Sorry so late in this discussion. However, just going to quote David Konstan:
His profile and Credentials: research.brown.edu/myresearch/David_Konstan
He passes the CRAAP test: csuchico.edu/lins/handouts/eval_websites.pdf
a bingo moment if ever there was one :!:
So I went to an Orthodox Church today, and they were singing many things. And often when they were saying things like the Lord’s Prayer, I think, and other things, I expected to hear the Western “forever and ever”.
Instead, I heard “in ages of ages”.
I’m just saying.
Very interesting. Thanks Bird. Was it Greek orthodox?
No, it was an OCA Church, which is essentially Russian but the services are typically in English due to converts. I asked a few people and they said aion is translated as age, same with the Hebrew olam. This seems rather normal for them. They did say that “unto ages of ages” basically translates to “indefinite amount of time times indefinite amount of time”, so it maybe a period of time difficult to comprehend, for instance (which is the essence of the Hebrew word olam), but they stick to translating it as “ages”. Not like they do not use the term forever. But, for instance, when they speak of God, they use expressions such as “now and forever and unto the ages of ages”.
Also the Symbol of Faith that I’ve acquired from one website, which is basically the Creed, says this at the very end: “I look for the Resurrection of the Dead; And the life of the Age to come. Amen.”
Please note that the EOC is not explicitly UR. It’s a bit bouncy in that issue, and some saints suggested that UR is the final end, but the general agreement is that the potential UR is so far away we should as well assume it is not there.
I really don’t know God’s conversion rates outside of hell right now, either. And neither do you! 
But, if you think God’s conversion rates outside of hell amount to billions of people being lost and thrown hopelessly into the LOF neverendingly, do you think that’s because God must be a lousy preacher?!
Your remarks, as usual, are shortsighted and self-refuting. Which is why, having other fish to fry, I didn’t bother replying to your assertion about billions emptied out of hell/hades and not found recorded in the BOL–a claim about numbers you sure aren’t getting from Rev 20 or anywhere else in RevJohn. When John talks about superlarge numbers in RevJohn, he’s seeing massive salvational victories from sin (and in at least one case even a total victory of all created creatures loyally praising God eventually for His mighty saving victories), not massive failures in saving people from sin.
(“Remnant” language refers pretty routinely either to the currently small proportion of people being saved or being more-or-less loyal to God at the time of the writing, e.g. only a remnant of Jews being Christians at the time of Paul writing the Romans epistle; or to the survivors of the tribulation and the coming of the Day of YHWH. Merely surviving the tribulation without getting killed has nothing at all to do with being saved, as some people survive still in rebellion–but according to the OT convert in large numbers afterward!–and some saved people die but are resurrected along with the wicked, although to eonian life instead of eonian crisis.)
That’s your hopelessness and despair about the gospel talking. Not the eonian gospel of RevJohn talking.
Already addressed in the other thread on that topic. And if you had understood my comment to you about 1 Pet 3:18-19, you would not think I was using it for testimony of future post-mortem salvation (since I brought it up in context of present post-mortem salvation. I have plenty of other scriptures for future post-mortem salvation; I had explicitly said I only have a few pointing to present post-mortem salvation, 1 Pet being the most prominent.)
I appreciate you reiterating, though, that (despite what you wrote earlier in this thread, which I was replying to by ref to 1 Pet) you do after all believe that people who die with a sin or spiritual death nature, not having been born again and not having eonian life, can be and in fact have been saved by Jesus post-mortem, and that their sin or spiritual death nature was not ultimately what decided where they spent all eternity. I assure you, I’ll remember your acknowledgment of this in the future. 
For example. 
Obviously you think not all who have this nature will follow the devil into eternal fire after death, or you wouldn’t have acknowledged that Christ was saving people post-mortem who had already died with a spiritual death nature.
Keeping in mind that I actually don’t claim billions are going into the LoF (nor that billions aren’t) at the judgment: do you really think if Almighty God could not convert billions of people who lived and died before and during and after your life, that He could possibly succeed regarding you?
Clearly you do not see the fallacy in this yet (at the time of your post). But considering you are someone who by your own admission only recently became a Christian, you ought to be able to see your fallacy: do you really think if Almighty God could not convert you until a handful of years ago, that He could possibly have succeeded regarding you eventually?
That God has not yet saved person X from sin after such-n-such time is not even the slightest evidence that God will never be able to save person X from sin. Ditto for any number of persons Xn.
A position you yourself acknowledged in this thread and recently elsewhere is false. But which you conveniently forgot, because it wasn’t convenient to your attempt at trying to argue against my belief that God is evangelizing now including in hades.
