Dr David Bentley Hart

[Mike Bell]

David Bentley Hart the eminent theologian has "come out" as a Christian universalist. I have included the youtube link to his excellent lecture "is hell forever"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dOsKzh7Kyw      He is very much an intelectual and lots of it is difficult for a truck driver like myself to understand but his main point seems to be that if god created the world knowing that even one person would spend eternity being tortured then creation was a tragedy.

Mikie

[ed]

:welcome:

Well I hope he capitalizes on it.

Can't watch the vid, at work.

Happy trucking!

Here is a good page I came up with on a google search.
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/essential-readings-on-universalism/

The 179 Responses to Readings in Universalism at the bottom are interesting.  One of the posters is D.B.Heart............Don't know if that is the guy or not, but he knows his stuff.

Nope, confirmed, he is having a very nice conversation on that page.

Ctrl+f D. B. Heart and you can follow it very nicely.  Good reading.

I'm a fan.  :)

[marie glen]

hi! I will be leaving this tab up.. so I remember to watch this youtube video..

...the link looks very promising (interesting) too!  :smile: :thumbsup:

[Lazarus Short]

Welcome and keep on truckin'!  :friendstu: :gimmefive: :friendstu:

You will arrive at your ultimate Destination in due time...

[gregoryfl]

I see that he presents the understanding of the Eastern Orthodox church, at least similar, if I am understanding him correctly.

Here are some provocative comments made by David on that wordpress site:

"There is no verse in the New Testament that unambiguously threatens eternal punishment. There are three that are regularly invoked by the Hellfire Club (my fond name for those who have some emotional commitment to the idea of a hell of eternal torment), but none of them really says what they imagine it says. Conversely, the seemingly very clear statements of universal salvation number quite high (47 at my last casual count)." (10 May 2015)

"The classical Platonic-Aristotelian-Christian understanding of freedom is one in which the rational will of necessity, when set free from ignorance, wills the good end of its own nature; and perfect freedom is the power to achieve that end without hindrance. Thus God is perfectly free precisely because he cannot work evil, which is to say nothing can prevent him from realizing his nature as the infinite Good. Similarly, for Gregory of Nyssa or Gregory of Nazianzus, perfect freedom is liberation from the fetters of ignorance that constrain the rational will from seeing the Good as what it is. For Augustine, the highest freedom is the perfection of human nature in a condition of  non posse peccare. For Maximus, the natural will is free because it tends inexorably towards God, and the gnomic will is free precisely to the degree that it comes into harmony with the natural will. And so on. Since, after all, all employments of the will are teleological–necessarily intentionally directed towards an end, either clearly or obscurely known by the intellect–and since the Good is the final cause of all movements of the will, no choice of evil can be free in a meaningful sense. For evil is not an end, and so can be chosen under the delusion that it is in some sense a good in respect of the soul (even if, in moral terms, one is aware that one is choosing what is conventionally regarded as 'evil'); and no choice made in ignorance can be a free choice.

"In simple terms, if a deranged man chooses to slash himself with a knife or set fire to himself, you would not be interfering with his 'freedom' by preventing him from doing so. You would be rescuing him from his slavery to madness. This is why the free-will defense of the idea of an eternal hell is essentially gibberish. Which, incidentally, does not break from the 'synergist' view. It is merely to say that the cooperation of the created will with God's is still a cooperation–if needs be by terrible purgation–in restoring a human soul to its natural state. I think of Gregory of Nyssa deals with this quite delightfully and cogently in De anima et resurrectione." (11 May 2015)

"As it happens, I number among my friends and acquaintances some of the greatest scholars of Orthodox canons and councils and history in the world; and to a man they would assert that the Orthodox Church–no matter what the inclinations of its catechists and prelates may have been down the ages–has never definitively condemned universalism as such, or even addressed it under any synodical or conciliar conditions of special import. It has condemned some teachings that are also, as it happens, universalist. But the sort of universalism found in Gregory and Isaac, which fully acknowledges the reality of judgment and hell, has never even been addressed." (12 May 2015)

In response to a libertarian formulation of human freedom and the claim that the development of personhood requires epistemic distance between Creator and creature:

"It may be that I simply have not come across universalists of that variety. I am familiar with patristic universalists, with a variety of mediaeval and modern figures, I revere George MacDonald especially...but I probably am entirely unaware of a great deal of popular universalism.

