“Jackanapes” Outstanding word!!!
Geoffrey,
That was a magisterial statement. If a Catholic believes in Universalism he is unorthodox. He can still be Roman Catholic though because Universalism is heterodox. Just as the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us. Roman Catholics believe in heterodox doctrine all the time. So, I agree one can be Roman Catholic and Universalist.
Randy,
I agree in hope. The magisterial statement about hell by Pope John Paul II above says hell is a possibility not a certainty. I’m a Hopeful Universalist.
The problem I have with Protestantism (I’ve been one my whole life) is that they rarely allow for personal experience. They try to mold you with their interpretation with the Bible. Catholics have their Dogma but they allow for private revelations and things even if it’s not canonized as dogma. The mystics are a good example.
Dogma comes down to being a technical question over whether someone is acting in communion with the RCC or not. Since it would be inconsistent for someone acting out of communion to receive the sacraments, the technical question has a practical bearing, although as a matter of practice the RCC has for several decades usually left that matter up to God’s judgment and the conscience of the one seeking the sacrament. Priests (and bishops etc.) are however allowed to exercise judgment over whether to offer or withhold the sacrament on a case by case basis, so as to head off mere doctrinal chaos: so homosexual couples will be refused the sacrament of marriage, as an obviously obvious example.
Of course the Catholic should be maturely and personally responsible for working with the team instead of against it. So it’s very right for Michael to consider the limits of belief in order to be cooperating in good faith with the body of RCs in communion. 
That being said, while JP2’s language can be read as universal salvation (total scope and total persistence to victory), he adds qualifiers inconsistent with one or the other total assurance. I do think the Popes have been preparing the RCC for universal salvation as a back-door belief since the time of the Divine Mercy institution, and largely in conjunction with that movement. But strictly speaking they’re still teaching what Protestants would call some form of Arminianism. The total persistence to victory language in context refers to the assurance of salvation for anyone who convinces God they’ve done enough right things to be considered Roman Catholic. Even if they grossly fall away afterward into mortal sin, that just means purgatory will be a lot worse for them (and in inverse proportion to whether they seek genuine reconciliation in this life and how far they get in that), not that their situation is hopeless. Although, they also acknowledge that someone could look to all human understanding like a Roman Catholic and yet not be one in their heart, only going through the motions which the Church in good faith accepts, in which case the promise of assurance never did apply to them. By the same principle, they acknowledge that someone might be saved by God, and thus also into RC communion, through His judgment in favor of their secret desire even if they don’t know how to express it. (Although that’s a quite recently developed or re-developed belief.)
Ooh 
… On both sides of my family my grandparents were Catholics (maybe one of them was born into a Russian Orthodox household but that’s pure conjecture on my part since I don’t know much else about her father * other than his surprisingly Slavic name) and I don’t think they knew about… any of this stuff, ref. institutions, sacraments, purgatory, etc. Then again they didn’t have anything akin to access to this pool of info…
I think the choice of the handle “hopeful” for a sub-category of “universalism” is interesting considering what “hope” means in the Bible, particularly in the latter writings which many of us refer to as the New Testament. Generally, unless I misunderstand, people say “hopeful universalist” to mean “one who is not absolutely certain about this (either from lack of conviction [for whatever reason] on the issue or from fear of being presumptuously overconfident about it) but {merely} wishing for universalism to be true.” But the biblical “hope” always [correct me if I’m wrong] refers to certainty and is very tightly connected to that other famous term people have used for centuries in “religious” contexts: faith. In a way, hope and faith are the same thing, or they’re two sides of the same coin.
We even have the famous reference in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Ch. 11, v. 1) which defines faith as the material or substance that hope is made of, the anticipation of an invisible something that will one day be obvious, but before then this faith (= hope) is the evidence, or witness testimony, of that which is being anticipated. “Let us hold on tightly to the confession of our hope so that it does not waver, for He Who promised is trustworthy/faithful”, says the previous chapter (10:23). I think that it is the confession here that is in danger of wavering, not the hope.
