Psalmist,
I had the same questions regarding abbreviations when I first found this site and UR 
Jason pointed me to a place on this site where the abbreviations are somewhat defined. Can’t remember where that is located though. Maybe PM him.
But yeah… ECT = eternal conscience torment.
The Shack
At last - thanks again Melchi!
Psalmist,
There is a (rather short) abbreviation list at the head of the forum FAQ here.
It can also be accessed from the top of any page, as the first hyperlink to the left under the “Search” bar at the upper right.
This is probably what ISitInAwe is talking about.
Thank you, Jason and I Sit in Awe. So much to read, so little time. Oh wait, I have ages ahead of me.
-wonder what ‘FAQ’ means? and furthermore - why is ‘monosyllabic’ such a long word?? 
One more thing - yesterday the our newspaper said that the local stationary shop was moving!?!? 
Not Fatally Awkward Questions then? 
No, those are what A37 thinks he’s always asking us, even after we answer them. 
Meanwhile, I’m currently very much enjoying Christopher Bryan’s previous book Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower. The Kindle edition has the same faults as his book on the Resurrection (no hyperlinked endnotes, and no chaptermarks or endnote chaptermarks), which is annoying, but a fault of his publisher and/or whoever they hired to convert the thing to Kindle format. 
(Good grief, I know Kindle is horrid when it comes to foot/endnotes, but my SttH transfer from .doc file to Kindle format automatically hyperlinked my footnotes, and it isn’t even a published book for sale! …yet. 
)
A few hours of my free time each week since mid-November (my birthday) has been spent playing Skyrim, so I guess I could say I’m also currently reading a bunch of Elder Scroll fanmade short stories. 
(There are dozens of books in the game, and each of them features what amounts to a fictional short story set in the ES milieu. Unfortunately the bookshelf subroutine is broken on the Playstation 3 version so I can’t have them sitting on the bookshelves of my house, but I can put them in drawers and chests.)
I have been reading a number of books and articles for stuff I am writing for the History Channel/Ecclesiology thread here. Am currently coming to the end of a chill out session and in the coming week will get going on the stuff I’ve promised Drew and Jason.
I am reading the ‘All Shall BE Well’ collection with much enjoyment – lots of food for thought and new insights. (If you lived down my street you could borrow my copy!). Regarding Julian of Norwich, I hadn’t thought of her visions as episodes of an NDE recollected carefully and pondered in memory – it seems she’d had an amazing experience but kept her feet firmly on the ground about it, and used it to communicate something of the ground of Hope to all of us, God bless her(reading her is so different from the extracts I’ve read from some of the other mystics of her time who were often very highly strung with over active/self indulgent imaginations).
I have also been reading Timothy Gorringe ‘God’s Just Vengeance’. This is about the influence of penal substitution theories of atonement on England’s ‘bloody code’ of retributive criminal justice in the eighteenth/early nineteenth century. Gorringe argues that Abelard’s moral theory of atonement is more compatible with restorative justice. Reading this has set me thinking beyond atonement theories to concepts of eschatological judgement. I know there are a rich variety of concepts and images associated with this in the Bible. Unfortunately the common picture seems to be derived not so much from Biblical themes but from an image from imperial Roman law, where the office of judge and counsel for the prosecution are combined. How we picture the ‘eschaton’ really does affect how we do things in the here and now – and I wonder if any UR exponents have started to imagine what divine justice means in terms of restorative justice? I know that there are biblical themes suggestive of restorative justice and I wonder whether, say, the workings of the imperfect but still wonderful Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa give us a flawed but profitable analogy on which to think about Divine justice? (I think people often misconceive of restorative justice as a ‘soft option’). I’m going to have a ponder on this - but won’t try and write anything about it in the near future.
All the best
Dick
How to Write a Book Proposal, 4th edition, just arrived from Amazon. My agent recommended the book because I need to include marketing information in my next proposal before he can send it out to major publishing houses.
Dear All,
Though these are no theological tomes, for the record I have in the last couple of months, I have read in this order:
Paul. A Novel written by Walter Wangerin
The Apostle - a Life of Paul, written by John Pollock
and simultaneously with Acts, and Paul’s Epistles.
FOLLOWED BY:
The Heavenly Man , the remarkable story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun, together with Paul Hattaway.
The account of the experiences and faith of Brother Yun are so similar to those of Paul, as also the spreading of the Gospel by Paul in the Easter Mediterranean 2000 years ago and Brother Yun in China.
Worth mentioning is Brother Yun’s one of a number of recommendations to the Churches in the Western world in one of his final chapters, years after escaping to the West, “Reflecting on Four Years in the West”, is for Revival and Sharing of the Word of the Lord, quoting,
Jeremiah 20.9 and Philemon v 6.
Let’s go!
Michael in Barcelona
I have now finished Bryan’s book on Jesus and the Roman Empire–which reminded me there’s a book on my shelves I’ve been meaning to read for a while, or perhaps I’ve forgotten I already read! (Wilkens’ The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Edited to add: huh. Looking at the table of contents, I am entirely sure I’ve read Wilkens’ book already once or even twice. I remember really liking it, but I remember almost nothing of its actual contents. Oh well.)
