I am absolutely willing to let the patristic scholars (especially Dr. R) take the patristic questions; I would only be quoting Origen from them anyway. Though I’m pretty sure Dr. R at least would say it’s a bad idea to ignore the Fathers whom Origen demonstrably knew and admired.
On the (supposed) “theological problem” per se, however, I think I have a responsibility to answer as an author (minor though I am) expressly invited here by the site owners at the beginning to write on the connections between Christian universalism and coherent trinitarian Christian theology, and in fact to help provide a trinitarian anchor for the site. (Which is not to say others couldn’t also reply.)
Dr. R (at the very least) is going to reply, based on extensive discussion of the primary texts, that Origen didn’t believe all people pre-existed in some bodiless state and then sinned themselves into material bodies; only that Adam and Eve (among human persons) existed in a bodily state which was spiritual but not animal and that God specifically gave them mortal animal bodies after their rebellion (maybe also the rebel angels in a somewhat different way), from which result the children they bred got the original sin effect via similar animal bodies.
It isn’t much different from what any Southern Baptist preacher would say, just a little more exotic about the details. Origen may have believed (in accord with the best science of his day) that all persons pre-exist in the physical seed of their male ancestors, but that isn’t the same as bodiless pre-existence sinning into material bodies either.
By Nyssa’s day, however, there were apparently some groups going around believing this notion (of pre-existence of bodiless souls) and calling back to Origen on it – which shouldn’t be surprising since even in his own day he had to defend himself on what he was actually saying, and even in the 400s if you wanted to win a philosophical or religious argument the second best way to do so after citing scripture was to claim Origen defended it! (It really is hard to overestimate how much influence he had.) Jerome and Epiphanius attacked those few people, thinking Origen really had taught that (which Rufinius kept rather sarcastically reminding Jerome that Jerome at least knew better), but the slander was kept alive until Justinian’s day when it gathered political clout.
Anyway, Nyssa didn’t drop the pre-existence of bodiless souls; Origen had never taught it. No one ever accused Didymus the Blind (disciple of Origen and holder of the same presidency of the Alexandrian catechetical university throughout most of the 400s – appointed by Athanasius the Great, champion of Origen’s orthodoxy himself!) of believing such things (as again Rufinius sarcastically reminded Jerome who still revered Didymus as “the Seer”); no one ever accused Gregory Thaumaturgus of such things (Black Sea champion of orthodoxy and evangelism, disciple and convert of Origen, directly responsible for leading Macrina the Elder to Christ and by her Nyssa and Basil, probably also their friend Nazianzus).
Nyssa doubtless simply knew better. He knew Didymus (and Athanasius), his family had known Gregory the Wonderworker. He got his “Origenism” from them. Including the part about evil having an origin in time and having an end in time – a point Origen threw against the Gnostics, heavily criticizing their notion of the eons.
Anyway, sorry, I said I wouldn’t go off on the patristic side.
No, God is going to transform it into immortality at some point after or during the general resurrection, depending on one’s personal relationship to Christ already when the judgment comes. (At the risk of sounding redundant, Origen taught that, too, as Dr. Ramelli specifies.) No “eonian” life until the personal relationship is solidly established, but God can raise people to lesser modes of life meanwhile, and Christians can begin participating in eonian life now before death (yet still die of course – even Christ the Resurrection and the Life Himself could and did still die in that sense).
Origen did think eventually time would end, though not before everyone was saved from sin and back into personal cooperation with God; I gather this idea continued on into the days of the Cappadochians and is still a pretty normal belief in orthodoxy today. I’m not myself on board with that idea, but that’s for picky technical reasons having to do with how creaturely persons relate to one another and (by contrast to the Persons of the self-existent ground of all reality) what is necessary for creatures to relate to God and to each other. If “eons” are taken (as Origen did) to be division markers for periods of salvation history though, marked by groups of sinners finally repenting instead of continuing to fondle their sins, having been led (in various ways) to repentance and righteousness by God (with evangelical cooperation of the saints continuing on until the harvest is all in) – then sure I could agree the eons will come to an end when the final sinner (presumably Satan) repents and comes home; but I could go with that and not believe time per se will end for creatures.
(I do think Dr. R argues persuasively Origen and others thought time actually would end in an aidios now, so to speak, but I’m a little surprised Origen would go with that since he stressed very strongly that only God could exist as pure bodiless spirit and those concepts seem to me quite connected: even spiritual bodies exist in some sort of created system of Nature where behaviors would constitute continuing history of that Nature and thus also created time. A point Origen again strongly stressed over-against his Gnostic opponents. He didn’t think spirits would give up their created immortal spiritual bodies and resolve back into God – again over-against his Gnostic opponents, in favor of the reality and importance of created persons in love under God – so it seems inconsistent to me that he would think time would end for creatures even in the perfection of apokatastasis. But eh, not something I would grief him about. )
She sure didn’t present the argument of everything annihilating out of existence except God in her 2014 tome! I’m picky enough I don’t much like her attempts at getting around a (previously undetected) problem with what she claims concerning the usage of {aidios} in scripture; if she had argued that I’d be stomping all over it.
