For almost two millennia, especially in the Western Churches, everlasting damnation has been understood and justified as an expression of retributive punishment: God justly condemns the reprobate because of their sins. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia, in its entry “Hell” authored by Joseph Hontheim, provides an succinct summary of the what is commonly referred to as the retributive, or punitive, model of hell: “There is a hell, i.e. all those who die in personal mortal sin, as enemies of God, and unworthy of eternal life, will be severely punished by God after death.” In this model, following the language of Scripture, God is portrayed as the Judge who actively condemns the reprobate to everlasting torment. This torment consists of two elements:
- “The poena damni, or pain of loss, consists in the loss of the beatific vision and in so complete a separation of all the powers of the soul from God that it cannot find in Him even the least peace and rest. It is accompanied by the loss of all supernatural gifts, e.g. the loss of faith.”
- “The poena sensus, or pain of sense, consists in the torment of fire so frequently mentioned in the Holy Bible. According to the greater number of theologians the term fire denotes a material fire, and so a real fire. We hold to this teaching as absolutely true and correct. However, we must not forget two things: from Catharinus (d. 1553) to our times there have never been wanting theologians who interpret the Scriptural term fire metaphorically, as denoting an incorporeal fire; and secondly, thus far the Church has not censured their opinion. Some few of the Fathers also thought of a metaphorical explanation.”
Catholic and Protestant theologians disagree on what constitutes mortal sin, but most agree that the eternal fate of all persons is irreversibly decided at the moment of death (Heb. 9:27).
In his 2008 entry on “Heaven and Hell,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jonathan Kvanvig writes that the traditional model is constituted by four theses:
- “The Punishment Thesis: the purpose of hell is to punish those whose earthly lives and behavior warrant it.
- The No Escape Thesis: it is metaphysically impossible to get out of hell once one has been consigned there.
- The Anti-Universalism Thesis: some people will be consigned to hell.
- The Eternal Existence Thesis: hell is a place of unending conscious existence.”
During the past hundred years, the retributive model has come under severe criticism by Western philosophers and theologians. Specifically, they have argued that the finite crimes of the wicked do not deserve infinite punishment, even if these crimes are identified as an offense against God. As Kvanvig writes: “Even if all wrongdoing wrongs God and is therefore, in an objective sense, infinitely bad, it does not follow that an infinite punishment is deserved.” Eternal damnation, in other words, is judged to be an unjust punishment.1
As a result, many 20th and 21st century philosophers and theologians have advanced what is now commonly referred to as the choice, or free will, model of hell: God does not damn; the wicked damn themselves by their definitive rejection of God. The wicked freely choose separation from their Creator. In the words of Kvanvig: “Hell is conceived on this alternative model in terms of something a person chooses. Hell may be a place where some people are punished, but the fundamental purpose of hell is not to punish people, but to honor their choices.” In this model God ceases to be the active punisher. Rather, he passively permits the damned to suffer the natural consequences of their self-exclusion from the beatific vision. The poena sensus is thus discarded—God does not directly punish by the infliction of hellfire—but the poena damni is retained. Hell no longer serves the traditional purpose of divine retributive punishment. Because the free decisions of human beings are outside divine causal determination, and because God is committed to the preservation of libertarian freedom, God has no choice but to honor our decisions. Before free will, even the divine love is impotent. Thomas Talbott elaborates in his 2020 entry to the Stanford Encyclopedia, “Hell and Heaven in Christian Thought“:
Unlike the Augustinians, Arminian theologians emphasize the role that free will plays in determining one’s eternal destiny in heaven or hell; they also accept the so-called libertarian understanding of free will, according to which freedom and determinism are incompatible. Because not even an omnipotent being can causally determine a genuinely free choice, the reality of free will, they say, introduces into the universe an element that, from God’s perspective, is utterly random in that it lies outside of God’s direct causal control. Accordingly, if some person should freely act wrongly—or worse yet, freely reject God’s grace—in a given set of circumstances, then it was not within God’s power to induce this person to have freely acted otherwise, at least not in the exact same circumstances in which the person was left free to act wrongly. So in that sense, our human free choices, particularly the bad ones, are genuine obstacles that God must work around in order to bring a set of loving purposes to fruition. And this may suggest the further possibility that, with respect to some free persons, God cannot both preserve their libertarian freedom in the matter and prevent them from freely continuing to reject God forever. As C. S. Lewis, an early 20th Century proponent of such a theodicy, once put it, “In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of . . . defeat. . . . I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside” [The Problem of Pain, chap. 8].
The basic idea here is that hell, along with the self imposed misery it entails, is essentially a freely embraced condition rather than a forcibly imposed punishment; and because freedom and determinism are incompatible, the creation of free moral agents carries an inherent risk of ultimate tragedy. Whether essential to our personhood or not, free will is a precious gift, an expression of God’s love for us; and because the very love that seeks our salvation also respects our freedom, God will not prevent us from separating ourselves from him, even forever, if that is what we freely choose to do. So even though the perfectly loving God would never reject anyone, sinners can reject God and thus freely separate themselves from the divine nature; they not only have the power as free agents to reject God for a season, during the time when they are mired in ambiguity and subject to illusion, but they are also able to cling forever to the illusions that make such rejection possible in the first place. [emphasis mine]
Note the key phrase: “a freely embraced condition rather than a forcibly imposed punishment.”2 The choice model thus represents a radical change (or if one prefers, “development”) of doctrine. Divine retribution, at least as direct infliction, is eliminated, thereby answering the objection of unjust infinite punishment.3
Question: Does the choice model actually resolve the perceived problem of divine retributive punishment?
Footnotes
[1] The literature is vast, but see especially Jonathan Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell (1993), and Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (1992).
[2] Joseph Ratzinger endorses the choice model in his book Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (1977): “The true Bodhisattva, Christ, descends into Hell and suffers it in all its emptiness, but he does not, for all that, treat man as an immature being deprived in the final analysis of any responsibility for his own destiny. Heaven reposes upon freedom, and so leaves to the damned the right to will their own damnation” (p. 216). The choice model is explicitly affirmed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell'” (§1033).
[3] During the 20th century Eastern Orthodox theologians began to advance a variation of the choice model. In his classic The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944), Vladimir Lossky speaks of the parousial revelation of Christ in his uncreated light, which is experienced as a torment by all who are imprisoned in darkness and passion: “The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves” (p. 234). Hellfire is God himself. In 1980 Alexandre Kalomiros popularized this model in his lecture “The River of Fire.” As far as I’ve been able to determine, St Theophanes of Nicaea (14th c.) was the first Eastern theologian to advance the uncreated light model. For a sharp critique of Kalomiros, see Vladimir Moss, “The River of Fire Revisited.” In his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI appears to commend this construal of damnation: “Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour” (§47). For a modern defense of the divine presence model from a non-Orthodox perspective, see R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (2019).
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Random thoughts.
I don’t see that the choice model as you describe resolves the problem. Even if we concede that one can rationally choose an eternal Hell, there’s no vacating God from actively bringing about their torments. God sustains all things. He’s at the scene of every crime in this creative/sustaining sense. There’s no vacating him from the role of sustaining/grounding (executing the sentence, even if self-inflicted) the ongoing torments of the damned however we explain the justice of those torments. Is there a beast of a human being abusing a child, raping a woman, torturing an innocent person? God is immediately present in the beast sustaining them in the exercise of their choices just as he is present in the victims sustaining them. We can’t bail on the all-sustaining presence of God in all things which hold together in him – including all the shit that’s happening right now.
So I don’t find this general problem an eschatological issue per se. The question applies to all our past and preset experiences of divine judgment, all of which were justly deserved by us and so in some relevant sense ‘chosen by us’. But in none of these would I (speaking for myself) say God takes a kind of ‘hands off’ approach (ala Rom’s 1 “God turns them over to their own…”) so that the truth becomes he doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in our suffering just judgment. He becomes a sort of ‘observer’ of what we are ‘doing’ to ourselves. I don’t think this can be managed within any classical understanding of God’s presence to/in/with all things sustaining them immediately. In a sense that cannot be forgotten, God is “doing” it all, even after we qualify it (as we must) by noting that when it comes to hell, we suffer only what WE justly deserve.
As far as I can tell, Fr Al, to view hell as experiencing the revelation of God’s love as torture only because that’s how WE wish it doesn’t at all suggest God is not inflicting or accomplishing that torture. It’s his glory – i.e., himself – that we suffer.
Pardon all typos.
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Tom we are on the same page re: divine sustenance. The condition of suffering can only be sustained by God according to His will and purposes. Hell’s lasts moments came to an end about 2000 years ago.
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The key to the freewill defense of hell is that, “God has no choice but to honor our decisions.” Man’s choice on this account is a cause that is beyond God, a cause which, if God is to be understood as good, changes His will. God wills the good, but yields to the darkness of our choices to remain in Hell. His will is impotent before man. And to make matters worse it turns out that God doesn’t simply allow Hell, He is the sustainer of Hell, sustaining our free choice. How “free” and absurd is that? And how different this is from St Gregory of Nyssa for whom God’s will “is the measure of His power” (not our will) and without which no existing “thing either came into being or remains in being.” On this we can’t even remain in Hell without God’s will. What God wills is the determining factor. And so we are back to the moral character of God. What kind of God would yield to and sustain a Hell without end?
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What kind of God would yield to and sustain a Hell without end?
A god that William Blake called Nobodaddy.
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Doesn’t seem like Blake’s is the type of daddy revealed by Jesus in the Gospels.
So afraid of determinism we prefer the terror and absurdity of will lacking terminus. What’s all this Paul talk of slavery to Christ anyways, one gets the notion from him that to be truly free is to be a slave. Turns out all roads lead to Jerusalem.
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Blake was on to what a stinker the infernalist god is. Insofar as I understand it from his poetry, I don’t think his anitinomian vision really resolves the theodicy issues, but he definitely knew a skunk when he saw one, and even more commendably, was willing to call it a skunk at no small risk to himself.
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Even if all wrongdoing offends God & has an objectively infinite aspect, the subjective aspect of the offense remains finite, unless the person’s knowledge is fully illuminated by a vision beatific. An infinite punishment would be disproportional, hence evil.
Since I embrace impeccability & inancaritability vis a vis the beatific vision, the question of offending God in a subjectively infinite way is moot.
Any person who’s God-given volitional capacities have been fulfilled would, by definition, be a freely willing loving person. The more one’s telos is realized, the more one’s freedom & loving likeness to & intimacy with God grows. A person who rejects God in any measure commensurately lacks the same amount of freedom.
Subjectively, by definition, one can’t freely & infinitely offend God, for all sorts of reasons? and especially for many Thomist’s whose accounts of freedom include post-mortem impeccability & inancaritability? Toss in election & predestination and they have a serious “universalism problem” that not even Stump et al have solved.
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Oh, you guys are such inveterate Platonists 😉
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I’m metaphysically agnostic as far as different root metaphors go. I’m – not eclectic, but – rather promiscuous. I’m willing to be seen on the theo-streets with Thomists, Scotists, Palamites, NeoPlatonists, Sophiologists, NeoWhiteheadians & more, but, in the sheets, I’m Peircean-inclined, an inveterate pragmatist, just not of the vulgar sort. 🤩
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Inancaritability is a word I’ve never come across before. Not even the online dictionaries have it! Am I going to have to pull out my OED? 😜
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LOL! Let me know what you find.
