Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood,
[Jesus] himself likewise shared the same things, so that through
death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that
is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in
slavery by the fear of death. For to me, living is Christ and
dying is gain. As it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear
heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for
those who love him’.

By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into
a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the
dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled,
and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with
fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will
send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all
causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into
the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing
of teeth. These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction,
separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of
his might. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there
that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will
transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed
to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to
make all things subject to himself.

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the
things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand
of God.

For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking
for the city that is to come.

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we
die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we
are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so
that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.

And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once,
and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once
to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal
with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

So whether we are at home or away, we make it our
aim to please him. For all of us must appear before the judgment
seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has
been done in the body, whether good or evil.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may
have eternal life.

Hebrews 2:14,15; Philippians 1:21; 1 Corinthians
2:9; 1 Peter 1:3-4; Matthew 13:40-42; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Philippians
3:20-21; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 13:14; Romans 14:8-9; Hebrews
9:27-28; 2 Corinthians 5:9-10; John 3:16.

…..

Death – and the possibility of life after death -
is a serious issue. We are going to be dead a very long time!
Alexander the Great told his slave to say every morning ‘Philip,
remember that you must die!’ Death is no respecter of persons;
it is the ‘great leveler’: one out of one dies.

You know the well-known lines from Hamlet:

To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream; aye,
there’s the rub: For in the sleep of death, what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause…

The dread of something after death, The undiscovered
country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than to fly to others
that we know not of.

Psychologists tell us we die, generally, the way
we’ve lived. Not everybody has the confidence of the ancient Hebrew:
‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will
fear no evil for you are with me’ (Psalm 23:4). Dryden probably
expressed the more common feeling: ‘Death, in itself, is nothing:
but we fear/ To be we know not what, we know not where.’

Christianity is all about someone who has come to
this world from another world, to inaugurate the ‘kingdom of God’.
We humans are not capable of constructing our own utopias; instead
God comes to us in Jesus to redeem us from our follies and to
invite us to enjoy ‘eternal life’. Our faith in his teaching,
his claims about himself, and the reality of his resurrection,
give us a ‘sure and certain hope’ that this life is essentially
a curtain-raiser. Someone has returned from the ‘undiscovered
country’. Our faith in Jesus Christ pierces this ‘cloud of unknowing’.

Jesus taught about the inevitability of rewards and
punishments within and beyond this life, depending on our relationship
to him. Eternal life – a life lived in relationship with the living
God – can be experienced here and now, and more fully beyond our
death or resurrection. Death, separation from God, is similarly
both a present and future experience.

It has been said that Shelley and Milton, despite
the vast differences between them as writers, shared equally an
imaginative inability to think of anything interesting to do in
heaven. The caricature of people sitting on clouds strumming harps
is deep in our folk-consciousness. We simply do not know ‘the
furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell.’ The best we can
say is that Jesus thought heaven was definitely worth attaining
and hell definitely worth avoiding. He seemed to believe in the
reality of both places. And, as we have said all through this
book, for Christians he’s the authority. If you know someone who
has better credentials follow that person (but make sure first
they get themselves resurrected!).

If Jesus was who he said he was, our resurrection
and the life hereafter are ‘for real’. John Drinkwater’s poem
is most suggestive:

Shakespeare is dust, and will not come To question
from his Avon tomb. And Socrates and Shelley keep An Attic and
Italian sleep. They see not. But, O Christians, who Throng Holborn
and Fifth Avenue, May you not meet, in spite of death, A traveller
from Nazareth?

‘Death,’ exclaims the great Christian St. Paul, ‘has
been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting? Thanks be to God, who gives us
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15:54,55).

…..

Death, grotesque character, bogey-man of little children,
non- existent phantom, I don’t take you seriously, But I am disgusted
with you. You terrify the world, You frighten and deceive us,
And yet your only reason for existing is life, and you are not
able to take from us those that we love.

M. Quoist, Prayers of Life, Dublin: Gill and Son,
1967, p.31.

The day I die will be a glorious day! April I think
- or maybe the first of May. And birds will cry aloud for joy
and life newborn, that glorious morn – the day I die.

