Theodore Knight

“FWIF: For what it’s worth FWIW: For what it’s worth”
― Roderick Edwards, All Old People Must Die: The Last Generation

“mere three score and ten years to get it right if we are fortunate, and then an eternity of agony in which to rue the consequences if we get it wrong—he would never dare to bring a child into this world, let alone five children; nor would he be able to rest even for a moment, because he would be driven ceaselessly around the world in a desperate frenzy of evangelism, seeking to save as many souls from the eternal fire as possible. I think of”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

“Let me start again, in a more purely reflective vein. And let me start also by admitting that I have always—or, at least, for as long as I can remember thinking about such things—been an instinctive universalist as regards the question of the ultimate destiny of souls. Part of the reason for this, I confess, is purely affective: I have always found what became the traditional majority Christian view of hell—that is, a conscious state of perpetual torment—a genuinely odious idea, both morally and emotionally, and still think it the single best argument for doubting the plausibility of the Christian faith as a coherent body of doctrine or as a morally worthy system of devotion.”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

“Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), I would not think it worth the trouble to argue, as he does, that—given the paradoxes and seemingly irreconcilable pronouncements of scriptures on the final state of all things—Christians may be allowed to dare to hope for the salvation of all. In fact, I have very small patience for this kind of “hopeful universalism,” as it is often called. As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator. The position I want to attempt to argue, therefore, to see how well it holds together, is far more extreme: to wit, that, if Christianity is in any way true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all, and that any understanding of what God accomplished in Christ that does not include the assurance of a final apokatastasis in which all things created are redeemed and joined to God is ultimately entirely incoherent and unworthy of rational faith. This is an exorbitant and somewhat insolent claim, I realize, and I would not make it if I did not earnestly believe every alternative view of the matter to be ultimately unsustainable.”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation