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Post by jb on Jul 25, 2019 12:40:50 GMT -8
On September 24th, Yale will release __That All Shall Be Saved
: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation__ by David Bentley Hart.  It will make quite a stir. Online forums and denominational leaders of every religious stripe will vociferously denounce it as heretical or praise it for its high-minded and lucid prose. Click Here for yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300246223/all-shall-be-saved DBH will advance both logical arguments, dialectically, and affective appeals, emotionally. He’ll offer up reinterpretations of Scripture, exegetically, and of Tradition, patristically. I have no advance copy but … those are educated guesses. I’ll just cut & paste Yale’s marketing bit, below, not concerned with fair use (since it’s inherently promotional material): A stunning reexamination of one of the essential tenets of Christian belief from one of the most provocative and admired writers on religion today
The great fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea once observed that, in his time, most Christians believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all would eventually attain salvation. But today, this view is no longer prevalent within Christian communities.
In this momentous book, David Bentley Hart makes the case that nearly two millennia of dogmatic tradition have misled readers on the crucial matter of universal salvation. On the basis of the earliest Christian writings, theological tradition, scripture, and logic, Hart argues that if God is the good creator of all, he is the savior of all, without fail. And if he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare. But it is not so. There is no such thing as eternal damnation; all will be saved. With great rhetorical power, wit, and emotional range, Hart offers a new perspective on one of Christianity’s most important themes.
David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator. His books include The Experience of God and The New Testament.
End of Yale promo My own stance has evolved over the years. First, I was a practical universalist, defending a notion of hell as an indispensable theoretic concept, necessary for a coherent account of freedom. Slowly, I came to see the reasonableness of stances like that of DBH, but considered them heterodox. I next came to accept them as legitimate theological opinions, possibly orthodox, just not anything to which I would personally subscribe. Finally, I made the leap, substantiated by my own systematic argument (perhaps idiosyncratic but certainly overlapping with folks like DBH), where I now “dogmatically” hold to a universalist posture as most likely representing the truth, theologically. I’m not here to explicate my stance or to urge or defend it or that of DBH and others. Just tossing it out there. I’ll certainly answer a few questions as best that could be done succinctly & accessibly. Personal note: “succinct accessibility” is a pedagogical talent that comes naturally to some and must be learned by others. I’m lagging on that learning curve, so don’t want to offend charity by inadvertently lapsing into my dense idiosyncratic prose. Oftentimes, I’m sure my struggles to express what I have imagined to have learned have more to do with my own lack of a full understanding. Simplifying stuff comes easiest when one more fully grasps what may be complex. Anyway, if God and ultimate realities seem conceptually simple to one, then, whatever it is one is thinking about, it’s decidedly neither of those realities? |
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 25, 2019 13:03:28 GMT -8
I have long held the belief that an all-loving God could never condemn anyone to the eternal fires of damnation. God would know the trials and tribulations which most of mankind faces in life are punishment enough. Why would he create us to later simply punish the majority of us? This is a perverse way of thinking. Better to have avoided all the misery by never having putting creation in motion.
I have no idea who or what God is, but if he is just and all-loving, then he will know he would bear a significant amount of the "guilt" for putting us here in the first place. Thus he would not be too hard on the rest of us. Maybe a short while in purgatory and then onward to bliss. My optimistic view is that we were created to experience the joys and pains of life and through these, grow through learning and experience, thus bring us closer to God through consciousness. As far as I know, a rock doesn't experience any of these things.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 14:32:06 GMT -8
I’ll be waiting for Sean Hannity’s interview with The Almighty. I’ll have to check my local listing for that. That’s when we’ll get some clarity on the matter.
As for scripture, it seems pretty clear that “narrow is the gate and difficult is the path which leads to life…” Still, we don’t write the rules. Who knows?
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 14:53:08 GMT -8
He gave us Eve. Isn’t that punishment enough? Rimshot.
But seriously, folks. I guess the discussion would be, or should be, regarding how we can look beyond mere human conventions, aspirations, or wishes and distinguish between what God says and what human beings say God says. And it occurs to me that any opinion I have will simply be stuffing my words into God’s mouth.
So how do we reach beyond our own egos and interests and move toward some kind of knowledge of such things that is deeper and real?
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 25, 2019 15:16:05 GMT -8
You have a point.
I believe it is impossible to know God. Reason is merely a way of trying to fit God into a comprehensible framework. It can only go so far. There are those who appear to have had some sort of personal revelation from God, but these are so personal as to be useless when trying to bring about a general understanding of the Almighty. Perhaps the only way to know God is individually and that "knowing" might vary significantly from person to person.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 15:29:32 GMT -8
Methods? Certainty? Levels of transferability to others?
