The Western German Chancelor Konrad Adenauer once said: “Wenn Jesus Christus nicht auferstanden ist, dann ist die Situation der Menscheit wirklich hoffnungslos” (If Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, then the situation of mankind is truly hopeless).
This is a feeling I largely share but I am convinced that according to the traditional view on hell, the Gospel is NOT a good new. Billions and billions of humans are going to eternally suffer while knowing that their ordeal will never have an end.
God will grant eternal life to everyone truly loving Him and those who will cease to exist are people who rejected Him.
Interestingly, this fits extremely well the language that Jesus used while talking about the fate of those rejecting Him.
The whole imagery our Lord used (including verses suggesting the eternity of the torment) stems from the Old Testament where it means the UTTER destruction of God’s foes.
And their repentance and reconciliation after they’ve been utterly destroyed!
Oh, wait. That would be even better news than annihilation.
(Annihilation isn’t good news. It only looks good by comparison to ECT. Salvation of God’s own enemies from sin into righteousness, reconciling them to God and to each other, is good news. Anni offers exactly as much of that good news as ECT, in their various variations, and no more.)
Well many “godless” continental Europeans I talked to told me they would prefer criminals (especially those who are their favorite vilains) to be violently destoyed rather than redemeed by God, if He existed.
So the proposition that annihilationism is a bad new is far from being intuitively true for most people.
Perhaps, Lotharson, if the one being annihilated is hated, annihilation might seem a desirable thing – but what if s/he is loved? Almost everyone is or has been loved by some lovely person. What’s more, a very coherent case can be made that many if not all of those famed criminals were mentally and emotionally incompetent, even insane. What of that? It isn’t that they ever could just “walk into heaven” soiled and defiled as they are, but that Father should permanently annihilate any of those He loves (and remember, He loves the WORLD, which certainly includes all human beings) if it were in His power to save them? Far be it from Him! What’s more, He CAN save them and without violating their so-called free will (which is not and never will be truly free, outside of His loving tutelage). Remember He is the God who is mighty to save and who, lifted up, draws (drags) all people unto Himself.
Fortunately for sinners, God’s ways are not man’s ways. Universal Reconciliation may not seem like “good news” to people who have not learned to love their enemies – but when they come to realize that they are in the same boat themselves it may change their perspective.
In my view God both loves and hates the reprobate. The fires of God not only punish and condemn to extinction by turning them to ash but they purify and correct also. The Lake Of Fire is where the wicked are destroyed and turned to ashes. It’s the second death of body and soul. From these ashes the fires of God create a new person that is free from sin. For the LORD kills and makes alive; He brings down to the grave and raises up. This is how He operates in the Bible. He desires the salvation of all. For God is the savior of all people. Especially of them that believe. Some are saved by grace in this lifetime others are saved by fire in the next. I think annihilationism is good news. But everybody being reconciled to God is better news. It starts with God’s elect and then works it’s way from there:
The cross-centered peacemaking between God and His elect begins by reconciling God and His chosen ones but has a wider cosmic impact through that. As the elect are put right with their Creator by Christ’s death and blood the creation enjoys the restoration of harmony and longs for all the elect to come in. The passage seems to say that Christ died for His elect and secured their salvation and sanctification with His blood. This begins the reconciliation that will later have a greater cosmic impact when God reconciles all things (including the reprobate) to Himself through fire.
Addition:
I think God wants us to have balance. We are to love evil people as He does. How can we love and hate at the same time?
Annihilation is certainly good news as compared to ECT but that’s where it ends.
If God is to reconcile ALL creation to himself, and destroy death - the last enemy, then surely that alone would imply eventual salvation to All. The power of death remains whilst any remain dead or are destroyed.
Even believers of ECT and Anni. believe that every knee shall bow to Christ and this will bring glory to God. This acknowledges a change in position for many; will it really be worship to God if it is done only with an attitude of grudging admission? We are told what type of worship brings glory to God: worship in spirit and in truth; this can only come from a change of heart.
