Philosophy: Measured by Scripture: Eternal punishment shows universalism is incorrect

Where Prez Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California), had resolved many shades of concern and a few denunciations over his stand by including an outstanding living example in regard to who is going to Hell (unless such a person explicitly prepares and converts with all his or her heart -- such converts shoud always leap over into the Christian faith and its faith-community, as Soren Kierkegaard may have suggested) -- namely, the evidently unconverted Osama bin Laden at the time of his death recently.  Here I woud like to connect that solution to the problem of who's going to Hell, with another problem needing a solution.

In his mostly untranslated book, Calvinism and the Reformation of Philosophy (1932, a year after the debate opened in France on the problem of "Christian Philosophy"  from 1931 to 1935), D H Th Vollenhoven made this unusual juxtaposition of philosophical problems:

<blockquote>

[T]he formal recognition of the Holy Scriptures as the Word of God only obtains its content by answering the question: “What does Holy Scripture say?” The Calvinist response to this question can briefly be summarised as follows: 

1. Holy Scripture teaches the immediate sovereignty of that God who revealed himself in his Word, over all things in every relationship and in every area, and distinguishes in accordance with this clearly between God as the sovereign and that which has been created by him. [Creator/creature distinction, or Creator / creationLaw / creature distinction - Owlb] 

2. It views religion as unio foederalis (a unity of covenant) which is known to the human family by Word revelation, also already before the fall into sin. 

3. It proclaims with regard to the circumstances after the fall:  

3a  the total depravity of humankind [a desolation buffered by common grace -- Owlb]
3b.  death as punishment of sin [and relocation to Hell as part of a further punishment beyond death as such, for some -- Owlb] 

3c. the revelation of the grace of the sovereign God in the Mediator.

Let us now note the ground motives of the Philosophy measured against Scripture -- that is, those basic conceptions that take into account the Holy Scriptures in the study of all topics. In the development of its ground motives The Philosophy Measured against Scripture can peacefully depart from [a] Calvinist answer about the main contents of the Holy Scriptures.  ...

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Soteriological Near-Universalism: Rob Bell Case preceded by Neal Punt Case in Christian Reformed Church

posting 12r

The blog-entry that follows comes out of my reflections and research on the Rob Bell Case, and my encouragement upon taking notice that reformational scholar Dr Richard Mouw has supported pastor Bell.  To understand Mouw's position better I had to go back to the Neal Punt Case which prepared me to take on Jan Bonda's work as well.  

By way of intro, please note that Dr Mouw tawt philosophy at Calvin College for manuy years. After taking admin positions as well, Mouw was appointed President of Fuller Theological Seminary and continued to write many good books.  Eventually, I hope to get to his book responding to John Piper's book, Desiring God.  The reply is Mouw's God Who Commands, becawz Piper wants to treat the imperatives regarding Joy in the Bible , especially the New Testament, as deontologicals floated up out of their Biblical contexts (Northrup Frye) . In that book, Mouw references "The idea of divine generosity, see Neal Punt, What's Good About the Good News, the Plan of Salvation in a New Light (Northland Books, pp. 87-92)." Mouw says further that his own book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport (Zondervan Books, 2004, p. 130) also advances this idea of divine  generosity. I have these for-me-new sources on the problem being addressed here. As I said in a draft for an email to some friends:<blockquote>Earlier in 1985, while Mouw was teaching philosophy at Calvin College (I believe), the Christian Reformed Church actually put a pastor on trial for heresy.  The Neal Punt case.  The charge of heresy was made by the Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada CRC -- very distant from where Punt was pastoring in the Chicago region CRC (this can be done in the CRC).  Here's the link from a website Neal Punt still maintains today in his retirement. He was exonerated by the Chicago classis (as presbyteries are known in the CRC).  Now, I disagree with Punt becawz I come to this question from the standpoint of the Interim State as the missiological foundation of a soteriological near-universalism (a stance close to but not necessarily identical to Punts own carefully-honed position which he calls "Evangelical Inclusivism."  Punt has used the phrase "biblical universalism" in at least a URL address; but I had had the impression that there was yet another website expressing a related stance on the problem at hand but different from Punt's and my own, a third option for a solution to ruffly the same problem.   

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Theology: Evangelical Fred Sanders dialogues with Karl Rahner

Frank Viola's Reimagining Church (Mar15,2k11) "Rediscovering  the Triune Nature of God" is a fine introduction to authentic ins+t into Trinity, an Intertestamental stance of some rabbis (according to Ephraim Urbach The Sages) and mature Christian theology.  Unfortunately, Viola is a fetishist of "organic church" which he considers the top-notch 'missional' stance*, but also is unimaginably a student of Fred Sanders (Biola University theologian in Los Angeles), the leading perichoretic trinitarian theologian in North America (even G.C. Berkouwer did not write a volume devoted to the trinit y doctrine in his Studies in Dogmatics) -- Sanders being  in turn a critical yet appreciative student of the best trinitarian thawt extant. He wrote his dissertation on the German Catholic liberal Jesuit Karl Rahner's immanentizing theory of Trinity.  These thinkers have developed and sustained the wonderful full-version of perichoresis, the perichoretic understanding of the Trinity.  This is the view of Trinity also taken by Jeremy Ive (Anglican pastor and theologian about to be PhD'd by King's College, London UK), in his dissertation on Christian philosophers Herman Dooyeweerd's and DHTh Vollenhoven's  Trinitarian commitments and understanding.  Ive is a reformational theologian and conflict-resolution analyst of international relations, who in that role takes what I regard as a stance of Christian political realism, not a simplistic pacificism, in our zigzag path to the all-dimensional Kingdom of God's peace, full-blown Shalom!  Unlike yodererists such as Shane Clairborne, who at least nevertheless

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