“Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son, and Spirit set their love upon us and planned for us to share and know and experience the trinitarian life itself”

From all eternity, God is not alone and solitary, but lives as Father, Son, and Spirit in a rich and glorious fellowship of utter oneness. There is no emptiness in this circle, no depression or fear or insecurity. The trinitarian life is a great dance of unchained communion and intimacy, fired by passionate, self-giving, other-centered love and mutual delight. This life is unique, and it is good and right. It is full of music and joy, blessedness and peace. And this love, giving rise to such togetherness and fellowship and oneness, is the womb of the universe and of humanity within it.

The stunning truth is that this triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the trinitarian life with others. . . . This is the one, eternal, and abiding reason for the creation of the world and of human life. There is no other God, no other will of God, no second plan, no hidden agenda for human beings. Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son, and Spirit set their love upon us and planned for us to share and know and experience the trinitarian life itself. To this end the cosmos was called into being, the human race was fashioned, and Adam and Eve were given a place in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, in and through whom the dream of our adoption would be accomplished.

Before Creation, it was decided that the Son would cross every chasm between the triune God and humanity and establish a real and abiding union with us. Jesus was predestined to be the mediator, the One in and through whom the very life of the triune God would enter human existence, and human existence would be lifted up to share in the trinitarian life.

When Adam and Eve rebelled, ushering chaos and misery into God’s creation, the Father, Son, and Spirit did not abandon their dream, but wonderfully incorporated our darkness and sin into the tapestry of the coming Incarnation. As the Father’s Son became human, as he submitted himself to bear our anger and bizarre blindness, and as he gave himself to suffer a murderous death at our hands, he established a real and abiding relationship with fallen humanity at our very worst—and he brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. It was in Jesus himself, and in his death at our bitter hands, that the trinitarian life of God pitched its tent in our hell on earth, thereby uniting all that the Father, Son, and Spirit share with all that we are in our brokenness, shame, and sin, thus adopting us into their circle of fellowship.

In the life and death of Jesus, the Holy Spirit made his way into human pain and blindness. Inside our broken inner worlds, the Spirit works to reveal Jesus in us so that we can meet Jesus himself in our own sin and shame, begin to see what Jesus sees, and know his Father with him. The Holy Spirit discloses Jesus to us so that we can know and experience Jesus’ own relationship with his Father, and be free to live in the Father’s embrace with Jesus. As the Spirit works, we are summoned to take sides with Jesus against our own darkness and prejudice, and take the “incremental” steps of trust and change. As we do so, Jesus’ own anointing with the Spirit—his own fellowship with his Father, his own unearthly assurance, his own freedom and joy and power in the Spirit—begins to express itself in us, not diminishing our own uniqueness as persons but augmenting and freeing it to be expressed in our relationship with the Father, in our relationships with one another, and indeed with all creation, until the whole cosmos is a living sacrament of the great dance of the triune God.

C. Baxter Kruger

Once Loved Always Loved: Chapter Three

“Does God Desire All Men to be Saved?” The title pretty much tells us what chapter three of Once Loved Always Loved is about and for whom it is written. Do you need a hint? Our author, Andrew Hronich, was once a committed five point Calvinist, confessing the five doctrinal affirmations formulated by the Synod of Dort in 1618-1619:

• Total depravity
• Unconditional election
• Limited atonement
• Irresistible grace
• Perseverance of the saints

These five points (TULIP) are often seen as the purest form of Calvinism, but as scholars have pointed out, many Calvinists have not affirmed limited atonement, advocating instead a position termed hypothetical universalism. Oliver Crisp offers a succinct description:

Christ offers himself for all humanity with respect to the sufficiency of his work but for the elect alone with regard to its efficacy, because he brought about salvation only for the predestined.¹

Hence we may speak of five point Calvinism and four point Calvinism. Hronich focuses his critical attention on the former, and does not mention the latter. I wouldn’t think much if anything hangs on this, but I would have liked to have read his thoughts on hypothetical universalism.

The Dortian five points cannot be discussed without at least mentioning the views against which they were formulated to refute, summarized in the five articles of the 1610 Remonstrance:

• Conditional election
• Universal efficacy of Christ’s atonement
• Total depravity
• Resistibility of grace
• Conditional preservation of the saints

These five doctrinal affirmations characterize the tradition known as Arminianism.² While the Calvinist–Arminian debate is not relevant to this book review, we may note that all universalists are “Arminian” on one decisive point: the universal efficacy of Christ’s atoning work—hence the significance of the title of this chapter.

When God calls a five point Calvinist into the greater hope, I suspect that the doctrine of limited atonement will almost always be the initial battle ground. Why? Because limited atonement is clearly the weakest plank in the Calvinist position, requiring gross misinterpretation of Scripture, rejection of the consensual view of the Church Fathers on the universal extent of the atonement, and suppression of conscience. Most importantly, it denies the catholic Christian vision of the Holy Trinity as absolute love.³

If I believe anything it is this: the absolute, infinite, and unconditional love of the Holy Trinity, revealed in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, embraces all mankind, without exception. And because it is true and perfect love, it intends the salvation of every person. God wills our ultimate good; and that ultimate good is nothing less than eternal communion in the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Dortian claim, therefore, that Christ died only for the elect and not for the entirety of humanity can only be anathematized in the clearest and most direct terms. If true, there would be no gospel to proclaim.

Because of my dogmatic rejection of classical Calvinism, I was almost tempted to skip this chapter, assuming that it would be of little interest to me. And to a large extent that is true. But I decided to read on because I knew that it must be personally important to Hronich and was curious to discover which arguments he finds most cogent. It is no easy matter to reject a religious and theological confession to which one was once wholeheartedly committed; even harder is to abandon the community that lives, prays, and teaches that confession.

Does God desire all men to be saved? The Calvinist utters a decided no to the question. The no is mandated by unconditional election: the Father eternally and unconditionally elects those specific individuals whom he wills to save. If God desired the salvation of all, he would have willed the salvation of all; but he only wills the salvation of some. For this reason, the fathers of Dort reasoned that the atoning death of Christ is divinely intended only for the elect:

For this was the sovereign counsel, and most gracious will and purpose of God the Father, that the quickening and saving efficacy of the most precious death of His Son should extend to all the elect, for bestowing upon them alone the gift of justifying faith, thereby to bring them infallibly to salvation: that is, it was the will of God, that Christ by the blood of the cross, whereby He confirmed the new covenant, should effectually redeem out of every people, tribe, nation, and language, all those, and those only, who were from eternity chosen to salvation and given to Him by the Father.⁴

What, after all, would be the point in saying that Jesus died for all when he only wills the salvation of the elect? That seems confusing. Moreover, if Christ’s death on the cross is a sufficient sacrifice for the sins of all, then this would seem to logically imply that all will be saved, but all Calvinists would disagree with that conclusion. Needless to say, Reformed theologians have spent much ink reflecting on these matters.

A vitally important question immediately rises: If God’s salvific will is restricted to the elect, and if Christ’s work of atonement is efficacious only for them, is it meaningful to say that God loves everyone? The 17th century English Calvinist John Owen did not think so:

We deny that all mankind are the object of that love of God which moved him to send his Son to die; God having ‘made some for the day of evil’ (Prov. 16:4); ‘hated them before they were born‘ (Rom. 9:11, 13); ‘before of old ordained them to condemnation’ (Jude 4); being ‘fitted to destruction’ (Rom. 9:22); ‘made to be taken and destroyed’ (II Pet. 2:12); ‘appointed to wrath’ (I Thess. 5:9); to ‘go to their own place’ (Acts 1:25).⁵

Is love still love if it does not will the ultimate and final good of the beloved?

Perhaps this sounds too abstract. Let’s make it practical. You are a 5 point Calvinist evangelist hoping to convert to Christ a group of unbaptized unbelievers. Would you be speaking truthfully if you were to say to them: “God loves you, each of you, all of you. He loves you so much he died on the cross for you!”? I think the answer is no. At best you are speaking equivocally. You know that you do not intend “love” to mean “God wills your ultimate good,” but your hearers don’t know that, so perhaps you are technically not guilty of false advertising. Even so, your statement is misleading. Quoting David L. Allen, Hronich utters his protest: “How can God be said to love someone in the gospel offer when he has not provided a means for their salvation via an atonement?”⁶

Hronich shares the following anecdote to illustrate the confusion and pastoral damage equivocity can cause:

Imagine you have a child whom you entrust to me at my camp, and at the camp, all the children come down with a fatal disease. Fortunately, I manage to obtain enough medical pills to restore all the children to full health. Yet, I only administer the pills to a small number of my campers, while withholding the additional pills from the rest of the campers. All the while, I sit at the bedsides of those campers from whom I have withheld the medicine that would have cured them and speak words of “kindness” and “encouragement” over them, telling them that I will remain at their side, and that I’m here for them! What would be your reaction if you discovered that I had given the pills to other children but not your own? What would you think of me? Would you care to listen to me babble on about how I really loved your son, how I stayed up long nights next to his bedside comforting him? Would you consider this love?⁷

Does anything change if the Calvinist is a hypothetical universalist who believes that on the cross Jesus offered a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the world? Probably not. Yes, he is able to truthfully proclaim: “Jesus died for your sins. Believe on him and you will be saved.” But there is more to the story. If the Calvinist were to be completely honest, he would also have to confess to his auditors that that he does not know if any of them have been elected go glory, and if they haven’t, then God will not be providing them the grace to respond in faith to his offer of salvation. To put it in the simplest terms, the Calvinist should tell his audience that he does not know if God really and truly loves them. Perhaps he does, perhaps not. Jerry Walls and  Joseph Dongell state the dilemma in which all Calvinists find themselves:

Consider the love of God displayed in offering the gospel to the non-elect—persons who God knows can’t will to accept the offer without the very electing love he has chosen to withhold from them. Apart from electing love, the offer of the gospel only serves as an occasion for condemnation, since sinners who aren’t elect will inevitably reject it and thereby add to their record of disobedience. All of this makes it painfully clear that the non-elect are not loved in the only way that can promote their ultimate well-being. God has not chosen to give them the only thing that can possibly provide true flourishing and fulfillment. . . .

