I listened to the Gospel Simplicity video about Maximus. It makes me so frustrated that this interpretation has existed for so long but yet we continually dumb it down into a religious system of retribution, winners and losers. Or maybe the faith has always existed in mystical forms alongside the fundamentalists. You mentioned how Maximus has been accepted by the mystics. Hasnt the mystical experience always pointed to a kind of panentheism, I think there have been a few Christian mystics brave enough to claim the label. If experience is authoritative, isnt there a mystical consensus around the idea that everything is one (NDEs, kundalini experiences, oneness )? To me panentheism solves so many intellectual problems I have around theodicy.
I knew when I started following your work a year or so ago that you would eventually start appearing on the bigger YouTube channels in this sphere. Cheers to your family and your important work, Professor! As a native Tennessean, I'm usually somewhat dismayed by the sheer influx of people from elsewhere in the last few years, but I hope you're settling in nicely.
Yours is a theology I can do mission with in one of the most secularised societies on earth. Brilliant. Enlightening. Expansive. Here's a take I've not yet seen in discussions in more Christianised countries re: hopeful inclusivism. For those engaged in evangelisation, the Augustinian massa damnata encumbers more than it motivates. I was a young adult convert, and apart from my wife and children, I'm the only one in my extended family (38 persons) who professes faith in Christ. The 'traditional' infernalist position drove me to despair. Hans us von Balthasar's Dare We Hope liberated and energised. His gift to the Catholic church was simply prophetic: the good Good news.
I do have a question: Robert Barron (whose 'Is hell crowded or empty?' first awakened me), referred to universalism as a 'heresy' in his latest YouTube: 'Robert Barron responds to his critics'. Why might he have said this? The 5th Ecumenical Council? (I've read Kimel's 'Surprised by Joy').
Thanks for the comment, Chris! I can't say I know entirely what's behind Barron's remark. But I'll make two guesses. First, it's rhetorically useful for him to distinguish himself from the supposedly "extreme" view. That way his soft, "merely hopeful" universalist position seems comparatively benign to the many traditionalists out there that increasingly make up his audience, given his cozying up to American MAGA-types. Second, it's a frequently repeated claim that very few actually think through, as you know from Kimel's chapter on it. As I've said elsewhere, though, even if the anti-Origenist canons are entirely authentic to the 5th ecumenical council, and even if later councils verify them and give explicit detail as to why (they don't do the latter), Barron's claim here remains objectively false. It is simply inaccurate to claim that the 5th council condemned "final apokatastasis" or "universalism": neither expression appears in the canons at all. What *does* appear in the canons is *a specific version of apokatastasis*, namely one that "follows upon" that "monstrous primordial henad." In other words, what the canons as written condemn is not any and every universalism, but the specific version that posited a preexistent henad of rational minds that fell away from God, were subsequently caught in various bodies that God created in *response* to the primordial fall, and then, almost automatically (and without assurance that a future fall wouldn't occur), are restored in another apokatastasis that brings all minds back to their original, preexistent state (hence too the condemnation of the obliteration of "bodies, numbers, names" in that final unity). This is most nearly a version one can plausibly read in, say, Evagrius Ponticus's Kephalaia Gnostica (though some dispute even this). But it is most certainly *not* a generic condemnation of all versions of apokatastasis, hence of "universalism" in general. It is irresponsible for Barron or anyone else to claim otherwise. That betrays a lack of attentiveness to the actual details of the Church's own life in history and its specific judgments. It is therefore an instance of *not* thinking with the Church; for it abstracts from the very Church it pretends to defend and speak for.
Barron's claim is rhetorically useful. But it is also historically and methodologically wrong.
Hi Jordan, thank you for this reply. It’s both reassuring and surprising. I’m surprised that Barron opts for this stance to accommodate political shifts. In making sense of Christian Universalism, I’m also searching for markers for the ‘radical middle’ ie not being absorbed by trads at one end or by progressives at the other. Thanks again, Chris
It was a pleasure having you on the channel, Jordan! And I think I’m going to have to add “uncannily soothing” to my bio, lol.
