The Evangelical Universalist Forum

JRP vs TurretinFan Oct 2011 debate (official thread+YouTube)

Interesting debate. Obviously the surface was just scratched. I agree with Tfan that the translation of “aionios” is the real issue in these verses. I wonder why Jason (or for that matter TFan) doesn’t accept the “pertaining to the age to come” translation, or “life/punishment of the age to come” as Robin Parry does. Or did in TEU…

Roofus,

In my case, it’s because many of the uses of “eonian” don’t really fit that concept. The secret hushed since the times of the age to come, which the God of the age to come has now authorized us to proclaim…? The hills of the age to come collapse at the coming of Jehovah, because (unlike them) His ways are of the age to come?? The priesthood of Phineas and his descendants is of the age to come??? The cultic responsibilities and rights of the priesthood are of the age to come???

The bars of the age to come surrounded Jonah when the sea monster took him down to the depths of the sea???

I realize that an argument can be kind-of made that the Son is the God of the age to come (whether unitarian, trinitarian or modalist) where He reigns as merely an ultimate authority figure over those who have not yet repented and so have not yet come to see Godship as anything more than an exercise of power over those who are less powerful (the way they would be Gods if they could)–after which the Son ceases reigning (in some substantial sense) and hands over all things to the Father. And of course there are many examples where the meaning “of the age to come” would fit fine. But the term usage doesn’t fit other examples very well.

I don’t think I emphasized as strongly as I could have how even in Jonah the imprisonment comes from God, mainly because I didn’t want to bird-dog off into an argument for Jonah being a figure for post-mortem repentance and salvation. (I’ll mention that again in my post-debate commentary.) And obviously I agree in principle that the punishment and the life is, in some sense, that of the age to come–although in some real sense we have that life already in this age!

But my goal in that arm of the discussion–which I don’t think TFan ever quite understood–was to argue (1) that “eonian” cannot and by context does not have a necessary intrinsic meaning of never-ending (a meaning of some kind of duration is useless for TFan’s argument, although he seemed to think at the end that a meaning of any duration at all clinched his argument :confused: ); and that (2) there are at least two alternatives readily available for understanding the term usage, one of which can be used broadly but is neutral to the purpose of exegeting non-universalism (or universalism for that matter), and the other of which (long duration) is flexible enough that superficially similar yet substantially different meanings can (and provably were) used by both NT and OT authors in close contrasting topical contexts.

As to why TFan doesn’t accept “pertaining-to-or-of the age to come”, you’d have to ask him. :slight_smile: My guess is that he would answer that since the age to come does not end, so what?–that would mean the things described in that fashion are endless, too, right?

(I got the impression from how he handled my rebuttal material there, that he hadn’t really studied the term usage much (if at all) before the debate, and wasn’t prepared beforehand to deal with that topic, although he took some honorable swings at compensating for that lack on short notice. :slight_smile: )

Thanks! I know I prepared for many hours–it’s one of the main reasons I haven’t been participating as much on the forum recently as usual. :smiley: I have some email correspondents, and thread participants, who have been patiently waiting for weeks for me to get back to them. :frowning:

I’m honestly curious how long TFan prepared for it, though…

To be fair, one of my main theological concerns in the past ten years has been studying soteriology with an eye toward seeing whether or how far Christian universalism is true, and then arguing in favor of Christian universalism for the past five years or so. I don’t think this has been anything like even a tertiary concern for TFan’s apologetical thrust. He has been more concerned with countering Arm and Roman Catholic apologetics. It occurs to me that had he approached the debate as if he was disputing an Arminian on the meaning of those verses, he might have done better–or at least have been working more from his own area of long-practiced experience.

On the other hand, the approach he did take is more inherently accessible for Arms as well as Calvs (…including his purely Arminian evangelical attempts, which amused me infinitely :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: … more on that later…), so in that sense he helped the debate have a wider potential audience by providing greater topical relevance than if he had stuck to trying to argue only distinctively Calv doctrines (thus alienating an Arm audience). I think that’s a good thing. :slight_smile:

My impression, Jason, was that you were assuming that TFan would already have a good understanding of the “aionios” issue, so that you didn’t need to cover that well. Apparently that was not the case.

I think we all forget, but need to keep in mind that some of the things we’ve hashed over so much ourselves that they begin to seem commonplace, may still be unknown territory for others!

It was pretty clear to me that TFan just didn’t “get” a lot of what Jason said. And that’s not too surprising. From his opening statement it’s plain he didn’t have much of an idea of the arguments Jason was going to use. Considering how much was new to him, and how little time he had to reflect, I thought he did a great job. I hope he’ll be thinking over some of Jason’s arguments and doing some scripture searching as a result.

