The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Question about eternal destinies: the two-track picture

Theology Philosophical
#1

The standard evangelical position regarding the afterlife is that there are two possible destinies for humankind—heaven or hell. They are diametrical opposites, and a person is locked into one place or another the moment he or she dies. [As an aside, in the traditional view there are gradations in each (different levels of rewards in heaven and different degrees of punishment in hell), but it seems to me that those shades of difference are really rather insignificant; all that [i]really matters is that you make it into heaven (so you experience everlasting joy) and stay out of hell (so you avoid everlasting torment). If you get to be in the presence of God forever, it won’t really make that big a difference how many rooms your mansion has, and if you are experiencing the fire of hell forever, it won’t really matter how many degrees the fire is.]

Anyway, as I have moved more toward UR, I have questioned the whole two-track paradigm. If there are two and only two destinies, how do you define what makes the difference between ending up in one place and ending up in the other? I have never heard a coherent answer to the question of exactly what are the requirements to get into heaven and stay out of hell; you have to wonder what’s wrong with this picture if we can’t get our story straight. It seems to me that God does not go through a cattle-sorting process but rather deals with each of us very personally, taking into account everything about our lives—the faculties we have been given, the things that have happened to us, and the choices we have made. Rather than only two opposite possibilities, perhaps there is a whole spectrum of possibilities. I envision that we will all stand before God and that our *experience *of being in His presence will depend very much on our *relationship *with Him—everything from abject terror to perfect bliss.

And yet Scripture does seem to present a duality, with people categorized into one of two classes. The language that describes those who belong to God and those who do not speaks of two opposite groups, experiencing either eternal life or eternal punishment: the righteous/the wicked, believers/unbelievers, saved/unsaved, sheep/goats, wheat/tares, in the light/not in the light, alive in Christ/dead in trespasses and sins, those who have the Spirit/those who do not, etc.

So how do you all see this question? If we believe that in the end all will be redeemed, how should we understand what’s going on in the meantime? How do we interpret all the Scriptures that seem to indicate some kind of two-track system?

#2

I think there IS a two-track system (or maybe more tracks). We see this in the Hebrew harvest feastdays. There’s the barley harvest, which is celebrated in the feast of firstfruits – the barley harvest (the day Jesus rose from the dead), the day of Pentecost, which is 5 weeks after (the birth of the church), and the fall feasts which aren’t coming readily to mind at the moment, but which involve the later harvests – wheat? and grapes.

Here’s the beginning of a recent series of posts I did on the Sheep and the Goats parable. Maybe it will help point you in some interesting directions. journeyintotheson.com/2012/06/the-sheep-and-the-kids/ and in the same vein, Why Paul Ran journeyintotheson.com/2012/02/why-paul-ran/.

These posts deal, to some degree, with my own musings and struggling with the points you’re talking about here. The more deeply I look into God’s word, the more UR helps me to make sense of it – to bring together things I had written off as conundrums (because contradiction is a dirty word!). I don’t believe any longer in the whole tension thing – at least not in the way I used to. There are only passages we understand (a little bit) and passages we need more light on. It all fits, ultimately. God’s word works – when we understand it.

Blessings, Cindy

#3

Hi Diane

Partly I think that’s because there are no places in Scripture, that I know of, where some people are said to “go to heaven”. (Happy to be shown some, though.) And the hell question? For starters, why is there no word “hell” in the Greek and Hebrew texts? Probably no-one has a coherent answer because the question doesn’t necessarily have meaning.

The whole two-track system, while extremely helpful for categorising people into us and them, the good and the bad, the beloved-of-God and the evildoers etc etc, has very largely faded in my understanding and experience. If it’s true that all have already been saved through Jesus’ death, and that all will one day experience that salvation, then in what possible sense can I think of that wicked person over there as somehow different from me? Perhaps only in that for some reason God chose me and not him. (Having said that, I read a wonderful thing today which said that since God chooses the weak and foolish, then being chosen is probably not evidence of any superiority, but rather shows that we’re weak and foolish :laughing: )

With care!

Instead of bunching together a whole lot of different dualities (eg. saved/unsaved, sheep/goats etc ) and concluding that there is a two-track system, we look at each one in its context in the book it appears, taking note of who wrote it, to whom, the occasion etc etc etc.

Example: sheep/goats. Matt 25. Book of Matthew. Written by Matthew, a Jew, about the coming of the King. Concerned with the kingdom. The passage comes after Matt 24 where Jesus sets forth the signs of his coming to the kingdom. He says no-one knows the day or hour, therefore keep watch. Then in Matt 25, the parables of the ten virgins and talents. We know these are parables because they start with “It will be like…” They’re pictures.

