Marginal Christianity

Here’s a bare bones outline of a thought experiment I’ve been playing with concerning salvation, damnation, eternal destiny, universalism, and the like. It’s only bare bones, the main lines of a view that would require much other demonstration and detail. So keep that in mind as you read it. God created our world and us in it to share his life with us here. That’s the big picture within which we live our lives. God wants to be with us, ultimately as one of us (Jesus the incarnate one). This was not instantaneous. We needed to grow into or lives as free, responsible, and response-able creatures to whom God delegated the vocation of protecting, caring for, and nurturing the creation to its full flourishing. Now God is both willing and able to achieve his purposes. We call that divine sovereignty. God gets what he wants. He’s set up the whole process and equipped us with everything we need to succeed. There’s no reason for failure. Yet we do fail! Unfathomably, inexp...

In the series of posts I just finished reflecting on John Barclay's book Paul and the Gift I used Barclay's perfections of grace to comment on different soteriological positions, mainly comparing and contrasting Calvinism and Arminianism, but also mentioning Universalism. What I'd like to do in this post is show how Barclay's perfections of grace map onto Thomas Talbott's propositions as described in his book The Inescapable Love of God and his essays in the edited book Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate . Long time and regular readers will have seen Talbott's propositions before, but if you're new to them Talbott has us consider the following three propositions: Read more at http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-perfections-of-grace-in-calvinism.html?m=1

Posted on May 5, 2014May 5, 2014 by Bobby Grow Donald Fairbairn, Patristics theologian par excellence, has written a rich and very accessible book entitled Life In The Trinity: An Introduction To Theology With The Help Of The Church Fathers. I would highly recommend this book to you, and even recommend it as a devotional type of book if you are interested in doing your devotions with the Trinity. I have just recently finished reading through a section of the book that is discussing Christian salvation, and in particular, God’s action and human action in the realm of salvation. After sketching the common dilemma that has obtained in the Western branch of the Protestant church (i.e. Calvinism V Arminianism, e.g. emphasis on God’s choice or humanity’s choice in salvation – to be a bit reductionistic) in regard to salvation, Fairbairn offers an alternative that he has gleaned from his years spent with the Church Fathers. Here is what he has written: To spell this idea out a...

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/10/hellbound-talk-back-part-4-love-power.html Posted on 10.03.2013 Richard Beck  Last week it was my honor to participate in a talkback with filmmaker Kevin Miller after a viewing of Hellbound? . As I mentioned Monday, I am using posts this week to work back through some of the Q&A Kevin and I hosted, the queries we fielded and some of our answers regarding "universal reconciliation in Christ" or "evangelical universalism." Today's post is about love, power, eschatology and universal reconciliation in Christ. The best conversation I had was actually after the Q&A, a talk with Caleb who had read my series "On Warfare and Weakness" (see the sidebar for those posts). You'll recall that in that series I work with the notion (leaning heavily upon John Caputo) that God, being love, is a weak force in the world. Caleb's question had to do with how I reconcile that notion--Go...