In short, [the Calvinist] should frankly admit to the unconverted that he doesn’t know whether or not God loves them in the crucial sense that is absolutely necessary for them to experience eternal joy and flourishing. God may only love them in the sense that he provides them with earthly benefits and in the sense that he makes them an offer that in their fallen condition they can’t begin to appreciate. When God’s love to the world is reduced to this, it is difficult to see how it can be relished as the astounding good news Christians believe it is.⁸

The problem lies with particular predestination. If God elects some but not all to salvation in his Kingdom, then a terrible doubt is introduced into the gospel itself. Neither preacher nor auditor can know whether the good news of Jesus Christ truly intends them. You’re damned if you do; damned if you don’t.

But what if Calvinists should become convinced of the universal intent of God’s love? If this should happen, they will find themselves trapped in the Calvinist Conundrum:

1. God truly loves all persons.
2. Truly to love someone is to desire their well-being and to promote their true flourishing as much as you properly can.
3. The well-being and true flourishing of all persons is to be found in a right relationship with God, a saving relationship in which we love and obey him.
4. God could determine all persons freely to accept a right relationship with himself and be saved.
5. Therefore, all will be saved.

Hronich quotes the American Calvinist B. B. Warfield to similar effect. If only the Scriptures were not clear on eternal damnation, Calvinists could easily embrace the greater hope, all the while maintaining their fundamental convictions:

So far as the principles of sovereignty and particularism are concerned, there is no reason why a Calvinist might not be a universalist in the most express meaning of that term, holding that each and every human soul shall be saved; and in point of fact some Calvinists (forgetful of the Scripture here) have been universalists in this most express meaning of the term.⁹

“I thus beseech the better counsel of my Reformed brothers and sisters,” Hronich writes, “and hold out apokatastasis as the complement of Reformed doctrine, maintaining all the essential elements, whilst staying true to the gospel.”¹⁰

 

Footnotes

[1] Oliver Crisp, Deviant Calvinism (2014), 177.

[2] See Roger Olson, Arminian Theology (2006), 30-39.

[3] “If we are true to the New Testament we must assert that the Father loves all his creatures, Christ died for all, but none can come to the Father except the Spirit draw him. But to say it is a ‘mystery’ does not mean we abandon any attempt to probe this mystery, and see what light the Bible and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ throw on the mystery. Theology is faith seeking understanding. What kind of ‘logic’ controls any answers we seek to give? It is a mistake, I believe, to interpret the relation between the headship of Christ over all as Mediator, and the effectual calling of the Spirit in terms of an Aristotelian dichotomy between ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’. . . It is precisely this kind of Aristotelian logic which led the later Calvinists like John Owen to formulate the doctrine of a ‘limited atonement’. The argument is that if Christ died for all men, and all are not saved, then Christ died in vain—and a priori, because God always infallibly achieves his purposes, this is unthinkable. Where does this same argument lead us when we apply it to the doctrine of God, as John Owen and Jonathan Edwards did? On these grounds they argued that justice is the essential attribute of God, but his love is arbitrary. In his classical defence of the doctrine of a limited atonement, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, in Book IV John Owen examines the many texts in which the word ‘all’ appears, saying that Christ died ‘for all’, and argues that ‘all’ means ‘all the elect’. For example, when he turns to John 3:16, he says ‘By the “world”, we understand the elect of God only . . .’ What then about ‘God so loved . . .’? Owen argues that if God loves all, and all are not saved, then he loves them in vain. Therefore he does not love all! If he did, this would imply imperfection in God. ‘Nothing that includes any imperfection is to be assigned to Almighty God’. In terms of this ‘logic’ he argues love is not God’s nature. There is no ‘natural affection and propensity in God to the good of his creatures’. ‘By love is meant an act of his will (where we conceive his love to be seated . . . )’. God’s love is thus assigned to his will to save the elect only. It seems to me that this is a flagrant case where a kind of logic leads us to run in the face of the plain teaching of the Bible that God is Agape (pure love) in his innermost being, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and what he is in his innermost being, he is in all his works and ways.” James B. Torrance, “The Incarnation and ‘Limited Atonement’,” The Evangelical Quarterly, 55 (1983): 84-85.

[4] Canons of Dort II.13.

[5] John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, II.4.227.

[6] David L. Allen, The Extent of the Atonement (2016), 779; quoted by Andrew Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved (2023), 102. Yet as Allen describes at length, hypothetical universalists appeal to the universal efficacy of the cross as the ground for proclaiming the gospel to all sinners.

[7] Hronich, 98.

[8] Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist (2004), 191.

[9] Quoted by Hronich, 323.

[10] Ibid, 129.

Once Loved Always Loved: Chapter Two

“It is evident,” writes Andrew Hronich, “that the traditional depiction of hell as a divinely imposed retribution has been largely supplanted by that of a freely embraced condition.”¹ Absolutely right! This important theological change has happened so quietly, so quickly, so uncontroversially that one might be excused for believing that the free-will model of hell can be traced back to Jesus and his Apostles. We have forgotten that in the Western Church retributive punishment was long the doctrinal point of everlasting perdition, going back at least to the North African apologist Tertullian. In the first decade of the third century, commenting on Matt 10:28, he writes:

But [Christ] also teaches us, that He is rather to be feared, who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell, that is, the Lord alone; not those which kill the body, but are not able to hurt the soul, that is to say, all human powers. . . . whence we learn that the resurrection of the dead is a resurrection of the flesh; for unless it were raised again, it would be impossible for the flesh to be killed in hell. . . . If, therefore, any one shall violently suppose that the destruction of the soul and the flesh in hell amounts to a final annihilation of the two substances, and not to their penal treatment (as if they were to be consumed, not punished), let him recollect that the fire of hell is eternal—expressly announced as an everlasting penalty.²

And later in the third century, Tertullian’s fellow North African, St Cyprian of Carthage, wrote to Demetrianus, the Roman Proconsul of Africa, and rebuked him for his violent anti-Christian polemic:

When the day of judgment shall come, what joy of believers, what sorrow of unbelievers; that they should have been unwilling to believe here, and now that they should be unable to return that they might believe! An ever-burning Gehenna will burn up the condemned, and a punishment devouring with living flames; nor will there be any source whence at any time they may have either respite or end to their torments. Souls with their bodies will be reserved in infinite tortures for suffering.³

The doctrine of eternal damnation became the doctrinal position of the churches in North Africa and eventually in the whole of Latin Christianity, largely due to the influential writings of St Augustine of Hippo. And so it remained for a millennium and a half.

But in the 19th century a new construal of hell, commonly termed the free-will model, emerged, eventually becoming the majority position in much of Protestantism and finally in the Roman Catholic Church. I do not know who in Western theology first proposed the free-will model; but we can safely say that it was C. S. Lewis who popularized it: “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” Each human being freely chooses their eternal destiny, and God has committed himself to honoring their choice. Love invites communion; it never coerces. The damned, therefore, are responsible for their own suffering. The free-will model also neatly solves the conflict between divine mercy and justice inherent to the punitive model. It was as if the Church sighed in great relief: “Thank God! We no longer need believe in divine retribution and hellfire . . . and we can still keep preaching hell!” Two questions immediately come to mind:

• Does the Church’s adoption of the free-will model represent a development of the older doctrine of hell or the invention of a new doctrine?⁴
• Does the free-will model actually eliminate the eliminate the retributive dimension of hell, or does it simply hide it?

Chapter two of Once Loved Always Loved is devoted to an analysis of the self-damnation proposal and the libertarian understanding of freedom that underwrites it.

Hronich summarizes contemporary philosophical discussion of libertarian freedom in the first eight sections, noting various criticisms and solutions that have been offered. He then presents his preferred formulation: rational freedom. Rational freedom, he explains, is “the ability of the moral agent to deliberate amongst different courses of action, which is only made possible by a transcendental final cause or horizon towards which all rational creatures are determined.”⁵ Human beings are teleologically constituted: they are created with an innate orientation to the true, the good, and the beautiful; in other words, they naturally desire communion with God as the fulfillment of their being. “The creature is not an unmoved mover who posits for itself its own ends; rather, its ends are naturally fulfilled in union with God.”⁶ Human beings may not be conscious of their transcendental ordering to God, but unless they are suffering from an addiction or compulsive disorder, they always act in ways to advance what they rightly or wrongly believe will contribute to their happiness. And so Hronich concludes that a free definitive choice against God is ultimately impossible:

If what I have stated is true, then it is true that human beings are naturally ordered towards union with God. God, as the telos and end of human choices, is necessary in order for creatures to act freely, for in order for our choices to be free, they must have for themselves ends (or purposes); otherwise, they would simply be a brute event, indistinguishable from the tremors of an earthquake. When one chooses, therefore, one chooses this or that dependent upon which one believes will better satisfy their natural longings. “What allows one to choose between different possible objects of rational volition is an intellectual orientation toward some rational index of ends that are desirable in and of themselves” [David B. Hart]. In other words, there must be a why, a sufficient reason for making a decision, for any choice to be construed as free. Thus, I do not deny that a creature can temporarily reject God, but I unequivocally affirm that it is metaphysically impossible for a creature to do so finally. To have rejected God is to never have known Him, for if one truly knew God, one would come to realize God as the end that satisfies all the creature’s deepest longings. Thus, with perfect knowledge and perfect freedom, an eternal hell is rendered an impossibility, for it rests on a fictional narrative.⁷

If our happiness lies in loving communion with our Creator, then rejection of him can only be explained by ignorance, disordered desires, psychopathy, and other inhibiting factors. “Sheer choice in and of itself does not equate true freedom,” Hronich elaborates. “Rather, true freedom is not simply the ability to choose; it is when the creature has chosen well, when it is unhindered in its pursuit of the divine.”⁸ Free action presupposes the fulfillment of the relevant conditions of sound judgment. If a person dying of thirst were to find a spring of fresh water and yet refuse to drink, would we consider that refusal sane? Of course not. We would assume that some factor or power is preventing them from acting in their best interests. Perhaps they are convinced that the spring is a mirage. Perhaps their restraint is based on false information that the spring is poisoned. But whatever the reason, their freedom has been compromised and needs to be restored. The same logic applies to the possibility of self-damnation. A choice to embrace the eternal miseries of hell is illogical and therefore unfree; it denies the ultimate happiness for which rational beings are created. If God by his grace were to remove the salvation-inhibiting conditions, then the confused person would necessarily—and freely—choose eternal happiness. The free-will model of perdition is therefore fatally flawed. It presupposes a construal of personal liberty that allows the choosing of absurd and irreparably destructive alternatives.