When Paul refers to the Ephesians whom he ushered into the faith as previously “not having hope and being godless in the cosmos”—which I’d always thought to mean “doomed”—he’s actually saying that they had nothing to anticipate from “the covenants of promise” mentioned in the same verse (Eph. 2:12), mostly because they, being outsiders to “the commonwealth of Israel”, didn’t even know about these covenants or promises.
To the believers in Rome, Paul says that this hope is produced by the character that comes from persevering the tribulations which they are suffering for believing as they do (Rom. 5:1-5). In Paul’s time, it seems, it was taken for granted that non-Jews were created to be fodder for the flames of Gehenna. This low view of outsiders was held so strongly that when Paul went to Jerusalem in Acts 22 and said to a crowd of Jews that he had been sent by the God of their fathers to announce the Good Message of Messiah to outsiders, his listeners instantly decided that he himself was no longer fit to live. It was for hope [conviction] in such a dangerous message that Paul was in tribulations in many places on his itinerary.
Anyway, back in Romans 5, Paul says that “hope does not disappoint, because the waterfall of God’s love has fallen into our hearts” (v. 5) even though we were once God’s enemies. But we didn’t become his friends first, rather he made the sacrifice of Christ “while we were yet sinners” in order to end humanity’s animosity towards Himself. And then the section over which so much debate has raged online, as far as I’ve seen so far (vv. 12-21) >> All of humanity died in the first Adam, yet all of humanity, through the correct or upright act of the second Adam (Christ), shall be made correct or upright so that they can live again.
The expression “to hope against hope” comes from the chapter previous to this one, in which Paul describes the kind of trust/faith/belief that Abraham had in God’s promise that he, a really old man, would become the father of many nations (Rom. 4:18). I find it interesting that it always seems to be ignored (deliberately?) equally by those who would call themselves “Christians” and Jews, that the majority of those “many nations” are historically Arabian and African and so too also obviously outside “the commonwealth of Israel”. Nonetheless in Genesis 12, part of the first promise God ever makes to Abraham is that every family on Earth will be blessed through him. Incidentally there’s also a curse in there—“him who curses you I will curse”—which is immediately overridden by the… well, universal blessing which comes one clause afterward.
Finally, not to belabour the point—which is basically that, technically, “hopeful universalist” should mean “convinced or confidently unwavering universalist”—it is again to uncircumcised outsiders from Colosse that Paul says that the hope of glory is Christ within them. “He is the One Whom we are announcing, reminding every person and teaching every person in all wisdom so that we can present every person perfected/completed (or fully formed) in Christ Jesus” (Colossians 1:27-28).*
I have a great idea. Get a job in a factory that manufactures universal joints. Then you can honestly say you are a Roman Catholic Universalist 
Well, I asked the Priest at my church if I could believe everybody is going to be saved and he said “We can’t say that”. Moreover, it’s unthinkable for most in the Catholic community to believe everybody is going to be saved. Catholic Answers is probably the leading Catholic apologist website with highly trained Catholic apologists and they say that Von Balthasar and Bishop Robert Barron are great men but that they are WRONG about hopeful universalism being true. Not heretical but WRONG. Since it’s not heretical or even heterodox I will stick with hopeful universalism. It’s more consistent because in the Liturgy of Catholicism they pray for everybody to be saved - not just the souls in purgatory. To me it makes no sense to pray for all souls to be saved unless there remains the possibility of all souls being saved.
I think we must search for truth.
It is a lonely road, often. Most established religions become too enthralled with their own theologies to really deal with truth on a ground floor level.
Their time for looking for the truth has long passed, and now they are more interested in ‘status quo’.
Not that I am against Churches or formal religions. I am very establishment, in many ways.
But, God is truth. And we must seek Him…at all cost. Truth gets very messy. One of the reasons it is so elusive here on earth.
If you are concerned with who disagrees with you, the truth becomes exponentially more elusive.
We must put our trust in God, not man or Institutions. I understand the Catholic Church very well. The one, true Church, as they state. I was a Catholic for 47 years, very active at my parishes, and a Catholic School student for 12 years. I won the Christian Theology award at my graduation from 8th grade. I get it.
