Two of the Most Common Impasses between Universalism & Perditionism
Why this vs that stance reduces to universalist vs perditionist outlook doesn’t really boil down to the usual suspects:
classical vs process theism, strong vs weak simplicity, pantheism vs panentheism, compatibilism vs libertarianism, intellectualism vs voluntarism, transcendental determinism vs secondary determinism, Banezianism vs Molinism, ad nauseum. It’s nothing merely metaphysical, analytical, syllogistic, etc
It’s moral & theological. It’s how one receives general & special revelation in terms of sublative conversions, properly ordered, normatively.
“Though religious conversion sublates moral, and moral conversion sublates intellectual, one is not to infer that intellectual comes first and then moral and finally religious. On the contrary, from a causal viewpoint, one would say that first there is God’s gift of his love. Next, the eye of this love reveals values in their splendor, while the strength of this love brings about their realization, and that is moral conversion. Finally, among the values discerned by the eye of love is the value of believing the truths taught by the religious tradition, and in such tradition and belief are the seeds of intellectual conversion.”
Theological Aspects of Bernard Lonergan’s “Method in Theology” by Giovanni B. Sala, S.J
Why this vs that stance reduces to universalist vs perditionist stances, often enough, in my view, will therefore depend on whether one’s moral outlook has primarily & firstly been formed by love or by the intellect. Hence the repeated plaintive cry to not do analytics without Franciscan knowledge.
The first theological truth that goes awry: Dispositionally, aesthetically, affectively & morally, Who is this God of our creedal propositions? What does love entail? How will we know Love when we see it? What would Abba – Daddy really do or absolutely never do?
The other theological truth with an anthropological corollary that can go awry is a nonviolent, harmonizing ontology that doesn’t ontologically juxtapose being & nonbeing, good & evil, but which sees evil as a parasitic subcontrary. It’s not that any of our more astute perditionist interlocutors ever literally ignore the privative nature of evil. It’s not that they ever ascribe to God any literally intended evils.
Rather, from a universalist perspective, they are virtually ignoring the privative nature of evil by suggesting that evil will transist eternally, so substantializing evil for all practical purposes in a quasi-Manichean way. God’s permission of evil then becomes tantamount to intent, virtually not literally, per double effect principles (regarding disproportional harmful consequences).
So, the problem is, for all practical purposes, that perditionists are proclaiming a God of Mercy employing distinctions that make no truly loving differences. At least none that would cohere with our common sense, shared moral intuitions, aesthetic sensibilities & parental instincts, which we hold to be divinely connatural.