Grab that Justin Noia article pdf as linked in my post:
https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/thomism-works-well-enough-with-a
That’s the same post where I coined Eschatological Ignosticism. 😇
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And you didn’t hear it first from Hart! ;o)
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or Greg Boyd
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In terms of the logic, retributive and choice models do not seem opposed. Retributive punishment is usually understood as the view that punishment is imposed merely because, and only insofar as, it is deserved (appropriate on account of a moral fault). A choice model of hell states that the suffering of hell essentially consists in the fruits of one’s moral disposition, or something of this kind. The explanation is that what is essential to the suffering of hell does not result from God doing anything further than letting one persist in a bad moral disposition, since bad moral dispositions result ‘naturally’ in suffering that counts as punishment.
But, if one suffers from one’s own moral disposition in this way, then the suffering which results would always necessarily result merely because it follows from one’s moral state and one only suffers insofar as it is morally deserved. So the two are compatible. The choice model only adds that the connection between punishment and fault is internal, rather than extrinsically imposed (e.g., a prison sentence does not result necessarily or essentially from committing a crime, because one can avoid it; but one cannot avoid the evils that come from having a bad moral disposition, as these are essential and internal to it). That internal character of the punishment does not affect that the punishment, the suffering, results only insofar as it is morally deserved.
But notice, first, if one thought God’s punishments are only imposed on account of moral dessert (God does not punish unjustly), and that God punishes all faults appropriately (God punishes all injustice to the extent it is unjust), then one is committed to a retributive view of God’s punishments: God punishes only and precisely insofar as something is deserved. So ‘retributive punishment’ is not about God aiming to torture or something. In this light, I’d think that the view that God’s punishments are retributive is not actually opposed to the universalist claim that they are all necessarily reparative.
If God did not need the suffering to effect moral repair in imposing punishment, then God would impose more suffering than is necessary, and His punishments would be unjust. If a universalist were to accept that God cannot effect moral repair without the suffering, then retribution and repair coincide; God effects repair infallibly by means of the suffering, and the suffering is strictly required to effect that repair. God is therefore not imposing more suffering than is necessary to effect repair. Universalists can therefore hold precisely that all God’s punishments are both retributive and reparative, since all punishments are imposed only insofar as God is aiming to repair a moral fault, that suffering is necessary to repair those faults, and that punishment will not fail to repair those moral faults. (Incidentally, George MacDonald seems to have seen this connection.)
Second, the choice model is not incompatible with the poena sensus. God might do something additional in the afterlife (for everyone) that causes those with bad moral disposition to feel pain, but the pain would only be a result of their disposition and not because of what God is doing. That would be the point of a ‘river of fire’ metaphor: God causes something for all (e.g., resurrects all in new bodies, which causes them to have a special knowledge of Himself), what God causes is intrinsically good and suited to cause joy, but it accidentally causes pain to some merely on account of the way the moral dispositions that they have (e.g., that those persons perceive God as frightful, now that they see Him with their flesh). This too is an account of the poena sensus, since the pain that results is not merely the ‘worm of conscience’ or remorse for having failed to achieve happiness, but something additional that results from what God positively does. Nevertheless, the choice model would be able to distinguish that what God would be doing is not intrinsically such as to cause that pain – the pain results solely from the state of the persons who receive it.
Finally, if one wants to talk about a development of doctrine, we don’t even need any history to reconstruct the way in which one can see the logical moves are valid. The choice model looks to be a natural attempt to clarify or specify the sense in which hell is retributive. The choice model is compatible with retributive punishment; and there are good reasons to reject the view that God merely imposes punishment in an extrinsic way (e.g., He wouldn’t need to do so, it seems overly ‘legalistic’, and the Christian tradition has always broadly held vice is its own punishment), so that then one should adopt the choice model.
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To what end though? To be stuck in one’s nightmare of a never-ending loop of Hell’s “Ground Hog Day” is by definition as it is without a terminus and thus without purpose. Unless of course the purpose is to punish us without end and without purpose. Which would reveal then that God is not good, and not the Good, in a hellish infinite way too.
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What a dismal view of creation it entails. It can’t rightly be called the divine comedy if it starts in Heaven, and ends in Hell.
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My above post does not address that question of what good there might result from allowing people to reject God, since I was just commenting on the relation between these views.
I agree with you that there would have to be a good achievable by allowing the possibility that some persist in sin forever. Logically speaking, however, it is a mistake to infer (from the fact God might permit the possibility that some persist in sin forever) either that God permitting hell means He would have to will that possibility that some (generically) persist in sin forever, or that He wills the possibility that any particular person persist in sin forever, as a good in its own right or as a necessary instrumental means to some good.
If God ‘merely permits’ hell (John Damascene worked out what that meant in his De Fide Orthodoxa), this is to say the possibility of mortal sin is not itself a necessary instrumental means to what God accomplishes, but there is only a necessary metaphysical connection between the possibility of sin and something else that is good, which God wants. God can want the good that comes from free will – which freedom does not essentially consist in possibility to sin – while simultaneously making it the case that sin is possible, since to be a free creature necessarily involves the metaphysical possibility of committing a sin (even if it never occurs, by grace, as in the BVM or Christ). God can then also accomplish something which ‘defeats’ the evils that result from the possibility of sin. But He does not logically need to make (definitively) rejecting grace impossible to accomplish the latter.
(I deal with more of those questions about what goods might come from freedom here, as well as the question how God : https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hard-universalism-grace-and-creaturely-freedom/).
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Sorry, how God might achieve other goods the defeat the badness involved in the possibility of sin. All one has to show, recall, is there are some goods that *possibly would* defeat the mere possibility of hell. Perhaps God does contingently choose to save all. Could there be anything God might accomplish, in creating free creatures and allowing the mere possibility of hell, that makes this situation in which all those creatures are saved worth it? I think so. Maybe salvation is not possible without creaturely freedom, which means that salvation is not possible without that possibility of sin. Then the *mere possibility* of hell could be compatible with God’s benevolence.
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Fr Rooney, that sounds like a logically consistent argument to me. It’s implausible to us who 1) accept DBH’s game-theoretic analysis of the antecedent – consequent will distinction at the eschato-horizon, i.e. moral modal collapse and 2) believe we have, antemortem, sufficient knowledge of God’s character vis a vis what is or is not good.
I appreciate that our criteria of what’s good requires some rigor, but the Thomist notion of that which fulfills our human capacity vis a vis increasing goodness & being suffices here?
I appreciate especially the Totus Christus conception that you & other eschato- majoritarians have recognized as well as earnest attempts to ameliorate the degree of suffering involved vs any vulgar ECT account.
From my understanding of the Hartian account, I’m quite sure that our impasses have nothing to do with pantheist, determinist or theopanist impulses, nor with denials of simplicity or analogia, much less Hegel, etc ad infinitum
The impasse is almost strictly located as regarding God’s character & whether or not we have sufficient antemortem knowledge of whether or not an eternal perdition’s proportional to a finite offense, subjectively, of God, notwithstanding it’s objectively infinite.
Finally, other Thomists have well stated the “universalism problem” that presents due to affirmations of postmortem impeccability & antemortem election & predestination, rejecting secondary nature = character-based contingencies. Have you addressed this anywhere? akin to work of Stump, Pawl, Noia et al
pax!
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Father Rooney, thank you for your continued participation here. A couple questions:
1. You seem to be positing conflicting wills or desires within God. First, a desire that all shall be saved. Second, a distinct desire (creating free creatures?) that ultimately trumps the first desire. Do you acknowledge this as an implication of your position?
2. What is the meaning of “free creature”? One could posit that a creature is not truly free until it is acting in accordance with the purpose for which it was created. And if humans are created to be in right relationship with and to have communion with God, any human who fails to obtain that state would not be free, and hence God would have failed ultimately to create that person as a free creature. Instead, that person would remain perpetually in slavery to whatever is preventing him or her from realizing true creaturely freedom.
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As a universalist, I’d agree with you, but the problem is that the logic only works with universalism. God’s “added value” suffering can only be to effect moral repair if moral repair is actually possible i.e. hell is not eternal. Likewise even God permitting natural, internal suffering to continue could only be morally justified either if there was some similar purpose to it or God could not have forseen it happening (or if it would happen) to the person concerned and is helpless to stop it now it has occurred. Without universalism the argument sacrifices God’s omniscience and omnipotence to save his moral character.
Without universalism, also, what it justifies is not hell, in any sense of the word as it is meant in the Bible or Christian tradition. The penalties of “hell”, by this argument, are not punishments or torments but the unfortunate dreary absence of the joy of heaven, and “hell” would have to be some kind of care home or hospice in which God makes as comfortable as possible those who by nature have lost the ability to experience these joys and whom, sadly, God lacks the capacity to cure.
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I do not see that the realization of greater goods which defeat the evil of the possibility of hell requires that those are moral repair.
I mean, here’s an easy case: imagine a sort of perfect contingent universalism is true – nobody is suffering, nobody eternally in sin, and because all were predestined from the get-go. The evil of the mere possibility of hell in that world cannot be defeated merely in it somehow achieved or involved moral repair, since it does not such thing, trivially (since nobody ever suffered). That possibility cannot be permitted merely on that count. I would think what defeats the badness involved in the possibility of sin is somewhere else: the value of union with God that is achievable only by as a result of free will, and which value God intends while merely permitting the badness of the possibility of sin as a necessary result.
For, recall, hard universalism requires us to say such a metaphysical possibility of sin and damnation would be unjustifiable by anything that could be achieved. I find it highly implausible that literally no situation achievable in a perfect contingent universalist scenario could defeat the badness of the mere possibility of hell. But, that’s what you need to say if you think hell is impossible. So, I’ll let you figure that one out for me.
As to the latter, I don’t think you grasp the idea. Hell would be the painful absence of God, sure, in eternal separation from Him. I don’t think this is merely dreary. Similarly, I don’t think the experience of God in the eschaton by the damned is merely ho-hum. I do think these experiences are really painful to them. What I disagree with is two-fold. First, I think the pain of those experiences is internal to their sinful will and not caused by God. So, yes, I think in one respect God is unable to cure them: the only thing lacking is their consent to God helping them. Their condition essentially *consists in* resisting God’s help and love forever. Second, I think what God does for them remains good for them, even as it incidentally causes them suffering, and that the goods achieved by God in that scenario really do defeat their suffering. They stand in their flesh and see their loving Redeemer, and this sight is what terrifies them. But what causes the suffering is encountering eternally the God who is the Good, which cannot be bad for anyone to encounter. And I think they are eternally in the hands of people who love them, and possibly whom they also can love, and that they are re-created bodily in many of the same respects as the saints (an immortal body, etc.). A world where Christ redeems us and offers a perfect sacrifice of love that envelops even the damned, since it has recreated humanity by uniting it to the Son, does not seem worthless to me.
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“But what causes the suffering is encountering eternally the God who is the Good, which cannot be bad for anyone to encounter. ”
One of the two halves of this sentence must be false – if encountering the Good causes sinners to suffer eternally it cannot be good for sinners to encounter it. Only if the suffering is a temporary route to some greater for the sinner can it actually be good for them. The insistence on eternal suffering makes, at least for some people, the Good bad.
I won’t even bother with the rest of it since you continue to pretend that universalism denies the existence of sin, suffering or hell when you know perfectly well it doesn’t.
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Ian,
I’m not obligated to use terms in a revisionary universalist sense. By ‘hell,’ I mean roughly the traditional meaning: unending separation from God producing suffering. What I said in regard to sin was “hard universalism requires us to say such a metaphysical possibility of sin and damnation would be unjustifiable by anything that could be achieved,” which does not say that universalists need to deny sin. What I said was that the universalist needs to deny the possibility of definitive rejection of grace, by sin, that leads to damnation. That does not strike me as controversial. And in the first paragraph, I did not refer to anything more than ‘the possibility of sin’ merely because in a perfect contingent world, there would be no sin.