But it does seem to me that if you take the Gospel as gospel, there is punishment for sinners and rewards for the just. Whether this is a human invention or the way God does things is perhaps the real question. Anything we add will just be opinion.
I’ve always heard that you can’t judge god. And there is some merit to this point of view. We can certainly judge things, and I don’t think it’s wrong that we do. Why, for instance (as I was discussing with someone the other day), was Mr. Rogers taken from us at 50 with stomach cancer when the world is full of the most disgustingly evil people who live until they are 80?
It’s a correct question of justice to wonder what kind of world God has fashioned when there is so much endemic injustice, even making allowances for issues of free will.
We can only wonder. And this is really the Christian faith aspect: I will take a leap of faith and act in accordance with the idea that my ultimate well being is in safe hands as I walk a path with at least one foot set in eternity.
There are all kinds of immediate reasons to not love your neighbor, to commit every one of the seven deadly sins, and to just all-around eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we will die. It takes either a fool or a savant to believe in something outside this. And one is never quite sure which of these one may be, if one is either.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 17:56:19 GMT -8
JB, I believe your style of writing is sincere. You think that way in your own head regarding certain topics and you then often write it out that way.
I rail against pompous intellectualism and verbal diarrhea. But I’ve come to accept you as a force of nature and I hope everyone else does. People should know that JB can write at length in exquisite clear prose. But when tackling some of the subjects dear to him, he is thicker than molasses.
Please accept that as I have. And neither can I even begin to understand the scribblings of Einstein on his blackboard. But do I call Einstein an idiot?
Still, I will (in this world of misdirection, pomposity, egotism, and lies) encourage everyone for clarity, brevity, and to have a point.
One question I have regarding the subject at hand: It is obvious that in any lengthy text (such as the Bible, Old and New Testament), one could fashion any interpretation by cherry-picking quotes. There’s just a lot in there.
Do you know if this book is more the product of how the author wants the world to be or if he instead has a good argument that takes in contradictory evidence (and surely it is all throughout the Bible) without simply dismissing it as irrelevant or unimportant?
Dennis Prager, for me, makes the most sense about God. He believes in a good God and a god of judgment, and that it would be contradictory for god to be good if he gave a pass to evil.
From that standpoint, we humans also punish evil, and necessarily so. We may suppose that Jehovah will be a fairer judge, and even more merciful. But no judgment whatsoever? To me, that seems to elicit a view not from the Bible but from a kind of pop “non-judgmental” vibe going around that, in my opinion, is fairly inane.
If one gives a pass to evil (and I’m saying the eternal torment is just or necessary), then how is our life (particularly our suffering, our good acts, or our acts of sacrifice) then not meaningless?
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Post by timothylane on Jul 25, 2019 19:44:30 GMT -8
As I believe I've mentioned before, my mother had a brief flirtation with the Jehovah's Witnesses. As best I could gather, their view of Hell involved the obliteration of the damned. Thus, there would be no eternal punishment, but the damned would never receive salvation. Their souls would simply end. Of course, this might not sound like much of a punishment, but it hardly matters at that point anyway.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 25, 2019 20:11:46 GMT -8
Ah, therein lies the rub. I don't.
Over the decades I have read countless books about this religion and that religion. Philosophy and metaphysics. Theology or basic belief. Epiphany or reason. In our times, I have seen nothing which hasn't already been hashed out by the Epicureans, Stoics, Pythagoreans and countless other theorists. Nothing is new, but I do wonder how technology will eventually change things.
One of the things which is very helpful in Will Durant's volumes on Greece and Rome is that he goes over all the vary thinkers from crackpots to virtuous men in a compact space. To distill this information down to the number pages he uses must have been an enormous task. It certainly helps if someone is interested in getting a broad perspective of the West's intellectual development and how our foundational beliefs solidified themselves in our culture.
One thing I can say without any fear of being wrong is that for all their great intellectual achievements, our Greek and Roman ancestors where still too often vicious and violent people. And for all the complaints one hears about Christians and the Inquisition/etc., there is no doubt in my mind that the final triumph of Christianity in the West helped tamp down the level of wanton violence which would appear to be inherent in mankind.
I may start quoting some of the different passages which Durant wrote in the 1930s.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 25, 2019 20:27:41 GMT -8
I give Christianity a lot of credit for civilizing the pagans of Europe. Until Christianity pagan tribes viewed their future and life after death through the structures of the tribe. A man may die but he lives on in the lives of his children inside the tribe. Christianity changed this system that existed for thousands of years and very quickly.
Christianity promised to the pagans and heathens a life after death separate from the restrictive confines of the tribe. This philosophy was so powerful that entire tribes converted, often with prodding from their rulers. Over just a few hundred years the tribe became a province, then few more hundred years a region and by the mid 16th century a nation state.
