『Universal Salvation pt 3』のカバーアート

Universal Salvation pt 3

Universal Salvation pt 3

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10月19日まで。※適用条件あり
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction. I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201, It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations. Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time. Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves. And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says, I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, which is equivocation, so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains. To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things. [Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves. And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe. So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment. You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you...
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