The Coherence of Universalism: A Response to James Dominic Rooney (Part One)

by Eric Reitan, Ph.D.

Introduction

I am a universalist. I think there’s compelling reason to conclude that God, as understood by the Christian faith, not only aims to save all but, on account of Christ’s holy work, succeeds in achieving this aim. I should note that I do not deny hell: I think that some of God’s beloved creatures may well endure it for a time. What I deny is that any will endure it forever. 

In a series of recent articles in Church Life Journal (“The Incoherencies of Hard Universalism” {hereafter IHU}, “Hell and the Coherence of Christian Hope” {HCCH}, and “Hard Universalism, Grace, and Creaturely Freedom” {HUGCF}), Fr. James Dominic Rooney argues that views like mine are “incoherent” because universalists must affirm one of two purportedly untenable propositions: either (1) “God could not do otherwise than cause human beings to love him” or (2) “human beings could not do otherwise than love God” (IHU). In addition to his negative case against universalism, Rooney offers a positive case for the traditional view that eternal damnation is a real possibility. This positive case seeks both to paint a portrait of hell that does justice to God’s abiding love for all persons and answer some key universalist objections.

In what follows I consider both Rooney’s positive case for his version of the traditional view and his negative case against universalism. I begin with Rooney’s positive case in part because doing so will expose what Rooney and I have in common, and hence which premises of my universalist position I won’t need to defend. But I also start there for another reason: Rooney’s portrait of how God responds to the unregenerate embodies a great deal of wisdom, and it is a portrait with which I can almost wholeheartedly agree.

PART I: Rooney’s Positive Case for Eternal Damnation

I.1: Rooney’s Vision of Hell

Key to Rooney’s portrait of hell is the idea that hell is a state chosen by the damned. “Christ’s victory was to open the doors of Paradise to the damned,” says Rooney. “If anyone remains, it is only because (Lewis said in The Problem of Pain) ‘the doors of hell are locked on the inside’” (IHU). 

In developing this portrait, Rooney commends to his readers C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, a work of theological fiction that follows a busload of hell’s denizens to the borders of paradise. There, they are welcomed by the blessed and urged to embrace the eternal joy awaiting them. Instead, they reject the welcome for various petty, prideful, and tragically misguided reasons. 

Beyond just inviting readers to look at Lewis’s literary depictions of why the damned might reject God’s grace, Rooney adds his own depiction inspired by reflecting on what it might be like to lose a loved one to suicide. Rooney invites his reader to imagine reaching the border of Paradise to witness an unfolding tragedy: your loved one stands at the edge of a cliff, their back to heaven’s blessings. Gripped by despair, they prepare to fling themselves into the abyss. You try to talk them out of it. You reassure them that they’re loved, that God waits with open arms. 

They don’t believe it. Trapped by delusion and despair, they leap—and you spring forward, seizing their hand before they fall.

Now they dangle over the void, begging you to release them, insisting that your portrait of the joy that awaits is a lie. You assure them it isn’t, but they can’t or won’t believe you.

How long do you hold on? 

Rooney’s answer is forever. If you love them as profoundly as God loves his creatures, you’d never willingly let go.

Of course, as a finite creature with limited capacities, holding on forever might be impossible. But God is not so limited. God could and would hold on forever. 

And this is Rooney’s portrait of damnation: God holding onto the damned despite their rejection, “bringing them into union with Christ” despite the hopelessness or bitterness or hostility that twists their view of reality. Rooney goes on:

And that union, the presence of God’s love to them, is good for the damned—indeed, Gods presence to us is among the greatest goods—even if they do not perceive it as such. Their pain is not good in itself, certainly, but the damned (by definition) see the world wrongly—the damned perceive the Good Himself as hateful and painful. But God is doing something good; we should not trust the damned in their perception of whether their state is good for them. (HUGCF)

God does for the damned the best God can do given their persistent, delusional rejection of His grace. And God never stops doing for the damned the best God can do. His love never fails. 

