The Inescapable Love of God: Hell Lite

I think it is is accurate to say that over the past 100 years the free-will theodicy has become the go-to defense of the doctrine of hell. Its popularity crosses ecclesial boundaries. Even Baptists (maybe not many but some) can be heard invoking it. With one fell swoop, God has been removed as judge, jury, and prison warden from the eschatological picture. His retributive punishment of the wicked has been quietly retired. How often have you heard one or more of the following statements:

• God does not condemn; he only confirms our definitive choice for hell.
• God does not damn; we damn ourselves.
• God never ceases to love the damned; the gates of hell are locked from the inside.
• God does not inflict perditional suffering; we bring it upon ourselves through our obdurate impenitence.

If someone were to pipe up and say, “Fr Aidan, I have heard you say all of the above many times,” they would be absolutely correct. This is what I taught in the parishes I pastored.

The free will defense of hell was popularized in the 20th century by C. S. Lewis in his books The Problem of Pain and The Great Divorce.¹ It is difficult to know when to date its initial appearance in the theological tradition. Nicholas Loudovikos names St Maximus the Confessor and St John of Damascus as early proponents of this model; but further docu­mentation and analysis is needed. Within the Latin Church, the retributive construal of damnation held doctrinal sway for over a millennium and a half. As far as I’m aware, Catholic and Protestant theologians only began to advance the free-will defense in the 20th century.

Even so, the free-will defense has one glaring vulnerability—the interminable suffering of the reprobate. Even if is true that they bring it upon themselves, the fact remains that God is responsible for keeping them in existence in this condition. Would not annihilation be morally preferable? We shoot horses, don’t we? Catholic theologian Paul Giffiths has proposed a free-will version of annihilation or decreation as a substitute for the doctrine of everlasting perdition:

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.²

Most free-will theorists have yet to embrace the annihilationist option, whether for biblical or dogmatic reasons; but one thing I have noticed is that some now downplay the suffer­ings of the damned. Maybe it’s not as bad as the tradition has long presented it.

In response Thomas Talbott offers the following proposition:

3) “The free will theist’s understanding of hell is, in any case, utterly inconsistent with the New Testament teaching about hell.”³

Thomas Talbott suggests that the free will theodicy of hell is inconsistent with the New Testament’s terrifying imagery of Gehenna in two ways.

First, the biblical imagery argues against the suggestion that eternal perdition is a freely-embraced condition. Eschatological condemnation is typically presented as a judgment by God of sinful deeds, and for some, this judgment will come as a complete surprise: “‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? (Matt 25:37-38). Yet if the judgment comes as a surprise, then it can hardly be described as an outcome chosen and accepted by the condemned. Moreover, Gehenna is presented as a place of intolerable suffering and anguish: “The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth” (Matt 13:41-42)—not a condition one might freely and irrevocably choose. Equally clearly, the rich man in Jesus’ parable hardly displays a preference for his condition. He begs Father Abraham to warn his five brothers, lest they too find themselves in that “place of torment” (Lk 16:19-31). One might argue that the rich man had fair warning of the consequences of his neglect of the poor and homeless, but having now experienced those consequences, he is desirous of being delivered from them. His attitude may not count as genuine repentance—not yet—but perhaps, like Ebenezer Scrooge, he would avail himself of a second chance if given the opportunity. “Indeed,” writes Talbott, “insofar as the whole point of the New Testament imagery is to provide a warning and a motive for repentance in the present, it makes little sense to suggest that some people might prefer a hellish condition over a heavenly one.”⁴

Second, whereas Scripture presents Gehenna as a place of intolerable suffering, the advocates of the free will model often seek to minimize the suffering of the damned. That they do so is understandable, for the more intense the suffering, the more incompre­hen­sible the eternal rejection of God becomes. Philosopher Jerry Walls, for example, speculates that “those in hell may be almost happy, and this may explain why they insist on staying there. They do not, of course, experience even a shred of genuine happiness. But perhaps they experience a certain perverse sense of satisfaction, a distorted sort of pleasure.”⁵

Walls’s suggestion strikes me as initially plausible. I imagine that we have all experienced this kind of degenerate self-satisfaction. Talbott rightly notes, however, that the biblical image of torment excludes all such pleasure. Perhaps the Lucifer of John Milton’s imagination initially thought he would find the experience of ruling hell superior to service in heaven, yet as the poem unfolds, his despair grows and intensifies:

Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate, To me alike, it deals eternal woe. Nay curs’d be thou; since against his thy will Chose freely what it now so justly rues. Me miserable! which way shall I flie Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire? Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threatning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.⁶

Does Lucifer come close to repentance? Milton cannot entertain this possibility.

Walls acknowledges that the “happiness” of hell is ultimately based on self-deception. The damned have convinced themselves that their infernal satisfactions must be greater than whatever joys heaven offers. “They must take some corrupt pleasure,” he reflects, “in choosing evil because it is evil. Perhaps such a choice represents the epitome of self-assertion and independence from moral norms. Maybe it gives an illusion of complete autonomy that no other sort of choice does. It is admittedly hard to conceive of such a choice, but if real perversity is an option for free persons, it must be possible to see some advantage in choosing evil because it is evil.”⁶ But is it really possible to choose evil because it is evil?

In his pride and egoism, Milton’s Lucifer thought he could choose evil for the sake of evil (“All good to me is lost;/Evil, be thou my Good”); but this declared intent only reflects the depth of his delusion. What happens when all creaturely goods are withdrawn from the damned and they find themselves deprived of all sources of pleasure, including the pleasure of tormenting others? What happens when they are abandoned to the outer darkness in the anguish that must inevitably deepen and intensify? Here is the fatal vulnerability of Walls’s position, however we understand the psychology of demonic beings. He acknowledges that it is not within the power of human beings “to endure ever-increasing misery. We do not have the constitutional strength or capacity to absorb ever greater amounts of torment.”⁷ As the CIA operative in Zero, Dark Thirty says when he is torturing a detainee: “In the end, everyone breaks. It’s biology.” So why do the damned not break? Because God will not allow their suffering to reach the critical point. “To be sure,” Walls explains, “if God added such pressure, the person would be forced to see that sin causes misery and would find it impossible not to submit to the pressure. But the choice to submit under these circumstances would not qualify as a free choice.”⁸

In other words, God steps in to prevent the person from achieving salvific insight, and he does so out of ostensible respect for the libertarian integrity of the person. Like the lawyer who always walks through the door just at the moment when his client is about to buckle under the pressure of police interrogation and confess his crime, so God intervenes to protect the damned from the full consequences of their sin, thereby interrupting the process of illusion-demolition and thus allowing them to do irreparable harm to them­selves and to all who love them. How is this authentic respect for freedom? How is this love? Alcoholic Anonymous insists that every alcoholic must hit bottom before he will be ready to begin the road to recovery, yet apparently Walls envisions God as inhibiting the disintegrating spiral precisely to prevent the sinner from ever reaching his bottom. At this point the moral and theological power of the universalist position becomes evident:

We can appreciate, of course, why many free will theists would reject the barbaric picture of an eternal torture chamber in which no repentance and no escape from unbearable suffering is even possible. For an eternity of such suffering would seem utterly pointless, and a “god” who would actually inflict such suffering on someone forever would be unspeakably barbaric, even demonic. But here, I would suggest, the universalists are in a far better position to accept the images and language of the New Testament than are the Arminians and other free will theists. For the universalists can regard the misery of hell as both an inevitable consequence of sin and as a means of correction for it; that is, precisely because they reject the idea of a freely embraced condition, they have no need to water down the New Testament image of unbearable suffering.⁹

Might it just be possible that Gehenna is God’s last resort to reconcile humanity to himself?

(5 March 2015; rev.)

Footnotes

[1] For a succinct presentation of the basic models of damnation, see Thomas Talbott, “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[2] Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation (2014), pp. 211-212. Also see his essay “Self-Annihilation or Damnation,” Pro Ecclesia XVI (2007): 416-444. For a fascinating dialogue between Griffiths and five scholars, see the 2015 Syndicate Symposium on Decreation. Also see my article “Damning to Nothingness.” Cf. Eleonore Stump, “Dante’s Hell, Aquinas’s Moral Theory, and the Love of God,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16/2, (June 1986): 181-198. Following Thomas Aquinas, Stump argues that the gift of being overrides the suffering of the damned. Because of the metaphysical identification of being and goodness, it would be wrong for God to annihilate them. God’s only good and loving choice is to sequester them to prevent them from doing harm to the innocent and give them a place to act and will in accordance with their vicious nature. Stump elides the fact that for both Aquinas and Dante, hell is a place of retributive punishment and is therefore an expression of justice, not mercy. For this reason the Blessed do not pity the reprobate in their torment.

[3] Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (2014), p. 171.

[4] Ibid., p. 182. Contra infernalist exegesis, Talbott does not believe that Jesus intended to teach everlasting damnation in the parable of the rich man or his references to Gehenna.

[5] Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (1992), p. 126.

[6] John Milton, Paradise Lost, book IV.

[7] Walls, p. 133.

[8] Ibid., p. 132. In his book Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (2015), Walls rejects the traditional claim that the damned are incapable of repentance as a purely arbitrary assertion. He thus leaves open the possibility of post-mortem conversion (chap. 8). See my article “Repenting of Hell.”

[9] Talbott, p. 183.

(Go to “Gehennic Christ”)