None of us will enter heaven as we currently are, worst perpetrator or other.
Cindy: it is true that psychopaths are not able to love, they cannot. It would be completely unfair to punish them.
But has God an obligation to redeem them? I don’t know.
You deny free-will, fine. But if it truly exists, then it makes sense to believe that God cannot brainwash a person into loving Him, it is really beyond his power because it is logically impossible.
It’s not a brain-wash, nor electroshock treatment. It is wooing, drawing, enticing, non-sexual seduction. A showing of infinite Beauty, a glory that promises fulfilment. Christ is a persuasion. And he will ultimately persuade, entice, cajole, and blind with Beauty each and every person.
The time it takes is up to Him.
Well, there are various scriptural and trinitarian (metaphysical) arguments about that. (In my experience even the scriptural arguments on this point, where not necessarily trinitarian, tend to be supercharged once trinitarian theism is factored in.) But that would take a while to cover.
I’m a big fan of free will – the metaphysical side of my apologetics basically starts with the recognition of creaturely free will – so I agree with what you’re saying about the logical impossibility of forcing someone to truly love someone, even for God. And I grant that while resurrection would remove many problems brought into the case by broken physicality, people may still choose to rebel or to keep rebelling, requiring God to make their choice of rebellion inconvenient for them to some extent (since He cannot accept their rebellion per se).
But by the same token, God is still free (even more free than the person is) to keep leading the person to repent and let go of their sin. Whether He has an intention (or even obligation) to do so is another topic, but if we’re just talking about capabilities here, clearly God has the capabilities to keep at it until He gets it done, and I don’t think it requires a huge amount of faith to trust that God (the foundational ground of all reality) has the competency to get it done someday even if a sinner refuses for eons of eons. (We’re talking the metaphysical side of the topic here; whether God reveals the outcome in scripture is another topic. But even if the outcome was a never-ending stalemate, that would still technically count as Christian universalism so long as God doesn’t give up.)
Whereas, on the other hand, any appeal to God’s respect for free will, to explain a punishment from God, instantly refutes any judgment where God authoritatively enacts a loss of free will in punishment. It is because I accept and believe in God’s respect for the free will He Himself gives to rational creations (making them rational creatures in the first place) that I must logically reject annihilationism even more than any version of ECT. Because there might perhaps be a theory of eternal conscious torment where God keeps the free will of the sinner in existence (but the sinner happens never to use his free will to repent and accept God’s salvation from sin); but if God annihilates the sinner (in the hopeless punishment sense that annihilationists are talking about, distinct from an ECT or universalism theory) that’s the end, the free will is over (because the existence of the creature has permanently ended) and God is the one Who finally destroyed it.
Annihilationists cannot reasonably expect me to accept God’s respect for creaturely free will on Sunday, and then to reject (in the most ultimate possible way) God’s respect for creaturely free will on Monday, much less on exactly the same topic.
So we’re back to a comparison of soteriologies for good news again, and once against Christian universalism has more good news than the other two basic types: God either has more respect for creaturely free will than the other two, or at worst God isn’t going to let creaturely free will finally ruin His attempts at saving sinners from sin.
Well, if it comes to that, many “godly” continental Europeans (and other “godly” people all over the world throughout history) have tended to agree that God bringing evil people to righteousness isn’t “good news”. But I’m talking about technical theology, not about what’s intuitively true for this or that person. And I don’t think it takes a whole lot of finely spun technical reasoning to figure out that insisting on final unrighteousness instead of final righteousness as good news, cannot be (strictly speaking) a righteous good news.
(But people aren’t usually taught to look at the situation like that. Even by, and among, Christians, who of all people ought to know better.)
Jason answered well, Lotharson, and I agree with him – but for the record, I do believe Father respects free will. HE doesn’t put us into bondage. Jesus came to set us free – which would imply that we, in some way, don’t start out free. I believe we’re all growing INTO free will, and that we’re somewhat free. It depends on how much a hold sin has on us as to just how free we are. A lot of it depends on your definition of free will.