I stress these elements of Rooney’s vision of hell because I share them, and they play an instrumental role in my own case for universalism. 

Another feature of Rooney’s portrait of hell is that the damned are in fact with the blessed, held in the arms of God and their loved ones, even if their rejection of God leads them to misperceive the blessings around them as afflictions. Rooney endorses St Isaac of Nineveh’s view that “one and the same fire of God delights the saints in heaven as it torments the damned in hell. God’s love is received ‘according to the mode of the receiver’” (IHU).

In other words, Rooney sees the damned are a mere change of perspective away from blessedness: all it would take is for their delusional picture of their circumstances to be replaced by a true one. But he thinks it is at least possible that their rejection of divine grace is so decisive that this change of perspective will never come. 

Two key premises underlie this portrait of hell:

1. The miserable state of the damned results not from divine rejection of the damned but from their rejection of divine grace, and this miserable state consists wholly in the natural consequences of that choice. 
2. God’s love for the damned is unfailing, seeking the most good for them that God can bestow consistent with respecting their rejection of divine grace.

My response to Rooney’s critique of universalism, which will amount to a positive case for universalism, relies on both 1 & 2. This is why I say I can almost wholeheartedly agree with Rooney’s portrait of hell. There is more we hold in common in our vision of God and how God responds to the unregenerate than there are points of difference.

That said, there’s a crucial ambiguity with respect to #1 that I want to turn to now.

I.2: Resistible Grace, Efficacious Grace, and the Ambiguity in Rooney’s Vision of Hell

On Rooney’s picture of how God responds to the unregenerate who persist in rejecting divine grace, one thing is clear: God does not bestow what has come to be called “efficacious grace”—that is, grace that by itself is sufficient to secure salvation.¹

Efficacious grace does more than just make salvation available, a boon to all who don’t reject it. Efficacious grace transforms the will of the unregenerate person such that they freely accept what God offers. As John Kronen and I argue in our book, God’s Final Victory, there is good reason to think that a sufficiently clear self-revelation of God would have just this transformative effect and so would constitute efficacious grace.² 

The idea is this: being presented with the truth about God, fully and unfiltered, would render the ultimate choiceworthiness of union with God absolutely indubitable to any creature made in the divine image whose nature is such that they can only find true joy and contentment in loving union with their creator. With a clear and direct experience of the truth about God, all reasons for rejecting loving union with God would be exposed as error and delusion. And any doubts about the strength of the reasons for accepting such union would evaporate.

No creature of God made for union with God could, in the face of that truth, do aught but fling themselves with thanksgiving and joy into God’s embrace. They would have every reason to do so, no reason to do otherwise (all possible reasons of this kind having been exposed as fatuous), and no uncertainty or false beliefs about what is best. And so, a sufficient complete divine self-revelation would constitute efficacious grace.

Whether Rooney agrees that a powerful divine self-revelation would amount to efficacious grace, there is some reason to think he believes God can bestow efficacious grace (even though he doesn’t use that term). At one point, Rooney says that “on traditional theories of grace such as that of Thomas Aquinas, God could have predestined everyone to glory without ‘violating’ their freedom,” citing the sinless Blessed Virgin Mary as an example of the bestowal of such grace (HUGCF). This certainly sounds like an endorsement of God’s power to bestow efficacious grace in a manner compatible with respect for freedom. Elsewhere, however, he seems to deny this same claim.¹

What is clear about Rooney’s view is that God doesn’t extend efficacious grace (except, perhaps, in extraordinary cases like that of the Virgin Mary): “God’s grace can be resisted,” he says (IHU). Or, even more clearly: “God’s grace does not necessarily bring about our free conversion; God’s plan was always to give grace such that we can reject it, given our free nature” (HUGCF). Let’s call the grace Rooney has in mind “resistible grace” (a better term than the traditional moniker of “sufficient grace”). Rooney’s view is that God extends resistible grace but withholds the efficacious grace that would guarantee salvation—presumably because, as Rooney puts it, “free creatures have an intrinsic value greater than rocks or chimpanzees on account of the kinds of relationships that rational creatures can enter into” (HUGCF).

