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I think some of the verses you listed are hyperbolic

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The quote chosen by J.R. Packer, from Owen's book which he was reviewing.
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by J. I. Packer -- Chapter 8, A QUEST FOR GODLINESS, The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (J. I. Packer's introduction to a 1958 reprint of John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (Banner of Truth: London)

Footnote 23.
Owen indicates more than once that for a complete statement of the case against universal redemption he would need to write a further book, dealing with 'the other part of the controversy, concerning the cause of sending Christ' (pp 245, 295). Its main thesis, apparently, would have been that 'the fountain and cause of God's sending Christ, is his eternal love to his elect, and to them alone' (p 131)I, and it would have contained a more large explication of God's purpose of election and reprobation, Ishowing how the death of Christ was a means set apart and appointed for the saving of his elect, and not at all undergone or suffered for those which, in his eternal counsel, he did determine should perish for their sins' (p 245)I. It looks, therefore, as if it would have included the 'clearing of our doctrine of reprobation, and of the administration of God's providence towards the reprobates, and over all their actions', which Owen promised in the epistle prefixed to A Display of Arminianism (Works, X:9), but never wrote. However, we can understand his concluding that it was really needless to slaughter the same adversary twice. .
. .
.........

The parts I wonder about are (because they are identifiable to me as "double predestination" and seemingly at odds with John 3:16...):

.....Its main thesis, apparently, would have been that
.....'the fountain and cause of God's sending Christ,
.....is his eternal love to his elect, and to them alone'

.....and

.....showing how the death of Christ was a means
.....set apart and appointed for the saving of his elect,
.....and not at all undergone or suffered for those which,
.....in his eternal counsel, he did determine should
.....perish for their sins'

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add 1 Cor. 15:22-28 to your list of potential support for universalism.

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Benjamin Warfield ... basically argued that Jesus' statement was descriptive of the state of affairs at the time he was speaking but not meant to be a normative statement for all time.

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"As we said, however, Palamas lays particular stress on the fact of the hypostatic union in Christ's person of the divine and the human. From the Virgin, the Logos of God took on a body, although pure yet nonetheless mortal and capable of suffering. And he says on another occasion, as we saw, that it was not fitting for Christ to die a natural death -- not because he adopts any aphthartodeocetic notions, but because he sees death as being directly related to sin; and, for the same reason, neither John the Baptist nor the saints underwent a natural death. As a matter of fact, Palamas' teaching rules out all docetic concepts of regeneration in Christ; and everything he ways more specifically about the honor conferred on man's mortal body through the incarnation of the Logos of God is, as Kern observes, the Christian ascetic's hymn in praise of man and his body.

When the Logos of God took on human nature, He bestowed on it the fullness of His grace and delivered it from the bonds of corruption and death. The consequence of this hypostatic union in Christ of the two natures was the deification of the human nature He assumed: "For the Logos became flesh, and the flesh became the Logos, even through neither abandoned its own proper nature." Thus was brought about in Christ the regeneration of the "image" and its elevation towards the archetype.

The position adopted here by Palamas is in line with the so called "physical" view of deification. This "physical" view, which derives the deification of human nature from its hypostatic union with the incarnate Logos of God, was advanced by Irenaeus and further developed by Athanasius the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyriil of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, thus becoming the common property of the Orthodox tradition. Transposing the trinitarian doctrine on to an anthropological plane, Gregory of Nyssa teaches that the nature of man is one, but is distinguished into many individual hypostastasis But as John of Damascus points out, *1* "nature" can be understood to denote an abstraction, in which case it has no intrinsic reality; *2* secondly, to denote a species, in which case it comprises all the individual hypostases of that species; and *3* thirdly, it can be viewed as a particular, in which case it is linked with the nature of the species but does not comprise all its individual hypostatsis. The Logos of God made flesh did not take on human nature in the first two senses, because in the first case there would be no incarnation but only delusion, and in the second case there would be incarnation in all human individual hypostases. Therefore, what the Logos of God took on in His incarnation was the first fruit of our substance," individual nature, which did not previously exist as individual in itself, but came into existence in His hypostasis.

