Thomas Talbott > Quotes

“if you reject universalism, then you must also reject at least one of these assumptions; that is, you must either deny that God wills (or sincerely desires) the redemption of all sinners or deny that he will in fact satisfy his own will or desire in this matter.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“The only victory love can enjoy is the day when its offer of love is answered by the return of love. The only possible final triumph is a universe loved by God and in love with God” —William Barclay”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?” —John Stuart Mill”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“If sin is anything that separates us from God and from each other; and if God is to be “all in all,” then he must sooner or later destroy all sin and thus remove every stain from his creation. According to the New Testament as a whole, God has a two-fold strategy, I want to suggest, for accomplishing this end. On the one hand, he sent his Son in the flesh to defeat, in some unexplained mystical way, the powers of darkness and to pioneer the way of salvation (see Heb 2:10)—a way of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice. On the other hand, for those who refuse to step into his ordained system of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice, he has an alternative strategy: in their estrangement from God, they will experience his love as a consuming fire; that is, as wrath, as punishment, and, in the end, as a means of correction. So in that sense, they will literally pay for their sin; and God will never—not in this age and not in the age to come—forgive (or set aside) the final payment they owe, which is voluntarily to step inside the ordained system of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice. As Jesus said, using the analogy of someone being thrown into prison, “Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny” (Matt 5:25). 97.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“One cannot believe that God has divided humanity into the elect, whom he loves, and the non-elect, whom he despises and believe that God is nonetheless worthy of worship and, at the same time, love one’s neighbor as oneself.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“That God’s grace is utterly irresistible over the long run now seems to me the best interpretation of Pauline theology, as a majority of theologians in the West have always insisted.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“As George MacDonald was so fond of pointing out, not one word in the New Testament implies that vindictiveness and wrath are ultimate facts about God, or that Christ’s sacrifice was required in order to appease a vindictive God. A more accurate understanding would be that Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s sacrifice to us, the means whereby God changes our attitudes and reconciles us to himself (see, for example, 2 Cor 5:19); it is not a means whereby God’s attitude towards us is changed. God’s attitude remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. For God is love; that is the rock-bottom fact about God. But the history of organized religion, at least in the Western tradition, is a record of our human resistance to the proclamation that God is love, that his love extends to everyone, and that it is in no way conditioned upon human obedience or human faithfulness.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“if we suppose that God, being supremely powerful, supremely wise, and supremely loving, can achieve, and will settle for nothing less than, perfect justice, then we must also suppose that he will settle for nothing less than a full atonement for sin—something that will actually make up for, or cancel out, sin; and as we have seen, punishment (in and of itself) has no power to do that.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his love with a joyful response of love.” —Madeleine L’Engle”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“For insofar as fear of eternal damnation and the power of excommunication, backed by the coercive power of the state, had become the Emperor’s primary means of social control, he could hardly tolerate a doctrine that would seem to undermine that power altogether. Justinian thus illustrates an important historical truth. Many religious doctrines serve, among other things, a sociological function, and over the centuries the traditional understanding of hell has served one function especially well: it has enabled religious and political leaders to cultivate fear and to employ fear as a means of social control. That more than anything else explains, I believe, why the imperial church came to regard the idea of universal reconciliation as a threat not only to social stability but to its own power and authority as well.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Once the consuming fire of God’s love has destroyed, whether in this life, in purgatory, or in hell itself, everything that is false within us, once nothing of the false self remains for us to cling to, then nothing of our opposition to God will remain either. For then we shall see through all of the illusions that made such opposition possible in the first place. And then we shall discover the most glorious truth of all: everything that sinners fear most about God—the wrath and the fearsome punishment associated with his righteous ordinances—was never anything more than a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ and thus to save them from themselves.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Some will no doubt balk at the idea that perfect justice in a theistic universe would lay so many requirements, however self-imposed, upon God himself, and some may find particularly offensive the idea that justice requires forgiveness. Do I really want to insist not only that sinners ought to repent, but also that God owes it to them to forgive them when they do?—that repentant sinners actually deserve God’s forgiveness? In point of fact, I want to claim more than that. It seems to me that all sinners, repentant or otherwise, deserve God’s forgiveness, not because they have earned it, which is impossible, but because it is their inalienable right as sons and daughters of God. Merit has nothing to do with it. Sinners are entitled to God’s forgiveness for the same reason a newborn baby is entitled to parental care—because it is something they desperately need and cannot live without.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Perhaps we are now in a position to see why exegetical disputes between those who operate from different theological frameworks are apt to seem so futile. To Arminians and universalists, it will no doubt seem as if the Augustinians have simply rejected the plain teaching of Scripture that God at least wills or desires the salvation of all. To Augustinians and Arminians, however, it will likewise seem as if the universalists have rejected the plain teaching of Scripture concerning the reality of eternal punishment. And to Augustinians and universalists, it will seem as if the Arminians have rejected the plain teaching of Scripture that God is almighty in the sense that nothing can thwart his redemptive love forever.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“As John Murray has pointed out: When Paul uses the expression “the many,” he is not intending to delimit the denotation. The scope of “the many” must be the same as the “all men” of verses 12 and 18. He uses “the many” here, as in verse 19, for the purpose of contrasting more effectively “the one” and “the many,” singularity and plurality—it was the trespass of “the one” . . . but “the many” died as a result.75”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Had it not been for an obsessive fear of heresy, grounded in the traditional understanding of hell, most of the atrocities committed in the name of the Christian religion would never have occurred.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“For nothing works greater mischief in theology, I am persuaded, than a simple failure of the imagination, the inability to put things together in imaginative ways.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Many religious doctrines serve, among other things, a sociological function, and over the centuries the traditional understanding of hell has served one function especially well: it has enabled religious and political leaders to cultivate fear and to employ fear as a means of social control.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“An answer commonly given is that through suffering Jesus was perfected in his role as savior ; 254 and though that seems right as far as it goes, one should not, I would argue, minimize the implication in the text that Jesus’ sufferings somehow made him more complete or whole. F. F. Bruce has asked: “If the Son of God is the effulgence of his Father’s glory and the very impress of his being, how can he be thought of as falling short of perfection?” 255 The answer depends upon the kind of perfection in question. If the essence of God is love, if God is now in the process of creating additional persons to love, and if God himself suffers along with his suffering children, then there is a personal sense in which not even God, despite his metaphysical perfections, is now complete or whole or “all in all.” For in no loving relationship can the one who loves be complete or whole until the one who is loved is also complete and whole; in that respect, the process whereby the children are reconciled and made whole is also a process whereby the Father is completed and made whole in his relationship with these very children.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Even the Augustinians, I would note, seem prepared to acknowledge this much: because God has forgiven us and has commanded us to forgive others, we have an obligation to forgive; we have no right, that is, not to forgive. But why , I would ask of them, has God commanded us to forgive others? Is it not precisely because, given the Christian view of the world, forgiveness is the just and proper response to sin? Is it not because the sinner, who yet retains the image of God, deserves forgiveness?”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“In his commentary on 1 John, however, Calvin saw more clearly than Packer did exactly where the issue must be joined. The issue is not, as Packer caricatured it, whether the proposition God is love expresses the complete truth about God. The issue is whether it expresses a truth about the very nature or essence of God—whether, in other words, it ascribes (what a philosopher would call) an essential property to the very being of God.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“I can still remember sitting in my wife’s Calvinistic church before we were married and hearing her pastor read such texts as Ephesians 1: 11 and Romans 8: 28, exclaiming in a loud voice, “Not just some things, but all things!” But he would never read the second half of Romans 5: 18 in the same way; he would never even hint, of course, that not just some but all men will eventually receive justification and life. I thus concluded at a relatively early age that neither he nor any other Calvinist had a plausible criterion for determining when “all” does, and does not, really mean all.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Not every idea to which some persecutor appeals is, of course, automatically suspect. But when a religious doctrine appears consistently (and over a long period of time) to have destructive effects in the lives of those who accept it, then we have a prima facie reason, surely, to question its soundness. For as Jesus said, “A sound tree cannot [consistently and over a long period of time] bear evil fruit.