God does not coerce! Without question, this is the most popular, and perhaps most powerful, objection raised against the universalist hope, at least in those circles where the retributive construal of damnation does not hold sway. God has given human beings the faculty of free will, the exercise of which requires genuine independence and autonomy. The roots of this position go back to the early centuries of the Church. As St John Chrysostom declares:
Beloved, God being loving towards man and beneficent, does and contrives all things in order that we may shine in virtue, and as desiring that we be well approved by Him. And to this end He draws no one by force or compulsion: but by persuasion and benefits He draws all that will, and wins them to Himself. Wherefore when He came, some received Him, and others received Him not. For He will have no unwilling, no forced domestic, but all of their own will and choice, and grateful to Him for their service. Men, as needing the ministry of servants, keep many in that state even against their will, by the law of ownership; but God, being without wants, and not standing in need of anything of ours, but doing all only for our salvation makes us absolute in this matter, and therefore lays neither force nor compulsion on any of those who are unwilling. For He looks only to our advantage: and to be drawn unwilling to a service like this is the same as not serving at all.1
Arminians would no doubt like to see some mention of prevenient grace, but the essential point is ecumenically affirmed—God does not coerce. He has made humanity in his own image, bestowing upon him free will, and he so respects personal freedom that he will allow any and every individual to reject him—eternally, decisively, irrevocably.2 God does not determine human choice. He persuades and seduces, but he does not force; he does not manipulate; he does not invasively overwhelm. The God of love will not violate the integrity of the person, for what he wants from each of us is a free reciprocal response of love.
Modern philosophers speak of the above construal of freedom as libertarian freedom or the power of contrary choice: if I choose to do A, I must also have been able to do B. I am only free if I can act otherwise. Robert Kane specifies two conditions for libertarian freedom:
1. The existence of alternative possibilities (or the agent’s power to do otherwise) is a necessary condition for acting freely, or acting “of one’s own free will.”
2. Determinism is not compatible with alternative possibilities (it precludes the power to do otherwise).3
An action cannot be simultaneously free and the product of sufficient external causes. Or as Thomas Talbott succinctly formulates the libertarian position: “A rational agent chooses freely in a given set of circumstances only when the agent categorically could have chosen otherwise in the exact same circumstances.”4
Given this understanding of human freedom, many Christian philosophers conclude that God does not cause free human actions. Human self-determination and divine agency are mutually exclusive:
I do something freely in this libertarian sense . . . only if it is within my (unexercised) power, at the time of acting and in the very same circumstances, to refrain from doing it; and I refrain from doing something freely only if it is within my (unexercised) power to do so. It is within my power to refrain some something I do, moreover, only if, first, it is logically possible that I should refrain from doing it, and second, nothing outside my control should causally determine (or necessitate) my doing it. Accordingly, if my act of writing this page is free in the relevant sense, then it must have been possible for me not to write it; and if it was possible for me not to write it, then there is a possible world in which I do not write it. That world—call it W—might be the same as the actual world (at least in certain relevant aspects) up to the time of my writing, but in that world I choose to spend my time in another way. But though W is truly a possible world (a way things might have been), it is a world that God was powerless to create; had he tried to make it actual, he would have failed. He could, of course, have caused me to refrain from writing, but then I would not have refrained freely. In the exact circumstances that obtained, only I could bring it about that I freely refrain from writing. Since I could have chosen not to write, W is indeed a possible world; but since I did not make that choice and God was powerless to bring it about that I did so freely, he was also powerless to create W. If free will (of the libertarian kind just described) is even possible, therefore, there may be infinitely many possible worlds that God, however omnipotent he may be, no more has the power to create than he has the power to produce a sufficient cause for an uncaused event.5
Talbott’s argument presupposes divine causality as extrinsic to creaturely agency—only thus can it be said that the two are mutually exclusive. He is aware that providing a rigorous account of “external sufficient causes” is a challenging task; “but,” he comments, “if I am to exist as a distinct agent, then something must qualify as being external to myself, and this would presumably include causes that existed back in 1500 A.D. as well as causes that lie in eternity itself.”6
If the above account of divine and human action is true, then the universalist hope—specifically, hope as lively and confident expectation—is false. There must be a possible world where at least one person freely holds out indefinitely against the divine offer of mercy and reconciliation. Perhaps this is that world. Perhaps this is a world where many or even most human beings irrevocably choose exclusion from the beatific vision. This is the core thesis of the free-will defense of hell. God does not damn the wicked; the wicked damn themselves. Eternal perdition is always a possibility because of God’s gift of libertarian freedom.
Can Almighty God effect the universal reconciliation of human beings, while respecting their freedom and autonomy? This question brings us to the heart of Talbott’s philosophical proposal.
