Love at arms’ length: reconciliationism and its tentative future

In a string of articles, over the years, Shawn Bawulski has propagated a palatable via media between full-fledged apokatastasis and a traditionalist doctrine of hell. Though not original to Bawulski, reconciliationism, in the eyes of many, offers a more faithful and effective synthesis of varied Christian eschatological commitments. Despite reconciliationism’s initial comparative aesthetic and moral superiority vis-à-vis numerous alternative eschatological models, it flounders amidst a quagmire of theological impediments. To that end, this paper examines some of reconciliationism’s shortcomings, particularly relating to peculiar conceptions of concupiscence and everlasting ennui.