Jerry Walls has advanced a strong objection to the universalist invocation of rational freedom: the damned believe that definitive separation from the God of love is what they truly want. The Satan of Paradise Lost serves as the exemplar of the libertarian embrace of hell:

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

So the damned believe: whatever suffering and privation may follow from one’s act of self-damnation is outweighed by the happiness and satisfaction derived from autonomous existence. “Those who prefer hell to heaven,” Walls writes, “have convinced themselves that it is better. In their desire to justify their choice of evil, they have persuaded them­selves that whatever satisfaction they experience from evil is superior to the joy which God offers. At the very least, they see some advantage to be gained in the choice of evil.”⁹

As it stands, is this a plausible claim? Only, I would think, if we have determined in advance that hell is eternally populated and are struggling to understand how the lost could have freely chosen this doom. “Ahh,” we think to ourselves, “they have deceived themselves into believing that hell offers them greater possibilities for happiness than heaven does.” Self-deception, as Walls explains, is not a matter of lacking information; it is a culpable suppression of what we already know combined with an equally culpable refusal to act upon it. Walls assumes that self-deception must also be operative in hell, thus enabling the delusion of infernal well-being, however threadbare and minimal. But is the assumption sound?

The flaw in Walls’s reasoning becomes apparent upon a little more thought. It’s not as if at the final judgment we are given a choice between living forever in a lovely chalet in Aspen, Colorado, or a spacious villa in the French Riviera. All teloi are not equal. The eschatolog­ical choice is a stark either/or—ecstatic bliss with Jesus Christ or interminable torment in the outer darkness. There is no in-between, no middle ground between light and darkness, no mixing of heavenly beatitude and infernal wretchedness. Hell is the irrevocable loss of the beatific vision, and it is this loss that makes hell hell and constitutes its true suffering (poena damni):

The poena damni, or pain of loss, consists in the loss of the beatific vision and in so complete a separation of all the powers of the soul from God that it cannot find in Him even the least peace and rest. It is accompanied by the loss of all supernatural gifts, e.g. the loss of faith. The characters impressed by the sacraments alone remain to the greater confusion of the bearer. The pain of loss is not the mere absence of superior bliss, but it is also a most intense positive pain. The utter void of the soul made for the enjoyment of infinite truth and infinite goodness causes the reprobate immeasurable anguish. Their consciousness that God, on Whom they entirely depend, is their enemy forever is overwhelming. Their consciousness of having by their own deliberate folly forfeited the highest blessings for transitory and delusive pleasures humiliates and depresses them beyond measure. The desire for happiness inherent in their very nature, wholly unsatisfied and no longer able to find any compensation for the loss of God in delusive pleasure, renders them utterly miserable. Moreover, they are well aware that God is infinitely happy, and hence their hatred and their impotent desire to injure Him fills them with extreme bitterness. And the same is true with regard to their hatred of all the friends of God who enjoy the bliss of heaven. The pain of loss is the very core of eternal punishment.¹⁰

In hell not even a modicum of happiness is possible. To choose final separation from God is to choose an intensity of misery that can never be mistaken for pleasure or satisfaction. Infernal suffering shatters all our delusions. Self-deception is necessarily unsustainable; otherwise hell wouldn’t be hell.

Let us now posit the possibility of post-mortem repentance: every person in hell is given infinite opportunities to repent of their sins and cry out to the all-merciful Savior for their salvation. The majority Christian view denies this possibility, of course, but it is difficult to see why the God of absolute love would arbitrarily determine death as the deadline for repentance. Assuming the hypothesis, is it plausible to think that people, no matter how wicked and corrupt, can everlastingly deceive themselves into believing that they are content in their infernal state, despite their alienation from the creaturely goods for which they yearn and despite the convincing power of their suffering? As Hronich observes: “It may be true for a time that a person might be led to falsely believe that separation from God is more desirable than union with Him, but until experiencing the effects of actual separation, they are perfectly oblivious of what it is they are choosing.”¹¹ Only the direct experience of infernal misery can bring about the knowledge necessary for an informed and free decision, yet it is this very knowledge that will inevitably bring the damned to their senses and encourage them, like the prodigal son, to begin the journey home to their Father. “Those who yet claim that they may continue to choose separation must face the quandary of the damned possessing no strong motive for choosing damnation whereas there is a very strong motive for not choosing it.”¹²

In the end, Hronich avers, a decision to decisively and definitively separate oneself from the absolute Good is incoherent. Only those enslaved by ignorance, delusion, psychological illness, and disordered desires could entertain, and make, such an incomprehensible and self-destructive choice; yet precisely these conditions disqualify them from freely making it. The choice model of damnation is thus refuted. It rests upon a false understanding of freedom:

In short, rational freedom stipulates that true freedom necessitates true knowledge and true sanity of mind to be qualified as such. In the absence of either of these, apart from true knowledge and true sanity of mind, one is not wholly free. In other words: a decision to reject God forever cannot be both free and fully informed. God as supremely loving wills for us that which satisfies our deepest yearnings, but so long as we ‘are mired in ambiguity and subject to ignorance, illusion, and deception, we will no doubt misjudge our real wants and yearnings repeatedly and especially the means of satisfying them’ [Thomas Talbott]. Yet, God, being supremely wise and supremely powerful, will by no means misjudge these affairs but will instead know how to correct our misgivings in a way that does not interfere or violate our freedom to act upon such misgivings.¹³

Yet there is another card for the defenders of self-damnation to play: perhaps rational beings are capable of transforming themselves into beings who choose evil for the sake of evil. Hronich calls this the “hard-heartedness” objection. Let us imagine the damned as those who, through a lifetime of selfishness, iniquity and sin, have become the kind of persons who can only choose evil, not just because of the perverse pleasure they might derive from their wicked acts but because that is who they now are. “A person who has chosen evil decisively,” Walls stipulates, “would be a person who consistently wanted evil at all levels of desire.”¹⁴ For all intents and purposes, the reprobate are irredeemably evil. They no more deserve our pity and concern than do the orcs in Mordor.¹⁵

Drawing on Sören Kierkegaard, Walls directs us to a commonly recognized feature of human life: the good and evil that we do shapes us into either good or evil persons. We call this character formation. Those who acquire a virtuous character have developed a propensity toward virtuous action; those who have acquired an evil character have developed a propensity toward wicked and immoral action. It is thus possible for a person to become so inhabited by sin that it becomes a power within him, possessing him, directing him. Thus Kierkegaard:

The sinner on the other hand is so thoroughly in the power of sin that he has no conception of its totalitarian character, or that he is in the byway of perdition. He takes into account only each individual new sin by which he acquires new headway onward along the path of perdition, just as if the previous instant he were not going with the speed of the previous sins along that same path. So natural has sin become to him, or sin has so become his second nature, that he finds the daily continuance quite a matter of course, and it is only when by a new sin he acquires as it were new headway that for an instant he is made aware. By perdition he is blinded to the fact that his life, instead of possessing the essential continuity of the eternal by being before God in faith, has the continuity of sin.¹⁶

The choosing of evil has so conditioned the damned that it has become the decisive principle of their existence. Conflicts between first- and second-order desires have been resolved and personal incorrigibility established. “At this point,” writes Walls, “evil is present through and through a personality, and there is no place left for good even to get a foothold. It never ‘bottoms out’ so to speak, and thus there is little, if any, prospect for a return to good.”¹⁷ If one is an advocate of the free-will model of perdition, I think one has to say something along the lines suggested by Kierkegaard and Walls, lest one end up shifting responsibility for the infernal suffering of the damned back upon God. It is critical to provide a compelling reason both for their initial choice to definitively reject God and for their everlasting continuance in their rejection. The free-will model depends upon it.

But note the absence of genuine freedom in hell. Not only is the freedom of the damned diminished; it is extinguished. Whatever degree of libertarian freedom they may have once possessed is now lost. The damned are incapable of choosing otherwise, for they lack the desire and power to be other than what they have become and now are. Their decisions and actions are determined by their acquired evil nature. One would think that this consideration, in itself, would refute the free will model of perdition; but its defenders claim that it is sufficient that the actions preceding the formation of the evil character be libertarianly free. The damned may no longer be capable of willing communion with God, but they are nonetheless morally responsible for their incapacity.¹⁸ They have, we may crassly put it, become orcs. Orcs never repent of their wickedness. They cannot be healed of their malice. They cannot be delivered from their hatred and violence. They cannot be converted to the Good. They can only be slain. As the Elvish proverb goes: “The only good orc is a dead orc.”¹⁹

But is this picture of the hard-hearted person eternally rejecting God’s offer of forgiveness and everlasting bliss plausible, particularly in light of their interminable suffering? “We generally associate hard-heartedness with an individual’s callous, dispassionate disposition towards others,” remarks Hronich, “but it is another thing entirely to speak of their hard-heartedness in relation to their own state.”²⁰ Think of an alcoholic or drug addict. Are they oblivious to the pain of their condition? I assure you they are not. And sometimes, by the grace of God and with the help of family and friends, they can reach an existential point where they can acknowledge their addiction and seek sobriety. Yet the hard-heartedness objection requires the damned to be “be unmoved by their own plight: they must eternally resist changing their behavior in spite of its radically harmful effects to themselves.”²¹ Is this credible? I think not. And the credibility diminishes to zero when we remember these four fundamental truths:

• God is absolute love.
• God is omnipotent.
• God has made us with an unquenchable thirst for union with him.
• God never ceases to search for and restore the lost.

The two common objections raised by the supporters of the free-will model of damnation—self-deception and hard-heartedness—lose their persuasiveness when considered in light of these truths. Do we really have the power to eternally lock God out of our hearts and souls? Are our wills so omnipotent and God’s grace so impotent? Hronich concludes:

If it is that hell’s doors are “locked from the inside,” then there is every reason to believe that it shall eventually be left vacant. No rational creature can continue to elect unremitting anguish for itself with no strong motive for doing so. Thus, both the rational and libertarian models of freedom can reasonably affirm that in the end, God will succeed in reconciling all to Himself.²²

Perhaps we just need to remind ourselves that our freedom is a gift of our Father and always operates within his divine providence. We may abuse our freedom in terrible, horrible ways. Even so, we cannot wander so far that he cannot restore us to his love, even if it should take eons and eons.

Christ is risen and hell is emptied!

Footnotes

[1] Andrew Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved [2023], 50.

[2] Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 35.

[3] Cyprian, An Address to Demetrianus 24.

[4] See “How Hot is Hellfire? The Retributive and Choice Models of Hell.”

[5] Hronich, 62.

