I’ll give you my version, Warren, as briefly as I can. Though I don’t know how solidly, I suppose I was in the Anni camp in some sense for a year or two, as I finally allowed myself to question the last vestiges of what I had inherited theologically. It was also that inheritance which, at irregular intervals, whispered to me, “Well you know, some have to be destroyed, at the very least,” and so ensured that I would stay in the Anni pit-stop for a while longer. Early exposure to C. S. Lewis helped that; N. T. Wright encouraged it. But at some point I found myself saying I believed either God destroyed some, or he saved all. I was certainly done with ECT.
I found myself there for at least two reasons. One, I kept seeing overt, implied, or “closet” universalists emerging everywhere - people I respected and loved, some living and some now fully living. Two examples from the literary world were George MacDonald and Jacques Ellul. I also became aware of the numbers, or possible numbers, of contemporary UR adherents, and of adherents from the historic Church, including some Church Fathers. It became “okay” to think that way.
The second reason was a set of philosophical propositions, mostly brought to a head by reading MacDonald. I could not get around these and other arguments (or at least the germs of them) from his pen: if God must destroy some, then he is not Lord of all, and he has been eternally defeated; true atonement requires that there shall be a making up for all sin, and that requires that the sinner must be involved in the atoning process - in other words, only God-in-me can make restitution for the wrongs I have done to others, and vice versa; God is one (I’m not talking about divine monism here - I am a Trinitarian), or he is evil - justice and mercy, love and wrath, must be the same thing; “immortality” is not a thing conditioned upon a second birth, but upon the first one - that is, our source: we are made not from nothing, but from God, and since from God, then the enduring breath/Spirit of God must be in every child formed in his image; death is really nothing, and cannot be any kind of hindrance to God in his saving work (neither, I would now say, can it be a hindrance to his perfected saints). Even if you feel no weight from these arguments, you can at least, I’m sure, see how they would unsettle someone who did.
And so that is where I found myself when the final straw was laid upon my already overburdened intellectual back. That “final straw” was a progressive letting go of all remaining ECT and Anni presuppositions, with the help, mostly, of Baxter Kruger, et al, at Perichoresis, and Peter Hiett of the Sanctuary Downtown in Denver (both were apparently influenced by Barth, like yourself). Trey Tomeny has already linked you to Hiett’s sermons, but I would echo everything he said about them. I owe Peter a great debt for all the hurdles he helped me finally jump. Listening to him online has especially helped me to mentally reconcile many things, for example:
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The absurd and unending debate between Calv. and Armi. I now have no trouble believing that God is all-Love, and all-powerful, and therefore will do all things that Love would and must do. I have no trouble with God “violating” my supposed “free will,” because if he doesn’t, somebody sure as hell better, or I’m in real trouble. My will is the problem, and it won’t be fixed by me, to all eternity. (On a related note, if you think the will only has to make one good choice for God - derisively labeled by critics, “decisional regeneration” - then perhaps my will can muster that…but I doubt it.) I have come to see - and this was a major part of the shift for me - not just intellectually, but as an undeniable personal fact that continually rears up and reminds me of itself, that I don’t have a leg to stand on before God, compared to anyone you like. I have actually come to believe, perhaps paradoxically, that it is harder to prove anyone will be saved, than that everyone will.
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My own inability ever to go back to an Inerrantist position with regard to Scripture, and, in tension with this, my residual-from-my-upbringing love for the Bible and inability to arbitrarily chuck something I may not like on its pages. I have been able to fondly reclaim many passages and themes I once dismissed despairingly. I can now embrace those once-rejected words with a love and appreciation founded on better principles than before. I can see a deeper significance than I had dared dream of. One quick example might help, and it relates to the possibility of annihilation specifically. Bearing in mind that it’s been 12 years since I studied these things in an academic setting, and I have only the most cursory understanding of Koine Greek (but at the same time, may I mention the cultural and literary distance of 2,000 years, the fog of manuscript variants, the likelihood that Jesus taught in Aramaic, etc.), here is the conclusion I came to about the latter half of Matthew 10. In v. 28, the Greek words for “destroy” and “soul” (as they are usually rendered) are the same as “lose” and “life” in 39 (also in 16:25, btw; that is, psyche and the apoles- verb stem). This must surely change the meaning from what we customarily assume, no? To be accurate, wouldn’t we have to translate 39 as “whoever destroys his soul for my sake,” or 28 as “him who can lose your life and body in Gehenna”? Kind of makes it sound like “fear” in 28 isn’t what we immediately think it is, and that we shouldn’t fear others because they won’t help us - help us, that is, to destroy the lives/souls that we have constructed, the lives we mistakenly think are our own, the false selves in God’s world. God will help us (at all necessary cost to himself and us - thus our rightful fear) by destroying that life, either with our willing cooperation, or our desperate final consent.
And so, I’ve surrendered, finally, to the conclusion that, for me, seems inescapable. Caleb Fogg linked an essay by Richard Beck for you. I find myself in full assent to what Mr. Beck said, if I may paraphrase: UR is the only “theory” that makes sense of creation and existence itself, and God’s purposes for it, and what we know of the past, and what we see around us now, and what we believe about the future, and on and on…
Hope this has helped you somehow. God’s Peace.
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