Thanks Drew– we’ve seem to have travelled the same way (or at least similar ways). And Corpselight, I can also empathise with the anger that many work through when abandoning beliefs in ETC and/or Penal Substitution – whoa I’ve been there, read the book, seen the film… (and it still hasn’t completely gone away).
I think there’s also another issue concerning our empathy for those with whom we differ. The Tentmakers site has a hard core, page of ECT quotations (that should be ‘triple x rated’) which I came across a couple of days after Christmas (I’m not in favour of censorship but wouldn’t recommend the page as bed time reading!!!). On it there is a particularly appalling example of a hellfire sermon by Dr Pusey, a Victorian Anglican of the High church traditionalist wing. It is so appalling in its fanatic and sadistic imaginings that it shook me for several days after reading it; not because I felt convicted of sin by reading it, but because it seemed to betray a depth of lostness on the part of Pusey that was fearful - and I felt almost a guilt by association for having read it. So I did some research on Dr Pusey and found out that as a young man he had entertained openness to ideas of universal reconciliation. However, his much loved and cherished wife had died young, as had his much loved and cherished daughter; and the poor man had interpreted both griefs as visitations upon him of God’s wrath. From then on he was a firm believer in Penal Substitution and ECT. I know that such griefs have also affected the lives of Universalists and do not always numb the heart permanently – but I could not help feeling pity for poor Dr Pusey and wishing that there had been an explanatory note about him at Tentmakers.
I sometimes think about Dante’s Divine Comedy – in idle moments. A lot of ideas about Hell in the Western imagination stem from this – even for people who have hardly heard of it. I’m thinking especially of its dreadful Gate over which is written Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’ and its concentric Circles in which the damned suffer ingenious and sadistic punishments for infinity appropriate to their sins. But what is seldom considered is that Dante walked with pity amongst the damned. In doing this he marked a turning point away from a time honoured tradition in which ‘Christians’ looked forward to scoffing at the lost in their torment. Perhaps there is a lesson here for we who believe in UR – sometimes we need to walk with pity amongst those who believe in the more horrible forms of ECT.
This puts me in mind of something I was reading about Burnett, an early Anglican Universalist. He imagined hell as not being eternal but rather as a place where sinners will undergo the equivalent of the absolutely horrific death once reserved for traitors under English law, but with the punishment drawn out over tens of thousands of years. He added that there will be holiday breaks in which sinners would have the chance to reflect on/process the experience. However well meant his imaginings were, given the times in which he lived, this to me sounds just bizarre, like something out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I hope that I/we can do better than this in holding Divine Justice and Love together in my/our imaginations.
To return to Dr Pusey, I’m sure he was in hell in a sense – numbed and made cruel by grief. I’ve always found it interesting that at the centre of Dante’s Hell the devil is frozen in a block of ice – and the pain of extreme heat and extreme cold are virtually identical. These days I sometimes thinks of the Judgement in terms of ice melting – and the pain that will be felt being like that of a frostbitten hand in which the blood begins to course again.