[6] Ibid., 63.

[7] Ibid., 64.

[8] Ibid., 66.

[9] Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (1992), 129.

[10] J. Hontheim, “Hell,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910). Free-will perditionists are loathe to acknowledge the severity of the loss of the beatific vision, lest God’s goodness be called into question. Walls even speaks of the damned as being “almost happy” (Walls, 126).

It should be noted that modern Eastern Orthodoxy does not think of think of hell as privation of the beatific vision; rather, the damned are fully exposed to the uncreated Light and this is their torment. See George Metallinos, “Paradise and Hell According to Orthodox Tradition.” Also see “Damnation and the Phantasmagoric Effervescence of Passion.”

[11] Hronich, 71.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 69-70.

[14] Walls, 121; quoted by Hronich, 76. We may wonder whether the notion of choosing evil for the sake of evil is coherent. St Thomas Aquinas doesn’t think so.

[15] This is a controversial and perhaps unChristian statement, I know. Tolkien struggled for decades with the moral status of the orcs. Yet the stories speak clearly enough: nobody pities the orcs and nobody regrets killing them. Now compare the state of the damned in the writings of C. S. Lewis. Are they still human or only remains of what once was? And if the latter, do they have a moral status, or are they only detritus to be thrown out with the eschatological trash? See “Taking the Bus to Hell.”

[16] Sören Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, chap. 2; quoted partly by Walls, 120.

[17] Walls, 120. “Nevertheless it is a possibility that a man will let himself be so mastered by his desires that he will lose all ability to resist them. It is the extreme case of what we have all too often seen: people increasingly mastered by desires, so that they lose some of their ability to resist them. The less we impose our order on our desires, the more they impose their order on us. We may describe a man in this situation of having lost his capacity to overrule his desires as having “lost his soul.” Such a man is a prisoner of bad desires. He can no longer choose to resist them by doing the action which he judges to be overall the best thing to do. He has no natural desires to do the actions of heaven, and he cannot choose to do them because he sees them to be of supreme worth. There is no ‘he’ left to make that choice.” Richard Swinburne, “A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell,” in The Existence and Nature of God, ed. Alfred Freddoso (1983), 49.

[18] “Perhaps, for example, the damned consistently chose to prioritize finite commodities over union with God to the point where such became a habit. However, they did not directly choose the habit; rather, the habit was a result of their continual choices.” Hronich, 81.

[19] Does the absolute love of God intend the damned? This is a fascinating question that needs to be repeatedly put to the defenders of free will damnation. What does it mean to love someone who is truly evil and beyond redemption? Does the word love even mean anything in this context? If the hard-heartedness objection defeats the universalist thesis, then annihilationism becomes an option to be seriously considered. Yes, the gift of existence is a great good, but does its goodness outweigh the great evil of irredeemable suffering and torment?

[20] Hronich, 78.

[21] Eric Reitan, “Eternally Choosing Hell,” Sophia 61 (2022): 365-382; quoted by Hronich, 78.

[22] Hronich, 88-89.

Transubstantiation: Where Does the Bread Go?

On 13 October 1551, the Council of Trent published its Decree on the Holy Eucharist. Chapter IV defines the dogma of transubstantiation:

And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which He offered under the species of bread to be truly His own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that, by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called Transubstantiation.

What does transubstantiation mean? Perhaps we should first ask: What does it not mean? To answer that question, we turn to the canons of the decree. The first two establish the boundaries for dogmatic reflection and speculation:

Canon 1. If any one denieth, that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue; let him be anathema.

Canon 2. If any one saith, that, in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist, the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and denieth that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood-the species Only of the bread and wine remaining—which conversion indeed the Catholic Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation; let him be anathema.

Canon 1 condemns symbolist construals of the real presence and eucharistic conversion; canon 2 condemns co-presence or consubstantiation construals.

What then is the positive teaching of the Tridentine decree regarding transubstantiation?  Here’s my non-RC reading: the eucharistic consecration of the bread and wine effects their transformation into the Body and Blood of Christ. This change is substantial, ontological, real. The physical qualities of the elements remain intact—they still appear to be bread and wine—yet in reality they are the risen Christ himself, personally present in his divine and human natures.

The whole substance of the bread, the dogma asserts, is changed into the substance of the Sacred Body; the whole substance of the wine is changed into the substance of the Precious Blood. What does “substance” mean in this context? The term is often popularly explained as an invisible some “thing” that exists under the phenomena, a pin-cushion into which the accidental properties of the object get stuck; but this view of substance originated with John Locke, not with Aristotle and Aquinas. Anthony Kenny explains:

To an Aristotelian, the natural meaning of the decree of Trent which states that the substance of bread and wine turns into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, is not that some part of the bread and wine turns into some part of the body and blood, but simply that the bread and wine turns into the body and blood. Following Aquinas (in 1 Cor 11:24), the Fathers of Trent used “the substance of Christ’s body” and “Christ’s body” as interchangeable terms. According to scholastic theory, substance is not an imperceptible part of a particular individual. It is not a part of an individual; it is that individual.¹

Substance, in other words, answers the question, What is it? Trent gives a direct and simple answer: the Body and Blood of Christ. The council notably avoids the scholastic term accidentia (accidents), preferring instead the more traditional word species (appearances). It was concerned to set the boundaries of orthodox belief and to assert the eucharistic change and presence, not to canonize a specific explanation of how the bread and wine become the Body and Blood. No doubt most of the council Fathers believed that St Thomas Aquinas had provided a satisfactory explanation of transubstantiation in his Summa Theologiae, but there were also others who preferred the explanations advanced by Franciscan theologians. The Council did not decide between them. Theologians were given the freedom to speculate on the eucharistic change, as long as they stayed within the boundaries of the dogma and respected its central assertions. Until the past seventy years, Catholic speculation pretty much stayed within the conceptuality and terminology set by Trent. Like all dogmas, the Tridentine definition is not the final word on the mystery of the eucharistic change—though it is for Catholics a dogmatically definitive word—and like all dogmas, it invites further reflection and clarification.

A superficial reading of Trent might lead one to believe that the council is asserting a natural change in the elements, only disguised by the continuance of the empirical properties of the bread and wine. Robert Sokolowski explains that the eucharistic change does not occur within the natural order:

The bread and wine of the Eucharist become the body and blood of the Lord, but they become specifically his resurrected and glorified body and blood. Transubstantiation should not be taken as a mere substantial change in the natural order of things. It is not as though we were to claim that a tree became a leopard but continued to look and react like a tree, or that a piece of cloth became a cat but still seemed to be cloth. I think some of the objections to Transubstantiation come from an implicit belief that such a worldly change of substance is what is being claimed. Rather, it is not simply the worldly substance of the body and blood of the Lord that are present in the Eucharist, but his glorified body and blood, which share in the eternity of the celestial Eucharist. The bread and wine are now vehicles for the presence of the eternal Christ, the eternal Son who became incarnate for us, died and rose from the dead, and is eternally present to the Father. The ontology of the Holy Trinity is part of the Church’s faith in Transubstantiation.²

Yet we wonder: Where does the bread and wine go after their transubstantiation? Michael Dummett has identified what appears to me to be a critical weakness in Thomas Aquinas’ famous formulation of the doctrine:

The theory has now rendered the connection between the consecrated elements and Christ’s Body and Blood exceedingly tenuous. Aquinas is extremely cautious in treating the question of whether the Body of Christ is in the place in which the consecrated Host is located. He does not wish to deny outright that it is in that place, for to do so would be to reject any belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist; but he is equally chary of affirming it outright. Christ’s Body may be said to be there, but it is not there after the manner of a body which occupies a space in virtue of its proper dimensions. Now anyone who adopts a ‘realistic’ interpretation of the Eucharist must tread warily in answering this particular question; but Aquinas is especially constricted by the theory he has propounded. According to that theory, the accidents of the bread and wine persist, and attach to certain regions of space, in the sense explained, as their quasi-subjects. And, as a quite separate fact, the Body and Blood of Christ are in some special sense present, though not exactly as occupying those regions of space. On this account, there is no connection between the two. The consecrated elements are, as it were, merely the discarded husk of the bread and wine earlier present, and have no more intimate connection with the Body and Blood of Christ than that. It is as if the bread and wine have stepped aside to make room for Christ’s Body and Blood, which could not otherwise be present, and in so stepping aside, have, so to speak, left their mortal remains behind. Aquinas’s words read very impressively; but, as soon as we pause to reflect upon the theory he is actually advancing, we cannot but conclude that the conception it embodies must have gone astray.³

Perhaps a Thomist can effectively rebut Dummett’s criticism (perhaps), but I would contend that once the substance of the bread is theoretically severed from its accidents, the faithful will inevitably look upon the consecrated bread and wine as creaturely disguises (“empty husks,” as Dummett puts it) for the supernatural reality “contained” within. As I argue in my essay “Eating Christ,” we need to find ways to overcome the dualism inherent to the transubstantiation doctrine.

Joseph Ratzinger proposes an attractive way forward in an essay originally published in 1978. He writes:

What has always mattered to the Church is that a real transformation takes place here. Something genuinely happens in the Eucharist. There is something new there that was not before. Knowing about a transformation is part of the most basic eucharistic faith. Therefore it cannot be the case that the Body of Christ comes to add itself to the bread, as if bread and Body were two similar things that could exist as two “substances,” in the same way, side by side. Whenever the Body of Christ, that is, the risen and bodily Christ, comes, he is greater than the bread, other, not of the same order. The transformation happens, which affects the gifts we bring by taking them up into a higher order and changes them, even if we cannot measure what happens. When material things are taken into our body as nourishment, or for that matter whenever any material becomes part of a living organism, it remains the same, and yet as part of a new whole it is itself changed. Something similar happens here. The Lord takes possession of the bread and the wine; he lifts them up, as it were, out of the setting of their normal existence into a new order; even if, from a purely physical point of view, they remain the same, they have become profoundly different.⁴

The risen Lord takes possession of the bread and wine and assimilates them into his glorified human nature. The bread and wine are thus changed in the depths of their being. They have become Christ’s Body and Blood, his sacramental embodiment in the world.