Talbott states a crucial implication of the free-will defense of hell: “Insofar as freedom and determinism are incompatible, free choice introduces into the universe an element that, from God’s point of view, is utterly random in that it lies outside of his direct causal control.”7 Consequently, not only is it possible for human beings to embrace evil and definitively set their wills against the divine will, but God is ultimately helpless to do anything about it, given his self-imposed limits in the exercise of his omnipotence. The gift of freedom requires the Creator to respect each individual’s choices and decisions. To put it bluntly, the Almighty is powerless to either prevent our self-damnation or to rescue us from it. The everlasting perdition of some, many, most, or even all of humanity is the unavoidable, but divinely acceptable, consequence of human freedom. For the free-will defender of hell, the lost are collateral damage.
In response to libertarian self-damnation, Talbott advances three propositions:
(1) “The very idea of someone freely rejecting God forever is deeply incoherent and therefore logically impossible.”8
Talbott asks us to consider the example of a young boy who puts his hand into a fire and keeps it there, despite the intense pain, despite all pleas from his parents and friends. What would we say about this boy? Is he acting rationally? freely? responsibly? Would we not think, rather, that something must be terribly wrong with him? Perhaps he suffers from congenital analgesia. Perhaps he is overwhelmed by self-destructive impulses. The point Talbott is making is that other necessary conditions obtain, besides the absence of coercion or the power to do otherwise, in order for an action to be judged a free action: specifically, a minimal degree of rationality is needed. “That which is utterly pointless, utterly irrational, and utterly inexplicable, “he writes, “will simply not qualify as a free choice for which one is morally responsible.”9
Everyone agrees that eternal damnation represents the absolutely worst thing that can happen to a human being. It is not just tragic; it is the maximal tragedy. So why would a rational being make such a choice for himself when it contradicts his fundamental good and renders impossible his own happiness? We can entertain the possibility of such a choice only if it rests upon ignorance, deception, pathology, or addiction; but all such conditions result in diminished capacity and therefore diminished freedom.
Of decisive consideration here is the coincidence between the ultimate happiness that we will for ourselves and the ultimate happiness that God wills for us:
Let us now begin to explore what it might mean to say that someone freely rejects God forever. Is there in fact a coherent meaning here? Religious people sometimes speak of God as if he were just another human magistrate who seeks his own glory and requires obedience for its own sake; they even speak as if we might reject the Creator and Father of our souls without rejecting ourselves, oppose his will for our lives without opposing, schizophrenically perhaps, our own will for our lives. . . . But if God is our loving Creator, then he wills for us exactly what, at the most fundamental level, we want for ourselves; he wills that we should experience supreme happiness, that our deepest yearnings should be satisfied, and that all of our needs should be met. So if that is true, if God wills for us the very thing we really want for ourselves, whether we know it or not, how then are we to understand human disobedience and opposition to God.10
When I first read Inescapable Love, this paragraph jumped out at me. My reading in the moral theologies of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, mediated in particular by Servais Pinckaers, had prepared me to receive Talbott’s argument. Here is the secret of the universalist hope: The good we desire for ourselves and the good God desires for us are identical!11 At any given moment we may not be able to see this profound truth of our lives, due to our egotism, alienation, ignorance, pathology, and vicious character; but no matter how hardened our hearts become, we remain creatures made in the image of our Triune Creator. God, and only God, can satisfy our deepest desires.