Because of this divine plan that Rooney attributes to God, human rejection of God remains ever a real possibility—at least prior to accepting divine grace and directly experiencing the absolute choiceworthiness of what God offers. More significantly, Rooney claims that someone rejecting God “forever” or “decisively” is a live possibility. And so, given this (purported) divine plan to forever extend resistible grace but withhold efficacious grace, eternal hell remains a live possibility for the creatures God loves and wants to save.

The ambiguity I mentioned above is this. When Rooney indicates that God loves the damned and does the best that God can for them given their ongoing rejection of divine grace, does he mean that God loves then as far as God can love them within the divine constraint on love imposed by God’s plan to extend resistible grace but not efficacious grace? Or does he mean that God loves them as far as God can love them given that love itself motivates God to extend resistible grace but not efficacious grace?

In other words, is this supposed divine plan to withhold efficacious grace, even from those who would be eternally damned without it, an expression of God’s love for humanity—or is it a constraint that puts limits on what God can do for love, a constraint that comes from some other divine motive? How Rooney answers this will have significant bearing on what he’ll need to say about God’s moral nature, the place of love in that nature, and the character of divine love. 

Suppose Rooney thinks God’s plan to extend only resistible grace (and withhold efficacious grace) is not motivated by divine love but by other considerations that constrain God’s love. In that case, Rooney’s view of hell would be rejected by those who see God’s love as the divine moral property to which all others are subordinate (or of which all others are mere expressions). Given just how many theologians have adopted such a view, I’d hesitate to attach the label “heretical” to those who reject such a purported divine plan on these grounds.

For this reason (as well as some things Rooney says in passing), I’ll assume that Rooney thinks God’s purported plan to extend only resistible grace is an expression of God’s love. In that case, whether or not one accepts Rooney’s vision of hell will be influenced by one’s understanding of the nature of love—specifically the kind of love attributed to God in the Christian theological tradition. One might suppose, for example, that divine love for creatures includes both (a) an interest in providing and respecting the conditions for genuine freedom, and (b) an interest in promoting the creature’s good, including but not limited to preventing endless misery. While (a) might be thought to favor the divine plan Rooney attributes to God, (b) would favor bestowing efficacious grace to those who would, absent it, endure extreme suffering forever. So which of these interests of divine love takes priority, and why?

Here, it is worth recalling that on Rooney’s portrait of hell, God prevents the damned souls who seek to fling themselves into the abyss from doing so: God holds them close and unites them to Christ, giving them the best God can give while respecting their rejection of divine grace. But in so doing, God is not honoring their choice to fling themselves to oblivion. Out of concern for the creature’s good, God refuses to let them have what they seek—presumably because it is more loving to grant them the good of union with Christ (even though they can’t enjoy it given their delusions) than it is to let them have oblivion.

So Rooney appears to agree that God’s interest in promoting the good of the damned can be a reason for God to override their choice to throw themselves into the outer darkness. But he denies that such a concern would be a similarly compelling reason for God to grant efficacious grace—even though that would lift them out of perpetual suffering and into eternal joy. Why? There may be answers to this question, but Rooney doesn’t give them.

Rooney may think he doesn’t need to settle these questions—that he can safely bracket them and still win the day against the universalist. In fact, just such an assumption appears to underlie the way he defends his preferred view of hell against charges leveled by David Bentley Hart. In the next section, I’ll look at that defense and argue that it is inadequate. Given its inadequacy, to support his view of hell Rooney must answer the kinds of questions posed above.

I.3: Rooney’s Skeptical Theism

David Bentley Hart argues that God’s final victory over sin and evil, the soteriological victory of divine love and grace, would be incomplete were God to fail to save all. In Rooney’s words, “God would not be ‘all in all,’ or finally victorious in his Providence for the universe, if he allowed hell (68-69); God could not simultaneously really will that ‘all are saved’ and allow anyone to be damned” (IHU).