I have always and everywhere believed and stated that the LoF judgment is an act of justice. I believed that from 1976 to early 2000, and have continued to believe it from early 2000 to early 2012. My understanding of what justice primarily entails changed early in 2000, thanks to studying trinitarian theology and coming to study the Greek scriptures more closely. But I defy you to find anywhere, at any time, that I have ever once denied that God’s punishment is an act of justice, including in the Lake of Fire, or where I have ever once denied that God does not act with total success to fulfill justice.
This is another indication that you do not at all understand me (not to say other URs) and really aren’t interested in doing so. After dozens of months of opportunity here, both active and lurking, to figure out that I strenuously affirm the total justice of God, and refuse to ever deny it (against more than a few non-universalists, not incidentally!–and against some universalists, too!), this is what you think: that I don’t grasp that the LoF judgment is an act of justice.
You are however correct that I don’t grasp (anymore, although I used to grasp it quite strongly–something else you conveniently forget) that the LoF is not a form of correction.
Your argument depends on mixing your metaphors. We do in fact routinely consider life sentences in prison to be opportunities for correction, and rejoice when prisoners repent, even if they cannot come out of prison yet. But since that would be obviously antithetical to your analogy, you switch metaphors to the death penalty, which by analogy would be annihilation not ECT.
As for me, I actually do regard judicial death penalty sentences here on earth a remedial punishment (handing over the flesh for destruction in the hope that their spirit will be saved in the day of the Lord to come); and the vestigal remnants of this hope survive in the classic judicial benediction when carrying out the death sentence: “May God have mercy on your soul. Proceed!”
URs think that what is impossible with man is possible with God when it comes to salvation, just like Jesus said. How dare we!
You didn’t read whom you quoted from very well, or you would have anticipated the reply (which in fact is rather popular among universalists, although I don’t appeal to it), that “eis ton aiona”, or into the eon, thus means “a term or limit, up to, towards, until” “an age or time”.
The phrase can denote never-ending eternity, but it doesn’t necessarily have to, as your own source acknowledges. When you understand what “eis” means (usually a term or limit, up to or until a certain point), “up to or until an age” makes perfect sense. 
(Although it can also mean forever by expanded metaphor. But when it does it’s a metaphorical expansion of language that literally would mean a very limited although long period of time.)
While Paidion is correct that it means “into”, your source is correct about it typically referring to a limit, whether up to the limit or crossing over a boundary point (like going into Tennessee from Kentucky). It can also mean “for”, by the way, which is why English translations sometimes read “for the age” rather than “into the age”.
Some of us are possessed of this thing called “memory”, allowing us to remember what you say. But in case you change it later, this will help archive why they were complaining.
I notice that you didn’t explain what you meant by “you” meaning URPilgrim and a bunch of URs “are going to have a rude awakening at the judgment seat if you don’t receive correction before you die.”
But Christian URs are Christian because we do receive correction before we die. Your followup that “it is possible for any Christian to be blotted out of the BOL. Rev 3:5” is true but irrelevant to what you typed unless you meant that URs as such are going to be blotted out of the BoL if they don’t receive correction before they die about being URs despite being Christian.
So yes you did hint that URs are not saved by being URs, or else you were only typing without paying attention to what you were saying. (Not unusually. )
These are people who by all accounts were definitely not saved yet, and worse were actually hypocrites in regard to their salvation! Christ hadn’t started exposing and disciplining them yet, but He was about to.
So in fact the Lord disciplines (with the same terminology) those who are not yet believers. That’s often how they come to be believers; which is exactly what Christ is hoping for if they don’t repent first (although He would prefer they repent first and so not have to come to the exposing and disciplining.)
This is also covered in another thread you set up for purposes of discussing that topic.
Since in exactly the same verse the Hebraist says that “all have become partakers” of that same chastisement or correction, the distinction must mean that those who refuse or otherwise act against their chastisement or correction are refusing legitimate sonship. Thus also the warning of the Proverbalist being quoted by the Hebraist: “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord”.
To Lefein’s list of verses, by the way, can be adduced Col 1:20, where in Christ the entire fullness (even if that’s the entire fullness of deity as in the next chapter’s use of that phrase) delights to dwell “and through [Christ] to reconcile the-all into Him, making peace through the blood of His cross–through Him, whether those on the earth or those in the heavens.”
