There still are a few “Universal Salvationists” floating around. An old pal of mine was one; he associated with the Congregationalist denomination, and came by his universalism from at least one Cong. minister.
It’s a polite variation of the faith, at least. There was a quip in an old Reader’s Digest, where a minister said that, because of his faith in the Bible, he knew there was a Hell…and because of his faith in God’s perfect love, he knew Hell was empty.
It has the advantage of removing certain taints from God that would make him less than perfect. This whole “God of Wrath” thing can never, in my mind, be reconciled with “Perfection.” I know what wrath means in my life, and it’s always a falling away from my own ideals. If God can’t live up to my own measly standards for myself, how can he possibly be “perfect?”
But taking up even the rottenest, shittenest, stinkin’est, pukin’est rotters of the world into heavenly love – that requires some serious dedication to moral perfection.
Don’t forget that God is omniscient and exists outside of time.
So when he condemned Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he already knew he would regret the decision he was in the middle of making and would change it. Which raises the issue of why he didn’t just stop right then.
More than a few I’d argue. And with folks like Rob Bell and the such, they are making their way into Evangelicalism as well (I’d argue this entire conversation has taken on a very Western Protestant viewpoint to begin with - Eastern Orthodox, for one, views on Hell and salvation are very different than, say, Southern Baptist views The Orthodox view is very similar to the Reader’s Digest quip). I’d be very confident in asserting that the majority (if not vast majority) of my Lutheran congregation is universalist.
(and yes, which means I am relatively prepared to see folks like Adolf Hitler in the Age to Come)
I confess to a grave ignorance regarding Eastern Orthodox tenets.
My friend was such a universalist…he even figured Satan himself would, in the end, be brought to see the light of salvation. Hitler is a piker in comparison!
The point (as my friend taught it) is that Hitler (and Satan) would, in the process, come to sincere contrition.
One vaguely interesting variant of this is the “journey through moral learning” motif, as hinted at in Dante. There really is a way out of Hell…but it takes people a long time to give up their sins and take the journey. Niven and Pournelle also hint at this in their own Inferno and its sequel.
(Yes, alas, I know more about fantasy theology than about real Eastern Orthodox theology… So… Where’s a good place to start reading?)
(Eastern Orthodox view of salvation with chairs! :D)
Though I’d argue that more and more of “eastern” Christian thinking is making its way back - esp the focus on the mystery of God and not overthinking things as if religion is like a legal code. It tends to be something that kind of clicks with those considering themselves Postmodern Christians (and beyond).
I’ll also so, I don’t mean to push down all Western Protestantism, not even Evangelical Western Protestantism (I came to Christianity through Evangelicalism, even though I’d consider myself today a Mainline Lutheran [and maybe add a few adjectives ].
But I can easily see the possibility for universalism in the Christus Victor theory of atonement: Christus Victor - Wikipedia . (I even perhaps can view it in the satisfaction, as opposed to penal substitution, theories)
But if he saw what he was going to do, and changed it, he’s now wrong and no longer omniscient. If he is omniscient and can’t change it he is no longer omnipotent.
True…but he doesn’t have to exercise that power to possess it.
One could argue that you don’t have the ability to commit suicide. You say (sensibly) of course you do, you just don’t really want to right now. Is it meaningful for me to argue that you don’t have that ability unless you actually demonstrate it, right now, here’s the bottle of poison?
God can be wrong – he just has the wisdom not to be.
(Er, no, I’m not a believer, so this is all just abstraction to me.)
That would not be “being wrong”, then-that would be “deliberately screwing up”. Being All-Wise, he knows what the right answers are so, even by repression, he is incapable of making mistakes.
Oddly enough, the concept of Hell was never one that I found hard to intellectually accept. The way I learned it, back when I was a good Christian boy, was that at death, the person can see, finally, God unconcealed and unoccluded. Seeing God, and seeing all the times that he or she turned away from God, as well as embraced him, the soul react either with joyful recognition and wonder, or bitter, soul-searing regret and shame. One is “Heaven”, and the other, “Hell”. Neither was a place that God assigned the individual soul; rather, each was that soul’s experience of God.
And if can be wrong he’s not omniscient. That’s where the paradox comes in.
