The Evangelical Universalist Forum

The Most Real Reality and the Folly of the Cross

Back from hiatus, and working on several projects that I’ll be posting up soon (God willing and the creek don’t rise!)–including a slightly more detailed report of how the Nashville theological conference discussion went between Tom Talbott, Jerry Walls, and Edward Fudge.

Meanwhile, I finally got around to posting up a critique of Professor Edward Feser’s attempts to defend against claims of God’s moral viciousness by, in effect, denying that God is moral and therefore cannot be accused of moral failure. (The link is to my article on the Cadre Journal.)

This has more than a passing relationship with Christian universalism, since one of the points of contention that Dr. Feser is defending against is that the Roman Catholic stance on eternal conscious torment involves viciousness. Indeed I have been accused by a fan of Dr. Feser (although I’m unsure he himself would do so) of being not a real supernaturalistic theist but instead only a “theistic personalist” precisely because I mentioned in a thread over at Victor Reppert’s Dangerous Idea that I originally came to be a Christian universalist because I found that it followed logically as a corollary to ortho-trin!

A very nice and polite defender of Dr. Feser’s has been corresponding with me in the comments, so I recommend those for further reading after the article. (I’ll create a new thread for reference to a related scriptural detail in the comments involving Psalm 62, btw.)

Note: my argument, as might be expected from me :wink: , is a dispute between trinitarian theists, and my critique concentrates on what I regard as uniquely superior characteristics of that doctrinal set that a fellow trinitarian ought not to be throwing under the bus in order to escape criticism about God’s moral character! Some of my points however should still be relevantly acceptable to non-trinitarian theists.