Against Universalism and Infernalism

The following is an argument against both Universalism (in the soteriological sense) and Eternal conscious torment.

A Defense of Annihilationism

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.

God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo. By David Bentley Hart

I want to give a few comments on this wonderful essay by David Bentley Hart Called God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo in the Radical Orthodoxy journal put out a few years ago, expanded on in later works. This essay is one of the best theological critiques of eternal conscious torment I’ve read, and the main argument is that God is responsible for his creation and that the eternal torment of damned souls, even if it is due to the free choice of the damned, still must lay at the feet of God in terms of ultimate responsibility; given that, the doctrine of eternal conscious torment makes nonsense of any coherent theory of atonement and creation ex nihilo.

Theodicy and Creation ex-nihilo

Why the problem of evil cannot be resolved by Classical theists or Neo-Classical theists.

By Classical theists I mean those who affirm absolute divine simplicity (along with creation ex-nihilo and exhaustive divine foreknowledge), by Neo-Classical theists I mean those who deny absolute divine simplicity but affirm creation ex-nihilo and exhaustive divine foreknowledge.

Schelling’s dynamic God

I wish first and foremost to draw attention to the constancy with which Genesis says of Jehovah, but never, to my knowledge, of the Elohim, that he appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; this in itself presupposes that he was not the immediate content of their consciousness, as those think who propose revelation as the one and only first principle of explanation. No less noteworthy is the way the patriarchs at significant moments call Jehovah by name as one calls someone whom one wishes to detain, or who should show himself.
. . .
The original human race had, in the relatively-One and eternal [Elohim], in fact really understood the true, the essentially-One and eternal. Only the advent of the second god [Jehovah] brings consciousness to the point where it distinguishes the essentially-eternal, which in the merely accidentally-eternal had been the true, the genuine god—where it distinguishes the essentially-eternal from that which was so only for one era.
. . .
The true god is mediated for him by the natural god not just transiently, but constantly, for him the true god is never the existing god, but constantly only the god coming to be, which in itself would suffice to explain the name “Jehovah,” in which that same concept of coming to be is pre-eminently expressed. Abraham’s religion does not therefore consist in his abandoning that god of the primal time, and becoming untrue to him, in fact it is the heathens who do that; the true god himself was revealed to Abraham only in that god of the primal time, and is thus indivisible from him, indivisible from the god who always was, the El Olam, as he is called.
. . .
Just as the true god is for him the same as the El Olam, similarly this true god is the same as the god of heaven and earth; for as such was once worshipped the god common to the whole human race. For Abraham, Jehovah is not a materially different god from this one, for him he is simply the true god of heaven and earth.
. . .
But it cannot eliminate it for the present, it will therefore overcome this limitation only to the extent that it recognizes the true god as the god indeed now merely appearing, but at the same time as the god who at some time shall be. Seen from this side, the religion of Abraham is pure authentic monotheism, but this is for him not the religion of the present—in the present his monotheism is subject to the restriction of mythology—certainly, though, it is for him the religion of the future; the true god is the one who shall be, that is his name. When Moses asks under which name he should proclaim the god who will lead the people out of Egypt, this god answers “I shall be the I shall be”; here, thus, where the god speaks in his own person, the name is translated from the third person into the first, and it would be quite inadmissible to find here too the expression of the metaphysical eternity or immutability of God.
. . .
We earlier explained the name “Jehovah” as the name of the one who is coming to be—perhaps this was its initial meaning, but according to that explanation it is, in the case of Moses, the name of the future one, of the one who is now only coming to be, who will one day exist, and all his pledges too concern the future.

Schelling, F.W.J., Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology.

Love, Beauty, and the Demonic as Saturated Phenomena

Macrina Magazine, earlier this week, published an essay of mine on the relationship between the notion of the Saturated Phenomena, the mechanistic worldview, love, beauty and the demonic. Take a read:

Love, Beauty, and the Demonic as Saturated Phenomena

Love and Solidarity in the Light of Death and Eternity

Originally published by Macrina Magazine, May 9, 2020

The Phenomenological world and the Noumenalogical world

I recently finished the book Deliver us From Evil: Interpreting the Redemption from the Power of Satan in New Testament Theology by Richard H. Bell, and would like to share something I learned from it. One main insight, which I already kind knew but didn’t ever apply it this way, is that the world of science, the world of empiricism, is the phenomenological world which is not necessarily the world in it self: the noumenalogical world. What this means is that when we think of spirit/human interaction (such as demon posesssion), we are speaking of something happening on the level of the noumenalogical, meaning the world in itself independent of the how it appears to us through our senses and our necessary interpretive frameworks of perception (space, time, causality, etc etc). Richard Bell then goes on to apply the Sophenhauer’s own philosophy to claim that mythology can, in part, uncover the noumenalogical, the world as it is. Richard Bell then reads much of the biblical theological discourse (redemption, salvation, the fall, Satan, Christ) mythologically and claims that it is through this mythological reading that one can approach the theological reality.

Healing

In dealing with theodicy, a scriptural data set that needs to be taken into account is Jesus’s healings. The reason for this is that with these healings, we get Jesus’s own reaction to human suffering. Some accounts portray the motivation as ‘pity’ (e.g. Luke 7:13 with Jesus rising the only son of a woman from the dead,  Matthew 14:14 with the healing of sick people in the crowd, Matthew 20:34 with his healing of the blind man). The word used for being moved pity is σπλαγχνίζομαι bascially means being moved as to one’s inward parts, kind of like how one might say “that hit me in gut”.

So what are we to make of these accounts? I think there are a few things we can say:

Not wanting any to Perish

In the previous post we examined some scriptures that are commonly used to defend exhaustive Divine foreknowledge, now let’s look at some that imply the opposite. There are many, but let’s look at three: Jonah 3:4–10; 2 Kings 20:1–6 (Isaiah 38:1–5); and 2 Peter 3:7–9.  Starting with Jonah: