Saved as Through Fire

Of all the fields of theology, eschatology has traditionally been the most troublesome for Christians to come to agreement upon and has become something of a perennial Achilles' Heel in theology. The consequences are drastic. Why so? It's my view that the Bible is the result of God's action of self revelation through the telling of a narrative. The thing about a story is that final conclusions cannot be drawn until the final chapter has been concluded. If the Bible is the story of God, one cannot truly and finally know God accurately until the ending of the story is known. This explains why so much of the Bible is filled with prophecies regarding the eschaton, the last days of human history. God had to include the final chapter ahead of time, within the pages of Scripture, if He was to succeed in accurately revealing Himself. This demonstrates the importance of getting eschatology right. The closer one gets to an accurate interpretation of the last days prophecies, the more accurately one will see the revelation of God's nature and character. Eschatology reveals the final fate of humans and the world they live in under the sovereign rule of God. How God manifests this sovereignty in disposing of the world and all His creatures reveals to us with finality what God is like. Is He vengeful, manifesting an ultimately hateful desire to refuse redemption of some of His creatures? If so, did the sovereign, ominipotent and all loving Creator love some creatures more than others in such a way that the fate of creatures are finally determined by such bestowal or defecit of Divine love? Then, would the final "take" on God's character be that He is both Love and Hate, with no ultimate reconciliation of the two opposites into one defining attribute? Or is God truly and finally love, as the apostle of John defines Him, above all other considerations. There's no doubt that divine wrath is exhibited in the narrative of Scripture. But if God is finally and ultimately love, we should expect such manifestation of wrath to be temporary and constructive. This will control our understanding of such eschatological images such as "hell" and "the lake of fire." Additionally, that latter image is also a metallurgical one, as the book will show. The book understands that metallurgical themes permeate the entirety of Scripture and is the most proper background against which to understand the story of eschatology. The motif and imagery of fire is found in the protology of the Bible (the beginning of the story) as well as the eschatology (the end.). Fire is such an overwhelming image not because God is a sadist who delights in torturing His errant creatures forever, but because He is the divine metallurgist, who uses fire to bring His world of creatures to their final and perfected and purified end. This book will tell the story of eschatology by mining the full depth of the Scripture's metallurgical allusions. In so doing, it will move to the final conclusion of God that important theologians in the ancient Church, such as Gregory of Nyssa, called Apocatastasis, or the return of all things back to God. This is an ultimate universalism - not a false universalism of "all are now saved" but a hopeful and true universalism of "all will eventually be saved"...because how can omnipotent, omniscient love ever fail to lose even one of His creatures to eternal damnation? It doesn't make sense. A word about the eschatology in this book: it is both at turns preterist as well as futurist. These two basic divisions characterize opposing systems of interpretation. Preterism stresses that most of the last days prophecy was fulfilled in the first century. Futurism counters that and stresses that most of the last days prophecy remains in our future. What I describe in this book is a pathway of interpretation that allows a preterist interpretation where the context demands it and preserves futurism with other passages. This balance leads to a unique eschatology.