Stacy—welcome to OST, and thanks for your input.

I personally think the view of ‘eternity’ you and Ryan have implicitly espoused is really not necessitated by Scripture. Augustine, who held the same view (that God is atemporal), held to it not because of Scripture, but because of his Neo-Platonism (I remember reading somewhere in the confessions something along the likes of ‘I was taught by the Platonists to see the superiority of stability over change’—or something like that, which essentially meant that for God to be ‘in time’, he would have to be less than ‘perfect’).

As we (thanks to people like Andrew and Tom Wright) rediscover Scripture, and especially the Pauline epistles, I think a lot of the puzzles and paradoxes that arose from ‘modern’ concepts of time, eternity and predestination become irrelevant. Framing sovereignty (surely a biblical concept) in terms of absolute control (as the Reformers did and the Reformed do) should be seen as extra-biblical and unnecessary—and this doesn’t require throwing sovereignty out, but rather recovering what it meant for the biblical writers who appealed to it.

I also think Andrew might have something to say about the traditional formulation of Jesus ‘descending into hell’. Again, the emerging church’s conceptions of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ differ significantly from those of traditional evangelicalism, so while your ‘universalism’ may be perfectly understandable, it may stem from an incorrect understanding of judgment talk in the new testament.

If we must insist upon talking about people’s ‘final destination’, two guidelines should probably be followed (and these may stand in tension): God’s boundless grace MUST be emphasized (through the prism of Jesus’ work on the cross, of course), and the ability of humans to say NO must not be compromised. I’m not particularly comfortable with talk about ‘free will’ (not because it’s incorrect, but because it puts the focus in a weird place), but I think we can’t afford to underestimate how stubborn all of us can be. That this should have ‘eternal’ consequences seems pretty straightforward.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

-Daniel-