You have to change what the meaning of reconcile means there, compared to how Paul uses it one verse later, to avoid this meaning that God does save all sinners from their sins through Christ. This is at least as much of a parity as your complaint that “URs change the meaning of aionion” which you started this thread about, seeing as how “eon” and its cognates (even “eonian”) does sometimes mean less than forever (as you have had to reluctantly admit with much grudging and heel-dragging); but you are going to have much harder trouble finding examples of “reconcile” not meaning the making of peace between sinners and those they have sinned against (which not incidentally is explicitly what Col 1:20 reference, too.)
That is absolutely not what Paul says to the pagan philosophers at the Mars Hill forum. He appeals to them that their own prophets have said that all persons are already the offspring of God, and on this ground therefore that they should not think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stonework or any image formed by the art and thought of man, i.e. they should stop being idolaters.
Your continued appeal to Galatians 4, flatly ignoring the contextual explanations offered about it as though no one bothered to write about the cultural issues involved there, is pointless. But you do not even bother to quote the verses leading into that (although others did), because those would ruin your point: “Now I am saying, for as much time as the inheritor is a minor, in nothing is he of more consequence than a slave, although he is master of all, but is under guardians and administrators until the time purposed by the father. Thus we also, when we were minors [before becoming Christians], were enslaved under the elements of this world.”
This is the explicit context of the verses you keep referencing from Gal 4: the people you are saying were not sons, not only were sons but were heirs!
That is direct evidence that Paul here is talking about the paterfamilia social concept accepted by Mediterranean societies in general, including the Hebrews from ancient times and in the days of St. Paul (when Rome had made it the law of the empire): the son of the father, until he matures, is legally considered the same as a slave, and the father decides when to confer the special privileges of operating as a representative member of the family. If the son refuses to mature but insists on behaving irresponsible, the father is under no obligation to confer the inheritance; but the son is still the son of the father and potentially the heir even if the father has not yet conferred the family authority.
In this case, Paul extends the analogy by talking about the guardians of the heir-children having rebelled and so now holding the heirs in bondage, keeping them in the status of slaves. God sends His only-begotten Son to rectify this. (This is also what the “ransom” is about: the paying of the price to raise up someone from the status of captivity to the status of freedom.)
You yourself routinely don’t think it’s as simple as that, when trying to defend against Rom 5 and related verses which prophesy that all shall be alive in Christ as all died in Adam.
Your KJV must be leading you wrong if it says anywhere in the 9 verses before Malachi 2:10 or the 2 verses afterward that the one father is supposed to be Abraham. Hebrew rhetorical parallel repetition, saying the same thing two ways: “Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us?” I have numerous translations, including several super-literal ones in Hebrew, and none of them indicate a reference to Abraham as the father in the prior or subsequent contexts. (It does talk about profaning the covenant of “our fathers”, plural, i.e. the covenant with God their Father!–but that does not mean “we all have one father” refers to Abraham. You could try arguing that it refers to Levi, if you want, per verse 4; but I think you already know that that isn’t going to help your case here.)
Moreover, the context is not about mere adultery, as you might have noticed if you had read those verses yourself instead of only briefly glancing over them. It’s about spiritual adultery against God, i.e. idolatry. The people being talked about there are rank traitors and unbelievers among Israel, and especially among the priests. (Mere adultery is adduced against them later in vv.14-17, but that is not what is being complained about back around verse 10.) They are not sons of God in the sense of being righteous loyal followers, thus not sons of God at all as far as you’re concerned.
Fortunately, YHWH will come suddenly to His temple someday (i.e. in the Day of the Lord to come) and hopelessly punish those rebel priests with eternal conscious torment or annihilation.
(Or maybe instead He will purify them and refine them like gold and silver so that they may present to YHWH offerings in righteousness after which their offerings will be pleasing to YHWH as in the days before. For He is like refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap. Which is what YHWH actually prophesies shortly afterward in chapter 3 concerning the fate of those rebels in the Day of the Lord to come. But I realize your opinion differs on that. )
Paul apparently thought all those pagan philosophers he was lecturing to, were! Or how many Christians at the Mars Hill forum do you think he was witnessing to so that they might accept Christ and be saved, Aaron? (Luke says some converted afterward, but doesn’t say any were already Christians before then. The way he talks about them implies none were–they had brought him in to listen to him talk about some new god they had never heard of before, though Paul says they certainly had heard of Him after all.)
But really, you are taking standard Jewish talk about the omnipresence and utter finality of God (Who doesn’t exist within anything larger and next to Whom nothing else exists on par at the same level of reality), and trying to reduce it down to only talking about people who happen to be Christians already.
Lef’s answer about forming fallen David (or fallen anyone else, up to and including Mary the mother of God) in the womb and breathing life into him, is entirely correct and appropriate as an answer. And I say that while also believing strongly in genetic original sin (unlike Lef).