“If encountering the Good causes sinners to suffer eternally it cannot be good for sinners to encounter it.” In one sense, nobody denies it is bad for the person that they are suffering. In another sense, it is supremely valuable to encounter God for them, just as it is for anyone. So the point is not to call the suffering itself good, but to say that the situation in which they encounter God is itself valuable for them.
While I agree suffering for eternity is, by itself, a bad thing, we are asking not whether suffering is bad, but whether God has a good reason to allow it in terms of the good He wills for the sinner. First, we compare the sinner who would be ‘left alone’ to the remorse of conscience versus the sinner who God encounters in this way. It seems to me it is good that God continues to exercise love towards them more than if He did not. Second, does the value of a world in which God became man and inseparably united Himself to all humanity, including that sinner who rejects Him, *possibly* ‘defeat’ the evils involved in the suffering they experience? Notice *possibly*, since all I need to show is that it might. It seems to me that the value of the love which encompasses them for all eternity, the love of the sacrifice of Christ, remains infinitely valuable for them even when they reject it. And, similarly, the classical Christian view that Christ reconciled the world on the Cross seems to me to indicate that this love also defeats the badness involved in their suffering. So, I do think it is *possible* that Christ’s atonement and uniting themselves to Him for eternity defeats whatever disvalue is involved in their suffering. I do not see a good way to show that it could not, which would not undermine these claims that Christ’s love really is infinitely sufficient to reconcile us to God, prior to and independent of whatever we do.
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I give up on someone who just redefines the deliberate and endless infliction of suffering through God pressing his presence on those who don’t want it and never will as “good” or “love”.
Why not spend a little time finding out what universalists believe before responding? All Christian universalists believe that “God became man and inseparably united Himself to all humanity, including that sinner who rejects Him.”: the only difference is that we believe that Jesus succeeded in his endeavour and united all humanity, while you dogmatically insist it’s possible he gave up and left some behind.
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One either starts out with the doctrines of mortal sin and eternal hell and explains God according to it (as Fr Rooney does), or else one starts out with the absolute goodness of God and explains all else accordingly.
I favor the latter because of the revelation of God in person of Jesus Christ, he it is who in word and deed manifested in his very person the moral character of God. To speak of torture and pain without end and without remedial purpose in the light of Jesus is as blasphemy to me.
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And let me add this: resort to some supposedly hidden mystery of God’s purpose for an unending hell of pain and suffering, yet to be revealed, not only marginalizes Christ’s revelation of God but flat-out contradicts Jesus’ witness. The yet to be revealed character of God beyond that revealed in Christ must then be fundamentally different: sin and darkness will prevail; worse yet, on this account, it turns out that the infinite persistence and triumph of sin is encompassed in the goodness of God. Yes truly this is blasphemy.
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d’accord!
What gets God out of the dock for me vis a vis evil is, more so, character evidence provided for Abba by Jesus and His great cloud of witnesses. That suffices to create the reasonable doubt necessary to exhonerate God, Who, however otherwise ostensibly responsible per given circumstances just couldn’t be morally culpable. It’s not that case theories (logical defenses) don’t matter, it’s just that, notwithstanding those & other evidence (including theodicies, which I positively eschew), character, alone, suffices. Analogy to criminal jurisprudence – seems right-headed & good-hearted.
Most succinctly, what I think is going on with the back & forth is that – When the only tool one has is an analogical, essentialistic hammer, every problem, suspiciously looks like a natural participatory nail.
Thomism has the tools to avoid this, thankfully, especially in its transcendental, existential & personalist schools.
Truth be known, the Báñezian stance may, ironically, be the most felicitous of all, when purged of the tradition’s majoritarian Paterological Character Defects.
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Some questions regarding the third footnote:
“During the 20th century Eastern Orthodox began to advance a variation of the choice model.”
-What accounts for this change (or development) in Orthodox doctrine? Relatedly, why was the variation advanced in the 20th century (as opposed to sometime else)?
“In 1980 Alexandre Kalomiros popularized this model in his lecture ‘The River of Fire.’”
-What accounts for the popularity of this lecture (and, for that matter, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce) within the modern Orthodox Church?
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Good questions and I do not have well-supported answer. But there is a strain within Eastern Christianity that insists that God punishes only to convert and heal, but this strain mainly appears in universalist writings–Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa, and St Isaac the Syrian immediately come to mind. The River of Fire model is trying to thread this needle (unsuccessfully, in my opinion).
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Wouldn’t the change have occurred for the same reasons that it occurred in Western Christianity (albeit a little earlier): it was thought to give God an excuse for allowing hell to exist and torture creatures forever, since the sinners really want and choose that condition? God was only being a live-and and-let-die-and-burn-forever kind of nice guy? I would think that some of the more ecumenically-minded modern era Orthodox theologians would’ve been influenced by the same thing their Western brethren were: the realization that the growing perception of modernity that the infernalist god who punishes people forever in the name of divine retributive justice is really a demonic projection that arose out of the ressentiment of Christians could not be gainsaid forever.
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Possibly, probably, heck if I know. 😎
But I do think it accurate to say that theme of eschatological retributive punishment never received the emphasis in the East as it did in the medieval West. Unfortunately, no one has ever done a major study of the eschatological teachings of second millennium Eastern theologians, at least not in English. We are at a huge scholarly disadvantage.
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I see that Fr Rooney has joined the conversation. I ask everyone to play nice. He deserves the same degree of civility that everyone else deserves and which I demand. Thank you.
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John Sobert Sylvest:
Let me start by pointing out that 2) would generate a circular argument for universalism. If the knowledge available in the afterlife is sufficient to bring you to love God necessarily, then the only knowledge capable of doing that is the Beatific Vision and nothing else. If God gives everyone the vision after death, automatically, then all are already saved, and an argument using that as a premise is circular.
I don’t think anything about post-mortem repentance is at all relevant to whether hell is possible. Hell’s metaphysical possibility is a very low bar. Hard universalists have to deny it would be possible, at all. Yet the mere fact of having indefinite time to repent does not make it logically impossible that anyone fail to repent forever. You need something else, such as the claim nobody can ‘really’ (that is, intentionally) do anything that causes them to cease to be in a state of grace, which is what gets you to the intuition that God cannot justly punish anyone for a finite sin.
Notice again that the claims about God being unjust punishing someone for a finite sin look circular: they assume as a premise a controversial claim that mortal sin is metaphysically impossible according to some definition or account of free will or reasons. [Eric Reitan does this, I think, defining ‘acting on reasons’ in such a way that nobody could reject God’s grace while acting on reasons (in his sense). Even if you think his account of freedom is plausible, one could not really use that account as the basis for a sound argument to be a universalist, because arguing thus is circular.] That is to say, these views presume that God would always withdraw grace from human beings for no good reason, because humans necessarily always act from supernatural love of God (and so God would be unjust for punishing you for loving Him by then separating you from Him forever). I disagree for many reasons that all of our actions are necessarily out of supernatural love for God (it seems obvious from experience and Scripture that we do not), but we really don’t need to deal with it directly, as what I say below can give us the big picture metaphysical reason it is wrong.
As to 1), I think it is simply wrong that God permitting the possibility of sin can only be on account of willing the possibility of sin to be good for its own sake or as an instrumental means to some end. The classical claim is the other way around (Damascene), where what God intends is the good of free will. Free will is not essentially the capacity to sin, but it is metaphysically necessary as a result of creating a free creature that there is the metaphysical possibility of sin (a free creature incapable of sin by nature would be God; creatures are necessarily not God). So, God willing to create free creatures alone is what makes sin possible, even as this possibility is compatible with God being able to predestine everyone freely to heaven.
It is helpful here to contrast the classical Banezian picture on which God could predestine everyone freely to heaven with that of DBH. Banezian universal predestination would not be metaphysically necessary: even if human beings were all impeccable by God’s grace, God need not have predestined them all. Sin would not be, on the Banezian picture, metaphysically impossible for creatures (just that didn’t, as it were). DBH holds that God could not do otherwise than predestine all, which makes it strictly metaphysically impossible for anyone to be damned. That is what you need to be a hard universalist.
But, yes, I think this position that God could not do otherwise clearly does require that God could not do otherwise than create, elevate us to grace, and prevent the possibility of losing that grace definitively (or at least, given a decision to create us, must elevate us to grace, etc.). What this implies is an essential relation between God and human beings, since grace is participation in God’s nature (what it is to be God). There is clearly a logical necessary bi-conditional relation between God and human beings on this picture: if there is God, then there are human beings definitively in grace; if there are human beings, God definitively gives them grace. To put it simply, that relation is only true because of the essence either of God or us. Either our essence makes us essentially such that have God’s nature, which is to say we are essentially God; or, God’s essence involves human beings such that God would not be God without us. To me, both of these conclusions are obviously wrong – and, while I think we can argue against both philosophically, I think they are also obviously in contradiction with defined ecumenical classical dogma.
The first possibility involves claims condemned in regard to Pelagianism. That view involved the idea that Adam did not lose grace for his descendants (Pelagius thought we did not need the atonement or baptism in order to be able to merit salvation – we could do so by our natural power of free will). Pelagius’ doctrine was condemned at Ephesus and more explicitly by Nicea II. Adam lost grace for himself, such that we would have been in our sins if not for Christ (dogma); Adam was essentially human after the Fall; ergo, it is not essential to human nature that we cannot lose grace. The second seems to me to contradict the condemnation of Monophysitism at Chalcedon, which distinguishes the two natures of Christ as being without transmutation or mixture, and holds that the union of natures is a contingent one that occurred in virtue of the hypostasis of the Son (and so was not one that was essential to human nature as such). If God were essentially related to human beings, there would be a confusion or mixture of natures; for example, the Incarnation would have been essential to God.
Anyway, more can be said, but this is too long already. I’d just end by saying again that denying universalism is true does not entail that: anyone is in hell, that people being in hell are necessary for God’s purposes, that most people will go to hell, that God punishes people for what they could not have avoided doing, that God can damn anyone for no reason, that God could damn literally everybody and it would be compatible with His goodness, that the blessed rejoice in the pain of the damned, etc. etc. As I’ve said before, Banezianism too is not logically connected with whether universalism is true. Universalism could be false and Molinism true. It doesn’t matter, so it is really unhelpful to bring it in, as these other issues about efficacious grace are just red herrings. This isn’t about Thomism or libertarian freedom or whatever, but the logical contours of what is necessary to affirm everyone is saved, and then what reasons we have to believe what is required (and whether those reasons conflict with classical dogmas). I do not see that appeal to Thomism is necessary, implicitly or explicitly, to argue that Pelagianism or Monophysitism are false and that universalism requires something like them to be true.
Yours in Christ,
Fr. JD
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Fr JD
Regarding any circular argument critique, as an epistemological pragmatist, whose theory of knowledge is coherentist & of truth is correspondent (so on the spectrum of weakly to non-foundational), in my view, the most any of us can ambition about primal realities are semi-formal heuristics, which is closer in form to persuasive rhetoric than formal syllogism.
That said, I purposefully & implicitly indicate certain inescapable circularities, most every time I employ them, prefacing same with “by definition,” even in my informal argumentation.
What’s of more interest to me, when I do encounter or employ tautological, circular or analytic strategies is – not only whether or not they strike me as virtuous or vicious, but, more so – whether or not they are plausibly true or, at least, make mostly successful references to reality, evidentially.
