Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #infernalists
Most recents (3)
Near the end of #ThatAllShallBeSaved, David Bentley Hart adds additional criticisms of the free will defense of hell by #infernalists and against sounds similar to reformed predestination (which he ridicules throughout the book).
#DBHart argues that true freedom does not mean the ability to arbitrarily choose from any outcome, and it does mean the ability to always choose what is good.
He then does a good job of explaining that God is not a being independent from existence, like Zeus wandering about Mt. Olympus. Hart quotes the #panentheism prooftext (Acts 17:28) to demonstrate that god is bound up with creation (although without affirming/denying pantheism)
In the Third Meditation (very Cartesian headings) of David Bentley Hart's #ThatAllShallBeSaved, he provides a helpful (yet terse) commentary on Paul's sermon in Roman 9-11 regarding "Jacob I loved, Esau I hated", demonstrating the rejecting of one brother, ultimately saves both.
#DBHart argues that this literary unit with Romans is wrongly used to justify a double judgement with one part being identify as "vessels of wrath" due to ancestral sin, but the loci actually demonstrates the salvation of all through the rejection of one brother
It may be true for Augustine that original sin is a sexually transmitted disease #STD and sin is concupiscence but this is not the reformed tradition's understanding of it. So he is flat wrong to lump Reformed in with this older Catholic dogma.
"Augustine of Hippo … refered to such persons [universalists] as misericordes, 'the merciful-hearted'" — David Bentley Hart #ThatAllShallBeSaved
According to #DBH, Basil of Caesarea reports that the majority of Christians were universalists and believed hell was a purgatory (pace 1 Cor 3) and not eternal. And #universalism was common place in the first half of the first christian millenium. #ThatAllShallBeSaved
#DBH says the arguments against #universalism are predictable and sophomoric. He says the clear language of scripture does not in fact oppose universalism, nor was it condemned as heretical by the 5th ecumenical council.
