FredP

It's kind of a fine point, really. Conditionalism says that humans are by nature mortal, but God grants immortality to the redeemed. Annihilationism, conversely, says that humans are by nature immortal, but God grants termination of existence to the unredeemed (so that they will not have to endure unending torment). Those who are not redeemed either simply pass out of existence naturally (conditionalism) or are wiped out of existence "unnaturally" (annihilationism). Either way, the result is pretty much the same, as far as a doctrine of Hell is concerned, which is why the two tend to get lumped together.

Here is an article in Christianity Today which summarizes the debate within Evangelicalism, since Anglican John Stott's "tentative" defense of annihilationism in his Evangelical Essentials in 1988: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/012/1.30.html It also points out the fine distinction between conditionalism and annihilationism (which I was under the impression were the same thing): "Conditional immortality, or conditionalism for short, is the view that human beings are not naturally immortal. God, who alone is inherently immortal, grants the gift of immortality only to believers. Unbelievers, because they lack this gift, do not live forever. Although technically not identical with annihilationism, conditionalism has come to be used as a synonym for it." "... Stott tentatively defended annihilationism -- the view that unbelievers are finally annihilated and thus do not experience torment that is eternal in duration (as traditionalists believe)." The pro-conditionalist and/or -annihilationist books cited in the article are: The True Image: The Origin and Destiny of Man in Christ, Hughes, 1989 Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell, essay by Wenham, 1992

I have strong Universalist leanings, but I also want to maintain that God will not force our return, no matter how long we hold out. I saw this expressed very jarringly -- and effectively! -- in a defense of Hell I read recently: if God forced people to love him, that would essentially be tantamount to rape. I think of it more in the sense that, as long as we can hold out, God will hold out longer -- as long as it takes for us to return of our own free will. Well, the "essential" Origen is On First Principles. You can find parts of it in the Classics of Western Spirituality volume, Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works. From a cursory search on Amazon.com, it looks like there is also a nice anthology available called Origen: Spirit & Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, edited by Hans Urs Von Balthasar (one of the greatest modern Catholic theologians, died in 1988). Might pick that one up myself.

It's amazing, I can't believe how much more responsive and interactive he gets on a weekly basis! Last week he discovered that these weird looking things in the air are actually his feet and toes. He can actually bring them all the way to his mouth and suck on his toes! So cute. And rather annoying when you're trying to change his diaper....

Des, I'm sorry that you seem to have read things into my comments that I didn't say. On the "foul play" thing: I said one doesn't even need to suppose there was foul play involved, to go along with the more compositional view of the gospels that you and I both agree is a more accurate view of how they got here. I was trying to emphasize for our more conservative brothers and sisters that skepticism about the motives of early Christianity isn't a prerequisite to embracing a more "progressive" reading of the gospels. I think a lot of the reason why conservatives take shots at progressive Christianity is that PC has a bad habit of always retrojecting sinister motives back onto the early church. I wasn't saying that you personally were arguing for foul play, just taking your comment as a jumping off point. On the "institution" thing: once again, I was taking your comment as a jumping off point to say that the institutional and communal dimension of spirituality is necessary to ground it in history, and "real life." We're on the same page here! Fred

I do agree that any notion of a "God" who literally tortures people by throwing them into a never-ending furnace for breaking his laws is repugnant. This isn't divine "justice" or "holiness" as some people claim -- it's pure bloodthirstyness, a projection of the worst human abuses of power onto God. At the same time, as I've largely come to read the core stories of the Bible archetypally and allegorically, I ask myself what reality might the "eternal torment" view of Hell -- which does come out of the mouth of Jesus in the gospels, and is pretty hard to miss in Revelation -- possibly be pointing at? I think it comes down to two things. First, choice. Hell is our persistent willful choice to remain separate from God, and to stay wrapped up in attachments and identities that create pain and suffering and destruction, for ourselves and everyone around us. However, since God is the eternal Ground, the True Self of everything that exists, real separation from God is actually impossible. We are all equally eternally surrounded and bathed in the radiating love of God; the difference between Heaven and Hell has to be in our own hearts. To a heart that continually rejects its inescapable union with God in favor of the impossible condition of separation, the radiating waves of God's love actually feel like flames that are trying to destroy us. The fact is, we're really in Heaven, and always have been -- we only believe we're in Hell. As C. S. Lewis says, "The gates of Hell are locked from the inside." Secondly, patience. God so thoroughly respects our freedom to choose union, that God allows us to persist in our rejection eternally if we so choose. The "eternal" in "eternal torment" isn't so much a statement about our punishment, as it is a statement about God's patience. It points to the fact that God will never abandon our hearts to self-destruction; God will wait forever if need be. Origen -- and possibly even St. Paul, though that's debatable -- long ago, and Unversalism today, believe that God's grace is so irresistable and so powerful, that every person will eventually return to God. I have to say I resonate more with this view than with Conditionalism, which feels to me like God eventually gives up on you and puts you out of your misery if you reject him long enough. Overall, I think the "traditional" doctrine of Hell -- symbolically, of course -- does point us in the right direction by emphasizing both our freedom and God's infinite patience. That's my $.02, take it for what it's worth....

Yes, but your IP isn't nearly as much of an identifying mark as you think. For one thing, most residential IP addresses are still handed out dynamically when you connect to the internet -- even my DSL service which stays up "all the time" typically reconnects 2 or 3 times a week and gets a new IP. Most corporate IP's are mapped dynamically to the local intranet network, so there's not necessarily a relationship between what your IP is on the outside and what it is on the inside. Moreover, only your internet provider has the information about what IP was allocated to what user at what time, and they also have strict privacy guidelines about whom that information is made available to. So even for routed DSL (the minority) and cable users who have fairly static IP addresses, if they don't map to a well known DNS (domain name service) record, there's really no way for anyone without a lot of relevant authorization (like law enforcement, etc.) to track an IP to any personal information about you. I love it. Although the best use of the information would be to stop sending my junk mail I don't want. I guess I attribute it mainly to the fact that the internet has been a part of almost my entire adult life, so I've come to trust the "security of obscurity." There's so much information floating around out there, that it's highly unlikely that anyone will realistically use it against me. It's about as likely that someone will break in and rob my house, or find my credit card number in a garbage heap somewhere. I just picked up on this line of discussion because I happen to know a lot about internet security. I worked on a network security product for a number of years, that actually had a bit of government interest for awhile, until our engineers started infighting and the whole thing got derailed.

Nope, THIS is 3 or 4 months: The little squirt on the right is Ethan, John's brand new cousin.

Mostly, it indexes your hard drive on your hard drive, so that you can efficiently search for files. There are very explicit legal issues governing how much information they can take from you, and it all has to do with improving the performance and relevance of searches you make. You may permit them to capture information about sites you visit for relevancy purposes, but that's never stored on a personal basis. It's more like putting a Nielsen module on your web browser. But uploading a snapshot of your hard drive is completely unfeasable from both a bandwidth and a storage standpoint. There are very specific mathematical limits to how much your files can be compressed, and what is Google going to do with 100,000 people's hard drive contents anyway? You probably already have some kind of value card at your local supermarket, so they know exactly what you buy and how often. It actually helps to predict supply and demand patterns, so that surplus goods don't go bad, and prices (ostensibly) can stay lower. It's essentially the same thing. The stuff to be scared of involves deliberately putting back doors into cryptographic algorithms so that Uncle Sam can listen in on your electronic communications that really are private. It's unfortunate that people use public misperceptions about the power of technology to worry the public about the wrong things. Sorry if that sounds cranky. Just imagine how I get when people forward me emails claiming that I'll receive a gift card from Best Buy if I forward it to everybody on my email list.

All kidding aside, this is a REALLY good point. Our attachments do become our identities, even the ones that are destroying us. My father-in-law died last year of liver failure, due to a lifetime of alcohol abuse. If you want to talk about "healing," God healed his soul by shutting down his body. It was probably the only time in his adult life that he was free of the drug long enough to be vulnerable, to see himself for who he really was -- and to really hear that despite the mistakes he made in his life, his family still loved him and always will. There has been so much healing in my wife's family throughout this process, which I don't think would have happened if he had been "saved" from the pain of being driven beyond his comfort zone, and died of something more quickly.

One doesn't even need to suppose that there was foul play going on here. Peter's de facto leadership in the early Christian community was already well underway when the gospels were written. He no doubt believed and taught that any spiritual authority he may have had in the community could only be grounded in Christ, and not in himself. It's easy enough to see the story as an illustration of this fact, if you don't have a vested interest in reading it as the establishment of a new order of priests. Any group of people who intend to do anything beyond sit there and stare at their feet are going to have an institutional dimension to their existence. The idea Aletheia posted from another discussion board, of religion allowing spiritual ideas to "gain traction in history," really struck me as being exactly right. It emphasizes that we're talking about functionality -- what makes spiritual wisdom "stick" to humanity long enough for it to gain traction. It also emphasizes its situational nature -- when the texture of the mud changes, you have redesign the tires. Some, perhaps, can learn to navigate the mud without them. Maybe that's the eventual goal for all of us. As yet, I'd say humanity is far from being able to navigate the terrain of spirituality without religion, and by extension, authority and leadership. But Jesus probably express the goal of leadership best: everyone, when he has completed his training, will be like his teacher.