But I don’t even know what your theological complaint is. Even supposing for purposes of argument Nyssa had switched over to evil having an origin in time thus having an end in time (from something different taught by Origen), obviously his point would be the same as Augustine’s a few decades later (actually following Origen’s work though he doesn’t seem to have realized it, probably via Nyssa at least as the leader of Chalcedonian orthodoxy): evil has no independent existence at all, so cannot be anything other than a perversion of the good, allowed to exist by God in accord with God’s overarching intentions toward creation, but even then not on the same par as derivative goods either – the main distinction being that God directly supports in existence only that which is derivatively good, whereas creatures in rebellion (though themselves and their capabilities, originally created good by God, remain directly supported by God – not ever being independent existences themselves) directly create and support evil by a privation of the good in their lives. Thus God, Who in God’s unique multi-personal existence as ground of all reality is essential Love and Justice (justice being the fulfillment of love between persons), is not the author of evil, but rather creatures are by abusing the gifts of their God-supported existence and capabilities.
It isn’t a question of some merely mechanical (or even abstractly logical) relationship so that what even God brings into existence must necessarily cease to exist; but rather what we can expect God to act toward keeping in existence and to act toward removing from existence. God loves people, and thus loves sinners, even though God doesn’t love sin; we can expect God to keep acting to keep derivative persons in existence (whom He loved into existence anyway), and to act toward removing evil from existence which can be nothing more or other the injustice of creatures – not the injustice of God Who is Justice! Fundamental Justice could not act toward keeping injustice in continuing existence; but then created persons (being real persons and not puppets of divinity) are who do injustice. Merely poofing the persons into behaving differently as a final solution (leaving aside the question of temporary confirmations to get other purposes accomplished) would be treating the misbehaving persons as puppets not as children of the Father of spirits. To act against evil’s existence, then, God acts to lead the rebel creatures to stop their rebellions.
Authoritatively sanctioning never-ending evil would be for God Himself to act against His own self-grounding coherency as the Trinity; the only reason we creatures don’t instantly annihilate when we do that is because God acts to keep us in existence anyway, but Justice could not do that for the purpose of final ongoing injustice – not and continue to exist. But if God ever chose to cease existing all our past present and future would cease to exist or rather would never exist in the first place and we wouldn’t be here to talk about it: we can be sure fundamental self-existence is going to keep on behaving coherently and so to keep on existing, even though we only depend on fundamental existence. Our continuing existence is evidence God won’t behave inconsistently; our continuing existence despite our own behaviors against the ground of our existence, is evidence about God’s intentions for us: and those intentions must be a fulfillment of justice congruent to and with the continually enacted justice between and among the Persons of God for and with each other.
Put a little oversimply, if eternal conscious torment is true then God would not be hating sin, or at best would be hating it in contravention to God’s own positive justice as the Trinity (because God stops seeking, or never even intended to seek, the righteous behavior of the sinner. Or God was outright beaten by the sinner, which denies supernaturalistic theism at all – a point any Calvinist ought to sympathize with in criticism of Arminian soteriology.) If annihilationism is true, then God would not be loving the sinner. Nor would God be even slightly respecting the (God-gifted) free will of the creature by locking it into final injustice without repentance, much moreso outright destroying the creature (and its derivative free will) out of existence altogether.
I realize this is an answer from the side of trinitarian metaphysics per se, but the challenge was about the metaphysics of the situation so I haven’t replied with an exegetical case. I also realize i haven’t specifically talked about the self-sacrificial action of the 2nd Person in this account, including in the Incarnation, but I’ve been thinking about it very very loudly (so to speak)! In a full metaphysical account I would talk about the 2nd Person and the relationship of the 1st and 2nd to each other (and even the 3rd) before even talking about creation of not-God realities; and I would talk about that before talking about morality; and I would talk about morality before talking about sin and what from within orthodox trinitarian theism we can expect God to act to do about sin, including the Incarnation. The 3rd Person of God has His own importance in all this, and still would even if there was no creation per se, and still would (and will) even where no sin exists in a created reality per se. But for sake of relative brevity I’m not going into detail about a full trinitology (yet) – because I don’t have to go into details about the specific actions of the Persons in order to answer a challenge against the notion that God would act to remove sin from existence but not to remove sinners.
In short, the ancient patristic universalists weren’t appealing to some undifferentiated unity with a mechanical tendency to return to undifferentiation – but even if they were, I’m certainly not.
And they weren’t appealing to some merely mechanical principle of created reality necessarily ceasing to exist by being created reality (so that any created reality would necessarily suffer the same fate) – but even if they were, I’m certainly not.