And I will walk where fairer flowers than any earth
has seen grow sweet and wild. And undefiled the panorama of my
Father’s home will stretch before my wondering eyes. And with
what glad surprise I shall behold far fairer than all else my
Jesus’ face.

And all that wondrous place will centre on his beauty
- and his grace.

And this will be my own – my very own! For I’ll be
home – the day I die.

Margaret Phillips, The Day I Die. 100 Christian Poets,
Gordon Bailey, England: Lion Publishing, 1983, p.128.

Every person has their own tale to tell, including
those who wouldn’t believe in God if you paid them.

As human beings we are trapped by our rootage in
nature. We are all subject to the forces of aging, sickness, pain
and death. We lack what Big Daddy, in Tennessee Williams’ play
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof calls the ‘pig’s advantage’ – ignorance
of our mortality. The nature of existential anxiety has been discussed
by many thinkers including Soren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir,
Erich Fromm, Paul Tillich, Erik Erikson, Rollo May, Ernest Becker,
and Mary Daly. Erikson calls it the ‘ego chill’. Tillich described
it as our ‘heritage of finitude’.

Howard Clinebell, Growth Counseling, Nashville: Abingdon,
1979, p.110.

The consequence of… original sin was three kinds
of death: ‘judicial death,’ the realization that rejecting the
relationship with God meant being cut off from his eternal life;
‘spiritual death,’ the awareness of God’s wrath, coupled with
the realization that human beings can do nothing to restore the
lost relationship; and finally, ‘physical death’ which, as James
Denney wrote, is simply a negative sacrament, the outward and
visible manifestation of an inward, spiritual disgrace.

Kenneth Swanson, Uncommon Prayer, New York: Ballantine,
1987, p. 48.

I view death as a coronation. My death will be a
victory. I want the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ sung at my funeral. I
don’t want to leave my family, but I know it is going to be fantastic
on the other side…

There are many people whose lives seem to be prematurely
snuffed out. When my seven-month-old daughter died, I came to
the conclusion that the purpose for her life was fulfilled in
those seven months. That experience transformed me; my view of
death has come into focus because of Judy. We are not here to
fulfil our own purposes, but God’s.

If I am living in conformity with God’s will, if
I am obeying him and doing what he tells me step by step every
day, then when it comes time for me to die, I know this is just
the next step in his will.

Evelyn Christenson, ‘Death’, in LaVonne Neff et.
al, Practical Christianity, Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers
Inc., 1988, p. 219.

When you are with somebody you love, you have little
if any sense of the passage of time, and you also have in the
fullest sense of the phrase ‘a good time’.

When you are with God, you have something like the
same experience. The biblical term for the experience is Eternal
Life. Another is Heaven.

What does it mean to be `with God’? It doesn’t mean
you have to be thinking about being with God, or feeling religious,
or sitting in church, or saying your prayers, though it might
mean any or all of these…

We think of Eternal Life, if we think of it at all,
as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of
it as what happens when life begins.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins,
1973, p.20.

We know neither the moment of the consummation of
the earth… nor the way the universe will be transformed. The
form of this world, distorted by sin, is passing away, and we
are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling and a new earth
in which righteousness dwells, whose happiness will fill and surpass
all the desires for peace arising in our hearts. Then with death
conquered the children of God will be raised in Christ, and what
is sown in weakness and dishonour will put on the imperishable:
charity and its works will remain, and all of creation which God
made for human beings will be set free from its bondage to decay.

Gaudium et Spes, par. 39, in Tony Kelly, Touching
the Infinite, Blackburn: Collins Dove, 1991, pp. 25-26.

We are all of us judged every day. We are judged
by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We
are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces
and lives of our children and by our dreams. Each day finds us
at the junction of many roads, and we are judged as much by the
roads we have not taken as by the roads we have.

The New Testament proclaims that at some unforeseeable
time in the future God will ring down the final curtain on history,
and there will come a Day on which all our days and all the judgments
upon us and all our judgments upon each other will themselves
be judged. The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who
judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully.

Romantic love is blind to everything except what
is lovable and lovely, but Christ’s love sees us with terrible
clarity and sees us whole. Christ’s love so wishes our joy that
it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy.
The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering
which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal.
The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one…

People are free in this world to live for themselves
alone if they want to and let the rest go hang, and they are free
to live out the dismal consequences as long as they can stand
it. The doctrine of Hell proclaims that they retain this same
freedom in whatever world comes next. Thus the possibility of
making damned fools of ourselves would appear to be limitless.

