Is universal salvation in the bible? Im curious if it can be backed up by scripture. Thank you
Short answer is ... yes it is, but then again, alternate eschatolopgies are also offered. So it's a base of 'balancing the Book' ...
A technical point first: the Greek word
aionos comes to us via the Latin aeternum and is rendered 'eternal' ... however ...
David Bentley Hart has written:
“Much depends, naturally, on how content one is to see the Greek adjective αιωνιον,
aionios, rendered simply and flatly as "eternal" or "everlasting." It is, after all, a word whose ambiguity has been noted since the earliest centuries of the church...
Certainly the noun αἰών,
aion (or
aeon), from which it is derived, did come during the classical and late antique periods to refer on occasion to a period of endless or at least indeterminate duration; but that was never its most literal acceptation. Throughout the whole of ancient and late antique Greek literature, an "aeon" was most properly an "age," which is simply to say a "substantial period of time" or an "extended interval."
At first, it was typically used to indicate the lifespan of a single person, though sometimes it could be used of a considerably shorter period (even, as it happens, a single year). It came over time to mean something like a discrete epoch, or a time far in the past, or an age far off in the future", and also "John Chrysostom, in his commentary on Ephesians, even used the word aiōnios of the kingdom of the devil specifically to indicate that it is temporary (for it will last only till the end of the present age, he explains)".
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Then we get things like Philippians 4:20:
Now unto God and our Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Gk: τῷ δὲ θεῷ καὶ πατρὶ ἡμῶν ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων ἀμήν
So a rendition of the Greek according to Hart's New Testament reads "And to our God and Father be the glory, unto the ages of the ages; Amen".
So what we read as 'for ever and ever' is, in the Greek, 'from aeon until aeon' – so there was the prevalent idea that an aeon (aionos) was not eternal in the sense that we understand it, but rather the complete duration of time of a given age – that the aeon of the Mayfly is a day, the aeon of ourselves is threescore years and ten, and the aeon of this world, under the prince of this aeon, whjom Our Lord came to overthrow, is limited and, in a real sense, already over ...
...
It's a big topic – one that's back in the limelight in certain circles..
(For those interested, I follow the Fathers, notably St Maximus the Confessor, and latterly the RC theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, the orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, and the RC theologian Ilaria Remelli)
