Saviour of All Fellowship
May 1999
Dear Friends in Faith,
We welcome all of you who are new to the Saviour of All Fellowship. Most of you who are new have come into contact with us by way of our web site. We are thankful to God for this means of getting the truth of the evangel out. Does the preaching of eternal torment actually keep people from sinning, as some have claimed? What about people in Russia, formerly U.S.S.R. or China, in which people were not taught eternal torment but were rather taught a form of atheism? Did they fare any worse as far as crime rate was concerned than Europe of Dante’s age when a hell of torment was widely accepted? A true and scriptural view of judgment is that each act receives a just recompense whether good or bad. But the greatest deterrent to sin and crime is the power of the evangel of God’s love and grace in the life of the believer. God’s grace can only lead to a desire to honor Him Who is our Lord and Saviour with a life worthy of that honor. Beyond this power stemming from our awareness of God’s grace, is the further awareness that those who endure will reign with Him, and those who disown Him will be disowned from reigning, though not losing their salvation (2 Tim.2:11-13). There is a new web site on the internet called: Universalism and the Bible, by Keith DeRose. Keith began teaching at Yale in the Fall of 1998 as Associate Professor of Philosophy. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from UCLA in 1990. His primary areas of research are epistemology, philosophy of language, and history of modern philosophy. His site can be found on the internet at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/univ.htm Concerning the argument that the word “all” in Romans 11:32 means “all without distinction rather than all without exception,” Keith writes: “But it is clear that ‘all,’ at least when used properly, never means anything like that. Suppose some slippery character is being investigated, and hands over to investigators several files relating to the case under consideration. The slippery character then says that he’s handed over all the files about the case. It later turns out that . . . he’s held on to over half of the files. Suppose his reaction to this revelation is: ‘Well, I handed over several files from each of the 10 major categories into which they fell. And I didn't just pick the least damaging files to hand over. Rather, I picked in a random fashion the files I would hand over from each category, so that each file, regardless of its category, and regardless of how damaging it was to my case, had a chance to be handed over. So, you see, I really did hand over all the files--all without distinction, that is; not, of course, all without exception.’ This won't fly, precisely because ‘all’ just can't mean anything like what the `all without distinction' crowd says it sometimes means. My reaction, at least, is not that this fellow was being deceitful merely in using one sense of ‘all’ while it has another good sense. He’s worse than that: There’s no good sense of ‘all’ that would make true his miserable lie . . . . Quite simply, ‘all’ means all.” In His Grace and Peace, Dean Hough and Tony Nungesser |