Well, as usual, the "privacy experts" aren't technology experts, so they hear "Google saves its searches forever," and assume that means that there's some database out there that links your searches to your name, phone number, and the last mocha you ordered at Starbucks. The search itself is stored by Google forever -- that is, what you typed in and what links matched -- because Google uses this information to improve their calculation of search term relevance. A website can't link a request back to any personal information, unless you've specifically given them that information previously, and then given them permission to remember who you are when you come back. (And if you're paranoid about searching on sites like amazon.com, yahoo.com, etc., where you have created a personal account, just log out or sign off before doing your searches. If you're still paranoid, delete all your cookies, but be prepared to log in and reconfigure every site you visit on a regular basis!)

Of course! It seems very practical for there to be authority in the church. But even allowing for different opinions about authorship of the pastoral epistles, I would still read these letters as giving practical situational advice, not as saying the church in its institutional dimension must organize itself in this way. I think these structures are amenable to revision or even complete overhaul -- especially as concerns the extent of the power of spiritual leadership within the church -- as the social, political, spiritual, etc. needs of humanity change over time. Of course, there are just some hard limits to how much we'll probably agree on this, given our somewhat different ways of reading scripture. But we already knew that.

Well, it's incorrect to identify the Church with the Kingdom of God. The Church is the universal community of Christians; the Kingdom is the New Creation that God is making out of all things. The Kingdom is the primary reality; the Church exists only to bear witness to it, and to prepare people to live in it and serve it. Christ's headship in the Kingdom doesn't imply anything about the authority structure of the Church. There are people who have been burned by church in the past, that's for sure. But I don't think that's the only factor in being suspicious of political forms of church authority. Let me put it this way: do you suppose the Kingdom of God has anything to do with a political structure of who obeys whom in the cosmic (or earthly) pecking order? The Kingdom of God is present whenever and wherever Christ the Eternal Word shines through from the true center of our being like a flame, refining us and setting our desires aright. This is the spiritual headship of Christ, the kingdom of heaven within you. I don't see that isn't being a "spiritual lone ranger." Quite the opposite actually: it's the transcendence of our identification with our little separate selves, the cacophony of voices within -- and the embrace of Christ our true center, who is the true center of all things, the ground of genuine unity with one another. Clearly we recognize that others on our path have a deeper degree of undertanding and mastery over their "kingdoms," so to speak, and so we look to them for guidance. And obviously, we humbly recognize when we have the opportunity to provide guidance to others as well. If that's what you mean by spiritual authority, then I'm all for it. But systems of leadership, by design, are purely functional, and always subject to revision. The goal is transformation -- the emergence of the kingdom within, and the removal of systems of domination, including spiritual domination, so that the kingdom can freely emerge in others, and throughout the world.

I'm guessing it was an inclusive language thing.

If I'm not mistaken, The Religions of Man was the original title of the book which is now called The World's Religions.

What I said was: I then proceeded to argue that it doesn't hold up.

Better beer? Than Sam Adams?

My wife makes a killer turkey meatloaf patty thingy. You mix onions and mushrooms in with the ground turkey and form it into patties, then cook it in cream of mushroom soup, with even more mushrooms added if desired. Obviously, season to taste. Of course, if you don't like mushrooms, I recommend against it.

Whew, I thought you said, extort them! Need to get these glasses checked out.... Heh. Anyway... If I might don the "new spirituality" hat for the purposes of being a Devil's Advocate -- for Aletheia of course! -- I might say that the ultimate goal of all external forms of submission is to cultivate the inward submission of the ego to the will of Christ the True Self. The external form is never an end in itself, but a training ground and illustration, at best, of this ego submission. If that sounds fluffy and new agey, what I'm talking about is literally the death of the false self -- a far more difficult path of renunciation than the mere transference of authority to another person. It seems to me that all forms of religious authority ultimately boil down to this -- you're either practicing transference, or you're practicing transcendence. The choice is yours.

Huh, it's been there all the time, and I've been looking everywhere else for it.

