[tag]Randylkemp[/tag] on another thread recently asked for discussion on this article about “ultimate reconciliation” at the Christian apologetics site Gotquestions.org (gotquestions.org/ultimate-re … ation.html).
The article is mostly structured as a reply and critique of Rob Bell’s “Love Wins”, specifically his appeal to apokatastasis and cognates in the Bible. Or that’s how it starts anyway.
(Note: the article is anonymous, so sometimes I’ll talk as if there’s one author and sometimes as if there were plural authors. I just don’t know.)
They start their criticism by ignoring how important Origen of Alexandria was and remains to the history of Christian theology (including trinitarian theism), and his acknowledged teaching authority at the time (as head of the Didaskelion); and by ignoring that he didn’t only interpret scripture allegorically (as though he only interpreted scripture that way).
Aside from that, the article doesn’t actually refute Origen, not even on how he actually used the term apokatastasis. All they do is make an argument from suspicious innuendo about Origen being influenced by Greek philosophy, and then noting the term seems to have been originally coined by Heraclitus who used it to mean that “the beginning and end are common”. They jump immediately to Augustine refuting Origen (they skip how long that took, and don’t mention Augustine’s sole argument per se), and add appeal to “a council at Constantinople” condemning “Origen’s belief in ultimate reconciliation” in 543 A.D. (As a overly picky sidenote, if A.D. is going to be used, it should be in front of the year not after: the year of our Lord A.D. 543. BC, BCE or CE go afterward.)
Since the article mentions “two” champions of ultimate reconciliation “that stand out” “down through history”, I figured Gregory Nyssus, the Father of Orthodoxy, the Orthodox of the Orthodox, an avowed disciple of Origen whose family was converted to Christianity by Bishop Gregory Thaumaturgus (after whom Nyssus was named) himself a convert and disciple of Origen, would necessarily be their second example. There aren’t any bigger guns that people today might recognize (such as Didymus the Blind might have counted back in the days before Gregory), or not any bigger guns than Gregory who generally aren’t disputed as Christian universalists (such as Athanasius himself).
But no, somehow the writers think the late medieval (or early Rennaisance) Arian philosopher Socinus (and his nephew Faustus) in the 16th century, counts as standing out more than Clement of Alexandria or Gregory Nyssus. The article especially focuses on Socinus’ philosophical argument which the writers report as follows:
The article states that “the text contained in Love Wins echoes their conclusions perfectly”.
That, frankly, is a lie, unless the article authors are pulling quotes someone else provided from LW without having read it themselves. I think the record will show that I’m quite harsh to a significant and substantial part of LW, but while it’s arguable that Rob’s conclusions echo Origen’s pretty closely, Rob definitely is advocating orthodox trinitarian theism, not Arianism (not in that book anyway), and does NOT (in LW anyway) regard God’s “justice” as optional or any of God’s other attributes either. (I’m qualifying myself because LW is the only thing I’ve ever read by Rob Bell. But the authors only refer to LW, so…) Rob concludes that God’s wrath is optional, in the sense that God can stop doing wrath toward a person once they repent (this being the goal for His wrath), like every single Christian in the history of ever, or at least any Christian who ever thought God would not be wroth toward they themselves at the very least! Nor do they ever quote Rob on God’s justice being supposedly optional; perhaps they couldn’t find one (unsurprising since such quotes wouldn’t exist in LW, whereas other quotes in favor of God’s justice being ultimately fulfilled do exist.)
Nor, by the way, would Origen have come even slightly close to what they report as Socinus’ position. But that doesn’t stop the article authors from blithely continuing with “This is where Bell and his predecessors * greatly err in their theology; they misunderstand and misconstrue the Scripture’s teachings on God’s mercy and His justice.” I don’t personally know Soc’s work firsthand, but at this point I don’t even trust the writers have represented him accurately!
In fact, the authors themselves simply misunderstand and misconstrue the Scripture’s teaching on God’s justice, because they reduce justice solely down to wrath, when “justice” (and especially God’s justice) isn’t wrath at all, although God’s wrath can fulfill God’s justice. Certainly both Old and New Testaments mention justice very often in ways that have nothing at all to do with wrath and/or punishment.
