Ancient afterlife beliefs

  Is God’s salvific will universal? The answers of Augustine of Hippo and John Chrysostom Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and John Chrysostom (d. 407) were two massively influential Christian theologians, venerated as saints in many Christian traditions, including Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Both seemed to agree that a portion of human beings will be forever lost and will experience some kind of post-mortem unending torments. As I will show, however, despite these agreements, the two theologians disagreed on how to answer a very important question: is God’s salvific will universal?   This is evident if one reads how they handled a specific Biblical passage that seems to explicitly say that God’s salvific will is universal (i.e. that God wants the salvation of all human beings): 1 Timothy 2:(3-)4. Augustine of Hippo’s exegesis of 1 Timothy 2:4 “103. Accordingly, when we hear and read in sacred Scripture that God "willeth that all men should be saved,"221 althou...

  The problem of free will and salvation “97. Accordingly, we must now inquire about the meaning of what was said most truly by the apostle concerning God, "Who willeth that all men should be saved." 203  For since not all--not even a majority-- are  saved, it would indeed appear that the fact that what God willeth to happen does not happen is due to an embargo on God's will by the human will. Now, when we ask for the reason why not all are saved, the customary answer is: "Because they themselves have not willed it." But this cannot be said of infants, who have not yet come to the power of willing or not willing. For, if we could attribute to their wills the infant squirmings they make at baptism, when they resist as hard as they can, we would then have to say that they were saved against their will. But the Lord's language is clearer when, in the Gospel, he reproveth the unrighteous city: "How often," he saith, "would I have gathered your...

On the duration of Gehenna: 'controverted judgment passages' in the New Testament It is goes without saying that there are many passages in the New Testament of the Christian Bible that, at face value, do support the notion that eschatological punishment are definitive and that the separation between the ‘righteous’ and the ‘wicked’ will be irrevocable. Some of these passages include (the list is not meant to be exhaustive): Gospel of Matthew: Mt 5:21-2, Mt 5:29-30, Mt 13:40-2, Mt 13:47-50, Mt 24:36-9, Mt 24:45-51, Mt 25:10-11, Mt 25:31-46, Mt 26:24 Gospel of Mark: Mk 9:43-8, Mk 14:21 (parallel to Mt 26:24) Gospel of Luke: Lk 12:5, Lk 16:19-31, Lk 17:26-31, Lk 19:11-27 Gospel of John: Jn 3:5 (which has a parallel in the longer ending of the Gospel of Mark, in Mk 16:16), Jn 5:28-9, Jn 15:5-6 Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians: 1 Cor 6:9-10 Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: 2 Thess 1:8-9 Second Epistle of Peter 2:6 and Jude 7 I could go on but I think the above list is quite pe...

  The Buddhacarita and the Arakasutta on the suffering and finiteness of human life Buddhacarita, book 3 (written by Ashvaghosa): Here is how the Buddhist poet Ashvaghosa retold the story of the Buddha’s (the ‘prince’ in the story) encounter with old age, illness and death: “26. But then the gods, dwelling in pure abodes, having beheld that city thus rejoicing like heaven itself, created an old man to walk along on purpose to stir the heart of the king’s son. 27. The prince having beheld him thus overcome with decrepitude and different in form from other men, with his gaze intently fixed on him, thus addressed his driver with simple confidence: 28. ‘Who is this man that has come here, O charioteer, with white hair and his hand resting on a staff, his eyes hidden beneath his brows, his limbs bent down and hanging loose, — is this a change produced in him or his natural state or an accident?’ 29. Thus addressed, the charioteer revealed to the king’s son the secret that sh...

  Possible problem for theistic universalism By 'universalism' I mean the view that all human beings or all rational beings will be saved in the end and will experience some sort of unending state of blessedness even if reaching that state for some will require a long period of conscious affliction. By 'theism', I mean a world view that posits as the ontological foundation of all beings a personal God. I'll discuss the case of an universalism that includes all rational beings, which might be defined as sentient beings that can have rational faculties and have some understanding of the 'infinite' nature of God and, therefore, be in communion with God. Personally, I lean towards theism (while I sympathetic to various theistic religious traditions, I'm still an agnostic about them, so my position might be called 'philosophical theism') - although I have some doubts about the meaning of terms like 'omniscient' and 'omnipotent' when ap...

Omniscience and free will I'm struggling with the notion of 'omniscience' of God, at least in the stronger and usually accepted meaning of the term, i.e. that God knows all future contingents, i.e. all events that will happen. The problem I have is that it seems to imply a strict determinism. However, if one accepts the notion that our choices are not determined ('free will'), determinism would be a problem. To appreciate the problem, one has to consider the fact that if determinism in any form is true all our choices are inevitable. Hence, all bad deeds that human beings made in the history of humanity were actually inevitable. But if they were inevitable, it doesn't make any sense to me to think that those who did those bad deeds are responsible. They couldn't do otherwise.    Notice that this problem doesn't arise in a 'weaker' notion of 'omniscience', in which God knows all possible future events, rather than which events will indeed ...