Are you saying that there are footnotes in his translation which openly and forcefully declare Apokatastasis to be true? Or do you see that the translation itself is pushing this agenda?
Do you remember the scene in Lewis's book, The Last Battle, where the dwarfs are locked in the stable and Aslan gives them fine food, good wine, etc. and in the darkness, they think it is old turnips and foul water? Why? Because they cannot see what has been given to them. Now in the book, Lewis has Aslan say that there is nothing that can be done to help them, which I find ridiculous because all Aslan has to do is to open a door or window and let the light in and they will see everything as it truly is. This is the so called "free-will theodicy" of those who defend eternal, conscious torment.
The best of us in this world are still somewhat blind, somewhat in darkness. Many have never even been exposed to the Light. The idea that these people "hate" God is illogical, since they know nothing of Him. Having never seen missionaries, having never heard the name of Jesus or the Gospel of His salvific love, they do the best they can in utter darkness. Shall they be tormented forever? Augustine and others say "Yes," as if such a thing were in any way just.
And what of those who are deceived by false Christian teachers, such as I was for numerous years? Did I hate God then when I refused to consider the apostolic faith(s)? What soul would see Christ in all His beauty and love and continue in rebellion. Remember, we all make decisions which are in our own best interests. That is the human way. I find it hard to believe that a soul, upon seeing Christ, would not want the best for itself.
Or they could experience it as the Bible describes this fire of God in many places - as cleansing and redemptive. This is an a priori assumption on the part of so many people, that the only response to God will be more hatred and that the only purpose of the fire of God's love is to destroy and harm. Yet we see in the Bible the refiner's fire which cleanses the gold, the fires of 1 Corinthians 3 which burn away the wood, hay, and stubble, leaving that which is precious. It seems to me that many people view God as the "Divine Getter Evener" for their own desires for wrath on those who have hurt them in some way. Tertullian spoke of this in looking forward to the glee that he and other Christians would experience as they watched their tormenters on earth be eternally burned. Somehow that doesn't seem to match Matthew 5:44.
Now, ultimately we do not know everything that happens after death, but I feel that a hint of what we might expect is based in the fact that God is love, and love always does the best for that object of its affections. Thus, one could expect that this loving outreach continue into the next life.
We are all saved. We just don't all know it yet. St. Paul said so. Perhaps that is where Universalism was birthed, in the book of Romans.
Romans 5: 18-19: "Therefore as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. 19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.
I understand that DBH should not be speaking in dogmatic tones regarding Universalism. That is not obedience to the Church. One thing that very much bothers me about his presentations is the lack of warning people that there is a judgment of our deeds before Christ, and that those who have done wickedness are going to be punished, the severity of punishment corresponding to the level of evil done. People must understand that Universal Salvation is not a free ticket on the express train through the Pearly Gates.
At any rate, your argumentation aside, the fact of the matter is that the only church in antiquity which embraced Universalism or Apokatastasis as a definite future outcome rather than as something to hope and pray for was the Assyrian Church of the East, which at the time was the largest in the world geographically, but did not account for the majority of the population in any of its lands except the island of Socotra in Yemen (which did not stop the genocide of the Assyrian Christians there by the Muslims, a genocide that wiped that church out everywhere except in its historic homelands of the Fertile Crescent in Iraq, Iran and Syria, and the Malabar Coast of India, in a terrible genocide initiated by the evil Muslim warlord Tamerlane. We know the Assyrians believed Hell was temporary from recently translated writings of St. Isaac the Syrian, translated by Sebastian Brock (which some people argue are of a different monastic from the Assyrian church, but there was not much in the way of Eastern Orthodox monasteries in the region where St. Isaac is said to have lived, but it is rather an area where the Assyrians and the Syriac Orthodox predominate), and from the Book of the Bee, a book by the eighth century Bishop of Basra, which also declares that those in Hell will receive “stripes according to the severity of their transgressions and then be released.” So basically, at one time, the Assyrian Church of the East believed in a form of Universalism that is less monergistic than full Universalism, which I would call Hell-As-Purgatory. I do not think this is their doctrine at present, but the Assyrian Church can be enigmatic and difficult to pin down; for example, the deny being iconoclasts, and their canons require an altar of Christ (specifically the Image-Not-Made-By-Hands if I recall) to be present on the altar in their churches, yet these icons are rarely if ever present. I attribute this confusion to the fact that for centuries, in violation of their own canon law, the church was ruled by a hereditary Patriarchate, wherein the future Catholicos-Patriarch was inevitably the younger son of the older brother of the presently serving Patriarch, since the church maintained celibate bishops even after all of its monasteries were lost in the genocide of Tamerlane.
