Parents And Youth Pastors

Wintery Knight recently posted some comments from a youth pastor in Canada. I don't agree with everything the pastor says, and I'm not in much of a position to judge some of his comments. But I agree with a lot of what he says, and I think there is a tendency to criticize churches too much and not criticize parents enough.

That may be due, in part, to the fact that the Bible often holds religious leaders (priests, Pharisees, etc.) to such a high degree of responsibility for the evils in a culture. However, the fact that religious leaders have often been at the forefront of societal problems in the past doesn't prove that we should always assume that they're primarily responsible for problems in the modern world. For one thing, our circumstances today are significantly different. In a nation like the United States or Canada, the large majority of people are literate. We live in an information age, in which people have easy and free or inexpensive access to a lot of information. Etc. In some ways, people aren't as dependent on church leaders today as they were in the past. The degree to which different groups are to blame for societal problems differs from one context to another, and I think religious leaders often get too much blame today while others aren't blamed as much as they ought to be.

Here are some of the youth pastor's comments:

Sending children to a youth ministry is pointless if the parents aren’t actively discipling their kids during the week. Christianity just won’t stick. For example, why do the kids of most immigrants lose the mother tongue of their parents? Well, because they spend at least 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, at school taught in English. All their friends speak English. All the media they watch and listen to is in English. The only time they even hear their mother tongue is at home. And unless the parents make a concerted effort to teach the language and to emphasize its importance, the child will lose the language. They may understand it. But they will barely be able to speak it, it won’t impact their lives, and they will most definitely not pass it on to their kids.

The same thing goes for Christianity. If the parents aren’t actively, every day, teaching and discipling their kids in Christianity it’s content and its importance then there is almost no point in sending them to a youth ministry. If the parents aren’t every day praying with their kids, teaching them how to share their faith, giving them good reasons to be Christians, etc. they are not being good Christian parents....

It has been my experience that the youth with non-Christian parents are often much stronger Christians than those youth who have Christian parents who are failing as Christian parents (which is most of them). See, a youth with non-Christian parents has a good reason for why their parents don’t disciple them in Christianity: they’re non-Christians! Thus, the bad example of the parents only reinforces in the youth that they need to use their own initiative to learn about the Christian faith. But if a youth has Christian parents, and the Christian faith isn’t the most important thing in the parents lives, the youth is going to learn that Christianity is really not that important. If the parents never read their Bible, the youth is going to think that is acceptable. If the parents emphasize school more than Christ, the youth is going to think school is more important, no matter what the parents say about Jesus. If the parents emphasize sports more than Christ, the youth is going to think sports are more important, no matter what the parents say about Jesus. The hypocrisy of the parents will destroy their child’s faith….

As a final point, I’m not saying youth or children ministry is pointless. It is incredibly important. Let me say it again: youth ministry is incredibly important. But there is no reason to spend thousands of dollars hiring a youth pastor in a church that doesn’t already have parents doing their job. Until that happens, save your funds, and use dedicated lay leaders.

"NY Times twists on horns of secular free will dilemma"

http://bnonn.thinkingmatters.org.nz/ny-times-twists-on-horns-of-secular-free-will-dilemma/

Thou Hypocrite

Says Dave Armstrong of James White over at Peter Lumpkins' pad:

It's a pattern of years and years of hypocrisy: condemning things and doing the same things himself; saying one thing and doing another . . . it becomes more significant insofar as it is one thing of a long line of questionable practices

.

Yeah, Dave, like saying you won't address other bloggers or talk trash about them...

Update: Matt over at Peter's either didn't read this post or has a reading comprehension problem:

He writes:

Gene Bridges @ Triablogue followed up on this post.