Terence Nichols has further developed Benedict’s proposal. Consider a molecule of water. By scholastic criteria, it is a substance. It enjoys an independent existence, subsisting in itself. But consider what happens when it is drunk by an animal and absorbed into the bloodstream. It is incorporated into a larger substance and now exists in relation to that whole. Lacking metaphysical independence, it no longer qualifies as a substance: it has become a “subsidiary entity.” Now apply this line of thought to the eucharistic conversion:

My proposal is that what happens in transubstantiation is analogous to the incorporation of atoms or molecules into the body. If I ingest a mineral (say calcium) or amino acids (in the form of protein), these molecules are built into my cells and become part of a larger substantial whole, my body. But they do not cease to be calcium or amino acids: if they did, they could not nourish the body. What changes is that they are no longer independent substances existing per se, in themselves, rather, they exist in another. Similarly, the bread and wine do not cease being what they are—their chemical structure and form remain the same, else they could not function as food—but they cease to be independently existing substances and become incorporated into another substance, the Body and Blood of the Lord, as subsidiary entities. Now this comparison of transubstantiation to the incorporation of minerals or protein into the body is analogous; the two situations are similar but not identical. For the Body and Blood of Christ are the glorified body and blood, not the body and blood as they existed on earth. But the analogy seems to be a strong one.

Thus it is possible, on this model, to say that the whole substance, that is, the independent substantiality of the bread and wine, is changed into the whole substance of the body and blood of Christ. But at the same time the bread does not cease being bread (or the wine wine); it ceases only to be a separate substance. Instead of existing in itself, per se, it exists in an­oth­er. . . . This, I think, satisfies the requirements of Tridentine orthodoxy.⁵

Thus reinterpreted, transubstantiation ceases to entail the destruction or replacement of the eucharistic oblations but rather their metaphysical elevation. Retaining their original physical properties, the bread and wine have been incorporated into a higher level of reality; they have become the bread of heaven and the wine of everlasting salvation, the Body and Blood of the eternal Word. The bread and wine do not hide Christ who lurks underneath them; they are Christ, given to the baptized in a sacramental mode. To describe the consecrated elements as ordinary bread and wine would therefore be a gross misdescription of what in fact now truly exists. As Herbert McCabe observes, the consecration is God’s public declaration that the usual criteria for identifying things do not apply. The consecrated elements now exist at a level of existence at which it is no longer appropriate or relevant to ask the questions “Is it bread?” or “Is it wine?”⁶ “It is not that the bread has become a new kind of thing in this world,” states McCabe: “it now belongs to a new world.”⁷

The Ratzinger–Nichols proposal avoids the philosophical conundrums posed by the scholastic renderings of transubstantiation. For one thing, it is no longer necessary to posit a nonsensical metaphysical miracle to account for the continuance of the accidents of bread and wine. By all scientific criteria, the bread and wine are bread and wine. The R–N proposal thus accords with the general Catholic principle: grace perfects nature; it does not destroy it. Yet I cannot help wondering if the notion of incorporation is the best way to approach the eschatological mystery that is the Eucharist. One day perhaps I will return to this question.

 

Footnotes

[1] Anthony Kenny, “The Use of Logical Analysis in Theology,” in Theology and the University (1964), 232.

[2] Robert Sokolowski, “The Eucharist and Transubstantiation,” Communio 24 [1997]: 870.

[3] Michael Dummett, “The Intelligibility of Eucharistic Doctrine,” in Rationality and Religious Belief (1987), 246-247.

[4] Joseph Ratzinger, “The Presence of the Lord in the Sacrament,” God is Near Us (2001), 85-86.

[5] Terrence Nichols, “Transubstantiation and Eucharistic Presence,” Pro Ecclesia, XI (Winter 2002): 70-71.

[6] Herbert McCabe, “Transubstantiation,” New Blackfriars 53 (1972): 552-553.

[7] Herbert McCabe, “Eucharistic Change,” God Still Matters (2002), 119. Also see “Eschatological Transubstantiation.”For a comparison of the views of Sergius Bulgakov and McCabe, see “Transmutation or Transubstantiation?”

This article was originally published on my old Pontifications blog (27 October 2005); now revised.

Once Loved Always Loved: Chapter One

Once Loved Always Loved is a large book (10″×7″) consisting of seven lengthy chapters totaling 355 pages. Its chapters average over 50 pages of mucho words. The book would be considerably longer if it was smaller in size. I share this otherwise trivial information because it impacts my review. In this series I hope to devote one blog article to each chapter. In order to prevent the articles from becoming tomes in themselves, I will have to give short shrift to one or more sections of each chapter or skip over them altogether, as you will soon see. Consider yourselves forewarned. 😀

If we wish to understand the final end of humanity, states Andrew Hronich, we must apprehend the significance of God’s initial act of divine creation. From out of nothing the divine Creator has freely brought the cosmos into being. He was not compelled by either internal or external forces to create. The world might not have been; God might have chosen otherwise. “Is the act of creation,” Hronich asks, “a display of the benevolence of God or of extreme malevolence?” How we answer this question will shape our interpreta­tion of God’s plan of redemption in Jesus Christ. “Our view of the Alpha will ultimately determine our view of the Omega.”¹ We begin with the beginning of the story; only thus will we understand the concluding chapter and the story as a whole. If God has freely and intentionally spoken the universe into existence (“Let there be . . . “), then it is itself theophany, a historical revelation of the Creator in movement to final consummation. But our cognitive process also works in the reverse: comprehension of the Omega necessarily informs our comprehension of the Alpha. The end discloses the eternal motivation for divine creation. “The rationale for the first cause,” explains Hronich, “is the final end that prompts it.”² So it would seem that beginning and end must be thought together, with the consequence that all assertions about the final future are necessarily assertions about God and his character. Or as one biblical scholar puts it: “All eschatological statements can finally be reduced to, and their validity tested by, sentences beginning: ‘In the end, God . . .'”³ To speak of the eschaton is to speak of the God who eternally wills a specific end of the world: “every statement about God is ipso facto an assertion about the end, a truth about eschatology.”⁴ All theology is eschatology; all eschatology, theology.

Yet how do we know what the final end will be? Here Hronich displays his evangelical background. We must turn to the Holy Scriptures, he tells us. Our insight into the end comes from our exegesis of the “propositional statements which God makes concerning Himself”⁵—and specifically from our exegesis of those statements that speak of the incarnate Word of God. The divine plan for the world is disclosed in a single word: Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen, is the self-revelation of the Creator and thus the revelation of the final end. He was “always God’s plan to sum up and unite humanity in Himself.”⁶ To quote Robinson again:

Christians have seen the end of the Lord. To them eschatology is neither the peering of curiosity nor the prising of argument into a future state. The telos has been declared in the fait accompli of Jesus Christ. In Him “it is finished,” into Him all things have been gathered up. Whenever the finis may come, there can be no other end to the universe: God will be all in all.⁷

The Last Judgment is nothing more nor less than God bringing to completion his redemp­tive work in Jesus Christ. But if Jesus is himself the consummation of this work, then questions are immediately raised concerning the traditional doctrine of eternal damna­tion. How can hell be? Has God failed to faithfully enact his good will? Is he a weak or flawed Creator? Is Jesus truly good?

At this point Hronich makes a curious move. Quite honestly, I was hoping for a longer elaboration of eschatology, yet he breaks off from his instructive eschatological reflections and jumps to a discussion of divine foreknowledge and the philosophical proposal that goes under the name of Molinism. The logic of this shift initially confused me, but perhaps the connection lies between the cosmic conclusion as eternally willed by God and his prevision of this conclusion. In any case, as we recall from the first article in this series, Hronich claims that the premises of the common defenses of hell ultimately lead to universal salvation, and he specifically names Molinism as one such defense.

Molinists maintain that God possesses what they call middle knowledge: prior to his creation of the world, God knows all contingent truths and counter-factuals regarding what free creatures would and will do in all possible historical scenarios. In his middle knowledge, God then chooses one possible world to actualize. Molinist perditionists struggle to explain why God would foreknowingly choose to create a world in which the eternal damnation of a portion of humanity is a metaphysical necessity rather than creating one in which all will be saved.

Hronich explores the Molinist defense of hell in depth, but I lack the competence to comment on the accuracy and cogency of his complex analysis. Our author clearly deems the Molinist defense of hell flawed, if not metaphysically and morally absurd. Bottomline: even if the Molinist attribution to God of a perfect comprehension of free futuribles is plausible—and many philosophers find the notion of middle knowledge incoherent—is it plausible to think that, out of the billions and billions of possible worlds, no possible world exists in which all human beings will, in their grace-enabled freedom, choose to embrace the divine gift of salvation, either in this life or the next? Molinists do not and cannot know that such a possible world does not exist. They only have their dogmas and intuitions. We may, therefore, reasonably posit the existence of a possible world in which all are saved. If so, then surely the God who desires the salvation of all (1 Tim 2:4) would choose to actualize it. Our present world is that world.

On the other hand, if a universalist possible world does not exist (William Lane Craig calls it transworld damnation), then God is faced with two mutually exclusive choices:

• to not create the world, thus voiding “ahead of time” the infernalist conclusion, or
• to create one of the possible worlds in which hell is an inevitability.

A truly good God, Hronich argues, will of course choose the former, thus obviating further discussion, as there is no one around to debate the wisdom of his choice. If he chooses, has chosen, the latter, then we may reasonably infer that our Creator is a moral monster and is reprehensibly responsible for the interminable suffering of the lost. As Gordon Knight observes:

[According to Molinism] God knows that in creating many of God’s creatures, he is ensuring that they will spend eternity in hell. True, God does not causally determine the choices that lead to the damnation of these persons. Nevertheless, the counterfactuals of freedom ensure that if these individuals are created, they will be damned. Therefore, merely in the act of creation God is guaranteeing for many of God’s creatures an eternal life that is much worse than never having existed at all. . . . On this Molinist scheme God does not force anyone’s decision, but this does not prevent God from being utterly manipulative in his attitude towards creation. Let us allow that Bob would freely reject Christ in any possible circumstance. Let us further allow . . . that in such rejection, freely made, Bob is responsible for his own fate. Neither of these allowances justify Craig’s claim that a Molinist, damnation-friendly deity can also consistently be viewed as good and loving towards each of God’s creatures. For, while in this example Bob is responsible, so too is God. One does not, in general, lose all responsibility for an action just because it involves another person’s free choice. If I knowingly give the keys of a car to Sally, who happens to be drunk, I share a responsibility in the outcome, even though it was Sally’s free decision to drive while inebriated. Likewise God, in creating persons whom he knows will never accept Christ, shares a responsibility for the resultant suffering in hell.⁸

I would only add that God does not just share responsibility for hell; he is directly and exclusively responsible, for he has created a world which will necessarily produce hell. The libertarian choices of human beings is quite irrelevant to the equation.

