Sin, the averting of sinners by their own actions from the LORD’s loving face, has nothing whatever to do with the LORD. It is an absence, a horror, a grasp at nothing that succeeds in moving the graspers toward what they seek. The LORD has nothing to do with the privation that sinners seek. He cannot. He is the LORD who spoke the beautiful cosmos into being out of nothing, and his causal involvement with attempts to return it to nothing is and must be exactly zero. For the LORD to inflict pain, eternally or temporally, upon nothing-seekers, would be for him to recognize an absence as a presence, and to respond to it as if it were something. The pain that we suffer is always the result either of the damage to which the fall subjected the cosmos, or of the particular sins we commit in that devastated cosmos. The LORD does not punish us, if that means inflicting pain on us in retribution for the wrongs we have done. The only sense in which he can be said to punish us is that we, because we are damaged and sinful, may find his caress painful. But such pain is epiphenomenal to love, and has the presence of damage (the presence of an absence) as its necessary condition. The LORD, therefore, does not and cannot intend the infliction of pain, and has no causal implication with its occurrence. Pain is, without remainder, the felt component of an absence being reduced by presence. What the LORD does is enter into and pass through the absence by incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, thus remaking the cosmos away from the absence introduced into it by sin, and toward the harmony of ordered beauty. The doctrine of the harrowing of hell, implicit already in the Apostles’ Creed and one of the earliest scenes to find representation in Christian art, can stand as a symbolic representation of this view: the LORD makes and remakes; he does not unmake, and the infliction of pain as punishment would be to contribute to unmaking. An objector who wishes to defend the necessity of the LORD’s agency in pain-producing punishment for those who attempt to unmake themselves is insufficiently serious about what it means to say that the LORD is creator and redeemer, and therefore all too likely to make of him a local idol engaged in a cosmic battle with dark forces. Better, altogether more Christian, to say that the only thing the LORD does for sinners is remake them (by baptism, by killing the fatted calf to return their substance to them) when and whenever they ask, and that the only thing sinners can do for themselves is unmaking. Necce est quod anima deo deserta in nihilum cadet, we might say; and since the LORD does not change, remove himself, punish, or condemn to hell, this must occur as a result of the sinner damaging himself sufficiently that the LORD no longer sustains him—and can no longer sustain him without refusing his freedom to seek the end he prefers, even if that end is nothing.
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
I liked the selection until the annihilationist view he ended with — I can’t imagine that view is compatible with God’s love.
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I imagine that Griffiths would say that allowing a person to fall into the nothingness he is so desperately seeking is an expression of his love and respect.
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Proponents of the greater hope have not yet advanced a compelling rejoinder to the annihilationist position, largely, I suspect, because their energies have been invested in responding to the infernalist position. Until the publication of Griffiths’s book, annihilationism has been an evangelical affair and coupled with retributive punishment: at the last day God raises the wicked in order to first retributively punish them and only after the appropriate punishment has been exacted does he obliterate.
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Annihilation would seem to be in direct contradiction to the title statement that the Lord “does not unmake”
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I disagree, Iain, though it is probably the case that the passage needs to be read within the full context of Griffith’s construal of free-will annihilationism. He would maintain that the LORD is totally uninvolved in the sinner’s dissolution. He permits it to happen but does not cause it to happen. As he asserts in the above passage: “his causal involvement with attempts to return it to nothing is and must be exactly zero.”
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I am not sure that it makes sense to say we can unmake ourselves. We can approach nearer and nearer to destroying and distorting all the good in us so that to unmake us would (an annihilationist might argue) amount to a mercy, but the “I” doing the unmaking will always be there doing the unmaking unless God finishes us off.
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Iain,
Griffiths, I think, is clearly playing out a logic similar to that of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce where the sinners choose or at least approach nihilation by locking the doors of hell from the inside — hence, “the only thing that sinners can do for themselves is unmaking.”