Or maybe Hell is the limit. Since the damned are
said to suffer as dismally in the next world as they do in this
one, they must still have enough life left in them to suffer with,
which means that in their flight from Love, God apparently stops
them just this side of extinguishing themselves utterly. Thus
the bottomless pit is not really bottomless. Hell is the bottom
beyond which God in his terrible mercy will not let them go.

Dante saw written over the gates of hell the words
`Abandon all hope ye who enter here’, but he must have seen wrong.
If there is suffering life in hell, there must also be hope in
hell, because where there is life there is the Lord and giver
of life, and where there is suffering he is there too because
the suffering of the ones he loves is also his suffering.

`He descended into hell’, the Creed says, and `If
I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there’, the Psalmist (139:8).
It seems there is no depth to which he will not sink. Maybe not
even Old Scratch will be able to hold out against him forever.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins,
1973, pp. 48, 37-38.

Hell is not so much a threat to be hurled at other
people, but a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer
in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ
in solidarity with his descent into the night. One draws near
to the Lord’s radiance by sharing his darkness. One serves the
salvation of the world by leaving one’s own salvation behind for
the sake of others.

J Ratzinger, ‘Eschatology’, pp. 217 ff. in Tony Kelly,
Touching the Infinite, Blackburn: Collins Dove, 1991, p. 193.

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more;
neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the lamb
which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall
lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes, Revelation 7:16-17.

This is one of the most comforting passages in all
literature. It teaches that our loved ones are in a place of peace
and beauty. They are under the watchful care of God and regularly
experience his tenderness. The deep hunger and thirst of their
souls has been satisfied. God, like a loving mother, puts his
protection over them and with kindly hand wipes away every tear
from their eyes. This he has done for your dear ones who have
crossed over to the other side.

If you learn to love this passage and meditate upon
it, he will wipe away every tear from your eyes also.

Norman Vincent Peale, Thought Conditioners, New York:
Foundation for Christian Living, n.d., p.24.

I have heard of love at first sight. I have rarely
heard of love before sight. How can I expect to love a day that
I have never seen? But, depend upon it, when he makes that last
day of mine, he will make it well: and, as is invariably the case,
it will be a very different day from the day my terrors have painted
for me. Even for the Day of Judgment the same will hold true.
It would be the nightmare of the ages if that day were being fashioned
by any hands but his. But since, when that day comes, the print
of his fingers will be upon its dawn, we may be sure that its
proceedings will appeal to everyone’s reason and to everyone’s
conscience. Justice and judgment will be the habitation of his
throne, and we shall sing the old song. `This is the day! This
is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad
in it.’

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In, London: Epworth Press,
1958, p.25.

There is the constantly recurring question whether
we shall know and meet and recognise each other again on the other
side of death. One thing is quite certain – Christian orthodoxy
does not teach the immortality of the soul; it teaches the resurrection
of the body. We do not mean by that the resurrection of this body
as it is. For many of us the last thing in the world that we would
want is the resurrection of the burden and the weariness of this
mortal body. We would never wish for the resurrection of the actual
body with which someone was smashed up in an accident or died
with an incurable disease. It so happens that Greek has no word
for personality, and the resurrection of the body means the survival
of the personality; it means that in the life beyond, you will
still be you, and I will still be I…

There are two quotations of which I have always been
very fond: `God has his own secret stairway into every heart’.
`There are as many ways to the stars as there are [people] to
climb them’… I have often quoted the dimensions of the heavenly
city as they are given to us in Revelation 21:16. Each side of
the city, which was in the form of a square as John saw it, was…
twelve thousand `stadia’. A stadion was about two hundred and
twenty yards; and… twelve thousand stadia is about fifteen hundred
miles. The area of a square whose sides are fifteen hundred miles
is two million, two hundred and fifty thousand square miles! There
is an immense amount of room in the city of God, room for all
who come. Further, the city had twelve gates, three on the east,
three on the north, three on the south, and three on the west.
There was a way in from whatever direction the pilgrim to it might
come.

