u/Wobama46

As many know, the passage from Matthew 25 ends up being one of the hardest verses (at least I have found) to interpret in a Universalist picture:

"Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." - Matthew 25:46.

I know that there is a lot of discussion surrounding the Greek translation and if whether "eternal" should be "of the age". But my question comes down to who are the righteous? While we see in earlier verses of Matthew 25, the righteous are referring to the sheep, we also see in Paul's writing that the righteous refer to "the many":

"^(18) Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. ^(19) For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous."

Some Infernalist like to claim that "the many" is in contrast to "all people", but wouldn't this imply that "the many were made sinners" meant that not all people were made sinners? This is the same type of asymmetry Infernalists accuse Universalists of doing when interpreting the word "eternal" in Matthew 25:46!

So if we accept "the many" as being another way to refer to all people then would Matthew 25:46 imply that all people achieve eternal life?

After opening my heart to the idea of universal reconciliation, I have tried to do my due diligence and understand the explicit arguments against universal reconciliation in favor of eternal conscious torment (ECT) - beyond the basic "heretic" claim I grew up with.

A common argument I see is how UR can negatively affect evangelism, going as so far to say it makes a less convincing claim for the Gospel. While I understand there are many here who have disagreements on the role of evangelism and what the great commission meant, at least for me I am partial towards the mission of sharing the Gospel to the world. I understand the urgency of evangelism under the framework of ECT.

However, it got me thinking, how many athiests/agnostics in todays age would be willing to "convert to Christianity"/accept the Gospel but couldnt because of UR as opposed to ECT? Like how many athiests are going "yea...I would totally believe in the Gospel if it wasn't for the UR nonsense, however I would totally be convinced if you preached to me ECT!"

Like I get that for many athiests they have many problems with Christianity besides the doctrine of infernalism (if thats what they were taught), and I am not expecting Universal Reconciliation to be a silver bullet, especially to those that still hold to staunch materialism above all else. However it is impossible (or at least very difficult) for me to perceive of a person who would be open to the Gospel but couldnt make that leap of faith due to UR compared to ECT. If anything, isn't ECT a major stumbling block for the process of conversion/even those in the faith today?

Hi All, I am very new to this sub and frankly have only been open to the idea of universal reconciliation since last week. I was raised in a non-denom "infernalist" household for most of my life and I always thought that any form of dogmatic universalism was "heresy" at the level of denying the Trinity or Christ's physical death and resurrection. However, in that context, something akin to "hopeful" Universalism was still allowed.

I can't quite recall what it was, but earlier this week I was reading scripture that confident universalists point to (wish I remembered which one)...and all of a sudden I felt overwhelmed by the spirit and started to...cry? In the blink of a moment it all...just made sense? I was like "Oh! this is the good news the apostles were talking about and were willing to die for."

The notion of the Gospel as being THE GOOD NEWS entirely changes when you see that God will (not hopefully/maybe) reconcile all creation onto Himself through Jesus Christ. Once you view the Gospel in this light it almost feels impossible to view it any other way!

I will be honest I am deeply afraid that my heart is decieving me :(. In a sense it almost feels like I like what I am feeling has to be wrong/"too good to be true". I can already here my family saying that what I am feeling is just human emotions that have no discernment on the nature of God's justice. Anyone else been through this experience and know how to get over it? It's almost like I can't be certain of a doctrine like this unless I feel the "emotional downside" to confirm my human fallibility.

To be fair, I understand pop-sci can skew the perception of how much philosophy working physicists actually care about in either case.

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For some context, I have taken the standard graduate courses in both QM and QFT, and while both were heavy on the math, I couldn't help but feel like QFT was philosophically "simpler" (whatever the hell that means) compared to QM. In QM you have a lot of discussion online about Born's rule, Bell's Inequalities, uncertainty principle, and of course, a lot of emphasis on the wavefunction. But in QFT all these things take a back seat for correlation functions, RG flow, beta functions etc. All of which seem philosophically simpler (but much more abstract mathematically). The only online discourse I might find about philosophy and QFT is "are virtual particles real?".

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Anyone else notice this gap?

Hi All,

I am about to begin my PhD in the fall at UChicago for pure mathematics. Most likely will be in something related to Probability Theory and Mathematical Physics. My undergrad was a combination of CS/Math/Physics and have taken grad courses in all three subjects. My favorites were the courses I took in ML, Measure Theoretic Probability, Stochastic Calculus, and Quantum Field Theory.

If I am being honest, Quant was never my main goal as I mainly wanted to produce research in academia. However, after my Stochastic Calculus course, I realized how much serious math was used in Quant. So it got me wondering, do people still produce novel math at Quant firms? If, after a PhD, I choose to look at spending some time in Quant would that make it automatically impossible to return to academia?