Of course, it seems such an end would defeat God’s perfect freedom to create a wholly good cosmos whose root and end is Christ. The pleromatic integrity of humanity is lost to a soteriology that embraces mere individuals aggregated into society, rather than an ontological unity of intrinsic relations. Much better is the implicit hope suggested in Paul Claudel’s poem, “The Day of Gifts” — splendidly translated by our friend, Jonathan Monroe Geltner — the subversion of Griffiths’ pessimism is properly ground in the agapeic generosity that never despairs of the unique good intended from the Origin. Claudel hints that sinners always implicitly have chosen some malformed grasp of the Good that is ultimately inalienable from a destiny in Christ.
The Day of Gifts
BY PAUL CLAUDEL
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JONATHAN MONROE GELTNER
It’s not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with sins enough.
Someday I’ll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a lifelong drunk.
And I’ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all my days,
And I’ll see that I’m rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its unnumbered paths and ways.
I haven’t lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to pardon.
Now I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed off virtue’s burden.
Each day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count them like some paranoid miser.
If what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men beneath your standard; If there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not suffice,
But who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after You is there any life,
Well then there’s Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint Cecilia and plenty more!
But if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore,
If a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled ingrate,
Or the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face—
Well, anyway, You didn’t come to save the just but that other type that abounds,
And if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere . . . Lord, I’m still around.
And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little something back from You,
Hasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You,
Hoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him,
And maybe this little that he’s made himself, kept back until then, though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim.
It would be something that he’d put his whole heart into, something useless and malformed.
Just like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered forward with encumbered arms
And offered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride,
A magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands, a pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.
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Annihilation such construed may not imply divine causal involvement, but it seems to me that on any account annihilation amounts to a divine abandonment, a giving up and a forgetting, allowing the injustice of wrong to be cast in perpetuity, and such irreversibly so. The hopeless have no hope, darkness has trumped the light. Who then can be saved?
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Does Griffiths ever explain how it is that a creature is capable of completely unmaking itself? It is not at all clear to me, even in principle, that anything can contain within itself the power to eliminate itself entirely.
I like the overall thrust of what he’s saying in this passage. It seems like a good corrective to keep in the back of one’s mind when doing theology that God’s actions are always creative and never destructive.
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I think I wrote my first part too quickly. It seems like what he is saying at the end of this passage is not that the creature has in itself the power to become nothing, but that there can come a point where a person becomes so damaged and ingrained in their will towards nothingness that God’s only course of action is to let them fade away as the natural consequence of Him no longer sustaining their existence. If this is what he’s saying, then I would take issue first with the idea that anything can become so damaged that God cannot re-make it, and second with the idea that a person could ever properly will to be nothing.
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Griffiths seems to have an individualistic view of the person. When Billy “unmakes himself,” he also “unmakes” Sally, who is related to him. A person is essentially related to others. God does not remake one person without remaking another in some way.
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I wonder how the annihilationist accounts for a coherent ontology. This seems to me to be a real problem. From a Dionysian framework, it would be tantamount to a failed return for a thing that is enfolded in the Divine and to have proceeded from the Divine to then pass out of existence. It has the feel of passing beyond existence through rebellion. Of course, then there is the issue of whether or not privation can ever be so absolutized that it would bring a rational creature out of existence. The problem seems to compound if evil can have victory over Being or beings, because to cease to exist would be to deliquesce into a sort of immanent privation that can only be described as evil.
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To step away from the annihilationist conversation, I’d like to ask how one is to interpret passages like that of the parable of the weeds in Matthew 13? It seems like God, through his angels, is very active in destroying those who do evil. Is this a picture of the final judgement? Or is it Jesus prophesying something else (a friend of mine who is ride or die for universal reconciliation says that this stuff has something to do with the destruction of the temple)?
I realize there’s a big rock in my heart that is the fear of the infernalist; that God is ready and willing to toss us into the fire. My experiences with the Orthodox Church so far are starting to erode said rock, but it’s still there.
So how are we to interpret verses like the one I just mentioned in light of the idea that God is not involved in our “unmaking”?
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I didn’t want to gratuitously like sequentially so many comments, but I think really all the questioning regarding annihilation by folks here is on point. It may seem considerably less vindictive than the vision of God and saints rejoicing in the eternal torment of sinners, yet it is still far from the victory of the gospel.
