Post Edited (jefscott) : 8/5/2005 6:34:24 AM (GMT-5)

I'm fine with getting into the "scary" stuff, but we shouldn't give up completely on "safe" explanations if they work.

Post Edited (Sahid) : 8/5/2005 11:00:31 AM (GMT-5)

Mephi: The problem has NEVER been one about living a faithful life. Heck, man. One could be a double-predestinationist 5 point Calvinist and live a…

Tom: YOU couldn’t. Not now.

Mephi: The problem is the same thing that it's always been for me...Coherence and CONSISTENCY!

Tom: That’s what I meant in my question to you.

Mephi: Do you know what started me on the universalism track? Do you REALLY wanna know? This one thing...Somehow, I got convinced that God loved his creations so much REALLY would do absolutely EVERYTHING in his proper ability to save as many sentient beings as he could to enjoy relationship with Him.

Tom: I hear ya, and I totally agree.

Mephi: Basically, I asked myself...is there a possible world where the Triune God, LFW, and universalism could be FEASIBLE? Where moral autonomy wouldn't be negated. Where gradations of eternal punishments and rewards MADE SENSE. Where sin, hell, and death would truly be no more. Where divine judgement would be severe, utterly painful, AND just; punitive, retributive, AND restorative.

Tom: Right. My question is this, if you get affirmative answers on all those questions, what about the exegetical question (which you didn’t list as “…where all this would be exegetically justified”)? And I’m wondering, if you get affirmative answers on all of those contexts you just listed but got an exegetical “no,” what would you do? Seems to me that since you already believe Jesus and Paul were wrong on some theological matters, why care what the exegetical case for universalism is? See? If the exegesis makes a slam dunk case for ECP, you can just dismiss it as theologically errant. So why DO you care what the Bible has to say about it?

Mephi: (Note: This is a summary sentence of my 7 amended ideas about God:

--God IS love. Not God is "loving" God IS love. Complete omnibenevolence.
--God is completely omnipotent. God can accomplish whatever God wants to accomplish that doesn't a) violate the laws of logic (including the metaphysics of love) and b) does not go against God's necessary essential existence.
--God REALLY wants display His glorious nature to beings OTHER THAN God and have it represented back to God by that something.
--God REALLY wants those "others" to participate with self-determination in their OWN moral existence.
--God REALLY wants all sentient beings in Creation to embody and reflect God's glorious nature to God and each other forever...extending the "dance of the Trinity"
--God REALLY DOESN'T WANT any sentient being to experience eternal destruction. Not only because it's bad for the sentient beings...but because that would TAKE AWAY from God's own aesthetic experience of contingent reality.
--If there is ANY POSSIBLE WAY that God can actualize God's own divine disposition and intentions, God will do so.)

Tom: I agree with every point. I’m just not sure that it’s being true that there is a possible way to accomplish this, or possible world where all in the end choose for God, that it’s necessarily the case that all WILL choose. Maybe we need to talk about “possible worlds.” A possible world may be possible without ever being actualized just in case it could have been actualized. And if one is committed to believe what the “biblical” view on hell is, then one can only be as optimistic about the above points as the exegetical evidence will allow. If one is not necessarily committed to believe (on theological claims) what the biblical authors say (and you’re not), then you can be optimistic on the given points regardless of the biblical case for ECP.

Mephi: and... 2) The majority of people who have ever existed WILL endure eternal destruction (either ECP or annihilationism)

Tom: I’d agree in the case of ECP. I’m not convinced annihilationism fails in every case.

Mephi: I can believe #2 easily...as long as I deny #1. Gimme a reason WHY I should deny #1. It's not that I can't do that. I can. Just give me a really good rason why I should.

Tom: Perhaps you can affirm #1 and deny #2’s ECP while affirming #2’s annihilationism. I can. I’m not claiming annilationism is true. I’m just saying that if a plausible exegetical case can be made for it then I would totally go with that. It would make the free will defense totally doable for me. But I think I’m committed, for better or worse, to whatever the most convincing exegetical evidence is, even if it’s ECP. You don’t have to worry about that I don’t think, since if ECP is THE biblical view you can dismiss it as errant. Right? You don’t require an exegetical case for your universalism. You can always claim you have good reasons to believe Jesus and others were mistaken on this. I mean, it’d be nice to have even the slightest plausible case for it, yeah. But even if you’ve got ZERO evidence for it, you can still  go with #1 and deny #2. I can't dismiss Jesus' theological beliefs about the ultimate destiny and fate of people as errant.

Which brings me back to my question about how you sift through the ‘authority’ of Jesus’ claims. And what you said on that helped me understand you better. Thanks.

Gotta run and catch my flight home (been in Denver this past week and flying home this afternoon!)

Tom

Mephi: Tom, do you still hold to those presuppositions? If so, how?

Tom: Which presups? Absolute inerrancy? I don’t think so, no. I mean, I certainly don’t rest my belief in the truth of the gospel and my confidence in the gospel’s ability to change lives on the absolute inerrancy of the Bible. It’s much the opposite. Any confidence I have in the book rests on the fact that everywhere its message is proclaimed throughout the earth, it radically transforms people and society.

