Thank you ephod and MLiiYL.
LadyLove:
26th February 2003 at 12:00 PM ladylove said this in Post #7
I do think you are taking this verse out of context to fit a Universalism view. However, please let me know if you don't believe that everyone recieves salvation. Because I don't believe everyone does...and the Bible does not support that view either.
You have some very strange disjointed belief systems. It appears you believe that EVERYONE will be saved (Universalism), yet also appear to agree with the Pre-wrath view of eschatology. Please let me know if this is how you view your theology. I could misunderstand your posts, so please correct this if I am wrong here. This is very strange.
My post record did not show that this thread had been replied to or else I would have replied sooner. Though I have addressed this in other threads, I will address it here again for the rest.
It is my view that, of the pre-millenial views of eschatology, pre-wrath is far superior to any other view. I am still evaluating the possibility of less literal views. Though I admit that the surprising coherency of the pre-wrath view strongly suggests that it is correct.
I do believe that everyone will be saved
eventually. This does not mean that anyone will avoid judgment, or that no one goes to Hell. It simply means that Hell is not a place where God tortures people forever because He just can't figure out something better to do with them. The misunderstanding regarding the nature of Hell is due to errors being introduced into the first non-Greek/Hebrew copies of the Bible (in Latin). Since then, the errors of been handed down to us, and even today, no popular Bible has corrected them (publishers are too afraid of the money they would lose). There are actually many translations that do not have the erronous renderings which teach eternal torment, but they are obscure. The majority of the confusion comes from the mistranslation of a single word and it's derivatives:
aion,
aiones, aionios and in Hebrew,
olam. Some Christians have even done some honest, albeit superficial, study of these words in answer to universalism. I've stared the opposition in the face, and their argument simply don't hold water.
The following two links are electronic copies of books with no copyright. The first is much newer than the second, but the second is a little more thorough (though less readable) than the first. If you can find time, I strongly suggest that you read them in that order. They will shed light on just how dubious our translation of
aionios and
aion as "forever" and "eternal" is.
http://www.tentmaker.org/books/time/index.html
http://www.tentmaker.org/books/Aion_lim.html
As far as taking that verse out of context, that is not at all the case. In fact, just yesterday, I verified that it is very much within the context. I will reprint below something I sent to someone in an email that relates to
1 Corinthians 15:22-23. And this doctrine does not stand or fall on this one verse. There are many others like it in both the Old and New Testaments.
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While shopping in Books A Million, I happened to see a book entitled
Figures of Speech Used In the Bible authored by
Bullinger. So I took the opportunity to look up something I had heard concerning
1 Corinthians 15:23, and I found a small discussion of that very verse.
From the
Rotherham's Emphasized Bible (REB):
1 Corinthians 15:23 --
But each [will be made alive] in his own rank: a firstfruit, Christ; after that, they who are the Christ's in his Presence; afterwards the end.
Bullinger fully supported the view that the figure of speech,
the end, refers to the rest of the dead being resurrected rather than referring to the end of the world. But he viewed this third resurrection as a resurrection for judgment at the end of the one thousand years of Revelation chapter 20. However, in a completely different part of the book (the figures of speech being arranged by category and only in the index by scriptural location), the author contradicts this view in discussing
1 Corinthians 15:22.
From the REB:
1 Corinthians 15:22 --
For just as in the Adam all die [Greek: or
died],
so also in the Christ shall all be made alive.
He was apparently well aware that when it appears elsewhere in scripture, the term
made alive always refers to the kind of vivifying resurrection that results from the saving work of Jesus. Because of this, he explained that the
all who die in Adam cannot truly mean all people, because some will escape death through the rapture. Based on this assumption, he infers that in a similar manner, the
all who will be made alive in Christ cannot refer to all people because not all will be saved. However, because the two discussions were separated in his book by many pages, he apparently never realized that his position on verse 22 contradicts his explanation on verse 23. Apparently, he also didn't consider that the tense of the Greek word for
die can also mean
died (in a historical sense; see following quote from
http://www.blueletterbible.com concerning the verb's tense).
"Some phrases which might be rendered as past tense in English will often occur in the present tense in Greek. These are termed "historical presents," and such occurrences dramatize the event described as if the reader were there watching the event occur. Some English translations render such historical presents in the English past tense, while others permit the tense to remain in the present."
Such a historical present can only be determined by context.
So, an explanation that preserves the idea that both instances of all mean
all people, would be: Just as Adam surely
died (spiritually) on the day that he ate of the tree of knowledge (Genesis 3:16), we surely were born dead (spiritually) because of Adam's transgression. It could easily be argued that this spiritual death is what is being referred to here. In that way, an amplified rendering of verse 22 might read: For as in Adam all have died [spiritually], so in Christ all will be made alive [spiritually]! This fits perfectly with the usage of
made alive (Strong's # 2227) elsewhere in the New Testament.
Because modern translations render these verses in such a way that only Christ and those who are in Christ at his coming are mentioned as part of the all who will be made alive, this was previously a major sticking point for me, and it easily provides cover for those who wish to find an easy way out of the universalist implications of these verses. In this new light, it has instead become an extremely strong scripture in support of universal salvation! When properly understood, verse 23 clarifies exactly who the
all in verse 22 is, and it thus makes the grammatical gymnastics of non-universalists all the more dubious.
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Pontious Pilate asked Jesus to his face: "What is truth?" What indeed?