Gregory Palamas teaches explicitly that regeneration in Christ is not regeneration of individual human hypostases, but of responsible human nature, with which the Logos of God united Himself in His own hypostasis: "He renewed, not our hypostasis, but our nature, which He assumed, united to it in His own hypostasis." In the person of Christ existed, in its entirety, human nature individually particularized, which, being hypostatically unified with the Logos of God, was deified and received the fullness of the divine energy. For Palamas and the Orthodox tradition, the flesh of Christ, being the body of the Logos of God incarnate, is the point of man's contact with God, and furnishes the way to the Kingdom of heaven. Athanasius the Great formulates this briefly, saying that, whereas after Adam's transgression all men were led towards corruption, Christ's flesh, being the body of the Logos of God, was the first to be delivered and saved; and thereafter, he adds, we, "being one body with Him, are saved in His body; for in His body Christ leads us to the Kingdom of heaven and to His Father."

Through the deification of Christ's human nature, the "first fruits of our substance" were deified, and a "new root" was created, capable of instilling life and incorruptibility into its shoots. Possessing as it does the fulness of divine grace, it imparts this to men. For, as Palamas says, no one among created beings can contain the infinite power of the Spirit except He who was conceived in the virginal womb, through the coming of the Holy Spirit and the overshadowing of the Most High. It is because of this that He could contain within Himself "the fullness of divinity," whereas we can only receive "from His fullness."

The regeneration of man in Christ is not just his restoration to heaven. God in His wisdom converted Adam's self-willed defection into an opportunity for his advancement; "God in His wisdom and power knew how to convert the falls resulting from our self-willed defection to good ends."

But man's link with the new root in Christ does not derive from a natural cause, as does his link with the old root in Adam. Whereas men's descent from Adam links them automatically with the old root in him, union with the new root is brought about by free personal participation in the regeneration in Christ. Thus the "physical" view of deification developed by the Greek Fathers and by Palamas does not imply any mechanical commutation of humanity, but an ontological regeneration of human nature in the hypostasis of the incarnate Logos of God, accessible to every man who participates personally and freely in the life of Christ.

In deriving the deification of the human nature of Christ from its hypostatic union with the Logos of God, the Church Fathers and Palamas do not undertake the saving and regenerative significance of His death and resurrection; but they establish a secure foundation on which these can be safely considered as the sources of men's regeneration. In other words, the Church Fathers and Palamas are not concerned with the actual moment of the incarnation so much as with the entire fact of God's dispensation as achieved in the person of Christ, who was born, loved, taught, performed miracles, died, was resurrected and ascended into heaven.

The assumption of human nature by the Logos of God from the womb of the Virgin is the foundation and starting point of His incarnation and of the deification of humanity; their consummation is to be found in the passion and resurrection. Among the events of this divine dispensation, says Palamas,

....."the best of all or, rather, the incomparably and
.....uniquely best is the incarnation of the Lord Jesus
.....Christ, and most of all consummation of this,
.....the saving passion and the resurrection . . . For then
.....everything needed for our salvation was accomplished:
.....the perfect dispensation of the Son of God in
.....the flesh, His inspired teaching, the consequences of this
.....theandric activity, the imparting of the theandric
.....body, the divine saving sacrifice, the arising from the
.....dead after three days, the beginning of eternal life
.....and of the delight in God that it confers. "

The hardest battle against the devil was fought upon the Cross, and sin was abolished against thereby; the glorification of human nature in Christ was accomplished through the resurrection. Finally, Christ's ascension, as the crown of His dispensation, guided human nature to the glory of the Father."

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pp (28)29-32 in 'The Regeneration of Human Nature in Christ" -- Ch.1/sect 2 in Mandzaridis' "The Deification of Man",
(a book which is quoted by Robert Rakestraw of Bethel Seminary in his June '97 JETS article: "BECOMING LIKE GOD: AN EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE OF THEOSIS " available on the net at )

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The Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a/the sinner"), then, indicated both man's problem and God's solution, Jesus is the Savior, the anointed king, the one who has mercy. But the Prayer also tells us something more about the person of Jesus himself. He is addressed as "Lord" and "Son of God": here the Prayer speaks of his Godhead, of his transcendence and eternity. But he is addressed equally as "Jesus", that is, by the personal name which his mother and his foster-father gave him after his human birth in Bethlehem. So the Prayer speaks also of his manhood, of the genuine reality of his birth as a human being.