I mean what I said! It really was a delight.
Glad to see you two in conversation!
I listened to the Gospel Simplicity video about Maximus. It makes me so frustrated that this interpretation has existed for so long but yet we continually dumb it down into a religious system of retribution, winners and losers. Or maybe the faith has always existed in mystical forms alongside the fundamentalists. You mentioned how Maximus has been accepted by the mystics. Hasnt the mystical experience always pointed to a kind of panentheism, I think there have been a few Christian mystics brave enough to claim the label. If experience is authoritative, isnt there a mystical consensus around the idea that everything is one (NDEs, kundalini experiences, oneness )? To me panentheism solves so many intellectual problems I have around theodicy.
I knew when I started following your work a year or so ago that you would eventually start appearing on the bigger YouTube channels in this sphere. Cheers to your family and your important work, Professor! As a native Tennessean, I'm usually somewhat dismayed by the sheer influx of people from elsewhere in the last few years, but I hope you're settling in nicely.
Kia ora Jordan from Aotearoa New Zealand,
Yours is a theology I can do mission with in one of the most secularised societies on earth. Brilliant. Enlightening. Expansive. Here's a take I've not yet seen in discussions in more Christianised countries re: hopeful inclusivism. For those engaged in evangelisation, the Augustinian massa damnata encumbers more than it motivates. I was a young adult convert, and apart from my wife and children, I'm the only one in my extended family (38 persons) who professes faith in Christ. The 'traditional' infernalist position drove me to despair. Hans us von Balthasar's Dare We Hope liberated and energised. His gift to the Catholic church was simply prophetic: the good Good news.
I do have a question: Robert Barron (whose 'Is hell crowded or empty?' first awakened me), referred to universalism as a 'heresy' in his latest YouTube: 'Robert Barron responds to his critics'. Why might he have said this? The 5th Ecumenical Council? (I've read Kimel's 'Surprised by Joy').
Ngā mihi,
Chris
Thanks for the comment, Chris! I can't say I know entirely what's behind Barron's remark. But I'll make two guesses. First, it's rhetorically useful for him to distinguish himself from the supposedly "extreme" view. That way his soft, "merely hopeful" universalist position seems comparatively benign to the many traditionalists out there that increasingly make up his audience, given his cozying up to American MAGA-types. Second, it's a frequently repeated claim that very few actually think through, as you know from Kimel's chapter on it. As I've said elsewhere, though, even if the anti-Origenist canons are entirely authentic to the 5th ecumenical council, and even if later councils verify them and give explicit detail as to why (they don't do the latter), Barron's claim here remains objectively false. It is simply inaccurate to claim that the 5th council condemned "final apokatastasis" or "universalism": neither expression appears in the canons at all. What *does* appear in the canons is *a specific version of apokatastasis*, namely one that "follows upon" that "monstrous primordial henad." In other words, what the canons as written condemn is not any and every universalism, but the specific version that posited a preexistent henad of rational minds that fell away from God, were subsequently caught in various bodies that God created in *response* to the primordial fall, and then, almost automatically (and without assurance that a future fall wouldn't occur), are restored in another apokatastasis that brings all minds back to their original, preexistent state (hence too the condemnation of the obliteration of "bodies, numbers, names" in that final unity). This is most nearly a version one can plausibly read in, say, Evagrius Ponticus's Kephalaia Gnostica (though some dispute even this). But it is most certainly *not* a generic condemnation of all versions of apokatastasis, hence of "universalism" in general. It is irresponsible for Barron or anyone else to claim otherwise. That betrays a lack of attentiveness to the actual details of the Church's own life in history and its specific judgments. It is therefore an instance of *not* thinking with the Church; for it abstracts from the very Church it pretends to defend and speak for.
Barron's claim is rhetorically useful. But it is also historically and methodologically wrong.
Hi Jordan, thank you for this reply. It’s both reassuring and surprising. I’m surprised that Barron opts for this stance to accommodate political shifts. In making sense of Christian Universalism, I’m also searching for markers for the ‘radical middle’ ie not being absorbed by trads at one end or by progressives at the other. Thanks again, Chris