I would love to have a place (and maybe it already exists) that shows church fathers/early Christians who were either Universalists or appeared to lean that way with quotes supporting. Anyone? Also, wasn’t there a quote that showed that Augustine was aware that there were many universalists around during his time?
Yes, but the quote is heavily disputed, as nearby context indicates he very well may have been talking about the refrigerium (days when souls in torment get a vacation from the torment). Augustine is okay with that in principle, although he thinks it doesn’t happen: it’s still hopeless eternal conscious torment so yay.
One of these days I hope to carefully glean through Hanson’s 1899 book and sort the entries better, with an eye toward removing or accounting for… let’s say “overconvenient analysis”. He has some interesting material to report, but he overreaches a lot, too, trying to make the evidence look stronger.
While that wouldn’t settle all questions, I think it would be a handy starting point to springboard from.
tentmaker.org/books/Prevailing.html
Above link is where you can download the Hanson book.
I Love that book and think it will provide alot of the type of information you may be looking for. I just started on my Journey studying all this however.
I also agree with JP, it sort of weighs the evidence on our side with a little reaching. But it has in my opinion alot of undeniable evidence that Universalism was held by more than a few of the early Church Fathers. And these were typically the ones that were most versed in the Greek languange. But, with the doctrine of Reserve established and the fact that the early church was spending the bulk of their time on Apologetics vs Universalism, maybe there even more Universalists then we may know.
The Section on Origen itself is fascinating. And his Arguements from scripture are in my opinion very good.
Some time ago I got a hard (or paperback, I can’t remember now) copy cheaply from Book Depository UK. Unfortunately there were so many printing errors with sentences and entire paragraphs mixed up that it was very heavy reading to say the least!
I plan to download it and have a better look.