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.
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Friends,
I totally affirm this short expression of Trinitarian blessing that is extended to us humans. Pithy. Accurate. A witness to the much needed truth of the cosmos. Thank you for sharing C. Baxter Kruger’s words with your constituency, Aiden.
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Until just recently, I hadn’t heard of C. Baxter Kruger. I still don’t know much about him, but I found a blog post from 2012 in which he gives his position on universalism, echoing Kallistos Ware and Hans Urs von Balthasar:
“That Jesus Christ loves us all and has included us everyone in his life with his Father and the Holy Spirit, I consider to be an absolute, eternal fact. That every human being will come to experience this life fully, I consider to be a hope, but not a fact. It is a hope grounded in the astounding love of the blessed Trinity—in the endless fidelity of the Father, the complete and finished work of Jesus, and the redeeming genius of the Holy Spirit. I think we have every reason to hope for everyone to come to know the truth so as to experience salvation. But to make such a hope an absolute fact, or a conclusion, or a doctrine is, to me, a mistake. That would be to deny, theologically speaking, the authenticity of our personhood and our real freedom to participate. We are real to the Father, Son and Spirit, distinct persons within the life of God, with our own minds, hearts and wills, which will never be violated by the blessed Trinity. So there remains the possibility that in our distinctness, we will choose to live against our own beings. Such a violation of reality is as absurd as it is painful, but possible. It is not possible for the Father, Son and Spirit to morph into another God, with another dream for humanity. In this universe, and in all universes to come, the Father, Son and Spirit will never, ever give up their dream that we would all come to experience fully the trinitarian life together.”
That last sentence reminded me of St. Sophrony’s words, “You may be certain that as long as someone is in hell, Christ will remain there with him.” Glory to God!
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But it is nonsense – it is not a possibility to “live against our own beings” forever. This would be to deny God as origin and final end of being, to deny that God is the proper end of rational nature.
Real freedom does not consist in choosing, but in choosing well. Choosing against our own nature is not freedom, that is pure bondage.
I am a hard universalist, but I do not suggest the salvation of all to be dogmatized, or conveyed as absolute fact (we are after all speaking about faith), but universal salvation is the only coherent and rational conclusion one can draw from the biblical account and from common sense.
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I’m inclined to agree with you but I’m also grateful for the hopeful universalists out there.
The passage of Kruger’s that Fr. Aidan posted is beautiful. It’s a message the world needs to hear. But sadly the world is done listening to Christianity because Christians have failed in our basic responsibility to love one another as Christ loved us. As George MacDonald said, “It is because our life does not shine that men have stood up and said ‘There is no light.'” An airtight case for universalism might lead some to Christ, but it is love that will hold them fast to the Savior.
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Yes, and how can we love, and know what love is, when the Gospel has been hijacked by an account of a powerless and monstrous god? We are told by the likes of CS Lewis that, once again, it’s up to humanity to unlock hell. That ain’t no good news folks. Run, don’t walk.
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Totally agree. Lewis was a great writer and has inspired a lot of people, especially Protestants. But in the final analysis, like all the rest of us, he was just a man, and could make mistakes. One of his biggest mistakes was his dogmatic claim that hell is somehow “locked” by us. Many saw and see that as a much-welcomed escape from The God Who Is A Cosmic Tyrant. Lewis’ dogma shifted the “blame” (if you will) from the God Tyrant to us. That sounds good, if you don’t think about it very hard or long. But as you and others have pointed out, Robert, it’s still an error, and a very bad error indeed.
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That’s a great question. I’d say that one can love and know what love is by humility for example. “Everyone who has been clothed with humility has truly been made like unto Him,” says St. Isaac of Syria. I’ve known only a handful of genuinely humble people in my life, but their effect on me has by the grace of God been disproportionately greater than that of all the proud people I’ve known.
