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Craig on the Possibility of Eternal Damnation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Thomas Talbott
Thomas Talbott
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon 97301
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Extract

In two recent papers, one a critique of two papers of mine, William Lane Craig has sought to put the Free Will Defence in the service of the traditional doctrine of hell; he has sought to establish, in other words, that the following proposition, which I shall call the Damnation Thesis (DT), is at least possibly true:

(DT) There exists at least one sinner S such that S will never be reconciled to God and thus never be saved.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , December 1992 , pp. 495 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 See Craig, William Lane, ‘“No Other Name”: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ’, Faith and Philosophy, VI (April, 1989), 172–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Talbott's Universalism’, Religious Studies, XXVII (Sept., 1991), 297–308.

2 See Talbott, Thomas, ‘The Doctrine of Everlasting Punishment’, Faith and Philosophy, VII (January, 1990), 19–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, ‘Providence, Freedom, and Human Destiny’, Religious Studies, XXVI (1990), 227–45.

3 Plantinga, Alvin, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 59Google Scholar. An evil qualifies as broadly moral evil if it is produced by a free agent, either human or non-human.

4 ‘Talbott's Universalism’, p. 306.

5 Ibid. p. 308.

6 Ibid. p. 299.

7 Ibid. p. 307.

8 Ibid. p. 308.

9 Ibid. p. 300.

10 Ibid. p. 303.

11 Plantinga, op. cit. p. 28.

12 ‘Talbott's Universalism’, p. 301.

13 Ibid. p. 301.

14 Milton's portrayal of Satan, though enormously insightful in specific contexts, seems to me in the end as unrealistic as his depiction of the war in heaven (in which immortals fight each other with cannons and the like). Milton's artistic challenge was to portray Satan both as the Arch Fiend and as a free and morally responsible agent. That he was unable to unite both portraits into a believable whole in no way diminishes his artistic achievement.

15 Ibid. p. 302.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid. p. 300.

18 Ibid.

19 ‘Human Destiny’, p. 236.

20 See ‘No Other Name’, p. 183.

21 ‘Talbott's Universalism’, p. 299.

22 Ibid. p. 306.

23 Ibid. p. 307.

24 See the eleventh chapter of Romans. See also the discussion in Talbott, Thomas, ‘The New Testament and Universal Reconciliation’, Christian Scholar's Review (XXI:4 (June, 1992), pp. 376–394).Google Scholar

25 John 8:32.