In their book God’s Final Victory, philosophers John Kronen and Eric Reitan present an argument for universal salvation based on the efficacious grace of God. They lay it out in five steps:
- It is always possible for God to extend to the unregenerate efficacious grace; that is, a form of grace sufficient by itself to guarantee their salvation (i.e. sufficient to bring about all that is necessary for salvation, including relevant subjective acts such as sincere repentance and conversion).
- Making use of efficacious grace to save the unregenerate is morally permissible for God, at least when the recipient would not otherwise have been saved.
- It is therefore possible and permissible for God to save all through the exercise of efficacious grace (1, 2).
- If God has a morally permissible means of saving all, then God will save all.
- Therefore, God will save all (3, 4).1
Premise One: Efficacious Grace
I have not often explicitly availed myself of the Western notion of efficacious grace in my arguments on universal salvation, though it has made its appearance under different guises in articles on David Bentley Hart and Sergius Bulgakov.2 Hart speaks of humanity as having been created with an innate desire for and attraction to the Good:
No one can freely will the evil as evil; one can take the evil for the good, but that does not alter the prior transcendental orientation that wakens all desire. To see the good truly is to desire it insatiably; not to desire it is not to have known it, and so never to have been free to choose it.3
Given humanity’s ineradicable engraced orientation to the Good, all God need do is remove the ignorance and disordered passions that inhibit sinful human beings from apprehending the Good and thus embracing the happiness to which they are destined in Jesus Christ. “To see the good truly is to desire it insatiably.”
Bulgakov speaks of humanity as having been created in the image of Jesus Christ. When Christ reveals himself to us at the Last Judgment, we will see ourselves within the proto-image and know who we are, who we are intended to become and be. In Christ and through Christ we will apprehend the fundamental truth of our existence:
This proto-image is Christ. Every human being sees himself in Christ and measures the extent of his difference from this proto-image. A human being cannot fail to love the Christ who is revealed in him, and he cannot fail to love himself revealed in Christ. The two things are the same. Such is human ontology. Love is the Holy Spirit, who sets the heart afire with this love. But this love, this blazing up of the Spirit, is also the judgment of the individual upon himself, his vision of himself outside himself, in conflict with himself, that is, outside Christ and far from Christ. And the measure and knowledge of this separation are determined by Love, that is, by the Holy Spirit. The same fire, the same love gladdens and burns, torments and gives joy. The judgment of love is the most terrible judgment, more terrible than that of justice and wrath, than that of the law, for it includes all this but also transcends it. . . . It is impossible to appear before Christ and to see Him without loving him.4
The divine judgment effects irresistible conversion because because it confronts us with our true selves in Jesus Christ: irresistible because it declares the truth we already know in the depth of conscience; irresistible because it presents the good and happiness we have always desired; irresistible because it pours out upon us the ravishing love for which we have long sought.
For both Hart and Bulgakov, efficacious grace is grounded in humanity’s created being. God acts in such a compelling revelatory way as to make it possible for humanity to see God as their true end, happiness, and glory. Grace is not an divine act extrinsic to their created nature but its healing and liberation. Theologians will immediately note the Eastern Christian commitments of Hart and Bulgakov. Both eschew a hard distinction between nature and supernature. Grace is not a donum superadditum. Human nature is engraced from the beginning in its natural orientation to the Holy Trinity, which continues after the Fall. Grace is the Holy Spirit acting to restore human beings to their true humanity in the Incarnate Son.
Which brings us back to Kronen and Reitan. They define efficacious grace as follows:
“Efficacious grace”—grace that is sufficient by itself to save sinners, because it transforms their characters so that they fully repent of all past sins and embrace God without reservation.5
“Efficacious grace” refers traditionally to that species of grace sufficient by itself to fully convert creatures, such that all who receive it are saved.6
According to the Thomists and their Protestant followers, when God grants efficacious grace, He guarantees conversion and regeneration by putting creatures in a state that influences their motives such that they have every reason to respond favourably to the offer of salvation and no reason not to.7
By these definitions Hart and Bulgakov may be understood as advocates of efficacious grace.
In their elaboration of divine grace, Kronen and Reitan identify two propositions that ground their argument from efficacious grace:
- Every rational creature is naturally ordered to the good.
- God is the perfect good.8
This means that every person not only seeks to attain that which is good for them but they seek seek union with the God who is their objective, supreme, and ultimate good. As a result, every rational creature is “naturally disposed to imitate God insofar as its nature allows.”9 This entails the conclusion that rational creatures are necessitated to love the good, under the right conditions:
For Aquinas, just as the intellect is ordered to truth, so the will is ordered to goodness. Hence, just as the intellect cannot fail to believe a self-evident truth if it is presented to it, so the will cannot fail to love the the perfect good if that good is presented to it. This good, however, is God, and so only God, if clearly perceived, necessitates the will to love [ST pt. 1, q. 82, a. 2].10
Two questions immediately arise:
- Why do rational beings turn away from God if he is their good?
- If efficacious grace infallibly grants conversion to God, how does it not compromise human freedom?
In answer to both questions, the authors turn to Thomas Talbott and his presentation of rational freedom, which they believe is very close to Aquinas’ own understanding. “Like Aquinas,” they write, “Talbott insists that one cannot imagine anyone freely choosing what they have no motive to choose and every motive not to choose. Such a choice, for Talbott, is incoherent. If one is in a condition such that all one’s motives converge on one choice, Talbott thinks this choice becomes inevitable.”11 Such an inevitable choice may be considered a free choice under certain conditions: (1) the absence of ignorance and deception and (2) the absence of controlling affective states that determine the person’s actions. The authors offer this provocative illustration:
Suppose Jenny grows up in a dystopian future where children are fed an addictive drug from infancy. They are taught (falsely) to believe that the drug is a medicine they need to stay healthy, while in fact the tyrannical regime uses it to control the people. Given her addiction and beliefs, Jenny’s motives converge on the choice to continue taking the drug; but insofar as this choice is governed by deception and addiction, it is not free in Talbott’s sense.
However, suppose a resistance group reveals to Jenny the truth. She now knows the drug is harmful but remains addicted. Hence, she has reason-based motives to stop taking the drug, but these are impotent due to her addiction. Now suppose the resistance gives her a counter-drug that weakens but does not stop her cravings. Whenever she is near the drug she faces an inner struggle. Sometimes, with the right support (and some luck), she resists her craving; but usually she falls prey to it, weeping in shame at her weakness. At this point we might say that she has some measure of freedom—but it remains constrained by the hold the drug continues to exert on her.
However, imagine that the resistance finds a way to break her addiction. Now she neither craves the drug nor thinks taking it is a good idea. Let us suppose, furthermore, that she has no other motive to continue taking it but many reasons not to: concern for her health and continued sobriety, gratitude to her liberators, a desire to oppose the unjust regime, and so forth. Suppose, in short, that once freed of her addiction, all her motives converge on the choice not to take the drug. Would we not say that now, at last, her choice is truly free—even if, as Talbott and Aquinas believe, her rejecting the drug is now inevitable?12
Kronen and Reitan note that the above illustration demonstrates the inadequacy of both libertarian and compatibilist explanations of freedom. Prior to Jenny’s liberation from her addiction, her choice to take the drug qualifies as a free choice according to a compatibilist understanding of freedom (Jenny chooses according to her preferences and desires), but does not qualify as free according to Talbott. After her liberation, Jenny’s choice to refuse the drug qualifies as free according to Talbott, but not according to a libertarian understanding of freedom (Jenny cannot rationally choose otherwise). What makes the difference? In the former, reason is unable to exercise its right function; in the latter, reason is “no longer impeded from playing the role it ought to play in decision making.”13
Underlying Talbott’s construal of rational freedom are four presuppositions:
- values are objective, such that there are objectively good or best choices and objectively bad ones;
- the rational faculty makes judgments in accord with its finite grasp of this objective order of values;
- the will can be controlled by non-rational forces (such as addictions or entrenched habits);
- the will is naturally ordered to choose in accord with rational judgments such that it inevitably does so in the absence of any non-rational controlling factors.14
The will, in other words, is naturally ordered to follow reason—its default setting, as Kronen and Reitan put it—and reason is naturally ordered to identify the objective good. When all is working rightly—there are no contrary affective states to disrupt the reasoning and willing process—our actions may be appropriately judged as free.
