Response to Eric Landstrom

[lightbuzzyear]

The article I’m responding to is here: ovrlnd.com/Universalism/unieletter.html

Response to “An Open Letter to All Who Hold Universal Reconciliation to be True”

A Brief Preface
Is it wrong to ask for Scriptural proof for a doctrine that is stated as fact?

No it’s not wrong, but most who ask this question have a notion of “Scriptural proof” that is misleading and circular. I’ll grant the benefit of doubt here and assume the question was created by a sincere interest in pursuit of the truth.

As to the comment, “… not all of the following is believed by every universalist…” my universalism is somewhat different from the ‘status quo’, so it seems prudent to post an outline of the structure of my belief in order to provide a basis for understanding my responses. The fundamental tenets of my Christian Universalism are:

1. Salvation is presented in Scripture primarily in two forms of Dualism:
   A) Good/evil dualism, which pertains to individuals generally (as in saved/unsaved) found in the literal, and to
   elements within each person specifically (true and false or good and evil) found in the allegorical;
   B) Eternal/Temporal dualism, which makes a particular distinction between the nature of each—for example,
   the mutability of the temporal vs. the immutability of the eternal—as they relate to God’s decrees dealing with
   man in Scripture.

2. Regeneration and Hell refer to one and the same thing. Sanctification is regeneration performed
   gradually and fragmentally in the human soul, while the wrath of God is the hell of regeneration performed
   in the soul en masse.

3. The object and goal of salvation is not simply to be freed from sin—which is at best an ambiguous notion—but from the property or quality which causes sin. If true, this greatly reduces the importance of popular notions of free will as a distinct power of the intellect to choose more or less freely between various goods and evils. Instead, the effects of regeneration was designed by God to free the human will to seek what any rational being would automatically seek if not hindered from it: truth and all and any goods which follow from it.

From the basic tenets above, salvation possesses a twofold nature and many arguments against the salvation of all can be answered from this perspective:

TEMPORAL In time all are born again to moral culpability (Jn 1:9) and the partly-free will which develops from this enlightenment may be used to conform to the call of Christ, which is to conform to Truth, His essence (Jn 14:6). The nature of the temporal is mutability, where one may backslide and be reclaimed again into the ecclesia. Rejection of or growing cold in one’s relationship with Christ (Truth) attracts the verdict of punishment via the wrath of God (Jn 3:36, Rom 1:18, Heb 6:4-8, etc.). Because, as noted in fundamental beliefs above, the hell of regeneration is purgative and reformative in that it frees the intellect to pursue the good (thus weakening the desire to sin), the nature of hell and regeneration are revealed as the love of God. In other words, God’s wrath always brings within it some fragmental destruction of that which creates attraction to particular sin and prevents hindrance to relationship with Him. In this the perfection of God’s justice as well as His love and mercy are found without tension, unlike traditional doctrine which pits as one of its ideals God’s justice over against His mercy, violating God’s perfection in the process in that one of God’s attributes must trump another.

Features of the Dual Modes of Salvation

**ETERNAL ** In eternity God decrees that Jesus dies for the sins of all (1Jn 2:2), that He will draw all (Jn 12:32) to Himself, that He will save the same all who died in sin (Rom 5:18, 1Cor 15:22), that His eternal decrees are not subject to debate but are supervised by His sovereign will (Isa 14:27, 43:13), that He will save any in whom there is even the slightest hint of good or spiritual life (Isa 42:2-3). Because God incorporates the literal and allegorical simultaneously into a shared meaning structure in His inspired word, the two must be properly combined and interpreted in such a way that tensions posed by either one individually are overcome.

In other words, in time every human is quickened to moral culpability, invited to participate with Christ in sanctification to a state of faith. The Lake of Fire is God’s pure essence—pure Truth—in which the kindling of false elements in the human soul, unless covered by the imputed righteousness of Christ by faith, undergoes sudden and terrible regenerative hell. Hell is real, horrendous and performed without mercy (Ezek 7:4, 9:10, Jer 11:11, Mat 5:26). Beyond drawing the departed soul back to Him (Eccl 12:7, Heb 9:27) following physical death, God need not perform judgment per se; justice and judgment are carried with each soul insofar as one has developed faith in sanctification in time. All that is not of faith of necessity is destroyed in the Lake of God’s pure Truth, restored in the death and resurrection of regeneration (Jn 12:24) .

