Kronen & Reitan: Efficacious Grace as Lobotomy

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. It is therefore possible and permissible for God to save all through the exercise of efficacious grace (1, 2).
4. If God has a morally permissible means or saving all, then God will save all.
5. Therefore, God will save all (3, 4).¹

Premise #2: The Moral Permissibility of Efficacious Grace

Let’s now move on to the second premise #2 of the argument. Even if God can effect the salvation of all through transformative intervention, is it morally permissible? Many will object that such action will violate personal autonomy and freedom. Kronen and Reitan respond to these concerns in several pages.

The 19th century Scottish theologian A. M. Fairbairn describes the doctrine of universal­ism as “compulsory salvation.” He apparently believes that the only way God can save all is for him, in essence, to “lobotomize” the obdurate. God overrides the individual’s free choice and replaces it with his own. Fairbarn puts it this way:

Compulsory restoration is only another form of annihilation. Freedom is of the essence of man, and he must be freely saved to be saved at all. Were he saved at the expense of his freedom, he would be not so much saved as lost. For the very seat and soul of personality is will; and were the will suspended, especially in the article of its supreme choice, the personality would be destroyed; what resulted would be not a new man, but another man from him who had been before. And the original man could not be recalled into being; for were the old will, suspended that the man might be saved, restored, the old state would be restored with it. Those alone can freely stand who have been freely saved; and without freedom there can be no obedience, without obedience no beatitude.

Hence the argument as little involves universal restoration as it allows partial annihilation. What it maintains is an eternal will of good, and, as a consequence, eternal possibilities of salvation. God will never be reluctant, though man may for ever refuse. But to necessitate were as little agreeable to the regal Paternity as to annihilate. The Fatherhood will ever love and ever seek to create happiness; the Sovereignty will ever govern and ever seek to expel sin and create righteousness; but neither will ever forget that the son is a free citizen, and must be freely won to submission and obedience. Sin is not to be vanquished either by the destruction or the compulsory restoration of the sinner, but by his free salvation; and should this fail of accomplishment, yet God will have been so manifested by the attempt at it, that all the universe will feel as if there had come to it a vision of love that made it taste the ecstasy and beatitude of the Divine.²

We may presume that the memory of the individual remains intact throughout and after the divine operation. He simply experiences himself differently. One moment he hated God, the next he loves him. He has no explanation for his metamorphosis. He does not remember anything having been done to him. He’s just different. In an instant his whole outlook on life and divinity has dramatically shifted. Perhaps he’s even ecstatic about his inexplicable transformation. But is he still the same person? Fairbairn thinks not. Free people cannot be conscripted into the Kingdom against their will, and to suspend their will necessarily entails the destruction of their personality. What in fact has happened, Fair­bairn asserts, is that God has annihilated the old person and replaced it with another.

Fans of the original Star Trek may recall the episode “This Side of Paradise.” The Enterprise is ordered to check on the colony on Omicron Ceti III. They discover the colonists to be exceptionally well, happy, and content, despite the dangerous Berthold rays now bathing the planet. As we soon discover, the colonists have been infected by spores from a native flower. Seeking answers for the health of the colonists, Spock asks Leila Kalomi, played by the beautiful Jill Ireland, to explain the mystery, and she takes him to a field where the flowers grow. He is exposed to the spores. The change is dramatic. For the first time in his life, Spock experiences happiness and joy. He immediately falls in love with Leila (who wouldn’t?). From that point on, he has no desire to be liberated from his rapture. Question #1: Is Spock still Spock? Question #2: Did Leila have moral warrant, without asking his permission, to expose Spock to the bliss-bestowing spores? Question #3: Does Captain Kirk have moral warrant, without asking his permission, to eliminate the influence of the spores, thus restoring Spock to his original Vulcan self? I’m guessing Fairbairn would answer no, no, yes.

Kronen and Reitan do not find Fairbairn’s argument compelling. Invoking the definition of Boethius that a person is an individual substance of a rational nature, they maintain that there is a critical difference between person (the hypostasis in which attributes inhere) and personality (beliefs, attitudes, memories, habits, affective states, etc.). A personality is what a person has; it is not what a person is. “If this is right,” the authors comment, “then a transformation destroys a person only if it removes something essential to being a person—such as the person’s rational faculty. A transformation in personality does not do this.”³

Recall the example of Jenny in our first article. By their therapeutic intervention, the resistance liberates Jenny from her addiction and restores her to health. They do not destroy her in her personhood; they save her:

To say that their activities do not save Jenny because they cause the drug-addicted, benighted individual to cease to exist makes little sense. Likewise, it is hard to see how doing away [via efficacious grace] with the ignorance and bondage to sin that afflict an unregenerate person would entail destroying them.⁴

Even if are using word “destroy” metaphorically to describe the redemptive change—the destruction of the old person—we still have to concede that the person is the beneficiary of that destruction. The essential core of their personhood has been salvaged from “sin’s ruinous effects.” Looking at efficacious grace this way also enables us to read Scripture differently:

In fact, if the biblical language of destruction is conceived in this way, it may help to reconcile some of the more troubling hell texts with God’s benevolence. The vessel of wrath then becomes the false self—the sinful personality destroyed through the divine act of bestowing efficacious grace. The vessel of mercy becomes the person’s true essence—the enduring beneficiary of grace.⁵

Even still, one might think that the person’s autonomy has been violated. Freedom is critical to our self-development. Kronen and Reitan formulate the objection thusly: “If God simply erases the character formed by our free choices, then God has not merely over­rid­den our freedom, but has ignored our prima facie claim on having our free choices deter­mine what kind of people we become.”⁶ In other words, God is acting immorally. Like Leila, he is exposing human beings to the spores of efficacious grace without their permission. Therefore, premise #2 is false. Or is it?

 

Footnotes

[1] John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God’s Final Judgment: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism (2011), p. 131.

[2] A. M. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (1895), pp. 467-468.

[3] K&R, p. 140.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

(Go to “Is Efficacious Grace Moral?”)