"Even so, I still cannot grant the liceity of the way you formulate freedom. Part of it is that there is a difference between being 'informed' in the modern sense (possessing "information" and then, in a second movement of deliberation, deciding upon it based upon some distinct set of criteria) and being truly "in-formed" in the classical sense of being reshaped by the glory of God. God is not a species of cognitive information in the former sense, some finite object available to my judicious gaze. To know God is to be transfigured into what is revealed. At that point of truest liberty, freedom and necessity are no longer distinguished, any more than they are in the Father's own love of his own essence in the Son and Spirit. Remember, the only thing to which Paul says we are predestined (well, marked out for in advance, really) is to be conformed to the image of Christ. No less austerely apophatic thinker than Maximus says that we achieve freedom (and are perfect as Christ's Father is perfect) when all distance (diastema) disappears and we rush into the embrace of love.

"Again, I think compatibilism and determinism are both inapposite to the question of freedom; they concern a libertarian model of free acts that I believe logically vacuous. But my hostility towards analytic philosophy and its native categories occasionally verges on the unreasonable. Simply said, all things are determined to an end, a final cause, and will reach that end, and hence fulfillment, unless some unnatural interruption prevents them; but rational nature is capable of interrupting itself. Still, willy-nilly, all natural wills return to God, and know the fire of glory as bliss or torment, but even that torment is a knowledge of truth that cannot not convert the will, however gradually, to its true end. Otherwise God will never be all in all and creation will never be completed. That teleological understanding of the will, and of its relation to nature, simply cannot be forced into the categories of libertarian or determinist thinking, and I honestly wish Christian theologians would stop using the Analytic categories for that reason." (12 May 2015)

"I think I have been pretty clear in saying that the conversion in question is necessarily a conversion of the will through its own free (and progressively freer) act. Even the will's power to say no, however, is animated by its primordial hunger for the Good and, as Gregory and others argue, to that it cannot say no, except by ceasing to exist. That is the act of all its acts. So, in time, over the ages perhaps, it continues to seek its rest in God, freely but, for that reason, inevitably.

"Analytic philosophy does not own words like 'determined,' incidentally. My problem is specifically with the current analytic categories of determinism, compatibilism, libertarian freedom, etc., because they all presume an originally voluntarist understanding of free will, which is simply incoherent. When I use 'determined' in that sentence, I am just speaking of final causality, primary causality." (13 May 2015)

"Because God is not a finite object over against you as a subject, you cannot simply turn away towards 'something else.'; He is the ground and end of all desire and knowledge as such, the Good in itself. You cannot choose or not choose God the way you would choose or not choose a cup of coffee. You desire anything because of your original desire for God as the transcendental Good and Beautiful; you know anything because of your original intellectual appetite for God as the transcendental Truth as such. Even in desiring to flee God, you are desiring God as the 'good end' you seek in godlessness. He is inescapable because all being, goodness, unity, truth, and beauty simply are God in their transcendent truth, and because a rational nature is nothing but an infinite dynamic orientation towards that transcendent end. The natural will, as Maximus says, can will only God. Don't think of God as a candidate in a political race, whom you could simply reject and be done with; he is the original and final act of your every discrete act of desire. And, in the ages, since God is all and there is literally nothing beyond him, the natural will is always seeking its natural supernatural end. Simply said, God is not an object of desire; he is the end that makes desire." (14 May 2015)

I have wanted to pursue this on this message board as another possibility to what most here belief concerning universalism, but think that what it presents goes contrary to what Gary Amarault believes and so have never tried to pursue this fully. Maybe a moderator can weigh in on this?

Ronen

[jabcat]

ronen, can you pm me where you'd like to take things and what your questions/concerns are?  thanks.

[marie glen]

Very good! I liked it! He did lose me a little from time to time.. (as a humble wife of a truck driver :hiya: , but I do think I caught most of it!) And I do surely LOVE logic. My thought being God is both Life and Perfection.. Imperfect being the opposite of life, hence life as we presently know it and rescue needed.. I'm not sure why but I feel He MUST be perfect, or He too would fade.. Since He is Perfect, the 'end' result of all this can onLy be the best one possible.

Thanks for posting the link! ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dOsKzh7Kyw  )

[marie glen]

:welcome:

Well I hope he capitalizes on it.

Can't watch the vid, at work.

Happy trucking!

Here is a good page I came up with on a google search.
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/essential-readings-on-universalism/

The 179 Responses to Readings in Universalism at the bottom are interesting.  One of the posters is D.B.Heart............Don't know if that is the guy or not, but he knows his stuff.

Nope, confirmed, he is having a very nice conversation on that page.

Ctrl+f D. B. Heart and you can follow it very nicely.  Good reading.

I'm a fan.  :)

I signed up to follow this blog, it looks very interesting.. and I need more exposure to the church fathers which he is pursuing.. Interesting "about" page - https://afkimel.wordpress.com/about/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog

And I bookmarked his page "Readings On Universalism"

Thank you for posting the link. :smile:

I like his statement about his - "long-held, but largely secret, universalist hope" :smile: