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franklinstower
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The Bible and true Christianity does not allow for Universalism. If a "church" preaches Universalism, it is not a Christian church. They have a false gospel. The Bible even says let those who preach a false gospel be cursed by God himself.
Galatians1
6I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! 9As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!
Thanks for sharing your opinion RIP. Unfortunately most of the greatest minds and saints of the early Christian Church disagreed with you, for the first 500 years in fact. You are welcome to your opinion on it though.....
I won't waste time arguing back and forth and quoting convenient scriptures, as I belive it to be the lowest form of Christian apologetics-- more often misused than used correctly.
Many Christians insist that if you question hell, you are rejecting what has always been agreed upon by the Church, but the doctrine of eternal torment was not a widely held view for the first five centuries after Christ, particularly in the early Eastern Church, the Church of the early apostles and Church fathers such as Paul, Clement of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and others.
The notion of eternal hell slipped into the Catholic Church largely through Augustine who was heavily influenced by Plato's pagan thoughts on the matter of souls and bodies and separation at death.
- First, Plato believed that the soul was separate from the body and that the soul was fundamentally pure but tends to become deformed through association with the body.
- Second, like his teacher Socrates, Plato believed that the soul itself was immortal, thus necessitating an eternal destination for the soul after the body dies.
- Third, Plato proposed that good actions result in a reward in this life, but more importantly, a greater reward after death. Similarly, bad actions result in consequences in this life, but even greater punishment after death.
It is of this philosopher that St. Augustine said--
“The utterance of Plato, the most pure and bright in all philosophy, scattering the clouds of error . . .”
These ideas proposed by Plato are not from the Bible. They are Greek philosophy. BUT we have spent centuries reading them into the Biblical text and even translating the Biblical text through their lens.
Once the concept was firmly accepted by the Catholic Church and the bias was decided, theological and philosophical apologetics followed like changing the interpretation of certain words within scripture (especially the many different words now all translated as hell) and homogenizing them until a tidy picture was/is presented by the Catholic Church on the matter.
These well meaning translation errors and homogenizations persist to this day in any bible you are likely to see and use.
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