This is not really a Biblical Argument for Universal Salvation, I've made those already and will continue to do so in the Future. This is my response to how many Christian Apologists try to defend the Doctrine of Eternal Endless Fiery Torment to Non-Believers. And this has been in my mind actually since before I became a believer in Universal Salvation, even when I still accepted the traditional doctrine of Hell, this argument was a bad one to me.
The argument is that God can't be a Just God if He doesn't Punish Sin. That it'd be horribly unfair if a nice old lady who never hurt anyone her whole life got the same eternal fate as a sadistic serial killer. Obviously, they insist, God wouldn't be a good Judge if He allowed that.
And yet the Gospel being taught by traditional Protestant Evangelical Faith Alone Christians is not at all presenting the Heavenly Court Room as one that would be Just by modern secular legal standards.
They're teaching that the same person that provoked you to Sin in the first place is going to be your Prosecutor, even though the Judge knows full well that this Prosecutor is engaged in open Treason against Him. But if you're a "True Christian" then your Defense Attorney is the Judge's Son, and His defense is simply "I already took his Punishment for him" and so you get let off scot-free. But if you're not a Christian then you don't get a Defense attorney at all, and the bare minimum sentence being handed out is being set on Fire forever and ever, even if you never killed or raped anyone.
In other words, the traditional Evangelical Gospel absolutely allows a circumstance where the sadistic serial killer goes to heaven but the nice old lady goes to hell. If the nice old lady was an atheist till she died, but the serial killer got born again in prison like Jeffery Dahmer.
Our current Legal System doesn't even really give out Life Sentences, what we call that is really about 50 years. We certainly don't give out sentences of Eternal Torture.
There are many indications in The Bible that the Punishments God gives out will fit the Crime, that some Sinners will have it worse then others. Matthew 5:25-26/Luke 12:58-59 and Matthew 18:34 rules out the possibly of the Sentence being permanent. Evangelical Universalists like myself do not believe there are no ramification for our actions, but we believe God's Punishments are corrective and come from a place of Love as our Father.
There is a tendency for people (like Superheroes in badly written comics like Cry for Justice) to say Justice when they mean Vengeance or Revenge. And I suppose the way we Translate The Bible sometimes encourages that since Goel (which is used of God) in the KJV is sometimes translated Avenger or Revenger when what it really mainly means in Kinsman and Redeemer. But as Linkara likes to quote from the movie Camelot "Revenge... the most worthless of causes.".
No mortal human being has ever inflicted eternal endless torment on someone, we don't have the ability to do that So that punishment would never fit the crime.
Remember the whole issue of God promising to restore Sodom in Ezekiel 16? Well the whole point there was God saying it would be unfair to restore Jerusalem (that's us spiritually) and not Sodom, because our knowing God actually makes out Sins worse.
Sunday, May 6, 2018
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Early Jewish-Christian groups.
The different early Jewish-Christian groups mentioned in Early Church writings are often confused with each other, some of that confusion may begin witch the Greek and Latin fathers themselves not always treating them as different. Nazarenes, Ebonites and Hebrews are three names that get thrown around.
The Nazarenes according to most references were not guilty of any major Heresies, they had the entire New Testament, they viewed Jesus as the Son of God and The Messiah, and believed in The Virgin Birth, and they did not reject Paul. They were viewed as outside of Orthodox Christianity only because they kept Torah.
The Ebonites didn't believe Jesus was Divine, used only an altered version of Matthew, and rejected Paul as well as the Virgin Birth.
The name Nazarenes is Biblically used of Believers in Acts 24:5, but it is of outside origin just as much as the name Christian was. Contrary to how some people present it, I feel the origin of the name Christians in Acts 11 at Antioch is presented positively.
A website called NazareneJudaism.Com claims the Nazarene sect were the True Church and seek to identify themselves as the heirs to that group. They have a lot of good information, but I also have to disagree with them in many areas. Mainly they think the fact that the Nazarenes kept the Law means they must have disagreed with "Christianity" that we're not under it anymore.
Justin Martyr in Dialogue with Trypho distinguished between Jewish-Christians who keep the law but don't teach it's obligatory, and those who teach it is obligatory. I believe the former were the Nazarenes and the later the Ebonites. My own position is that keeping the Law can be beneficial, but we are not obligated to keep it.
