This post will presuppose a familiarity with my argument presented in my article God as Love, in creation, available here. It will assume a Shellingian concept of God as dialectical and dynamic, and a notion of Love developed by Alain Badiou on others in which one determines herself through the other.
Let’s define sin as the willful rejection of God’s love, which means the rejection of God in himself. Given that (in light of the article “God as Love, in Creation”) God’s love is his God’s relationship to creation as both grounding it in its existence and determining himself in relation to his creation (God as first and final cause); the sinner rejecting God is rejecting his own existence. If our existence is a gift, a gift which is the result of God’s love, and a gift which returns to God in God’s self determination through this gift, then a rejection of God is a rejection of the gift of existence. The sinner does not desire for God to be ‘all in all’ and therefore does not desire to ‘be’ at all. To put it a different way, to hate God is to hate creation, since we only can know God as creatures related to their creator. One cannot harm God directly, but one can rob God of his beloved, his creature, and one can also reject the gift of being, the most direct relation we with with God, and the most direct way we know God.
An eternal conscious torment view would mean that God does not allow the sinner to get what he wants, but in fact keeps the sinner in existence, receiving the gift of existence, while the sinner—due to his sin—experiences that gift as torment.
A universalist view also denies the sinner what he wants, the universalist God keeps the sinner in existence, receiving the gift of existence, with the knowledge that the sinner will turn from his sin. The universalist view is certainly more attractive and coherent than the eternal conscious torment view, nevertheless, the assumption is that finite agents cannot actually decide to reject God, at most they can tentatively resist God. If this is true, I would summit, they cannot truly love God. A true declaration of love is, and must be absolute, if one declares one’s love to one’s beloved the love declared is always permanent in intention. However, a declaration of love is with the hope of reciprocation, the reciprocation cannot be guaranteed, the contingency is necessary to the event of love. Therefore, if one never actually had the ability to permanently reject God’s love, the reciprocation of God’s love becomes, not a true reciprocation of the other, but just the relentless power of God’s gift. God’s gift of creation is gift only in that it is excessive, it needn’t have been, but the reciprocation of the gift must be a true counter gift, not merely the necessary and inevitable return of the gift. God’s gift of creation. If it is truly a gift of love, must be able to be rejected, truly rejected, if the reciprocation is inevitable than God’s determination of himself by creation is really a determination of himself by himself, his creation of the ‘other’ is not truly an ‘other’ but a rather complex machine where the outcome is ultimately set.Annihilationism is simply the view that God allows mankind to reject him, and thus reject existence, and therefore, when mankind does not reject God, but receives the gift of existence with gratitude, joy, and love, the love that God gives is truly reciprocated by the love other an ‘other,’ therefore the love of God truly is love, and not merely an elaborate self-love, and God’s creation is truly the creation of an ‘other,’ and not merely a complex and finite extension of himself.
Musing on Theology 