In order, therefore, for a person to irrevocably reject God and the unsurpassable happiness that union with him brings, he must irrevocably reject the very happiness for which he most yearns. And let us stipulate that the person has been informed of the dire consequences of his sin and rebellion. Does it make sense that he would choose hell rather than heaven? No, we reply, it makes no sense, yet people do it all the time. It’s one thing to be told about future consequences; it’s another thing to actually experience those consequences. So let us now imagine that same person in hell. His remaining ignorance has been removed; his illusions and delusions stripped away. He is unable to pursue apparent or lesser goods. His disordered desires are cut off from their objects. Finally, we would say, he is truly informed, not by mere word but through direct experience, of the irremediable misery of the damned. We now put to him the soteriological question: “Do you choose to remain in this condition of horrific suffering and torment?” Surely we would all agree that the only sane answer would be: “No, I do not choose to be in hell. Despite the warnings, I had no idea that it would be like this. Please help me. The agony is intolerable.” But what if instead he replies: “Yes, this is where I wish to be for all eternity. Leave me be.” Does this reply make sense? Reason dictates that he should change his decision. He has every sound motive to reject hell and none not to do so. Yet he tells us that he prefers to remain in hell. Would we not suspect that despite all that was stipulated above about his informed condition, this lost soul actually exists in a state of insanity, delusion, and interior bondage? Talbott elaborates:
As a first step towards answering this question, let us distinguish between two senses in which a person might reject God. If a person refuses to be reconciled to God and the person’s refusal does not rest upon ignorance, or misinformation, or deception of any kind, then let us say that the person has made a fully informed decision to reject God; but if the person refuses to be reconciled to God and the person’s refusal does rest upon ignorance or deception of some kind, then let us say that the person has made a less than fully informed decision to reject God. Now no one, I take it, would deny the possibility of someone’s making a less than fully informed decision to reject God; it happens all the time. Even St. Paul, before his conversion to Christianity, presumably saw himself as rejecting the Christian God at one time. But what might qualify as a motive for someone’s making a fully informed decision to reject God? Once one has learned, perhaps through bitter experience, that evil is always destructive, always contrary to one’s own interest as well as to the interest of others, and once one sees clearly that God is the ultimate source of human happiness and that rebellion can bring only greater and greater misery into one’s own life as well as into the lives of others, an intelligible motive for such rebellion no longer seems even possible. The strongest conceivable motive would seem to exist, moreover, for uniting with God. So if a fully informed person should reject God nonetheless, then that person, like the boy in our story above, would seem to display the kind of irrationality that is itself incompatible with free choice.12
The critical plank of the free-will defense—namely, the damned freely choose their miserific state—must therefore be judged incoherent. It may make for high drama (“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n”!), but it crumbles upon sober analysis. The popular formulations of libertarian freedom, therefore, need to be revised to accommodate these kinds of considerations. The “could have done otherwise” qualification fails to provide an adequate understanding of genuine freedom. Instead of libertarian freedom, let us speak of rational freedom: “The essence of freedom . . . is the ability to follow the dictates of one’s own reasoning powers, provided that one has passed the relevant threshold of rationality.”13
Would a God of absolute love permit any person to irrationally throw themselves into the fires of Gehenna? We pray he would not, yet the libertarian God appears to be impotent before our self-chosen hells.
(28 February 2015; rev.)
Footnotes
[1] John Chrysostom, Hom. in John 10.1.
[2] Christians who affirm absolute predestination (Calvinists, Thomists) will obviously take exception to this sentence. The salvation of the elect is guaranteed.
[3] Robert Kane, The Oxford Handbook on Free Will, 2nd ed. (2011), p. 11.
[4] Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (2014), p. 190. For a discussion of modern debates on free will, see Talbott’s recently published book Understanding the Free-Will Controversy (2022).
[5] Ibid., pp. 160-161.
[6] Ibid., p. 156, n. 7.
[7] Ibid., p. 167.
[8] Ibid., p. 170. Also see Thomas Talbott, “Free-Will Theodicies of Hell” (2016), as well as his entry “Universalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (2007), chap. 25.
[9] Ibid., p. 172.
[10] Ibid.
[11] See “The Secret of the Universalist Hope.”
[12] Talbott, pp. 172-173.
[13] Talbott, Free-Will Controversy, p. 71. Also see Thomas Talbott, “God, Freedom, and Human Agency,” Faith and Philosophy, 26 (October 2009): 376-395. Talbott argues that God, as the necessary perfect being and uncaused cause of all divine actions, is the freest of all possible beings. In his perfect rationality, omniscience, and infinite goodness, he always acts for the best. The possibility of acting otherwise is logically irrelevant to him. God therefore should be judged the model of genuine freedom, even for rational creaturely beings: “But unlike God . . . , ordinary human beings are neither perfectly rational nor all knowing; instead, their rationality and the extent of their knowledge are both limited and matters of degree. Still, despite the enormous difference between God’s perfect rationality, as traditionally understood, and our more limited rationality, the freedom of God nonetheless represents the ideal, I have suggested, for a rational agent. Accordingly, even as God acts freely whenever his perfectly rational and wise judgments determine his actions, so we act freely whenever our more limited understanding, as expressed through reasonable judgments concerning the best course of action, determines our actions. All of which points, I suggest, to a sufficient condition for the freedom of any rational agent, whether it be a perfectly rational supreme being or a less than perfectly rational human being” (p. 390).
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
This recent series of (re)posts on The Inescapable Love of God is outstanding. I’m really enjoying it.
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It seems to me that the likes of Feser and Rooney suppose that Talbott’s view of freedom holds for us in this mortal life, but that for those who die in a state of mortal sin, their ‘will’ is locked in a rejecting-God position.
But it’s clear that such a damned being, one incapable of pursuing his own good, would no longer be a rational agent, and hence no longer a person, which is to say, he would no longer be the person he was in his mortal life. God would have annihilated the person and replaced it with a non-person fixed in an eternal state of suffering.
Two things follow. It is not the man who resides in Hell. And that God is a monster.