Sonia

Well done Jason (at least the first hour that I listen to)… but boy, do you talk fast :wink: TFan almost put me to sleep :unamused:

Are there any chances that there may be a transcript of this debate in the future?

Yes, I did assume that, partly as a charitable presumption in favor of his competence at studying the issue, and partly so that I wouldn’t have to spend my main argument time (including the rebuttal) simply on that topic.

My rebuttal regarding eonian naturally served somewhat to that purpose in passing, but was mainly aimed at demonstrating that having “eonian” mean superficially similar but also substantially different things, for the sheep and the goats, was for several reasons entirely feasible as an interpretative strategy: the term is demonstrably used that way, if rarely, in both the OT and the NT; and non-universalists themselves, as such, have to treat identical terms as though they mean something substantially different in close topical contexts elsewhere. (This is also something I don’t think TFan ever really acknowledged. I thought about pressing him on it during cross-exam, but I wanted to stick with the chosen texts and their local and citational contexts as much as possible, and didn’t want to turn the discussion into a debate about Rom 5 and Col 1.)

Agreed and agreed–although frankly, he had plenty of time to research how I was going to proceed from looking up my work here on the forum. While I didn’t spell out in correspondence before the debate what I was going to do, I did alert him two or three times that I was going to make a positive argument (not merely a defensive one) out of those four texts. That would have been so weird to me as a non-universalist, I would have thought I had to try looking up what that person had done before on the topic (if possible), or at least try to anticipate how someone might proceed who had stressed several times that he was going to include citational references in the local contexts (i.e. OT citations by the authors/speakers) for purposes of interpreting the intended meaning!

TFan has shown in other work that he is a good researcher; I was honestly curious to see how he might anticipate and counter my arguments by preliminary research. As it is, I think he saved most of his research until during the debate itself!

If so, he did about as well as anyone could expect. From a purely tactical standpoint (I could hardly call it strategic, but maybe I could call it operational…), and setting aside the question of whether the truth was best served by doing so, he did the ‘right’ thing by trying hard to nix any OT contexts-via-citations after the fact, as being irrelevant. He couldn’t exactly get rid of Synoptic contexts (and whatever the same principle would be for the parallels of Jude 6 to 2 Peter) by the same principle, but he ignored as much of them as possible; and he made some vigorous attempts to deal with them more directly, too (although on the other hand some of those attempts relied on ignoring other narrative and thematic contexts.)

To be fair, he mentioned (and tried to piece together) a lot more contextual information in Rom 9 itself than I did. But here’s one big difference in our approaches: I specifically said I could have gone (and wanted to go) into a ton more about Rom 9’s contexts, and I didn’t try to shut down his contextual reference attempts there. Whereas he not only virtually ignored my referential arguments to OT citations and their interpretative contexts there, he tried to substitute another OT citation instead (from Job) as being a superior probability reference. (And stuck to doing that when its topical connections to Rom 9 were clearly demonstrated to be only circumstantial at best.)

I can certainly say that, considering how much he handicapped himself, he did as well as he could. I’ll be complimenting him later on some things, when I get around to doing a post-debate commentary.

URPilgrim,

I will certainly be posting up my pre-written material later, although not for a while as I don’t want to distract from Chris’ site as the main source of the debate.

TFan, in the past, has posted up his side of arguments in prior debates, so there is a good chance he’ll do that here, too, eventually.

If he does that (especially if it’s an actual transcript of what he presented), I may put that together with my prepared material; and then, being halfway down the fairway to transcribing the whole thing, go on and finish transcribing the other half. Although if someone else wants to do that, I’m okay with it! :laughing:

For what it’s worth, normally I would do a whole lecture (or sermon) on each of those five sets; that’s why I had to talk so fast to cover the material all at once.

Bless his heart, TFan probably felt like a boxer who showed up to a sumo match… :mrgreen: And not a particularly fast boxer, either. But he manfully forged ahead as well as he could, and there’s a lot to be said in favor of that. :slight_smile: Whatever else his presentation was, it certainly wasn’t an infoglomp, so had the advantage of being far more immediately accessible than, heck, any ten seconds of whatever I was doing at any time. :wink:


But isn’t this age one in which the power of the age to come has invaded?



Not really- the punishment of the age to come could be that punishment that occurs within the age to come vs throughout the age to come.


Another tack that universalist/annihilationist take is that the effect of the punishment is eternal, as in “eternal redemption” vs. “eternal redeeming”. See Fudge on this.

“From God” doesn’t seem to work for so many examples. The idea of “age” seems to be missing.