Mr. Bridges is of the uber-Reformed variety. He also would like to dance to Duffy's "Mercy". Maybe Mr. Lumpkins is a hypocrite, at least according to Mr. Bridges, but maybe Mr. Lumpkins can be vindicated if he can also dance to "Mercy" by Duffy

1. No, I didn't follow up on Peter's post, Matt. I followed up on Dave Armstrong's comment on Peter's post.

2. My response is not directed toward Peter or anything written by him; it is directed towards Dave Armstrong. Dave accuses Mr. White of the very thing ("condemning things and doing them himself) that Dave has been doing for years on end with respect to a multitude of bloggers. I find that rather comedic.

I'm not defending James White - I'm not criticizing him either. I'm not defending Peter Lumpkins; I'm not criticizing him either. This post isn't about Peter Lumpkins, Matt - it's about Dave Armstrong and what Dave said at Peter's place. Peter is, to me, as inconsequential a person in my life as he ever was.

Oh, and for the record, I would much rather dance to the Ralphie Rosario mix of Donna Summer's Billboard #1 Dance hit, "Fame, the Game" than Duffy's Mercy. Duffy is sooo 2008. Donna Summer has much more staying power.

"The Sacrament of Marriage"

http://metalutheran.blogspot.com/2011/03/sacrament-of-marriage.html

Evil as misfortune

James Anderson recently did a fine post on a popular objection to hell. In the combox, the conversation quickly digressed to a different, equally popular objection to hell. And, predictably enough, Anderson soon came to an impasse with critics of hell.

These debates always stalemate because, at rock bottom, critics of hell see evil as misfortune rather than culpability. And so, at rock bottom, they see punishment as misfortune rather than just desserts. Not just desserts, but ill-desserts. As such, misfortune demands restoration, not restitution. 

At their moral center they are morally dead. Hollow. They have no capacity to see evil in essentially ethical terms. It should only evoke pity.

As a result, we’re treated to their morally indiscriminate compassion for everyone regardless of guilt, innocence, or degrees thereof. Their empathy is universal because their empathy is amoral. 


For all their outward compassion they are, at heart, moral monsters.

Bill Stuntz

A recent post from Justin Taylor informs that William J. Stuntz has passed into glory. Stuntz's articles, testimony, and last interviews are well worth reading or viewing. See here, here, here, and here for some of what's available. Thank God for Bill Stuntz.

The Endless Faith

Sam Harris made a name for himself by writing The End of Faith. That was back in 2004. 2004 came and went, but faith is still here. Followed by 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010...

So I’m curious about his timetable. When does the end of faith end, exactly?

Riding on the coattails of Harris, Loftus is slated to publish The End of Christianity this summer. Evidently, he doesn’t believe it will end before his book hits the shelves. What about this autumn? Is that when Christianity will self-terminate? 

Aren’t these prognostications a secular parody of the street preacher with his End of the World placard?

Before Harris, you had the death-of-god movement in the Sixties. Well, that came and went, but faith is still here. Long before that you had Nietzsche and Durkheim.

So when do we come to the end of the end of faith? Seems as though the end of faith is confidently predicted every generation or so, yet it never comes to an end. The infidel equivalent of millennial cults that make short-sighted predictions about the future, then repackage the oracle to accommodate empirical failure.

Perhaps Gary North, Sam Harris, John Loftus, Hal Lindsey, and Harold Camping could economize by pooling their resources.

Shouldn’t the secular heralds of Christianity’s imminent demise at least set some empirically testable expiration date? Or do they prefer the studied ambiguities of the psychic hotline and the horoscope? 

The tree of life

If as some have suggested that Death was a natural part of life before the fall and somehow different from death after the fall then the cultural mandate of Marriage from Gen 1:28 would have presupposed death. Which would undermine your argument. Yes?

By The Space Bishop on Is there sex in heaven?

No. That oversimplifies the issue.

i) Adam and Eve were naturally mortal. Naturally liable to death. (I don’t find Turretin’s denial exegetically tenable.)

ii) But that doesn’t mean Adam would automatically die of old age at 930 had he never sinned.

iii) The death of Adam is explicitly penal in character: a punishment for transgressing the prohibition.

iv) This isn’t hard to harmonize. Before they fell, Adam and Eve had access to the tree of life. They had the opportunity to become immortal at any time prior to their downfall.

