I don’t think I’m up to watching it again 
So I’d better shut up 
Well that’s kind of you Jason 
; to Arnelite and myself – and to all other contributors –
Regarding Boehme – I only have a very dilettante acquaintance with his writings (mainly excerpts from anthologies). I would not recommend him as a spiritual guide for today – no way. But I think it is unfair for a Calvinist to say that he argues perversely and heretically that the origin of evil was in God (that may be appropriate for Jung but not for Boehme). Hard line Calvinists in a sense actually claim this to be true. God predetermines everything externally including the predestination of most of humanity to ECT – and we must accept this scandal as part of our faith. Boheme only claimed that what is manifested in human beings and in the universe as fiery wrath is also in God but in God it is harmonised by Love and light – it becomes evil because we chose to turn away from love and light. My personal take on the influence of Boeheme is something I’ve indicated above. The scholastic Protestant Reformation lost something that the Catholic and Orthodox traditions retain; namely a tradition of symbolic spiritual psychology with which to chart the process of sanctification and the perils of the way (including discernment about visions). The scholastic Protestants concentrated on external legal transactions. Boehme’s appeal was that he reinvented the missing bit for Protestants who felt it s lack albeit in a weird and dislocated language.
Arnelite and Jason 
another polemical point made against modern Christian universalists in the video is that they teach a concept of divine retribution more akin to the doctrine of karma in Hinduism and Buddhism that we simply reap what we sow rather than reaping the eternal whirlwind. I found this interesting; it is a change from the more traditional attack that universalists simply ignore the possibility of paying for sins in the world to come because God is a woolly liberal God of woolly liberal love. Any thoughts?
At that point I kinda just tuned out a bit, so I don’t remember it clearly. If I’m reading your summary correctly, he faults universalists who do believe in some sort of post-mortem punishment for positing that that punishment is finite rather than infinite (or at least everlasting). If he is at least reckoning with the fact that a good number of universalists don’t believe that Hitler is, upon death, immediately playing dreidels with his victims in heaven, that’s a good sign. I don’t really fault him for not considering this in his lecture, but he really can’t just assert that God’s justice requires that sin merits an everlasting punishment without addressing criticisms that universalists (and others!) have raised.
At the time, I thought he was just trying to stick to the general theme of his talk that universalism is esoteric and score some rhetorical points with his audience about how foreign and weird universalism is.
I should say that in a few of my posts, I wondered why he didn’t just make more actual arguments against universalism (whether exegetical, theological, etc.). I forgot that he does say a portion of the book will supposedly make such arguments and that his lecture was merely presenting the historical thesis. Of course, he does spend some time in the lecture trying to make biblical and theological arguments, none of them convincing (some aren’t even arguments). The description of the book in McClymond’s CV says:
So, it sounds like the historical narrative argument outlined in the lecture will be the primary focus of the book.
There’s a link to the YouTube video in the original post.
Well with the mention of ‘karma’ he could be doing a number of things. I think his book sounds like an attempt - however sincere the motives -to discredit universalism by imposing a meta-historical grid on historical particulars so people won’t look at the historical particulars and see how these are distorted by his meta historical gird (Francis Schaeffer’s project did something similar). So the mention of karma – since karma in its specific sense is part of an Eastern religious worldview based on reincarnation as a path to eventual reabsorption into the Absolute – might refer to Origen’s supposed belief in reincarnation as the vehicle for purgatory. Actually Origen did not believe in reincarnation but rather in future spiritual states that the soul would pass through in the process of purification. I am only aware of a very few in the history of Christian universalism who have believed in transmigration of the soul. I know that Lady Anne Conway and van Helmot did and, apparently General Gordon of Khartoum did.
The issue for punishment for sin for McClymond seems to revolve around PSA (of course). Only Christ can pay for our infinite offence which has incurred God’s infinite and holy wrath. And of course some Christian Universalists would agree – although they would disagree on the scope of Christ’s atonement. I understand for example that the Ultra Universalists PSA believed that because Christ has paid the price all are spared any future punishments including corrective/ remedial punishments. But again McClymond seems to suppose that PSA is the only ‘orthodox’ doctrine of atonement open to Christians. However this is another argument outside of the scope of arguments about Universalism per se. Suffice to say that Universalists disagree over this issue as do non-Universalists.
Anyway – that’s how things appear to me.
