That’s not really fair, Prince, is it? One or two verses? There are many hundreds of posts and threads on the forum that do much much more than repeat a few cliches and point to a couple of verses. The whole character of God is what is at stake, not just staking out our position. That character of the good God, imo, is what makes both ect and annhilationism repugnant.
Exactly.
Prince, you may not have seen previous posts i’ve made were i described how i followed an Annihilationist view for a couple of years? Let’s just say that when i discovered UR, and realised how God’s character was not defended by the idea that He loses/gives up on anyone, regardless of ECT or Anni, i leapt at it.
The scriptural weight of arguments for Anni lead to us rejecting eternal hell: all well and good. But they still fail because they require GOD to fail. I could build a lot of complicated Scriptural arguments for a lot of things, but the Bible is clear that:
God is all powerful
God is all wise
God is all loving
God wills that all shall be saved, which is impossible for us.
God is able to do what is impossible for us.
God NEVER FAILS.
Corpse & DaveB,
I overstated: I don’t think that universalists tend to be prooftexters, sorry if I gave that impression. But we can be confident of the interp. of a verse supporting our position. I don’t know what the line is b/w prooftexting and “confidence”…
I am curious about annihilationism or conditional mortality b/c, while it still a ways from full-fledged UR, it has some things going for it. For instance, I think one could still affirm God’s love never fails and subscribe to anni, if we have true libertarian free will, and somebody just never wanted to be in God’s presence, that in the end, God would let that obstinate soul perish as opposed to either allowing it to torture itself and others for all eternity - or- God punishing it with Hell (all this depends on one’s conception of the afterlife, obviously and whether we can accept God/Jesus postmortem).
A deficit with universalism, and a possible “plus” to non-universalist schemes: as long as there are sinners/rejectors/people refusing God’s grace, there can be Hell Those God has saved may be free from this Hell w/ unlocked doors but everybody else will be in agony. Naturally, it would be horrible if somebody really wanted to go their own way, even after second, third, fourth … x opportunities in the afterlife - but - at that point (for, like you, I do think God’s love is extremely patient and God will save people, postmortem, even after rejections), but if there are some people that clearly never want to go to heaven period - at that point (and not b4), I think anni might b the humane thing 4 God to do (and granted, this hearkens the capital punishment debates, for some espouse that life imprisonment is fundamentally for merciful than the death penalty and vice versa - and the stakes obviously are raised when we’re talking about eternal punishment).
I think that Tom Talbott is right for the most part in that, as illusions are stripped away from people, it will become very hard in the afterlife for one to want to cleave oneself from God and others as the false motives will b shown for what they are. I do not know if it is impossible, as opposed to highly unlikely, for some even in that clarity to reject God. If you think that we lack “free will” and/or to secure UR, God can use some kind of determinism, then obviously annihilationism would not be preferable at all. If ultra-universalism is possibly T, then annihilationism would be clearly morally inferior (r u ultra-universalists or more “purgatorial” univs?)
Oh dear, lotharson (Mark, is it?), you really do need to read the second edition of my book. 
Or even the first edition, for that matter. You wrote:
Don’t you think, for starters, that we should at least consider the ways in which Jesus typically expressed himself? Suppose that someone should make the following statement, which parallels yours in a relevant respect: “I find it extremely hard to believe that Jesus followed an ethic of love if he uttered these words: ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters . . . cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14:26)” In fact, I once heard an atheist make just this sort of assertion.
You went on to write in a later post:
So now compare your own questions with these questions:
Given the way in which Jesus typically expressed himself, why should anyone think that our culturally conditioned Western expectations would be even relevant in either case? However you might answer that question, here is what I am wondering: Would you agree with that atheist I heard who took Luke 14:26 as an indication that Jesus was quite immoral?—and if not, how would you explain the words quoted there? If you will try to explain Luke 14:26 to my satisfaction, then I’ll likewise try to explain those famous words concerning Judas to your satisfaction. Of course, there’s no guarantee that either of us will be successful in this endeavor. But it might be fun to try.
Thanks for raising this issue.
-Tom
I find the dis-similarities regularly overemphasized. Critics will talk about how this or that doesn’t show up in GosJohn, when in fact it does – just to a lesser extent or not in the form typical of the Synoptics. Certain themes of Jesus do show up in GosJohn that rarely if ever show up in the Synoptics; but narrative and thematic logic suggests those circumstances to be back-channel discussion between Jesus and His rabbinic opponents, so one would naturally expect some differences between that and the public preaching. Other more trivial verbal differences can easily be accounted for by different ways of translating Aramaic into Greek.
An argument can even be made that the Synoptics strongly represent selections from programmatic teaching material polished by each of the authors and/or communities behind the texts, and so are proportionately less like how Jesus actually spoke and taught.
Of course the mainstream critical view is that there are differences; I’ll even allow that currently the mainstream view is that the differences are extremely different (though again I find the differences over-estimated). But there is not a mainstream critical view on how the differences are best explained. What was once the mainstream critical view about the explanation of the differences, was based on source critical theories from the 1800s which were themselves largely based on a now discredited philosophical theory about the natural (and even inevitable) evolution of religious beliefs. Aside from strongly sceptical views, which are not the mainstream scholarship (which remains largely Christian in belief), this has been abandoned.
I’m an ultra-purga-U 
No, i don’t know what that means either. I am staying agnostic on this, because i stopped believing in any form or duration of hell before i became a Universalist.
Anni in your examples still doesn’t work, because it requires God to fail or give up. Those are two things the Bible teaches quite consistently that God does NOT do. All my points were derived from Scripture, and supported by the metanarrative. Any individual Scripture that seems to depart from the whole (in this example, Scriptures that appear to show a final destination of the wicked as being destruction or torment) need to be read in the light of the whole, and in some cases, it is necessary to remember that God didn’t require each of the authors of the Bible to be 100% correct, or else chunks of the Psalms and Job, and likely a number of other places would not exist.
ECT and Annihilation suggest that God gives into the will of His creatures in a passive sense or judges and inflicts a penalty on them in the more active sense. Both of these situations are permanent, and require God to stop working to save His creatures. In other words, He gives up, because He alone has the ability to save them. Whether saving through determinism (dragging the lost back home) or working with free will (and i think that both methods will be employed: whatever works best for the subject), God never fails, and what God states as His will WILL happen.
I’m probably not going to be in a position to reply anymore after this, so hopefully someone else can jump in if you’ve still got questions…