My own variant of this objections runs as follows: if God, motivated to seek the salvation of all, were ever forced to choose between (i) allowing one of his creatures to be mired forever in bondage to sin and despair-inducing delusions and (ii) extending the efficacious grace that brings them irresistibly to a state of free repentance and love of God (at the cost of bypassing their deeply impaired and delusion-riddled deliberative processes), God would opt for (ii). 

(Note, while I find this objection to Rooney’s view of hell powerful, my own defense of universalism does not depend on it: even if God would favor (ii) over (i) were God forced to choose between them, I do not think God is driven to such a choice.)

However the charge is leveled, Rooney’s response is to take a page out of the skeptical theist’s handbook: 

We know in general that God only allows evil because he can produce out of it some greater good. Even for Hart, natural and moral evil would need to be allowed by God, and God does not desire to inflict suffering upon anyone even if he permits it for some good reason. But if this is true, then there is no principled logical reason that God cannot have a good reason to allow even that moral evil that leads to damnation. I cannot see how we can know that God would not have such a good reason—God’s reasons and omnipotence are far beyond our comprehension. (IHU)

Rooney’s idea, in short, is that God’s reasons are so far beyond our ken that we cannot rule out God having good reasons for allowing some of his creatures to reject divine grace forever, thus forever thwarting God’s desire for their salvation and forever miring them in abject misery. 

This is how so-called “skeptical theists” address the problem of evil: given that God transcends our understanding and so must remain largely a mystery, there may be reasons why God would permit such horrors as the Holocaust, even though that doesn’t look to us like something a perfectly benevolent and almighty God would allow.

Rooney invokes this cloud of divine mystery to do more than say that, for whatever God clearly does permit, there must be some good (if unknown) reason why God permits it. To work as a response to the universalist challenge posed above, the cloud of mystery must also prevent us from making any legitimate prima facie judgments about what God would permit. For the cloud of mystery to do the work Rooney invokes it to do, it must be so thick that when asked, “What does divine love rule out?” we are forced to shrug and admit we can’t rule out a thing. 

After all, unlike the moral and natural evils of this world, the eternal damnation of persons is not some known fact about reality that (assuming God’s existence) must be consistent with God’s goodness given that God clearly did permit it. The real possibility of eternal damnation is, instead, a theological postulate. 

If Rooney takes God’s permission of eternal damnation to be a fact in the way we must take the Holocaust to be—if he says, “Since God clearly does bestow only resistible grace while withholding efficacious grace even from those who’d suffer eternally without it, God must have a good reason for doing so even if we don’t know what it is”—then he is simply begging the question against the universalist. Rooney is astute enough not to do that.

What he does say is that, given that Christians must suppose God has good reasons for allowing the Holocaust, “there is no principled logical reason that God cannot have a good reason to allow even that moral evil that leads to damnation” (IHU).

There are two problems here. First, there are crucial disanalogies between terrestrial horrors like the Holocaust and eternal damnation. Terrestrial horrors are finite, but eternal damnation is a postulated infinite horror. The victims of terrestrial horrors can have their lives redeemed in such a way that, despite the horror, they find their lives worth living on the whole. But to endure eternal damnation is, by definition, to endure an existence that one does not find worth living on the whole. That God clearly must have good reasons to permit finite suffering that might yet be redeemed (in the sense that the victim’s life comes to experience life as worth living) does not imply that God can have good reasons to permit infinite suffering that, by hypothesis, will never be redeemed in the relevant sense.

Given these differences, it is hardly obvious that, given God’s permission of terrestrial evil, there can be no “principled logical reason” why God cannot have reasons to permit eternal damnation.

But the deeper problem with Rooney’s claim here is that it’s simply not strong enough to defend his preferred view of how God deals with those who persistently reject divine grace. In response to Rooney’s claim that given all we don’t know about God, God might have good reasons to withhold efficacious grace even from those who’d be eternally damned without it, a universalist could retort as follows: “And given all we don’t know about God, God might have decisive reasons to extend efficacious grace to those who, absent it, would suffer eternal misery. The question is which we should believe given what we do know.” 