Yet the God of the gospel is not a moral monster; in his creative and redeeming love, he only wills the good; therefore this world of ours is the world in which all human beings are destined for glory—if Molinism is true. Q.E.D.

After dealing with Molinism, Hronich moves to a discussion of open theism—the view that God does not infallibly know the outcomes of free rational beings. He knows possibilities, probabilities, likely trajectories; but does not possess certain foreknowledge of the future. Open theist defenders of hell affirm the infinite love of the Creator but insist on the possibility that human beings may in the end definitively choose eternal separation from the God who is love. God respects this final choice because of the value he puts on libertarian freedom. Loving communion requires free consent; it cannot be coerced. Hronich criticizes this position along the lines laid out by Thomas Talbott: a truly loving God will not allow his creatures to do irreparable harm to themselves and will thus intervene to protect them from themselves. If necessary, he will allow them to suffer the consequences of alienation from God (let’s call it “cold turkey”). Eventually they will realize that the hell they have chosen cannot bring them happiness, and they will turn to God for their salvation. God will then deliver them from their ignorance and heal their disordered desires, thus making possible a truly free, rational, and wholehearted decision to embrace the good and bliss they truly desire for themselves, which is identical to the good and bliss God desires for them.

Hronich then transitions into a discussion of God’s universal Fatherhood, citing various biblical passages. He believes that an affirmation of the universal fatherhood is necessary for a right understanding of God and his care for humanity. In the words of Thomas Allin:

The essence of Christianity perishes in the virtual denial of any true Fatherhood of our race on God’s part. Follow out this thought, for it is of primary importance. We lose sight of the value of the individual soul, when dealing with the countless millions who have peopled this earth and passed away. What is one among so many? we are tempted to say, forgetting that the value of each human being is not in the least thereby altered. Each soul is of infinite value, as if it stood alone, in the eyes of God its Father.

And more than this, we are altogether apt to forget another vital point, to forget whose the loss is, if any one soul perishes—it is the man’s own loss, says our popular creed. But is this all? No, a thousand times no. It is God’s loss: it is the Father who loses his child. The straying sheep of the parable is the Great Shepherd’s loss [Luke 15:4-7]: the missing coin is the Owner’s loss [Luke 15:8-10]. In this very fact lies the pledge that he will seek on and on till he find it [Luke 15:4]. For only think of the value he sets on each soul. He has stamped each in his own image: has conferred on each a share of his own immortality— of himself: do but realize these things; put them into plain words till you come thoroughly to believe them; and you must see how impossible it becomes to credit that unworthy theology, which tells you that such a Father can ever permit the work of his own fingers, his own offspring, to perish finally.⁹

I personally find Hronich’s presentation unsatisfactory, as he fails to interpret the divine Fatherhood in terms of the Holy Trinity. God is first and foremost Father because he is the eternal Father of his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. It is only by our incorporation into the sonship of the Son (however and whenever that incorporation occurs) that God “becomes” our Father. This is the revelation given in the New Testament, upon which the assertion of universal divine Fatherhood rests: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt 11:27). Hronich’s intention is good. He wants us to see that the Creator is a good father who only wills the good of his children. As his children, we are of infinite value to him. I concur, but to talk about the divine Fatherhood apart from Jesus the Son is misleading at best and unitarian at worst. Hronich’s case would have been considerably stronger if he had grounded it in its proper Trinitarian context. But I will say no more and move on to the next section.

The concluding section is titled “Concerning Eternal Bliss.” This is the strongest section of chapter one. Given Hronich’s introductory comments on eschatology, it makes sense for him to conclude the chapter with a discussion of the bliss of the saints. How can they enjoy perfect and supreme happiness, he asks, while knowing that their family and friends (and even strangers) are suffering the torments of hell?  Yes, the damned are wicked and evil, thoroughly and irredeemably entrenched in their malevolence, anger, pride, lust, and malignant narcissism—yet they suffer intolerably, interminably. How can their agony not touch the hearts of the redeemed? Yet the doctrine of hell insists that the saints are and must be indifferent to their torment. Their unbounded bliss has no room for pity, grief, and sorrow. Such emotions would only diminish their ecstasy. Readers of Thomas Talbott and Eric Reitan, as well as readers of this blog, will recognize the argument.¹⁰ It constitutes one of the most powerful objections to the doctrine of eternal perdition in the universalist arsenal, and our author elaborates it admirably.

Hronich begins his presentation with a powerful statement by the famous 20th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher:

If we now consider eternal damnation as it is related to eternal bliss, it is easy to see that once the former exists, the latter can exist no longer. Even if externally the two realms were quite separate, yet so high a degree of bliss is not as such compatible with entire ignorance of others’ misery, the more so if the separation itself is the result purely of a general judgment, at which both sides were present, which means conscious each of the other. Now if we attribute to the blessed a knowledge of the state of the damned, it cannot be a knowledge unmixed with sympathy. If the perfecting of our nature is not to move backwards, sympathy must be such as to embrace the whole human race, and when extended to the damned must of necessity be a disturbing element in bliss, all the more that, unlike similar feelings in this life, it is untouched by hope.¹¹

Schleiermacher is responding to a long tradition in Western Christianity that the joy of the saints is heightened by seeing the excruciating, but deserved, sufferings of the reprobate. “O the mercy and grace of God, for he has saved us from this terrible doom!” Jonathan Edwards well captures the sentiment:

When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different front it! When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!

This will give them a joyful sense of the grace and love of God to them, because hereby they will see hew great a benefit they have by it. When they shall see the dreadful miseries of the damned, and consider that they deserved the same misery, and that it was sovereign grace, and nothing else, which made them so much to differ from the damned, that, if it had not been for that, they would have been in the same condition; but that God from all eternity was pleased to set his love upon them, that Christ hath laid down his life for them, and hath made them thus gloriously happy for ever, O how will they admire that dying love of Christ, which has redeemed then} from so great a misery, and purchased for them so great happiness, and has so distinguished them from others of their fellow-creatures! How joyfully will they sing to God and the Lamb, when they behold this!¹²

Are we not horrified when we read these words, and if we are not, what does that say about the state of our souls? Are not the damned our brothers and sisters for whom Christ died on the cross? Are they not our neighbors whom our Lord bids us to love as we love our­selves? Or does the nature of love change in heaven? In her autobiography, St Teresa of Avila shares a vision of hell granted her by the Lord. She expresses gratitude that God has delivered her from the terrible fate of the lost, but then goes on to say:

This vision, too, was the cause of the very deep distress which I experience because of the great number of souls who are bringing damnation upon themselves. . . It also inspired me with fervent impulses for the good of souls: for I really believe that, to deliver a single one of them from such dreadful tortures, I would willingly die many deaths. After all, if we see anyone on earth who is especially dear to us suffering great trial or pain, our very nature seems to move us to compassion, and if his sufferings are severe they oppress us too. Who, then, could bear to look upon a soul’s endless sufferings in that most terrible trial of all? No heart could possibly endure it without great affliction. For even earthly suffering, which after all, as we know, has a limit and will end with death, moves us to deep compassion. And that other suffering has no limit: I do not know how we can look on so calmly and see the devil carrying off as many souls as he does daily.¹³

Is this not the nature of holy charity, a willingness to offer oneself as a sacrifice to deliver others from their sin and suffering? No, love does not change in heaven. Unfortunately, St Teresa could not see that her response of compassion must also be true of the saints who enjoy the beatific vision.

Hronich surveys the various attempts by Calvinists and Arminians to lessen the force of the heavenly bliss objection. He finds the arguments intellectually wanting and morally abhorrent and advances morally compelling refutation. Here moral intuitions divide, and the reader is confronted with a choice: Which God do we believe in, will we believe in?

 

Footnotes

[1] Andrew Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved (2023), 1.

[2] Ibid.

[3] John A. T. Robinson, In the End, God, special ed. (2011), 23; quoted in Hronich, 2.

[4] Robinson, 29; quoted in Hronich, 2.

[5] Hronich, 2.

[6] Ibid., 3.

[7] Robinson, 93; quoted in Hronich, 3.

[8] Gordon Knight, “Molinism and Hell,” in The Problem of Hell, ed. Joel Buenting (2008), 112; partly quoted in Hronich, 13.

[9] Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant, annotated ed. (2015), 71; partly quoted in Hronich, 39. Also see Thomas Erskine’s remarks on the divine Fatherhood in his letter to J. Craig.

[10] See “Eternal Damnation and God’s Love for the Blessed.”

[11] Friedrich Schleiemacher, The Christian Faith, 2nd ed., ed. H. R. MacIntosh and J. S. Stewart (1928), 721; quoted in Hronich, 33-34.

[12] Jonathan Edwards, “The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous; or, The Torments of the Wicked in Hell, No Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven,” The Works of President Edwards (1817), IV:512; partly quoted in Hronich, 34. Now contrast this response to the vision of the damned:

“When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand what St Paul meant when he said, ‘I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren.’ But he will no longer understand those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each other, ‘Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbours no more.’ St Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God’s glory as for the man’s sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?–who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?” George MacDonald, “Love Thy Neighbor,” Unspoken Sermons, Series One.

[13] Teresa of Avila, Autobiography, chap. XXXII.

(Go to chapter two)

The Father Who Loves … and Loves …

by Herbert McCabe, O. P.

It is very odd that people should think that when we do good God will reward us and when we do evil he will punish us. I mean it is very odd that Christians should think this, that God deals out to us what we deserve. It is not, I suppose, really odd that other people should; I suppose it is the commonest way of thinking of God, for God tends to be just a great projection into the sky of our moral feelings, especially our guilt-feelings. But I don’t believe in God if that’s what he is, and it is very odd that any Christian should, since there is so much in the gospels to tell us differently. You could say that the main theme of the preaching of Jesus is that God isn’t like that at all.

Take the famous parable of the prodigal son (Lk. 15.11-32). In this, the younger son goes to a distant country far from his father and squanders all his father’s gifts in debauchery and generally having a high old time. After a bit he sees himself for what he is, so as to say, ‘I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.’ What his sin has done is to alter his whole relationship with his father; instead of being a son he now should be treated as one who gets his wages, gets exactly what he deserves. But there are two things here; there is the fact that this is what his sin has done, and there is the fact that he recognizes this. To make sure you see that this is the crucial point of the story, Luke has it repeated twice. The vital thing is that the son has recognized his sin for what it is: something that changes God into a paymaster, or a judge. Sin is something that changes God into a projection of our guilt, so that we don’t see the real God at all; all we see is some kind of judge. God (the whole meaning and purpose and point of our existence) has become a condemnation of us. God has been turned into Satan, the accuser of man, the paymaster, the one who weighs our deeds and condemns us.