William Barclay, Testament of Faith, Oxford: Mowbrays,
1977, pp. 62, 98-99.

Ever since I read Richard Baxter’s sprawling, rhapsodic
classic, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest 40 years ago, I have thought
that today’s Christians ought to be much more heavenly minded
than we are. Baxter showed me how the hope of heaven should spur
us to resolute effort in our discipleship (‘run in such a way
as to get the prize’ 1 Corinthians 9:24) and also bring us joy,
since heaven is our real home. When persons suffering from loss
of memory cannot recall where their earthly home is, we pity them;
but Christians who forget that heaven is their true home, and
never think positively about heaven at all, are much more to be
pitied… If the prospect of being with Jesus Christ, closer than
ever before – all frustration, weakness, and pain having been
left behind – does not thrill us constantly, our Christianity
is dreadfully sub-standard. If we really loved our Lord, would
not this guaranteed hope be a source of eager delight? And is
not loving the Lord the heart of real Christianity? Think about
it.

See you in heaven, I hope.

J.I.Packer, ‘Why I Like My Pie in the Sky’, Blackburn,
Victoria: New Life, 16 August, 1990, p.4.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those
who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’, and those to whom God says,
in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.
Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that
seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.

C.S.Lewis, The Great Divorce, quoted in Clyde S.
Kilby, A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C.S.Lewis, London: Geoffrey
Bles, 1968, pp. 170-171.

…..

Father God, I have committed my whole life to you.
The future is unknown to me, but not to you. Thankfully, modern
medicine can prolong my life, but not for ever. Beyond this life
I’m in your hands: thank you for that most ultimate security.

Give me an unwavering faith in Jesus Christ your
Son, whose coming to us has changed everything. May this faith
annul death’s terrors, and enable me to enjoy his promise of ‘life
in all its fullness’ including some day a glorified body like
his.

Save me from whatever contagion clings to me from
this present evil world. Give me strength to run or to walk, or
to wait with patience.

May I love you with all my heart and serve you with
all my strength, until the day I experience a triumphant welcome
on the other side…

…..

O my God, shall I one day see thee? What sight can
compare to that great sight? Shall I see the source of that grace
which enlightens me, strengthens me, and consoles me? As I came
from thee, as I am made through thee, so, O my God, may I at last
return to thee, and be with thee for ever and ever.

John Henry Newman, in Tony Castle, The Hodder Book
of Christian Prayers, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986, p.26.

Lord Jesus Christ, Good shepherd, in you, past, present
and future are brought together in one great hope. Renew our faith
in you, so that the past may not hinder us, the present overwhelm
us or the future frighten us. You have brought us this far, and
we praise you; continue to lead us until our hope is fulfilled
and we join all God’s people in never-ending praise.

Alan Gaunt, New Prayers for Worship, John Paul the
Preacher’s Press, 1978, p.2.

O God, so rule and govern our hearts and minds by
the Holy Spirit, that being ever mindful of the end of all things,
and the day of thy just judgment, we may be stirred up to holiness
of living here, and dwell with thee forever hereafter; through
Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord.

Frank Colquhoun, Prayers for Every Occasion, USA:
Morehouse-Barlow, 1974, p.130.

We set our hearts on heaven, where Christ is at God’s
right hand. Christ is our life, and when he appears, we too will
share his glory. Christ lives in us. Though our bodies will die,
yet for us the Spirit is life; the Spirit of God who raised Jesus
from death. This is our secret. Christ is in us; We will share
the glory of God…

A grain of wheat is a solitary grain till it falls
to the ground and dies. A grain of wheat is a solitary grain,
but dead it bears a mighty harvest.

Praise to Jesus, the resurrection and the life. All
who have faith in Christ, though they die, they will come to life;
and no one who is alive in faith will ever die.

For the Son of Man was raised up so that everyone
who believes in Jesus may have eternal life.

Look on Jesus, lifted up, lifted high to redeem the
world.

A New Zealand Prayer Book, Auckland: Collins, 1989,
pp.105, 107.

Lord, care for your people and purify them. console
them in this life and bring them to the life to come. we ask this
in the name of Jesus the Lord…

Father, in your plan of salvation your Son Jesus
Christ accepted the cross and freed us from the power of the enemy.
May we come to share the glory of his resurrection, for he lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and
ever.