All that these opposing claims show is that, given the extent to which God transcends us, we cannot decisively rule out God having good reasons to permit or do things that, given our best and most well-reasoned judgments, we think the Christian God would not permit or do. But this is merely a call for us to recognize our fallibility when we think about matters divine. Such fallibility does not rule out reaching conclusions about how a God of love would relate to the unregenerate. If it did, Rooney and I should both shut up. What such fallibility does is counsel us to retain a robust humility as we engage in theological discourse. 

Take an analogy: given my cognitive limits, I cannot rule out that I am living in a Matrix-like computer simulation. But that is no reason to think I do, and I am fully justified in believing I don’t, absent more than the mere possibility that I might be. If I start having experiences like Neo’s, then I should reconsider; but absent such reasons, I am warranted in believing—fallibilistically—that I’m not living in a simulation.

Similarly, if it looks like X is something God wouldn’t permit given our theologically informed understanding of God, the fact that, for all we know, God might have reasons beyond our ken to permit X is just a reason to hold our theological conclusions fallibilistically. If I witness X happening, then I know that unless God doesn’t exist at all, God must have a reason to permit X even if I can’t discern it. But absent such a “defeater” of my view that God would not permit X, if my (theological, philosophical, Scriptural, and experiential) reasons for thinking God would not do so are strong, I am entitled to conclude God would not permit it. 

The reminder to be humble enough to take opposing arguments seriously and admit I could be wrong is important—a reminder Rooney and I (and Hart) should take to heart. But unless Rooney wants to make the cloud of mystery so thick it forces him into silence, this is all Rooney’s point amounts to. Given that Rooney is not silent, I can only assume he does not think the mere fact that God could have reasons beyond our ken precludes us from engaging in theological reflection culminating in (fallibilistically-held) theological conclusions.

What follows from all of this is that Rooney cannot successfully rebut Hart-style universalist objections to his preferred view of hell simply by noting that, for all we know, God might have reasons beyond our ken to permit some beloved creatures to be forever lost in anguish and delusion who might be saved via efficacious grace. What Rooney needs to do is give us reasons to think that God would withhold efficacious grace even when someone would be forever lost without it; and he needs to show that these reasons are stronger than the reasons to think God would not withhold it in those cases. (I’ll help him out, sketching out a possible case for withholding efficacious grace, in a later section.)

Hence, Rooney can’t bracket the hard questions I posed in my previous section if he wants to win the day against the universalist. A defense of his preferred view of hell that appeals to the mystery of God succeeds in undercutting universalist challenges only if is turned into a cloud so impenetrably thick that it simultaneously undercuts everything Rooney wants to say.

I.4: The Problem of Heavenly Grief

Another challenge to his view that Rooney wants to answer is “the problem of heavenly grief.” Since I’m currently working on a book on this problem, what he has to say is of special interest to me.

The problem, in brief, is this: if any are eternally damned, at least some among the blessed would grieve for them and empathize with their suffering—and this grief and empathetic suffering would diminish their heavenly bliss. The divine promise to wipe away every tear and lift us into a place free from mourning would go eternally unfulfilled. 

One version of the problem—originally articulated by Friedrich Schleiermacher—has it that insofar as the blessed in heaven are morally perfected, they would have the kind of love that extends even to enemies. As such, the blessed would experience the eternal damnation of anyone as “a disturbing element to bliss.”³ Another version focuses on specific human relationships, noting that if any are damned, those damned souls are surely loved by someone in heaven. Parents would mourn lost children, wives would empathize with their husbands’ misery, etc.

Rooney appears to think his view of damnation offers a solution to this problem. Recall that, for Rooney, the damned are in union with Christ, immersed in God’s love, just as much as the blessed. What distinguishes them from the blessed is their willful resistance to seeing the truth about their situation. They perceive blessings as curses. They writhe in eternal anguish because of how deeply they misperceive what is happening to them.

