The Evangelical Universalist Forum

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

Regarding episode titles, there were three episodes; a seeming weight in your favor or TFan’s was almost inescapable. My choices were simply the results of trying to find songs whose titles seem relevant to the debate proposition. They are not intended to communicate anything about the individual portions of the debate, or who I think won. Nor was it part of a marketing strategy, or an attempt to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of my peers :slight_smile:

So noted and edited accordingly. :smiley:

(I still think those are good reasons for us not to complain about the titling, and that the legitimacy/marketing factors still naturally apply even though you didn’t do so for the sake of those factors.)

I enjoyed listening to the debate this evening while working in the kitchen and wrangling kids – so wasn’t able to give it quite as much attention as I’d have liked, but it was fun anyway! I’d like to listen to parts of it again when I have some quieter free time.

And I’d like to see a followup debate focused on several of the most clearly universalist passages!

Sonia

Ohhhh, those are no fun. :smiley: Where’s the challenge?!

Actually, preliminary indications from Chris are that the next topic may be whether ortho-trin leads to universalism by metaphysical logic. But that’ll be a while down the line. (Like probably not this year. :slight_smile: I might get an interview this year, maybe, but Chris’ schedule is iffy for various reasons. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was next year, too.)

We’ll have plenty to chew over here for a while–including picking at where I could have done better! :laughing:

I wouldn’t mind letting Jason and TFan duke it out over the alleged universalism passages first, before they discuss the Trinity argument. But yes, the next discussion on this topic on my show will likely not be until next year.

So!–as I said, I don’t want to put up transcripts of my prepared material yet, in order not to distract people from going to Chris’ site to get the main data.

But I think it’s fair game to post up transcripts of my prepared material that for one or another reason I didn’t get to deliver! :laughing:

First up: I was hoping TFan would ask in cross-exam about my translation of 2 Thess 1:9, so I could report my reasoning on that topic. This never happened, but Chris did ask about it in the Q&A period. Unfortunately, I only had 2-1/2 minutes to reply, so I had to provide a very truncated version of my prepared material on that–and I hadn’t prepared for that possibility ahead of time with a shorter version, so I expect I made pretty poor weather of it, rapidly selecting bits and pieces as I went down the page.

So, here are all those bits and pieces with the connective detailed material. :smiley:

I should note that Chris’ question involved (if I recall correctly) another OT reference (also from the Proverbs unless I’m misremembering–I’ll be checking that later), which this reply doesn’t directly address.

For those of who gravitate toward YouTube, I’ve created a Playlist for this debate at my YouTube channel.

Wow, good stuff Jason. Thanks for posting that.

Have now added a link to the playlist in my opening post; and added a mention of YT accessibility in the thread title.

A super idea, Chris! (Or someone else’s super idea–thanks, whoever that was!–but super for agreeing to do it. :smiley: )

The reason for the bite-size chunks, by the way, is YT’s imposed limit of 15 minutes per video.

Fascinating debate. Must have taken many hours of preparation. Well done!

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?)…