The remarkable thing is how fast, 30 years or so, and our culture seems to be reverting to pagan ways. Even the media is mentioning the deterioration of our culture. For this we, Christians and Jews must accept blame. We have failed to adequately defend the virtues of western civilization from those, communists and moslems, whose goal is the destruction of the west.
If you consider the best of Roman civilization to be the first two centuries of the common era that the novo west has had a good run. From the fall of Rome in 476 to the beginnings of what we now call western culture was a thousand years. I wonder if anyone will be around to pick up the pieces if we fall again. The fall can be so much faster then the climb.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 25, 2019 20:35:48 GMT -8
Every religious tradition claims to be "the one and only true faith" . That must be right I read it on the label. Intellectually, we all know that none are entirely right and some are more wrong than others.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 25, 2019 21:01:29 GMT -8
Artler, I’m a heretic when it comes to Christianity. Regarding what Christians saw as the goal and what God/Jesus saw as the goal are two different things.
Arguable, the only person who did Christianity right was St. Francis. (A broad statement, but for sake of argument. Yes, there's Paul. I get it.)
A clue to this whole issue is found in Matthew 19:
You could tell that Jesus wasn’t born just yesterday. You can sense he knew what was coming. There even seems to be a little sarcasm in his voice.
We see the seeds of “Christianity” in Jesus’ interaction with the man who wanted the trappings of righteousness but without the cost. Perhaps in Jesus’ words we can see the basic moral commandments as a minimum for the plebs which could translate as, “For goodness sakes, no natter what you believe, keep these commandments and you’ll be going a long long way to be right with God.”
The quasi-heckler wasn’t satisfied with that. He pretended to want to go deeper. Jesus called his bluff. But he wasn’t lying about how to go deeper. Francis took that path and changed the world. For the plebs, it’s enough to keep the commandments, do unto others, etc. Not everyone is or can be of the same understanding about these things. But those are easy and clear guidelines. Only the dishonest will have a hard time not understanding them. This is the minimum to do, and is likely enough.
For those who want to go deeper (as Francis did), it’s not hard to see that the point isn’t “Christianity,” of joining a club where you’re anointed as better and you have goals to save everyone else (if only to show how much better you are). The point was to follow Jesus. Whether one was in a position to sell all one had or not, the clear point was that one’s possessions in this world were secondary.
Maybe “hell” is a way for God to scare the plebs into good behavior, but He reserves the right to mete out punishments as He sees fit. But for those who rise at least slightly above the animal, the calling is rather clear. Follow Jesus, not “Christianity.” And it’s not a riddle in Matthew 10:39 when it says “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” One is to fundamentally change one’s approach to life, to fundamentally turn topsy-turvy the things you value.
If you can’t figure out that rather clear message from Jesus then you (or me) are in the position of the rich guy who is trying to find the easy path (the wide gate) when, if you get down to it, it’s the narrow gate that is called for. We can chide the Pharisees for their two-facedness and hypocrisy, but those messages were meant as an example for us. The plank definitely needs to come out of the eye to understand that lesson. Most of us are bullshitters looking to find ways around the hard stuff while still wanting to be seen as The Righteous.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 25, 2019 21:09:44 GMT -8
I think one way to view Christ's response is that he saw that which the young man truly worshiped, mammon. And Jesus then demanded the young man reject his false god and follow him. While the worship of mammon is a rather common religion, I suspect there are many other gods which we follow which have an equally strong hold on us and separate us from the true path. Jesus' message was simple, but not easy to follow.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 25, 2019 21:15:08 GMT -8
This is what made it so difficult for me, particularly the notion of forgiving one's enemies. Emotionally I'm not capable of it. I doubt I could give up all my possessions, either, but hardly anyone actually does. If that's the standard, Heaven is going to be awfully empty.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 26, 2019 7:02:26 GMT -8
Yeah, maybe so.
One of the interesting aspects of universal salvation might be in how it effects our attitudes toward earthly judgment. If God gives everyone a pass, shouldn’t we? If “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” is tossed out, what basis is there for any kind of objective morality, let alone a legal system?
In essence, what would keep the world (or the West) from becoming one big outdoor bathroom such as San Francisco? Who am I to judge?
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 26, 2019 7:13:17 GMT -8
LOL. You’re probably right. But I think it’s pretty clear, going by the New Testament, that the standards are much lower than that.
If universal salvation is true, they’re much lower than even that. It’s not Heaven as much as it is Kindergarten where you get a gold star just for showing up. And I don’t mean to ridicule the notion, per se. But there is that aspect of it. And maybe an argument can be made, given the difficulties and uncertainties of existence from our end, that’s how it should be.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 26, 2019 7:50:39 GMT -8
The question I have is whether the idea of universal salvation is separate from the modern impetus to “Don’t judge me.” You can’t watch a modern TV series or movie without that coming up.
