The Inescapable Love of God: Saved by the Gehennic Christ

“Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; and if any one’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” (Rev. 20:14-15)

“Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’” (Matt 22:13)

Unquenchable fire, outer darkness—two very different images, yet when held together in creative tension, they may hold the key to understanding the redemptive possibilities of Gehenna.

Why is it, asks Thomas Talbott, that most of us do not experience alienation from our Creator as the objective horror that it truly is? The Bible tells us that sin is destructive to our spiritual and psychological lives, yet these consequences somehow remain hidden from us. Why so? Talbott offers this answer:

Because we initially emerge and begin making choices in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and illusion, we do not typically experience our initial separation from God, or even our continuing separation from him in his life, as a horror. To the contrary, the very conditions that make an earthly life possible leave God at least partially hidden from us; they also protect us from experiencing our separation from him as a kind of horror.¹

This hiddenness from God, Talbott speculates, may well have been necessary for the formation of rational consciousness. After all, we know next to nothing regarding the metaphysical conditions necessary for created personhood. “It is easy enough, I suppose,” comments Talbott, “to imagine an omnipotent being instantaneously creating a self-aware, language using, fully rational, and morally mature person capable of independent action, but I, for one, see no reason to think this possible at all.”² Perhaps it was necessary that God create humanity just as he did, in the way that he did:

Are we to suppose that God could have created independent rational agents, or have brought them into being from the abyss, so to speak, without having to satisfy any metaphysically necessary conditions at all of their coming into being? How could God possibly create someone distinct from himself without separating the created person from himself and without, therefore, bringing about an initial separation to be overcome? By “an initial separation to be overcome,” which is admittedly somewhat vague, I mean to imply, among other things, a severance from God’s direct causal control on the metaphysical level and an experience of frustrated desire and frustrated will—the sort of thing that naturally leads to a sense of estrangement and alienation—on the psychological level. If these should be metaphysically necessary conditions of a person’s creation, then perhaps God had no choice, if he wanted to create any persons at all, but to permit their embryonic minds to emerge and to begin functioning on their own in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, misperception, and even a good deal of indeterminism.³

This hiddenness—what John Hick calls “epistemic distance”⁴—ineluctably characterizes human life in our world. Perhaps essential to growth into mature freedom and authentic personhood, it also brings with it the risk of error, intellectual and moral blindness, and sin. Because we do not presently enjoy the vision of our supreme Good, it becomes considerably easier, therefore, to seek our happiness in temporal and lesser goods: hence our frustrating inability to experience the spiritual consequences of our sins and our inveterate failure to recognize the horror of our alienation from our Creator.

Presumably, however, the epistemic distance dissolves after death, when each person is brought into immediate encounter with the risen and glorified Jesus Christ. Talbott indulges in a little bit of creative speculation about this prospect. Consider the two very different eschatological images of the lake of fire and the outer darkness. Talbott suggests that we can plausibly think of them as metaphorically signifying “two very different realities.”⁵ The lake of fire represents the holy presence of God, a presence that brings forgiveness and refreshment of the Spirit to the penitent but misery and torment to the impenitent. “The misery associated with the lake of fire, therefore, is simply the way in which the rebellious and the unrepentant experience God’s holy presence,” Talbott remarks.⁶ Eastern Christians will immediately think of the popular essay “The River of Fire” by Alexandre Kalomiros:

God is a loving fire, and He is a loving fire for all: good or bad. There is, however, a great difference in the way people receive this loving fire of God. Saint Basil says that “the sword of fire was placed at the gate of paradise to guard the approach to the tree of life; it was terrible and burning toward infidels, but kindly accessible toward the faithful, bringing to them the light of day.” The same loving fire brings the day to those who respond to love with love, and burns those who respond to love with hatred.

Paradise and hell are one and the same River of God, a loving fire which embraces and covers all with the same beneficial will, without any difference or discrimination. The same vivifying water is life eternal for the faithful and death eternal for the infidels; for the first it is their element of life, for the second it is the instrument of their eternal suffocation; paradise for the one is hell for the other. Do not consider this strange. The son who loves his father will feel happy in his father’s arms, but if he does not love him, his father’s loving embrace will be a torment to him. This also is why when we love the man who hates us, it is likened to pouring lighted coals and hot embers on his head.

