the article. Will read as soon as time allows. I have another link to arguments that I find intriguing regarding God’s will versus Free Will.
Ack! I forgot there was a whole huge important discussion back here! Sorry… Gene, first…
And yet, the problem with the paradigmatic sinners is not that they lack the knowledge of God, but that they are willfully acting against what right and proper knowledge they do have. This is (nearly?) constant in the OT and NT: Satan and the other rebel angels; Adam and Eve; Israel squinting its eyes and stopping its ears so that they will not repent and turn to God and be saved; the opponents to Jesus among the Pharisees; Saul kicking against the goads; the pagans of Romans 1 and 2 (the latter of whom at least will be judged for better and for worse according to what law they know, even if they don’t know the Torah)… even in the paragraph I quoted, the case is that we are convincing ourselves we can sin and not die, and the convincing is explicitly a “rectifying”.
The “irrationality” involved is willful irresponsibility: sinning against whatever of the light is provided to us by God.
I appreciate the reference to making our hearts “contrite”, though.
But what I am trying to get across is that sin that needs forgiveness is the fault of the sinner. Honest ignorance and error will be excused and healed; but sin needs repentance in order to complete the forgiveness already (and always) being offered by God.
Ran next;
Actually, Memra/Logos in the scriptures typically refers to a Person of God Himself (i.e. the 2nd Person, Who eventually Incarnated as Christ). The Logos (or rational, foundational action) of God, does not need a derivative image of God to exist.
However, I should have specified there (as I’ve done elsewhere, and as I’ll do again in my forthcoming comment to Sahid), that I do in fact think there is an intrinsic impossibility involved in God annihilating a derivative person, if the claim also involves orthodox Christian theism (at least binitarian) being true, and if the claim also involves God Himself not ceasing to exist. (Not because the annihilated person is God, but because God would be acting toward ultimate non-fair-togetherness toward the person and so would be sinning against His own self-existent ground of existence: action to coherent interpersonal unity.)
I agree with Kav about the importance of the term ‘confession’ in Biblical Greek, in regard to personal interaction with God: the term always elsewhere involves grateful praise (and often or even most of the time, involves grateful praise for God’s saving acts!)
Jeff: good (if admittedly limited) analogy there. {g} C. S. Lewis was known to be fond of that analogy, too. (It should thus be noted that the analogy can apply to positions other than universalism, of course.)
Jason,
Thanks for the response. I tend to think we’ll see these things different. I def. have a stronger reformed side to me than most do on this board. I find certain themes within reformed theology simply unavoidable. So I’ve been trying to understand the “other” side of theology. At this time I tend to argue that A&E did not know what they were doing since they simply COULD not know what the result of disobeying would be. Sure their told “you will die” by God but to them it is (how do I say) Chineese. The pharisees express this same type of knowledge, thus the prayer on the cross is not “Forgive them for they are learning what they have done wrong.” but “they don’t know what they do”. Did they know? i would argue yes, but being that sin controls the sinner, it is impossible for them to do otherwise. Thus the theme “Set the captives free” becomes relevant because NO ONE can set themselves free.
Obviously this has strong protestant traditional attachements. Namely, we are born sinners, we cannot save ourselves, man kind is out of control, and God alone saves.
Scripture to me is sound on these issues however, I am strongly encouraged to hear out other ideas as I see the scriptures are more three dimensional rathern than one. So I don’t want to say “THIS IS IT!” but I will say this makes tons of sense to me and at this point Universalism becomes nuclear in this structure.
Why does it become nuclear (figure of speech)? Because if man kind is not responsible for his crimes but is sentenced to death than it puts the responsibility of salvation upon someone else. I realize many do not like the notion that “God has to do something”. If I read Karl Barth right he did not like that language and even denied Univ. because he felt God does not have to save everyone. My view at this time is that’s exactly the way it is. God is responsible for either eternally losing someone or not. God is responsible for either anihilating them or not. Thus the question of romans 11…
“God has consinged all over to disobedience” for his purpose becomes more sound to me.