My final thought regarding the Marcionite charge – it seems that there may even be similarities between this heresy and all types of Augustinian Christianity that emphasise the total depravity of man. Because the Marcionite god comes not to save his estranged children but to save creatures that are completely alien to him. Anyone can play the spot the heresy game.
But the charge that universalist are Marcionites – made despite the fact that Origen was a key figure in defining the canon of scripture against the Marcionites – is as, you’ve noted, about Universalists supposedly not dealing properly with OT passages about the wrath of God (but never about claiming that God is not the creator of the world I hope!!!). Once again I know Universalists differ about how to interpret the wrath of God in the OT. It’s a thing that Dr McClymond and his students would need to argue about with different schools of universalism. For example, neither PSA Ultras, nor the nonviolent atonement purgatorial universalists (well there were a couple of them in Hellbound ) would accept the charge of Marcionite, although these two very different schools would deal with the violent texts in the OT in different ways. And of course there will be big differences among non universalists about what to do with the violet texts in the OT and on how the OT relates to the NT. I know of no Christian Universalists who thought/think we should ditch the OT.
Hey I’ve just found an article asking the question ‘Was Jonathan Edwards a Gnostic?’. Curious 
I think it is a development of Lee’s thesis in his book book ‘Against the Protestants Gnostics’.
Don’t think i’ve got the mental energy to read about the vile and vindictive fantasist Jonathan Edwards just at the moment, but it’s a good question to be asked! Thanks for posting all this Dick.
OP…yeah you can comment on youtube, but i don’t know if those comments would reach this greedy, lazy joke of a professor? i guess it might reach youtube commentators, but i always feel my IQ being drained when i read youtube comments, and have to resist commenting myself due to the “Someone is wrong on the internet!” obsession i and many others worldwide suffer from.
I’m still unconvinced that McClymond is greedy or lazy as such - it seems that he’s not playing fair at all certainly; but however irksome his arguments may seem to us I’m sure his book will have an influence because of who he is and because the argument is very ‘academic’. I’m certainly going to keep this book in mind because it might function as a good conversation stopper in debates between universalist and non- universalists in future. I think it’s good to focus the arguments in anticipation because arguments from meta history are good discussion de-railers unless we know how to get the discussion back on track.
My point about Gnosticism and Calvinism is that some have made this comparison at length - the comparison that Dr McClymond the Calvinist is using to try to discredit universalism (although the grammar of Gnosticism is defined differently). See -
robinphillips.blogspot.co.uk/201 … stics.html
orthodoxbridge.com/response-to-r … -gnostics/
Hi Jason - if you are still reading this stuff, Cyril O 'Reagan sees himself as stepping into the shoes of Iranaeus. According to Professor Ramelli Iranaues was just about a universalist was he not?
My first thought is that the scriptures don’t say the whirlwind reaped is eternal, and my second thought is I can think of several things offhand from Jesus Himself in the Gospels to the effect that we reap what we sow! (We shall be judged according to our standard of judgment, as we measure out so shall it be measured to us, etc.) But Dr. McCly’s lecture doesn’t sound like he had much scripture actually in mind anyway. 
And to be fair he was probably thinking of Hosea 8:7 where those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, which might be regarded as stronger payback for what they sowed. (Hosea also later prophecies that those who are slain by YHWH’s anger shall be restored faithfully to Him, alluded famously by St. Paul in his quote about what happens after the victory and sting of death and hades at the end of 1 Cor 15, as part of his exhortation to Christians to stand fast and keep the faith because our evangelical work in the Lord will not be in vain!)
At any rate, no purgatorial universalist author whom I know about (myself included) insists on a mere one to one payback along the lines of mechanical karma: had he actually studied the ancient patristic universalists, for example, he would have found them talking about ferocious payback coming to impenitent sinners far beyond the proportion of what they did in life – sometimes in language of mechanical punishment, in the sense that after a point they’re pretty much locked into a certain amount of long-running terrible punishment regardless of any other factors, despite being saved from their sins and brought back to righteousness in the end.