Those who hate Christ Jesus and obstinately reject his mercy can only experience “the consuming fire of God’s perfecting love” as punishment and wrath. They are incapable of recognizing Love as love. They cannot welcome it; they can only resist and curse and suffer its presence. In the oft-quoted words of St Isaac the Syrian: “Those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love.”⁷ Immersed in the divine goodness, the damned inevitably endure the lake of fire as a “forcibly imposed punishment.“⁸ “It is simply not possible,” Talbott continues, “for those who cling to their selfish attitudes, to their lust for power over others, or to their delusions of personal grandeur to experience God’s holy presence as anything but unbearable torment.”⁹

Talbott then proposes a surprising interpretive twist. If the lake of fire symbolizes the holy presence of Christ, may not the outer darkness symbolize “separation from the divine nature as far as is metaphysically possible short of annihilation”?¹⁰

Even in the lake of fire one may yet retain the power to continue resisting God’s purifying love. For even as such resistance inevitably makes contact with the divine nature increasingly unbearable, it may also open up a theoretical possibility, at least, for this further choice: either one can submit freely to the purification that the lake of fire represents and begin to dis­cover the bliss of union with the divine nature, or one can separate oneself altogether from God’s holy presence. The latter option implies separation from every implicit experience of God, including even an experience of the material universe. The brief New Testament allusions to the outer darkness suggest further that God may indeed honor such a choice. If, perchance, anyone in the lake of fire should retain the delusion that some good is possible apart from God, such a person would be free to act upon it and put it to the test. So even as Hitler tried to escape intolerable misery through suicide, perhaps some of those in the lake of fire may try to escape God’s presence altogether and thus leap from the lake of fire into sheer nothing­ness, otherwise known as the outer darkness. By this I do not mean to suggest annihilation (as if God would destroy forever what remains of his own image in even the worst of sinners); I merely mean to imply the loneliness and terror of living apart from every implicit experience of God. Nor is it even possible that someone rational enough to qualify as a free moral agent could both experience such a condition and continue to regard it as a desirable state.¹¹

Is Talbott speaking here of an objective or subjective state of affairs? Perhaps the distinction is meaningless. The undeniable point is that our personal orientation to God informs and determines our experience of God. If we have exercised our fundamental option in repudiation of God and consequently find ourselves immersed in the infernal fire, would we not seek a way of escape? And if physical escape is impossible, might we not retreat into our consciousness, building up wall upon wall of interior defenses, seeking to make nothingness our reality, and might not God make it so? Yet when we have succeeded as perfect a seclusion as we can manage, what would be the result? Happiness? Content­ment? Satisfaction? Perhaps while we live in the world we can entertain the possibility of happiness without God, but imagine now an existence stripped of creaturely goods and society, an existence of isolation, monotony, tedium, sterility, emptiness, misery, death. Talbott cites a few lines from George MacDonald’s sermon “The Consuming Fire,” but these lines are embedded in a splendid passage that deserves quotation:

The man whose deeds are evil, fears the burning. But the burning will not come the less that he fears it or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till he has paid the uttermost farthing.

If the man resists the burning of God, the consuming fire of Love, a terrible doom awaits him, and its day will come. He shall be cast into the outer darkness who hates the fire of God. What sick dismay shall then seize upon him! For let a man think and care ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him—making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though he knows it not. But when God withdraws from a man as far as that can be without the man’s ceasing to be; when the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in a ceaseless vertigo of existence upon the verge of the gulf of his being, without support, without refuge, without aim, without end—for the soul has no weapons wherewith to destroy herself–with no inbreathing of joy, with nothing to make life good;—then will he listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door; then, if the moan of suffering humanity ever reaches the ear of the outcast of darkness, he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation, of unspeakable death, for that region of painful hope. Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God—that one living death. Is not this

to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling?