Shoreless, one interpretation of parabolic judgement sees the weeds and the wheat or the sheep and the goats dichotomy as essentially intrapersonal. Your own development and path to God requires the endurance of sin and the time of purgation. Impatience and the requirement of immediate destruction lacks agapeic serenity in the face of evil, as well as realism and spiritual maturity regarding human weakness and the gift of time. Consider Incarnation and the solidarity with sinners accomplished by Christ throughout his entire life from conception through the silent years to the Cross/Resurrection/Ascension whereby kenotic forebearance marks the intimacy of God. Metaphysically, the divine Origin is the perduring gift at the center of the creature, the passio essendi that is continually forgotten. (There are analogies here to Heidegger’s charge of forgetfulness of being against onto-theology.) The Father allows for the long road of time and the wandering of the Prodigal in the chora makra (the place of illusion, sin, and death). You have to remember that Christ’s preaching of the kingdom is in the context of zealots who wanted a political messiah who would abruptly end the reign of evil, vanquish enemies, the kind of dualistic view of triumph that the world understood and that the devil offered in the Wilderness temptation.
Pavel Florensky and Adrienne von Speyr each sketched out imagistic renderings of the parable as saints in heaven and basically empty spiritual effigies of what the saints have left behind consigned to the flames. The weeds and the goats signify Paul’s carnal or old Adam, the old creation, but none of this is a dead loss; all is liberated by Christ into the renewed cosmos of unending joy and continual advance into the ever greater Good of TriUne plenitude. While this is a speculative hermeneutic and Scripture bears multiple licit interpretations, I do find this mode consistent with the victory of God’s love over finite, creaturely recalcitrance.
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Shoreless, to add to Brian’s comment, the issue is exactly that of interpretation, more specifically what (in)forms interpretation. It is worth drawing attention to the process, for it is not merely a question of “what does the this pericope of text teach” (only a strict literalist would subscribe to such) but an awareness of what is brought to the text, the complete interpretative framework from which meaning derives. Does a God who “is ready and willing to toss us into the fire” accord with the God who gives his life “while we were yet sinners” and “has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all”? Proof texting won’t break the gordian knot, we can’t merely point at this verse and that verse. What is more fundamental is that interpretative framework which in turn is informed by a constellation of considerations such as tradition; theological, metaphysical, and philosophical concerns; the affirmations of ecclesial councils; patristics and the patristic hermeneutic tradition; iconography, liturgics, and the like. These, taken together, mutually inform our understanding of God.
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A previous article on here by Thomas Talbott may also be of help to you shoreless:
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2018/05/29/how-to-read-the-bible-from-a-universalist-perspective/
It doesn’t touch on Matthew 13 but it can be of help as part of reading Scripture from a universalist standpoint.
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Cheers, guys
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In, perhaps, my only writing on hell, found in an essay (found on my webpage) on Salvation & Heaven, & included as a means to describe something I see of Heaven, I claim that because God is Ultimate Reality, there is little difference between saying that God judges & condemns, that God destroys, than that destrucion is inherent in sin & the natural consequence of sin.
As for annihilationism, my thoughts are very much this: God, being eternal, cannot (is there a difference here between will & can?) un-create what He has created. Also, God being Truth & Reality, Creates. The created cannot undo that action of God’s – for God is more real, & His actions more real – can he?
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Yes: sin is a grasp at nothing. (One reason why it makes no sense for people to say that God makes sin or ordains sin or makes people sin: God MAKES. It is nonsense to say that nothing can be made or that the falling into nothingness is a created thing. You might as well say that blue and red could be the same color or that a circle could be a triangle.)
All we, as sinners, contribute is the unmaking. It is God who makes, and God who re-makes. Alleluia. All we, as sinners, contribute is the sin. It is God who gives innocence, and God who restores innocence as righteousness. All we contribute is nothing. It is God who gives existence, and God who gives Himself. All we, as sinners, contribute is death. It is God who gives life, and God who gives resurrection.
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