My initial discovery of Universal Salvation was a joyful relief from the guilt-inducing fear of hell which accompanied so much of the sermonizing I heard as a younger Christian. Everything I did was motivated by the sword of God’s anger hanging over my head, ready to fall on me for the slightest miscreant act or error on my part. How much Hagen-Das Coffee Ice Cream could I eat before I went from enjoyment into gluttony and thus insured myself a place in the eternal flames if I died before getting to the Confessional? In those days, God was not loving heavenly Father looking down on me, a son, with the desire that I be healed and become like Christ, but the angry, vengeful Judge ever watching to see the slightest mistake so that I would fall under His eternal wrath. Yes, there were times in sermons that the one preaching would mention that God is love or that He loves us, but these times were overshadowed by the constant threats of revenge if I stepped out of bounds. Honestly, it got me more than a little crazy sometimes, and in retrospect, I must sadly admit that much of my religious activity in the past (and even today) was not based in a love for God in all His beauty, love, and majesty, but rather trying to avoid Him whacking me with a 2 x 4 spiritually. That’s sick.
Now there is something else driving me crazy about the Christian faith in my discussions of Universal Salvation with others. Numerous people will bring up quotes from the Early Fathers in defense of the savage idea of an eternal hell and expect that I must accept what they say as an infallible and final authority. This idea is rampant in the Orthodox faith, the idea that when a Father of the Church speaks, that settles the issue.
Well, no, it doesn’t!
If you are going to insist that what an Early Father teaches is infallible, then you have several problems I see with that idea. First of all, where and how do we have absolute proof that any teaching of any Father is infallible rather than being a theologoumenon? * In the first centuries of the Church there were great varieties of differing theological opinions floating around. For something to be dogma – that is, a teaching which you must accept under the penalty of falling into heresy if you reject it – it must have doctrinal authority. This leads to one very important question: WHERE do we find absolute doctrinal authority?
Personally, I see only two places, and I will give at least this to the Church of Rome, they do not mandate that the private revelations given out by supposed “seers” and “visionaries” (some of them being quite nuts!) ** in their church have the same authority as Scripture or the statements from the Magisterium. Orthodox laity and clergy don’t seem to understand this. They refer back to statements by the Fathers in a manner which appears that they believe all statements from the Fathers have same kind of authority that either the Sacred Scriptures or the Seven Ecumenical Councils have. Only in Scripture do we find the authoritative statements upon which we must base our faith and its practice. This is because in the Scriptures we find what Jesus, our God and Savior, taught us. In the Bible, God speaks and His Apostles, taught directly by Him, speak to us. This is not to say that I adhere to the Protestant error of “Sola Scriptura,” since the Scriptures must be properly interpreted. This is where the understanding of the Fathers in the ecumenical councils and Holy Tradition comes in.
For instance, at Nicea, the heretic Arias defended his proposition that Christ is a created being using the Scriptures alone. Jehovah’s Witnesses will do the same thing today with potential converts, taking a KVJ Bible a mercilessly beating you over the head with specific verses which, taken alone, would seem to indicate that Christ is inferior to the Father. This is where Holy Tradition is of great value. At Nicea, the final authority was simply this “Since the beginning it has been taught that Jesus Christ is one with the Father.”
End of discussion. Holy Tradition, that which was taught from the beginning, ruled the day.
Furthermore, our belief as Orthodox Christians is that the Holy Spirit guided the ecumenical councils as to arrive at truth when a teaching was contested. Thus, we have two, and only two, places where absolute truth is found and must be heeded. Everything else is conjecture, and some of it in the Early Fathers is rather . . . bizarre. In that category I would include such things as Augustine’s description of mankind as a “massa damnata,” the descriptions of a mythological bird, the Phoenix, as if it were real, Origen’s strange musings regarding the pre-existent state of souls and what they will be like at the end of time, Tertullian’s joy over sinners being tormented and how that sight will delight the souls of the righteous, the immortality of the human soul, and an assured statement that unbaptized babies go to hell. Not everything that the Early Fathers wrote was pure gold – and most certainly is not dogmatic truth.