The answers to questions posed:

“…I can find no evidence of the following in Scripture despite the assertions of universalists:”

1. The sins of the wicked being forgiven in the after life.

Postmortem repentance is not required for salvation of the ungodly. The sins of the wicked are not merely forgiven after death, rather they are dismissed after the source of sin is eternally destroyed (2Thes 1:9) and removed (Ezek 22:18-22, Isa 26:10-11) from the soul resulting in the restoration of the soul to fellowship with God (Zech 13:8-9, Mal 3:3). Death and resurrection is the core feature of Christian doctrine (Jn 12:24), and new life is found in both the first death (the regeneration of sanctification in time=life to those of faith) and the second death (Rev 20:14) of which those who do not conform in time have this promise from God: “But the LORD of hosts revealed Himself to me, “Surely this iniquity shall not be forgiven you Until you die,” says the Lord GOD of hosts.” (Isa 22:14) and, “Therefore through this Jacob’s iniquity will be forgiven; And this will be the full price of the pardoning of his sin: When he makes all the altar stones like pulverized chalk stones; When Asherim and incense altars will not stand.” (Isa 27:9). Christ’s atonement reaches even from time and space to hell itself in that

2. The wicked repenting in the after life.

See response to #1.

3. The wicked accepting Jesus Christ in the after life.

See response to #1; accepting Jesus is a merciful feature of the temporal mode of salvation only. No such offer exists or is necessary post mortem.

4. The wicked avoiding judgment in the after life.

See above, God’s judgment is perfect and none avoid it.

5. The wicked having sin “conditioned” out of them in the after life.

The questions are becoming repetitive. Several verses have been provided above which show that wrath culminates in cleansing and restoration (spiritual death and resurrection) in human essence and natural movement toward the good of the soul thus cleansed. “Conditioning” of this sort is well known to be a feature of regeneration or the new birth and sanctification.

6. God tormenting the wicked in the lake of fire (presumably to condition sin out of the wicked).

See response to #5 above. “Tormenting” to “condition sin out of” is emotional wording borrowed from the doctrines of eternal torment. The process of purification can be better described in more metaphysically technical terms as the cleansing of the property from the soul which causes sin. God does not torment. “Torment” and “hell” are simply words we use to describe the spiritual cleansing of regeneration from the human soul.

7. The wicked getting out of the lake of fire.

See above.

8. Nor can I find anywhere that God repents of His judgment on Satan in the afterlife, or anywhere else. Satan was condemned by the Almighty in Genesis chapter three.

My own view is that Satan is not an entity as a source of evil. I belief Lucifer is only a metaphorical type of the ‘satan’ within all humans which is conscious intellectual evil (Mark 8:33, Psa 51:2-10). This being so, Satan, per se, would be destroyed forever in the reconciliation of the human soul.

9. Nor do I see any evidence that God will acquit any fallen angel ever.

The last two questions find wide variance among Christian universalists, are a side issue in soteriology and only peripherally relevant to salvation, either traditional or universal. There is equally no evidence that God does not acquit fallen angels.

10. Nor do I see all peoples being saved in the after life.

As noted earlier, the reason for this is from the use of a deficient interpretive model. Failure to “see” implies only lack of understanding.

For these reasons I have asked for direct Scriptural support from anybody in the UR camp to support their assertions. At this point, I am left with the understanding that universalists are religious fideists, in that they seem to believe that no Scriptural support or reason based on evidence is necessary to uphold their beliefs beyond their sincere faith that universalism is true.

A definition needs to be given for what is meant by ‘direct Scriptural support’. It varies among individuals.

[JasonPratt]

I’m already far along working on a reply to JP Holding (whom I am at least a friend of friends of); but considering that I use the same exegetical techniques that I use when arriving exegetically at trinitarian theism, I’m amused by this:

I will happily remove or edit this list when a proof verse is given in answer for each of the questions below that doesn’t twist the original author’s meaning (as per James Sire’s 20 ways the cults twist Scripture).

Why do I suspect Eric would have no problem accepting the same exact principles in application when I’m doing one thing, but not when I’m doing the other?