Yes. Absolutely. Every worthwhile tradition on the planet teaches the cultivation of discernment. Our cultural obsession with fast food is a manifestation on the physical plane of this deeply spiritual problem. And discernment doesn't mean deferring our choices to the "experts" or "authorities" -- it means learning to make wise choices ourselves. That's a good way of putting it. I think this really is where discernment comes into play. Taking existing traditions very seriously -- including spiritual practices of restraint and self-examination -- will develop the spiritual "pallette" (as it were), so that what we desire and what is good begin to converge more and more. You wouldn't take St. Augustine's dictum, "Love God, and do what you will" as a license to shed all customary forms of morality; and yet we intuitively understand that this statement must be right, because the highest form of morality is to do the good because we desire to.

Right. Like I said, there's plenty of that out there. When I say that all words and concepts ultimately fall short of capturing God (which I'm pretty sure you're not disagreeing with, or you wouldn't be a very good Catholic!), that doesn't imply that all words and concepts are equally valid, or useful, or up for grabs. We still have to debate and discuss the (relative) accuracy and usefulness of theological concepts -- but that accuracy and usefulness doesn't depend on how you or I personally feel about them. It does, however, depend on the social, personal, philosophical, etc. horizons of the tradition employing them, and what the relevant connotations and meanings of those images are. Classical Christianity's adoption of Greek philosophy goes far beyond the use of the syllogism and the structures of formal logic, to an appropriation of the entire form/substance ontology of Plato. Even a dogma as central as the Trinity, for example, comes straight out of Platonism -- especially the second century Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, whom both Origen and Augustine (cf. Confessions VII and City of God X) explicitly credit in their own hugely influential formulations of this doctrine. It's not that the persons of the Godhead don't show up in the New Testament; it's that the precise definition of their relationship is based entirely on Greek metaphysical concepts. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, mind you -- a cursory reading of any of my posts lately makes it pretty clear that I'm rather fond of Greek philosophical concepts myself. But to claim that the "deposit of faith" was given once and for all by Jesus Christ, and has never been added to, only elaborated and unpacked, by the teaching authority of the Church, simply has no basis in reality. Sure, God has sustained the Christian tradition, just as God has apparently sustained all the great religious traditions -- if endurance is, as you say, an indicator of divine sustenance. But we all know these traditions offer differing -- and often radically incompatible, on the face of it -- doctrinal and philosophical conceptions of God, so even divine sustenance doesn't imply immunity from error and the limitations of human horizons. As my good Reformed friend remarked years ago: "It is pure nonsense to argue that the Spirit has kept the Church doctrinally pure but let it make an ass of itself in every other way." God preserves us in spite of all the ways we go astray, and provides more than we need in Christianity to draw us to himself, without needing to claim doctrinal immunity. Eh, not really. There's just not enough I really feel like saying on the topic to merit dedicating an entire thread to it. I have no deep abiding problem with episcopal structure for the smooth functioning of the Church in its institutional dimension. I don't even have a problem per se with the church having a "teaching authority" for the purposes of debating and preserving the truth as it may be understood at any given point in time. But when it's used as a trump card to snuff out dissenting voices, rather than allowing ideas to stand or fall on the basis of their own authority, that's where I bow out. When I see every Catholic theologian who debates the validity of papal infallibility silenced prima facie for disobedience to the teaching authority of the Church, that's when my circularity-detector starts going off. I do understand your reaction to the "disaster and disunity" of Protestanism. It's one of the factors that pulled me in the direction of Catholicism in the first place. But for every enduring Protestant tradition, there was an original doctrinal concensus that no longer exists. The fact that one "side" didn't break institutional unity doesn't mean that there wasn't genuine unreconciled disagreement in the Body of Christ. No, the concensus is already broken -- the "Church" no longer speaks with one voice. Calling one side off-sides by fiat only preserves the appearance of doctrinal unity, not the reality of it. But I agree with you that the current state of affairs in Protestant churches -- especially in Evangelicalism where personality is such a big factor in leadership -- is a mess. If doctrinal monolithicity (did I just make that word up?) is the problem for the Catholic and Orthodox communions, Evangelical Protestantism suffers from the opposite problem. (If anybody wants to make up a word for that, you're welcome to take a crack at it.) I think the "new spirituality" in its best manifestations, despite its potential for Ego Buffets (per Aletheia's last post), is attempting to steer a path between these rocks -- to appropriate the deep wisdom of the enduring traditions, to find unity in the fractured mess that the modern deconstruction of monolothic religion seems to have left us with. And what's crazy is just how much unity is actually there.

If you click on mystictrek's profile, it shows that he has contributed 0.98% of the total forum posts.

Right, that's what I was getting at. That's where the analogy breaks down, which why I don't use the "Creator/creation" analogy when I'm in a more precise metaphysical mode. But the analogy has other good aspects to it, and it's still a lot more accurate than other alternatives -- a meaningless universe, for example.