Originally posted by wittywonka
Although it may be considered radical in Christianity, I sincerely believe that...
-Hell doesn't exist, and that God's unconditional love will result in everyone going to heaven even if they don't repent.
-The story of Adam and Eve, as well as many others in the Old Testament, are metaphoric and not literal.
I'll post other i ...[text shortened]... omething...as I say in my profile, I'm strongly opinionated but willing to debate...
Not so radical. Universal salvation is still maintained as a possibility in the Eastern Orthodox churches, whose soteriology is one of healing (based on the underlying meaning of the Greek word
soterias, “salvation,” as cure or healing). In this non-juridical view of salvation, many Orthodox view “hell” as a curing “purgation,” rather than as punishment; and thus one’s “stay in hell” (all of this can be read metaphorically!) is not eternal.
Part of scriptural hermeneutics lies in deciding which texts/verses can be used to “con-textualize” others, and which cannot. No one can escape making such decisions (or accepting those made by others). Biblical literalism/historicism is a relatively latter-day phenomenon in Christianity: not much known before the Protestant Reformation and Luther’s doctrine of
sola scriptura, certainly not in the early church. Not that there isn’t any history in the Biblical texts, but that it is interwoven with myth, metaphor, allegory, powerful theological symbolism, etc., in such a way as to make it difficult for Biblical exegetes to sort out—even prominent textual scholars disagree.
Here is some commentary from the Orthodox viewpoint, that seems relevant to your inquiry...
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“Christ is the first-born of God, his Logos, in whom all people share. That is what we have learned and what we bear witness to ... All who have lived in accordance with the Logos are Christians, even if they have been reckoned atheists, as among the Greeks Socrates, Heraclitus and the like.” (Justin Martyr; d. 165 C.E.; an early church father indeed!)
Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement’s commentary: “For the early church salvation is not at all reserved to the baptized ... The Word [
logos] has never ceased and never will cease to be present to humanity in all cultures, all religions, and all irreligions. The incarnation and resurrection are not exclusive but inclusive of the manifold forms of his presence.”*
And: “For the highest spirituality (and theology) of the first centuries, God will be ‘all in all.’ Certain fathers granted that God would turn away from those who turned away from him.** This is what Western Scholasticism was to term
poena damni, the penalty of damnation. Such a fundamentalist [sic] reading of the Gospels (which leads to speculation on the nature of the ‘worm’ and the ‘fire’ that will torment the damned) was denounced not only as external but as ‘absurd’ by the greatest representatives of early Christianity, for example by St Ambrose of Milan and John Cassian in the West, and in the East, quite apart from strict Origenism, by Gregory of Nyssa, John Climacus, Maximus the Confessor, and Isaac of Nineveh.
“For this last author, whose development of the doctrine of hell is undoubtedly the most important contribution to this subject in the whole of Christian theology, it is unthinkable and contrary to the very spirit of the Christian revelation that God should abandon anyone.”
And: “But it is not impossible that all should be saved and reconciled to God.” (John Climacus, 7th century)
And: “As a copious spring could not be stopped up with a handful of dust, so the Creator’s compassion cannot be conquered by the wickedness of creatures.” (Isaac of Nineveh; 7th century) Isaac views whatever torment there is in hell as being caused by “the invasion of love,” which is a healing force; hell is not, then, separation from God. Clement comments as follows—
“We must pray, however, that the fire of judgment—which is the fire of God’s love—will not consume the wicked, but only that part in each one which is evil. The division into ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ of which the Last Judgment scene speaks would thus be made, not between Two crowds of human beings, but between two kinds of character within each individual. In practice, other parables of a similar kind like that of the ‘good seed’ and the ‘tares’ cannot be interpreted in any other way. Jesus explains that the ‘good seed means the sons of the Kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one’, and that at the end these latter will be cast into the blazing furnace (Matthew 13:36). Only Gnostics and Manicheans can hold that it is a question here of people. All human beings are creatures of God. What is ‘sown by the devil’ is destructive suggestions, the seeds of idolatry and folly. Good seeds and tares are human dispositions. To destroy the thoughts sown by the evil one is not to destroy the person but to cauterize him. What Gregory of Nyssa suggests is precisely this divine surgery.
“‘The body is subject to various forms of illness. Some are easy to treat, others are not, and for the latter recourse is had to incisions, cauterizations, bitter medicine... We are told something of the same sort about the judgment in the next world, the healing of the soul’s infirmities. If we are superficial people, that amounts to a threat and a process of severe correction... But the faith of deeper minds regards it as a process of healing and therapy applied by God in such a way as to bring back the being he created to its original grace.’ (Gregory of Nyssa,
Great Catechetical Oration)”
St. Gregory of Nyssa (4th century) referred to the
apokatastasis, the return of all things to God as “the final restoration which is expected to take place later in the kingdom of heaven of those who have suffered condemnation in Gehenna.” (
The Life of Moses, II-82-4.)
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* This and other quotes from Clement’s
The Roots of Christian Mysticism, unless otherwise noted.
** And Orthodoxy does not limit the possibilities to this existence.