To continue the recent discussions of hell, let me ask the wise folks of PB for their collective wisdom.
I was reading a recent article by Wilko Van Holten entitled "Can the Traditional View of Hell be Defended? An Evaluation of Some Arguments for Eternal Punishment" in Anglican Theological Review--not a journal I normally read, but I figured "What the hell?" (Ok, no more bad puns in this post, I promise).
Rest below the fold:
In a new issue of Religious Studies, Gordon Knight has an interesting article on universalism and open theism that many PBers may be interested in ("Universalism for Open Theists," 42 (2006):213-223).
Here is the central thrust of his argument:
I will argue that belief in the openness of God makes a hard case even worse. Furthermore, while this problem is perhaps most vivid in the case of open theism, it also can be generalized for all theists who accept a non-Molinist account of foreknowledge and who accept a libertarian conception of freedom of the will. On the other hand, this very same commitment to liberatarian freedom also precludes non-Molinists from accepting the sort of necessary universalism recently advocated by Talbott. The solution, I will argue, lies in adopting a version of contingent universalism that is able to avoid the moral problems of the [traditional] doctrine of hell while at the same time not doing violence to the strong conception of libertarian freedom to which open theists (among others) are committed (214).
A few comments below the fold.