Daily Mass Book, Brisbane: The Liturgical Commission,
1990, pp.38, 159.

…..

A Benediction: May the resurrected Christ, whom having
not seen you love, grant you his life, eternal life. May you live
every day of this life, may you be willing to serve the triune
God without prospect of reward, and yet, beyond all knowing, may
you anticipate with absolute assurance, the resurrection of the
body and the life everlasting. Amen.

UNIVERSALISM: WILL GOD EMPTY HELL?

In several Bible colleges I have asked the students
to answer, without too much time to think, this question: ‘Does
God love the devil?’ Invariably the responses are equally divided
between ‘Yes’ ‘No’ and ‘Don’t know.’

Of course, God is love. There is no situation where
he cannot be loving. Our dilemma is to relate his love to his
justice.

Here’s a pot pourri of quotes on this theme. You
decide!

I never heard my father threaten sinners, whose who
could not stop, though he knew God’s laws commanded them to stop.
He knew the flesh was for many stronger than the fear of hell.
But he never warned those who could not stop that they would go
to hell. He never reminded them that there was no escape from,
or amelioration of, the torments of hell… I think he liked to
believe, as I also like to believe, that God is more forgiving
than men, certainly more forgiving than women, indeed that God
ought to forgive everyone.

Manning Clark, The Puzzles of Childhood, Ringwood,
Australia: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 40.

Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which
I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if
it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and,
specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by
Christendom; and it has the support of reason. If a game is played,
it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature
lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but that
person (though others may help), and the person may refuse. I
would pay any price to be able to say truthfully ‘All will be
saved’. But my reason retorts, ‘Without their will or with it?’
If I say ‘without their will’ I at once perceive a contradiction;
how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary?
If I say ‘With their will’, my reason replies ‘How if they will
not give in?’

C.S.Lewis, The Problem of Pain, London: Fontana,
1957, pp. 106-107.

I believe in a literal Hell – not a metaphoric Hell,
but a literal place. The scriptures aren’t clear where that is,
but it is a place where God is not. That’s what makes Hell hell.
And the Devil is a literal person – the Darth Vader of scripture.
Hell will not be lined with TV sets, there’ll be no bars to go
to and have a drink with your mates, no dope and no orgies. It
will be a place of loneliness, not a nice place.

Tom Rawls, Assembly of God pastor, quoted in The
Bulletin, ‘Hell’, May 24, 1988, p. 43.

Hell, whatever else it means, is separation from
God. If you are out of Christ and away from God now, in many ways
you are in hell; for hell is separation from God. Now extend your
sense of guilt, your frustration, your self-inflicted burdens
into eternity – and that is hell. In eternity, the gulf between
you and God will widen, the darkness will become more intense
and the associations more repugnant.

Billy Graham, ‘Hell’, Hour of Decision broadcast,
1957, p. 10.

As a child, Robert Ingersoll heard a preacher proclaim
the doctrine that God subjects sinners to unending torment in
hell. Ingersoll decided that if God was like that, then he hated
Him. Later he wrote of his belief that it ‘makes [humans] eternal
victims and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror…
Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go.’

Cited in Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical
Scrivener, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1983, p.300.

Hell is a terrible possibility for a human being
who fully resists God’s will… I am not sure anyone is in hell…
For all we know even people at odds with God’s will could ‘change
lanes’ in their final moments of consciousness.

Father Walbert Buhlmann, Roman Catholic Swiss theologian,
in an interview with The Age, Melbourne, 22 August, 1986, page
unknown.

Neither the Hindu concept of reincarnation nor the
Western suggestion that unbelievers will be given a second chance
to believe or a way to be purified after death has any biblical
foundation… Passage after passage in the Bible that speaks of
ultimate hope also warns of final judgment… John 5:28-29 speaks
of the ‘resurrection of damnation’. John 3:16, the familiar Sunday
school memory verse that tells how much God loved the world, warns
about ‘perishing’ – being eternally lost… But universalism,
based on human speculation, sentiment, and hope, is not the last
word. Scripture tells us something more reliable: ‘God is not
willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance’
(2 Peter 3:9).