But then comes the sheep and the goats. And there’s no “It will be like…” It begins “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory.” This is a prediction of something that will happen. And we find out that the sheep and the goats are actually nations. And the sheep nations, who welcomed the persecuted Jews through the tribulation, have as their inheritance the kingdom. And they go to “eonion life” (not “everlasting life”). The “eonian life” is the kingdom. This in itself would have been astonishing to the hearers, because Jesus was saying that Gentiles would be entering the kingdom promised to the Jews!

Now, all of this is to say that we must interpret this far differently than we would interpret Paul’s “alive in Christ/dead in sin” dichotomy. For starters, Paul’s not predicting anything when he writes about it, and it’s a different genre.

Each one you listed, as well as any others, are all valid, all Scriptural, but as soon as we lump them all together in the one basket, we lose the distinctives of each and lose the meaning and lessons that each was designed to bring us. So, sheep and goats are about specific nations at a specific time in history.

Nicely said, Cindy. And I’d go further and say that a huge part of understanding it is (a) getting a literal translation, rather than the non-literal ones, and (b) reading each passage with care in its context.

#4

I like your question…my interests lie in the technical aspects of the salvation of all, and your inquiry is headed that direction.

My take lies in a definition of what “saved” and “unsaved” mean. This may be a bit abstract, so bear with me.

Assuming the authority of the Bible, the biggest discrepancy between man and God seems to lie in the good/bad dualism. I think this unfolds to provide the basis for the ‘two track system’ you speak of. But good and bad are values that wax and wane, shrink and grow with circumstances and imo don’t properly describe the problem. I agree with Aquinas who noted that “…the true, speaking absolutely, is prior to good…” (Summa Pt 1, Q16, A4). The dualism begins here, true and false. All goods follow from the true, and all evils from the false. Jesus noted that He is Truth (Jn 14:6). Assuming God is absolutely perfect in all His attributes, it seems to me that all His other attributes stand in relationship to His Truth, the defining characteristic of His Essence. It seems reasonable from this to suppose that when He declared His creation “very good” (Gen 1), He was effectively noting that it was true. Wholly true=perfect.

The dualism started with the fall. Adam stained his spirit and the creation causally with falsity. (Fallenness, missing the mark=false.) Logically, sin (an evil) is the conscious or cognitive product of an inherent quality of being, falsity. Hence, to be saved in its most reduced form is to have the false eradicated from one’s being and restored to a wholly true state. I think this is what Jesus meant in Jn 17 when He prayed to the Father on behalf of those who were His, “…keep them in Thy name, the name which Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, even as We are.” To be made “true” is to be “one” with Christ, one in both essence and mind. (This has important ramifications for why the Bible equates true belief with righteousness, but that’s for another thread.)

To elaborate the idea a bit, when Jesus said in v 14 “I have given them Thy word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”, He’s essentially saying ‘I’ve given them our Truth and the world hates the truth that’s in them because they are no longer of the falseness’. Another example, take Jn 3:19: “And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil.” Because of the interconnectedness of true with terms like good, light, etc. and false with bad, etc. read Jn 3:19 using ‘true’ in place of light and ‘false’ for evil.

Now to tie it together, if we assume (as I do) that hell is the word we use to describe what the soul experiences when death and rebirth take place in spirit, it seems reasonable to suppose that regeneration is hell. But if regeneration results in a change from false to true, then hell=regeneration=salvation. Restoration from false to true. You’re right, God deals with each of us personally. The entire Bible is an allegory of the work He performs in the individual human spirit as He changes each from a fragmentally falsified soul to ever higher levels of truth in sanctification. Salvation is found in the fires of hell because hell is the experience of death and rebirth of the spirit.

This concept was brought home to me years ago; as my sister in law lay dying of breast cancer at age 42, the family mourned the terrible sight of this former belly dancer, now bedridden, bloated to over 200 pounds by steroids, her waist long hair long gone from chemotherapy. In a gentle but stark epiphanic moment the Lord showed me someone lying in the bed being born while everyone else in the room mourned the horror of a young mother dying. This was a great comfort to me years later as I watched my parents die of lung cancer within a month of each other. Our choice is hell (regeneration) gradually and fragmentally in time to a state of faith, or all at once in the purifying lake of fire, where all that is false is destroyed to ash and reborn to true. The two destinies exist within every individual, one destined to death and the other to life…it’s just how each of us gets there that’s different. This is how I see it, anyway.

#5

Wow, this is deep stuff…