[This series is part of Section Four, Ethics and the Third Person. An index with links to all parts of the work as they are posted can be found [url=https://forum.evangelicaluniversalist.com/t/sword-to-the-heart-ethics-and-the-third-person/1335/1]here.]
[This series concludes Chapter 42, “Death”.]
[Entry 1]
I suppose it is technically possible that God might choose to let me utterly ‘win’ as a sinner; not merely to win a battle here and there (although a Pyrrhic victory it would certainly be!), but to win the war I instigate against Him. I push myself away, or even clamor to be over against, the source of my life; and God could possibly say, “Fine, if that is what you wish, you may have your wish”–at which point I would cease to exist, for I am not the Independent, and it is intrinsically contradictory for there to be more than one Independent, and therefore even if He wanted to, God could not grant me that scope for my wish. Much less could I ever attain that scope in any other fashion.
But I do not think He would ever choose to allow me to reap annihilation, either. That would be the final renouncement of any possible fair-togetherness between me and any other entity (including God). So God, in even allowing such a thing to happen (much moreso in actively annihilating the person), God Himself would be acting to complete non-togetherness between persons: God Himself would be acting against His own intrinsic eternal action of self-existence! It would be God, then, Who was being non-righteous! This couldn’t even be justice; not the justice of any kind of true, Godly righteousness (if trinitarian theism is true.)
It certainly couldn’t be love. God Himself, Who is love in His own trinitarian fundamental existence, could act to delay the fulfillment of love to me until a later time (since all natural times are present to God, and so the eventual fulfillment of love would be present to God the eternal–Who might even prophecy about this ‘ahead of time’ from our temporal perspective.) But act to deny (not merely delay) the fulfillment of love to me?–to actually, even if sovereignly, choose intentionally against such a fulfillment ever happening? What worse contradiction of theology could be imagined?! I might as well deny the reality of the orthodox Trinity at once and convert to Islam, or perhaps to Christian Arianism, and be done with it!