Ironically, they ignored the tree of life, which was permitted, and chose instead to partake the tree of knowledge, which was forbidden. As a result, they lost the opportunity to partake the tree of life. By ignoring what was permitted, and doing what was forbidden, what was hitherto permitted became forbidden. By taking for granted the gift of immortality which was available to them, death became the default penalty for their transgression.

v) This also raises counterfactual conjectures about the fate of their posterity had they honored the prohibition and partaken the tree of life. The text doesn’t furnish sufficient information to wax dogmatic on that score. But if we choose to speculate, then either the consequent immortality of Adam would be transmitted to his posterity, or else his posterity would be naturally susceptible to death, yet also have access to the tree of life. 

Rhapsodic about the rapture

I don’t normally discuss dispensationalism, but this caught my eye:

The pastor’s assertion is problematic, because anyone who knows anything about Camping knows he came out of a Reformed background, and is a staunch amillennialist. I can recall him renouncing Dispensationalism when he was interviewed on that LA radio show.

I pointed out to the pastor that if one were to consider Camping’s hermeneutic, it is drawn from the same typological, Reformed Augustinianism that fuels the typical amillennial and postmillennial eschatology. It was certainly evident when Camping debated James White a year or more ago on the Iron Sharpens Iron program.

He claims Camping talks about the rapture, the end of the Church age, and the Great Tribulation, themes he says are only found among Dispensationalists. But just checking my Reformed systematic theologies I have, like Reymond and Berkhof for example, all of them believe in the rapture, the end of the Church age, and the Great Tribulation. They understand these concepts differently in their schemes than what is articulated by Dispensationalists.

Now. Just so I am clear. I am not saying all my Reformed brethren are on the brink everyday of becoming a nut like Camping because of their hermeneutic. I am just saying a heavy emphasis on spiritualizing texts lends itself easily to his way of thinking. And that can be found among Reformed folks just as it is among Dispensationalism.

http://hipandthigh.blogspot.com/2011/03/camping-out.html

A few comments:

i) While Camping used to be Reformed, he’s a civil engineer by training. To my knowledge, he never attended seminary.

Of course, it’s quite possible for a layman to have a sophisticated grasp of Reformed theology. But it’s not as if Camping was a theology prof., OT prof., NT prof., or church historian at a Reformed seminary.

ii) I admit I don’t have a systematic knowledge of Camping’s theology. This is the extent of my direct familiarity: I have a relative who used to donate to Family Radio. In return, donors receive a slim monthly periodical. As a result, I had frequent occasion to read his answers to Bible questions that subscribers wrote him.

As I recall, his hermeneutical approach was a pastiche of allegory, numerology, and word-studies based on running your index finger down a column of words in a concordance of the KJV, wherein you ascribe the same overloaded meaning to every occurrence of the same word (in English).

Sorry, but I fail to see much resemblance between his hermeneutical approach and Reformed exegetes like Beale, Carson, Currid, Duguid, Hamilton, McComiskey, Poythress, Schreiner, Thielman, Waltke, &c.

iii) Brother Fred’s analysis also fails to distinguish between Reformed Bible scholars and Reformed systematic theologians. But if we’re discussing hermeneutics, and if we’re especially interested in prophetic fulfillment, shouldn’t we take exegetes like Beale, Poythress, and Robertson as our foil? These are Calvinists who specialize in exegesis, and also write about eschatology in their commentaries or monographs.

And even at the level of systematics, the late Anthony Hoekema marks a shift away from Augustinian “spiritualization.” Likewise, it won’t do to say that Poythress is “spiritualizing” the text when, in fact, he has a very earthly view of eschatological fulfillment:

“Response to Robert L. Saucy’s Paper,” Grace Theological Journal 10/2 (1989), 157-159.

Likewise, take Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament.

On the one hand, Peter Enns nominally represented the Reformed position. However, he was later fired on issues like this because his view of fulfillment reflected a serious deviation from the standard Reformed position.

