Thank God because I read the Bible and became suicidal. I clearly was reading it literally and from a 21st century mindset when it was written over 2,000 years ago. Thank God I was wrong!!!

My question is this. Did Moses really kidnap 32,000 virgin girls from Midian after slaughtering their families, stealing the flocks of animals and all the gold? See Numbers 31 for details. So is the 32,000 virgins literally true? If not 32,000 exactly, then how many? Did this event really happen? 31 Then Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the 👉 Lord had commanded Moses. 32 The plunder remaining from the spoils that the troops had taken totaled six hundred seventy-five thousand sheep, 33 seventy-two thousand oxen, 34 sixty-one thousand donkeys, 35 and 👉 thirty-two thousand persons in all, women who had not known a man by sleeping with him.

"Why the Bible can't be read literally" I know the answer to this one. Because it would be completely ridiculous and impossible. It has to be read as Fictional Literature that has been complied, massaged, harmonized, copied, translated and theologically interpreted. Not a single book but a collection of selected modified mythologies. Not Real and Not History.

Also, why do we assume the development of human theological and philosophical understanding has only been in one direction? Does it ever occur to these 'teachers' that it might be possible that human understanding of God may have become dull and clouded due to the fall, and that perhaps, at the beginning, we knew more than we do now about God? Why do none of these people mention the possibility that we lost understanding and knowledge (of things other than just good and evil) when we fell? It think it's time we re-introduce a biblical word into the modern vernacular - haughty.

Observations I have made: Christians who are more academic in life tend to be more conservative in their Christian expression (they have an apparent aversion to the spiritual gifts Paul describes), they tend to give in to (now demonstrably false) evolutionary theory, which in turn gives rise to theological compromises in the New Testament. They like to quote lots of big words to sound smart in the ears of many other people. They seem to struggle more with issues of faith, and they tend not to believe Old Testament history as true history. News flash: science and archaeology are confirming the Old Testament narrative as history more and more every day. Why can OT history not be both true history and metaphor and philosophy at the same time? To reject that idea I think is to both limit the text and, more importantly, limit God.

I learned nothing about process theology, open theism, or their refutations.

Causal chains are great philosophy fun but are lame in the real world. Nuclear physics has a core property of "spontaneous decay", i.e. the atom decayed without cause. It's not that the cause is undiscovered but can't exist. Why should I consider philosophical causality when real world causality doesn't play by those rules.

Not to out myself as a lemming, but I agree with and appreciate every word.

WTF is going on? "god" is a creation of ignorant and superstitious iron-age men who just reinvented previous "religions" that they didn't like. Why are we even discussing the ontological nature of the fictional character of "god"?

Jesus is our judge, and will determine our eternal destination…He spelled out how we will be judged. One would surmise that He should know the truth…

Rev 12:9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

I was wondering if he actually just sat still while the question was asked, lol

YES!

Wow! This is so good. So helpful. So hopeful.

the EOC never incubated ECT until Justinian! #AGAINSTJUSTINIAN -ism

David Bentley Hart takes this too far

So good. Love this theologian. “all shall be saved” - Excellent read! ❤🎉

ok cool I will be hostile back lmao

Its all allegory revealing spiritual truth. Literalism is not so much faith in God, but faith in history.

I've always had a problem with an all loving God who would create us against our will then torture us forever for being what we are.

Dripping with contempt - and perhaps he is right. If you want apostolic simplicity go to a mosque.

Voice quality🫥🫥

A lucid and passionate summary of the Muslim position.

Hart have you considered the possibility that peope are so against universalism because it directly contradicts the words of Christ, our Saints, our Councils and all of Orthodoxy Christianity?

It's like sitting in the living room of the highest heaven and listening to a sermon of one of the great apostles of the Lord.

I think the spiritual universe is governed by laws that are irreversible. Thus sin has to be accounted for. Considering sin on the one hand and sins on the other it is clear that the former relates to the symptoms ie, stealing lying and cheating are all sins. But sin is the spiritual disease by which we are all affected and the only sure way of dealing with this was through innocent sacrifice. Is there another way of dealing with sin? Jesus was that innocent's sacrifice for all of us. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. I think God requires us to choose our eternal destiny. If Adam and Eve who were perfect could walk away from God and have the gates of Paradise permanently closed to them then we must be cautious about our ultimate possible decision to reject Christ. Universalism destroys too much of the fabric of scripture to the extent of having to rewrite all of it in order to make universalist sense.

Excellent!

Cool.

Not nearly as many Christians believe the idea as much as they say they do? True, it's more likely there are more Christians who use the idea to feed the unconscious lizard brain of being on the right side of the competition.

Amen

Matthew 7:15-27. Dr Hart is a false teacher; all who follow him are building their house upon sand.

If believing in fairies makes him feel better then I have no issue with that.

when God visited me, I saw nothing, my body wilted and melted from inside, he said very few words, my ways are higher than your ways, you are mine now and I will never leave you

Ask the average Christian layman if they are aware of the philosophical canon of Aristotle, Plato etc that existed in the Western World and created the tradition of the church. However without this knowledge the stories of salvation take root in the believers, especially Protestant Fundamentalists. It is about the power of human language and storytelling that transforms the brain and human mind of believers.

Aaaaaaah...the mysteries of the human neocortex....We are actually very evolved to accept storytelling which is the basis for every cultural and religious tradition. We can argue that science itself is a more advanced genre of storytelling.

Very good point, God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. We can't deny Him neither the former (like open theists do) nor the latter (like Augustinians).

Capitalism penchant to make money the ultimate goal,spawns the need to be envied .

Hart uses the term “clearly” and his assessment is anything but. What is very clear is that Paul is addressing an unconditional election. The entire narrative of Jacob and Esau concerns the election of one and the rejection of the other. Twins, same parents, not born to do anything good or bad. I just don’t think it’s possible to create a clearer example of divine election. The illustration of the potter and clay reinforces his point. Even Paul’s hypothetical questioner’s objection buttresses the point that God possesses aseity and answers to no one. There is a sharp rebuke for even asking the question. How any thinking person can read these passages and conclude that Paul is communicating something other than God making a sovereign choice between sinners is incomprehensible. For goodness sake, he named the one he chose Jacob, which means “deceiver”. Paul says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Here’s the bottom line with this unbiblical heresy. Hart, and all universalists, do not think they deserves wrath. No condemnation, no hell. Poof, it all disappears. This is what self-righteousness looks like and God says he hates it. There is no humility in it. They believe that the god of their imaginations will be the god that judges them. They believe they will be judged by a god who is an improved version of themselves.

The future is Islam.

“You have to be sane to make free choices.” This is true. The cure to Alcoholism is like this…

The problem is rationality. The " choice" itself , made knowingly and voluntarily. HOW COULD IT EVER BE RATIONAL? There seems a necessary diminished capacity of reason.

The point should be don't take them either way. Jesus said why call me good, there is no one good but God. Now if it was anyone but Jesus saying it we could all agree that he would be saying don't call me good because I am not God. But since it is Jesus saying it there must be some hidden meaning because Jesus is God. Even though the speaker said good teacher out of respect he knew somehow that Jesus was God. Who thinks like that besides apologists. The genealogy one of the genealogies said his ancestors were in groups of fourteen but when you count them they don't add up. So now what to do? It must be allegorical, or perhaps some names are missing. So now we don't know what we thought we knew. If there were three groups of fourteen there would have been no question that it meant what it said but now who knows. Then there is the problem that Joseph is not biologically related so how does that work and there is another list nearly all different names also said to be his ancestry. So now we don't know anything and it is a free for all as to what if anything it means. I used to hope against hope that one person, one group with authority would make something like the red letter bible but for allegorical stories. Plenty have tried but they all fail as truth gives way to opinion. The Jesus seminar made the most careful study, just on the words of Jesus first looking for the most clear and the ones known to be from scribes and that hardly got off the ground because of idiots that think the church fathers in the first and second century knew better than all the great work since then, new documents, precision dating and most important language. All of that goes out the window because the bible is without error and everything in it is true . The church of course found hundreds of heretical teachings from the very people the church put in place. Some repented. Some were tortured and repented some tortured and burned at the stake. There were 40 antipopes back then and when protestants came along ... Probably more protestants were killed by the church including unspeakable torture than the Romans ever did. All this carnage, pitched battles all over Europe because people could not settle on a single understanding of the word of God, the God that is not the author of confusion.

I can't argue with that.

I wonder what Hart thinks about Akrasia

☦david bentley hart: "the Bible cannot be read literally because I am a wicked arrogant Origenist heretic & biggest blasphemer of our time, who hijacked eastern Orthodox identity & wants to drag innocent souls with me to the everlasting fire of Sheol for all eternity."

you know who else was 'hostile' to universalism? The 5th ecumencial council. Despite what univeralists might say, it WAS condemned

But Hart has no answer to the question of existence. He just,spits dense platitudes.

Paul does talk about eternal separation from God in 2 Thessalonians 1:9

This is correct. There is no such thing as free will. There is no other will than Christ's will. The divine will. Anything else is a distortion.

This severely underestimates human PRIDE. Pride will cause us to choose BAD things out of SPITE.