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“The Pauline idea of inclusive election—the idea that the elect are chosen instruments through whom God’s mercy will eventually reach those who have stumbled—sets Paul squarely against a temptation as old as religion itself: the temptation to distinguish between the favored few—to which, of course, we belong—and everyone else.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Let no one persuade you that there is in Him a little darkness, because of something he has said which His creature interprets into darkness. . . . Neither let your cowardly conscience receive any word as light because another calls it light, while it looks to you dark. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. But, of all evils, to misinterpret what God does, and then say the thing as interpreted must be right because God does it, is of the devil. Do not try to believe [therefore] anything that affects you as darkness. Even if you mistake and refuse something true thereby, you will do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than you would by accepting as His what you can see only as darkness.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“The only victory love can enjoy is the day when its offer of love is answered by the return of love. The only possible final triumph is a universe loved by God and in love with God” William Barclay”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“With such questions as these, we perhaps approach a critical parting of the ways, a point at which our two pictures of God diverge dramatically. In part because they regard justice and mercy as distinct attributes of God, the Augustinians suppose that God could justly have refused to forgive sinners or to save them from their sin; as the Augustinians see it, this makes God’s forgiveness a free gift and his mercy all the more glorious because it is supererogatory. But if, according to our alternative picture, God’s moral nature is simple—if all of his moral attributes are identical with his love—then his justice will be altogether merciful even as his mercy is altogether just; he will punish sinners, in other words, only when it is merciful to do so, and he will always forgive them because that is the most loving, and therefore the just, thing to do.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Now I have no doubt that, more often than not, a moral drawn from history lies in the eye of the beholder. But the more I read about the imperial church—the power plays, the petty jealousies, the various political intrigues—the less inclined I was to place any confidence at all in its pronouncements. In this, I suppose, my reaction was typically Protestant. Unlike some of my Roman Catholic friends, I had inherited a bias against official church pronouncements anyway; and as I saw it, the imperial church’s obsession with power and control inevitably bred, first, an obsessive fear of heresy, then, the persecution of heretics, and finally, a tendency to regard every deviation from the most rigid orthodoxy as heretical. Whereas the early church had sought to achieve unity through positive confessions of faith (“I believe in God the Father Almighty”), the imperial church sought to achieve it through the condemnation of error (“Let them be anathema”) and the persecution of those thought to be in error. And neither the moral character of the one thought to be in error nor the circumstances surrounding the fall into “error” seemed to matter one whit to an emperor such as Justinian, as his condemnation of Theodore of Mopsuestia illustrates. For though Theodore—“the ablest exegete and theologian of the Antiochian school” 27 had been dead for more than a century, though he had died in full communion with the church, and though Pope Vigilius had argued that no one can lawfully “judge anew anything concerning the persons of the dead,” 28 such was Justinian’s arrogance that he insisted upon condemning, not merely the bishop’s writings, but also the good bishop himself. And so, the Fifth General Council de­clared: “We, therefore, anathematize . . . the impious Theodore of Mopsuestia with his execrable writings.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“Let no one persuade you that there is in Him a little darkness, because of something he has said which His creature interprets into darkness. . . . Neither let your cowardly conscience receive any word as light because another calls it light, while it looks to you dark. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. But, of all evils, to misinterpret what God does, and then say the thing as interpreted must be right because God does it, is of the devil. Do not try to believe [therefore] anything that affects you as darkness. Even if you mistake and refuse something true thereby, you will do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than you would by accepting as His what you can see only as darkness.6”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“According to Paul, therefore, God is always and everywhere merciful, but we sometimes experience his mercy (or purifying love) as severity, judgment, punishment. When we live a life of obedience, we experience it as kindness; when we live a life of disobedience, we experience it as severity (see 11:22). Paul himself called this a mystery (11:25) and admitted that God’s ways are, in just this respect, “inscrutable” and “unsearchable” (11:33),”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God

“For one of these responsibilities is to promote the welfare, including the spiritual welfare, of all created persons; God could no more choose to create persons without accepting that responsibility than human parents can choose to raise children without acquiring an obligation to promote their welfare.”
― Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God