In the 1960s, the last hereditary Catholicos, Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, changed the calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian, which was as unpopular in that church as it was in our own, and the Old Calendarist bishops who broke away in the Ancient Church of the East felt compelled to do so when in addition to the calendar issue, an Indian bishop discovered while reading an ancient nomocanon (collection of canon laws) that a bishop cannot chose his own successor, which was the basis for the hereditary, or at times semi-hereditary patriarchate, in which normally the Patriarch would select his youngest nephew to be his successor (but the choice was up to him, and in the event his nephew died, he could appoint someone else), and this of course is an ancient canonical principle shared by the other churches of apostolic origin such as the Eastern Orthodox Church; one will find a similiar canon in the Pedalion, which is our nomocanon. After finding this out, a group of bishops broke away to found the Ancient Church of the East, led by Mar Addai II, memory eternal, who died a few years ago, who unlike the hereditary Patriarchates, who after the Ottoman genocide of 1915, had ruled from the safety of Chicago, where there is an enormous Assyrian expatriate population, located himself in Iraq. Mar Shimun XXIII then in 1974 caused considerable turmoil when he announced his intention to marry, which would have likely caused the majority of the Assyrians to move to the hierarchy of Mar Addai II, but tragically Mar Shimun XXIII was assasinated. Catholicos Mar Dinkha IV, memory eternal, was elected as the first non-hereditary replacement to succeed him in the Assyrian Church of the East, and in the 2000s he began working with Mar Addai II on reunification of the two churches, which will likely happen soon. The Assyrian Church of the East has around 1.5 million members, 700,000 of which speak Aramaic, constituting the largest surviving population of Aramaic speakers who use Aramaic as their vernacular language, and the Ancient Church of the East has about 100,000 members (nearly all of whom speak Aramaic; they may be included in the 700,000 figure I mentioned; I am not sure).
Due to this turmoil, what Metropolitan Kallistos Ware wrote repeatedly about the Church of the East in his book The Orthodox Church, that they lacked theologians to clarify their positions on certain questions of doctrine, largely remains the case due to the turmoil and the persecutions. However Mar Dinkha IV did formally renounce Nestorian Christology in the 1970s. The Assyrian church has very good relations with the Moscow Patriarchate.
But at any rate, as I said earlier, if Orthodox Christians feel they must be part of an Eastern church that is universalist, perhaps when the dust settles they will find the Assyrian church to be their spiritual home. The doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church cannot be changed, and the position of those who argue that Universalism is the true doctrine of Eastern Orthodoxy are ignoring our rejection of monergism and our emphasis on synergy in salvation, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council, and the reasons why Origen is regarded by many as a heretic (I myself do not feel it was right to anathematize him posthumously, but certain ideas of his are highly erroneous, for example, his idea of the transmigration of the soul). St. Gregory of Nyssa also speculated about apokatastasis, but that is very far from it being declared official doctrine.
This did ironically lead, however, to the wacky Episcopal Church in San Francisco adopting St. Gregory as their patron saint. They have icons pained in the Byzantine style on their ceiling of such reknowned holy men as the Kanghzhi Emperor who banned Christianity in China due to the disagreement between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over whether or not ancestor worship was acceptable, resulting in many martyrdoms, and also other really good Christians, like the Buddha. I speak in jest of course. But had they realized that St. Gregory of Nyssa is one of only a handful of Church Fathers who composed a canon accepted throughout the Orthodox Church, another being his elder brother St. Basil the Great, that specifically condemned homosexuality, thus reinforcing the scriptural prohibition of it.