On the other hand, Bock takes a more typological approach than Kaiser. Yet Bock is a leading dispensationalist.

“Spiritualize” may be a polemically effective battle cry to rally the troops, but it really needs to be retired in the interests of theological accuracy.

iv) In addition, as Brother Fred also knows, the eschatological options in Reformed theology aren’t limited to either amillennialism or postmillennialism. You can be a Reformed premil. I believe that Tom Schreiner, Jim Hamilton, and D. A. Carson are Reformed premils.

iv) Is there a distinctive Reformed hermeneutic in contrast to Dispensational hermeneutics? That’s not an easy line to draw.

a) To begin with, both contemporary Reformed exegetes and contemporary Dispensational exegetes employ the grammatico-historical method. So at that basal level there is no appreciable difference. They simply arrive at different conclusions.

b) Traditionally, there’s a difference between covenant theology and dispensationalism. However, the difference is more like a rugged coastline rather than a sharp straight line.

On the one hand you have progressive dispensationalism. Fred knows more about that than I do.

On the other hand, covenant theology ranges along a continuum.

My Bible Ain't No Thinline!

I finally got tired of carrying to church both my hardcover UBS Greek New Testament A Reader's Edition and my cheesy cardboard binding A Reader's Hebrew Bible. So today I had a great idea, instead of having a professional Bible binding company charge me for putting both of these testaments under one leather cover, I remembered I had a pighide leather NASB stored away from years ago (pighide symbolizes God making the unclean, clean). So I decided to rip the binding off both of my Hebrew and Greek Readers' editions, as well as the pighide binding from the NASB. All I did was use 5-minute epoxy and add two ribbons. And thankfully the pighide binding was a full-yapp, otherwise, it would not have wrapped around both Readers' editions. It weighs in at 2,356 pages of three thick inches of Hebrew and Greek!

Maybe Mark Bertrand will feature my Bible on his Bible design blog for creativity!

OK, it is not pretty, but it works. The Greek Reader is a bit longer than the Hebrew Reader, but it has character!

"Evangelicals Divided"

I don't agree with the author's alternative, but he presents a useful overview:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/03/evangelicals-divided

The Hidden Life of Prayer

The Hidden Life of Prayer by David McIntyre.

Heaven overarches

Heaven overarches earth and sea,
Earth-sadness and sea-bitterness;
Heaven overarches you and me:
A little while and we shall be
(Please God) where there is no more sea
Nor barren wilderness.
Heaven overarches you and me
And all earth's gardens and her graves:
Look up with me, until we see
The day break and the shadows flee;
What tho’ tonight wrecks you and me,
If so tomorrow saves?

-Christina Rossetti

Dying Testimonies of Saved and Unsaved

Dying Testimonies of Saved and Unsaved (1898) by Solomon B. Shaw here, here, or here.

Another book by Shaw here.

HT: Annoyed Pinoy.

Counterfactual sin

One stock objection to hell is that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. We only commit a finite number of sins in this life, so everlasting punishment is disproportionate.

There are different ways of fielding this objection. For now I’ll make one point: we only commit a finite number of sins in this life because we are mortal. We stop sinning in this life when we die.

If we lived 800 years instead of 80, we’d commit 10 times as many sins. And that, in turn, raises the specter of counterfactual sins. All the sins we’d commit if we had the opportunity to do so. If we could sin with impunity.

Often a man will refrain from sin, not because it’s wrong, but from fear of the consequences. If he thought he could get away with it, he’d do it. Likewise, a handsome man, or rich man, has greater opportunities to commit adultery or fornication than a poor homely man.

So even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the framework of the critic, it doesn’t follow that everlasting punishment is disproportionate. That’s a very superficial view of sinners.   

