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.
I really enjoy reading your posts. I'm still on the road to Christian universalism. I gave up my belief in the "eternal conscious torment" view of Hell a while back and I'm still leaning more towards annihilationism than universalism, but I'm reading these posts with an open mind!
ReplyDeleteThank you, I'm glad to know my material is being read.
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