No church creed until around at least about 500 A.D. condemned either the belief in eventual universalism or the ultimate salvation of all fallen angelic beings. Origen, Gregory Nyssa, Jerome, St Isaac the Syrian & other church fathers were among those who proclaimed the final universal reconciliation of all created beings.Clement of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome, Diodorus of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia & the Ambrosiaster writing are included, with qualifications, by the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Apocatastasis, which states the doctrine was not formally condemned until 543 AD. “The doctrine was thenceforth looked on as heterodox by the Church.” Thereafter followed the dark ages of the next 1000-1400 years, including Inquisitions, Crusades, burning of opposers & their writings, denial of freedoms such as freedom of religion & freedom of speech. Do we really want to follow the “Christian traditions” that bore that fruit?
Apocatastasis: “A name given in the history of theology to the doctrine which teaches that a time will come when all free creatures will share in the grace of salvation; in a special way, the devils and lost souls.” newadvent.org/cathen/01599a.htm
"The main Patristic supporters of the apokatastasis theory, such as Bardaisan, Clement, Origen, Didymus, St. Anthony, St. Pamphilus Martyr, Methodius, St. Macrina, St. Gregory of Nyssa (and probably the two other Cappadocians), St. Evagrius Ponticus, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. John of Jerusalem, Rufinus, St. Jerome and St. Augustine (at least initially) … Cassian, St. Issac of Nineveh, St. John of Dalyatha, Ps. Dionysius the Areopagite, probably St. Maximus the Confessor, up to John the Scot Eriugena, and many others, grounded their Christian doctrine of apokatastasis first of all in the Bible. — Ramelli, Christian Doctrine, 11."
Here we have an Epistle of Barnabas' (70-135 AD) remark in the context of an eschatological 8th day Sabbath rest, when wickedness ceases to exist, all things are made new & God will be "giving rest to all things":
15:7-8 Behold, therefore: certainly then one properly resting sanctifies it, when we ourselves, having received the promise, wickedness no longer existing, and all things having been made new by the Lord, shall be able to work righteousness. Then we shall be able to sanctify it, having been first sanctified ourselves. Further, He says to them, "Your new moons and your Sabbath I cannot endure." Ye perceive how He speaks: Your present Sabbaths are not acceptable to Me, but that is which I have made, [namely this,] when, giving rest to all things, I shall make a beginning of the eighth day, that is, a beginning of another world.
The Epistle of Barnabas there speaks of wickedness, not the wicked, ceasing to exist.
That epistle was regarded quite highly in the early church, especially in Alexandria by ClementA & Origen. It seems not to have been known in other regions till quite a bit later & scholars tend to see Egypt as its place of origin. All this adds weight to the view that it supports universalism.
According to most of the early church fathers.
Did you forget to finish your thought? As it stands that sentence doesn't say anything.
Furthermore, you quoted a mere 7 "church fathers", which is not "most" of them.
Moreover, why quote "church fathers" when you consider them irrelevant & uninspired:
Irrelevant not scripture.
Additionally, quoting English mistranslations of Greek (Latin etc) words that are a point of debate in the whole universalism vs endless torturism discussion does not prove that the church fathers you quoted mis-translations of were opposed to universalism. As Patristic scholar Illaria Ramelli said:
"Of course there were antiuniversalists also in the ancient church, but scholars must be careful not to list among them...an author just because he uses πῦρ αἰώνιον, κόλασις αἰώνιος, θάνατος αἰώνιος, or the like, since these biblical expressions do not necessarily refer to eternal damnation. Indeed all universalists, from Origen to Gregory Nyssen to Evagrius, used these phrases without problems, for universalists understood these expressions as “otherworldly,” or “long-lasting,” fire, educative punishment, and death. Thus, the mere presence of such phrases is not enough to conclude that a patristic thinker “affirmed the idea of everlasting punishment” (p. 822)." (Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Brill, 2013. 890 pp.)