My interest, therefore, in juxtaposing different words like inancaritability, impeccability, predestination, election, justification, infused contemplation, goodness, being and the like, as others have variously defined them, is much more modest than advancing some formal argument. Rather, first, it’s to avoid talking past others due to our equivocal and/or ambiguous conceptions. Next, once we’ll have agreed upon those notions, we can explore how well they cohere, systematically.
Other Thomists have acknowledged a “universalism problem” and have variously addressed it, mutually critiquing one another’s approaches. I will receive your generous response as a helpful foil to their approaches as well as to my own, hoping to both better understand all of you as well as to deepen my self-understanding.
For now, my focus remains on more preliminary concerns than examining the logical relationships between premises & conclusions. We have not even reached an agreement on our definitions of the terms, which are employed in our premises, definitions which often unavoidably embed our conclusions within (not necessarily viciously), making our reasoning far less ampliative & persuasive than we’d hope.
I’ll likely respond further to any points you made, only if I haven’t previously addressed them here, or even elsewhere in some way, as long as they strike me as an on the nose challenge to my stance. The older I get, and the more critiques I’ve incorporated, the less that stance has changed. Even if I am substantively repeating myself, though, I’ll respond if I discover a new idiom & better way of saying what I’ve already said for decades (and inartfully so)!
Thanks!
St. Meinrad, ora pro nobis.
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Fr JD, you wrote:
As to 1), I think it is simply wrong that God permitting the possibility of sin can only be on account of willing the possibility of sin to be good for its own sake or as an instrumental means to some end. The classical claim is the other way around (Damascene), where what God intends is the good of free will. Free will is not essentially the capacity to sin, but it is metaphysically necessary as a result of creating a free creature that there is the metaphysical possibility of sin (a free creature incapable of sin by nature would be God; creatures are necessarily not God). So, God willing to create free creatures alone is what makes sin possible, even as this possibility is compatible with God being able to predestine everyone freely to heaven.
END OF QUOTE
For others, this pertains to the moral modal collapse argument of DBH.
Fr JD, I’ll stipulate that you above-articulated the proper understanding of the logical defense of evil. I find it compelling enough. That’s not my quibble. And DBH has already well spoken for himself.
It’s just not a sustainable logical defense of hell.
It’s as if, in the beginning, God surveyed the tehom & saw that it lacked an eternal agency sufficiently potent to oppose His Will, i.e. it lacked any Manichean attributes.
So, out of nothing, He created finite agents, whose relative goodness could host evil parasitic existences, as they’re merely privative & enjoy no substance of their own.
Of course, on the free will defense of evil, only the possibility of these parasitic existences is necessary. They’re neither a necessary instrument nor a desired final end.
As such, those viscious natures can be purged & remain mere ephemeralities.
OR …
On a free will defense of hell account, the cost of any actual eternally vicious natures is deemed acceptable. Then, whether or not there’s ever an eternal Manichean residue of finite agents, who can eternally oppose His Infinite Will, the price of that Manichean habitus will have already been negotiated, sufficiently allocated for in the ad extra budget of the divine economy.
[I’ve no argument that the “mere” possibility is a logically low bar. The evidential problem is the inordinately high cost that’s been “justified” morally, in any event.]
This will have all been done for an unambiguously instrumental purpose with an ostensibly perfectly acceptable end-result. And calling it a by-product & not an end-product wouldn’t be exculpatory because one dare not risk the grave evil involved in the de-formation of an imago Dei into a mere vesitge or shadow of God (as effected by allowing the obliteration of capacities, the removal of essential human potencies).
Only a perverse & insidiously evil double effect calculus could abide the enormity of such a loss within the Totus Christus or the immensity of the suffering of any of its beloved members.
As we know, when a doubt of fact is in play, the safer course must be followed, when something as serious as life is at risk. Why not even more so if it’s a life, eternal?
respectfully,
jss
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Fr JD, I’m processing your extensive response it bite-size pieces.
I’m not reflexively over against all elements of Báñezian Thomism. I can make room for physical premotion, for example. But the conceptual mapping which would be necessary to make your response sufficiently apposite to my own dogmatic universalism is not reflected in your discussion of essences, natures, participation, grace and so on. There are more categories in play for many of us of a more personalist bent, e.g. Clarke re divine esse naturale & intentionale. While variously distinct but integrally related, many of the dynamics in play are otherwise theo-phanic & perichoretic, otherwise involving idiomata, energeia, and personal hownesses & references to – not definitions of – whonesses, logoi & tropoi, ad infinitum.
It’s not to say I’ve been deliberately strawmanned but I can’t even see my positions fully reflected back to me in your replies, so am feeling inadvertently caricatured.
It’s not like we’re totally talking past each other but, in your essays & conversations, I only see through a glass darkly my own stances as well as my meager understandings of DBH.
So, when we are within a single idiom, we’re yet to have agreed upon the same definitions. When we’re critiquing cross-systemwise in different idioms, we haven’t established all the categories required.
I hope that makes sense. I don’t intend it harshly. You are internally coherent and earnest. There’s a lot more external congruences than your philosophy has dreamt of?
The Ignatian counsel to impute an orthodox construction when interpreting others can be more than us hard universalist can or should expect? So, maybe let’s at least find a few things to which we might stipulate starting, let’s say, the 7th council backwards. Just joshing.
pax et bonum
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John:
First, again, we should leave entirely aside Banezianism. It is irrelevant to any aspect of my arguments against Hart or universalism. You can assume Molinism is true, if you like, but it would not make any difference for any argument I have made. My case universalism is false alleges there are both dogmatic and metaphysical grounds to reject that what it is to be human is not what it is to be God; or, that God’s nature has an essential relationship to human beings. Nothing in that requires Thomism in the least.
Second, your argument just assumes that God cannot intend to create free creatures who are able to resist salvation, to lose divinization by their own free choices. It’s not Manicheanism; it does not require a subsistent alternative principle alongside God. God could simply allow us to be able to reject salvation, viz., create us free and able to choose to love Him or something else.
If it is true God can create us this way, then there might be goods that not even God can achieve without allowing the metaphysical possibility that we can sin and lose salvation. Those would be the goods of eternal personal union. Not even God can create free creatures who are by nature unable to sin, so not even God could create a world in which there is personal union with Him but no free creatures.
Now, I think the case against universalism is strongest when you ask whether that union would have been worth the mere metaphysical possibilities involved in creating free creatures. Take that case where God does, in fact, predestine everyone from the first moment of their existence – all persons are like the Blessed Virgin. Would this good of union with God have defeated the evil involved in the *mere metaphysical possibility* that free creatures can reject grace forever? I don’t see why it isn’t.
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Fr JD, you wrote “we should leave entirely aside Banezianism. It is irrelevant to any aspect of my arguments against Hart or universalism.”
JSS
Oh, I already recognized that. After all, it seems quite clear to me that, in and of itself, it’s not incompatible with hard universalism. If Oliver Crisp is right, that a universalist case could be made from Calvinist construction, a Báñezian take would be “doubly” felicitous! So, it’s not the Báñezian systematics but the extraneous God-conceptions of so many Báñezians that I find theo-repugnant & to which I meant to refer, implicitly.
Fr JD, you also wrote: “My case universalism is false alleges there are both dogmatic and metaphysical grounds to reject that what it is to be human is not what it is to be God; or, that God’s nature has an essential relatIonship to human beings. Nothing in that requires Thomism in the least.”
JSS
Again, d’accord. I won’t reiterate the impasses I’ve already located & previously articulated. Insights from Clarke, Rahner, Maritain & a host of others have largely influenced my outlook &, yes, even Réginald.
Fr JD, you also wrote: “your argument just assumes that God cannot intend to …”
JSS
More precisely, I argue that God WOULD not intend to create free creatures who are able to knowingly resist the beatific vision. Their antemortem epistemic distancing would not be inconsistent with a culpable, sinful resistance to divinization that can form a vicious secondary nature, however eternally & irrevocably subject to purgative graces.
Respecting the analogical interval between the divine esse intentionale and our human volition, noncompetitive though they may be, most discussions of what God can, must, would or should do, whether as essentially necessary or as theophanically fitting, are much too facile per my sensibilities.
Fr JD, you also wrote: “It’s not Manicheanism”
JSS
I concede that. In my other writings I more rigorously & artfully describe it as quasi-Manichean, precisely because it’s parasitic not subsistent, you know, like a screw-tapeworm.
Fr JD, you also wrote: “Take that case where God does, in fact, predestine everyone from the first moment of their existence – all persons are like the Blessed Virgin. Would this good of union with God have defeated the evil involved in the *mere metaphysical possibility* that free creatures can reject grace forever? I don’t see why it isn’t.”
JSS
Only the evil of the objective consequences but not of the subjective intent. N’est pas?
I reject both divine indwelling based (grounded in God) as well as character disposition based beatific contingencies (grounded in human persons). While the former is a superior theo-construct to the latter,
it only works with a viciously abstracted conception of natura pura, which means it’s untenable.
But not even the competing auxiliis schools need be an obstacle to my dogmatic universalism as long as the nature – grace relation is treated concretely & integrally, such as can be glimpsed in Maritain, Rahner & Lonergan’s Thomist conceptions, for example, or as in a host of panentheist systems.
Finally, I encourage you to delve more deeply into perichoretic dynamics so as not to approach every impasse as strictly a participatory & essentialist problem.
To wit:
https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/each-persons-beatific-capacity-remains
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In response to “How Hot is Hellfire?” I only wish to contribute this antidote I read many years ago in The National Review;
[The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so “profound” that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.]
Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you, and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.
The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct…leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.”
[My understanding is that only this student received an A.]
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Then it’s entirely possible to have gone to Hell, only to have a hockey game break out?
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Entirely possible, especially if Canadians are well represented. ;o)
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I am finding this post by Fr. Aidan and the discussion very interesting. Thank you.
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Andy:
“1. You seem to be positing conflicting wills or desires within God. First, a desire that all shall be saved. Second, a distinct desire (creating free creatures?) that ultimately trumps the first desire. Do you acknowledge this as an implication of your position?”
No, I don’t think it is true there are conflicting wills in God. I think it is simply a normal kind of intention where someone wants something through a certain means. I liked Mitchell and Webb, who had a sketch where some politicians are considering reducing the poverty rate by killing all the poor. It’s a funny sketch, of course, because that’s cruel and absurd. When we think of the way in which to reduce the poverty rate, we quality that we want to do it a certain way. I don’t think God’s intention to save all is any different; He aims that He saves whomever should be willing, who does not put up an obstacle to His grace. That’s a clear way in which God wills to save all, since He then showers grace and opportunities on all people, making it possible to be saved, and so forth. Thinking God is conflicted in wanting to save all and not wanting to make it impossible for anyone to resist Him looks to me pretty parallel to thinking that our desires conflict between wanting to reducing the poverty rate and not wanting to kill all the poor.
“2. What is the meaning of “free creature”? One could posit that a creature is not truly free until it is acting in accordance with the purpose for which it was created.”
