/lit/ - Literature

>>16750750
Adversus Haeraeses

How does it feel to know this nigga destroyed all your obscurantist nonsense 1800 years ago?

>>16699331
>He became what we are so that we might become what He is
The Incarnation opened the path for man's divinization. See Irenaeus, St. Athanasius the Great, etc.

>>16393083
It's not an easy question to answer by any means, and I don't have a very satisfying answer. Some Christians (a minority throughout the history of the church, but always present) have been universalists. Since God desires all to be saved, and God is omnipotent, then all will eventually be reconciled to God. No one will be damned forever. Origen and perhaps Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa expressed this view in the early church, and plenty of modern theologians have agreed- Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, for example, both argued that even if we can't be sure all will be saved, it's our duty as Christians to hope for a universal reconciliation, and I quite agree with them.

Still, it's hard to read Jesus's own words in the Gospel and the majority of our tradition and not come away with a belief in Hell. I don't want to explain this away, since it's what I believe and what the mainstream of Christianity has always taught, but I don't think it's as simple as what you suggest- that salvation is just based on whether we're lucky enough to be born into a Christian family or Christian country. That seems to be a Protestant sort of idea (I don't want to get into the differences between the Christian churches, but it's relevant here), that salvation is a matter of having the right faith, of believing in the right God; that being a good person doesn't matter, that it's better to be a Christian who does vile things than, say, a Hindu who works tirelessly for justice. Salvation in Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican/high Lutheran thought is a process of both faith and works- the "Christian" who claims to believe in Jesus but ignores the poor, cheats on his wife, etc isn't really a Christian at all, and (perhaps) the Hindu who has never heard of Christ yet follows His teachings might well be a Christian in a deeper sense (what Rahner calls "anonymous Christians"). Christianity is fundamentally about free will- this is what so shocked and intrigued the Roman world, where belief in Fate or chance was basically a given across most philosophies. Christianity suggests that we all have a choice, between light and dark, between good and evil, between God and the dark powers of this world; "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable" (Phil 4:8) is ultimately from God, there is no other source of goodness.

>The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself

Why have Christians abandoned this kind of language?