I am no longer Catholic, I am Lutheran, and they would not be happy with Universalism, either. But none of that matters.
I must seek God’s face. That is the only concern I need to have.
I don’t think the Pope or Bishops will be with us when we stand in front of God. We will give an account, of our own.
2 Timothy 1:7
7 For God has not given us a spirit of [a]timidity, but of power and love and **discipline.
1Peter 3:15
But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,
D.**
I would be curious what he would say if you asked him if you can believe that more than zero people will certainly be damned to never-ending Hell.
Plenty of Roman Catholics in history have claimed that it is certain that some humans would suffer never-ending damnation in Hell. So why would it be verboten to be certain that no human will suffer never-ending damnation in Hell? In both cases, the hypothetical Catholic is claiming knowledge of ultimate human destiny. Why would it be OK to claim that some are certainly Hell-bound, but when it comes to universalism things immediately get uncertain and agnostic?
I’m glad you are staying. I’m a hopeful Christian universalist too, and hope that if all don’t make it to be with the Lord that God would at least annihilate those souls. I just don’t understand why God would need souls to be tortured forever. Anyway, I feel pretty confident that my interpretation of scripture with some insights from the authors who’ve written about this, proves that Christ really did defeat sin and every soul will come to Him eventually.
I can understand how you might feel that because your church doesn’t believe in Christian Universalism that you feel you’d have to leave, but maybe it’s good that you’re here. I go to a home based fellowship, and I’m pretty sure that my pastor believes that the unsaved go to eternal torture, but my pastor’s teachings are so focused on Jesus and the grace of God, that I think it’s ‘close enough’ and probably shouldn’t try to find a local fellowship that are all Christian Universalists because their might not be any around and I enjoy fellowship and learning with the home group. So long story short, you can probably do both, if you like your church stay but you can stay here on the message board.
Every human will experience both heaven, and hell, in a never ending cycle; we live in our afterlife.
The question is considered legitimate and having the potential to be true by being consistent. God does not create inconsistencies. An inconsistency is a partial perspective based on limited perceived, and limited considered, information; i.e. where human’s live.
Every religion is inconsistent with God’s works (everything not touched by man). So to have universal salvation, the considered system must be consistent with a philosophy, that is NOT inconsistent (i.e. is consistent) with God’s Works (the universe; i.e. universal-ism; everything not touched by man, i.e. God’s Works).
If the universe is perfectly causal (current scientific evidence shows it is), then in every evolving and closed causal system, every aspect of it will eventually repeat. However, most likely every consistent alternate decision a person makes will be experienced. Therefore humans will all experience heaven and hell and not be burdened with prior knowledge of each experience.
My treatise supporting Universal Salvation: Updating Bible based on God's Works NOT Man's Works
So every person, without exception, that currently lives, will live again; perpetually. An afterlife that is real. An afterlife where a person experiences every alternate decision that is consistent with the then God’s Works (everything not touched by man).
So Universal Salvation is a certainty, so long as there is consistent evolving causal physics. So far, there is no evidence at all that evolving causal physics is not consistent.
Therefore, being logically consistent is living in God’s image paralleling God’s Works.
Therefore, being logically inconsistent with God’s Works is an act counter to God’s Works; demonic.
Not all alternative views show the unsaved as tortured forever. There are views such as:
What I call the P-Zombie view. Where they are in some kind of exile.
There’s the sub-human view. Where they become subhuman. Again, it’s a variation of the P-Zombie view.
Then there is the conditional immortality or annihilation view
The Eastern Orthodox view - Heaven and Hell is a state - not a place. It’s how we respond to God’s omnipresence.
I am a hopeful universalist. But if not all are saved - due to decisions humans and demonic beings make (i.e. I believe demons made their bed already and have to lie in it). I believe they lose conscious individuality or identify. We can call that a variation of conditional immortality. But I don’t think they exist anymore in physical form - but as non-conscious energy. Perhaps we can call this the Dr. Who or Star Trek view. There’s an interesting article in the Protestant site Patheos called Repainting Hell: C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright (by Jeff Cook)
See, Michael? We even let people in who believe everyone will experience heaven and hell in a never-ending cycle, and call that “Salvation”! (And thus “universal” since everyone is trapped in that never-ending cycle of plunging the depths of total injustice.) 
