That All Shall Be Saved

"'If the work that someone has built endures, that one will receive a reward; if anyone's work should be burned away, that one will suffer loss, yet shall be saved, even though as by fire." 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 (tr David Bentley Hart)

In Romans 11," Those whom [Paul] identifies as 'elect' do not constitute the whole number of the saved; they are merely the first fruits of the grand plan of salvation. The 'derelict' too will, at the close of the tale, be gathered in, caught up in the embrace of election before they can strike the ground. "

The book of Revelation is "a religious and political fable, principally concerned with Rome and Judea in the closing decades of the first century, and written in extremely obscure symbols for a community that already understood their hidden meanings."

Yet even in Revelation, the final judgement of the saved and the damned is" succeeded by a new age in which the gates of the restored Jerusalem will be thrown open, and precisely those who have been left outside the walls and putatively excluded forever from the Kingdom will be invited to wash their garments, enter the city, and drink from the waters of life."

Better to spend one's effort on" the eschatological language used by Christ in the Gospels."

"... there is no single Greek term in the New Testament that quite corresponds - or corresponds at all, really - to the Anglo-Saxon word 'hell', despite the prodigality with which that term has always been employed in traditional English translations of the text; nor anywhere in scripture do we find a discrete concept that quite corresponds to the image of hell - a realm of ingenious tortures that took ever more opulent and terrifying mythical shape in later Christian centuries."

There is only Sheol, Tartarus, and Gehenna - the "Valley of Hinnom" southwest of Jerusalem, referenced in Isaiah and Jeremiah. Contemporary rabbinical schools of Shammai and Hillel also described Gehenna as a place of purification or punishment.

"'... everyone will be salted with fire'" for "'salt is good'" Mark 9:49,50 (tr David Bentley Hart)

"The texts of the Gospels simply make no obvious claim about a place of endless suffering ; and again, the complete absence of any such notion in the Pauline corpus (or, for that matter, in John's Gospel, or in the other New Testament epistles, or in the earliest Christian documents of the post-apostolic Church, such as the Didache and the writings of the 'Apostolic Fathers', and so forth) makes the very concept nearly as historically suspect as it is morally repellant."

Early Christians understood" that the aionios kolasis, the 'chastening of the Age' (or as usually translated in English, 'eternal punishment') mentioned in Matthew 25:46, would consist in only a temporary probation of the soul.... "

" For educated Jewish scholars of Christ's time (or thereabouts) who wrote in Greek, such as Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE - c. 50 CE) and Joseph us (37 - c. 100), an aeon was still understood as only a limited period of time.... "

"... the idea of eternal perdition for the wickedest of souls, in a place of unending suffering, appears to have been a Greek notion - mythological, religious, and philosophical - before it ever took (shallow) root in Jewish thought.... Plato's Phaedra, for example, contains a far more unambiguous theory of perpetual damnation than does any text in the bible. "