Now we come to the real issue, as I see it, between Father M and myself:
Picking up the conversation from Part One:
Father M: man, you really don’t listen to what we say at all. I will go into why, AGAIN, later as I am on my phone.
and I have read his new book. it’s garbage just like his translation of the New Testament. he doesn’t understand what love or goodness or apokatastasis actually is from a patristic POV, and he cherry picks from Nyssa mainly. (It’s garbage. Uh huh. Sure! Let’s face it, Father, you read it with a real prejudice and a desire to pick it apart. “It’s garbage” is neither a constructive review or a viable criticism. You have to do better than that. Where is your detailed critique? So far, no one has come up with one among the many which I have read)
and I will say, St Augustine did have many errors that messed up the West, but hell’s eternity wasn’t one of them. it appeared a lot of Fathers East and West before and after him. (Universalists acknowledge the existence of hellist teaching in the first five centuries before Augustine began to destroy it. We just don’t think it was correct anymore than we think that Arian heretics were correct. But here’s the big question: which doctrine is more in line with the verse “God is love?” The one that makes him a sociopathic monster or the one that shows Him acting in love? I’m not going to let you get away with an appeal to other writers just because they were Early Fathers. Some of the Fathers were dead wrong in some of the things they taught.)
oh, and one last thing. we believe in apokatastasis. (You do???) read St Maximos who came after St Justinian. which is also something you and I have discussed. it depends on the understanding. (You will shortly see what he means by “the understanding.”)
and I don’t believe God is powerless against man’s free will. that has nothing to do with whether or not hell is eternal. this is why it seems like you don’t listen to us.
ME: Then what are we arguing about? *sigh* Let me go back and find the links to that discussion if I can. Thank you, as always, especially for your irenic responses to me as I plod on.
Father M: your understanding of apokatastasis. there is a wrong way to understand it, and a right way. DBH understands it incorrectly. (No, he doesn’t. He understands it in the same way that St. Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac of Syria present it. )
just like there are two heretical ways of understanding the phrase, “one Nature of the Word of God incarnate” and a correct way to understand it. we affirm the latter.
Father M: here we go, answering some of your points as promised
Thank you.
As the Latin culture became more dominant in Christianity, so did the ideas associated with penal substitution, total depravity of mankind, and the misinterpretation of the scriptures, all leading to the conclusion that mankind is by nature damned and hated of God.
Father M: none of this is related to the idea of an eternal hell. while it is erroneous theology, one can have a belief in an eternal hell and reject total depravity, penal subsitution, etc. so this is a moot point.
I do not see this at all. I see Augustine’s ideas as the very foundation for eternal hell because in his anthropoloty, man is a worthless object that God decides to save not because of any intrinsic value, but to show His power and goodness. As Brad Jersek said in one of this presentations, if you have a priceless painting by a master that has been in an old, musty garage for a century and is covered with mold, damaged, and the paint chipping off, you dont’ throw it away or destroy it. The value of it will make you work as long and lovingly as possible to restore it to its original condition. The very fact that we bear the image of God should be enough to see that God values that image and would do all necessary to restore it. Total depravity, Original Sin, etc. infers that the image of God is gone in man, that man can do nothing good by and off Himself, and that unless saved, the human soul is not worth saving.
I see that torment because the torment is restorative and corrective.
Father M: as do I, this also doesn’t refute an eternal hell. If you see the pains of hell as restorative and corrective, then how do they fail to restore all?
You take the position that it will never end because God is powerless against man’s free will and unable to overcome that.
Father M: I never said that. God isn’t powerless against man’s free will.
True, you never said that, but that is one of the most popular responses against Apokatastasis, and one I believe which would be your response to the question I asked above, i.e., that the pains of hell fail to restore all because not all men will turn their will towards God and God must respect the free will of man.
The bottom line is this, those in the church who did teach eternal damnation were in the minority, they were culturally influenced by the Latin church, and they don’t have a philosophical leg to stand on. Their understanding of God’s mercy was just as warped as the understandings of the Arians a couple of centuries earlier. Just the fact of the popularity of the Arian heresy shows that the fathers and bishops of the church could err, and did so quite grievously. In the timeline of history we we see that the teaching of Apokatastasis was the predominant teaching until Augustine, and following Augustine Justinian, who together manage destroy it from the teaching of the Church and replaced it with the courtroom mentality of the Romans. This is why I say what I say.
