That All Shall Be Saved

He was telling his contemporaries, and most particularly those among first-century of a final divine reckoning for creation to denounce the injushis fellow Jews who had forgotten the justice and the mercy of the Law, that under God's reign it would be the poor and neglected who would be vindicated by divine righteousness, and their oppressors who would be cast down. To me, therefore, it seems almost insane for anyone to imagine that such language can be distilled into specific propositions about heaven and hell, eternity and time, redemption and desolation. All it tells us is that God is just, and that the world he will bring to pass will be one in which mercy has cast out cruelty, and that all of us must ultimately answer for the injustices we perpetrate. It is a language that simultaneously inhabits two distinct ages of the world, two distinct frames of reality, neither of whose terrains or vistas it pretends to describe in literal detail: It at one and the same time announces a justice to be established within historical time by divine intervention and affirms a justice that can be realized only beyond historical time's ultimate conclusion. It is intended, it seems obvious, to move its listeners to both prudent fear and imprudent hope. But, beyond that, only the poetry and the mystery remain.

We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.

if human nature required the real capacity freely to reject God, then Christ could not have been fully human.

What distinguished Christ in this regard from the rest of humanity, if Christological orthodoxy is to be believed, is not that he lacked a kind of freedom that all others possess, but that he was not subject to the kinds of extrinsic constraints upon his freedom (ignorance, delusion, corruption of the will, and so forth) that enslave the rest of the race. In Augustine's terms, he was-as we should all wish to become-incapable of (or, rather, not incapacitated by) any deviation from the Good. He had a perfect knowledge of the Good and was perfectly rational; hence, as a man he could not sin; hence, he alone among men was fully free.