I don’t think things are quite like that (although I can see why the ancients, and some of the late 18th/early 19th century universalists whom he thinks are merely gnostic disciples of Boehme, thought they had to go that route. Stonehouse in particular goes very far in trying to cipher out how many thousands or ten thousands or millions of years of punishment various sinners are slated for, based on his idiosyncratic calculations of “eon” and its cognates.) But I do agree with, for example, George MacDonald that so long as a person is impenitent of any sin, even what we might regard as the smallest of sins, that person will not come out from the punishment of God – which may be heavy or light as God sees fit to soonest lead the sinner home, but “soonest” may still be eons of the eons.
There is simply no parallel here with karma so far as I understand it, unless the parallel is supposed to be drawn through Jesus supposedly back to Hinduism or Buddhism! But I know better than to argue for that, and I doubt Dr. McCly is seriously intending to do that (or even remembers that Jesus said things which to a Hindu or Buddhist would sound like karmic payback.)
Re: transmigration of the soul, MacDonald also had at least a strong suspicion that people would be reborn as lower animals for their sins and so learn humility as part of the process of the purgative punishment. He talks about it once or twice in the Unspoken Sermons, not just in his fantasy work (where the most obvious example seems The Princess and Curdie.)
Re: McClymond being greedy – I suspect CL means McCly looks like he’s more interested in selling books to a popular audience rather than being fair and accurate with the data. However, his argument (though sloppy) may be more intended to be academic than that.
Yes, she argues in (I would say convincing) detail that Irenaeus believed all human sinners would be saved at last (using arguments very much the same way as overt Christian universalists contemporary with and after him, i.e. Bardaisan and Clement and Origen), only rebel angels would be finally lost.
So even though she agrees technically and in practice he was an annihilationist (the rebel angels are annihilated), his scope of annihilation was limited to one class of rebel entities – a class most human persons wouldn’t care even slightly about anyway. (I’d have to read back over her section on Ir again but I seem to recall him agreeing the demons are really rational creatures, though their rationality is ruined, not mere abstractions or urges or impersonal powers or some other tack taken by some Christian universalists who acknowledge the annihilation of demons but deny the demons really exist as persons – thus they’re still categorically distinct as universalists from annihilationists, as no actual persons will be finally lost. We have some such Kaths here on the board as I recall.)
Yep, that is precisely why i say “greedy”.
And i think he’s lazy because he has been very unscientific and unacademic in this approach to the data. we need fewer Christian pseudoscientists that play up for a crowd they know will be mostly supportive (because Universalism is obviously wrong), and more that actually look at the data on both sides and offer balanced views.
Frankly, i’m sick of them. If they are humiliated by the real arguments, well…that’s just too bad. But we all know that won’t happen until there is a REAL paradigm shift and not just this steady trickle towards the Hope that the Bible truly teaches. Until then, muppets like this will write awful, badly put together books that sell a lot because they tell itching ears what they want to hear.
What people want is cheap grace for themselves and vengeance against their enemies. Universalism offers costly (to God and us, if properly applied) grace that applies not just to us, but even to our enemies (hence it being potentially costly to us).
OK James - I think I was begin over literalistic the good Dr looks far too worn out to be lazy in a literal sense
And thanks Jason - that’s very interesting Was Stonehouse directly influenced by Boehme?
This is an interesting conversation all round. A different take on an apologetic for universalism than the usual
Does any one know why von Balthazar should be considered a prime example of an anti-Hegelian or of any universalists who have been directly influenced by Hegel?
I guess i can agree with that…once you get past the crap first objections that have been answered ad nauseum, i suppose it is an interesting attempt. Also, it perhaps allows us to shed light on how forms of Gnosticism have permeated other forms of Christianity, as you have done above
So maybe this lovely chappy has done us a favour, really.
In all objective fairness, i suppose the conversation must continue, both for and against, so that we stumble towards the truth. I just appreciate people doing their %^*ing research first and not starting off with the same rubbish arguments AGAIN. But the Gnostic connection (if it exists) is at least something new to talk about.
I doubt it – it’s been a few years since I read his (first) book (his sequels where he responded to various opponents including the Wesleys may be lost), and whatever he was he wasn’t mystical. He crunched a lot of scriptural data, and leaned heavily on the Syriac Peshitta/Peshitto as being the original scriptural text. Another unusual feature of his work is that he’s the only author I’ve ever read or even (specifically) heard of who was a binitarian Christian – not a trinitarian, and not a bi-theist: he denied the distinct personhood of the Spirit but was otherwise ‘orthodox’ in his Patrology and Christology (neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance etc.)
