Thomas ... Tell me your story!
Told here and there across IO. A first reference I would give is a post I made here:
#24
Later, at a conference on Patristic Theology (fully of heavy-weights, I was the only attendee not in orders!) a nun who I later realised is a current-day mystic, asked me a question, clapped with delight and said, "You're a Christian Platonist" and then hounded me for the rest of the conference ('Ask him a question, go on, go on!') ... so I wear that epithet with a little pride ...
Looking round, I found an old discussion with
@Ahanu, on the issue of Universal Salvation – The (Secret) Doctrine of Apokatastasis.
And then, web-trawling, I found
Eclectic Orthodoxy, the blog of Fr Aiden Kimel – here he talks about Universal Salvation:
"I want to make it absolutely clear that I approach these meditations (on universal salvation) not as a seeker tentatively and timidly groping his way toward some anxious, uncertain, fragile hope. Unlike, say, the great 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." (David Bentley Hart,
That All Shall Be Saved, p. 66; emphasis Fr Kimel's)
I'm here because I like it here ... we have our ups and downs, but I've found other forums either too docile or too troll.