By ‘free creature,’ I think that means roughly a creature whose actions are contingent and within their control of their intellect and will. You may read my reply to John, though, that I think this is an unfruitful digression, because your argument for universalism is clearly circular. Anyone who is not already a universalist is not going to accept nobody is free unless they supernaturally love God, which is what you imply by saying ‘acting in according with the purpose,’ etc. And my arguments for the falsity of universalism do not rely on any definition of freedom. I bring up questions of the value of free creatures, but the point there is that being a free creature permits relationship with God more than being a rock would – and I don’t think this is in dispute. And I did propose a classical response above that creating free creatures permits the possibility of sin. All one needs to do is accept it is possibly the case that this is true for my argument to hold. If it is possible not even God could create a free creature capable of union with Him that is not metaphysically unable to sin, then (by some further steps) God possibly can allow mortal sin for good reasons, because He would not be able to create a creature capable of union with Him unless there is the possibility of sin. Finally, my argument against the possibility that human beings cannot by their free actions lose grace is not an argument that relies on claims about the nature of freedom, but merely general claims about essences and the God-human relation. As long as humans are not essentially divine, and God not essentially related to humanity, then universalism would be false. Nothing about freedom there.
So proposing that I’m wrong about the nature of freedom is not really relevant.
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1. You have redefined the premise here. My premise was that God simply wills all to be saved. You have redefined it to be God wills all to be saved subject to certain conditions. So, it appears the only way you have avoided the conflict is to redefine the premise. In addition, I find it interesting that you would argue against something on the basis that it would be “cruel and absurd.” Some find the idea of God maintaining persons in an eternal state of perdition with no possibility of salvation cruel and absurd – indeed, given the eternal stakes, much more cruel and absurd than the proposition you were responding to.
2. I don’t know that circularity is a problem in the sense that if the scriptural witness indicates that true freedom is to be in right relationship with God and that entails universalism, then the scriptural witness entails universalism. I think that is what Hart is getting at when he says that if you take God as revealed by the scriptures as true, then that entails ultimate reconciliation of all created beings. So, while the argument may be circular in a sense, your burden is to show that God did not create us such that true freedom is right relationship with Him.
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Andy:
1. If you define what God wants as ‘God wants all to be saved, such that they cannot possibly fail to be saved,’ then of course I will not grant the premise (and say, in addition, this is not what Scripture means). So that’s another circular argument, not a real encounter with my position on the basis of premises I would accept.
2. If the only way in which to prove universalism is true would be to give circular arguments, then I think this is reason enough to say that universalism is rationally unmotivated.
Similarly, it is not my burden to show anything about the nature of true freedom, since I don’t use it as a premise in any argument I make. But, in fact, I have already given you arguments that universalism is false. If those arguments are sound, then it would follow that the account of freedom you endorse, on which mortal sin is impossible, would also be false. (For example, an argument that the condemnation of Pelagianism requires that it is possible for us to fail to be in a state of grace, on account of our sins; this shows mortal sin is possible).
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Thanks again for the responses. It appears the nub of it is 1, whether God contingently or absolutely desires all to be saved, and 2, are we the type of creatures whose nature is such that our true end and hence freedom is union with God.
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Since I don’t disagree our true end is union with God, that’s not in dispute. It seems to me obvious or tautological that we disagree whether God desires all to be saved (so that nobody cannot not be saved) or whether that means that God desires all to be saved, if they want to be (so that they can reject salvation). That’s not very informative, however, and is not the nub of the dispute. What we are disagreeing about is whether the nature of God’s love in general, or the nature of human beings, *could* allow human beings to reject salvation. I don’t see any way to argue for this except to argue that human beings’ nature and God are essentially related. So that is where the nub actually lies, in my opinion.
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1. Why do you do this? You have already admitted that you believe in the manualist Thomist idea of efficacious grace, which means not only that God can and does make it impossible for people to resist him, but that this is the only way anyone is ever saved. You are simply lying about your own premises here.
2. It is not possibly true that your argument could ever hold unless one accepts as a metaphysical axiom that freedom means a total divorce from logic, rationality, or purposeful intent, ie. acting randomly with no goal. And further, it is obvious that God is essentially related to humanity (particularly if one believes in the Incarnation) so your second point is false as well.
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Calvin:
1. I am not lying, you simply do not understand the commitments of Banezian theories of efficacious grace. The theory is simply that God’s grace is intrinsically to bring about an effect, not that human beings can do nothing to resist receiving grace. All Banezians agree that God only denies grace on account of a prior fault. There are questions about how human beings are responsible for that fault, and controversy, but indeed all of this is totally irrelevant to universalism. Banezianism has nothing to do with whether universalism is false. You could be a Molinist who believes universalism is false.
2. That’s a false dichotomy, certainly, in regard to your claims about freedom. But it is more importantly false on ecumenical Christian theology that Christ’s Incarnation involved a mixing of natures, so that human nature (or that nature of Christ) is essentially related to the divine nature – Chalcedon condemns such a perspective. That’s the Monophysite heresy.
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“What we are disagreeing about is whether the nature of God’s love in general, or the nature of human beings, *could* allow human beings to reject salvation. I don’t see any way to argue for this except to argue that human beings’ nature and God are essentially related. So that is where the nub actually lies, in my opinion.”
This is helpful. I think that if we say the nature of God’s love is that He wills all to be saved, and the nature of God’s resourcefulness is such the He ultimately can overcome all human rejection of salvation, which nevertheless may persist quite some time for some, the result can be a confident hope in the ultimate reconciliation of all things, without any argument that human beings’ nature and God are essentially related in the way you perceive to be a problem.
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Notice: I never have said hell is necessary for God’s plans. Affirming ‘hard’ universalism is false (that it is not true hell is impossible) does not require affirming universalism is necessarily false (that someone must be in hell).
So, instead, I have no doctrinal problem with contingent universalism, which holds that it is contingently true that all human beings are saved. Nothing I have said conflicts with such a view. All I would claim is that we have no revelation that it is true, so it cannot be more than an opinion or probable thesis. And there’s nothing wrong with hoping and praying that all humans be saved.
But notice too the case for such contingent universalism being a really conceivable, consistent, and good outcome that is compatible with God’s love for us undermines ‘hard’ universalism. If contingent universalism is coherent and compatible with God’s benevolence, then hard universalism cannot be true (since hell is possible on the contingent universalist picture).
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1. No it isn’t. This is, again, a lie. The Banezian system is *excruciatingly* clear that it is a predestinarian system, which divides grace into efficacious (always saves) and sufficient (a misnomer, never saves). God picks out who to save ante provisa merita, ie. completely arbitrarily, and everyone else is doomed before they are born. Stop being dishonest, it’s a sin you know.
2. No it isn’t. Your theory relies entirely on God not being the Good which is sought by all in all things whatsoever they seek. Which he is. However misguided someone may be, it is always the case that he seeks the Good in everything he does.
And, moreover, it is laughable for someone who states their belief in a predestinarian system wherein God can and does make people infallibly come to him without this in any way being a violation of freedom to say that freedom requires the possibility of damnation.
And finally, haven’t you learned by now that your attempts to throw the word “heresy” at people are ineffective? I don’t care what you think is heresy. I merely care about the truth.
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“Notice: I never have said hell is necessary for God’s plans. Affirming ‘hard’ universalism is false (that it is not true hell is impossible) does not require affirming universalism is necessarily false (that someone must be in hell).
So, instead, I have no doctrinal problem with contingent universalism, which holds that it is contingently true that all human beings are saved. Nothing I have said conflicts with such a view. All I would claim is that we have no revelation that it is true, so it cannot be more than an opinion or probable thesis. And there’s nothing wrong with hoping and praying that all humans be saved.”
It is also true that nothing you have said, at least as I can see, conflicts with the view that the nature of God’s love plus His infinite resourcefulness makes an eternally populated hell impossible.
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Okay, Calvin. First and last warning. No calling people liars. No insults. Period.
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Ok. Am I allowed to point out discrepancies in the other party’s avowed positions?
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Calvin,
I deny repeatedly that you understand my position; you call me a liar for not holding the Calvinist position you believe Banezianism to be. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
Here’s a thing you might then consider doing: ignore Banezianism. It has nothing to do with anything I have said about universalism, in the least. Presume that I am a Molinist or an open theist. Imagine I believe that God merely foreknows what people will freely do, under exactly the same kind of action by God. Grace is on this picture extrinsically efficacious. God merely foreknows that, if He gives two people exactly the same graces, one will cooperate and the other won’t. He does nothing that ‘makes’ the one convert rather than another. [That’s Molinism.] Or, imagine the same thing, but that God does not foreknow what will ultimately occur at the end of time or even as a response to the graces He gives. He is always in the present giving grace that will move people to accept Him, but even He doesn’t foreknow anything about what they will do in response to that grace. [That’s open theism.]
Now, nothing I have said has anything to do with the right answers about how God causes people to love Him under grace. And our discussion obviously isn’t even a dispute about the nature of efficacious grace; that latter question is entirely irrelevant to whether God would not be loving, etc., if He did not save all. All I have said is that universalism gets it wrong that God cannot do otherwise than cause all people infallibly to love Him.
“Your theory relies entirely on God not being the Good which is sought by all in all things whatsoever they seek.” I’ve not made any claims that imply God is not the Good that all seek. My position does requires that people are able to commit sin, i.e., love something other than God in a way that is incompatible with their being His friends, and persist in sin indefinitely. But, in fact, my position presumes that God is the proper end even of the damned, since it is the mere fact that they are made for knowledge of God, that He is their ultimate Good and end, which makes the fact that they are persisting in sin eternally painful – the pain of hell consists essentially in not obtaining the perfect Good for which you are made. So, ironically, my position rests on the truth of the claim you believe I deny.
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Fr Rooney, it’s exactly the claim you further that, “universalism gets it wrong that God cannot do otherwise than cause all people infallibly to love Him” that has been countered here time and time again, and to which you haven’t responded directly. The kind of God who would do otherwise than to will and make to be that all creatures will to love him in the end cannot be called good, neither the Good. We are back to the moral character of God. But I understand the prior doctrinal position which is the all in all which directs your perspective.
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Molinism and open theism are both evil. God creates people knowing in advance they will/may get tortured forever. If God loves me, He would not put me into a nightmare existence where I may commit mortal sin at any moment and end up being tortured forever. I think, deep down, we all know this. We all know that universal salvation is true. Who would consent to being born if there was a non-zero chance you could be tortured forever? Birth would be a curse. Contingent/soft universalism is also evil. It is evil to risk the possibility of eternal suffering.
Libertarian free will is not incompatible with hard universalism. There are broad and strict accounts of libertarian free will, as WM Grant points out in “Divine Causality and Libertarian Freedom.” On a broad account, an act could be considered free if (a) it is indeterministic or (b) it is determined, but the determinans (what makes it determined) was acquired through a previous indeterministic act. On hard universalism, a person may freely reject God *to a degree* or for a longer or shorter period of time but they will always come back.
I don’t understand how anyone could sleep at night if they really believed they may commit mortal sin at any moment. How could anyone enjoy being a parent, and looking into their child’s eyes for the first time, think that their baby could be hell someday because of spontaneous, unpredictable choice to do B instead of A?
“At any moment, I may sin and lose God.” -St. Teresa of Avila
Clinical depression. No joy at all. Every moment of everyday thinking of eternal hell. I’m done with being Catholic.
As much as I like(d) the idea of Christian universalism, it doesn’t add up. I think Edward Feser has done a good job explaining why. Jesus could have easily told us that everyone goes to heaven, but instead, he said things that had it so nearly the entire church embraces an evil doctrine. I’ve adopted Lewisian quasi-universalism instead. Everyone gets the afterlife of their choosing (this was a throwaway speculation David Lewis brought up in “Divine Evil”). My afterlife will involve eating pizza and drinking chocolate milk.
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“Contingent/soft universalism is also evil. It is evil to risk the possibility of eternal suffering.”