But with this divine difference: that the outer darkness is but the most dreadful form of the consuming fire—the fire without light—the darkness visible, the black flame. God hath withdrawn himself, but not lost his hold. His face is turned away, but his hand is laid upon him still. His heart has ceased to beat into the man’s heart, but he keeps him alive by his fire. And that fire will go searching and burning on in him, as in the highest saint who is not yet pure as he is pure.

There can be no escape from the consuming fire that is the incarnate and glorified Savior. As the Psalmist sings:

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there! (Ps 139:7-8)

Even in the infernal depths, there is the Gehennic Christ. Perhaps not, therefore, two different realities but one indivisible reality experienced differently. There is only the consuming fire—the fire of love and deifying union, the fire of judgment, the fire of purgation, the fire of Nothingness and Being.

MacDonald finds in the outer darkness the solution to the problem posed by human freedom. The risen Christ need not violently impose himself upon the wicked. He need only allow them to know the nothingness they desire, in utter confidence they will find their condition a harrowing and intolerable horror. Finally, ineluctably, all resources exhausted, overwhelmed by despair and guilt, all avenues of escape closed off, the soul cannot but abandon her destructive illusion of autonomy. Talbott elaborates:

If MacDonald was right about this, as I believe he was, then God knows from the outset that, beyond a certain limit, libertarian freedom cannot survive further separation from the divine nature. Accordingly, no matter how tenaciously some sinners might pursue a life apart from God and resist his loving purpose for their lives, God has, as a sort of last resort, a sure-fire way of shattering the illusions that make their rebellion possible in the first place. To do so, he need only honor their own free choices and permit them to experience the very life they have confusedly chosen. When, as a last resort, God allows a sinner to live without even an implicit experience of the divine nature, the resulting horror will at last shatter any illusion that some good is achievable apart from God; it will finally elicit, therefore, a cry for help of a kind that, however faint, is just what God needs in order to begin and eventually to complete the process of reconciliation.¹²

Given the necessity of this providential and salvific outcome, Talbott boldly speaks of a nondeterministic predestination unto glory. When read through the glasses of the universalist hope, the words of the Apostle take on fresh meaning:

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also pre­destined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he pre­des­tined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified. (Rom 8:28-30)

In Christ, declares Talbott, all humanity is divinely predestined to eternal bliss in the communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Nor should we think that human freedom is therefore compromised. Why should the shattering of our illusions be judged a violation of personal integrity?

We thus return to the well-worn analogy of the grandmaster in chess. . . . When a grandmaster plays a novice, it is foreor­dained, so to speak, that the grandmaster will win, not because he or she causally determines the novice’s every move or even predicts each one of them; the end is fore­or­dained because the grandmaster is resourceful enough to counter any combination of moves that the novice will in fact freely decide to make. And similarly for the infinitely wise and resourceful God. He has no need to exercise direct causal control over our individual choices in order to “checkmate” us in the end; he can allow us to choose freely, perhaps even protect us from some ill-advised choices for a while, and still undermine over time every conceivable motive we might have for rejecting his grace. For once we learn for ourselves—after many trials and tribulations, in some cases—why separation from God is an objective horror and why union with him is the only thing that can satisfy our deepest yearnings and desires, all resistance to his grace will melt away like wax before a flame.¹³

Talbott goes so far as to speak of a “necessary universalism” and a “guarantee” of salvation. “Given the nature of God’s love, wisdom, and power,” he avers, “it is logically impossible that his grace should fail to reconcile all sinners to himself.”¹⁴ The game of existence is divinely rigged. No matter how many different roads we travel, no matter how many turns and u-turns and round-abouts, in the end we will find ourselves returning home to the Father who eagerly await us. God has created us for everlasting bliss and ecstasy in his Trinitarian life.

At this point the hopeful, and not so hopeful universalist, will balk. The language of necessity seems presumptuous. How dare we? Yet how dare we not, if we truly trust Christ to be true to his love and promises, sealed in his death and resurrection? Or do we actually think there is a even a minuscule chance that he will fail us, abandon us, condemn us?