I respect and admire C. S. Lewis even though I don’t always agree with him. In some ways it is up to us to unlock the doors of the hells into which we lock ourselves. After all, the Creator endowed us with the capacity for reflection and repentance, so we are not entirely without agency. But for those who are for whatever reason unable to unlock those doors in this life, Christ will not abandon them in the next. He has already descended into and conquered their hells. Praise God! In the meantime, we must pray for all.
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Of course there’s agency, but the point is that rational agency, true free agency, can only be when it is oriented to its proper rational end. Keeping locked inside of hell is neither truly rational nor true agency. We cannot coherently speak of freedom nor of agency in the “free will” defense of hell. Don’t forget, the claim is that this is their eternal state. It is simply an impossibility to absolutely and eternally persist, compos mentis, in denying one’s telos- to know the Good and not desire it, to know Love and not want it. To persist in denial of God is the height of insanity, to be “out of one’s mind”. And we all know that culpability obtains only as far as agency is conducted compos mentis. On CS Lewis’ account either this god holds fully accountable those that are out of their minds, or else keeps them from knowing the Good and keeps them unjustly locked up forever in a state of insanity.
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My view is that CS Lewis’ concept of hell being locked from the inside and the free will defence of hell is useful for understanding its existence, but cannot justify its eternity. It explains why God cannot simply release us from torment, since it is self-imposed, and I think it right that our existence as autonomous beings must enable us to make bad choices. Preserving our autonomy also restricts the options available to God in how he can go about freeing us. It does not, though, justify leaving us there.
And God doesn’t. He respects our locks and does not break the doors down, but instead enters into hell as one who has died as a sinner along with the rest of us, and preaches to the dead in hell (as Peter says) to enlighten them as to their best interests and persuade them to repent and return with him. CS Lewis got it right, I think, that the gates of hell are locked in the inside, but seems to have missed that they are then *broken* from the inside, too.
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Broken from the inside by Christ.
Or perhaps the doors are not even really locked, though we labor under the delusion that they are, seeing, and behaving as if there are, intact locks where there are, in fact, only shattered ones.
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I don’t know if you are Orthodox, but as far as I can tell, having not read The Great Divorce but having read much about it, C. S. Lewis paints a vision of hell consistent with the Orthodox view described by Alexandre Kalomiros in “River of Fire.” I say “consistent” because the men’s group at the local Orthodox church where I live read The Great Divorce and because another Orthodox priest from a different parish told me that Lewis essentially expresses in The Great Divorce the Orthodox view of hell. In addition, Fr. Stephen Freeman has reproduced Kalomiros’s essay on his popular blog, priests on the Ancient Faith website have discussed the essay, and one can find articles on other legitimate Orthodox websites including the OCA website that seem to validate the essay. Personally, I find this unfortunate, but that is the reality of things at least in the Orthodox Church in America. But I’m not Orthodox, so these views don’t have a bearing on my faith.
My point is that the same criticism leveled against C. S. Lewis can also be leveled against Kallistos Ware, Hans Urs von Balthasar, C. Baxter Kruger, and many others, including perhaps one’s local parish priest or pastor who is merely hopeful but not confident that all will be saved.
I’m grateful for Lewis, if not for The Great Divorce then for The Abolition of Man. I’m also grateful for Kallistos Ware, particularly The Orthodox Way. Please don’t allow frustration over views expressed by these and other Christian brothers and sisters to feed any anger or resentment or bitterness that they don’t go all the way. I felt that way (bitter and angry) for a long time and still struggle with it on occasion. What is helping me overcome that bitterness is prayer, reading Holy Scripture, volunteering at a local food kitchen, reading George MacDonald and Dostoevsky, and fasting from the news and blogs, though I sometimes look at this blog and one or two others because I love and support the work that Fr. Aidan does. God bless him, and God bless you and all other readers out there who believe in the greater hope!
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No, I am not bitter or angry about this at all. Merely pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in free-will infernalism, and voicing my opposition to it. Look, truth be told, very few Christians really believe it anyways. Everyone knows “Susie is with Jesus.”
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