The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Randal Rauser and predetermining people to hell

While I highly appreciate the insights of professor Randal Rauser, I was really disappointed by his two last posts:

randalrauser.com/2013/12/if-god-wants-to-damn-your-children-should-you-agree/

randalrauser.com/2013/12/dont-confuse-moral-courage-with-irrational-dogmatism/

Imagine that at the judgement day you learn you are saved but that your son or daughter has been predetermined by God to eternally burn in hell.
Let us further imagine you also learn that God was responsible for the fall and our sinful nature.

You also know that God did all of this “to show off His glory”.

How would you react?

It would be slightly less bad to learn that my son or daughter was to be eternally exterminated, but it would be a sad, sad day and I would ask to be eternally exterminated as well. Indeed I suspect that many, many would request the same. I don’t think Father would be displeased. After all, He IS love and His love never changes, and He desires us to be like Him.

In one of the articles referenced above, the question is posited that:

what do you do if God’s perfect goodness is so different from human conceptions of goodness that His actions are utterly indistinguishable from what you would normally consider as evil?

If we had asked C.S. Lewis this question, his response may have been something like:

Thanks for reminding me of that quote, Dan - it was an actual turning point in my theological thinking some years back, and re-reading it reminded me of the ‘sea-change’ I was going through. I can also sense GeoMacD in that quote.

edit: and of course the ideas in the quote were the basis for the marvelous Channing essay: The Moral Argument against Calvinism. That essay is easily one of my favorites and responsible for my turning to Universalism.