Since an entity which isn’t omniscient can be omnipotent, and an entity which isn’t omnipotent can be omniscient, the definition of God as the great that there can be is violated for a God attempting to be both.
Well, possibly, but this is beginning to sound too much like St. Anselm. You’re denying omnipotence on a self-referential basis, and you might just as well be asking if God could create a rock so heavy, etc. It’s purely a linguistic approach, and those stop working the minute “Omni” of any kind walks in the door.
“Infinity” is, by definition, paradoxical.
(I don’t wholly disagree with you; I just sense that the process here is founded upon fortuitous definitions of words.)
Heh. With omniscience, he knows ahead of time what the outcome of a “bad” choice would have been.
As above, all our logic starts to fail when “Omni” is proposed. The concepts of omniscience and omnipotence cannot be formally defined, because of contradictions such as yours and Czarcasm’s.
What I usually recommend is for believers to scale back, and throw away the “infinite” part of their belief. God doesn’t have to be “infinitely” powerful: the ability to juggle galaxies is plenty sufficient! God doesn’t have to know “everything,” just a trillion times more than anyone else knows.
The difference between 10^400 hamburger sandwiches, and an infinite number of hamburger sandwiches, is indistinguishable on any human scale!
But you can logically imagine a world in which you do commit suicide.
For another example, assume the old question about God creating a rock too heavy for him to lift was true. (It isn’t because God can still have maximum possible omnipotence without doing anything logically impossible.) You can’t refute this by saying God could do it, but just hasn’t chosen to. Nor can you refute the Barber paradox by saying that the barber has just chosen not to shave himself but can.
If you wish, imagine gods Op and Os challenging our god to do something different from what he and God Os have seen. Surely you’re not saying the only answer is that God chickens out and goes to hide somewhere.
BTW if Op and Os challenge each other the same way one wins - but this just means that the claim of one is false, and is in no way a paradox.
In summary God hiding under the bed is not an answer to the paradox!
But the claim that God is both Op and Os is a paradox, because it is self-contradictory. Isn’t that the definition of a paradox?
(It must be true…and therefore it must be false…)
This is why I recommend that religionists back away to a stance of Pp and Ps – Plenipotence and Pleniscience. Their God can still be quadrillions of times more powerful and knowledgeable than anyone or anything else, without the absurdities imposed by attempting to realize a concrete “infinity.”
(A God which literally knew everything would spend an infinite amount of his resources knowing his own thoughts, and knowing his own knowledge of his own thoughts, and knowing his own knowledge of his own knowledge of his own thoughts… Etc. Forever. Such a navel-gazing God is infinitely uninteresting.)
Pretty much by definition, God has been wrong at least some of the time. Either God was wrong when he damned everyone for original sin or he was wrong when he overturned that decision. And God being omniscient, he’s always known one thing was right and one thing was wrong. So having done both things, he knowingly chose at some point to do something he knew at the time was wrong.
This is an unfortunate misreading of the real content of Genesis. In the first chapter, jehovallah creates man and woman, side by side at the same time, in his own image and gives this unnamed couple dominion over everything. You could infer that he made them nominally perfect, and you might well be right.
But those two were not Adam and Eve. Adam was created from the dust of the earth, life breathed into his nostrils, in 2:7, and Eve hacked out of his side around verse 22. No real implication of their perfection, Adam was put there to take care of the garden, and Eve added in to keep him from getting lonely.
So what of this “original sin”? What was it? Well, this is where the thing kind of folds in on itself like some kind of wacky Tardis.
Jehovallah told Adam (who later told Eve) not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil: this means the second couple were wholly innocent, they had no moral understanding. They could not have sinned because they could not have known that it was “wrong” to disobey their creator until after they actually had.
It is kind of like razncain’s “… then why did you tell me?” joke: before they knew about right and wrong, Adam and Eve were happy and innocent.
Genesis symbolically depicts the emergence of humanity. The garden of Eden story is the transition from savagery to moral understanding. Cain and Abel depicts the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. And then some other goofy stuff that seems to imply some a priori knowledge of Mosaic law.
It was written in the form of poetry. Poetry is not meant to be interpreted literally. But how you go about grafting jesus onto that, well, I guess you have to end up distorting things. Which was a whole lot easier when bibles numbered a few thousand worldwide. Now that any doofus can read that stuff, maintaining believability is a much bigger challenge.
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