Harold O.J.Brown, ‘Will Everyone Be Saved?’ Pastoral
Renewal, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Volume 11 No. 11, June 1987, p.
15.

For there to be joy, there has to be freedom. If
there is a basis for hell, it is right here – not in God’s dissatisfaction
with humankind, but in our dissatisfaction with him and the shape
of the gift of existence he is giving us. Hell is a human and
not a Divine creation… The biblical witness from the beginning
to the end is that it is not his will that any should perish,
but that all come to his joy… The image of Jesus weeping over
Jerusalem is far closer to the Divine reaction to sin than anger
or torture…

None of the many images of hell in the Bible were
meant to be literal descriptions of what actually happens in the
life beyond… The point is that the biblical writers used many
different images and symbols to declare one thing – that it is
possible for any one of us to miss the whole point for which we
were created…

This is an eternal punishment, but not an eternal
punishing. No humane person… would hold one in existence and
torture that one for no purpose. Certainly God would not do such
a thing…

But even a God cannot do it all by himself. The response
of joy is the part I play out of my freedom, and if I will not
finally affirm life and the One who generously gives it, he cannot
make me do so.

John Claypool, ‘Divine Tenacity and Human Freedom’,
unpublished sermon preached at Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson,
Mississippi, September 14, 1980.

In one thing I would go beyond strict orthodoxy -
I am a convinced universalist. I believe in the end all will be
gathered into the love of God. In the early days Origen… believed
that some would have to go to heaven via hell… He did not believe
in eternal punishment, but he did see the possibility of eternal
penalty.

Jesus said, ‘When I am lifted up from the earth I
will draw all to myself’ (John 12:32). Paul writes: ‘God has consigned
all to disobedience that he may have mercy on all’ (Romans 11:32).
‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1
Corinthians 15:28)… Matthew 25:46 says the rejected go away
to eternal punishment and the righteous to eternal life. The Greek
word for punishment is kolasis… [which] originally meant the
pruning of trees to make them grow better. It is never used of
anything but remedial punishment. The word for eternal is aionios,
which cannot be used properly of anyone but God. Eternal punishment
is then literally that kind of remedial punishment which it befits
God to give and which only God can give…

I believe it is impossible to set limits to the grace
of God… I believe that the grace of God is as wide as the universe.
[And] I believe in the ultimate and complete triumph of God, when
all things will be subject to him, and when God will be everything
to everyone (1 Corinthians 15:24-28).

William Barclay, Testament of Faith, Mowbrays, pp.
58 – 60.

Not famine, not pestilence, not war will bring back
seriousness. It is not until the eternal punishments of hell regain
their reality that [humans] will turn serious.

Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in Time, January 27, 1961,
p.50.

At that moment [Jesus' resurrection after his 'descent
into hell'] a kingdom has appeared for all in the midst of hell,
a kingdom of peace and joy and laughter. Hell is broken and mastered
in Jesus. No longer is it horror without end, for he is the beginning
of the end of all horrors. The sufferings of hell are no longer
eternal nor are they the final word. Death has been triumphantly
destroyed. ‘Where, death, is your sting?’ are the words Paul uses…
to taunt death. Hell is open. Man and woman are free to pass through
it. And this is not true only of this hell but of all hells on
earth… the glimmer of dawn has begun to break above the fields
of death and the places of murder, and also above the little hells
of everyday life.

Jurgen Moltmann, in Gerhard Rein et. al., A New Look
at the Apostles’ Creed, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969, p.41.

When confronted with God’s revelation of the awesome
reality of hell, we cannot help sharing the feelings expressed
by Teilhard de Chardin: ‘Of the mysteries which we have to believe,
O Lord, there is none, without a doubt, which so affronts our
human views as that of damnation. And the more human we become…
the most lost we feel at the thought of hell… You have told
me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to hold
with absolute certainty that any single person has been damned…’
To put the mystery precisely, we must believe two doctrines: (1)
the almighty power of God who wants all people to be saved, and
(2) the possibility of eternal perdition for those living and
dying without love and friendship with God. We must accept these
two doctrines without fully understanding how they can be reconciled.

Rev. Leo Watt O.F.M., Hell: A Modern Approach, Melbourne:
A.C.T.S. Publications, Sept. 10, 1967, pp. 27,28.

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