Metaphysical possibility and ‘risk’ are not the same. It can be the case that each person is capable of mortal sin, but it never to occur, by God’s predestination. God’s predestination on any such model (Banez, Molina, etc.) does not undermine that metaphysical possibility, and our actions would not become necessary or unable to be otherwise. So, no, contingent universalism does not involve ‘risk’ in the sense you mean. There would be a 0% probability of anyone going to hell, even though it would be metaphysically possible.
The situation you describe is impossible for hard universalism in this sense: if God cannot but cause you to love Him, then it would be metaphysically impossible for anyone to persist in sin forever. Then, whatever other facts about free will are true, it would be impossible for anyone to sin in such a way, given God’s decisions from eternity and prior to any act you perform. Matthews Grant rejects such decisions for that reason; God’s decision would be prior to any of your choices and so determine what we do, cutting out alternative possibilities.
“If God loves me, He would not put me into a nightmare existence where I may commit mortal sin at any moment and end up being tortured forever. …I don’t understand how anyone could sleep at night if they really believed they may commit mortal sin at any moment.”
I think that’s just a bad way to look at the situation, prompted by a kind of scrupulosity. There is no need to be afraid of hell in that obsessive way, as that is indicative of mental illness (which is to say, it misrepresents the truth of the matter). And it is nothing to be ashamed of, certainly, if one has scrupulosity or a mental illness, but it is not a normal attitude toward the possibility of committing a sin.
I think the right attitude is represented in the first letter of St. John:
“My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. …this is the boldness we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him.”
You do not commit mortal sins at random; it is not something that just happens to you. Nor is it the case that you are helpless in the face of sin. We have prayer precisely to ask God not to lead us into temptation and to give us that hope. This is what I addressed in my article: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hell-and-the-coherence-of-christian-hope/.
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Of course you are right about soft universalism, C-R. (I’m not commenting on the various free will approaches, here.)
See my Addendum at the bottom of https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/the-free-will-defense-of-hell
where I differentiate Narrow Escape Soft Universalism, Trick or Treat Soft Universalism & Heck If I Know Soft Universalism. All brands are untenable.
I took your comment re risk & evil to be referring to hell as a conditional necessity. That remains a subjective evil notwithstanding the objective outcome.
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“It can be the case that each person is capable of mortal sin, but it never to occur, by God’s predestination.”
Would God’s predestination introduce a factor that is both prior to and logically sufficient for no one ever committing mortal sin? If yes, then God is causally determining it, which contradicts its being metaphysically possible for them to mortally sin. If not, then God still took a risk. Knowing in advance that the risk would work out doesn’t cancel the fact that it’s a risk.
“Matthews Grant rejects such decisions for that reason; God’s decision would be prior to any of your choices and so determine what we do, cutting out alternative possibilities.”
There would still be alternative possibilities for some of our choices, but there would be a limit at which point you could no longer choose evil. God would not be deciding which path you take, though all paths eventually lead to God. Grant is a Catholic so I disagree with him.
“There is no need to be afraid of hell in that obsessive way, as that is indicative of mental illness (which is to say, it misrepresents the truth of the matter). And it is nothing to be ashamed of, certainly, if one has scrupulosity or a mental illness, but it is not a normal attitude toward the possibility of committing a sin. ”
I think if one believed in eternal hell, it would lead to mental illness. I struggle with chronic depression and evil thoughts. At Mass today, I stayed in the back sitting in the confession booth. I stared at a crucifix thinking about how much I hate God. I hate Him with an intense passion, for creating me without my consent and then torturing me for indeterministically choosing B over A.
That a person can *putatively* be Catholic and not fall into mental illness shows that they don’t believe it. Deep down, we all know that love would never abandon one to misery because of a spontaneous choice. Deep down, we all know universalism (of some kind) is true. You don’t have to outwardly believe me, for I fervently believe that you already agree but can’t admit it. I was in the same position.
Thankfully, the Catholic God is not real.
“You do not commit mortal sins at random; it is not something that just happens to you. Nor is it the case that you are helpless in the face of sin.”
I didn’t say random (there are reasons for A and reasons for B), but it is sufficiently akin to randomness. They’re subjectively indistinguishable. There’s no deeper reason for why the agent chose A over B. And you don’t know what the choice will be until it occurs. The cause is exactly the same causally prior to both effects–there is no way for the cause to guarantee that A will occur that doesn’t rely on A occurring in the first place. I didn’t choose to have an unstable will that may commit mortal sin at any moment.
“We have prayer precisely to ask God not to lead us into temptation and to give us that hope.”
And no matter how much you pray, you may still commit mortal sin at any moment. You may still be one of the reprobate. Catholicism is too depressing for me to handle. I can only live on the presumption that I am saved. I would say the same for everyone else, even if they’re not consciously aware of it.
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C-R, forget about everything but never forget God is love, your are not an exception, a mistake, an impossibility; no, it is for you he died, it is for you he came, it is for good he created you. Let all thoughts that say otherwise be forever still for false they are. Here to help, you are not alone, send me an email.
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Robert Fortuin, I appreciate your concern. I love the idea of Christian universalism. I’ve often dreamed of going to a Traditional Latin High Mass in an alternate reality where Roman Catholicism teaches universal salvation. But I just don’t think Christianity and universalism are compatible with each other. Jesus could have clearly taught universalism but chose not to. I have to throw my hat in with Bertrand Russell and say that Jesus was not good. The Christian god is not good. (This is another aspect that Ed Feser pointed out. Bertrand Russell at least took Jesus at His word, unlike Christian universalists who want a fantasy.) I’m a universalist, but not a Christian.
I also appreciate Fr. Rooney’s concern. I know he thinks that he thinks God would allow eternal torment, and he’s trying to help me from going to hell. But Catholicism is false. Praise God! God would never torture someone forever because of an indeterministic mental event.
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“Jesus could have clearly taught universalism but chose not to.” – beg to differ C-R, much has been written here about the scriptural basis for universalism. I take it Jesus not only taught but accomplished universalism by his life, death, and resurrection. I also take it Jesus, as the express image of God, definitively revealed the moral character of God. Like Fr Rooney you too are taking prior doctrinal commitments to shape your understanding of God, of the Good. This is all backwards. Start with Jesus.
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“the Calvinist position you believe Banezianism to be.”
This is simply what Banezianism is. Read, for instance, Garrigou-Lagrange, or any of his fellow travelers, medieval or modern. They make absolutely no bones about this fact, that per this system God alone decides whether one is saved or damned, ante provisa merita.
“My position does requires that people are able to commit sin, i.e., love something other than God in a way that is incompatible with their being His friends, and persist in sin indefinitely.”
And this is exactly the point in which you are wrong. This is simply a very basic fact about desire: it cannot be satisfied until it is actually satisfied. A will which is seeking something sinful cannot but continue in an unstable and changing state until it finds something in which it can eternally rest. This is why it is simply impossible for any will to remain “eternally fixed” on anything else but God, and therefore why it could not remain in a state of torment forever.
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If you think Christianity and universalism are compatible, good for you. I don’t, and I recommend Stewart Felker’s articles on aionios which DBH and Al Kimel haven’t addressed. It just doesn’t make sense to me that God would start a religion with such an evil teaching not being condemned from the start.
And I maintain that Roman Catholicism, though false and evil, is the only form of Christianity worth taking seriously. They got the guts to tell people that artificial contraception is sinful when just about all other denominations have caved in on it. The cynic in me thinks that Catholicism may be necessary in order to get people to behave. Perhaps the threat of eternal hell was a strategy on Jesus’ part. Without it, there’s the danger of becoming lax and then society degenerating because of widespread disordered sex (homosexuality, porn, birth control).
I may be wrong. Perhaps non-Catholic Christian universalism is true, so I’m not going to say you’re irrational if you disagree with me. But I’m standing by my position that Jesus, Christianity, and eternal hell are evil.
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Just to suggest God is ‘retributive’ like humanity is, should be blasphemous. God is love! There is no retributive news in His very nature. Justice yes, judgement yes. But we already know the judgment and wht it is; the judgment shows our choices for what they are, exposing our motives to the Light of God, and thenforth comes the justice from that. Which gives us a choice. One choice only; hold on to your shit, (imagine your shit as a pan you are holding on too) whilst being bathed in the firey love of God, which burns sin-pans, until you are burned enough with your shit to let it go! The sin is holding the hot pan. Not US but held BY US!
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I think the idea must be somewhat older than the 20th century, since it is the picture of hell given by elder Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky couldn’t have made it up himself, he clearly wasn’t much of a theologian.
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Good point about Elder Zosima and the Brothers Karamazov.
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Yes. But Zossima clearly believes in postmortem repentance. Many passages in TBK indicate that he is at least a “hopeful universalist”, and, if memory serves me, a few seem to suggest that he is very close to being a “hard universalist.”
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I don’t see how I could ever trust a Father who would let me burn in the Lake of Fire forever because….because I wanted to? The idea defies decency of even the most mundane and ordinary kind.
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I mean rationally you can’t especially when said Father could infallibly pull you out at any time with his efficacious grace but just… doesn’t. But you’re supposed to say you do anyway, it’s a test of your faith or whatever.
It’s rather like being expected to be grateful for a lifejacket that allows 99.99% of its users to drown.
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But remember, he may have a “good reason” for being infinitely cruel. Unless you can dispositively demonstrate that he doesn’t have such a “good reason”, then it must follow that he may. And if he may, then in all probability, he will. Therefore, eternal torment is real. Never mind the good reason—that is immaterial.
And remember, he only submits people to eternal torture because he loves them so dearly!
Share the Good News!
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If a person managed to stay in hell forever, then we would have to reassess what hell is cause the foreverness reveals that what we’ve called hell is actually their heaven; the foreverness means they are doing exactly that which they were made to do and are having a blast, so we’re still short one eternal conscience torment..
this glorious rebel beams forth the glory of God and that is heaven, and if you went up to this eternal creature and implored him leave, he would guffaw, wrap his arms around you with joy and ask with amusement: why in the hell would I ever leave heaven?
we are all God in drag (h/t RD), and that rebel might reveal just how Christ harrows hell. that st rebel, that st judas, that st lucifer,, if you will, loves the true the good and the beautiful so much they spend eternity clearcutting the Grove of fake gods.
My 11 year old spiritual director MikeD has taught me this, resistance, call it rebellion if you like, even when destructive and in need of control, when it is pure, there is a core that is holy, and I can promise you this, if MikeD is in the badlands we call hell chopping down monsters who call themselves God till only one remain, then the ONLY definition of heaven for me the idiot, is with him and Jesus in hell, and I would joyfully choose to stay in hevll forever till it is hell forever no more.
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“If contingent universalism is coherent and compatible with God’s benevolence” …
Not even almost persuaded
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I empathize with Counter-Rebel’s comments above. I would never say Jesus is evil; however, decoupling traditional Christian claims of hell from Christianity as a whole proves difficult for me too. Surveying the scope of doctrinal history, one finds eternal hell woven into the fabric, by and large “dyed in the wool.” In comparison, vocal universalists represent a small strand. Overhauling the traditional eschatology doesn’t bode well apologetically and, for me, has more and more felt like a meta shift. How do we herald a bright future that most Christians have denied while still confidently believing the other items of faith that most Christians have believed?
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Robert – I suppose this depends on the Christian tradition. As an Eastern Orthodox Christian I have no such difficulties, our tradition is richly imbued with universalism. This is not to say we do not have our fair share of infernalists – we do, but it is they who have to twist the tradition to fit their view. But I certainly do understand and am not unsympathetic to your situation and the struggle this presents.