By rough analogy, the actions of the resistance to liberate Jenny from her false beliefs and addiction may be thought of as an expression of efficacious grace. “If efficacious grace is a divine act producing uniformly salvation-favouring motives,” then not only does it not contravene freedom but establishes it.15 “Efficacious grace in this sense, rather than interfering with rational freedom, appears to be its culmination.”16
But is it possible for God to effectively remove the destructive affective states that inhibit freedom without violating personal autonomy? Given the divine omnipotence, surely we must think so. After all, this is his world which he has created, and is creating, from out of nothing. There are no apparent metaphysical reasons why he could not directly heal the disordered desires of human beings by the bestowal of grace. Nor is God a finite agent who needs to violently invade his creatures in order to effect change within them. The Creator/creature relationship is too intimate for that kind of coercive intervention. The real question is not whether
God can bring about uniformly salvation-favouring motives in the unregenerate, but whether He can do so in a way that promotes rather than impedes rational freedom. In fact, we think an omnipotent being could do both, such that it is within God’s power to bestow efficacious grace without violating freedom—at least if ‘freedom’ is understood in this Thomistic sense.17
Kronen and Reitan propose two ways in which the omnipotent God might accomplish the transformation of sinners.
First, God might present himself in an immediate, unclouded experience of himself:
For rational creatures, this ordering to the good and to God takes a special form. Rational creatures, by definition, can choose based on reasons—that is, they are motivated to act not merely by instinct or appetite, but by the recognition that certain apprehended truths (reasons) entail that a course of action is good to do. Saying that rational creatures are ordered to the good means two things: first, when they directly and clearly encounter the perfect good in unclouded experience, they will recognize it as the perfect good; and second, the perfect good (which, by definition, is the standard according to which all other goods are measured) would, under conditions of immediate and unclouded apprehension, present itself as overridingly worthy of love. Creatures’ subjective values will thus spontaneously fall into harmony with the objective good, with all choices reflecting this proper valuation.
Put another way, immediate awareness of the perfect good will so sing to the natural inclinations of the soul that love for the good will swamp all potentially contrary affective states. One would have every reason to conform one’s will to the perfect good and no reason not to. This latter point gains further strength from the Christian notion that what is prudentially good for rational creatures (what promotes their welfare) does not ultimately conflict with what is morally good—both are realized through union with God. Unclouded apprehension of the perfect good will thus harmonize prudential and moral motives such that every rational creature presented with a clear vision of God would have every reason to love God and no reason to reject Him.18
Second, God might bestow on the unregenerate the gift of wisdom to enable them to choose truly:
Aquinas believed that God could grant efficacious grace to rational creatures, even without bestowing a clear vision of Himself, by first granting a person the ‘gift of wisdom and council [such] that his reason should in no way err regarding [either) the end [God] or the means [to the end) in particular.’19
With Aristotle, Thomas understood that disordered passions often prevent a person from doing what reason dictates they should do. God, however, can counteract a person’s disordered desires by “1) granting ‘infused virtues’ so that ‘his will is more firmly inclined to God’, and 2) divinely inspiring his ‘mind to resist sin’ whenever an ‘occasion for it presents itself’.”20 Thomas, however, acknowledges that sinlessness may not be achievable for human beings in this life, though he notes the exception of the Blessed Virgin, was so confirmed in grace that she was made capable of living in unblemished communion with God. Thankfully, sinlessness in this life is not a condition for eternal salvation. Efficacious grace only guarantees glory—but what an awesome only.
One way or another, the omnipotent and gracious Savior will deliver us from our sin, ignorance, delusion, and interior bondage. In the words of Martin Luther: “When God works in us, the will is changed under the sweet influence of the Spirit of God. Once more it desires and acts, not of compulsion, but of its own desire and spontaneous inclination.”21
By our Lord’s gift of grace, the prophecy of Ezekiel will be made actual in the depths of every sinner:
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. (Ezek 36:26-27)
The bestowal of efficacious grace is but the realization and fulfillment of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in humanity..
Footnotes
[1] John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God’s Final Judgment: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism (2011), p. 131.
[2] For Hart, see “Doomed to Happiness“; for Bulgakov, see “Irresistible Grace: Is Bulgakov and Augustinian?,” “Irresistible Grace: Our Secret Hope?,” and “The Irresistible Truth of Final Judgment.”
[3] David Bentley Hart, “God, Creation, and Evil,” The Hidden and the Manifest (2017), p. 345.
[4] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, pp. 457-459.
[5] Kronen and Reitan, pp. 4-5.
[6] Ibid., p. 128.
[7] Ibid., p. 132. This formulation is unusual. I do not recall a Thomist ever putting the matter quite like this, and I don’t imagine that Banezian Thomists will be satisfied with the “failure” to ground efficacious grace in physical premotion causality. But the emphasis on rational decision-making is crucial to the K&R thesis. The point is that God directly brings about the condition of rational clarity, thus leading to the inevitable embrace of God.
On efficacious grace in the Roman Catholic tradition, see the entries in the online Catholic Encyclopedia: “Actual Grace,” “Controversies on Grace.” For a vigorous Catholic defense of efficacious grace, see Reginald Garrigou Lagrange, Grace (1952), chaps. 6 and 7. For an equally vigorous defense from a classic Reformed perspective, see Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 15th topic.
[8] Ibid., p. 135. On God as the natural end of human beings, see pp. 68-80. The following proposition is an integral plank in K&R’s Argument from Complacent Love: “Every rational creature is naturally ordered towards union with God.” Ibid., p. 72. The authors explicitly reject the Catholic construal of natura pura. “Rational creatures are naturally ordered to union with God,” the authors explain,” because that is the only thing which, given what they are, will complete them and enable them to flourish.” Ibid., p. 78.
[9] Ibid., p. 136.
[10] Ibid., p. 212, n. 9.
[11] Ibid., p. 133.
[12] Ibid., p. 134.
[13] Ibid. “Specifically, the Thomistic view is that what we call libertarian freedom is a coherent understanding of freedom only when the creature confronts conflicting motives for action. It does not extend to circumstances in which the creature has every reason to pursue a course of action and no reason not to. Under such circumstances the Thomistic view is that the will of the creature is not merely inclined but is determined to perform the act. The act remains wholly voluntary, but since there is no possible world in which an agent who has every motive to do A and no motive not to do so nevertheless refrains from doing A, the action is also determined, and so conforms to what is usually labelled ‘compatibilist freedom’ by contemporary philosophcrs.” Ibid., p. 132.
[14] Ibid., p. 135.
[15] Ibid., p. 135.
[16] Ibid., p. 136.
[17] Ibid., p. 135. I will return to the autonomy objection in Part Two.
[18] Ibid., p. 136.
[19] Ibid., p. 136. The quoted clause from Aquinas is from De Veritate q. 24 a. 9.
[20] Ibid., p. 137. Aquinas: “By the grace proper to this life, however, a man can be so attached to good that he cannot sin except with great difficulty because his lower powers are held in check by the infused virtues, his will is more firmly inclined to God, and his reason is made perfect in the contemplation of the divine truth with a continuousness that comes from the fervor of love and withdraws the man from sin.” De Veritate q. 24 a. 9.
[21] Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. and ed. J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston (1957), p. 103
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Does this article have implications for Jesus’ choice in the garden? It seems like the article implies that Jesus’ choice to endure the cross is inevitable (and thus ‘free’ in the terms of this article). Yet the NT seems to praise Jesus for his choice and Paul’s ‘therefore’ in Philippians 2, (i.e., obedience as the basis for exaltation; or exaltation as the reward for obedience), seems hollow and much less laudable if the choice is inevitable.
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I imagine part of the response to this kind of question will draw on more general objections to the divine goodness, i.e. is God hollow and less laudable because he is ‘necessarily’ (and therefore ‘inevitably’ good?
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Premise 4 is false.
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You admitted in an exchange that God could introduce a factor prior to and sufficient for salvation, e.g. contingent universalism and the Virgin Mary. The hard universalist says God would do that in all possible worlds, given that a loving God would not allow eternal torment.
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Fr Rooney, you must know that you are obliged to affirm that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”. Yet you claim that “if God has a morally permissible means of saving all” it still wouldn’t follow that God would save all.
The only defence of this position which I have seen you offer is that it is possible there may be some ‘greater good’ that outweighs even the good of being saved and the evil of eternal damnation. I wonder what that might be? I suppose the most likely candidate suggested for this would normally be ‘free will – but we know it can’t be this given you’ve explicitly said you think God could predestine all to salvation without violating creaturely freedom.
In any case – as has been put to you many times without response – it is unclear how any ‘higher good’ could avoid violating a person’s dignity by treating them as a means not an end. After all, there is no higher good *for the individual person* than fulfilling “their vocation to divine beatitude” (CCC 1700)
But if God lets us fail to achieve our personal vocation and highest good in order to attain some abstract ‘still higher good’, this would mean God would be treating us as a means, not an end. This is impermissible – remember that “the inversion of means and ends…. or in viewing persons as mere means to that end, engenders unjust structures” (CCC 1887).