Infernalists, will of course, continue to object to the foreordained conclusion of universal reconciliation, convinced that libertarian freedom entails the freedom of human beings to damn themselves. How can a genuine friendship with our Father be established if in the end we are not free to reject him forever? Yet as Talbott has convincingly argued, this notion of self-damnation is itself logically incoherent: it fails to satisfy the rational conditions of libertarian freedom. Nor can we seriously entertain the possibility that the God of absolute love would permit us to do irreparable damage to ourselves. If this is what freedom means, it has lost its value as a good to be divinely honored. As Eric Reitan remarks, if freedom entails the ability to condemn oneself to interminable torment, “I sincerely hope that I lack it”:

The capacity to eternally act against all of my motives would introduce into my life a potential for profound irrationality that I would rather do with­out. And if I exercise my libertarian freedom as described above, dooming myself to the outer darkness without reason, I sincerely hope that God would act to stop me—just as I hope a friend would stop me if I decided to leap from a rooftop for no reason. I would not regard the actions of that friend as a violation of any valuable freedom, but would see it as a welcome antidote to arbitrary stupidity.¹⁵

When I first read The Inescapable Love of God, I felt uneasy with Talbott’s language of necessity, despite the cogency of his arguments. I had no problem declaring a confident hope that through the death and resurrection of Christ, God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28). Yet that word “necessary” stuck in my craw. For me, it was a question of how we make the move from speculative reflection to proclamatory gospel. When we preach, we tell a story of judgment, grace, and hope. To speak unconditional promise in the name of the crucified and risen Christ is different than speaking of a necessity embedded in the structures of creation and the human psyche—at least so I thought. Back in 1949 Thomas F. Torrance criticized an article on universalism by John A. T. Robinson: “If universalism is true—is a necessity,” he wrote—“then every road whether it had the cross planted on it or not would lead to salvation.”¹⁶ Would universalism remain a necessary truth even if Jesus had not died on Calvary and risen into glory? The answer to the contrafactual question, of course, is a resounding yes. Love necessarily seeks union; love necessarily triumphs.¹⁷ There is no possible world where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does not bring humanity into the theosis of apokatastasis. And we know this, not because we have reasoned it out on our own, but precisely because of God’s self-revelation in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. All possible worlds are gathered into “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8). But it’s easy to get lost in contrafactual speculation. The gospel roots us in the unique events of Pascha. And so with the Apostle we proclaim:

For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-39)

My review of The Inescapable Love of God now comes to conclusion. I give Dr Talbott the last word: “Contrary to what we might fear, the Creator and Father of our souls—the Lord of hosts and Kings of kings—is good.”¹⁸

(8 March 2015; rev.)

Footnotes

[1] Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (2014), p. 185.

[2] Ibid., p. 158.

[3] Ibid., 158-159. Talbott notes the irony of our existential condition: “Some of the very conditions essential to our emergence as free moral agents [e.g., ignorance] are themselves obstacles to full freedom and moral responsibility, obstacles that can be gradually overcome only after we have emerged as embryonic moral agents and have begun to interact with the world on our own, so to speak.” “Universalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (2008), ed. Jerry Walls, p. 453.

[4] John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. (1977). Following Hick, Talbott commends an Irenaean reading of the Adamic Fall: “Why Christians Should Not Be Determinists: Reflections on the Origin of Human Sin,” Faith and Philosophy 25 (July 2008): 310-312.

[5] Talbott, Inescapable Love, pp. 185-186.

[6] Ibid., p. 186.

[7] Isaac the Syrian, I.28.

[8] Talbott, Inescapable Love, p. 186.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., p. 188.

[12] Ibid., p. 189.

[13] Ibid., pp. 194-195. Cf. Eric Reitan, “Eternally Choosing Hell: Can Hard-Heartedness Explain Why Some Remain in Hell Forever?” Sophia 61 (2022): 365-382.

[14] Talbott, Inescapable Love, p. 191.

[15] Eric Reitan, “Human Freedom and the Impossibility of Eternal Damnation,” in Universal Salvation? (2004), p. 137.

[16] Thomas F. Torrance, “Universalism or Election?” reprinted as an appendix to In the End, God, sp. ed. (2011), p. 146.

[17] See my article “Universal Salvation: Love Is Its Own Necessity.”

[18] Talbott, Inescapable Love, p. 3.

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