Eternal Punishment?

[RKCastillo]

Hey guys!

I was hoping that a universalist could answer the objections people are using with the eternal punishment, or eternal judgment scriptures.

How do you respond to those?

[steve]

Your question is broad one. The objections to universal reconciliation are very numerous, and so are the answers given in its defense. There has been much interaction on these topics over the years at this forum. If you have some time to do a bit of reading, you will find just about every objection and every response at these two links:

http://www.theos.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=73
http://www.wvss.com/forumc/viewforum.ph ... cb08e0340f

[RKCastillo]

Thanks Steve...

I will go read those.

I was talking to someone saying there are really only around a dozen mentions of Hell in the Bible and none of them really point to a person being there eternally.

And then they started to bring out the eternal judgment verses.

So I was wondering the opinions of universalists on those.

[steve]

Yep, those would be the subjects discussed at many of the threads youwill find at those links.

[RKCastillo]

So...looking at the word aionios and the multiple times it is used in the New Testament.

I doesn't usually mean "forever"

[steve]

It has a number of possible meanings. "Forever" (meaning "endlessly") often does not seem appropriate as a correct translation. The word literally means something like "of [or "pertaining to"] an age [or "the age"]." In its varied usage, it sometimes seems to mean something like "for the duration" or "for a time" or "continually" or something else. "Aionios punishment" or "aionios fire" or "aionios life," etc., may mean punishment, fire, life, etc. that pertain to the age, or (alternatively) to punishment, fire, life, etc. that proceed from the eternal God.

[Paidion]

Having looked up the word “aiōnios” in extra-biblical Greek literature, I found that the word is usually used in the sense of "lasting". Indeed, I think this is a good translation of the word. For example, it was used to describe a stone wall which was built so as to be enduring. Josephus used the word to describe a prison sentence which is believed to have been only three years.

The word “aiōnios” is sometimes used as an adverb, as in Philemon, when Paul tells Philemon , "For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back “aiōnios” ["lastingly" or perhaps "permanently"].

Another place in which the word is used adverbally is found in the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament book of Jonah into Greek. The translators render the Hebrew word "owlam" as “aiōnios”. In his prayer of thanksgiving for having been delivered from the fish's belley, Jonah said, " I went down to the moorings of the mountains; the earth with its bars closed behind me forever; yet you have brought up my life from the pit, O LORD, my God. [Jonah 2:7] NKJV

Jonah was is the belly of the fish for three days! It certainly wasn't "forever" [aiōnios]. Even "lastingly" seems a little long for 3 days, though,for Jonah, the experience must have seemed to last a long time!

[Paidion]

I thought some of you might be interested in George MacDonald's view:


There is one growing persuasion of the present age which I hope this book may somewhat serve to stem -- not by any argument, but by... a healthy up stirring ... of the imagination and the conscience. In these days, when men are so gladly hearing afresh that "in Him there is no darkness at all"; that God, therefore could not have created any man if He knew that he must live in torture to all eternity; and that His hatred to evil cannot be expressed by injustice, itself the one essence of evil, -- for certainly it would be nothing less than injustice to punish infinitely what was finitely committed, no sinner being capable of understanding the abstract enormity of what he does, -- in these days has a arisen another falsehood, less, yet very perilous: thousands of half-thinkers imagine that, since it is declared with such authority that hell is not everlasting, there is then no hell at all. To such folly, I, for one, have never given enticement or shelter. I see no hope for many, no way for the divine love to reach them, save through a very ghastly hell. Men have got to repent; there is no other escape for them, and no escape from that. — George MacDonald, preface to Letters from Hell (anon., ca. 1871)

[Homer]

Interesting post Paidion. I recently read of how many of the universalist "no hellers" had a change of heart when they observed the results of their preaching and came to a rather utilitarian view of hell. A sort of universal purgatory, that is.

[Troy]

Would conditional immortality/annihilation according to those like Stott, Pinnock, etc be the same as that of Jehovah's witnesses?