The Nazarenes as I said used the proper New Testament, but they did have the original Hebrew version of Matthew. Confusion seems to come in via that the altered Matthew the Ebonites used was called the Gospel According the Hebrews and sometimes of the Nazarenes. In Bart Ehrman's Lost Scriptures of Christianity book, everything he puts under either the Nazarenes or the Ebonites I view as being from the Ebonite Gospel, and I think the Egyptian Gospel of the Hebrews may be the same as the Gospel of the Egyptians.
The Nazarenes viewed Jesus as the Son of God, but it's difficult to verify if they held a true Trinitarian doctrine. What's said of their Christology could be interpreted as consistent with Arianism, or a view that Jesus had no pre-existence before being conceived in Mary's Womb (which is sometimes an aspect of Modalism). It's difficult to know one way or the other. However that the Arian Emperors engaged in a lot of Antisemitism makes me think them and the Nazarenes wouldn't have seen eye to eye.
According to http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/antioch the Gentile Christians of Antioch at least originally weren't that Antisemitic, but often joined the Jews in Synagogues. But after the Church married Rome the establishment started trying to fight this. It may not be a coincidence that the key adversaries of Nestorius (Cyril of Alexandria and the Sister of Theodosius II) were also highly Antisemitic.
Some commentators view the Gospel reaching Damascus as fulfilling the Syria part of the Great Commission, but that's because of Old Testament Aram being misleadingly translated as Syria. Antioch was the capital of the Roman Province of Syria, so the Church being established in Antioch by the end of Acts 11 is what I view as fulfilling the Syria part of the Great Commission.
The Nazarenes according to most references were not guilty of any major Heresies, they had the entire New Testament, they viewed Jesus as the Son of God and The Messiah, and believed in The Virgin Birth, and they did not reject Paul. They were viewed as outside of Orthodox Christianity only because they kept Torah.
The Ebonites didn't believe Jesus was Divine, used only an altered version of Matthew, and rejected Paul as well as the Virgin Birth.
The name Nazarenes is Biblically used of Believers in Acts 24:5, but it is of outside origin just as much as the name Christian was. Contrary to how some people present it, I feel the origin of the name Christians in Acts 11 at Antioch is presented positively.
A website called NazareneJudaism.Com claims the Nazarene sect were the True Church and seek to identify themselves as the heirs to that group. They have a lot of good information, but I also have to disagree with them in many areas. Mainly they think the fact that the Nazarenes kept the Law means they must have disagreed with "Christianity" that we're not under it anymore.
Justin Martyr in Dialogue with Trypho distinguished between Jewish-Christians who keep the law but don't teach it's obligatory, and those who teach it is obligatory. I believe the former were the Nazarenes and the later the Ebonites. My own position is that keeping the Law can be beneficial, but we are not obligated to keep it.
The Nazarenes as I said used the proper New Testament, but they did have the original Hebrew version of Matthew. Confusion seems to come in via that the altered Matthew the Ebonites used was called the Gospel According the Hebrews and sometimes of the Nazarenes. In Bart Ehrman's Lost Scriptures of Christianity book, everything he puts under either the Nazarenes or the Ebonites I view as being from the Ebonite Gospel, and I think the Egyptian Gospel of the Hebrews may be the same as the Gospel of the Egyptians.
The Nazarenes viewed Jesus as the Son of God, but it's difficult to verify if they held a true Trinitarian doctrine. What's said of their Christology could be interpreted as consistent with Arianism, or a view that Jesus had no pre-existence before being conceived in Mary's Womb (which is sometimes an aspect of Modalism). It's difficult to know one way or the other. However that the Arian Emperors engaged in a lot of Antisemitism makes me think them and the Nazarenes wouldn't have seen eye to eye.
According to http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/antioch the Gentile Christians of Antioch at least originally weren't that Antisemitic, but often joined the Jews in Synagogues. But after the Church married Rome the establishment started trying to fight this. It may not be a coincidence that the key adversaries of Nestorius (Cyril of Alexandria and the Sister of Theodosius II) were also highly Antisemitic.