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Take heart, Robert. Back in the 60s journalists started writing on the disappearance of hell from the Protestant pulpit, and in recent decades hell has receded into the background in Catholic preaching and catechesis, thanks to Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Lip-service is still given, of course; yet the change is dramatic. The popular adoption of the choice model has had a significant impact. The choice model simply preaches differently than the retributive model.
So while hell may seem to be woven into the gospel fabric, I think we may find (though I won’t be around to see it) that in a generation or two a strong universalism will have become the standard hope of Christians. It may be hidden under the language of “hopefulness,” yet it will be a genuine and robust hope nonetheless. Preachers will continue to warn the faithful of the fearful consequences of sin, as indeed they must; but they will not threaten God’s total, complete, and irrevocable abandonment of sinners. And when this happens, the unweaving of hell from the gospel fabric will be done, no matter what the magisterial authorities may say.
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To quote Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima: “So may it be, so may it be!”
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Well said, Fr Aidan. My own Bp Alexander (OCA) has publicly recommended this Hope (while dissuading the faithful from confident assertions). He also mentioned in a interview that Origen was a saint. Rightfully so, I think. I like how you spell out this theological advance in, might I say, evolutionary terms. I.e. perpetual progress. New light is breaking in, “the night is almost over…” If DBH is right, this new groundswell of universalism may signal the unfolding of tradition’s inherent rational unity. The seed is slowly realizing its mature tree-ness.
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I think Fr Rooney has aspirations of being a revolutionary, groundbreaking theologian—the first to ever demonstrate that eternal torture is rational, coherent, just, compassionate and LOVING. (The last being especially amusing).
Indeed, he would be the first in millennia of theology to accomplish such a feat. There is only one small problem— he has failed at his objective. He fails over and over again. His manifold logical and moral deficiencies have been pointed out ad nauseam, but he continues on with the same dismantled argument again and again.
Here is a question for him that I don’t think anyone has asked, but it is a simple one: Is there an argument that could change your mind? Can such an argument exist?
If not, then honestly, what exactly is the point of posting here? It seems that you are not genuinely looking to be challenged.
I suppose you are just here in an effort to sow doubt? Maybe you relish the role of conviction-spoiler? Maybe you hate the idea of someone could live with an absolute, unwavering conviction that all beings will be brought into divine fulfillment?
Look, I’m very much in favor of healthy skepticism. There are innumerable points in Christianity that deserve probing doubt, but the concept pf eternal torture isn’t one of them. The single most superstitious, repugnant, incoherent, and ABUSIVE concept that humankind ever invented doesn’t deserve a mere moment of doubt as to its legitimacy.
So once again, is there an argument?
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I don’t think you’re making us universalists look good with this posturing. How is anyone supposed to know in advance what, if any, arguments would convince them? Rooney may not be responding because he knows not to answer fools according to their folly.
I agree that the doctrine of hell is abusive, but that’s partly because I think it’s false. If, per impossibile, it were true, then non-universalists would be horrible people if they didn’t warn people about hell. Peter Singer recognizes this.
Take solace in this: if universalism is true–which it is–it will be manifest. One day, no one will teach eternal hell anymore. Christians say that God allows evil to bring a greater good out of it. I believe that the doctrine of hell is evil, which will make it all the more glorious when it is finally defeated, more glorious than if there had never been a doctrine of hell at all. (Sort of a universalist spin on felix culpa.) Garrigou-Lagrange once said it is a greater work to make a just man out of a sinner than to make heaven and earth. Perhaps it’s a greater work to make a universalist church out of an infernalist church than to make a church. “It’s gonna be a glorious day” -Radiohead, “Lucky.”
Speaking for myself, I don’t think any argument would convince me of non-universalism. To say that love would allow eternal torment is like saying 2+2=5, and I simply have no argument with people who disagree. I think we all know eternal torment is evil; it just takes longer for certain people to realize it. I’m not going to let my closed-mindedness prevent me from expressing my view.
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“How is anyone supposed to know in advance what, if any, arguments would convince them? Rooney may not be responding because he knows not to answer fools according to their folly.”
The question was relating to the kind of argument.
One can deduce that the only argument he would accept would involve proving that God cannot have a good reason for allowing eternal torture. But he has already stated on numerous occasions that establishing this is impossible.
Never mind how incompatible infinite goodness and eternal torture are.
Once again, the crux of his position:
Since we cannot know that God may not have a good reason for eternal torturing people, eternal torture is at least possible. And if you cannot disprove the former, then you have no business believing in the inevitability of universal salvation.
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“Since we cannot know that God may not have a good reason for eternal torturing people, eternal torture is at least possible.”
Actually we can. It’s a simple logical step. Good is not evil, and evil is not good. Therefore, an endless and infinite evil cannot have a good reason precisely because of what it is.
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Yes, it is glaringly obvious. It literally could not be more obvious. There are many facets of theology that are ambiguous and nuanced, but this isn’t one of them.
His argument is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Time to move on.
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“I don’t think you’re making us universalists look good with this posturing.”
You mean, unlike the universalist that calls Jesus evil and states that the litmus test of true religion depends on being opposed to artificial contraception?
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I renounce what I said about universalism being true and Jesus being evil. Roman Catholicism is true. I ask Fr. Kimel to delete my other comments. Heresy is evil and I plead for God’s mercy.
Joe, any worldview that teaches evil is good is automatically false. To use contraception is to treat one’s partner as an object for mere gratification. That Catholicism has the right view on this, whereas other churches have caved in, is telling.
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About what I said on free will, all I did was describe–in a whiny manner–how libertarian free will operates. An appeal to outrage.
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… We know God is ( unconditional ) love but God also allows suffering (and evil) for the greater goodness (?) There are so many ways to BE human! So how can we fully understand God’s nature (?)
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“Who are you, O God and who am I ?”
– St Francis of Assisi
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Keep in mind Elizabeth that when it comes to clearly, definitively revealed nature of God’s moral character (i.e. such that God is love, God is good, God beauty) we cannot resort to mystery to counter this manifest revelation. To do so would to vacate faith of meaning, it would be a flight to nihilism, to absurdity; it would counter and contradict God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, the express image of the Father.
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Thanking you for the reply Robert Fortuin,
I understand what you are saying…Faith and hope in Christ 🙏
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Hi Robert,
I’m wondering if you would share further on this; I know you’ve done good work on analogy. Here’s my thing: I’m not sure how, or even that, we can claim anything about God to be clearly, definitively revealed. It seems the older I get, the more agnostic I get regarding precise, explicit theological statements. They seem to delimit the mystery—perhaps necessarily—rather than clearly revealing it. Indeed, perhaps they merely point to it, like a finger pointing to the moon. I do believe faith knows God. But such knowledge seems to me to remain implicit and non-inferential, making the disposition of faith infinitely more rich than its propositions. In some sense, doesn’t knowledge of God always remain tacit, forever inarticulable, namely because direct experience forever resists definitive articulation?
Thank you kindly,
Owen
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Hi Owen,
I agree with you that our theological endeavors have to be undertaken with the proviso that as far as our understanding is concerned, although we can know reliably, it will always remain knowledge in part. While not (necessarily) contradicting or vacating established understanding, there will always be more to say, more to know. The good will remain the good, we are not going to redefine and call good evil or evil good, but even so there’s much (like infinitely much) that we do not know about the good.
I say all this with another proviso: the person of Jesus Christ, as “the express image” of the Father, who himself is God in the flesh. There, in Jesus, we encounter the definitive and clear revelation of God, the moral character of God, “what God is like” if you will. And this cannot be vacated, emptied of meaning, such as by introducing constructs of divine mystery which contradict Jesus’ revelation and thereby dissolving the strands of analogical likeness.
So with this I have to say that while knowledge of God remains tacit, it is indeed articulable – however not exhaustibly so. I do not believe that knowledge of God is inarticulable, this is to say that there is a distinction between certitude and exhaustibility.
I hope that is helpful, a hasty reply. There remains more (much more) to say about this! 🙂
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Heard and appreciated, Robert. Thanks for your time to respond.
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The good will remain the good, we are not going to redefine and call good evil or evil good, but even so there’s much (like infinitely much) that we do not know about the good.
Perhaps because good is endlessly creative and varied, while evil is monotonously repetitive. Tolstoy was wrong. All unhappy families are alike; each happy family is happy in its own way. Even more so the endless variety of good and bliss realized in the risen life of Jesus.
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It’s so interesting – I think of the repeated findings in psychological studies correlating creativity (esp. poetic, musical, religious) with depression and bi-polar conditions. Some level of sadness is often tied to a capacity to look at things in a fresh way, outside the popular paradigm, in a deeply metaphorical way. These folks can shift the gestalt and create artifacts of enormous beauty, seemingly as a result/expression of their inner suffering and pain. Blake said “hell” energizes the way to imagination and creativity. Felix culpa.
Since Jesus was “a man of sorrows,” perhaps the coupling of goodness with happiness doesn’t quite do justice to lived experience. And, further, perhaps our neat polarities of good and bad, heaven and hell, don’t either. As Qoheleth says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting,” and “Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself?” (7:2 and 16). For me, I think we actually need resistance in order to grow. And if St. Gregory’s teaching of perpetual progress is correct…
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Owen,
There is, I believe, and Robert will tell me I’m wrong (this is our usual fun time and he knows I thoroughly enjoy him as person and commentator) that there is a monistic and dare I go so far as Heraclitus, Schelling, & Hegel to imply a contradictory tension that underlies becoming phenomenologically. It isn’t so much dialectic to synthesis as it truly is learning to understand the limit and accept contradiction where it falls. There is a tension in procession and reversion as it applies to being as it becomes with Creator and creation co-creating being as it emerges. (hence why even to a firm neo-platonist, God resides beyond being in a sense, even as its ground).
That is indeed the mystery of it and where I think you are correct. Where I think people, particularly in modernity and post-modern schools get led astray is that the “angst” of being, the fear of what will be and what is unknown, in the face of the tension of being is made too much of and seen as ground because it feels so untethered, and this what the ancients clearly saw through. The mystery of being, the sheer unbridled power of the divine as it manifests in and through us as we co-create is where, to me, some of the analogies fail, and yet it is in this failure that not angst should appear but rather the beauty and excitement of sheer becoming. There is a ground for which things are moving towards and becoming fully realized, one isn’t untethered at all but connected to the fount that brings forth everything. That newness should incite awe, not fear, just as a child taking up a new activity, or game, or creating something for the first time. It’s an inversion of the necessity thrust upon us by circumstance with eyes that are only seeing the things-for-themselves, not what lays beyond them as they are in- themselves. (To borrow a very quaint distinction from Berdyaev). Where I would disagree with the idealists is that this becoming is not learning itself from a zero point to learn to be fully known, but rather all is known and at play with itself as it winds through the ideas it holds for each and every moment in conjunction with us. The divine “Lila” is the mutuality of progression towards a teleological end, however long it may take, and what they get right is ascending from man to God in the sense of what can become fully known precisely because the ground of each of us, even phenomenologically is the very same beauty for which we were made.
And, I think, one must be careful in saying that we would never call the good evil, or vice versa, precisely because in existence we do all the time. We make decisions that we feel are good, and have reasons to do so, and yet only evil ends sometimes are manifested, and vice versa. That whole commentary on “what you meant for evil, God brought about for good” after all. Most of what we surmise as good is only ever realized after the fact, as is sometimes its negation, and we really may never truly know the good until all things return in the end. After all, as humans, we are very histrionic in our approaches to existence. Those who want to move ethics beyond good/evil distinctions aren’t always wrong per se in being agnostic about what it could be. They just are in the futility in trying to ultimately define them as such in toto.
