Incidentally, also a completely new email address and ip there. What are the odds?!
Also now banned, and since you insist on trying to get around the bans I expect your Jan 15 scheduled unban will be revoked and probably not reassigned. As to your motives, I’ve brought out the data for members to decide for themselves whether the logic adds up.
I didn’t “fail” to address your thread last time because I was busy elsewhere. But imagine what you like, no one can stop you.
Discussions about Adam and Eve (either literally or representing our first human ancestors), in regard to free will, salvation, God’s omniscience and/or God’s intentions in the Fall, are actually rather common on the forum, as anyone who bothers to spend a few minutes checking will discover; challenges to Christian universalism amounting to God’s respect for free will of sinners resulting in Him destroying the free will of sinners or allowing them to destroy their own free will, are even more common. Two projects I’ve been recently working on (with extensive commentary here on the forum) feature opponents to universalism appealing to such arguments, and a third very recent thread features Jerry Walls (and one of his own annihilationist opponents for that matter!) giving it, too. That doesn’t count the dozens of other times I myself (not even counting other members) have discussed the topic on this forum since its inception, including in relation to my beloved ‘teacher’ C. S. Lewis, whose theological and apologetical school of thought I definitely follow (with slight modifications in line with the logical implications of his own arguments, including with repairs to the few logical incoherencies in his arguments) and who was by far the most popular Protestant proponent of the theory in the 20th century, thereby greatly influencing contemporary proponents of the theory today.
But what the hey, never hurts to lick that calf again.
Christian universalism, like any other Christian soteriology, is about salvation of sinners from sin. God puts it into effect if and only if some of His creatures sin, just like He would put any other salvation theory (if another one is true instead) into effect if and only if some of His creatures sin.
That God in His omniscience sees creatures using their free will to sin and so (from our temporal perspective) plans in advance to save them from their sins, including how to go about it through the Incarnation and Passion (among other things like inspiring evangelism and setting up the historical contexts of the Incarnation and Passion), is no more a problem for Christian universalism than it is for any variety of Arminianism or Calvinism.
That God insists on acting to save sinners from sin without their initial permission or even desire, is no more a disrespect or violation of their free will in Christian universalism than it is in Arminianism (where God does so for all sinners at first even if for whatever reason(s) He gives up later) or in Calvinism (where God persists in doing so for some sinners instead of for all sinners until He gets it done).
That God created a perfect world and yet allowed His perfectly good creatures to fall into sin, temporarily ruining His world, is no more a problem if He persistently acts to save all such sinners from sin afterward, than if He acts to save only some sinners from sin afterward. I would say it’s even less of a problem in the former case, because unless God saves all sinners from sin eventually, then God allows (or cannot stop) sin from ultimately and permanently ruining at least some of His originally perfectly good creatures!
So much for Adam and Eve: it is at least as logically coherent for God to allow them to sin, temporarily ruining His world, if He plans to save them both from their sins someday (per Universalism), than if He plans to save only Adam or only Eve from his or her sin someday (per Calvinism), or omnisciently foresees that He will give up saving one of them from their sins for whatever reason (per Arminianism). The same principle extends to however many sinners other than two ever exist: a comparison of total or partial salvation from sin, is still an all or part comparison regardless of the actual numbers involved.
Meanwhile, it is far more logically coherent for God to restore all His creatures to righteousness and incorruption someday, if He created them to be righteous and uncorrupt in the first place and regards this as an optimal state of affairs, than for God to allow or insist on some of His creatures never being righteous and uncorrupted.
It is also far more logically coherent for God to keep acting to preserve the free will of His creatures, even if currently they are freely choosing to do that which will destroy their free will apart from God’s gracious intervention, if He values their free will; than to allow them to destroy their free will (much moreso to destroy their free will Himself) if He values their free will.
Precisely because I wholeheartedly and coherently endorse the doctrine that true love requires, values and supports free will, thus that God Who is essentially and fundamentally True Love as the ground of all existence requires, values, and supports free will; I therefore logically reject any soteriology which involves God’s creatures losing God’s gift of their free will. There are some versions of universalism which avoid that problem, but every version of non-universalism involves God allowing or forcing at least some of His creatures to permanently lose their free will.
That all people will come someday to a point where they freely choose good instead of evil ever afterward, is no more problematic than that God eternally chooses to do good instead of evil rather than being constrained by some superior force to only do good. That God will persistently act toward bringing about such a state of affairs between all persons until, in His omnicompetency He gets it done, and won’t give up short of the goal, is no more problematic than for God to persistently and eternally act to self-exist as the foundational “state of affairs” (in several senses of that phrase) between Persons freely choosing to fulfill fair-togetherness toward one another in interpersonal communion. The greater (God’s Trinitarian foundational self-existence) is itself the strongest possible guarantee of the lesser (God bringing all derivative creatures to be righteous to one another, even if at particular moments in time they aren’t being righteous with the righteousness of God, apart from which there is no other righteousness).
In short, because the Trinity is true, God is and must be a universalist at heart.
Those (and your other brief scripture refs) have all been discussed many times on the forum, including by me, including (for Matt 12 and 2 Thess 1) in some recent threads of mine, including in threads you either started or participated in, including in threads you were running before being banned in January; so for anyone new to the forum (unlike you) if I don’t go out of my way to discuss them again here, that doesn’t mean I’m ignoring them. But since I know from long past experience that you’re going to claim (against all evidence) I ignore such things anyway, I figured I might as well pre-empt your complaint.
Same is true for your claim that God’s spiritual fire and heat (analogically describing the action of the Holy Spirit) do not change a man’s heart (since few if any universalists either claim or care whether literal fire and heat leads a man to repentance)–you’ve conveniently forgotten scriptural examples to the contrary, as well as the extended discussions of the contexts of Rev 14, just like you claim to have forgotten you created this thread and its topic shortly before being banned, thus having never seen your own argument before.
Anyone wanting to discuss things with you who doesn’t know you yet is advised to take such things into account.
Meanwhile, I have indeed finally grown tired after all these years of trying to protect you from the consequences of your actions; let them fall on you for a while. For example, anyone who wants to score free points on you while you can’t respond is welcome to do so, as far as I care–I won’t stop them.