For example:

1. INACCURATE QUOTATION: A biblical text is referred to but is either not quoted in the way the text appears in any standard translation or is wrongly attributed. Example: The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says, “Christ said, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’” Whereas this text is found ONLY in Psalms.

Now, I would never cite this as evidence in favor of trinitarian theism (or any related high-deity Christianity like modalism); and I wouldn’t even say that Christ had ‘said this’ if Christ had said “Be still and know I am” in a context clearly indicating He was expecting personal trust in Himself. But I would definitely argue that Christ was citing that verse and putting Himself in the place of reference to God (especially if the Greek in the Gospel matched with the LXX of Psalm 46:10).

Similarly, when NT authors (the John who received the Revelation for example) cite or allude to OT scriptures (alluding to Ezekiel where the formerly rebel but now repentant kings of the earth entering into the New Jerusalem for example) I tend to argue that the intentions of meaning are at least significantly similar. (The “kings of the earth”, for example, who are only used elsewhere in RevJohn to refer to the ultimate human rebels against Christ aside from the False Prophet and perhaps the Beast, still refers to rebel kings of the Earth at Rev 21:24–but they were slain by Christ back before the lake of fire judgment, 19:11-20, as impenitent rebels against Him! If not also thrown into the lake of fire before the descent of the New Jerusalem but after the general resurrection of the evil and the good. Yet here they are, following the light of Christ into the NJ, and leading in others, too, when impenitent rebels are still most definitely outside, 21:27. Certainly they were slain, and certainly they were included among the resurrected, so either they repented in hades before resurrection and the lake of fire judgment, or they repented after the lake of fire judgment.)

2. TWISTED TRANSLATION: The biblical text is retranslated, not in accordance with sound Greek scholarship, to fit a preconceived teaching of a cult.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who routinely mistranslates the term for “baby-goat” at Matt 25, or for “shepherd” at Rev 19:15. But when those are properly translated from the Greek, it makes a big difference in what the judgment of the sheep and the goats means, and in what the ‘ruling’ means with the rod of iron by a king overrunning armies (as the Hebrew verb tends to imply at the end of Psalm 23!) So who is translating the Greek according to preconceived teaching there?!–because I sure couldn’t trust non-universalist translations to tell me what was really being said there. I discovered those by accident while doing other study!

Similarly, while doing trinitarian apologetic studies on 2 Thess 1:6-10 (which compares referential meanings between Isaiah 2:10,19,21 and Zechariah 14:5, among other places, to Paul’s application of them to Jesus Christ), I just happened to run across “sound Greek scholarship” (unless the USB Greek text and the Textus Receptus and Thayer’s lexicon etc. are supposed to be cult texts) revealing that verse 9 states that the impenitent wicked shall come to value/honor/pay (a very positively appreciative term) the justice of their whole-ruination (a term for punishment definitely used by Paul elsewhere in 1 Cor 5:5 to refer to a hopeful although extreme punishment where Paul expects the goal to be the salvation of the whole-ruined man’s spirit in the same coming Day of the Lord which Paul is talking about here at 2 Thess 1!) So who was translating the Greek according to preconceived teaching there?!–because if the Greek is translated (as is entirely proper, and which by the way happens to fit the total contexts of that first Isaianic prophecy of which chapter 2 is a part) “value (or honor) the justice of eonian destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His power”, instead of “pay the penalty” or “incur the punishment” of “eternal extinction” or something of that sort, then that would make a big difference in what Paul meant to be saying: no one could come to value the justice of their own ultra-punishment unless they continued existing and eventually repented of their sins after the ultra-punishment! Which would be an indication that “eonan” shouldn’t be translated “eternal” there either. Which I also learned was entirely possible, even (as in Matt 25) when the term is used twice with two referents in close topical comparison, thanks to “sound Greek scholarship”. (While doing trinitarian apologetic study on Rom 16:25-27, for example.)

3. BIBLICAL HOOK: A text of Scripture is quoted primarily as a device to grasp the attention of readers or listeners and then followed by a teaching which is so nonbiblical that it would appear far more dubious to most people had it not been preceded by a reference to Scripture.