I realize my struggle here is like the calvinists who have to answer…“What about sin, who authored sin”. I’m not ready to answer that as I’m not even sure I can answer what sin is? is it disobeience? Is it rebellion? Is it unholiness? Is it all of these things?
My struggle however also has a strength which is that it makes man kind more of a infant in this universe and does not treat him like god.
Now for a continuation of the discussion with Sahid…
[Note: I didn’t post this originally, many months ago, because I was worried about seeming to pick on Sahid. I would, at least on this board and for the normal kind of guest posters, rather let a comment go unanswered than to overtly charge someone with huge levels of unorthodox theology when they’re trying to be orthodox otherwise. If someone isn’t in a teaching or similarly authoritative position, such a charge is only likely to be upsetting for no gain to anyone.
However, with Dr. Glenn Peoples now arriving on the board as a proponent of (hopefully ) orthodox annihilationism, I thought it might be a good idea to finally post this up as an example of the sorts of concerns I have, as an orthodox trinitarian theologian, with annihilationism.]
True; although the temptations do sometimes involve coercion. But I shouldn’t have muddied the discussion by bringing in a different kind of freedom than what you were talking about elsewhere. (I meant existing free from the inherited disposition to sin, but that’s not any of the kinds of freedoms we’ve been talking about elsewhere. Sorry; my bad.)
Um… but in annihilationism there is no togetherness. (Hindsight note: you would seem to be denying the togetherness totally even at the end of your comment where you introduce the “hypothetical” notion of a lingering existence after annihilation.)
So a ‘fair-togetherness’ that emphasizes the ‘fair’ and not the ‘togetherness’, to the elimination of the togetherness at all, would not be fair-togetherness at all. Annihilation would also, not incidentally, eliminate the fairness to the person along with the person: the person would no longer exist to be fair to, whether in punishment or whatever.
(And after that, I begin to wonder whether you also have in mind some idea of ‘fair-togetherness’ that ‘emphasizes’ the ‘togetherness’ by eliminating the fairness! I have met some opponents who went this route, btw…)
Only in the sense that the answers are pretty obvious: fair-togetherness cannot be fulfilled for a person who ceases to exist, whether between that person and God or between that person and a victim of that person. No person, zero togetherness. And again, if God acts to annihilate me or chooses to allow me to annihilate myself, He is obviously acting directly against the fulfillment of fair-togetherness. No person, zero togetherness.
There cannot be such a thing as fair-togetherness with no togetherness. And once the person ceases to exist, the fairness to the person ends as well.
Yes; because that would be tantamount to saying that we are appealing (or applying) to some greater power (or whatever) over against God in order to achieve our goal of separation from His omnipresence (thus annihilating ourselves from existence).
Until your comment to which I’m replying now, I had understood you to not be claiming that we can do that, but that the final action in regard to the fate of the annihilated sinner lies with God.
Some things later in your comment, though, seem to be requiring that God has nothing to do one way or another with the ‘annihilation’ (lingering existence or otherwise) of the sinner. That, or God has nothing to do intrinsically with the sustenance of the sinner. (The father-preventing-son-from-leaving-home analogy is either inapt, or else is describing a very different theology than any supernaturalistic theism. Human sons are not dependent on any human parent for continuing existence, and can in fact exist apart from the intention and action of the parent. That’s largely because both the human son and the human parent exist dependently on an overarching field of existence that isn’t either one of them.)
Mormons would say ‘God’ can create other entities who exist independently just like he does; but Mormons agree to disagree with orthodox theologians on this kind of issue, too. (Whether the disagreement is that God can create other truly independent facts of existence which-or-who aren’t dependent on something else for existence; or whether the disagreement is that what we call ‘God’ isn’t self-existently independent in the first place. Either way, orthodox trinitarian theists would disagree, and affirm that God depends upon nothing else for His existence and nothing can ever exist at the same ontological level of God. Which makes us heretics to the Mormons: they believe we’re in doctrinal error about this.)
It isn’t a question of weakness or strength. It’s an ontological issue: two independently existent beings would have absolutely zero relationship to and with each other–otherwise they would be existing within a common field of existence, and so both be dependent upon that common existence. But to have absolutely zero relationship to each other would mean to share no common characteristics such as, for example, existence. This is why trinitarian monotheists are still monotheists and not tri-theists.
