Daniel Kirk has a response to Richard Beck (whose starting post I didn’t link to). Essentially, Kirk makes two points. One has to do with how the story fits together. He speaks of a:

“continuity between this life and the next. And, the plea for universalism indicates a similar failure. The way the Christian story works, as all good stories do, is by a measure of continuity between one scene and the next – even when we recognize the presence of a hero who comes in and rescues people from what would otherwise be the natural course of their actions.”

In other words, the present with its “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” and “What we do in life echoes in eternity” should not be separated. For Kirk, at the end of the day, the

“…reason one why I am not a universalist is because the story indicates a continuity between this life and the next such that there are those who demonstrate themselves to be children of the kingdom and those who are demonstrating themselves to not be so (re)born.”

The second reason for his not being a universalist has to do with free will. For Kirk, those who want free will can’t have it both ways. He says:

“After asserting that everything is entirely up to us, that God would never force anyone to choose God or love God, in the end we are not willing to accept that there might be grave, even eternal consequences to this act of freedom. In the end, we are asking for God to overcome our freedom by a mighty act of universal election.”

In other words, the universalist wants free will but at the same time if things that we do now echo in eternity (such as not repenting and choosing against God), then:

“If we are going to so stridently insist on a God who is willing that his creatures choose or reject God in freedom, I think we need to have the courage to posit a God who is willing to live with the consequences of that freedom—a God who, in the end, is willing to say to us who have rejected God, ‘Your will be done.’”

Beck comes along and says that he has given up on free will because:

“as the years passed my confidence in free will eroded. I worried about moral luck and social location. More, my training in psychology exposed me to neuroscience, behavioral genetics, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and behavioral analysis. I eventually concluded that humans were not radically free.”

And as I’ve posted him here before, he speaks about how very few of us “rise” above to make radical changes in our lives (except for Oprah).

Of course I don’t buy into the fact that we can’t overcome especially given that it will be simply us and God (with no other “distractions”). But I don’t buy Kirk’s idea especially as it is conveyed via his freewill spiel. Look at the story of this guy and tell me that sin is not complex, difficult and web like.

http://www.wilsonstation.com/?p=4533