So it is seems to me that your position commits you to saying either “the divine beatitude is not really man’s vocation and it is not really man’s highest good” or “it is morally permissible to treat human beings as ends not means”. Both of these are impermissible, which is just one reason why I think your position is clearly false.
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The last paragraph should read *as means not ends*
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God’s desire to save all is not proof of premise 4. I would point to the distinction drawn by Damascene. Roughly, we can draw the distinction this way: it is not true that God has a desire to ensure that all are saved, even though God has a desire that all should be saved, if they do not place an obstacle. Nevertheless, the latter desire (God’s antecedent will) is clearly compatible with the possibility that some should place an obstacle and fail to be saved.
So, no defender of the orthodox position will concede that 2 Tim. is just a statement of the truth of premise 4. And I think we also have a positive case for rejecting such interpretations: because they conflict (as hard universalism does generally) with Christian dogma. While I won’t defend it here, my fuller case against premise 4 would rely primarily on the falsity of Pelagianism. Nothing about us or what we do merits that God should elevate us to His life or, similarly, that God should ensure all are saved. If nobody deserves grace, however, then God failing to restore you to grace after sin is not something for which God could be culpable or blameworthy. If God is not blameworthy for allowing a creature to persist in sin, God is not blameworthy for allowing hell, which is just the state of some persisting in sin forever.
Similarly, if God were not to prevent sins or restore any individual to sanctifying grace after losing grace by a mortal sin, God does not become responsible for or blameworthy for those sins, merely on account of permitting those sins. Assuming individuals are responsible for the occurrence of sin, and (as Christian doctrine has always taught) God is in no way the cause of sin, then God not intervening to prevent that sin does not entail that He is somehow less than perfectly good or loving. God is then not less than perfectly good or loving for allowing hell, which is just the state of some persisting in sin forever. Only if God causes sins would there be such implications for His character. But that He is not the cause of sin is Christian doctrine.
[An appeal to greater goods comes in the explanation of why God might have good reasons to permit moral evil. The goods achieved by committing moral evil are not, according to classical free will defenses, instrumentally connected with those evils. God does not achieve the greater goods by means of the evils. So, your criticism of such defenses misfires.]
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On the random Pelagianism charge, I hope it’s worth reminding you that
universalism does not assert that humans are unfallen, free from original sin, or otherwise capable of freeing themselves of sin or achieving perfection on their own. It just asserts that God creates humans with the capacity to be perfected, and that God can bring it about that all humans freely fulfil that capacity. End of.
I’m curious as to why practically all of your post is focused on trying to show that God is not the cause / responsible for / blameworthy of sin. I did not use this language or employ these concepts – in fact I carefully used the language of ‘permission’ and ‘letting’ throughout.
Likewise I didn’t argue (or in any way touch on the issue) that your position meant the greater good would be ‘achieved by means of the evils’.
My argument simply focused on the fact that man’s ‘highest good’ is beatitude, and that the Good could not allow the possibility of our highest good not being achieved – even for the same of some abstract ‘greater good’ – without failing to treat us as ends.
After all, the only justification for claiming God could choose to allow man to fail to attain beatitude are either:
1) the ‘exercise of free will’ is actually man’s highest good (not beatitude); or
2A) the ‘exercise of free will’ – while not man’s highest good (which is beatitude) – is itself the ‘greater good’ favoured by God; or
2B) the ‘exercise of free will’ – while not man’s highest good (which is beatitude) – is itself essential to allow the existence of some separate ‘greater good’ favoured by God.
But 1 denies that man’s highest good is union with God, which is false.
And both 2A and 2B mean that God is willing to allow the possibility that man’s highest good is not achieved *in order* to enable God’s ‘even greater good’ to be achieved. But that is to treat man as a means, not an end. Whether or not the good is strictly achieved ‘instrumentally’ by a specific evil or not is totally irrelevant. The point is merely that a loving father does not prioritise anything over the highest good of his children.
Father, if you had children, and had the option to either predestine them to eternal happiness, or instead to ‘allow them’ to damn themselves for the sake of some higher good, would you be a loving father? And would the fact that your children chose to harm themselves in this way – that it was ‘their fault’ – get you off the hook?
Would you let your family damn themselves – i.e. grant them the possibility of damning themselves – in order to achieve some greater good, even though you knew that you could predestine them to freely choose eternal happiness and thereby reach the fulfilment of their own personal highest good? If not, why think the Good itself would do it?
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“Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive, officiously, to keep alive…”
Your argument relies on God lacking any morality in the Christian sense.
As you have been told many, many times before, universalism is true if, and only if, God is good, and “good” in the sense of “good” as revealed in Jesus Christ. If you do not accept the premise that God is good in this sense, then, of course, you must deny universal salvation, but please don’t pretend this is “Christian orthodoxy”, or even Christian.
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The hard universalist would say that God would prevent all from placing an obstacle given His desire to save all and that this is compatible with libertarian free will. If God determining/ensuring one’s salvation doesn’t violate free will in one possible world, then why would it violate free will in any non-zero number of possible worlds, including all of them?
“Assuming individuals are responsible for the occurrence of sin” Only to a degree, for the hard universalist. For him, no one is completely culpable given that they didn’t choose to have an indeterministic will that does A over B unpredictably.
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Thanks for this. I found you and Hart much easier to follow than Kronen & Reitan
and most appreciate your post “Doomed, Doomed . . . Doomed to Happiness” 23 May 2022.
I’m grateful for Eclectic Orthodoxy!
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Well, I’m guessing that I’m way out on the edge of the majority of universalists on this, for I am not a believer in efficacious grace (i.e., ‘grace that is sufficient by itself to save sinners, because it transforms their characters so that they fully repent of all past sins and embrace God without reservation’). I categorically deny that this is even a possible mode of God’s uniting us to himself.
I don’t have issues with the Conclusion (that ‘all shall be saved’) or with Premise 4 (‘If God has a morally permissible means of saving all, then God will save all’). But P4 is ambiguous with respect to efficacious grace. P4 could be true and efficacious grace be false. But since I reject efficacious grace as such, I reject P1-3. This whole line of argumentation for universalism doesn’t work for me.
That said, Fr Rooney’s associating universalism with Pelagianism is confused. No hard universalist thinks (nor need he/she think) that God saves anyone ‘because they deserve it’. It also does not follow from our ‘not deserving to be saved’ that God would not be evil for failing to save us: (https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2023/02/22/the-god-of-the-possible/). We do not deserve the infinite and unconditional love of God, but God remains such unconditional love nonetheless. And were God not to save anyone, his being evil would not derive from failing to give any the good they deserve, but from failing to be the Good they do not deserve.
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Silly, silly, Tom. You know just as well as I do that the large majority of universalists do NOT believe in efficacious grace. Heck, most haven’t even heard of the term. And that’s why Kronen & Reitan followed up their chapter on efficacious grace with another chapter on universal salvation and libertarian freedom. 😜😁😉
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I’m inclined to disagree.
I know of perhaps 1 other universalist who holds to a (qualified, not absolute) libertarian mode of deliberative agency throughout. All other universalists I know personally (including yourself), whatever their views of choice in this life may be, retreat to efficacious grace (by whatever name) as the manner in which God finally secures the consent of the damned.
I knew Kronen & Reitan had that chapter on libertarian choice, but I read that as offering libertarians a way to embrace universalism (a good thing too), not as expressing their personal view. I haven’t counted heads, but my guess is the majority of universalists do hold that in the end, God’s revelation floods the mind with light sufficient to make rational deliberation regarding God impossible (i.e., efficacious grace).
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I’m not 100% sure what “efficacious grace” consists of: is it somehow changing people as it were from the inside so that they are directly transformed to be susceptible to God, or is it simply placing people in such circumstances and showing them sufficient of God’s nature that they are transformed through such external influence? (or both?, or neither?)
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By whatever means (external or internal), as explained in the blogpost, it is ‘grace that is sufficient by itself to save sinners, because it transforms their characters so that they fully repent of all past sins and embrace God without reservation’. And in the first (I think, but maybe both) of his recent guest posts here responding to Fr Rooney, he describes it in terms of God flooding (my term) the consciousness with light that removes all grounds for rational deliberation re: God. One becomes incapable of saying ‘No’ to God, for the epistemic distance required to such a move (distance that defines our existence presently) is removed. God becomes the only option.
I don’t disagree that we are intended for a union with God that finally forecloses upon all possibility of turning from him. My issue is that I think we must choose (deliberatively) our way into that finally resolved state of rest. It’s not an ‘end’ God can secure “by itself” by simply “transforming our characters so that…” we then make only certain choices.
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Sorry, I left Eric Reitan’s name out: And in the first (I think, but maybe both) of his recent guest posts here responding to Fr Rooney, he describes…” The “he” there is Eric.
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“for such a move” not “to such a move.” Ugh.
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Tom: “My issue is that I think we must choose (deliberatively) our way into that finally resolved state of rest.”
Whatever your position is, it can’t be hard universalism. No matter how unlikely, it is metaphysically possible for a coin (if coin tosses were truly random) to land tails every time or for an agent to choose B over A every time. The hard universalist would find your position just as evil as infernalism, for it entails the possibility of eternal suffering. If you don’t claim to be a hard universalist, then fine.
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It is only possible for a coin to land tails “every time” for any given number of coin tosses. The number of coin tosses are exactly the number of tosses it takes until the coin turns heads. Until the coin turns up heads, you simply haven’t finished tossing it. All are saved in the end simply because, until all are saved, it is not the end.
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Whatever actually works is by definition “efficacious” if it persuades someone out if their wrongheadedness, and because God does it it is “grace”. On the other hand just overwhelming someone’s personality and reason so that they are incapable of rational deliberation so that they in some sense cease resisting (if this is what is meant) is either not “efficacious” or not a “grace”: either their original, wrongheaded personality restores itself when the overwhelming ecstatic vision is passed, so it is not efficacious, or they never regain their senses and stay in a state of constant but mindless bliss, which is less a “grace” than a form of horrific spiritual lobotomy.
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Iianlovejoy, the hard universalist may not share the intuition that libertarian free will requires indeterminacy for all choices. I will say, however, that anyone who does have such an intuition has no right to claim that their position is hard universalism nor do they have a right to claim infernalism is evil. The consistent hard universalist would not use an infinite opportunity argument for the reason I outlined above (in reply to Tom).
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Tom: “We do not deserve the infinite and unconditional love of God…”
We do not deserve this love and care by anything we do or could possibly do—i.e., any self-willed act. This includes any act of faith or belief.*
On the other hand, we are intentionally brought into existence by no choice of our own. In that sense, we do deserve the love and care of that which brought us into existence.
*It would seem that it is the non-universalist, with their ultimate bifurcation of humans and their destiny, that upholds the notion that human beings are deserving—or rather, can be deserving—of God’s infinite and unconditional love. The premise of limited salvation, granting God’s egalitarian stance toward all beings, necessitates that the deciding factor for salvation or damnation rests with the individual. It is the act of the individual human will that transforms salvation from mere potential to actualization. Thus, salvation is universal in potential only. It is incumbent upon the individual to finish the task, self-transforming so as to receive. This self-willing, since it is what distinguishes the saved from the lost, is what renders one as deserving of the full disclosure of God’s love.
So yes, according to the non-universalist, a person can be deserving of salvation and moreover, it is they that must make themself deserving. Why else would only a portion of humanity be saved?
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Joe,
Not sure I’m following ya, but I can’t seem to see my way through to agreeing that we ever, in any sense, ‘deserve’ God’s love. I don’t know how to get ‘deserve’ to mean that. Even brought into being ex nihilo doesn’t seem to imply we ‘deserve’ God’s love and care.
If we want to posit the absolute and unfailing appropriateness of God’s loving and pursuing us, God’s character gets that done, from whatever vantage one views things. There’s no creaturely deservedness that obtains simply because we come to be ex nihilo. At least I can’t see it. But I’m often mistaken.
I’m rather hard-headed about this though. Maybe just the journey I’ve been on the past few years, but the gratuity of creation, its inherent poverty, the emptiness and nothingness of the Void we have to navigate – all that pretty much leaves us (I think) ‘empty-handed’ before God. I don’t see how (or more importantly, Why) one needs to deposit some ‘deservedness’ on the created side of things. As long as one insists one ‘deserves’ God’s love in this or that ‘sense’, one isn’t confronting the Void.
Sorry if I’ve misunderstood ya.
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Tom: “ There’s no creaturely deservedness that obtains simply because we come to be ex nihilo.”
We don’t just come to be…we have been brought to be.
Are we children of God?
If we take the analogy of the parent and the child—the preferred Christian analogy— I would hold that a child does indeed deserve to be loved and cared for by their parents, simply by virtue of being born.
I don’t think it is wrongheaded to presume so manner of divine responsibility toward creation. Universalists have recognized that were God to freely create with the foreknowledge that some would be lost, that such a decision to create would be immoral and catastrophic. Doesn’t this recognition assume divine responsibility toward created beings?
So, maybe “deserving” (on the part of humanity) ins’t the right concept, but rather “responsibility” (on the part of God).
But of course, analogies only take us so far and this discussion, as God-talk almost always does, becomes invariably mired in anthropomorphism.
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Yeah, I think we may both be standing in that mysterious middle-ground where we ‘say’ and ‘unsay’ things. For sure there’s agreement. I totally agree we’re have been brought into being out of nothing. I’m just not sure ‘deserve’ really captures the sense in which we relate to God (in his comprehension of us). ‘Deserve’ seems to me to imply an obligation on the other to love, etc. I think ‘responsibility’ also fails to capture the sense in which God’s loving pursuit of us is unfailing, though I agree we are absolutely justified in expecting that God will love and seek us out.
I apologize if I’m being difficult.
I think some of this has to do with the question of our ‘value’ (to or before God and others). If we ‘possess’ value inherently, by virtue of existing at all, in the sense that God’s love of us is a ‘response to’ this value, motivated ‘by’ it (the way it is in/for us), for which response God is ‘responsible’ (as we are), then I’ll find myself disagreeing, in spite of how common it is to say we possess inherent, even infinite, value. I think there’s something missing here.
True, others have a claim upon us, and we can have a responsibility or obligation to love others, but I definitely don’t think this means God is (via analogy) similarly obligated to love us (the way parents are obligated to love children who ‘deserve’ their love). I say this because I don’t think anything created possess its own value, inherent in it, by which I mean a value extrinsic to God’s value and which God sees in us and pursues (the way parents see and respond to the value of their children). This is because God is the supreme value, and (if you ask me) all value within the created order is simply God present in it, i.e., God’s value, in it. This is why we can (Col 3) intend ‘all we do as unto the Lord and *not* unto men’, and why our feeding the poor is feeding Christ, and our failing to visit the imprisoned is failing to visit Christ. There’s an asymmetrical priority in the God-World relation that’s dissimilar to how we relate to one another. So for me, God is the *only* value to speak of, and the value we perceive in others is our perceiving him. Indeed, I’m tempted to say ‘value’ (or ‘aesthetic value’) is a Transcendental, a name for God.
This may obligate us (in the proper order of things) to love God and others, but I don’t see how the inverse is also true, i.e., that God has a responsibility to love us, or that we ‘deserve’ it. I think not. I think at some point we recognize God is off this map – he ‘is’ infinite love, and not because he has a responsibility to ‘be’ so. Well, once we say this, how do we introduce ‘responsibility’ (or ‘deservedness’) as a reason or ground or motivation that qualifies God’s loving us? God’s loving us is simply God’s being God to/in/for us. And certainly God has no responsibility to ‘be himself’ – in any sense.
But of course none of this means we God is free to not love us or to cease pursuing our highest good in him.
I did just finish a long walk outside in the sun and might be a bit sun stroke!
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Counter-Rebel: Whatever your position is, it can’t be hard universalism. No matter how unlikely, it is metaphysically possible for a coin (if coin tosses were truly random) to land tails every time or for an agent to choose B over A every time. The hard universalist would find your position just as evil as infernalism, for it entails the possibility of eternal suffering. If you don’t claim to be a hard universalist, then fine.
Tom: On the contrary, CR. Two things:
1) Libertarian choice (properly understood – i.e., as transcendentally grounded in and oriented toward the Good, something no libertarian need deny: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/at-liberty-to-become-free/) is not a random, unmotivated act on par with a coin toss. If we must discuss percentages of likelihood, a choice is libertarian just in case outcomes are greater than 0 and less than 1, which means a outcome can be extremely likely. We are not talking coin tosses. A libertarian only argues that one is, let us say, the final arbiter in the transition from possibility to actuality. It doesn’t mean there are no conditions that circumscribe choice or incline the will toward its proper/final end. We remain transcendentally oriented toward the Good. I’m not suggesting hell (as redemptive) is just a 50/50 toss. I have no doubt (because we know it now to be true without it determining choice as such) that suffering the just consequences of choice can and does educate people, break dysfunctional orientations, and create new possibilities of choice. But one ‘chooses’ one’s way along this path, affirming and ’embracing’ what the consequences ‘mean’, the ‘truth’ they tell. And where there are defects of nature or will, obviously love needn’t leave all those in place. God can certainly efficaciously restore us to our ‘right’ minds, even if that restored state maintains a certain ‘epistemic distance’ so that the necessary self-determining act of surrender can be made. That ‘distance’ is not insanity.
2) It is also false that my position “entails the possibility of eternal suffering.” It precludes such a possibility, for 2 reasons: a) the will as such can never (eternally) foreclose upon itself all possibility of turning to God, and b) strictly speaking, there is no way one can ever succeed in ‘having eternally repeated’ one’s rejection of God. Eternity is always before us. There’s no traversing it, and hence no “possibility of suffering eternally.” What *is* true is that ‘foreclosure’ is impossible, and there is no possible final rest for the mind and will but God. This is as ‘hard’ as it gets, and coin tosses do nothing to soften it. In the end, persons are irreducible to tosses and machinations. God’ll get it done. Nobody is going anywhere and nobody can foreclose upon themselves. But there is no terminus ad quem, no ‘line in the sand’ beyond which God efficaciously closes the deal. But there is also no ‘point of no return’ beyond which the future is foreclosed upon. So, my universalism is as ‘hard’ as God’s love is unconditional. I have no worries whatsoever.
———————
Iain,
It may be that ‘whatever actually works’ is by definition ‘efficacious’. But it may also be that what actually works is a combination of several necessary but not individually sufficient explanations. I do not think God acts in the world as ‘just another finite agency’, but I do think our deliberative agency is God-given (not ‘as such’ an effect of the fall, however trapped our wills may presently be), and I assume God granted such (risky) agency precisely because it is one of the terms in which finite, created persons must make the trek from origin to end in fully personal existence in God.
As for how some universalists imagine God to infallibly secure the will’s assent, I can (but don’t wish to here) provide the descriptions I have of such accounts. They all basically reduce to God’s removing all epistemic distance such that the mind has no possibility of deliberative choice in the matter (for deliberation is not possible apart from relevant epistemic distance). This is not a cruelty of design. On the contrary, it is (I argue) the grace by which finitude participates willingly in its own final creation as ‘person’. God is its only final end, of course. ‘Eternal suffering’ is impossible to secure (or even to imagine).
Cheers!
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There’s a difference between having no rational alternative available to us because we understand all other choices to be irrational, so that the very fact that we retain the capacity for deliberative thought is what leaves no other choice to make, and the kind of overwhelming experience that prevents us from applying our minds to what is or is not a good idea at all. If the latter is “effacious grace” I want nothing to do with it.
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Tom,
I didn’t say libertarian free choices are random–‘random’ meaning indeterminism without reasons. I drew the parallel with coins because randomness and libertarian freedom are both indeterministic. We could use a very loaded die instead of a coin. No matter how unlikely, the loaded die could land on an unwanted side everytime just as an agent could choose B over A everytime.
If your intuition is correct that libertarian freedom always requires indeterminism, then you can’t call yourself a hard universalist. End of story. The best you can get is soft universalism, which the consistent hard universalist (if they think unending suffering is evil) would think is just as evil as infernalism. Wes is right.
“It is also false that my position “entails the possibility of eternal suffering.” I think everyone can understand that on both soft universalism and infernalism, there is the possibility of suffering-not-ending, regardless of how you label it, and that, for a hard universalist, both positions could be seen as evil? “So what if a person could always get out of it,” says the hard universalist, “the actual suffering could go on forever, and it’s evil to allow unending suffering. That was the problem with infernalism in the first place.”
“God’ll get it done.” The hard universalist can say that. You can’t.
“They all basically reduce to God’s removing all epistemic distance such that the mind has no possibility of deliberative choice in the matter (for deliberation is not possible apart from relevant epistemic distance).”
This begs the question against the hard universalist who affirms a view of libertarian freedom in which only a non-zero number of choices (acts of will) need to be indeterministic but not all of them. I’ve quoted W. Matthews Grant and Gregory of Nyssa before on this, so I’ll refrain from doing that unless asked. Epistemic distance, on the hard universalist view, is shortened by both the good and evil paths, though the latter takes longer and/or is more painful.
You may have the intuition that all choices have to be indeterministic, but then you can’t be a hard universalist, which is fine.
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CR: I drew the parallel with coins because randomness and libertarian freedom are both indeterministic. We could use a very loaded die instead of a coin.
Tom: They are not indeterministic in the same way, not the same ‘kind’ of indeterminism.
Wanna say more, but gotta run! Later, but not infinitely later.
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I agree, but it doesn’t contravene anything I said.
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If a deliberative/libertarian act of trust is not a species of coin toss, i.e., not materially indeterminate event, then how does that not contravene your claim that that (on my view) deliberative acts are comparable to coin tosses?
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Tom, a couple things:
1. You object to our “deserving” God’s infinite and unconditional love. But if God chooses to create us with a particular nature and needs (which involve that very love), none of which we played any role in, does it not follow that we deserve to have those needs fulfilled? And if God is the only one who can ultimately fulfill them, does it not follow that there is a certain self-imposed requirement on him to fulfill them? This seems to me the sort of argument that George MacDonald makes.
2. I’m not sure that your response to Counter-Rebel is sufficient. That is, I don’t think it follows from a) the impossibility of the will foreclosing upon itself all possibility of turning to God, and b) the impossibility of ever traversing an actual infinity of suffering, that the possibility of eternal suffering is precluded, at least in the normal sense of some people never being united to God. Even if the will can’t foreclose upon itself, it will still be possible to continue in rebellion. And just because someone can’t traverse an actual infinity or eternity of suffering, it could still be the case that there is never a point at which their suffering ends.
If I’ve misunderstood you, please let me know.
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Hi Wes!
Your 2nd point first. I think the impossibility of foreclosure + the impossibility of traversing the infinite future are precisely what makes it impossible for anyone to “suffer eternally in hell.” It’s always possible that the suffering end and, given the circumstances, immeasurably likely, even if always, of necessity, a ‘deliberative’ act of ‘trust’. To choose God is not to have a switch flipped inside us. It is an intimate act of personal ‘trust’. And trust is a deliberative act (at least deliberatively arrived at, even if once secured, no longer deliberatively renegotiated over and over).
So at what point does such suffering become ‘eternal’? Never. ‘Indefinite’? yes. That’s entirely different. But I’m pretty sure even DBH (maybe this’ll draw him in for my annual whack upside my head) describes hell as ‘indefinite’. I think this comes in during his discussion of aionios, but my memory is foggy.
Point is, ‘indefinite’ suffering can be purposeful, redemptive, educational, and transcendentally grounded. IOW, ‘as long as it takes’. God’s got all the time in the world, and nobody is going anywhere. Why the need to secure a hard (fixed) line in the sand at which point God ‘gets it done’? That doesn’t buy us the security or assurance we seek. In the end, remember, the choice is a choice to ‘trust’ that God loves me, not to believe in this or that proposition or fact of history, and trust is a deliberative act. It’s not like being backed into a corner ‘unable to deny’ the truth about some math problem, or the actual date of your parents’ marriage, or how man jelly beans are actually in the jar.
Re: your 1st point. I’m not sure. Check my last response to Joe (above) about ‘deserving’ (and his mention of ‘responsibility’) where I bring up ‘value’. Does that help at all?
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Tom,
Regarding your response to Joe, I’m not satisfied, but I’m also fine with agreeing to disagree 😉. It still seems to me that if God creates us with particular needs, there is a very meaningful sense in which we deserve to have them fulfilled, independent of the relative values of creator and creature. And if he’s the only one who can fulfill them…
I’ll also push back a bit on this other point. Yes, on your view it’s “always possible that the suffering end,” but at any given point it’s also possible that it continue, right? And I agree that on this view nobody could ever complete an eternal of infinite amount of suffering. My point is just that given what you’ve said, this seems to be a possibility: at every point in the future (or eternity or however you want to think about it), it’s possible that some individual choose to continue in this path of suffering, and thus there would never be a time at which their suffering ended and they were united with God. While I’d agree it would be very unlikely, this at least seems to be a possibility on your view, and hence not precluded by your previous points.
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Wes,
Disagreeing is fine. I’ve lived happy and alone with this point for years. I’m OK.
Wes: It still seems to me that if God creates us with particular needs, there is a very meaningful sense in which we deserve to have them fulfilled…
Tom: How about this: …God deserve to fill us. Is that really not enough? We have to stake a claim of a value and deservedness ‘we’ possess which moves God to act ‘responsibly’ on our behalf?
Wes: I’ll also push back a bit on this other point. Yes, on your view it’s “always possible that the suffering end,” but at any given point it’s also possible that it continue, right? And I agree that on this view nobody could ever complete an eternal of infinite amount of suffering. My point is just that given what you’ve said, this seems to be a possibility: at every point in the future (or eternity or however you want to think about it), it’s possible that some individual choose to continue in this path of suffering, and thus there would never be a time at which their suffering ended and they were united with God.