Perhaps the word has a few different meanings based on the time period written (influence of Plato?)…

I think that TFan did well in pointing out (it seemed to me) that the OT passages that you mentioned where not necessarily what Paul was referencing. That uncertainty toppled your argument, it seemed to me.

Yes, I was willing to agree with that.

Similarly, I’m willing to agree that the fire that destroyed Sodom was the fire of the age to come, invading this (or a prior) age, so to speak.

What that can or should mean, is quite another thing again.

Yes, I understand the conceptual distinction involved, but I’m not sure TFan does-or-would. :slight_smile:

Most annihilationists, in my experience (Fudge especially included), would not think it proper to interpret eonian life the same way, i.e. the effect of the life is permanently eternal so that (in equal but opposite application compared to annihilation) the person is not conditionally immortal anymore.

As to the former, that may be true in a few OT examples, although in my experience it works in more examples than any other uniform interpretation. While I recommend that for simplicity’s sake if a single uniform interpretation must be used, I have no qualm about using another meaning–so long as the multi-form possibilities of the meaning (where they demonstrably exist) are recognized as needing contextual interpretation on a case-by-case basis. Which TFan kept wanting to get away from having to acknowledge: notably, he barely even mentioned my actual contextual argument for Matt 25, preferring to try to focus on the term usage of eonian instead, and thought that simply acknowledging some sort of feasible duration meaning solidly shut the case in his favor (as though any duration meaning must necessarily equate to never-ending duration).

As to the latter, the rarer (and perhaps more emphatic) term {aidios} itself, if interpreted as being something other than imperceptible or non-private, exemplifies how physical or natural imagery can be applied to God (or even to different natural phenomena) even though the base meaning if literally applied to God would crudely disaffirm supernaturalistic theism. “High-brightness” is not literally a characteristic of God (per the interpretation of its usage in Romans to parallel “theotes” for divine power); and is not even the same imagery category for duration in regard to God (per the interpretation of its usage in Romans as “everlasting” in regard to God). Similarly, the underlying Hebrew terms translated into Greek as “eonian”, are both physical metaphors regarding the horizon (up to and beyond it, especially the eastern horizon where the sun comes from), which not only have no literal application to God but are again a categorically different image type than a temporal term.

Certainly, one can see how the metaphor develops in various ways: the horizon line in the east indicates where the future is, so that direction is like traveling or looking into the future. But it would be clumsy to criticize “eonian” in a temporal sense as an interpretation for AHD and/or Olahm, on the ground that the idea of a horizon, or of space, seems to be missing from such an interpretation!

Similarly, God Most High transcends any high-brightness in a totally different way than any natural height, and transcends the future in a totally different way than any natural temporality. But no one complains about applying that language as a way of describing God.

Once that concept is in place, however, it becomes possible to speak of God as Most High (roughly the same as “high-brightness”) or as the Everlasting, and from there to speak of effects which properly belong to God as being most high or everlasting effects.

The question is whether there is evidence the authors are actually doing this. I think there is some evidence, although the case for such isn’t ironclad. But it doesn’t have to be ironclad, because the duration interpretation is definitely and demonstrably such that the terms cannot intrinsically mean never-ending.

That leaves me plenty of options, including that sometimes the term may indeed mean never-ending. The only option excluded is that the term always means never-ending. But then there cannot be much of a meaningful exegetical argument from the term-usage merely in itself for a doctrine of something described by the term to be never-ending.

Thus TFan’s attempts, two or maybe three times, to try to treat any duration acknowledgment at all as though that necessarily shuts the door. He has to necessarily shut the door by appeal to the term!–his case cannot stand, from reference to the term, and so at all in several places (including Matt 25), if the term varies in its duration usage, or only counts invariably when referring to something other than duration.

I thought that his point about the same word being applied to life and punishment requiring uniformity held pretty well when compared to the “everlasting hills”, looking at that as being not a literal eternal, but still participating in the meaning “eternal”…

I actually think this hurt your case. For most people, it doesn’t matter what kind of argument you put out there. As long as there are very clear passages of scripture that say “eternal punishment”, all other arguments fail to overcome that until you deal with “aionios”. I haven’t heard everything but I’ve listened to a few hours of it and a few times it seemed as if you avoided responding to questions about aionios and I didn’t quite understand why.

I have found that most people miss the arguments first time around since they are so convinced of their scriptural position and equally convinced that you don’t believe in hell or punishment (I noticed that tfan was initially surprised that you believed in punishment). As a result there needs to be a fundamental challenge to the idea that God punishes forever. I think that is the crux of the scriptural argument that all the other arguments should hang on and until you knock that one down the other person will see you as being completely wrong and themselves victorious.