Do I think our judgments should be more balanced? Of course. In his own time, Francis was aghast at the practices of punishments meted out.
But what he didn’t do was to say that having moral standards was the problem in the first place. (And he made robust and fine-tuned judgments in regards to keeping his Brothers to the the rules of the Order as they were laid out.) He did not appear to share the vibe of many of todays “non-judgmental” types that we should let everyone out of jail because the real problem is making judgments in the first place.
I take if for granted that the Creator can judge (or not judge) as He likes. My question is why anyone would be inclined to prefer a Creator who made no judgments. If being too judgmental has costs, so does being non-judgmental. We can make a wreck of people’s lives when we just give bad behavior a pass and pat ourselves on the back for doing so. It takes something special to be a real adult. And real adults have to make judgments. Good parents have to make judgments. They don’t just let everything pass so that their kids always like them. (Well, apparently there are far too many who do act in this way.)
People need guidance and they need penalties if they cross over the line. It’s not kind to victims of rape to just give the perpetrators a pass, thinking that talking nice to them is the answer. Could we really expect less of God?
Again, I’m not God and I don’t set the Cosmic rules. He does. Dennis Prager often quotes Micah 6:8 as the essence of the Jewish and Christian orientation in a nutshell: Act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.
One will note that this is a mix of things that have to be balanced. Act justly…but temper it with mercy (but obviously don’t throw out the entire idea of justice itself).
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 26, 2019 7:57:03 GMT -8
After writing this yesterday, I started reading Durrant's "The Age of Faith" which starts with Constantine and goes into the growth of the Church. Only 51 pages in, I came upon St. Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius, born about 340) who was, to quote Durrant, "the leading advocate of asceticism-one of the greatest scholars and most brilliant writers ever produced by the Christian Church."
St. Jerome apparently loved his classical writers such as Virgil and Cicero. So much so that even when he went to a desert hermitage as a young man, he brought along his books and couldn't quite cut the cord with beautiful writing. He tells the story of a dream he had that changed this.
..dragged before the Judge's judgement seat. I was asked to state my condition, and replied that I was a Christian. But He Who presided said, "Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also."
St. Jerome makes the point more elegantly, but we both come to the same conclusion.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 26, 2019 8:21:23 GMT -8
Yes, but, do you agree with this? Wasn’t that a little extreme? I truly appreciate the purity of the efforts made (such as those by Francis), but there can be a sort of destructive puritanism that can creep into religious practices when the voice of conscience becomes the voice of obsession.
I’m on record noting that God gave us assholes, penises, excrement, pain, aging, and death. This does not seem to be a world where one must live the perfect life. I’m not even sure how that is defined.
And those who attempt to do so can either be saints or crazy zealots, and perhaps it’s fair to say the two are not mutually exclusive. But when I take off to my monastery, I’m taking my books and I’m not going to feel guilty about it. The iPad is coming as well.
And I do think Jesus was calling that guy’s bluff, especially when he said “If you want to be perfect.” Clearly we don’t have to be perfect, although aspirations in that direction are surely a good thing.
But didn’t Jesus face all kinds of judgmental malarky? Oh, you should not drink wine and use expensive oils. All of that should be given to the poor. You shouldn’t hang out with ex-prostitutes. It doesn’t look good. It seems to me Jesus had a handle on balancing The Good Life.
We might note in the context of the monastic life that the Jesuits have become extremely destructive to traditional (and healthy) norms. God surely smiles on the enthusiasm of some of these guys. But trying to create perfection on earth can lead to problems.
The article for Encyclopedia Britannica says:
Most modern liberal Christians would cringe at the notion….as would I. To label anything as “Pagan” just because it’s fails to meet some arbitrary standard seems goofy. This kind of stuff easily can turn to a debilitating superstition.
That said, if that is one’s chosen path, I find it commendable. I think the problem comes when one person’s need or preference is universalized. It might even become enforced. But I think you can devote your life totally to God and still read Melville’s Moby Dick.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 26, 2019 11:16:24 GMT -8
No. We should be able to discern the difference between enjoying something and becoming its slave. One would assume that in the case of Jesus and the rich young man, Jesus was able to do this. In the case of St. Jerome, it would appear he could not, but it must also be noted that his conclusion is what one would expect from logic. This is why reliance on pure logic can be dangerous. Stalin's positions were very logical, based on his being a Marxist/Leninist and his belief in that religion.
They say the beginning of wisdom is realizing our ignorance of things. Perhaps it is really understanding that things are not always what they appear to be and that we cannot always be right.
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