It is very odd that so much casual Christian thinking should be a worship of Satan, that we should think of the punitive satanic God as the only God available to the sinner. It is very odd that the view of God as seen from the church should ever be simply the view of God as seen from hell. For damnation must be just being fixed in this illusion, stuck for ever with the God of the Law, stuck for ever with the God provided by our sin.

It is the great characteristic of sinners that they do not know that they are sinners, that they refuse to accept and believe that they are sinners. On the contrary, they have found all the ways of justifying and excusing themselves. The whole conversation in hell consists of the damned telling each other how it is all a terrible mistake and they should not be there at all because they are righteous and virtuous. The desperate boredom of this must be the pain of hell, but the thing that constitutes hell is that God can’t be seen. All that can be seen is this vengeful punitive god who is Satan.

The younger son in the story has escaped hell because he has seen his sin for what it is. He has recognized what it does to his vision of God: ‘I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired servants’ (Lk. 15.21). And, of course, as soon as he really accepts that he is a sinner, he ceases to be one; knowing that you have sinned is contrition or forgiveness, or whatever you like to call it. The rest of the story is not about the father forgiving his son, it is about the father celebrating, welcoming his son with joy and feasting. This is all the real God ever does, because God, the real God, is just helplessly and hopelessly in love with us. He is unconditionally in love with us.

His love for us doesn’t depend on what we do or what we are like. He doesn’t care whether we are sinners or not. It makes no difference to him. He is just waiting to welcome us with joy and love. Sin doesn’t alter God’s attitude to us; it alters our attitude to him, so that we change him from the God who is simply love and nothing else, into this punitive ogre, this Satan. Sin matters enormously to us if we are sinners; it doesn’t matter at all to God. In a fairly literal sense he doesn’t give a damn about our sin. It is we who give the damns. We damn ourselves because we would rather justify and excuse ourselves, and look on our self-flattering images of ourselves, than be taken out of ourselves by the infinite love of God. Contrition or forgiveness (remember that it is we who forgive ourselves) is almost the exact opposite of excusing ourselves. It is a matter of accusing ourselves—for now the sons of man (people, human beings) have power on earth to forgive sins, power to recognize sin for what it is and so abolish it. Contrition, or forgiveness, is self-knowledge, the terribly painful business of seeing ourselves as what and who we are: how mean, selfish, cruel and indifferent and infantile we are.

The younger son recognizes a truth: that his sin had made him into a wage-earner, one who gets his deserts. And in the simple recognition of that, his sin is no more. Contrast him with the elder son: ‘I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command’ (Lk. 15.29). Even though he is law-abiding and not debauched like his brother, he has not seen God for what he is. He thinks of himself as a wage-earner. He thinks that he should collect his pay-packet from God and demand what he deserves. Jesus presents us here with the frightening possibility of the virtuous and carefully law-abiding man who, because he is concerned with himself, with his own merits and virtues, and what he thinks he deserves, cannot see God any more than the profligate (who at least has a good time).

The younger son was in some ways in a happier condition, for it was fairly easy for him to see himself as depraved, ungrateful and selfish. His sins were fairly easily recognizable as sins. The older brother is in a more subtle danger, and a greater one. God and his love were hidden from the younger one by the almost childlike pleasures of the flesh. God is hidden from the older one by pride, the speciality of Satan.

But of course it isn’t really easy for either of them; in fact it is impossible for both of them. Once you have deluded yourself with sin, once you have shut yourself off from God (rather than letting yourself be destroyed by his love, destroyed and remade, crucified and raised from the dead), once you have hidden his love from you behind your protective barrier, your blindfold of self-flattery, there is nothing at all you can do about it.

It is by the power of God, by the love of God coming to him even while he was in sin, that the younger brother became able to see himself for what he is; and this is contrition, this is forgiveness.

Never be deluded into thinking that if you have contrition, if you are sorry for your sins, God will come and forgive you—that he will be touched by your appeal, change his mind about you and forgive you. Not a bit of it. God never changes his mind about you. He is simply in love with you. What he does again and again is change your mind about him. That is why you are sorry. That is what your forgiveness is. You are not forgiven because you confess your sin. You confess your sin, recognize yourself for what you are, because you are forgiven. When you come to confession, to make a ritual proclamation of your sin, to symbolize that you know what you are, you are not coming in order to have your sins forgiven. You don’t come to confession in order to have your sins forgiven. You come to celebrate that your sins are forgiven. You come to put on the best robe and the ring on your finger and the sandals on your feet, and to get drunk out of your mind, because your blindfold and your blindness have gone, and you can see the love God has for you.

Being contrite, self-aware, about your sin is the same as believing in the love of God, smashing the punitive satanic god and having faith in the real God who is sheer unconditional love for you. You could say that it is your faith in God’s undeviating love for you that lets you risk looking at your sins for what they are. It’s OK, you can admit the truth about yourself. It doesn’t matter: God loves you anyway. To admit your sins is to proclaim your faith in God’s love for you personally. Telling your sins to the church in the sacrament of confession is just a form of the creed; you are saying, ‘I am really like this and all the same God loves me, God doesn’t care about my sins, he cares about me.’ God is just infinite, unconditional, unalterable, eternal love—and his love is for me and for all sinful people. That is the single statement that we make in the creed.¹

 

¹ Herbert McCabe, “Forgiveness,” Faith Within Reason (2007), 155-159.

“I cannot believe that any human being can be beyond the reach of God’s grace and the sanctifying power of His Spirit”

Undated letter of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen to J. Craig, author of the tract “The Final Salvation of All Men from Sin”

Dear Sir, 

Your epistle on the “Final Salvation of All Men from Sin” has been put into my hands by a friend who knew that the principles contained in it are those with which I have long concurred and sympathized, and having read it, I cannot help reaching out to you a brotherly hand, and saying, God speed you! 

The title of your pamphlet has been, I think, well chosen. It is not a deliverance from punishment, but a deliverance from sin that you desire or expect. All punishment appointed by God, whether it be the natural result of sin or any superadded chastisement, is intended by Him “for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness”; so that a deliverance from punishment, instead of being a thing to be desired, would, in fact, be equivalent to the deliverance of a sick man from the necessary and wise prescription of a skillful physician. This is the revealed purpose of punishment—a purpose agreeing with the character of God and with the relation in which He stands to men. He is the “righteous Father”—”the Father of the spirits of all flesh,” “who willeth not the death of a sinner; but that all should come to repentance.” Let us uphold fast the purpose of God in all punishment, and remember that as it is the purpose of Him who changes not, but who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, it cannot be a purpose confined to any one stage of our being, but must extend over all the stages, and the whole duration of our being. It is surely most unreasonable to suppose that God should change His manner of dealing with us, as soon as we quit this world, and that if we have resisted, up to that moment, His gracious endeavors to teach us righteousness, He should at once abandon the purpose for which He created us and redeemed us, and give us over to the everlasting bondage of sin. Do we not feel that such a supposition is too horrible—that it is most dishonoring to Him who has said, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,” and, “The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee”? 

This reasoning agrees with the argument presented to us in the 5th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where the Apostle, in setting forth the fulness of the redemption by Christ, declares that the benefit through Him is, in extent, parallel to the evil introduced by Adam; that is, that as the evil affects all without exception, so the blessing embraces all without exception. Let anyone read the 12th and 18th verses of that chapter, as if in juxtaposition, which they really are by construction, and he will find himself constrained to admit that this and nothing less could have been the meaning of the writer. Indeed, through the whole chapter there is a preponderating advantage thrown into the scale of the redemption, to the effect that not only were the evils of the fall met by the salvation of Christ, but that the gain far surpassed the loss, so that it is really contrary to sound criticism to hold, that in that most marked and most remarkable passage, where the comparative results of the fall and the restoration are expressly considered, any ground is allowed or given for a doubt as to the final salvation of the whole human race. The 11th chapter of that Epistle is pervaded by the same doctrine being a declaration that God’s election does not affect the truth and certainty of the final salvation of men, but relates to the temporary use which He makes of individuals or nations to accomplish the ends of His government. I know well that most people in this country feel that all such arguments and expositions are met and overturned by the solemn words of our Lord in the 25th chapter Matthew, and by other passages of a like import. I feel, on the contrary, that the passages which I have quoted from the Epistle to the Romans ought really to be considered as the ruling passages on the question, and that those from St. Matthew, and others of the same class, should be explained by them, and in accordance with them, because in them the fall and the restoration are expressly compared with each other, in their whole results, and the entire superiority claimed for the restoration in amount of benefit, and entire equality in point of extent; all which would seem to me to be utterly nullified by the fact of a single human spirit being abandoned and consigned to a permanent state of sin and misery. I therefore understand that awful scene represented in St. Matthew as declaring the certainty of the connection between sin and misery, but not as a finality. I do not believe that αίώνιος, the Greek word rendered “eternal” and “everlasting” by our translators, really has that meaning. I believe that it refers to man’s essential or spiritual state, and not to time, either finite or infinite. Eternal life is living in the love of God; eternal death is living in self, so that a man may be in eternal life or in eternal death for ten minutes as he changes from the one state to the other. 

