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religion · Shared topic · Revision 0

What is apokatastasis, and did the church condemn it?

What Is Apokatastasis?

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Starting explanation, not independently reviewed

The current answer

The restoration of all things, and what the church actually condemned

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Christian universalism did not smuggle in its key term: apokatastasis, the restoration of all things, is the New Testament's own word in Acts 3:21.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Acts 3:21, bedrock

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Origen taught that the fire of judgment is a physician's fire, corrective and therefore not endless, until all are restored.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Origen, On First Principles 3.6

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Gregory of Nyssa held the universal hope yet was commended as orthodox by the same conciliar era that condemned Origenism.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Gregory of Nyssa's standing in the era that condemned Origenism

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The anti-Origenist anathemas of 553 condemned the Evagrian system of pre-existent souls, not the bare hope that God will in the end lose no one.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Anti-Origenist anathemas associated with the Second Council of Constantinople (553)

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Historians dispute whether the anti-Origenist anathemas even belong to the official acts of the Second Council of Constantinople.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Anti-Origenist anathemas associated with the Second Council of Constantinople (553)

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Ilaria Ramelli is the great advocate of early Christian universalism, not a neutral surveyor: she sometimes reads ambiguous Fathers as universalists.

Imported citation, not independently checked: I. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (2013)

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Universal restoration is a wager the biblical texts permit but do not compel: a construction, not a finding.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Acts 3:21, construction

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Zoroastrian Frashokereti and Christian universalism converge on a healed ending, but no provable line of borrowing connects them.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Late Pahlavi texts on Frashokereti, whose written record post-dates Origen

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