The real problem the authors have with Rob and Origen (leaving Socinus aside as the odd man out theologically), is that neither Rob nor Origen teach penal substitution – or maybe Origen actually did, but not in the sense the authors regard it.
But penal sub isn’t itself mutually exclusive to Christian universalism! The authors themselves recognize this, because they go on to acknowledge that penal sub itself “can be misconstrued by some to mean that everyone will be saved through Christ’s death on the cross.”
My suspicion that the authors didn’t even read LW is strengthened by how they go on to report how “in addition to the scriptures mentioned by Bell in his book, some Universalists point to” other scriptures like 1 John 2:2 and 1 Tim 2:5-6 – both of which Rob also appeals to, to the great surprise of absolutely no one who actually read his book.
The authors think universalist arguments from penal sub must also be false because the scriptures testify (they think) to “most experienc[ing] eternal separation from God” and only a few being saved. Of course Rob and Origen also deal with such verses – and I don’t always agree with how either of them do so myself – but the article never mentions this.
After listing quite a few of the usual prooftexts (which have been discussed frequently here, including by me, so which I’ll pass over for reference elsewhere), the authors continue, “In arguing for ultimate reconciliation, Rob Bell asserts that God would not be great, loving, or merciful if He assigned people to hell. But nowhere does God’s justice ever factor into Bell’s thinking.” That, again, is either massively unfair ignorance on the part of the authors, asserting things against Rob which can be easily shown false from the text of his book, or they don’t care that God’s justice factors heavily into Rob’s account and think it’s important to lie to their readers about this, bearing false witness against Rob. They really discuss very little of Rob’s book – which might be fine if all the authors were doing was focusing on how Rob appeals to restoration and reconciliation in the scriptures compared to how they think the scriptures use those terms, but they don’t even do that in an article ostensibly intended (at the beginning) to address the question of “What is ultimate reconciliation”?
Perhaps sensing they haven’t actually dealt with Rob and Origen yet, the authors try again:
Rob and Origen would both no doubt answer that the scriptures themselves testify to the utter superiority of what’s being called God’s “antecedent” will here, which is easily resolved if the punishment isn’t hopeless, but the article isn’t interested in whatever they might say about it.
The article also treats the idea of corrective punishment as theologically worthless, as though avoiding eons and eons of punishment for impenitently holding to sins isn’t something damn well worth avoiding – and never mind the issue of massive continuing injustice in God’s creation.
Besides which, while I agree Rob’s theological positions do add up to a conclusion that we ought to expect God to save all sinners from sin eventually, strictly speaking Rob himself ends with the acknowledgment that unending hell might happen for any number of sinners anyway – since he thinks that might be the only way for God to properly deal with the free will He gives to creatures so they can be persons and children at all instead of robots. Do the authors mention this?! – by no means. Rob does (in LW anyway) fulfill, numerous times, what the article falsely calls him a “false teacher” for not fulfilling, ditto Origen, in regard to the injunction by God through Ezekiel to warn evildoers that they shall be punished, even to death, if they insist on continuing to do injustice.
Neither Rob Bell nor Origen “deny judgment” – far from it, they both heartily insist on it, and punitive judgment, too! But the article ends by pretending that they don’t, even though the author(s) acknowledged earlier that both authors do affirm post-mortem punitive judgment.
Of course, whoever wrote this article does not for a single moment believe that Eve was permanently damned by the punishment of her dying – or if he, she, or they do believe it, then they’re the ones running against the belief of all Christendom on this point. (I might add that the salvation of Adam and Eve by God is a major theme for patristic Christian universalists including Origen.) But it’s a standard misdirection to accuse universalists, whom this article never treats as being actually Christian (despite any evidence whatsoever), of siding with Satan on this, instead of siding with God against the continuation of injustice and final non-repentance which Satan would prefer.*
(Not that he’s being un-trinitarian; far from it. I just prefer to get to soteriology from there as a logical consequence.)
Thanks muchly. 
) good reading on those threads, Qaz, especially by Sobornost in the first two. 
I do not endorse any form of esotericsm. But I have spent my share of time studying Esoteric philosophy, along with traditional Western and Eastern philosophy,
Here are the definitions, from the online dictionaries:
