Sorry
@Cormack, in all the excitement I quoted one of your comments when I meant to quote this comment from
@Saint Steven:
"I was pondering whether free will (self-determination) and Universal Redemption are compatible"
It's a very good question. Can God guarantee to save everyone if we have free will and therefore some of us may choose to resist Him forever? I hope that's the question you're asking.
I'd ike some kind of answer to this too. I'm reading a book by Thomas Talbott at the moment, which where I got the three propositions in the OP from, and he discusses this. I'll try to give an idea of what's he says, at least as far as I understand it.
Talbott believes that we do have free will and that it plays an essential role in God creating us as rational and self-aware beings and then perfecting us as his children. As a universalist, he also accepts two additional Pauline claims: (1) that the very same “all” who died in Adam will most assuredly be made alive in Christ (I Corinthians 15:22), and (2) that our destiny “depends not on human will or exertion, but upon God who shows mercy” (Romans 9:16).
So how does he put these seemingly disparate ideas - that of free will and universal salvation - together? He says that Paul himself shows us how to do this. Because although Paul rejects the idea that we choose freely between different possible eternal destinies (heaven, hell or annihilation), arguing instead that our destiny is wholly a matter of grace, he nonetheless stressed the importance of choice. “Note then,” he wrote in the eleventh chapter of his letter to the Romans, “the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise, you also will be cut off.”
So how we encounter God’s love in the future, whether that's as kindness or as severity, is, Paul implied, up to us–a matter of free choice. But our ultimate destiny is not up to us, because God’s severity, no less than his kindness, is itself a means of his saving grace. In particular, His severity towards the unbelieving Jews–even his willingness to blind them, to harden their hearts, and to cut them off for a season–was according to Paul just one of the means by which God saves all of Israel in the end. In Paul’s own words, “a hardening has come upon part of Israel . . … And so all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:
25-26).
So what our free choices determine is not our eternal destiny, which is secure from the beginning, but the means by which it is to achieved. Because the more we cling to our illusions and selfish desires–to the flesh, as Paul called it–the more severe will be the means and the more painful the process whereby God shatters our illusions, destroys the flesh, and finally separates us from our sin.
We don't take credit for our own redemption or even for a virtuous character (where such exists). This credit goes to God. But Christianity also stresses the importance of free choice, of choosing who we serve. But there's no tension between these two emphases as long as we see our free choices as determining not our eternal destiny but the means of grace available to us. Exercising our moral freedom is essential – not so much that we choose rightly rather than wrongly, but that we choose freely one way or the other. We can choose to live selfishly or unselfishly, faithfully or unfaithfully. But our choices, especially the bad ones, will also have unintended consequences in our lives; as the proverb says, “The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps” (16:9).
Talbott gives some examples to illustrate this: a man who commits robbery may set off a chain of events that, unintentionally, lands him in prison; and a woman who has an affair may discover that, even though her husband doesn't know about it, the affair has lots of unforeseen and destructive consequences in her life.
So our bad choices almost never get us what we really want and that is part of what makes them objectively bad and also one reason why God is able to bring redemption out of them. When we make a mess of our lives and become more and more miserable, this hell we create for ourselves will in the end resolve the ambiguity and shatter the very illusions that made the bad choices possible in the first place. That's how God works with us as rational and morally free beings. He allows us to make choices and He then requires us to learn the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn.
So bad choices can be just as useful to God in correcting us and in teaching us about love as good choices can be. So why should we do good rather than bad? Paul himself raised the question: “Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?” (Romans 6:1). After all, “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). But Paul’s answer is an emphatic: “By no means!” That the pain we experience if we thrust our hand into a flame may serve a beneficial purpose–because it enables us to avoid an even greater injury in the future–hardly means that we have a good reason to thrust our hand into the flame again and again. And similarly, that the misery and unhappiness that sin brings into a life can serve a redemptive purpose–because it can provide a compelling motive to repent–hardly implies that one has a good reason to keep on sinning and to continue making oneself more and more miserable.
Talbott notes that universalists are often accused of being sentimental about God’s love - and we see this on this forum. But the idea that God will in the end destroy sin rests upon a more balanced view of God’s love than does the idea that He will keep sin alive in an eternity of hell. Because God will not permit any of us to cling forever to our illusions or to remain forever ignorant of the true nature of our selfish choices. We are free to sin and perhaps even to get away with it for a while, but we are not free to sin with impunity forever.
Talbott concludes: "So unless we first repent of our sin and step into the life that Christ brings to us, God will sooner or later–in the next life, if not in this one–permit our illusions to shatter against the hard rock of reality. In that respect, God’s holy love is like a consuming fire (see Hebrews 12:29); it will continue to burn us until it finally purges us of all that is false within us. The more we freely rebel against it and try to defeat it, the more deeply and inexorably it will burn, until every conceivable motive for disobedience is consumed and we are finally transformed from the inside out. And so God will eventually destroy sin in the only way possible short of annihilation: by redeeming the sinners themselves."
I've given up asking rhetorical questions. What's the point?
- Alexei Sayle
