88 Apokatastasis: Four Meditationsent courses of action, trying to decide precisely what he is will-
ing to lose at the tables. My concern is the coherence of theo-
logical language in light of the logically indispensable doctrine
of creatio ex nihilo. The golden thread of analogy can stretch
across as vast an apophatic abyss as the modal disjunction be-
tween infinite and finite or the ontological disproportion be-
tween absolute and contingent can open before us; but it can-
not span a total antithesis. When we use words like "good,"
"just," "love" to name God, not as if they are mysteriously
greater in meaning than when predicated of creatures, but in-
stead as if they bear transparently opposite meanings, then we
are saying nothing. And, again, the contagion of this equivo-
city necessarily consumes theology entirely.
IV
Of course, theological language is determined by scripture. I
shall touch upon a number (though not all) of the New Testa-
ment's most famously universalist verses in a moment, in my
Second Meditation, and especially upon those that clearly as-
sert a strict equivalence between what is lost in Adam and what
is saved in Christ. I shall simply observe at this point how odd
it is that for at least fifteen centuries such passages have been
all but lost behind a veil as thin as the one that can be woven
from those three or four deeply ambiguous verses that seem
(and only seem) to threaten eternal torments for the wicked.
But that is as may be. Every good New Testament scholar is
well aware of the obscurities that throng every attempt to re-
construct the eschatological vision described in Jesus's teach-
ings or in the other books of the New Testament canon. And,
anyway, plucking individual verses like posies here and there
from the text is no way to gain a proper view of the entire