If I am not one of the Persons of YHWH (and I’m not, Incarnate or otherwise), then I am a derivatively existent person. My existence permanently depends upon God, not only as a matter of my past history, but of my continuing existence as well. Which is exactly why no person can continue existing ‘separately’ from God: there would be annihilation of the person instead.
True; the result being that once the object ceases to exist, the whole possibility of continuing to be fair or unfair to it also ceases. That means God acts to cease loving the annihilated object, too. Not necessarily a problem for the annihilation of a non-personal object, but a massive problem for the annihilation of a personal object: for God must then be acting (like the sinner, in his sin) utterly against cooperative interpersonal union.
A merely monotheistic God could do that (assuming, which I believe is false, that a merely monotheistic God could exist at all.) A God Who is Himself an actively reinforcing cooperative interpersonal union could also, admittedly, technically do this–but not without annihilating Himself (and everything else in existence, too).
And yet you are not in fact free to do very many Xs. Among the more important Xs for this discussion, you are not free to continue existing apart from the omnipresence of God. (Which is precisely why I agree that annihilation is at least a technical possibility.)
If that ‘frustration’ counts as ‘revoking’, then God is ‘revoking’ your free will already, and necessarily so. In which case I recommend you reconsider your implications of revoking, loving, etc.
If you reply that God is not revoking something that never was granted in the first place (in this case the ability to continue existing apart from God’s omnipresence)–then I answer that God is therefore not revoking the free will of the creature by frustrating it from achieving annihilation, even in your libertarian sense.
Wahhh, I’m frustrated from doing something I will to do! My Father must be not-loving me!! ?
Either way, if you consider ‘frustration’ to necessarily equal ‘revocation’ and thus the annihilation of the person per se, God ceases to love the person per se. You might as well try to defend the position that God can act utterly against loving the person and not thereby be acting (like the sinner himself, whose fate is annihilation) against the cooperative interpersonal unity of His own active self-existence.
(From what you’ve said earlier, this defense would perhaps involve God acting to fulfill fair-togetherness toward the person by eliminating the togetherness with this elimination still counting somehow as fulfilling fair-togetherness and thus still counting as God acting righteously instead of toward non-fair-togetherness. )
So now it is not unfair for the person doing the revoking of the other person’s free will to be revoking the other person’s free will? Or did you have another point in mind?
I reiterate: if you annihilate the person you very utterly revoke whatever free-will (libertarian or otherwise) the person has.
It seems simply bizarre to complain that merely frustrating the will of the person from achieving annihilation counts as amputating his imago Dei (thus we can expect God to allow the person to achieve annihilation); and then disregarding annihilation itself as not counting as the ultimate possible example of such ‘frustration’.
(But I expect you meant that God has nothing at all to do with the annihilation of the person, therefore insulating God from any responsibility in the annihilation of the person. In hindsight, you also end up “hypothetically” proposing that the person continues “lingering” in existence instead of being annihilated. If the person continues existing, though, then God can continue loving the person and seeking the person’s salvation from sin, acting toward fair-togetherness with the person.)
So… you agree that God will act to prevent His beloved daughter from achieving annihilation (which would obviously destroy her free will far more utterly and completely than anything else could possibly do).
Unless you are claiming that the person continues to exist as a person (with libertarian free will I suppose??) after God either allows or enforces the annihilation of the person?
Maybe the problem is that we have extremely different notions of annihilation…?
If your complaint is that God is doing something ethically wrong by revoking LFW merely by frustrating the will of the person from achieving annihilation, then I have extreme difficulty seeing how God would not be doing something proportionately even more wrong by choosing to allow or enforce annihilation of that same person (which must necessarily include the utter and permanent annihilation of that same person’s LFW.)
Consequently, LFW and annihilationism are only ‘consistent’ if the person and her LFW survive the annihilationism intact–and if God has nothing to do either with the annihilation or the survival of the person afterward.