Sad to say, texts of scripture are sometimes quoted primarily as a device to grasp the attention of readers or listeners, such as a warning against heretical teaching for example, to be followed up by a teaching so nonbiblical (a denial of God’s omnipresence for example, such as is commonly found in teaching about sinners continuing to exist apart from God) that even debased pagans and infidels regard it as dubious–but orthodox Christians should have been the first to smack such teaching aside as obvious heresy! Similarly, any notion tending to schism between the intentions of the Son and the Father: while far more naturally acceptable to most people, since sons and fathers do often operate at cross-purposes (pun intended), such teaching ought to be anathema even to non-trinitarian Christians, but much moreso to us trinitarians! And yet preface this with a scripture about terrible punishment coming from God to the impenitent (which is correct so far as it goes), and suddenly it is much more acceptable for Christians to accept that the Son came to save us from the punishment of the Father! (Or that God in any or all Persons would completely set aside His love to accomplish ‘justice’ toward an object, when God must exist essentially as love, and as justice in fulfillment of such love together between persons, against which foundation of all reality we sin when we are unjust–if trinitarian theism is true!)

4. IGNORING THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT: A text of Scripture is quoted but removed from the surrounding verses which form the immediate framework for its meaning.

How often have I seen non-universalists quote significant portions of Mark 9, right up to the end of verse 48–and then neglect to go on to the final two verses which (including by grammatic context) explain what the purpose of the unquenchable fire in Gehenna is? (Answer: very very very VERY often. Other answer: to lead us to be at peace with one another, for all will be salted with fire, and salt is ideal. But if the salting (of the fire) becomes unsalty, with what will it be salted again?!)

Or how often have I seen non-universalists try to deal with Mark 9:49-50, but neglect its clear grammatic links to verse 48 immediately prior? (Answer: not very often, but only because I rarely see non-universalists trying to deal with 9:49-50! The whole history of the schizophrenic transmission of verse 49 in ancient copies indicates desperate attempts to create new context or to rewrite the immediate contextual linkage. I got that from “sound Greek scholarship”, too. )

5. COLLAPSING CONTEXTS: Two or more verses which have little or nothing to do with each other are put together as if one were a commentary of the other(s).

Everyone raise their hands who has ever seen a non-universalist quote some verse about punishment from God together with Rom 6:23, as though “the wages of sin is death” was referring to a wage (technically a daily minimal pittance wage for keeping someone alive, thus Paul’s irony in using the term) from God (and/or as though “death” mean “hell”), despite Paul not in the least talking about punishment from God there.

Granted, there are other places in the scriptures, including places indicative of coming punishment, which talk about God coming to pay out to every man according to his work. But then, why not cite those verses instead?!

(Perhaps because when David at the end of Psalm 62 talks about God coming to pay out a man according to his work, he uses the verb {shawlam}, closely related to the word for peace, which is a primitive term meaning ‘to make safe’ and which is practically always used in very positively beneficial goals and intentions for the one being acted toward?–fairly paying, completing, saving, being friendly, making amends, to perfect, to make good, to make prosper, to make a peace treaty? And because David himself seems surprised to have it revealed to him at the end of his Psalm that the two things David has heard, that power and lovingkindness/mercy belong to God, are in fact one thing in unity? Because that would make a proportionately surprising difference as to what to ultimately expect from God toward those sinners David was complaining about and asking the protection of God from in the rest of his Psalm, not even counting many other of his Psalms decrying sinners: the undisputed power of God’s coming punishment would be one with His love toward the objects of His punishment, with a goal to make peace with them in a treaty/covenant, to make good, to make perfect, to complete them, to save them, to be friendly to them after all. Soooooo… maybe safer to pretend Rom 6:23 is talking about wages from God and collapse the contexts by appending it to a verse about God’s punishment of sinners.)

I could continue this at length, and maybe will later; but I thought I’d let others here have some shots at it, too.

[lightbuzzyear]

Why do I suspect Eric would have no problem accepting the same exact principles in application when I’m doing one thing, but not when I’m doing the other?

This is why I didn’t feel it worth taking the time to respond to these ‘20 ways…’ I’ve seen all of these alleged instances of ‘twisting’ performed by Christians of all stripes the last 15 years of reading on theology boards. They’re likely only deemed the practice of ‘cults’ when used by those the author disagrees with, doubtless forgiven and overlooked as mere mistakes when used by those of the same stripe.