Easter Proclamation
WITH FAILING eyesight of age and the financial inability to buy all of the recent books I'd like to read, I read a lot of free books on my computer from sources such as Archive.org and Project Gutenberg and much of the freely available, public domain publishing of primary documentary evidence, documents, letters, papers, etc. that I can get to without paying. And being on computer, I can use dark screen mode and blow the letters up enough so I can read them. I have come to love that. No mildew from old paper to set my allergies off, too.
There, that's enough of that.
One of the books I'm in the process of reading is Universalism The Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church: During Its First Five Hundred Years by J. W. Hanson, a Universalist preacher and theologian of the 19th century. I wish I had the time to fact check his assertions, though those that I'm somewhat familiar with he seems to be reliable.
One of the most striking things about his account of earliest Christianity, before it became the state religion of the late Roman Empire and began to amass worldly power and wealth, he says it was a remarkably cheerful religion as opposed to the gloomy, fate-ridden, hopeless Roman and Greek pagan religions and other religions in the area. I think he is a bit hard on Judaism and the Pharisees as well, as can be expected from a quasi-Protestant of the era, the Catholic Church in that regard, though the section of the book I'm interested in, before the Church came under the influence of the Roman imperial system, long, long before the split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches, he points out that there is virtually no mention of eternal damnation, satanic influences, souls being sent to eternal hell fire and all of the rest of the phantasmagoria, house of horrors stuff that has been such a huge blight on Western Christianity and, with the corruption in the post-enlightenment pseudo-history of the romantic and post-romantic periods, continues in Hollywood style today.
He remarks that in contrast to the gloomy, despairing, fatalistic Roman and Greek memorial texts, the readable messages in the Christian catacombs are full of hopeful expectation for the souls of the dead, that they have gone to be with God, with Christ and the martyrs and other saints in heaven. A far cry from that putridly attractive 13th century chant heard in many a lurid movie and late 19th century program music , Dies Irae.
He notes that until the Bible was translated into Latin, especially by Jerome, the original text in Greek didn't depict hell as eternal damnation of those who were forever cut off from God but as a period of purification during which souls not already sufficiently good would be coaxed into correction - though I'm sure my characterization of what he said is not how he'd put it. He points out the difference between different words for an after death period of suffering or an eternal one, I'm not a Greek scholar nor a Hebrew one so I'm reliant on those who are. I know that at least some other Greek scholars, then and now, make a similar point, David Bentley Hart being one of the most known modern Greek scholars who has written on it, too.
I look at the long and gloomy period of post-Constantine classical and medieval Western Christianity in which the sparks of light sometimes seem to be swamped in a sea of pathological dwelling on the dark, starting with Augustine's last work, and wonder if that isn't bound to come with an adoption of an all too worldly kingdom of the kind that Jesus emphatically said his kingdom was not. Hanson also discusses the excuse for people who knew the Scriptures keeping the common lot in ignorance of the idea of universal salvation because they worried the plebs couldn't be trusted to mind themselves and toe the line if they weren't worried about eternal damnation. The extent to which that and other sins feeding the other deadly sins, envy, covetousness, sexual neurosis and slander are tools of the rich and powerful to use against The People is pretty hard to deny, even today.
I pointed out that Hanson is hard on the Catholics but he's pretty hard on a lot of Protestants too, he attributes to them more of that kind of depravity than even the late medieval Catholic Church taught. Calvin is, of course, the one people blame the most and, fairly, he did seem to love the idea of a God evil enough to create people, even innocent babies, who God intended for eternal damnation, a God who is so evil it's no wonder so many who were brought up in that belief chose to stop believing in any God at all. Even the bleakest Catholic idea on that holds that every soul has the possibility of salvation and that none of us can know if any one person is or (as some more charitable Catholics have asked, if even one person is) eternally damned.
I would like to follow up on a lot of the things he says, for example, pointing to the non-Biblical but widespread idea that after he died on the cross Jesus descended into hell to preach to the souls there as evidence it was widely believed in the early Church that souls in hell were not there forever but only until they chose to be reunited to God. I can believe in a God that punishes us for the evil we do in life after we die since so many get away with it in this life but even for the worst of us, the idea that such evil of limited duration would justify eternal and extreme torment is excessive. It is certainly not understandable that God who is said to be all good and merciful and just could choose such a thing. Those claims, made in human terms to human understanding have to stand in our comprehension for them to have any meaning at all. I prefer the Jewish conception of God as being all good and holy to Calvin's God, or Augustine's who seems to me to describe the most evil creature ever conceived by human beings. I don't believe in that God because we are told to forgive those who wrong us, the implication in the Lord's prayer being that our being forgiven is related to, God's forgiveness of us, divine forgiveness not necessarily contingent on it. I relate it to the repeated exhortation to the Children of Israel in the commandments to practice charity, generosity and justice that they should remember they were slaves, strangers in Egypt. And God freed them from that Earthly suffering after a period, notwithstanding their still being fallible people. If we're supposed to remember that, maybe God remembers the obligation of the Creator to those who are created. I couldn't love a person who begot children only to torture them for even a miserable lifetime, I think to think God would do worse than what an evil person would do is blasphemous.
So, today, Halloween, as you see the products of Jerome and Augustine not knowing their Greek well enough to set up Western culture for all of that gloom and darkness, ask yourself why those who reject the Gospel on that basis are so attracted to it and why those who claim to accept it seem to be, as well. Easter is coming but All Saints Day is tomorrow. All Souls Day after that. Originally, as I understand it, the 1st was to commemorate children who had died and gone to heave, the 2nd, the adults. But I haven't fact checked that, yet.
Update: You forget that I believe in eternal life. God might create Poeple who suffer for a time in this world for eventual happiness whereas a parent who has children for the purpose of torturing them unto death doesn't have that power to bring them to eventual happiness. I certainly don't understand why suffering exists but, then, neither do atheists. I don't see any advantage of choosing to believe that all of that suffering is meaningless in the end, it's not as if atheists with power over other people are notably kinder than religious people are, especially those who accept the Jewish conception of God, Christians, Muslims, other monotheists who conceive of God in similar terms.
I certainly don't believe that the line of belief that Christianity is a part of is exclusive. We know of other Abrahamic monotheists, the Samaritans being the most well known through the Scriptures, the reported non-Jewish Abrahamic religionists described in the Islamic texts - though I don't know much about that. I certainly think the conception of God in the American traditional religions shares in that as some of the other African and Asian traditions do. The Hebrew Bible, after all, presents God as making covenants with other People, even enemies of the Children of Israel, two of the major figures of virtue in the Jewish Scriptures are Job and Ruth, neither of whom are Children of Israel, Jonah is sent by God to the enemy of Israel to preach so as to save the inhabitants of the enemy city of Nineveh. When I say I'm a universalist, I really mean it.
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