Tom: How do you know there “will never be a time” when their suffering ends? To say “never” here is an abstraction that can never possibly define any actual state of being. If we can always (and again, the ‘possibility’ here is not that of a coin toss by any stretch of the imagination) surrender ourselves to God, then – my point – no amount of suffering can ever arrive at having become “eternal suffering” (which was CR’s point against me, i.e., that my view implies “eternal suffering is possible”; on the contrary, it’s impossible). We can reiterate any instance and imagine another and another (abstractly). We cannot imagine “an eternity of rejection.”
Speaking for myself, I can’t imagine even Hitler lasting very long, to be honest. We’re talking about the full experience of our falsehoods being stripped of every possible support and means of escape, and the transcendental desire for God longing for its intended end (which combines to constitute our suffering), having answered Resurrection’s call to our glorification. Come on gentlemen! Let’s have some faith in the beauty of God! ;o) Even IF we suppose (as I do) that the final choice for God is to ‘trust’ him (a ‘deliberative’ act), I honestly can’t imagine the game getting beyond the first inning (or quarter).
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Tom, I can sympathize with the hypothetical hard universalist who finds you more annoying than Fr. Rooney. Everyone can see you’re being obtuse with the whole “eternal suffering” terminology thing. The point is that unending or eternal (or whatever word you want to use) is possible on your view, rendering it just as evil (for the hard universalist) as Rooney’s view. In fact, if God has foreknowledge, then he may know that Bob Smith will continually choose not-God forever.
For the record, I think it is the better part of wisdom to assume universalism is wrong and to go with Roman Catholicism, one of the few religions that tells people the truth about contraception. That’s why I keep saying “for the hard universalist” rather than “for me.” I won’t disclose whether or not I’m a universalist. I defend hard universalism because I want to see it get the best defense it can get, and as prideful as it sounds, I think I’m way better at defending it than most others. The “infinite opportunity” argument is horrible.
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CR,
I really don’t care whether others hang their preferred moniker ‘hard’ around my neck and admit me to their table.
I have no doubts whatsoever regarding the inevitable return of all spiritual creatures to Christ or that God will be all in all.
I’m absolutely convinced of the moral argument (and was so for several years before Hart published it). It is in my view absolutely impossible that God should create on even the ‘possibility’ of the final loss of any. So your ‘foreknowledge’ scenario is a non-starter for me. If for the sake of argument we suppose God foresaw such a thing, the moral argument makes it impossible to imagine he would create on such a condition. But he has created, and given the moral argument he cannot foreknow what you propose.
Yes, I view the individual surrender of the heart to Christ as an act of ‘trust’ and personal surrender (and thus ‘deliberative’) that cannot be secured by an act of grace “all by itself” (as the post defined efficacious grace). I have no idea what it even means to say God can secure such a thing “all by himself.”
If all of this means I don’t get to be considered ‘hard’ by others, that’s of no consequence. At the very least, a ‘soft’ universalist concedes the ‘possibility’ of final or everlasting loss. And I categorically deny this possibility.
If I am genuinely missing the truth on some relevant point about the mystery of human agency, God have mercy on me and open my eyes.
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Tom: “ Speaking for myself, I can’t imagine even Hitler lasting very long, to be honest.”
I was going to ask what kind of time frames you imagine.
Yeah, I think it will be in the twinkling of an eye—instantaneous, or near instantaneous—for everyone.
I know that may offend a person’s desire for retribution, but that very desire issues forth from our obscured vision.
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Thank you for making the point about retribution, Joe. I agree. God has forgiven all, and there’s no outstanding demand of ‘justice’ that insists Hitler should fry for a million years. That’s our despair and outrage talking. But God isn’t ‘outraged’ that way. I do think we have to own our choices at some level, confess them, ‘trust’ ourselves and our pasts to Christ, and I can see it taking more for some to process that and trust God with it. But nobody (except perhaps me) will languish in their despair very long.
I don’t imagine conventional time will prevail. I doubt there will be any clocks on the wall. But truly, I can’t image
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Tom: “How do you know there “will never be a time” when their suffering ends?”
Tom, if you look back at my comment, you’ll notice that I didn’t say this, and it actually distorts what I did say. My point was that, *according to your view*, which I reject, it’s *possible* there there *would* never be a time at which a person’s suffering ended. And I agree that “no amount of suffering can ever arrive at having become ‘eternal suffering’,” and have affirmed that multiple times. I’m not quite sure why my point is continuing to be missed, but everything else I’d say in reply I think I’ve already said.
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Thanks Wes. Sorry for the confusion. My bad. I’m aware you’re describing what you think follows *from my view*.
I know you grant that we can never ‘suffer eternally’. What I’m trying to expose is the connection between conceding this and the claim that (giving this view) ‘it’s possible that there would never been a time at which suffering ended’. But this latter claim cannot also be true. To be possible that there ‘would never be’ a time at which suffering ended is to be possibly eternal, and we just said that’s impossible. I’m not being obtuse here (as CR thinks). At least I’m not intentionally trying to be so. But the possibility you’re positing is simply not achievable, not actualizable.
I’ll leave it there. If I’m simply not seeing what’s obviously true, God give me grace to see it.
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“I have no idea what it even means to say God can secure such a thing “all by himself.””
Because you have the intuition that free choices must *always* be indeterministic. Consistent hard universalists do not and cannot have this intuition. The hard universalist may hold to something like this: when the creature is first created, it is epistemically distant from God and not-God, which leaves indeterminacy. It can choose God immediately and be stable. Or it can choose not-God, learn the consequences, and inevitably-yet-freely will to come to God. The freedom is to come to trust God in his own way, on his own terms, even if the trust is inevitable. Path A or B to the same end. It’s one thing to know smoking is bad intellectually, another to know it experientially.
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CR, it looks like you’re making my case for me. ;o)
Deliberation (which can only be indeterminate) is the God-given condition for our movement from origin to end in God. That deliberative capacity (made possible by that epistemic distance you mention) is what makes the fall even possible.
So far so good.
But draw the implications out. There simply is no risk-free pathway to final union, a pathway that forecloses upon all possibility of saying ‘No’. If it were possible, a loving God would’ve efficaciously secured it.
It seems to me though that you (and others apparently) see the eschatological venue as renegotiating this condition and supposing God now does what he did not do then, namely, efficaciously place us in a state in which saying ‘No’ to God is impossible. This supposes the end of some (the damned) is arrived at in terms other than those of the God-given conditions of our beginning, and I think we ought to have problems with that.
Whatever reasons explain our necessity for a deliberative beginning (and I don’t think it’s that difficult to imagine what those reasons are), they can’t be efficaciously waved in the eschaton, I don’t think. Yes, we can be graciously restored to a state in which our deliberative capacity is freed from its enslavement to falsehood. I haven’t objected to this. But this cannot (I don’t think) mean deliberation as such is foreclosed upon as the God-given means of the will’s movement to consummate union with God any more than it was a viable pathway in our beginning (however that’s to be imagined).
So I don’t think hell collapses that (epistemic) distance, in other words. Trusting God is what ultimately collapses it. God have mercy on me for thinking it, but I think we must ‘trust’ our way into that final rest.
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Tom: “I know you grant that we can never ‘suffer eternally’. What I’m trying to expose is the connection between conceding this and the claim that (giving this view) ‘it’s possible that there would never been a time at which suffering ended’. But this latter claim cannot also be true. To be possible that there ‘would never be’ a time at which suffering ended is to be possibly eternal, and we just said that’s impossible.”
Okay, given this comment, I think I may understand where we’re missing each other. The claims that “we can never suffer eternally” and that “it’s possible that there would never been a time at which suffering ended” are distinct because of the difference between “actual” and “potential” infinity. The latter can exist while the former cannot.
Tom: “To be possible that there ‘would never be’ a time at which suffering ended is to be possibly eternal, and we just said that’s impossible.”
No, the former is to say that your view involves the possibility of the *potentially* infinite rejection of God, and what we said was impossible is the *actually* infinite rejection of God. The one doesn’t collapse into the other, and so I don’t believe there is the “connection” that you see.
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Wes, thanks for this.
There are a few relevant things to say about ‘potential infinites’ (and potentialities/actualities) that avoid my view being (according to descriptions, if I remember) more annoying that Fr Rooney and as morally objectionable as infernalism! But I’ve been hammering on this a lot. So I’ll let it rest for a while. I don’t wanna give the impression that I might hammer away on it ‘into the infinite future’.
Thanks!