God is still our creator and sustainer, even when we are sinners; and is still our Father.
Not incidentally, your KJV adds a word to Eph 4:6 to make it read “in all you”, because it’s following the Textus Receptus, which wasn’t even following the most prevalent addition there {hemin} (irregular dative form of “us”, so “to us” or “for us”, the preposition of which the KJV doesn’t bother to translate either) but rather a reading found in only a bare handful of late sources {humin} (dative form of “you”, so “to you” or “for you”.)
So you should be sure to write a letter to the current propagators of the 1611 KVJ to warn them about the consequences of anyone “adding to God’s word” (the “you”) or “taking away from God’s word” (whatever preposition would be implied by the dative form of “us”).
In other words, the verse there if it originally read {hemin} (as quite a number of respectable texts and text families have), would be “one God and Father of all, the One above all and through all and in all to us” (not “of us” nor “in us all”). Or if it originally read {humin} (as only a couple of late texts have, plus the TR compilation on which the KJV was based), the verse would be “one God and Father of all, the One above all and through all and in all to you” (not “of you” nor “in you all”).
But if it originally read no pronoun there (in dative form or otherwise), as another respectably wide and even earlier set of texts and families have it (including Patristics who were definitely no friend to universalism like Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome, although also some famous universalists like Origen and Gregory-Nyssa), then it simply reads “and in all” at the end. The way it usually does everywhere else this sort of statement is made.
But even if there is a pronoun at the end, that would be part of the set of phrases explicitly set by Paul after the statement that there is one God the Father of all. And that phrase has exactly no variations.
I am amazed you can bring yourself to smile cheerfully while stating that those who only have eonian life in them (“a spiritually alive nature or God’s nature” “replacing the sin nature”) and no longer have the sin nature can and do still sin.
St. Paul, meanwhile, cries out against the death and sin that is still in him (Rom 7:14-25) and still looks forward to being set free from it, even though he has no condemnation in Christ (8:1). There’s the already/not-yet again.
Dad says in His word that He loves those of His children who are destroyed and dead, and rejoices when in their misery (call it disgust if you don’t want to call it fear) they finally come to their senses, repent and come home.
If you can’t even attain to the standard of the two most famous parables in the world (even among people who have never opened a Bible), you have no business trying to instruct people on what the Bible means. You act as though the Pharisee lawyer was correct to challenge Jesus in order to justify himself about who his neighbor is and is not.
“What shall I be doing to be enjoying the inheritance of eonian life?”
“Love God and love your fellow brother (a son of God as you are).”
“Feh! Who is my brother?!”
If you think the point of the parable was only restricted to the distinction between neighbors, you’ve missed the point. And if you think the point was to show the Pharisee that the Samaritan whom he thought was not a son of God was his fellow brother after all, you’ve still missed at least half the point: because the Samaritan treated the other man as his fellow son of God, in complete disregard of whether the man was a righteous Pharisee (or Christian) or a hypocritical Pharisee (or Christian) or a pagan or anything else. The only salient point was that the other man needed saving.
Which is entirely relevant to that extensive commentary I provided on the narrative and thematic contexts of the judgment of the sheep and the baby goats (literally the least of Christ’s flock in that judgment), which you first pretended to comment on with a brief cut-and-paste (demonstrating only that you hadn’t remotely understood what I was talking about), and then afterward pretended no one had ever talked about the contexts of.
Which brings us back to your (now heavily revised) OP, since you were concerned about that after participating hugely in the topical drift. I gave plenty of analysis indicating why contextually we should expect two different durational meanings of “eonian” there; you can only claim there is not the slightest contextual reason for doing so by flatly ignoring what I wrote in detail about the contexts. Which not surprisingly is exactly what you have done, choosing of your own accord to hare off into other topics which you thought to challenge me on rather than deal with what you asked us to supply that I supplied.
God routinely says that He gives death. And then makes alive after having given death. Typically in some context where he expects the one(s) He has slain to learn from it and repent. (But I can see from that why you would prefer not to remember that God takes away life as well as gives it.)
You are also now treading hard on effectively denying supernaturalistic theism, as your position involves things existing without God having to actively keep them in existence (which not incidentally is also directly denying scriptural testimony on that topic), thus being dependent on something other than God for existence (themselves or Satan or Nature or whatever).
This thread, having been started by Aaron Curry (aka “Revival” among other pseudonyms and nicknames on the board), is being locked down pursuant to review of Aaron’s banning from the board. Other threads started by Aaron (and possibly some threads with his majority participation) will also be locked down at the convenience of the ad/mods, in order to protect Aaron from receiving critiques while he is unable to defend himself.