Hilbert's hotel

i) Traditionally, the duration of hell is unending. But let’s bracket the duration of hell for the moment and discuss temporal punishment generally. In principle, a temporal punishment can have three basic durations: (a) definite; (b) indefinite, or (c) interminable.

ii) One thing these all three have in common is that someone can only endure his punishment a day at a time. Whether the punishment is a month, a year, or a lifetime, the experience can only be processed day-by-day. In that respect it feels the same from one day to the next.

iii) However, the difference in duration can also have a different psychological effect. Indeed, that, of itself, can have a punitive aspect.

iv) A definite sentence may feel less punitive if it leaves the convict with some hope. If, say, he’s sentenced to serve 10-15, and he goes in at the age of 17, he will still be fairly young when he gets out. He will still have a fair portion of his life ahead of him.

So that’s hopeful. He can mark days off the calendar.

v) Of course, that depends on the length of the sentence. If it’s a life sentence, or if he goes in at 50, and he’s sentenced to serve 30 years, then that’s pretty hopeless even though the interval is definite. His punishment might as well be unremitting.

In that respect, a definite sentence can be equivalent to an interminable sentence.

vi) An indefinite sentence may leave the convict feeling ambivalent. There’s a Kafkaesque uncertainty to the outcome. That can be both hopeful and despairing.

It’s more likely to be hopeful in the early phases. But as time wears on, hope wanes.

He could be released any day, or he could die in prison. There’s no telling. And that uncertainty is punitive in its own right. Never knowing whether today will be the last day, or there will never be a last day–until he’s carted out with a toe-tag.

vii) We traditionally discuss hell as everlasting punishment since that is objectively the case. But psychologically speaking, that may not reflect the perspective of the damned. After all, most of the damned didn’t really believe in hell before they died. So it’s possible that many of the damned have no idea how long they will be there. Even though they will be there forever, they may not know that.

Perhaps that’s revealed to them at the Final Judgment. The psychological prospect of never-ending punishment would be punitive.

On the other hand, Kafkaesque uncertainty (from their blinkered viewpoint) would also be punitive. Not knowing. Living day after day, year after year, not knowing if or when your punishment will cease can also be punitive.

And subjective uncertainly regarding the duration of hell is entirely consistent with the objective eternality of hell.

viii) Take a conman who’s used to beating the system. He’s so clever. All he’s life he’s be able to outfox the authorities.

Perhaps his infernal punishment consists (at least in part) of nursing the futile hope that he can break out of hell. He and some of his fellow conmen in hell scheme and plot how to outsmart the system. They pride themselves on their cunning, tireless ingenuity. And suppose God humors their misguided pride by allowing them to think they succeeded.

Take those science fiction stories set in a simulated penal colony where a prisoner or group of coconspirators plan their escape, and imagine that they succeeded. Their captors allow them a few hours or days of illusory freedom, then it suddenly dawns on the escapees that this was all a trick. The penal colony is a concentric prison. Cells within cells. Every time they “escape,” they soon discover that the “outside” world is still within the confines of the prison. The penal colony is endless. Instead of “infinite” time, you have “infinite” space (the functional equivalent). Like Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel. So Their hopes are dashed.

Yet they continue to nurse the futile hope that if they try just one more time (and there’s always one more time), they will finally breach the perimeter of the prison. So they spend eternity scheming the next jailbreak. Each time they “succeed,” they revel in the momentary exhilaration of their success­, exchanging high-fives–only to find, once more, that they are no closer to freedom than the last time, or the time before that, or the time before that. 

"Is Hell an Infinite Punishment?"

http://proginosko.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/is-hell-an-infinite-punishment/

God's orchard

J. Douglas MacMillan relates the following anecdotes in his book The Lord Our Shepherd (Bryntirion Press, 2009, pp 106-109):

I have met people who have said, 'Mr MacMillan, I am afraid I can't have Christ at all, because I am still afraid of death.' Now I have to look at this through the eyes of the apostle Paul. Paul could say, 'For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain', and he could also say, 'having a desire to depart and to be with Christ; which is far better' (Philippians 1:21, 23). But let us not forget that Paul also had to say that death was an enemy. More than this, he said it was the last enemy, and we praise God for that.

Can I again use personal experience? I remember the morning of the day on which my father died. Rather, it was the day before, the Saturday morning, for he died just after the entrance of the Sabbath. (He went on the Sabbath to his rest with his Maker on 16 June 1957, two years and two days after I was converted.)

On that Saturday morning I was going out on to the hill early. My father had been ill for three weeks, and as I looked into his room before going out at half-past six that June morning, he was propped up on pillows looking out of his bedroom window on to a kind of long, sweeping hill that rose behind our house. He was very weak, but he looked at me and said, 'Hello, Douglas, are you going out?' When I said 'Yes', he said, 'Sit down, sit for a minute.'

Then he said, 'What do you see out of the window, Douglas?' So I looked and told him, 'Well, I see the sheep just beginning to come down.' (The sheep always go up to the top of the hills at night to sleep - and many a Christian could learn a lesson from that. Go up to the hills before you go to sleep at night.) He said, 'It's strange, you know' - and a smile came over his face. (I had noticed a strange light in his face as soon as I went into his room.) 'It's strange, you know. I can't see that now at all.'

I said, 'What do you see?' He said, 'It's strange, I'm looking out of the window and it's as if I was looking into an orchard. It's a very beautiful place, and I can see people and I know a lot of them. I can see my mother and I can see your mother.' (I had lost my mother six years before.) Then he smiled again and said, 'Do you think I am seeing into heaven? I think I am.' He said, 'I have been on the doorstep for three weeks' - he had been asking people not to pray that he would get better - 'and I am going to go over it today.' Then he said,

For forty years I have followed Christ, and for forty years I have prayed for grace to live for Christ, and for forty years I have prayed for grace to die like a Christian. I have always been afraid secretly - never admitted it, but I have always secretly been afraid that I wouldn't get grace to die. But now I see how stupid I was. God wouldn't give me grace I didn't need until I needed it; and when I need it, I have it.

He said, 'Don't be afraid of death, it's going to be wonderful.'

I was with another minister two weeks before he died, a man who loved the Lord. His wife and son (also a minister) told me of their experience with him. He had been very weak, and he was a very gentle, good man, who was steeped in the Scriptures. He had not mentioned to his son or to his two Christian daughters or his wife that death was drawing near. In fact, when I was visiting two weeks before, one of his daughters (a nurse) was very concerned about him. When I asked her why she was crying she said, 'Oh, Dad had a bad night and, you know, when he got better this morning he didn't seem to realise how near death he was, and he was talking about his cabbages. Do you think there is anything wrong with my father?' (She meant something wrong spiritually.) I said, 'No, there's nothing wrong.'

They told me that two hours before he died, he sat up in bed (for days before that he had barely been able to move), and a light came on to his face and he said to his son sitting beside him, 'Get your mother, bring them all down. I am seeing into heaven and I can see the Saviour. He is with me.' His wife came down and she started to cry (who wouldn't?). But he said, 'Peggy, don't cry. This is what I have been waiting for. This is my coronation day.' He was like that until he passed into the glory that he was seeing. It is a wonderful thing to see God's people go home to the Father's house; and it is a terrible thing, on the other hand, to see people go out into eternal darkness.

Arminian morality

On the one hand:

Several have asked me here why I am defending Rob Bell.  Haven’t they been listening?  I don’t defend Rob Bell; I defend the principle of “Before I say I disagree I should be able to say I understand.”  No one can truly say “I understand” Bell’s book until he or she has read it.  What I have attempted to do here is caution Christians to act like Christians and gentlemen (and gentlewomen) and wait until they read the book to make up their minds and pronounce a view about it.  This rush to judgment before even reading the book is pathological.  It smack to me of book burning and certainly of a kind of censorship–implying that “good Christians” should not read the book lest they be infected by its alleged heresy.  This is a sure sign of anti-intellectualism at best and demagoguery at worst...So, let’s all just wait until Bell’s book is released and we have a chance to read it critically with a hermeneutic of charity (as opposed to a hermeneutic of suspicion) and then (and only then) offer opinions about its theology.

http://rogereolson.com/2011/03/13/evangelicals-behaving-badly-and-some-important-footnotes/

On the other hand:

I admit that I’m very late coming to read Walter Wink (professor emeritus of Auburn Theological Seminary, New York City).  People have recommended his books to me for years and I’ve managed to avoid reading even one of them!  From what I knew about his central thesis it seemed to me very similar to the thesis of Walter Rauschenbusch in A Theology for the Social Gospel–that there is a “kingdom of evil” that causes much, if not all, of the evil in the social world.  Also, his books seemed exceptionally long!  So I read reviews and articles and thought I got the point that way [Emphasis mine].

http://rogereolson.com/2011/03/22/walter-wink-and-greg-boyd-on-the-problem-of-evil/

Hellfire under fire

I’m reposting some email I sent to a friend.

**********************************

1. One of the stock arguments that universalists deploy against eternal punishment is that an "infinite" punishment for "finite" sin is unjust.

But your juvie delinquents could use a similar argument to game the universalist system:

"However much remedial postmortem punishment God makes me suffer is just a drop in the bucket of eternity. I'll have my fill of sin in this life, pay my dues in hell, then go to heaven."

Do the crime, pay the time. Even in this life, crooks will take a calculated risk. If the benefit outweighs the risk. If they have more to gain than lose.

And that's despite the fact that spending 10-20 years in the pokey when you only got about 70 years to play with, give or take (minus childhood), makes it a high-stakes gamble. You may die in prison, or by the time you get out, you may be past your prime. 

In universalism, by contrast, no matter how long you spend in the purgatorial slammer, when you get out you'll be just as young as when you went in. And you won't have a measly 30 years of life left. You'll have the rest of eternity. 

In this life, if you go to prison at 20, and come out at 50, you've blown the best years of your life. You can never make up for the lost years. The lost opportunities. That's irrevocable. Not only are you passed your prime, but life has moved on. Time didn't stand still for the eligible girls you knew at 20.

But in universalism, the damned are like vampires. They come out the same age they went in. They're immortal going in, and immortal coming out. Eternally youthful.

So, in the long run, they have nothing to lose. They can make up for lost time, since they never run out of time. They always have time to burn. They can always pick up where they left off.

2. On a different, but related note: I think one problem some people have with everlasting punishment is that, in their mind, they assume punishment must be positive affliction, viz. “torture.”

But it’s easy for me to think of punishment in terms of lost opportunities.

Take a father who promises to take his two sons on a camping trip. But before they go, one son behaves very badly. As punishment, he’s left behind. He misses out while dad goes camping with the other son.

That’s everlasting punishment in the sense that that’s a lost opportunity. The delinquent son blew his chance.

Even if he will have other opportunities to go camping with his dad, that particular opportunity has come and gone. That’s unrepeatable. Now or never.

Or take two teenage boys who have a crush on the same girl. But one is shy, so he can’t screw up the courage to ask her out on a date.

As a result, the other boy moves in. They marry. Have kids. Live happily after ever.

Suppose the shy boy had asked her out on a date. They fell in love. Raised a family. Lived happily ever after.

Instead he marries a shrewish girl who’s no fun to be around. Always complaining about something. Instead of coming home after work, he goes to the bar to avoid her.

He missed out on his chance at domestic happiness in this life. And he can’t go back and make up for the lost years.

Even if he could go back in time and ask her out, the other boy would lose out.

That’s not the same thing as punishment. But it illustrates a principle. There are things of value we can lose forever. And that could be punitive. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

In that respect, the punishment is endless, interminable. You always miss what you might have had.

Likewise, it’s possible to have something you cherish, then lose it for good. The punishment is endless because you can never recoup your loss. A permanent deprivation. 

3. To approach this from another angle, suppose we postulate that eternal punishment consists, not of positive, external pain and suffering, but types of sensory deprivation.

Suppose one circle of hell is absolutely dark, another circle of hell dead silent, and yet another circle in which the damned can't touch or be touched by anything or anyone.