And [DRAMATIC PAUSE…] for that matter they weren’t falling back from either of those ideas (in desperation or otherwise) onto universal choice of creatures as the basis of universal salvation. They did stress the importance of creaturely choice, but not as THE BASIS OF universal salvation from sin. They primarily stressed the choice and competency of God in universal salvation from sin (and did so over against their Gnostic opponents, not incidentally), including God’s competency at saving creatures from sin who were abusing the free will given to them by (and only by) God without voiding that gift to them.
They certainly didn’t treat human choice like a random roll of the dice (much less God’s choices in the matter!) – but even if they did, I’m certainly not. What Dr. Reitan does in his book is his business; I thought his account wasn’t sufficiently trinitarian myself, but I don’t recall him actually supporting the random dice roll explanation. I know perfectly well Dr. Ramelli didn’t argue for the annihilation of everything except God either, and I read her book more recently. I know perfectly well Balthasar has a strong account of the Holy Spirit and Pentacost; I know perfectly well the things you said about the end of Dr. Talbott’s book are wildly inaccurate. I have Eric’s book at the office, and I can’t say I’m going to feel overly surprised if despite your charge he doesn’t after all go with that notion, though I do kind of recall him discussing the option since the point of his book is to exhaustively categorize and discuss various options: mentioning a concept doesn’t mean sanctioning it. Still, even if he does and I’ve forgotten it, I DON’T TREAT HUMAN CHOICE LIKE RANDOM DICE ROLLS!
Salvation from sin doesn’t depend on he who wills (Pharaoh) or on he who runs (Jonah) but on God Who has mercy. God temporarily locked Pharaoh’s choices down when that was necessary to get other things done, and otherwise let Pharaoh run whichever direction he felt like at the moment for better or for worse. Constantly flippy flopping back and forth to the last minute isn’t a steady progression of hardening against Moses, though – and so far as the story goes, it was God Who provided Pharaoh the spine hardening when necessary to move the plot along! That’s entirely aside from whether God leads him to repent of His sins someday. Some ancient rabbis would say that since God promised he would be a witness (using a word for giving active testimony) to the nations, we can be sure God will raise him to do just that.
As far as progressive hardening goes, though, Joseph’s brothers would be a better example.
Not at all. We also however go with the texts of scripture (and ordinary human evangelical experience) which both agree that God can and does pulverize the hearts of the stubborn, leading them to salvation after all. It isn’t like this concept should be news to any Calvinist though (or even to any Arminian)!
Is God incompetent at training a person to habituate into good? I don’t think so. I have never once heard a Calvinist say so – unless they were opposing universal salvation and forgetting they weren’t Arminian while doing so. Then I hear things like this with some frequency from Calvinists (and/or Augustinians), but that’s hardly a sign they’re being theologically coherent. They ought to be agreeing with us that we can trust God to competently empower and train the will to good instead of evil sooner or later one way or another (allowing for minor disputes about how and when God accomplishes this)!
Am I just misremembering?? Are you not a Calvinist/Augustinian? – do you not believe God is entirely competent to save from sin whomever He intends to save from sin, from which salvation after some point the sinner will never fall again thanks to various competencies of God? If I’m misremembering and you’re some flavor of Arminian your challenge would make some sense – though even most Arms nowadays believe if people manage to do the right thing they can convince God to make sure their salvation is secure! God is not less competent at training children than human fathers are, or even human pet owners, is He??
So this business about human free will only being free like a tossed coin is free is utterly foreign to me (I deny randomly rolled dice are free with the freedom of rational souls – even short chain quantum determinism is still determinism), and I deny that “laws of probability” have anything to do with salvation from sin.
Hmmmmm.
THANK GOD LET’S!
Is your salvation from sin something like being coerced into always voting for a tyrant? No? Same answer, extend for any number of other saved people.
I seriously do not know why a Christian doctor of theology (or of anything related to theology) would be treating the eventual persistence of someone’s chosen righteous behavior like oppression by a tyrant.
Do I actually have to point out all the salient differences between God (especially being the Trinity) and an insane human dictator?
I don’t care so much about whether you become a Christian universalist, but some charitable common sense would be nice – it makes less than no sense to complain about X’s proposed eventual persistence of salvation being only possible by insane (and indeed Satanic level) tyranny and then to believe one’s own eventual persistence of salvation being possible by something other than the same Satanic level tyranny. Unless you think you yourself will always be flip flopping back and forth between evil and good because God can’t or refuses to bring about anything better; but then it would still make no sense to complain about other people believing the same thing you do! But even hardcore Arminians believe eventually God will bring at least some people to do righteousness and never unrighteousness again; and I don’t hear them complaining about this concept necessarily involving Satanic level tyranny over oppressed people.
Any stick is good enough to beat Christian universalism with, so long as the Christianity of the universalism is denied? If trinitarian Christianity is true, salvation from sin isn’t tyranny; neither is punishment for continuing to fondle one’s sins! Maybe those would be true if some Christianity less than trinitarianism is true, but in that case we’re all pretty much screwed because ultimate reality won’t be love and justice.