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Wes: No, the former is to say that your view involves the possibility of the *potentially* infinite rejection of God, and what we said was impossible is the *actually* infinite rejection of God. The one doesn’t collapse into the other, and so I don’t believe there is the “connection” that you see.
Tom: I said I’d shut it down because I was hogging the comms here. But heck, I process by talking about things, and you’ve been kind enough to try to think through this with me.
Perhaps Iain’s comment about the probability of a coin toss landing heads eventually collapsing to 1 will address that analogy. But for me of course coin tosses are unlike choices. I’m not sure the probability of one’s choosing God after previous rejections becomes 1.
But I’m being hardnosed about this and insisting that deliberation (deliberative trust) doesn’t disappear because the aim or outcome of the choice in this case is relational and personal, not supervened upon by purely ‘material’ factors (as with coin tosses). And the ‘personal-spiritual’ isn’t, I don’t think, quantifiable that way. So fears that my view opens the door to a potentially infinite rejection of God are not well-founded.
We’re talking about God restoring (efficaciously too!) the mind to ‘sanity’ (sanity by the way is not the removal of all deliberative capacity), stripping it of access to creaturely comforts and distractions by which we hide from the truth (truth that will be our torment at first), and God ineffably presenting the gracious invitation to trust him (the Spirit’s invitation that we are all familiar with, empowers and enlightening deliberation without foreclosing upon it). To ask for this kind of encounter to produce a ‘probability’ is to mistake the nature of things. No 3rd person (mathematical) account of it can be had.
Not only that, but I think universalists ought to ‘trust’ God here, that is, rest their case on, and ground their assurance in, God ‘personally’ and not in some ridiculous efficacious ‘operation’ of grace. God’s beauty and goodness are ‘harder’ than math or flips of a switch or operations that remove God-given capacities to say God gets the choice God wants. The whole debate at this point forgets who God is and that we are his imagine. The ‘trust’ that saves us, I think, is the best argument for believing ‘all shall be saved’. To devise an argument to ‘prove’ that everyone will ‘trust’ God when God removes their ability to do anything but trust is, I think, to fail to actually believe God is worth ‘trusting’. We want an argument or a syllogism, not the mysterious God of ferocious beauty.
Think of it this way: We learn to eat and survive on shit. The damned addicted to shit go to hell where they are deprived of shit and given a good square meal of delicious food. (Hell, after all, really is just heaven experienced as torment by those who haven’t acquired a taste for it, right?) Sooner or later, the ‘natural’ taste buds for God will respond and folks will come to love the menu. (The damned forced to eat British food will take longer to come around. Those given French and Lebanese cuisine will respond immediately!)
Tell me that helps!
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Wes, I wanna clarify what I just said:
“God’s beauty and goodness are ‘harder’ than math or flips of a switch or operations that remove God-given capacities to say God gets the choice God wants.”
I meant “so that” God gets the choice….
And then “The whole debate at this point forgets who God is and that we are his imagine.”
I mean his “image.”
And lastly: “The ‘trust’ that saves us, I think, is the best argument for believing ‘all shall be saved’.”
I probably should say “the trust by which God saves us.” I don’t mean to say our trusting is the sole cause of our salvation, obviously.
Hope that helps.
But I’m very serious about French and Lebanese cuisine.
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“…empowerING and enlightening deliberation….”
I go to typo hell and eat British food.
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“There simply is no risk-free pathway to final union, a pathway that forecloses upon all possibility of saying ‘No’.” What I call the consistent hard universalist does not share this intuition.
“If it were possible, a loving God would’ve efficaciously secured it.” The hard universalist would say it might not be possible for God to create us in an initial state that guarantees we choose God, even if subsequent states can guarantee it. Experiential knowledge of not-God can only come from having chosen not-God, and such knowledge might be the necessary and sufficient condition for being in a state that guarantees we choose (or will, if you prefer) God. In short, perhaps this kind of state can only be non-initial. However, this would seem to rule out Christianity given the impeccability of the Theotokos. Perhaps God could make us all impeccable from the start, but chooses not to because He wants to allow the beauty of the Incarnation. Felix culpa. A third option is that something about being the Theotokos requires and allows impeccability in a way that doesn’t work for anyone else. 4. God could but doesn’t because He is apathetic: paths A and B are equivalent given the same perfect outcome.
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Thank you CR. I do appreciate the convo.
There’s too much Kierkegaard in me at this point. The idea that God can unite us to himself ‘efficaciously’ (‘all by itself’ as Kronen & Reitan define it; apart from any ‘leap of faith’ or trust) is categorically out of the question for me. It’s the deliberative structure of the creaturely act which shares in defining our final personal coming to be. It’s not an incidental means by which the Spirit ‘personalizes’ us in Christ. So if ‘hard’ universalists have to be monergists (by that or any other name), it’s a self-defeating proposition for me.
Label away: Hard, Soft, Squishy, Stiff, Granite, Steel. I don’t give a damn. But I don’t at all agree that ‘deliberation’ threatens the consummation of all things with infinite postponement. I can’t imagine a ‘harder’ hope. If I could, I’d embrace it.
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Great points, Wes.
Wes: “ And just because someone can’t traverse an actual infinity or eternity of suffering, it could still be the case that there is never a point at which their suffering ends.”
I’ve brought this up on the forum numerous times and it never sparked discussion.
To be sure, I do not believe in hell (other than the hell of this world) but I think it is wrong to characterize the hell of Christianity as eternal. It would have a beginning and as such, at any given moment it would be finite. It would always be finite, even if it were to go on forever.
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I agree. My point is, this is a reason for why it cannot make sense to say (of my view) that “eternal suffering” is possible unless God draws a line in the sand beyond which point no one can possibly reject him. No. Folks who want to complain that ‘indefinite suffering’ (naturally transcendentally grounded in God) reduces to ‘eternal suffering’ (and is as morally objectionable as infernalism) are simply mistaken. I don’t know what else to say.
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Tom: “So at what point does such suffering become ‘eternal’? Never. ‘Indefinite’? yes. That’s entirely different….”
The point (from what I wrote in the post above) is that state can endure forever without being eternal. Strictly speaking, to be eternal is to be timeless, without beginning or end, devoid of duration. Eternality is often conflated with everlastingness, but they are distinct.
So, the fact that such suffering will never be eternal should be no consolation. There is no reason, as per Wes’ points, that it might not be everlasting. This is theoretically possible when salvation is made somehow contingent upon the unperfected will of the individual.
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Thank you Joe.
By all means, let’s say ‘everlasting’. I didn’t introduce the term “eternal” here. CR did. None of us means ‘timeless suffering without beginning or end’.
Your point that indefinite suffering can “endure forever without being eternal” is, I think, not true. And by eternal in your sentence you ‘everlasting’, right? But there’s no possibility that any can ‘endure forever’ in anything but their end in God.
Do not let abstraction entice you into calculating an imaginary infinite set, downloading every future moment into it, and then distributing the indefiniteness of deliberation onto the whole set, infecting it with the toxin of ‘soft’ universalism. That is not concretely actualizable and so not a rational concern. There’s no possible final loss of God’s intentions in an eschaton opened indefinitely to human deliberation (a deliberation, mind you, awash in the most intense revelation of the truth about one’s choices and the burning of the natural will’s ecstatic longing for God).
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I’m not sure I’m understanding you right Tom. As has been said, it is possible that a coin flip will come up heads forever. I assume you don’t deny this? So what is stop the sinner from holding out forever, if each and every choice to ‘eschatologically accept’ God is indeterministic?
Yes, you say, but at no point does the sinner actually ‘eternally reject’ God and thus at no point does hell or ‘eternal punishment’ per se exist. Likewise there is no point in the ‘coin flipping’ journey at which one could definitively say “it’s heads forever!” or “eternal heads it is”. But this defence sounds awfully similar to non-universalists who agree with some universalists nobody could ever ‘deserve’ eternal punishment (or at least that good God would never inflict it), but argue that hell does not violate this principle nobody actually experiences ‘eternal’ punishment as infinity is never actually reached. Okay, but it’s still eternal. Likewise, just because the soul never makes a final ‘one off’ choice for hell – but instead this choice is split over trillions of years of infinitesimally small mini-choices – the point is that hell remains possible.
To sketch my view more positively, I believe – like you – that we have indeterministic liberty with respect to all kinds of moral choices – but I would add that the nature and scope of this changes over time. If I deliberate and choose to avoid punching my friends, eventually I will get to a point where – because of the knowledge this pattern of actions gives me – I will become ‘immune’ from (in ordinary circumstances) hitting my friends. But equally if I make the wrong choice – if I hit all my friends – then (if I am gifted rationality and love) the knowledge this gives me will eventually also form me into the kind of person that is immune from hitting their friends (as I’ve realised this isn’t good for anybody!)