Rooney argues that the damned “are better off in the resurrection precisely because of being in union with Christ, since the damned are closer to now [sic] him than to themselves, an eternal scar within the Heart of Jesus. On the true scale of value, the divinization and glorification that the damned undergo is enough to defeat any evil that persists.” On the basis of this he concludes, “From the perspective of the blessed, the presence of the damned need not be a cause for sadness, but for rejoicing” (HUGCF).

Rooney seeks to personalize this perspective using, again, the example of someone gripped by suicidal despair who attempts to fling themselves into the abyss only to be seized by God and those among the blessed who love them: 

It is true that the desire your beloved has to throw themselves away is still there. Their pain sits inside and, some scars being so deep, their suffering might never fully go away. Yet, while they are in pain, I know that they can feel me with them. Far from serving as an obstacle to keep us apart, that pain and brokenness is part of what keeps us together. You will never leave or let go as long as your beloved needs you—and you will need each other forever. From my perspective, being forever with someone I love and cannot now lose is cause not for disappointment by rejoicing. You sit, side-by-side, holding onto each other as the Sun rises. (HUGCF)

One worry here is that “rejoicing” can be construed in two ways: as a total state of one’s being, or as a specific response to a specific good. In the former sense, being in a state of rejoicing rules out grief and suffering. But in the latter sense it does not. 

Suppose I learn my child was in a car wreck. I rush to the hospital fearing the worst. Upon arrival I learn that not only are they still alive but their injuries are not life-threatening. However, they have suffered a spinal cord injury. They’ll never walk again. While I might rejoice over their survival, I would at the same time grieve over their lost mobility. 

Rejoicing over a specific blessing isn’t the same as being in an overall state of rejoicing. It might be paired with a grief over specific losses that precludes being in an overall state of rejoicing.

Rooney’s thinking seems to turn on this ambiguity. Suppose my child is eternally damned but rescued from the abyss by God’s power. Suppose they remain in perpetual anguish, tormented by a despair that feeds their misperception of heaven that in turn reinforces their despair in an endless feedback loop of torment. They are here with me in heaven. I hold onto them, providing what comfort I can. My presence eases but do not remove their anguish. They weep and beg for it to end while I continue to hold them, tears streaming down my face. Do I rejoice that they are here with me, here and alive rather than swallowed up by oblivion? Do I rejoice that I can hold them close for eternity? Yes. But does that rejoicing exist alongside bone-jarring grief and empathetic anguish for their misery? Yes. Obviously yes. If I love them, their suffering cannot but be a source of grief and anguish—even if it’s caused by their own tragic misperception of reality and would end if only they came to see the truth. 

That God is doing the best God can do for them short of transforming their will in ways that allow them to see the truth means there is something to celebrate and something to grieve. There remains the eternal “what might have been” and the shared pain—even if they’re there with me, even if I can hold them in their misery, even if they’re not wholly and irretrievably lost.

As long as any are damned, the problem of heavenly grief persists. The promise that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more” (Revelation 21:4)—remains forever unfulfilled.

 

Footnotes

[1] Specifically, Rooney attributes to Aquinas the view that “if God desires to create free creatures, not even God can eliminate the metaphysical possibility that such creatures sin” (HUGCF). While one could take that to mean that efficacious grace is impossible even for God, it is arguably better to read it as saying that God cannot extend such grace in a freedom-preserving way. Either way, it appears to contradict his claim that, according to Aquinas, “God could have predestined everyone to glory without ‘violating’ their freedom.” Whether it is Aquinas who is contradictory or Rooney’s exegesis of Aquinas, or the problem is Rooney trying but failing to clearly articulate a subtle but coherent position, I leave for others to decide.

[2] John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God’s Final Victory: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 136.

[3] Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), p. 721.

(Go to Part Two)

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Eric Reitan is Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University and author of Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers and God’s Final Victory: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism, as well as numerous journal articles.