There is no lack of arguments for the general view which I have taken of this subject, drawn either from conscience or the Scriptures or both. There is one which cannot but have great weight with all who fairly consider it. Throughout even the Old Testament, God is more constantly presented to us as a Father than in any other character, and in the New, our Lord speaks of it as the chief purpose of His appearance in this world to reveal His Father as the Father of the whole human race. In both, frequent appeals are made to our sense of the love and desires and obligations of an earthly parent towards his children, in order to impress on us the nature of the relation in which God stands to each one of us; and very frequently these appeals are accompanied with the assurance that the love of the human parent is but a faint reflection of the love of the Heavenly Father. What can be more touching than the appeal in the prophet Isaiah? “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will not I forget thee.” The parallel passage in the New Testament is this: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give!” But we all feel that the first and ever-during duty of a father is to endeavor to make his child righteous. A righteous father must always do this. The moment he ceases to do this, he ceases to be a righteous father. However the son transgresses, we never feel that the father’s obligation to try to bring him back can be dissolved. And the righteous father’s heart goes along with his obligation. He could not give up his son although the whole world agreed that he had done all that could be done for him, and that it was useless to try any more. And shall we not reason confidently that the righteous Heavenly Father will do exceeding abundantly above all that the righteous earthly father can either desire or effect? But does this desire for the righteousness of his child in the heart of the earthly father terminate with the child’s life? Although he is only the father of his body, does he not yearn after the soul of his son, who has been, perhaps, cut off suddenly in the midst of sin and thoughtlessness? He does indeed yearn after his soul and carries it on his heart a heavy burden mourning all his life long and wavering between hope and fear as to what his everlasting lot may be. The righteous earthly father being only the father of the child’s body feels thus and acts thus, and can we suppose that the Father of the spirits of all flesh will throw off His care for the souls of His children when they leave this world, because they have, during their stay here, resisted His efforts to make them righteous? The supposition seems monstrous and incredible, and in truth could not be acquiesced in by any human being were it not for certain false ideas concerning the justice or righteousness of God.

I believe that love and righteousness and justice in God mean exactly the same thing, namely, a desire to bring His whole moral creation into a participation of His own character and His own blessedness. He has made us capable of this, and He will not cease from using the best means for accomplishing it in us all. When I think of God making a creature of such capacities, it seems to me almost blasphemous to suppose that He will throw it from Him into everlasting darkness because it has resisted His gracious purposes towards it for the natural period of human life. No; He who waited so long for the formation of a piece of old red sandstone will surely wait with much long-suffering for the perfecting of a human spirit. 

I have found myself helped in taking hold of this hope by understanding that God really made man that He might educate Him, not that He might try him. If we suppose man to be merely on his trial here, we more readily adopt the idea of a final judgment coming after the day of trial is over. But if we suppose man to be created, not to be tried, but to be educated, we cannot believe that the education is to terminate with this life, considering that there is so large a proportion of the human race who die in infancy, and that of those who survive that period there are so many who can scarcely be said to receive any education at all, and that so few— not one in a million—appear to benefit by their education. That, as there are great judgment days in this world, so there will be great judgment days in the other world, I have no doubt, but I believe that they are all subservient to the grand purpose of spiritual education. We are judged in order to be thereby educated. We are not educated that we may be judged. I believe that each individual human being has been created to fill a particular place in the great body of Jesus Christ, and that a special education is needed to fit each one for his place. Whilst we are ignorant of the destined place of each, it must of course be impossible for us to understand the wonderful variety of treatment through which the great Teacher is conducting all by a right way to the right end. But He knows and does what is best and wisest, and may there not be a necessity in some cases for treatment which can only be had on the other side of the grave? And shall we in our short-sightedness consider Him debarred from any such treatment? 

I cannot believe that any human being can be beyond the reach of God’s grace and the sanctifying power of His Spirit. And if all are within His reach, is it possible to suppose that He will allow any to remain unsanctified? Is not the love revealed in Jesus Christ a love unlimited, unbounded, which will not leave undone anything which love could desire? It was surely nothing else than the complete and universal triumph of that love that Paul was contemplating when he cried out, ” Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33.) 

Let me conclude now by saying that I am persuaded that this doctrine which you advocate is the only sufficient ground for an entire confidence in God, which shall, at the same time, be a righteous confidence. According to it, God created man that he might be a partaker in His own holiness as the only right and blessed state possible for him. If I truly apprehend this—if I truly apprehend that righteousness and blessedness are one and the same thing, and just the very thing I most need—I shall rejoice to know that God desires my righteousness, and if I further know that He will never cease to desire it and to insist upon it, and that all His dealings with me are for this one end, then I can have an entire confidence in Him as desiring for me the very thing I desire for myself. I shall feel that I am perfectly safe in His hand, that I could not be so safe in any other hand for that, as He desires the best thing for me, so He alone knows and can use the best means of accomplishing it in me. Thus, I can actually adopt the sentiment of the Psalmist, and say, “Thou art my strong habitation, whereunto I may continually resort. Thou hast given commandment to save me, for Thou art my rock and fortress.” And I can adopt these words without any feeling of self-trust, because my confidence has no back look to myself, but rests simply on God. The greatest sinner upon earth might at once adopt those words, if he only saw that righteousness was his true and only possible blessedness, and that God would never cease desiring this righteousness for him. I am fully persuaded that the real meaning of believing in Jesus Christ is believing in this eternal purpose of God, the purpose of making us living members of the body of His Son. And as this blessed faith helps me to love God and trust Him for myself, so it helps me to love my fellow creatures because it assures me that however debased and unlovable they may be at present, yet the time is coming when they shall all be living members of Christ’s body, partakers in the holiness and beauty and blessedness of their Lord.—I remain, dear sir, Yours truly, 

T. Erskine

Book Review: Once Loved Always Loved by Andrew Hronich

Once Loved Always Loved (Wipf & Stock, 2023) by Andrew Hronich is a very impressive defense of universal salvation. As far as I can tell, the author has read, watched, and listened to just about everything on the topic. This is particularly true regarding the philosophical and theological literature. His bibliography alone goes on for twenty pages in small type! I do not know anyone who has read as much on the topic of the final destiny of human beings as Hronich has. And the long bibliography is not just for show. One scholar after another shows up on just about every page of his book. The author knows the eschatological landscape well and walks around it with ease and facility. And what makes this truly amazing is that he does not (yet) have a Ph.D.! Clearly he is one super-intelligent man. (I imagine he was a terror in Sunday School.) Currently Hronich is working on a Master’s degree at Princeton University. I do not know if he has designs on an academic career in philosophy or theology, but I sure hope he does.

In the Introduction, Hronich shares a bit of his background. He was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist household and congregation and attended Liberty University. After graduation he entered into full-time church ministry under the tutelage of a “prestigious evangelical apologist.” A the very beginning of his ministry he decided to focus his preaching on the claim that “all human beings . . . are condemned to an eternal fate of conscious torment” unless they turn to Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Savior. Every person is born into a massa damnata, but God has made provision for their rescue by conversion and regeneration in the Spirit. Hronich also intimates that his preaching was informed by strong Calvinist convictions.

In the first year of his ministry, however, our young preacher began to wonder about the salvific state of those who have never heard the gospel. How is it possible that they are doomed to eternal perdition if they have never had an opportunity to embrace the good news of Jesus Christ? “Questions such as these,” he tells us, “opened my eyes to see that many of my brothers and sisters were living in fear, yet pretending to abide in love. We believed in a God of wrath yet prayed to a God of mercy, sang to a God of love yet preached a God of anger.” And so his questions multiplied. He then read Rob Bell’s book Love Wins and found it persuasive. Even so, he could not bring himself to believe that Bell’s message was true. His wrestling continued.

Hronich found himself drawn to Romans 5. The Apostle sure sounds like he is declaring universal reconciliation. He consulted the commentaries of well-known Calvinist exegetes (he specifically names John Piper, John MacArthur, and R. C. Sproul) and did not find their answers convincing. “Does Paul mean that all men will be justified?” he wrote in his Bible.

Finally, the Scriptural testimony compelled him to conclude that universal reconciliation is true. Not only does it make sense, it makes sense of everything—“of justice, forgiveness, mercy, grace, wrath, punishment, repentance, etc.” Having looked God in the face, he “came to understand what perfect love is, what and who God is.” A paradigm shift had taken place in his mind and heart. There is now no turning back.

Once Loved Always Loved is the fruit of Hronich’s new vision of the God who is absolute love. Universalism is indubitably true; indeed, he believes that “if classical theism is true, then universalism follows.” This is a bold claim, as he readily acknowledges, but our author is convinced that he can rationally demonstrate that universalism logically follows from Molinist, open theist, Wesleyan, and Calvinist premises. That this is so is the burden of his book. We shall see.

For whom then is Once Loved Always Loved written? Not for the ordinary person in the pew, perhaps not even for ordinary seminary trained pastors. Though Hronich weaves his strong evangelical-universalist convictions throughout his argumentation, he is predominantly concerned to address the best arguments advanced by philosophers and theologians who defend the dogma of eternal damnation and reiterate the strongest objections to this dogma advanced by universalist philosophers and theologians. No stone is left unturned. Unlike other titles that have been written over the past two decades, his case for universal salvation is both intellectually rigorous and comprehensive. The volumes written by Thomas Talbott, John Kronen & Eric Reitan, and David Bentley Hart are intellectually rigorous, he observes, and have been important in the formation of his thinking; but they do not cover the subject as comprehensively as he has done—hence the need for this book.

Hronich’s fundamental thesis is simple: God will bring all human beings to glory. He advocates a hard (necessitarian, dogmatic) universalism, not a contingent (hopeful, soft) universalism. The latter he believes (rightly, in my opinion) fails to resolve the evangelical and moral concerns raised by the prospect that one, some, many may be eternally damned:

On contingent universalism’s assumed premises, God would remain essentially good in any state of affairs, but it just so happened that the state of affairs that was instantiated in this world was one where universalism obtains. Yet, there are other possible (and feasible) worlds where contingent universalism fails to obtain, thus postponing the question of how God’s perfect goodness could be consistent with such a dreadful state. While such a horrid state of affairs did not happen, it could have. Why? How could God’s goodness possibly be consistent with such an awful end? (p. xviii)

Hronich confidently believes that he has written a book that will be “a mainstay on the subject for many years to come.” Perhaps he has. I intend to test his confidence in this review, though I fear I lack the competence, despite my wide reading on the topic over the last decade. He knows the philosophical terrain in a way that I do not. I’m just an ordinary (retired) parish priest.

At this point I have only skimmed the entirety of Once Loved Always Loved and have only read closely the first chapter. I will blog on a chapter after I have finished reading it. I expect a rereading of each will be necessary. At this point I do not know if I will write an article on each chapter or only on those that particularly interest me. I also reserve the right to revise my published thoughts after I have concluded my blogging. I deem that possibility necessary for a faithful review. This is an unusual way to review a book, I know—it’s fair neither to the author nor my readers—but at this time of my life, it’s the best I can do. What I do know is that Once Loved Always Loved will be a challenge for me.

I wish to note two initial criticisms, neither of which are directed to the author. First, the publisher should have invested in a good proof-reader. I have already noticed several errors in chapter 1, including a citation that should have been block-quoted. Second, the publisher should have provided an index. A scholarly book like this demands and deserves one.

(cont)