Thoughts on Decreation

Paul Griffiths on eschatology

I have been asked on more than one occasion since the appearance of That All Shall Be Saved whether I have any thoughts on Paul Griffiths’s strange and brilliant eschatological treatise Decreation. As it happens, I attended a small colloquium on the book when it first appeared some years ago, convoked at Mundelein Seminary by Matthew Levering, where I delivered a critical review of certain of its claims. As a rule, disagreements are more interesting than agreements, and on eschatological matters in particular the places where Paul and I concur are fairly easy to guess and are more or less banal in their obviousness; it is where we differ that, it seems to me, all the interesting conversations are to be had.

In any event, I have rescued my remarks from that colloquium and present them here.