He wrote (by a significant margin) the largest book I own of 18th/19th century universalism, and it’s available for free in several modes online. I think we may have a copy here on the forum somewhere…?
I’ve read a bit of von Balthasar, and it’s clear that he is attempting to respond to Hegel (and other modern philosophers) by appealing to pre-modern (Platonist) Christian metaphysics, while nevertheless attempting to synthesize what is good in Hegel. The first volume of O’Regan’s next series The Anatomy of Misremembering: von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity is supposed to cover von Balthasar’s relationship to Hegel.
As for other universalists directly influenced by Hegel, I remember seeing somewhere that Moltmann reportedly said something along the lines that all contemporary German theologians start with Hegel. Of course, this certainly doesn’t mean that Moltmann accepts Hegel’s system wholesale, and I think in many ways, they differ significantly. But I would say that Hegel has had a good deal of influence in much 20th century academic theology.
HI Arlenite -
Ah so the crux of it is that Hegel has a dynamic view of truth that develops/unfolds in history while the Platonists have a static idea of truth? And Boehme had a dynamic idea of truth as a clash between opposites such as love and wrath etc that become resolved when love tames wrath?
As well as the Bohemenist Universalists in England - and at roughly the same time – we have the Cambridge Platonist Universalists who argued that God’s unchanging essence is love so he therefore must and will redeem all of his creation. But the Cambridge Platonists had a mainly academic/clerical audience. The Boehmneists Philadelphians aspired to reach a more poplar audience - with a slightly potty and surreal agenda. When they finally went out to preach the arrival of God’s Everlasting Gospel of universal salvation they did so with a hellfire and damnation group of Huguenot exiles who were preaching a violent and judgement. This latter group – the Camisards would fall into ecstasy fists of laughter after engaging in paroxysms of hell fire preaching. The Philadelphians saw them as allies because they interpreted this as a sign of justice and mercy combining! Weird stuff. I don’t think their joint meetings went at all smoothly. But what have these to do with Robin Parry?
I know Barth was influenced by Hegel – but was discerning and rejected a lot of Hegel too; and I don’t think that makes his hopeful universalism Gnostic (I dare say his hopeful universalism had no Hegelian influences). I know that fundamentalists have often hated Hegel because this developmental/historical idea of truth is linked to liberal biblical criticism.
I guess the real heirs of Hegel must be the process theologians and the conditional futurists (but they are not all Universalists).
I guess the reason why Kierkegaard gets such a positive mention in these videos is simply that Kierkegaard rejected Hegel – but he rejected Hegel’s metaphysics for this stress on the subjective and the existential.
Hmmm – oh Hegel is so difficult; and I find it hard to grasp metaphysics and systematics 
.
Hi, Sobornost!
Oddly enough, my instincts say that von Balthasar is trying to eat some aspect of the Hegelian truth-unfolding-in-history cake, while also trying to have his Platonic ideals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty too(the triptych, after all, is written to correspond, in reverse order, with the transcendentals). Von Balthasar’s triptych is some 16 volumes long, and I’ve read maybe 5 of those, so take what I say with the appropriate grain of salt, but von Balthasar does want to strongly stress the “theo-drama” that is unfolding in history, especially in the incarnation of Christ. Von Balthasar’s God is quite dynamic, and he’s been criticized (rightly, I think) for making it sound like he’s got a spot in the divine “boardroom” to watch all the immanent divine “events” occur.
But, I imagine his major beef with Hegel would be that Hegel’s God seems, in some real sense, bound by the necessity and thus not free in the appropriate sense. Of course, there are many ways you can read Hegel, but I think that is probably one of the biggest points of contention. Von Balthasar wants everything - including the processions in the immanent Trinity! - to be the result of sovereign free choices to love.
Like you, I don’t really see how any of this is going to reveal all of these thinkers to be gnostic in a relevant way. But, I suppose I’m probably being a bit unfair since I’m going off a relatively short lecture and not his substantial work.
I hear you about Hegel though. My head starts to throb after about a page and a half of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hi Arlenite
My brother in throbbing headedness
You’ve read five volumes of Von Balthasar!!! Respect
Can you summarise them?
I’m thinking something along these lines:
youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g&feature=player_detailpage#t=187 (apologies for slightly rude ending )
edit: and middle bit
edit: linked to the bit i really meant