Which has seemed to be a tacit tracking topic throughout your answer so far. And so, not surprisingly, you explicitly answer shortly afterward:
Then you do in fact either have cosmological dualism (with the person now existing as an independent fact like God–which, btw, is what Satan wishes to accomplish); or else the person and God are both dependent for their existence on something ultimately other than God. Neither one of these positions is even supernaturalistic theism (unless we go back behind the apparent ‘God’ you’ve been talking about to the ‘real God’ upon Whom both the person and the apparent ‘God’ you’ve been talking about depend for existence), much less orthodox Christian theism.
Since “there are still quite a few significant differences between the hypothetical lingering soul and God which make ‘dualism’ a less than accurate label” for your position (so you say), then I will suppose you to be meaning the latter: ‘God’ and the not-annihilated lingering person both depend for their existence on some overarching reality that isn’t either ‘God’ or the not-annihilated lingering person.
I also note, not-incidentally, that you have now explicitly mentioned the notion of an annihilation that isn’t at all annihilation (with the ostensibly ‘annihilated’ person “lingering” in existence.)
As described so far, your position involves:
1.) a God that, one way or another, isn’t the ultimate fact upon which all existence depends (i.e. a theology other than supernaturalistic theism);
2.) an enaction of fair-togetherness (i.e. righteousness) by God, that involves acting toward (and accomplishing!) zero togetherness at all, but which is supposed to still involve fair-togetherness and not not-fair-togetherness (so that God will not be found to be doing unrighteousness);
3.) an annihilation that involves (hypothetical??) lingering existence and so which is not annihilation.
Point 1 means we have more fundamental theological issues to be discussing than any kind of annihilationism per se. Point 2 seems overly convenient to save the position (to say the least. ) Point 3 looks to be a repudiation of annihilationism per se and, at the least, an affirmation of some kind of ECT instead.
A mod note that I’ve retitled this thread for better accuracy. (Unfortunately, it also means that the read-count had to be reset. It was up to about 360 at the time I rebooted this thread.)
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Stephen Jones’ online booklet Free Will Versus Ownership (I wish I didn’t keep coming over as an SJ fanboy ). I have always liked this line of thinking.
I don’t think SJ here believes that God is subject to the Law of the OT but that, because those laws are an expression of his Divine nature (written on His heart so to speak), he will always act in accordance with those laws and so can in some way be said to be bound by them.
SInce it has relevance to some discussions with Bobx3 (Total Victory) as well (and I am hoping to finally get my reply finished off today and posted), I will mention that I would not claim that God’s plan “called for” man to sin. Neither would SJ, apparently, since later he emphasizes that he is not saying that God pushed man to sin. I can see readers rightly complaining about either an inconsistency or a poor choice of wording in SJ’s explanation!
But it does seem clear from the narrative contexts (leaving aside the question of how literally the story ought to be taken) that God did set up the situation of the temptation; not so that man would certainly sin, but so that man would have a choice to exercise and so to grow–or not. God from His vantage would “already” (from our perspective) know what man’s free choice would be (as well as that of whatever creature was doing the tempting!) and would be acting “already” (from our perspective) across all natural history with that choice in view: condescending to cooperate with that choice in God’s own way. But, acting in His own responsibility for the tragic events that happened, too: so that those events would someday lead to something other than tragedy for those affected by the events.
(This has more than a little bearing to my revision of Richard Carrier’s deductive argument from suffering, too, that I posted up on the forum several weeks ago–and commentary on which I am almost ready to post up more of, soon: possibly today.)
But I can certainly agree that the goats are “the sons of the kingdom” who are “being cast out into the outer darkness” (per 8:12) where there is both weeping and gnashing of teeth. In fact, I’ve been saying this all along. 
The sheep would be those from the east and the west, perhaps.
) .
) orthodox annihilationism, I thought it might be a good idea to finally post this up as an example of the sorts of concerns I have, as an orthodox trinitarian theologian, with annihilationism.]
?
)
) Point 3 looks to be a repudiation of annihilationism per se and, at the least, an affirmation of some kind of ECT instead.
). I have always liked this line of thinking.