Hi Sonia,
Thanks for your query. Unfortunately, I stay away from all social media–it’s just too overwhelming–so I cannot post on your forum. But one thing you might clarify for your pastor as well as for others is that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is indeed an encyclopedia of PHILOSOPHY, and the purpose of my entry was to review ideas that various Christian philosophers and theologians have put forth on the topic of heaven and hell. It would have been altogether unacceptable in such a context to review the various exegetical and biblical arguments for and against the three systems of theology identified in the entry. The whole point was to review the philosophical and theological arguments, not the biblical arguments.
Now like you, I find increasingly tiresome the supposed contrast between God’s Word and human reason, as if one could interpret a biblical text without employing one’s reason (and imagination) in the process. Is it not just too easy to confuse one’s own theology, based upon one’s own reading of the Bible (or simply on the theology handed down to one), with the Word of God?–and is it not likewise just too easy to contrast one’s own theology, as if it were the very Word of God itself, with human reason? For my own part, I strongly suspect that, more often than not, those who draw such a contrast understand neither God’s Word nor human reason.
But in any case, perhaps the best strategy at this point is simply to ask questions of a kind that might encourage others to familiarize themselves with the way in which Christian universalists interpret the Bible as a whole. Although most Evangelicals have some idea of how the Calvinists put biblical ideas together and some idea of how the Arminians put biblical ideas together, very few, I am persuaded, have even the vaguest idea of how various universalists, such as St. Gregory of Nyssa or George MacDonald, not to mention someone like Robin Parry, put biblical ideas together. How many have even considered, for example, St Paul’s clear teaching in Romans 11 that God’s severity, his judgment of sin, and even his hardening of a heart is itself an expression of mercy (or compassion) to the objects of his severity? So the best suggestion I can make is that you ask your pastor (and others) to respond to the kinds of biblical arguments that Christian universalists have actually set forth rather than to what someone might imagine them setting forth.
Anyway, thanks again for your query.
-Tom