Hey, David. Thanks so much for being here and posting all this. It’s incredibly helpful and is an especially important aspect of universalism to me.
I have a question though. In trying to explain the concept behind aionios to people in my head, I came up with a way of possibly explaining it but am not 100% that it is accurate. I’m sure that the concept’s fairly ambiguous to begin with that it could be interpreted more than one way, but here goes:
Plato was associating timelessness with a derivative of a word that meant an “age” because he was thinking of eternal essences which ages came to be identified with. We do the same thing in our own time by labelling ages, such as “The Age of Enlightenment,” “The Information Age” and in the Christian world, “The Age of the Law” and “The Age of Grace.” Plato believed that everything was rooted in the heavenly, eternal realm, thus “enlightment,” “law,” and “grace,” for instance would be eternal things that have been communicated to us and have come to identify an age. In short, it was something akin to dispensationalism. To say that someone would experience “eternal correction,” in the Greek meant something more like, they would be subject to the “Age of Correction.”
Correction, judgment, punishment, fire etc, are all divine, eternal things that thus come to constitute an age of existence for some.
Would that be a fair thing to say?