Fun trivia note: although along with many people I regard myself as a student of Lewis, CB actually was a student of Lewis (and Tolkien) back in the late 50s!
Anyway, next up (or maybe not, if I feel itchy about reading Wilkens again) will be God’s Final Victory by John Kronen and Eric Reitan. As someone who originally came to Christian universalism as a deductive logical corollary to trinitarian theism, I’ve been looking forward to seeing how much of their argument independently covers the same ground.
(I suspect they won’t cover nearly the same amount of theological ground as I did, though, if the Trinity only rates three mentions in the index, two of which are footnotes and one of which is in the introduction on page 2. 
But their references to recent and classical theological arguments on universalism pro and con should still be worth chewing over. I’m already indebted to them for relating, in a footnote to chapter 9 that I happened to glance past on the way to the index, the anecdote of Jonathan Edwards working out a complex philosophical criteria for distinguishing the elect from the non-elect and then excommunicating his whole congregation for several years as a result!–an excom that, for a Calvinist, must be permanent as the non-elect cannot ever become the elect.)
Update: while K&R’s GFV may only reference the Trinity (per se) three times, they indicate in their introduction that they will be proceeding with their argument from bases of theology generally agreed to by conservative Christians, with distinction from a similar argument they will also provide from bases of theology generally agreed to by other supernaturalistic theists. From the details of their introduction, this would seem to include the distinction of Christ’s deity.
I like the book’s outlay as reported in the introduction, and I generally approve of the introduction overall (so far). I may create a thread later to comment on the book, as it’s rather expensive right now.
Yesterday I finished Jukes’ 1867 monograph on The Restitution of All Things, which catches me up on the pre-20th-century English universalism apologetic texts that I’ve procured. (No doubt I’m missing some, partly as a personal preference, as I would rather stay as close to ortho-trin exponents as possible, and partly because the texts just flat out aren’t available anywhere at the moment. I’m thinking specifically of Stonehouse’ continuing dialogues with other theologians of his day, which he printed as sequels to his mammoth 1761 Universal Restitution.)
I’ve started the biography of Elhanan Winchester, but he himself had already printed a good spiritual biography as preface to a later edition of The Universal Restoration–which this work quotes liberally from (as well it should)–so I’m doubtful I’ll pick up much new here.
(As an incidental reminder, I and several of the other ad/mods regard Winchester’s book of dialogues to be, by proportion to its size, the best apologetic for universalism currently available. Stonehouse’ work is much more detailed in some regards, although I find some of his concepts extremely shaky, such as his attempts at precisely calculating how many years each “eon” phrase indicates. Jukes, for whatever it may be worth, is much shorter than even Winchester, and packs a lot of material, but I still prefer Winchester’s scope.)
I’m at least 2/3 of the way through J&K’s God’s Victory, and I’ve finally run into a chapter I largely disagree with (the one on penal sub), although I don’t think fixing (what I perceive as) the logical problems there will hurt their overall argument. I may have to write a thread on it elsewhere later, though.
Still occasionally moving through both translations of The Heliand for fun.
Funnily enough I’ve just finished reading it too (though not for the first time).
The Shack by Paul Young
An encounter with Papa! Reconciliation, God’s all embracing love, the Trinity. Meet all 3 in 1! Forgiveness, love our enemies. It all happens in and around The Shack!
Many of you will already have read this book; those who have not will have an unforgettable encounter!
Michael in Barcelona
Taking a break from the penal substitution study as it’s raising more questions than answering. Not convinced that penal substitution is false. pretty convinced that it is true in some sense, just not sure in what way. Still keeping an open mind though. Penal substitution opponents just seem to have to stretch a little too far in addressing the many many verses in support if PS. But then I thought the same about UR at one time.
Reading James Goetz book “conditional futurism” and “all shall be well”.
So far CF first two chapters are real good as introductory chapters. Brief but helpful.
All shall be well… I am reading the chapter on Winchester (or whatever his name was lol) excellent chapter! His arguements are some of the best i have seen. He also does a good job explaining the illogical argument that an infinite God would require infinite punishment.
Awesome 
Speaking of Winchester (I’m still going through his biography), does anyone know where to find a free pdf (or other decent format) of his 3rd and maybe 4th volumes on prophecies yet to be completed?
I’ve seen varying things about how many volumes exist. His biographer thought two. (His excerpt from them was what led me to hunt for them.) The two volumes I found over at the Princeton Theological Seminary Library (I’ve picked up other scanned books for free there) indicate there are at least three volumes. (The first book itself says there are three, and the second book ends with the discussion of the end of Christ’s millennial kingdom with clear indications that the material from the final chapters of RevJohn and related scriptures are up next.) Someone on Amazon has self-published four volumes, but there are no descriptions (and no searching inside the book. And I’m not very happy with the idea of paying someone $25 for what may be a piss-poor copy-paste of a pdf text with format codes, which unfortunately is what some of these self-published archival books amount to!)
My tentative guess is that the guy on Amazon has collected two sermons called “The three woes”, preached at about the same time as the other lectures and in the same place, along with related sermons, and called that the fourth volume. Which would be okay, although I’ve already got pdfs of that. I just want to know if anyone else knows.
Update: Dr. Benjamin Rush thanked EW for the fourth volume in a contemporary letter, so I suppose it must really exist.