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I have hesitated on this issue of the potential role of death in fixing a person’s fate, in large part because I’m not very well educated on all the theological and philosophical aspects of the universalism question but also because it seems to me most Christian faith traditions hold death to be the deciding point: all positions held, all beliefs had or not had, all acts unrepented at that point (although, it seems good deeds/works are not weighed) are what come before judgement.
And never mind dying in mortal sin as Brad references above (a categorization I do not necessarily observe), even dying in “simple” gnorance, dying past the age of maturity without sufficient acceptance or knowledge of the gospel, living and dying in an area where the gospel was not presented, etc., all seem widely viewed as unfortunate but largely unquestioned factors in sealing the fate of millions or billions according to many who hold a belief in a hell of eternal torments. A citation to Romans 1:20, that “they are without excuse” seems to be all that is needed.
I would be very interested to see or hear where there might be more expansive discussions in universalist thinking on the idea that death has been destroyed, that it no longer has its sting (and what precisely was its sting?), that Jesus holds the keys to death and hell (figuratively or literally). Conversely, would welcome any well-reasoned and cohesive presentation of the opposite view, that death is the determing moment after which no more movement toward God, repentance, or theosis is available to those sentenced to hell.
Father Aidan, I have to say that Ive greatly enjoyed the comics youve been posting lately. They bring a welcome levity to a topic that has recently been discussed in such stark terms.
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It’s possible that you develop this thought more in other articles, but I’m not entirely clear on what exactly Talbott views as the necessary/sufficient conditions for a choice to be free. His assertion that a choice cannot be truly free (and thus morally culpable) if it is irrational seems to beg the question in the universalism debate. If it is true, then the rest of the argument may follow – but I don’t think I have enough argumentation here to explain *why* it is true.
Personally I see no problem with saying that we can be morally culpable for our irrational choices made in ignorance, so long as we had sufficient information to know that our choices were morally wrong. It seems to me that the alternative to this would be to say that we can never really be morally culpable for any sin, since the commission of any sin must be the result of ignorance as to what the Good is. I think that notion would be obviously false, but I’m not sure how to avoid that conclusion from Talbott’s considerations here.
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Thanks for your response, alexpern. I agree with you that “the commission of any sin must be the result of ignorance as to what the Good is.” Or at least I would agree that we all emerge and begin making choices in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception, and some of these choices may indeed count as sins for the reason you have suggested: we may nonetheless know enough to know that they are wrong.
But neither would I conflate acting in ignorance with acting irrationally, as you seem to have done when you speak of “irrational choices made in ignorance.” Granted, every irrational choice no doubt includes some ignorance or misperception of some kind or anothertt. But the reverse is not true at all. Not every choice made in some degree of ignorance will count as an utterly irrational choice. So here is a paragraph from my essay entitled “Free Will Theodicies of Hell”:
“Suppose, by way of illustration, that a schizophrenic young man should kill his loving mother, believing her to be a sinister space alien who has devoured his real mother; and suppose further that he does so in a context in which he categorically could have chosen otherwise (in part, perhaps, because he worries about possible retaliation from other sinister space aliens). Why should such an irrational choice, even if not causally determined, be any more compatible with genuine moral freedom than a rigorous determinism would be? Either our seriously deluded beliefs, particularly those with destructive consequences in our own lives, are in principle correctable by some degree of powerful evidence against them, or the choices that rest upon them are simply too irrational to qualify as free moral choices.”
Incidentally, it was sheer luck that I happened to see your thoughtful response, and it may be several days before I’ll be able to check back again. Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday, and I’ll be tied up all day Sunday as well. But there are no doubt many issues that are worth pursuing further, if you should choose to so. Accordingly, I’ll check to see whether you have any further response in a few days. Thanks again for your response.
-Tom
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This amateur philosopher sees a glaring flaw in your argument. No human being has sufficient evidence. Beginning with pagans who have no idea of the law of God or what morality is, all the way up to the most educated PhD in theology, we are
completely ignorant of the totality of facts and actions/consequences in this life.
Moral culpability (guilt) sounds more like the legal approach of Western soteriology rather than the concept that Christ is the Great Physician who works to bring all to complete spiritual wholeness. Does God approach the pagan who never heard of Christ or the moral law on the same basis of guilt as the person who was raised in the Church and has rejected it all because he desires fornication over Christ? Moral culpability would assign them both to eternal hell, inasmuch as they are incapable of repentance after death, according to the Thomist view. But in Orthodoxy, I think I am on safe ground in saying that the after-death experience is one of healing the sickness of the soul of each of these persons. The amount of torment suffered is in proportion to the amount of evil engaged in as the soul is healed from its illness (sin sickness).
IMHO, the whole issue of “moral culpability” is deeply flawed. But that’s just my amateur philosopher speaking. Perhaps someone can defend it in a manner that might make some sense to me. So far, it does not.
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