Anyone wishing to understand the Christian tradition deeply must consider the central, formative role of Platonism. At various times Platonism has constituted an essential philosophical and theological resource, furnishing Christianity with a fundamental intellectual framework that has played a key role in its early development, and in subsequent periods of renewal. Alternately, at other times, it has been considered a compromising influence, conflicting with the faith’s revelatory foundations and distorting its inherent message. In both the positive and negative cases, the central importance of Platonism, as a force which Christianity defined itself by and against, is clear. Equally, this process of influence is not unidirectional. Whereas Platonism played a key role in the development of Christianity, the further development of Platonism beyond antiquity was dependent to a large degree upon Christian thinkers. The importance of this dialogue provides an answer to Tertullian’s celebrated question: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ The emphatic answer, detailed in the chapters of Christian Platonism: A History, is everything.* (Christian Platonism: A History.
An Interview with John Peter Kenney
Christian Platonism: A History
It appears to me that the fundamentalists of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism wish to understand history as being a series of perfect saints who made perfect theological declarations which were untainted by anything and completely true to both the original Greek texts of the Scriptures and what Jesus taught. More and more as I study and ponder the history of Christianity, I find such thinking Pollyannish at best and downright dishonest at worst. If the Fathers had such immense clarity in to the afterlife and issues such as the deity of Christ and the existence of His natures, there would have been no dissention among them, certainly no raucous councils, and no Chalcedonian schism.
Where does this leave us in our search for the truth of Universal Reconciliation, for you can find Fathers of the Church who openly taught this, and Fathers who insist that the souls of the wicked are destined for eternal torment. I think again that I must appeal to Holy Tradition and the ecumenical councils. For the first 500 years of the Church, Apokatastasis, the teaching that God will ultimately save all, was openly taught without so much as a whiff of the word “heresy” being uttered by the episcopate. No one called down St. Gregory of Nyssa and demanded a council to try him for teaching heresy. Five hundred years of teaching, starting from the beginning of the Christian faith, places this teaching in the realm of Holy Tradition. It stopped because an emperor did not like it and closed down the four theological schools which were teaching it.
Why did Justinian do this? He did so because the Roman Empire was being rent with divisions over doctrine. The council of Chalcedon, instead of settling the issue of Christ’s nature, caused riots in the streets. Justinian realized that a fractured empire is a weak empire and would be a hinderance to his goal of restoring Rome to its former glory. Therefore, in order to unite the empire, it was necessary to unite all under one banner of dogmatic theology. This was the purpose of the Second Council of Constantinople – and it failed miserably. Eighty years after Justinian’s death there were still ongoing riots and dissention in the streets over theological issues.
So, putting Justinian aside, we have three schools of Holy Tradition – Apokatastasis, Conditional Immortality, and Eternal Conscious Torment. How to decide between the three? What yardstick of authority can we use to determine which is most likely true?
Sacred Scripture.
In Part Two of this meditation, I will show that Sacred Scripture supports the Holy Tradition of Universal Reconciliation.
* A theologoumenon is a theological statement or concept that lacks absolute doctrinal authority. It is commonly defined as “a theological assertion or statement not derived from divine revelation “, or “a theological statement or concept in the area of individual opinion rather than of authoritative doctrine”.
** From “The Book of Truth”
“You are now, my children, in the middle of what is called the Tribulation, as foretold in My Holy Book. The second part, the Great Tribulation will commence as I have said, before the end of 2012. This is not meant to instill fear in you, my daughter, but to make you aware of the urgency for My children to pray for My help.” (Given on Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 @ 23:00)
(Well, this is a real problem because I do not remember any such start of the Great Tribulation. Of course, those who defend these visions are going to tell me that the Great Tribulation did indeed start, but it was unrecognized. Therefore, I have to look up the visionary descriptions of the Great Tribulation and see if this is possible. My understanding is that when the GT starts, you will know it, but I could be wrong.)
Muddling Through Life 