Scholars directory, with list of publications:
Ilaria L.E. Ramelli - ISNS Scholars Directory
Clement [ 30-100] The First Epistle to the Corinthians.
Chap. XI. — Continuation. Lot.
On account of his hospitality and godliness, Lot was saved out of Sodom when all the country round was punished by means of fire and brimstone, the Lord thus making it manifest that He does not forsake those that hope in Him, but gives up such as depart from Him to punishment and torture.
Nothing there affirms endless punishment or denies universal salvation.
This re Clement of Rome (d. ca 99 AD) is interesting:
"It might be worth noting that during the 4th century spat over universal salvation between the Latin super-Fathers Jerome and Rufinius, Ruf used to remind Jerome that they both still acknowledged Clement of Rome (2nd or 3rd pope) was a Christian universalist. It’s hard to say whether they’re doing so thanks to some spurious epistles from him, or whether it was from writing still extant in their day."
The Early Church Father issue
as well as:
"In the Ethiopic rescension of chapter 14 (found in the Ethiopic editions of the Pseudo-Clementines, specifically The Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the Dead), Jesus and Peter discuss the final salvation of sinners after a period of torments. Jesus obesrves (140ra) that sinners will not repent if the threat of eternal damnation is removed. But God and Christ will have compassion for all their creatures (140rb) and Jesus will destroy the devil and punish sinners (140vb-141vb). But he adds to Peter, “You will have no more mercy on sinners than I do, for I was crucified because of them, in order to obtain mercy for them from my Father.” The Lord will therefore give each of them “life, glory, and kingdom without end”, since Jesus will interceded for them. But this outcome must not be made known, to avoid an upsurge in sin (141vb-142vb). Peter reports this dialogue of his to Clement (of Rome, 2nd or 3rd Roman pope), recommending secrecy in turn, since the doctrine might foment sin in immature people."
Does "Apocalypse of Peter" show UR in the Early Church?
Tatian’s [a.d. 110-172.] Address to the Greeks. Chap. XIII. — Theory of the Soul’s Immortality.
The soul is not in itself immortal, O Greeks, but mortal.37 Yet it is possible for it not to die. If, indeed, it knows not the truth, it dies, and is dissolved with the body, but rises again at last at the end of the world with the body, receiving death by punishment in immortality.
Nothing there supports endless punishment, whether or torments or annihilation. So it is perfectly in harmony with universalism.
Clement of Alexandria [a.d. 153-193-217.] Exhortation to the Heathen. Chap X
For God bestows life freely; but evil custom, after our departure from this world, brings on the sinner unavailing remorse with punishment.
Nothing there supports endless punishment, whether or torments or annihilation. So it is perfectly in harmony with universalism. The "remorse" spoken of may be ungodly sorrow like that sorrow a criminal experiences when caught & punished, not the "godly remorse" that worketh - repentance - that Paul refers to:
2 Cor.7:9 Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing. 10For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.
Therefore, in light of the following, Clement of Alexandria, like his pupil Oregon, should be considered a universalist.
"CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (150-220 A.D.) likewise has sounded these words: “The Lord, [says John in his First Epistle,] is a propitiation, ‘not for our sins only,’ that is, of the faithful, ‘but also for the whole world.’ Therefore He indeed saves all; but some as converted by punishments, others by voluntary submission, thus obtaining the honour and dignity, that ‘to Him every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth,’ that is [to say,] angels, and men, and souls who departed this life before His coming into the world."
That quote is "...from a fragment of Clement's lost work Hypotyposeis preserved in Latin in the later writer Cassiodorus (ca 485- ca 585)...This passage is quite interesting, since Origen and Origen's followers (and many later universalists) often cited the teaching of Philippians 2" as "implying universal salvation by Christ" (The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism – June 5, 2018, by Michael J. McClymond, p.242-243).