I’m much more concerned with the question of the Bible’s ‘authority’ over our lives, and I don’t think it’s got to be absolutely inerrant in every respect to be authoritative in any respect, especially in the respect the Bible actually claims to be authoritative—with respect to what the truth is about sin, repentance, faith, salvation, and life in the Kingdom, all the stuff we NEED to have a reliable source for. But it’s indefensible to say that unless the Bible is believed to be ‘inerrant’ in every respect it can’t reasonably be accepted as ‘authoritative’ in some respects. True, it’s got to be inerrant just where we need it to be authoritative, and you and I agree that it is that.

The only claims the Bible makes about its own authority seem to be with respect to salvation and righteousness. The scriptures are God-breathed, Paul claims, with a view to our training in righteousness and godly living. It can be trusted completely as a guide to truth about God’s existence and purposes, about faith, righteousness, community dynamics, love, etc. If there’s a historical mistake about when some Roman governor began to rule, no problem for me. And I can make room for they’re believing in seven literal days of creation too. No problem. I have a harder time with believing Paul was flat out theologically mistaken about “death” being our “enemy,” though I agree something has to be done to reconcile the apparent contradiction.

I wouldn’t agree that the Exodus amounted to a few Jewish rebels escaping Egypt through the swamps, or that Jonah cannot reasonably be believed to have spent three days in a whale…if that’s what God wanted to do with him. If the resurrection is believed to be historical there can be no a priori reason to dismiss other less miraculous events and every reason to take miraculous stories at face value unless we’ve got good reasons to doubt the historicity of it (as we might in a parable). And I don’t think we have any good reason to doubt the historicity of the Exodus as a miraculous event, or of Jonah’s spending three days in a whale.

Tom

about Paul and death…

Mephi: The problem is that you can't deal with WHY Paul believes death is our enemy fully UNTIL you deal with how Paul views Adam as being the first sin and ORIGINATOR of death, and Christ as the person who fixes Adam's screw-up. N. T. Wright, I believe, is right on about that.

Tom: I, as well, was assuming the same.

Mephi: But what that means is that Paul's soteriology and hamartiology are significantly GROUNDED upon his belief about our origins, that is a LITERAL Adamic couple who, by their sin, brought about death as being the enemy.

Tom: As we’ve noted in person to each other, even assuming an evolutionary history, there STILL would be A homosapien couple, ONE couple who stands as THE parent of us all. Homosapiens didn’t spring up in various geographies independent of each other. And assuming God works with this process so that at SOME point in time his image (whatever the he** it is!) resides in humankind, there would still be, rougly speaking, SOME point in time when humanity, cognizant of God’s existence and in relationship with God, chooses to screw it up.

My problem with the “death” thing has nothing to do with the tension between a literal 7-day creation vs an evolutionary approach per se. It’s that physical death in principle precedes morality EVEN IN A LITERAL 7-DAY approach. Entropy is there, built-in to a system God created which reproduces after its kind, governing a system God created in which the earth is heated by the sun. Are there really 7-day literalists out there who argue entropy itself didn’t exist in the universe until AFTER Adam and Eve sinned?

Mephi: And do you really think that Paul would have just separated his view of the 7 day creation from his view of a literal Adamic couple? Heck, naw. You know that, man.

Tom: Perhaps not. Perhaps. I don’t know. Paul was a pretty thoughtful guy. I don’t think he was a fundamentalist.

Mephi: …you'd have to say that it was possible for Paul to be inaccurate about the 7 day creation, while speaking truth overall about the "death" thing. Are you willing to do that?

Tom: I’d like to at least explore the possibilities and not just assume that I know all there is to know about how to resolve the problem, thinking outside the box, etc.

Mephi: Are you saying that a biblical author can be INACCURATE about part of what he's trying to claim while being right on the whole about the major thrust of what is being said?

Tom: Heck yeah! Within JUST his letter to the Romans, YOU believe Paul was wrong about death as the last enemy but right about repentance, faith, the power of the gospel, the resurrection of Christ, God’s use of fallen governments, the sinfulness of Jews being equal to that of Gentiles, the inability of anything to separate us from the love of God in Christ, etc. etc. on everything else Paul talks about in Romans. So you already agree Paul was theologically mistaken on PART of what he claims and right on elsewhere. So OF COURSE a biblical author can be partly right and partly wrong, including individual issues like origins. Paul could have been mistaken in believing a 7-day literal creation but be right on if his overall point about origins requires only that it be the case that God created human beings. That sort of thing. Can his understanding of “death as enemy” be so construed as to show there to in fact be no contradiction between Paul and modern science? I’d like to think so.

Mephi: Oh, and about the book of Jonah, from what I'm understanding, the literary info that we have about it STRONGLY leads us to believe that it may well be a "narrative parable" (Brueggemann, Freitheim). A work done during the Persian period that uses lots of allegory, fable, satire, and legendary material about an obscure, but probably actual man listed in 2 Kings 14:25.

Tom

Post Edited (Humphrey Bogart) : 8/7/2005 9:43:03 PM (GMT-5)