Neither of those two methods – carrot and stick – violate my free will, it’s just that deliberative liberty (eventually) has natural (if aided by God) consequences on our character which enable us to naturally make one choice over another.
I guess I just see the same thing as happening with respect to our final ‘eternal’ choice for God – either we give in (to the heavenly carrot) and get fully hooked on God by that first eschatological taste, or else we lash out (earning the purgatorial/infernal stick) and, as we inevitably suffer the consequences of this rejection we – aided by God’s love – recognise how much we need God and therefore give in anyway.
Conclusion: I’m not saying that we ordinarily have an indeterministic choice to be eschatologically ‘for’ God or ‘against’ God but – if we keep making the wrong choice – eventually God will lobotomise us and take away our free choice. Rather I’m saying that indeterministic choices will inevitably cease to be indeterministic the more knowledge we build up, and that the results of both good indeterministic choices and bad indeterministic choices will eventually – if combined with God’s love – give us sufficient knowledge as to make certain choices inevitable, and that this applies to the ‘ultimate eschatological choice’ as much as it does for any other.
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David,
You write: “Yes, you say, but at no point does the sinner actually ‘eternally reject’ God and thus at no point does hell or ‘eternal punishment’ per se exist. Likewise there is no point in the ‘coin flipping’ journey at which one could definitively say “it’s heads forever!” or “eternal heads it is”. But this defence sounds awfully similar to non-universalists who agree with some universalists nobody could ever ‘deserve’ eternal punishment (or at least that good God would never inflict it), but argue that hell does not violate this principle nobody actually experiences ‘eternal’ punishment as infinity is never actually reached. Okay, but it’s still eternal. Likewise, just because the soul never makes a final ‘one off’ choice for hell – but instead this choice is split over trillions of years of infinitesimally small mini-choices – the point is that hell remains possible.”
There’s a lot there. I think the coin toss analogy needs to go bye-bye, because rational, deliberative choice is very unlike a coin toss. CR wanted to dismiss this since both are indeterministic, but they’re different enough to make the analogy useless. We’re not talking about ‘materially indeterministic’ outcomes that operate under fixed and invariable laws and each (coin toss) returns to its original beginning and gets flipped once more. That’s not choice.
I love your positive account of how our choices solidify over time. The more we make up our minds, the more our minds make us. We become our choices over time, so to speak. This is habituation, or addiction, etc. We can habituate in evil or goodness. And, importantly for us HARD universalists (!), this process of habituation can only finally end irrevocably in the Good. We can come to rest in God; we can never irrevocably solidify into evil. Our truest ‘freedom’ is that final state of irrevocable conformity to and rest in God. No more deliberating or struggling. But until that union, the God-given terms of our origin and pathway to God abide.
So this brings me to the proposed ‘efficacious grace’ in this post. What is here said is that the deliberative process you just described is done away with, and the damned do not deliberate their way toward a determined trust in God. No. Efficacious grace does its thing in the mind/heart and – poof – the sinner finds himself reprogrammed (forgive the programming lingo) unable to do anything but say ‘Yes’ to God, and not because the sinner chose his way into that state the way you and I choose our way through habituation into a more determinate state of character. On the contrary, the prosed view of hell I’m pushing back against argues that God moves upon the sinner and achieves that end (all by itself) without the sinner having to learn or discover or deliberate anything. (And we can make the efficacious grace as smoothly internal and non-competitive as we like. That’s not the issue.)
And I don’t especially have issues with this: “I guess I just see the same thing as happening with respect to our final ‘eternal’ choice for God – either we give in (to the heavenly carrot) and get fully hooked on God by that first eschatological taste, or else we lash out (earning the purgatorial/infernal stick) and, as we inevitably suffer the consequences of this rejection we – aided by God’s love – recognise how much we need God and therefore give in anyway.”
That’s basically my view. This is why deliberative choice is *not* like a coin toss or a throw of the dice. To the extent we resist the education that our painful consequences bring to bear upon us, we continue to suffer. Can one just choose repeatedly ‘forever’ to suffer and not yield to one’s own natural end? Technically no (because of the ‘forever’ thing), so in the meantime (as you’ve described) life will teach the derelict, the light will come on, and the ‘natural’ desire for God will instruct and shape and incline and inspire and direct and correct the will until it ‘trusts’.
That sounds to me like what you’re saying. If so, that’s my view as well. But be careful. You’re very close to having your ‘hard’-shell tacos taken away and being reassigned ‘soft’-shelled tacos.
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“As has been said, it is possible that a coin flip will come up heads forever.”
This is simply not true as a matter of basic mathematics. The probability of a coin coming up tails on the first try is 1/2, on the second 1/4, on the third 1/8 and so forth, in an infinite series. The probability of it coming up tails at some point is the sum total of all the individual probabilities in this sequence. The total of all the terms in the infinite sequence 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … etc etc is 1. Not nearly 1 or almost 1 or minisculely less than 1 but exactly 1, so the probability of the coin eventually coming up tails is 1. In probability terms if something has a probability of 1 it is something which will definitely happen in all possible scenarios.
It’s no use saying it is still somehow “metaphysically” possible unless “metaphysically” means “wrong”.
This is as wrong as Xeno’s paradox where Achillies chasing a tortoise can never catch him because Achillies has to close the distance by 1/2, and then 1/4 and then 1/8 and so forth and because tge sequence never stops he never catches the tortoise. It’s simply misunderstanding how infinite sequences work.
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Sorry for the late reply.
We may be in agreement Tom. Certainly I agree that we must deliberate to love God, and that there is no *arbitrary* point at which God decides “Hmm, this guy has had free will but long enough and keeps saying no, I better make up his mind for him….”
However I do think that – in principle – there is a ‘maximum number’ of choices against God that we could ever make. This will vary based on the individual – their constitutional make up and all their previous choices – but ultimately we end up exhausting our options and turn to God as the only thing left. Just like playing chess, one has freedom in terms of the moves one can make but – up against a grand master – the number of options available reduces the longer we play for until eventually – as we ‘lose’ the game – the options available become zero.
Again this ‘maximum number of choices’ is *not* because God arbitrarily takes away our choice after a certain point. It is because human nature is such that (if it is given grace and love by God) it will eventually naturally extinguish any non-God desire – either through exposure to the good of making choices for God, or through exposure to the bad of making choices against God. So in my view God ‘wins’ because – in the end – because all roads lead to God (not because God waits around for an infinite amount of time hoping we roll the dice correctly!)
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Iain, I see your point, but I think it is important to note that mathematics is a construct of the mind which is used as a *model* for reality – not the other way around. Metaphysics cannot be reduced to mathematics.
In any case, there is more than one type of mathematical infinity, and it is not clear that it is valid to map any of these on to the kind of infinity that eternal life.
After all, we say people will be in heaven ‘forever’. But there is no point at which ‘infinite time’ is actually reached. We never actually experience infinite time in heaven. But that doesn’t stop us saying that all will, necessarily, stay in heaven forever.
Likewise, there is no point – on a purely indeterministic model of choosing heaven over hell – at which anybody has actually made an infinite number of ‘no’ to heaven choices. But that shouldn’t stop us saying that, under this model, it remains *possible* that someone could keep making these choices forever (in the sense that – wherever you chose to ‘look’ at the timeline – the choice you see is a ‘no’ rather than a ‘yes’)
Really maths justs says that – theoretically – ‘once infinity is reached’ the probability of not saying yes at least once would be 0. But the point is that infinity is *never* reached, in which case it is possible that – wherever you looked on the time line before infinity is ‘reached’ – the answer is ‘no’.
p.s. The comparisons with the objections to Zeno’s paradoxes don’t seem relevant to me because those objections work precisely because Zeno’s examples are not true infinites. Yes, the distance that Achilles moves can be divided up into an infinite number of points – but that does not mean the distance travelled itself is actually an infinite quantity (it is clearly a fixed finite quantity) – Zeno’s mistake is that he uses a mathematical fiction (dividing distance up into a potentially infinite number of points) to make the false conclusion that an infinite distance needs to be traversed.
But that in the case of an infinite number of choices – psychological temporal decisions – that ultimately ads up to infinite time. And infinite time is forever. That’s because ‘choices’ are not just theoretical constructions like infinite subdivisions of finite distances – rather they are integers, a discrete unit. And if you have an infinite set of integers, that means the integers go on forever and never end, thus making it an infinite quantity.
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I don’t wanna sidetrack this blogpost. Fr Aidan, it’s your post! As Aragorn said to the Dead, “What say you?” Ha!
I stand in the Diet of Roanoke! Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me!
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