In Antioch, various means were used to counteract the great influence which the Jews had upon the local Christians. The synod of Antioch (341) forbade the Christians to celebrate Easter when the Jews were observing Passover, and John Chrysostom of Antioch, in his six sermons (c. 366–387), vituperatively denounced those Christians in Antioch who attended synagogues and resorted to the Jewish law courts.
So that may make interesting background for my Nestorians and the Church of The East post. Epiphanius of Salamis associates the Nazarenes with Boreas (Aleppo) and Basanitis (Bashan), thus placing them near Antioch.When Christianity became the state religion, the position of the Jews of Antioch deteriorated. The Jews of Imnestar were accused of having crucified a Christian boy on the feast of Purim, and the Antiochian Christians destroyed the synagogue (423 C.E.). When the emperor Theodosius II restored it, he was rebuked by Simon Stylites and refrained from defending the Jews. In the brawls between the sport factions known as the "blues" and the "greens," many Jews were killed.
Some commentators view the Gospel reaching Damascus as fulfilling the Syria part of the Great Commission, but that's because of Old Testament Aram being misleadingly translated as Syria. Antioch was the capital of the Roman Province of Syria, so the Church being established in Antioch by the end of Acts 11 is what I view as fulfilling the Syria part of the Great Commission.
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
The Lamb of God who takes away the Sins of The World
The YouTube channel called Remember The Commands did some videos during this last Passover season criticizing the concept that the New Testament account of Jesus fills the role of the Passover Lamb.
Much of it is nitpicking and stuff that is an inevitable result of a Human playing the role of the Lamb as a willing Sacrifice. And objections to a Human playing such a role at all I already addressed in my Human Sacrifice in The Torah post. It's not about denying the original meaning of the Passover, it's about God using a similar method to achieve an even greater deliverance.
However, there is one specific criticism mentioned there that every Christian should know how to answer if they've studied Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. He points out that The Passover Lamb is offered per Household, not for individuals or one for the whole Nation. A valid point, and the response is that Jesus was offered for the Household of Adam.
And that leads me to how The Passover itself in this context is an argument for Universal Salvation. There is no evidence in the Exodus account that it was possible for an individual within the Household who didn't have Faith in this ritual being left behind when they left Egypt. It being offered for The Household meant the entire Household regardless of individuals.
Likewise John The Baptist said in John 1 that Jesus takes away the Sins of The World, not of those who place their Faith in Him, The World. John 3:16 promises Believers will not Perish, but that doesn't contradict the rest being Saved after they Perish.
And again going back to Romans 5, the clear teaching there is that everyone made a Sinner by Adam is now made Righteous by Christ.
And in 1st Corinthians 15 Paul talks about the meanings of the Harvest Festivals further, like Revelation 14 does, defining Believers as the Firstfurits of the Harvest, which clearly means we are not the whole Harvest.
Much of it is nitpicking and stuff that is an inevitable result of a Human playing the role of the Lamb as a willing Sacrifice. And objections to a Human playing such a role at all I already addressed in my Human Sacrifice in The Torah post. It's not about denying the original meaning of the Passover, it's about God using a similar method to achieve an even greater deliverance.
However, there is one specific criticism mentioned there that every Christian should know how to answer if they've studied Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. He points out that The Passover Lamb is offered per Household, not for individuals or one for the whole Nation. A valid point, and the response is that Jesus was offered for the Household of Adam.
And that leads me to how The Passover itself in this context is an argument for Universal Salvation. There is no evidence in the Exodus account that it was possible for an individual within the Household who didn't have Faith in this ritual being left behind when they left Egypt. It being offered for The Household meant the entire Household regardless of individuals.
Likewise John The Baptist said in John 1 that Jesus takes away the Sins of The World, not of those who place their Faith in Him, The World. John 3:16 promises Believers will not Perish, but that doesn't contradict the rest being Saved after they Perish.
And again going back to Romans 5, the clear teaching there is that everyone made a Sinner by Adam is now made Righteous by Christ.
And in 1st Corinthians 15 Paul talks about the meanings of the Harvest Festivals further, like Revelation 14 does, defining Believers as the Firstfurits of the Harvest, which clearly means we are not the whole Harvest.
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