The Jesus Prayer is thus an affirmation of faith in Jesus Christ as alike truly divine and fully human. He is the Theanthropos or "God -man", who saves us from our sins precisely because he is God and man at once. Man could not come to God, so God has come to man -- by making himself human. In his outgoing or "ecstatic" love, God unites himself to his creation in the closest of all possible unions, by himself becoming that which he has created. God, as man, fulfills the mediatorial task which man rejected in the fall, Jesus our Savior bridges the abyss between God and man because he is both at once. As we say in one of the Orthodox hymns for Christmas Eve, "Heaven and earth are united today, for Christ is born. Today had God come down to earth, and man gone up to heaven".

The Incarnation, then, is God's supreme act of deliverance restoring us to communion with himself. But what would have happened if there had never been a fall? Would God have chosen to become man, even if man had never sinned? Should the Incarnation be regarded simply as God's response to the predicament of fallen man, or is it in some way part of the eternal purpose of God? Should we look behind the fall, and see God;s act of becoming man as the fulfillment of man's true destiny?

To this hypothetical question it is not possible for us, in our present situation, to give any final answer. Living as we do under the conditions of the fall, we cannot clearly imagine what God's relation to mankind would have been, had the fall never occurred. Christian writers have therefore in most cases limited their discussion of the Incarnation to the context of man's fallen state. But there are a few who have ventured to take a wider view, most notably St. Isaac the Syrian and St. Maximus the Confessor in the East, and Duns Scotus in the West. The Incarnation, says St. Isaac, is the most blessed and joyful thing that could possibly have happened to the human race. Can it be right, then, to assign a cause for this joyful happening something which might never have occurred, and indeed ought never to have done so? Surely, not only as an act of restoration, not only as a response to man's sin, but also and more fundamentally as an act of live, and expression of God's own nature. Even had there been no fall, God in his on limitless, outgoing love would still have chosen to identify himself with his creation by becoming man.

The Incarnation of Christ, looked at in this way, effects more than reversal of the fall, more than a restoration of man to his original state in Paradise. When God becomes man, this marks the beginning of an essentially new stage in the history of man, and not just a return to the past. The Incarnation raises man to a new level; the last state is higher than the first. Only in Jesus Christ do we see revealed the full possibilities of our human nature; until he is born, the true implications of our personhood are still hidden from us. Christ's birth, as St. Basil puts it, is "the birthday of the whole human race"; Christ is the first perfect man -- perfect, that is to say, not just in a potential sense, as Adam was in his innocence before the fall, but in the sense of the completely realized "likeness". The Incarnation, then, is not simply a way of undoing the effects of original sin, but it is an essential state upon man's journey from the divine image to the divine likeness. The true image and likeness of God is Christ himself, the Incarnation of Christ was in some way already implied. The true reason for the Incarnation, then, lies not in man's sinfulness but in his unfallen nature as a being made in the divine image and capable of union with God. (pp.69-71, "The Orthodox Way", K. Ware)

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The true reason for the Incarnation, then, lies not in man's sinfulness but in his unfallen nature as a being made in the divine image and capable of union with God.

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in "Perelandra" when the unfallen Adam and Eve of the planet Venus take the throne, after their trial and temptation, which they did resist. He describes a sort of "step up" at this point, which, while it is addressed to the Adam and Eve of that world, has echos of the incarnation.
"The world is born today," said Malacandra. "Today for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of Maleldil [the word for God in this book] that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be."

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The notion of sharing is a key alike to the doctrine of God in Trinity and to the doctrine of God made man. The doctrine of the Trinity affirms that, just as man is authentically personal only when he shares with others, so God is not a single person swelling alone, but three persons who share each other's life in perfect love. The Incarnation equally is a doctrine of sharing or participation. Christ shares to the full in what we are, and so he makes it possible for us to share in what he is, in his divine life and glory. He became what we are, so as to make us what he is.