Father M: I would love to see any evidence to support this. ( I doubt this. I think he would work overtime to find refutations of these points)
ME: With all due respect for you as a priest and honoring your ordination, I would kindly challenge you to set aside your prejudices, which I believe come from your Western background as a convert, read David Bentley Hart’s new book, and then if you still disagree, write a detailed explanation as to why rather than throwing stones at his personal character as other men have done in trying to protect him, it claiming as your only defense that the Church teaches eternal damnation. According to several various authors I have read, the Church in the East does not have either a catechism or a defined eschatology.
Father M: I have, and he, like you are doing in this thread (and have done) don’t get the Patristic understanding of what “good” is, or “love,” etc. Hart writes as if these are standards or concepts that can be acquired. meaning, if God doesn’t save everyone, He can’t be good or love because how can a good and loving God create people knowing there is an eternal hell? that is a modern philosophic worldly approach to good, but not a theological one. And since you said I have “Western prejudices” I can throw that back at you and Hart, since we all come from a Western background. that assumes you and he are on the side of the East, which you just aren’t looking at the history.
What you are saying in essence is that love is not univocal. That love is not defined by Matthew 5 or 1 Corinthians 13 as forgiving one’s enemies, doing good to them, etc. That love can be, because it is not univocal, beating the sheer hell out of my wife every night and when I am told that is not loving, I counter with “You really don’t understand what love is.”
Honestly, every time I field this objection I find myself gobsmacked. If words do not have a specific meaning every time they are used, then how can we even communicate with one another or with God? How can He communicate with us and how can we trust Him if there is no set meaning to words?
As for the word “good,” we have to define in what manner we are using that word. The Thomistic arguement appeals to God being good as His “being perfect and lacking nothing.” (Divine Simplicity) But if that is the only definition they are willing to use, then by extension, in relation to us, God can create beings for no other purpose than to show His power by torturing them forever for their rebellion against Him (Classic Westminster Calvinism) and yet still be called “good.” This is an utter failure to see that while God may be, in such a scenario, ontologically good, He is not at all “good” in any sense of that word when it comes to relationality. He is, in fact, being more like the pagan “gods” of antiquity who were capricious, angry, untrustworthy, ego-driven, and just as likely to kill you as to care for you.
I’m not changing my mind about Augustine and I’m still studying Apokatastasis with a real sense that this is the truth about God’s love.
Father M: well, your idea about St Augustine is just incorrect. he might have made the beliefs popular, but he didn’t invent them. and again, we affirm apokatastasis, just not how Hart has defined it.
Okay, I’m really trying to understand that last statement. You say you affirm Apokatastasis, yet you do not accept that it means the restoration of all things. Let me take a guess at what I think you mean and you tell me if I am correct.
For your understanding, Apokatastasis is that all will be returned to God and experience His love, but the wicked will find it absolute torment and the saved find it absolute joy. And these conditions are irreversible once the Final Judgment has taken place. So in your understanding, it is about all being returned to God, but not all coming to repentance, either here or in the next life.
Did I get that correct? Thank you for responding.
Father M: yes, and we have come to this conclusion before.
ME: Let me see if I can put a concise point on this:
1. Hell is eternal because God is eternal because hell is really the fiery and passionate love of God, which is eternal and never-ending.
2. The wicked experience this unending love as a hell of torment while the righteous experience it as a joy.
3. It will never end for the wicked because they do not want it to. God will continue to shower them with His unending love forever and they will not repent because they do not want anything to do with Him, just as in life they wanted nothing to do with Him.
END OF CONVERSATION
So here is the main difference between Father and myself. He believes that restoration means that God brings all souls back to Himself through Christ, but that not all will enjoy it because they will not repent in the next life, and thus they will suffer eternal hell. That is NOT what the Patristic Fathers taught about Apokatastasis.
Restoration of all means all!!
Muddling Through Life 