That’s because we aren’t a church, we’re a technical discussion forum. (Even though naturally many people treat us as their church since they have no church to go to currently.)
Yeah, that’s a pretty good point; it’s something I’ve wryly observed as a double-standard myself (although I don’t recall ever writing on it). 
I’m sure the difference comes from the different levels of respect given to pre-RC traditions – with hopeful universalism being allowed only because a greater respect for patristic universalists is now allowed, although naturally they aren’t allowed to trump papal pronouncements against Katholicism (so to speak). Who in turn are being quietly undermined by, among other things, a practical withdrawal of papal infallibility: when has a pope taught infallibly for sure? Eh, five or six times maybe. (One of those being the affirmation of papal infallibility as a dogma to be accepted to be in communion, of course!)
It’s kind of a confusing mess at the moment.
That reminds me of the philosophical and religious doctrines of eternal recurrence (i.e. Eternal return). We can experience all that is described in the Tibetan Buddhist heaven and hell descriptions. Or contemplate the eternal recurrence teachings of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. We will experience everything again - including another Nietzsche. Or James’ teaching can achieve the same thing as Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: All And Everything by mystic G. I. Gurdjieff:
Or as one reader describes this book:
My point is that the site owners, admins, and mods, very much do not believe such ideas about what “salvation” means; but we let JD be a (new) member anyway. And I’m not saying that as grudging support for admin choices to let him on, either: I’m the one who approved his first two posts!
No one has ever been kicked off the forum for not agreeing with the owners and admins’ doctrinal beliefs. People are only kicked off for being attention seeking misanthropes. We even allow misanthropes, so long as they aren’t attention whores. We even allow attention seekers, as long as they aren’t pernicious about it. We’re pretty damned lenient, really.
Actually, what’s more important then a person’s views - in my option - is this:
How do they arrive at them?
How do they defend them philosophically and theologically?
I have made it a point to try and understand what Islam and Muslims believe.
I will get the Luke Skywalker version at Mosque and Islamic center open houses (i.e. “official” version that Islam is peaceful, etc). And for many educated Muslims, raised in Western countries - this is most likely true.
I will get the Darth Vader version from reading Ex-Muslim and Western academic sources.
And it would be interesting if a Muslim joined the forum. How would we approach him or her? If we gave an answer they don’t like, would they shout like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland - off with the head? And the version of heaven and hell in the Quran is very literal and materialistic. If they are in hell, God serves them boiling water to drink. And when their skins burn off, he gives them new ones - so they can burn off again. And the men have beautiful virgin women in heaven - to keep them company. And as I read the Quran, I find elements of
Fatalism
Cruel and unusual punishment
Reverse evolution
And if you pay a tax, you might be allowed to be a Christian or Jew - in Islamic countries. It reminds me of the TV and comic series - the Walking Dead. In a land filled with the world collapsing and zombies everywhere - rulers like Negan and the Governor, give folks protection - for a price.
It’s probably as complex as trying to understand the good qualities of Donald Trump. At least Bill Gates has given a large chunk of his money to charitable concerns. And he has many third world projects he funds. And if he ran for president, I believe he would follow the advice of advisers and subject matte experts - rather then go his own way. I can elect a King (i.e. figurehead), if they follow the advice and counsel of appointed subject matter experts.
I have to say Jason you are lenient compared to other places. I went to a physics forum and posted some things on recent discoveries that may over through some modern Cosmological theories and they accused me of ulterior motives and kicked me off right off the bat.
Probably because they don’t trust anyone who’s not a nerd, Michael But if you had a physics degree and can discuss things from a mathematical and physics perspective, I’m sure you would be welcome with open arms. This video might give you some pointers Just behave and act, like the guy in the video 