Paul expresses this metaphorically in terms of wealth and poverty: "You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ: he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich" (2 Cor 8:9). Christ's riches are this eternal glory; Christ's poverty is his complete self-identification with our fallen human condition. In the words of an Orthodox Christian hymn, "Sharing wholly in our poverty, thou hast made divine our earthly nature through thy union with it and participation in it." Christ shares in our death, and we share in his life; he "empties himself" and we are "exalted" {Phil. 2:5-9} God's descent makes possible man's ascent. St. Maximus the Confessor writes: "Ineffably the infinite limits himself,while the finite is expanded to the measure of the infinite."

As Christ said at the Last Supper: "The glory which Thou hast given to me I have given to them, that they may be one, as we are one: I in them and thou in me, may they be perfectly united in one" (John 17:22-23). Christ enables us to share in the Father's divine glory. He is the bond and meeting-point: because he is man, he is one with us; because he is God, he is one with the Father. So through him we are one with God, and the Father's glory becomes our glory. God's Incarnation opens the way to man's deification. To be deified is, more specifically, to be "christified": the divine likeness that we are called to attain is the likeness of Christ. It is through Jesus the God-man that we men are "ingodded", "divinized", made "sharers in the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4). By assuming our humanity, Christ who is Son of God by nature has made us sons of God by grace. In him we are "adopted" by God the Father, becoming sons-in-the-Son.

This notion of salvation as sharing implies two things in particular about the Incarnation. First, it implies that Christ took not only a human body like outs but also a human spirit, mind, and soul like ours. Sin, as we saw (p.58), has its source not from below but from above; it is not physical in its origin but spiritual. The aspect of man, then, that requires to be redeemed is not primarily his body but his will and his center of moral choice. If Christ did not have a human mind, then this would fatally undermine the second principle of salvation, that divine salvation must reach the point of human need.

The importance of this principle was re-emphasized during the second half of the fourth century, when Apollinarius advanced the theory -- for which he was quickly condemned as a heretic -- that at the Incarnation Christ took only a human body, but no human intellect or rational soul. To this St. Gregory the Theologian replied, "The unassumed is unhealed". Christ, that is to say, saves us by becoming what we are: he heals us by taking our broken humanity into himself, by "assuming" it as his own, by entering into our human experience and by knowing it from the inside , as being himself one of us. But had his sharing of our humanity been in some way incomplete, then man's salvation would be likewise incomplete. If we believe that Christ has brought us a total salvation, then it follows that he has assumed everything.

Secondly, this notion of salvation as sharing implies -- although many have been reluctant to say this openly -- that Christ assumed not just unfallen human nature. As the Epistle to the Hebrews insists (and all the New Testament there is no Christological text more important than this): "We do not have a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but he was in all points tempted exactly as we are, yet without sinning" (4:15). Christ lives our his life on earth under the conditions of the fall, He is not himself a sinful person, bur in his solidarity with fallen man he accepts to the full the consequences of Adams's sin. He accepts to the full not only the physical consequences, such as weariness, bodily pain, and eventually the separation of body and soul in death. He accepts also the moral consequences, the loneliness, the alienation, the inward conflict. It may seem a bold thing to ascribe all this to the living God, but a consistent doctrine of the Incarnation requires nothing less. If Christ had merely assumed unfallen human nature, living our his early life in the situation of Adam in Paradise, then he would not have been touched by the feeling of our infirmities, nor would he have been tempted in everything exactly as we are. And in that case he would not be our Savior.

St. Paul does so far as to write, "God has made him who knew no sin to be sin for our sake" (2 Cor. 5:21). We are not to think here solely in terms of some juridical transaction, whereby Christ, himself guiltless, somehow has our guilt "imputed" to him in an exterior manner. Much more is involved that this. Christ saves us by experiencing from within, as one of us, all that we suffer inwardly through living in a sinful world..

(pp. 73-76, The Orthodox Way, Bishop Kallistos Ware, SVSP, 1979)

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