Don’t get me wrong, I think you made some excellent points, but they had no effect on Tfan since they went over his head and didn’t dent his opinion on eternal.

I strongly suspect a Philonic parallel via Plato, who also treated “eonian” as being a reference to God (insofar as he understood God, i.e. fundamental rational reality).

However, I didn’t want to go down that road for this debate, partly because it’s rather contested in itself, and partly because I don’t consider myself well-read enough on that topic to have a significant opinion worth listening to :wink:, but mostly because I wanted to stick to what could be argued from the usage by scriptural authors–especially since this was a debate about scriptural exegetics.

Incidentally, earlier today I looked up information on the curious case of the textual variant at 2 Thess 2:13, and wrote an analytical report on it for reply to a recent thread here.

I mention it here because elements of the analysis happen to dovetail with the notion of using eonian (and maybe aidios) as a way of talking, in the NT, about something coming uniquely from God.

Chris, I think you hit the nail on the head with that. That was the very first question in my mind when I first was presented with this doctrine – and I had begun to forget how big an issue that was for me. I spent huge amounts of time examining that word – over and over, again and again.

But I’ve started to think a little differently about this word. Looking at the Jonah example: “I went down to the moorings of the mountains; The earth with its bars closed behind me forever; Yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O LORD, my God.”

The bars closed behind him forever – that sounds pretty final and hopeless, right? But guess what? That still didn’t stop God from saving him! That means it just plain doesn’t matter if something is “forever” – that doesn’t stop God from doing what He wants – and if what He wants is to reconcile all things to Himself in Christ, the eternal bars of Hell are not going to stop Him!

With man it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.

Sonia

I haven’t finished listening to it all yet, however, I’m very impressed by all 3 involved, as it certainly would’ve taken a lot of time & effort!

Great content, you covered so many things and I learnt new things. As I know you & this topic reasonably well, I can usually keep up with your argument, however, because it’s so dense, those who aren’t familiar with you & this topic would really struggle (I know my wife did & she is reasonably familiar with this topic) to keep up with you (It’s like when I read Carson, I often have to read sentences more than once - unfortunately, one can’t do that easily with a talk), and that actually decreases your effectiveness. As this is new territory for most people, we need to do things like: slowly read a verse, rather than just quoting the reference; repeat key points; pauses after points to let them sink in; use simple everyday illustrations. Similarly I think dirtboy is correct for most Christians

Anyway, knowing you are striving for perfection (& have a robust personality :slight_smile: ), please see this as only constructive criticism. I’d very glad you took on the challenge, I know I couldn’t have put together such a logical and thorough presentation, let alone handled the pressure of a recorded debate.

Btw, apart from the density & speed, I thought you articulated words clearly and spoke with good expression and emphasis.

Hi Sonia,
I don’t think that it is that easy, unfortunately (I wish that it were!). I think that TFan made a good point that the Jonah reference is figurative, as it is in our language when we say “I was in line FOREVER”.
Roof

But roofus, God also does that in Jeremiah. He tells Israel that the fire of his anger will burn forever and it doesn’t! Over and over again in the Old Testament God shows that even when he says that it will be forever, his mercy comes in and forever doesn’t happen. In fact he goes on to say that he doesn’t punish forever in more than one place in the scriptures. There are some things that I’m still shaky on, but one thing that the scripture gives powerful testimony to is that God does NOT punish forever. He says that in his own words in more than one place in the O.T.

Alex,

Actually, I agree about the speaking quickly thing. You might have noticed that I didn’t speak as quickly in my cross-exam and in my finale when I wasn’t under the gun to cover a lot of info in the time constraint. (This was in fact one of my rationales for not summarizing my prior argument for my finale. I was under time pressure a bit more in the Q&A, so I know there was at least one time I had to afterburn. http://www.wargamer.com/forums/smiley/jet.gif)

I originally mentioned this when setting up the debate, that we ought to stick to one or two pretty narrow topics. That got expanded to five, and I understand and appreciate why–it helps the debate seem more like something worth doing–but when the doctrine is in the details… :wink:

I’ll have more to say later (than I already have) about why I didn’t lead out with the terminology argument–but again, part of the reason is that I had FIVE RATHER COMPLEX VERSE SETS to deal with. I had to make strategic decisions about how much of the terminology argument to present, and when. Yet that topic by itself would be worth at least one whole debate. :slight_smile:

Anyway, I’m glad I sounded clear and distinct (mostly–I know I sturbled a bit, too :laughing: ). I was very concerned about that, especially because I was going to have to turbo through those five sets (and a condensed version of the terminology argument for my rebuttal material.) :slight_smile: