Given the ample evidence in the New Testament, whose surface we have barely scratched, there is no reasonable hope to be had which says all mankind will be saved in the end. Therefore, no one should be spreading the idea that it is OK, let alone a good thing, to believe that there is a reasonable hope that all mankind will be saved. What does this look like for those who go out in bodily death *in the midst* of their sin? How about those involved in shoot-outs? Who die in the process of murdering? Are we to speculate on the possibilities of inculpability and last-second perfect contrition for the vast countless myriads of persons all over the world ? That seems to me to be a thought which people who teach this error will need to welcome as “reasonable”, if they want the attribution of “reasonable”. But this is not reasonable. We need not look further than what we read recorded in the New Testament concerning the Apostle Judas. Our Lord says of him, “The Son of Man indeed goes just as it is written of Him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.” (Matt 26:24). Better that he had not been born? Complete non-existence can only be preferable for someone whose existence will endure forever in the worst possible conditions. If Judas is predestined to glory and everlasting life, then his latter state makes all the more worth his being born. Better to have not been born means it would have been better of if he never existed, since his eternal estate will be one of abject misery.

Is there a millimeter space of possibility that there is a different meaning? The speculative theologians since liberalism took over biblical scholarship will always manage to find an “…well, its possible”, but they, I trust, will never gain the force of a persuasive argument in this matter. This method of the modernistic thought is to approach the most fundamental question of mankind and his relationship to evil, corruption, and sin with a few instruments which grease the interior disposition so that, in all likelihood, culpability is far less than what may seem. I call it the pobrecito (spanish for, “You poor thing”) mentality, which makes man the sinner be man the victim. By driving a wedge between the objective contravention of God’s will and the subjective capacities which are sufficiently aware of it , the modernists have opened a whole new field of pastoral science which allows for the speculative non-judgmentalism of our day. We might call it greasy grace, to borrow from Bonhoeffer, or infantile morality. Whatever you call it, the raw logic and thinking is quite fine, and checks out. But it lacks total common sense, and self-evident truths. For example, I could try and argue that the whole world, due to climate stress, poverty, economic hardship, depression, psychological illnesses, ungodly leaders, etc,etc is probably only within the “venial sin” boundary, and thus, theoretically heaven-bound, and given the oft lauded intricacies of the subjective conditions which make a sin “mortal” or “deadly”, my reasoning will check out just fine. But again, it lacks what any child would know just by thinking. Thankfully, we don’t see Christ or the Apostles driving with these insane hesitations to assert evil when it is real. Even our Lord, when he said, “cast not your pearls before swine”, indicated you could judge swine from the godly. This new pastoral science is what has stood behind many of the new policies which are finding wide acceptance in the Roman Catholic Church today, such as that of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, and the recent German proposal of intercommunion with Protestants. I don’t trust we are near making a U-turn from this any time soon. Perhaps, when God delivers us from the elderly Elite in the Church who still have strong attraction to this, we might see a new generation of true intellectuals who will be mistaken for a St. John the Baptist risen from the dead, like our Lord was so mistaken. The only reason he was mistaken for this was because He preached the dreadful day of judgment and the necessity of conversion or all men, because they were sinners who needed to be forgiven and pardoned. Or, even more so, mistaken for being Jeremiah, as our Lord was, since he was also a doomsday preacher. May God raise up fire-breathing prophets so that they can light up the world with truth, and die deaths conformable to our Lord!