The Sacred Writings of Clement of Alexandria By Clement of Alexandria:
The Sacred Writings of Clement of Alexandria
"God does not take vengeance, which is the requital of evil for evil, but chastises for the benefit of the chastised (Stromata 7.16)
"To Him is placed in subjection all the host of angels and gods; He, the paternal Word, exhibiting a the holy administration for Him who put [all] in subjection to Him.
"Wherefore also all men are His; some through knowledge, and others not yet so; and some as friends, some as faithful servants, some as servants merely. ....
"And how is He Saviour and Lord, if not the Saviour and Lord of all? But He is the Saviour of those who have believed, because of their wishing to know; and the Lord of those who have not believed, till, being enabled to confess him, they obtain the peculiar and appropriate boon which comes by Him. (Stromata 7.2)
The Universalists: Clement of Alexandria : ChristianUniversalism
“For all things are ordered both universally and in particular by the Lord of the universe, with a view to the salvation of the universe. But needful corrections, by the goodness of the great, overseeing judge, through the attendant angels, through various prior judgments, through the final judgment, compel even those who have become more callous to repent.”
“So he saves all; but some he converts by penalties, others who follow him of their own will, and in accordance with the worthiness of his honor, that every knee may be bent to him of celestial, terrestrial and infernal things (Phil. 2:10), that is angels, men, and souls who before his advent migrated from this mortal life.”
“For there are partial corrections (padeiai) which are called chastisements (kolasis), which many of us who have been in transgression incur by falling away from the Lord’s people. But as children are chastised by their teacher, or their father, so are we by Providence. But God does not punish (timoria) for punishment (timoria) is retaliation for evil. He chastises, however, for good to those who are chastised collectively and individually.” (Strom, VII, ii; Pedag. I, 8; on I John ii, 2)
...
Eastern Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart comments in his extensive notes (Concluding Scientific Postscript) re aionios following his translation of the New Testament:
"...John Chrysostom, in his commentary on Ephesians, even used the word aionios of the kingdom of the devil specifically to indicate that it is temporary (for it will last only until the end of the present age, he explains). In the early centuries of the church, especially in the Greek and Syrian East, the lexical plasticity of the noun and the adjective was fully appreciated -and often exploited - by a number of Christian theologians and exegetes (especially such explicit universalists as the great Alexandrians Clement and Origen, the "pillar of orthodoxy" Gregory of Nyssa and his equally redoubtable sister Makrina, the great Syrian fathers Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Isaac of Ninevah, and so on, as well as many other more rhetorically reserved universalists, such as Gregory of Nazianzus)."
"Late in the fourth century, for instance, Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea, reported that the vast majority of his fellow Christians (at least, in the Greek-speaking East with which he was familiar) assumed that "hell" is not an eternal condition, and that the "aionios punishment" of the age to come would end when the soul had been purified of its sins and thus prepared for union with God. Well into the sixth century, the great Platonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger could state as rather obvious that the suffering of wicked souls in Tartarus is certainly not endless, atelevtos, but is merely aionios; and the squalidly brutal and witless Christian emperor Justinian, as part of his campaign to extinguish the universalism of the "Origenists", found it necessary to substitute the word atelevtetos for aionios when describing the punishments of hell, since the latter word was not decisive..."
"As late as the thirteenth century, the East Syrian bishop Solomon of Bostra, in his authoritative compilation of the teachings of the "holy fathers" of Syrian Christian tradition, simply stated as a matter of fact that in the New Testament le-alam (the Syriac rendering of aionios) does not mean eternal, and that of course hell is not endless. And the fourteenth-century East Syrian Patriarch Timotheus II thought it uncontroversial to assert that the aionios pains of hell will come to an end when the souls cleansed by them, through the prayers of the saints, enter paradise" (The New Testament: A Translation, by David Bentley Hart, 2017, p.539-540).
https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-David-Bentley-Hart/dp/0300186096
Church Fathers & Universalism since Early Church times
https://s3.amazonaws.com/unsearchab.../©CPC+The+Ancient+History+of+Universalism.pdf
Universalism...First 500 Years