And, fwiw, I think the Gregorys and Maximus see the process of becoming as a fully eternal act that the desire we long for will never be satiated but that is the point, to be fully in bliss, as individual and universal with the one who carries all forward and grounds it. It isn’t a loss of self in the sense of a wave of Nirvana but a gaining of the true self or as Macdonald put it “the true name” by which we can be truly and fully known.
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I knew there was more to say about this 🙂
Nothing to disagree with you Logan, well said. In regards to good/evil I wasn’t speaking of that in the context of phenomenology of course.
Bulgakov’s Sophia addresses that co-creative process really well.
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You are correct! I enjoyed that text. I think all three of the main Silver Age Russians (Frank, Berdyaev, and Bulgakov) admittedly thanks to Soloviev were all hitting at the creative impulse in different ways. As is known, I tend to side with Berdyaev’s version of it, but I think Frank and Bulgakov both speak eloquently on the matter as well. Even Schelling at times, especially as he responds to Hegel in the later period in his lectures, comes to some of the similar ideas about these things. It’s interesting reading Kierkegaard’s notes from some of the lectures, and then to see where he winds up later in helping build out the narrative of angst. Angst is merely accepting the fall as the normative track, the soul’s acceptance of itself as ground. It shouldn’t be like that and is a perspective that should be flipped back to its proper focus.
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I wonder why dread loomed so large for them, perhaps as a primal motive? But it is a negative motive, I am baffled with what seems like an obsession.
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Well when we talk about ideology I think that’s where we fall into the pitfalls of phenomena/environment as shaping things. When one sees the milieu of the 18th-19th centuries I think there is this tension of truly feeling helpless in the face of what history was doing and the conflicts around it. So if one does accept that Hegelian notion of God dying and Geist just being this idyllic universal community that cares time forward, then it does pull you into yourself as the one who brings things fully forward in time. We become the tool of our own existence, and so some of those same impulses creep into the existential frame. One quickly loses sight of what we are intended to do and gropes for an answer to the pain/circumstances, instead of realizing this isn’t correct. It’s kind of why I appreciate Schelling’s notion of the intellectual intuition. It is already identifying the impulse of the divine/truth before it even appears to understand it, and not in that supposed “schwarmerei,” but in the sense of the impulse that needs to realize that there is more.
Angst comes from a refusal to leave oneself as the ground of itself. When one truly looks at being one already realizes you should no more fear it than anything else, if you see it clearly. So when you have the view to hold your own being is to be, it can be a bit unraveling. Even the Christian existentialists including someone like Berdyaev, etc, are wrestling with this notion of angst. Yet, I think for the good ones, it is merely a passing through to be conquered when you really become free from a supposed necessity. In many ways, it’s the belief that the necessary can’t be avoided, and yet, that’s the beauty of it, it can.
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Forgive my typos. Moving faster in my head than my fingers.
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Logan, thanks for your response to me above. I believe I’m tracking with you. Much to think about here.
Your mention of Heraclitus makes me think again of Gregory’s perpetual progress: “everything flows,” even in the afterlife. If this connection holds, then postmortem existence perhaps remains rooted in the same reality we know now—a process of interpenetrating experiences contextualized within the whole. In other words, there’s no radical discontinuity between now and then, here and there, dying and rising. Even “hell” exists in the seamless stream of divine life.
Accordingly, progress and healthy growth require resistance; a grain of wheat must die to produce fruit. And the Cross represents resistance par excellence. Given those terms, do you think the movement of perpetual progress requires continual postmortem “crosses” to realize new horizons? That is, does perpetual rising imply ever-new obstacles to overcome? Or does Becoming finally reach a stasis? If not, what does it look like to follow Christ crucified, forever, eternally pursuing the adventure of a perpetually new creation?
Many thanks!
Owen
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“‘Given those terms, do you think the movement of perpetual progress requires continual postmortem “crosses” to realize new horizons?”
My God, that sounds tiring. The prospect of endless “crosses”, if that would involve the anguish and suffering that “crosses” have always in my experience brought in this life, makes nonexistence sound tantalizingly more inviting. Perhaps I don’t want to grow forever, at the cost of endless suffering; perhaps I’m still more of a Buddhist because I really only wish for the end of suffering.
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Tu shay, Robert. Just to explore this line of thinking, though: aren’t stories without some form of tension rather boring?
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To me, such a story is not boring, but unreal.
But I haven’t experienced my life as a narrative. Rather, it is a patchwork of disparate, sometimes overlapping, sometimes apparently disconnected vignettes, that are related to each other only because they are “spatially” contiguous. If eternal life is analogous to this life as I have experienced it, then it is not a story, boring or otherwise.
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It is my understanding that what both the Desert Fathers, and the Buddhist masters, confronted in their different ways was the overpowering boredom of sustained confrontation with the self, which they experienced as inner poverty and emptiness. It was from entering and going through this arid terrain that they realized whatever liberation they did, beyond all psycho-spiritual dramas, beyond all suffering, passion, and contradiction. I have come to think that maybe boredom, the path of absence rather than suffering, is the way that leads to liberation.
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Fascinating, Robert, thanks for the feedback.
I tend to view my own life with a temporal throughline, rather than spatial; but I resonate with the episodic nature of the process – it often feels disjointed and fragmentary. What I’m seeking is a unifying principle from the gospel to understand transformative progress. Death–>resurrection seems to be the salient centerpiece and guiding metaphor of spiritual liberation in the Christian mythos.
Whatever the metaphor means in lived experience, it remains the Christian paradigm for divine progress, I think. Perhaps it can be mapped onto perpetual progress in the afterlife; perhaps not. Understanding the metaphor of “death” as boredom seems legit to me. It’s still an obstacle to overcome, and that kind of resistance seems necessary to realize progressive horizons of enlightenment. Nothing grows to full health and vigor in the natural world without some opposition.
I really appreciate the conversation.
Grace and peace,
Owen
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“Nothing grows to full health and vigor in the natural world without some opposition.”
I’m troubled by the metaphor of natural vital health as a picture of the goal of the process of eternal life, just as I’m troubled by the idea of biological evolution as a kind of spiritually progressive process You aptly enough questioned the idea of happiness, and even goodness, as an index for the goal of the process redemptive, and redeeming, life; I wonder if substituting vital natural health isn’t just as misleading. Can we imagine Jesus as someone pursuing something analogous to natural health and vigor in his life, or on the cross?
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That’s cool. I’m not attached to the metaphor. The observation about resistance/opposition is Nature’s way of saying something, though. Some spiritual traditions say nothing new comes into being without it. I can personally see how the cross fits that description.
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Seems to me the cross was dealt its final blow on the hill of Calvary. My vision is that the ever-extending epektasis will not be by way of resistance but by rest in the ever unfolding and unending beatitude which carries us forward into desire for Him. The River of Bliss carries all in All.
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For the sake of transparency, I will say that I’m a man near retirement age who will never be able to retire, who has no doubt squandered my gifts throughout my life and, as a result, is in an economically and socially insecure place that, barring some immense stroke of good fortune, will be my (and my wife’s) location for the rest of this life. I’m not saying this to elicit pity, but to acknowledge that my perspective on what we’ve been discussing is not the result of noble philosophical indifference and pure concern for truth, but due in large part to extreme physical and psychological weariness, and a lack of hope that anything will get better in the here-and-now. The figure I most identify with in the New Testament is Lazarus, that is, the Lazarus at Dives’ gate, though I’m certainly not as indigent as he was, at least not at present, and I’m as certainly not as righteous (I’ve always had the impression — though I’ve never been certain why — that Lazarus was a righteous man). I’m tired, I’m dispirited, and I dread the idea of an eternity in which whatever does not undo me makes me holier. “Please, Lord, no,” is what I say to that prospect, and I say it in what I acknowledge is very much an attitude of self-interest.
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Robert Fortuin: I hope and pray you are right.
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It’s my faith and hope – I take it as Gospel and as the Gospel. It’s the vision one can draw from Orthodox prayers and liturgical tradition. Eternity as an uphill battle against never ending obstacles is hell as I see it.
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If that’s true, then grace operates like gravity in eternity, and if one should fall, it pulls one further yet into the endless mercy of Christ. Of course, that would necessarily also be true before death, since it too is part of God’s creation and kingdom, but maybe the difference is it operates mostly invisibly this side of death, but out in plain sight postmortem?
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Owen,
I think one has to be careful when discussing “flux” in the way people often do with Heraclitus. We cannot forget that to him, all flux and change is still very grounded. In fact, monistically so. He is the main early driver of the Logos as ground after all, and to him, there is one existence, it is we who “define” it for ourselves and usually we define it poorly. The fragments warn about poor sight…of being to wet. We must dry ourselves out, or in his case, see properly.
You aren’t wrong…it is indeed the tension of struggle that brings things forth. If you remember the fragment of the bow, the actual greek is a play on words for bow and life are the same spelling with different inflections. So life and death are tied together as phenomena, and this is a stasis in and of itself.
You mentioned a linear through-line…In a sense, you are an arrow of time that will circle back on itself. So you are progressing, but you’re progressing to and through a point that will achieve a finality and become what it was fully meant to be as an idea that relates to its Ideatum. All instances of becoming, the tension of struggle, if we want to be psychological, are all of us trying to be a many who are ultimately working back to the One. We’re all manifesting at differing levels of the ontic ground of being as it manifests within us and tries to guide us to the true essence of being. The tension is the multifaceted web of becomings that interact with each other, and as Peter suggest in Acts 4 as well as Paul in 1 Cor. everything is working back to its final resting point when all will be fully consummated, and truly all.
So even for the Nyssen, epektasis is a fully ground flux whose movement is a dynamo that is an ever-moving repose to borrow from Maximus who sees this in both Nyssen and Nazianzus. It isn’t a repeating occurrence as if we are living in the Elysian fields etc, it is a final moment when the sheer love of creator and creation fully intertwine in one another, and that bliss, that finality, is carried forth by the struggle to a rest that is unlike anything one could describe.
Christ, then, in the incarnation and crucifixion “becomes” the ground of all completion and gives meaning to all of history and circumstance in both directions, and in that moment, transforms the whirling spin and disjointedness of nature into a solidly pointed arrow that points through all of time and anchors it fully once and for all.
To complete the circle, in a sense, the Cross “dries us all out.” And now, we aren’t walking around dreaming, but are eyes fully open to the truth of being and what it entails.
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Owen: “ I think of the repeated findings in psychological studies correlating creativity (esp. poetic, musical, religious) with depression and bi-polar conditions.”
And, personally, I’ve always found that the most beautiful music is also the most melancholic. There is a undoubtedly a curious and somewhat disquieting association between beauty and sadness, this side of the veil.
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There is an interesting article by Lionel Trilling how this stems from Freud’s approach to aesthetics, and traces the kind of history all the way back to antiquity and how this isn’t indeed necessarily so, but a shift in focus for what and how the “Poet” actually serves and manifests within culture. The poet/musician/artist is merely the conduit for what philosophy doesn’t put in argumentation but in “prose.” It’s called “Art and Neurosis” if you’re interested.
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Very interesting, indeed. Yes, thanks so much for the recommendation.
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In our own suffering we enter into the suffering of Christ within our own humanity and with God’s love. My understanding is when Christ said in His last words “It is finished” (John 19:30) He was saying that His work on the cross was accomplished and completed.
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