Predestined to Glory: The Extravagant, Prodigal, and Omnipotent Love of God

by Fr Aidan Kimel

I have followed the work of the esteemed philosopher Dr Eleonore Stump since her days at Virginia Tech. It is was with great interest, therefore, that I read her article “The God of Love.”¹ After reading the first paragraph, with its claim that “universalism is not only not a consequence of God’s love; it is not so much as compatible with God’s love,” I knew I had to attempt a response. The extravagant and prodigal love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been the heart of my preaching and parochial ministry since my ordination in 1980. At each step of the way, the logic of love has guided my theological convictions.

Divine love and universalism are incompatible, Stump argues, because salvation is the union of two free wills, divine and human. God graciously offers sinners his forgiveness and love, but he must wait upon their free consent. He will not force anyone into his Kingdom. It takes two to tango:

When God creates human beings with free will, God judges it acceptable to him that possibly some human beings might not be united with God and that human beings have control over whether this possibility is actualized. If God had not willed to create human beings with free will, then all states of affairs would have been up to God alone. But then union with human beings would have been precluded for God, since union requires two wills to unite. So, it is God’s will that it lies ultimately within the control of human beings whether God’s desire for union with each human being is fulfilled.

As Stump succinctly wrote in 1986: “It is not within the power even of an omnipotent entity to make a person freely will anything.”² In the literature, this position is known as the free-will defense of hell. Given her belief that universalism includes “the thesis that God unilaterally brings it about that all human beings are brought to heaven,”³ Stump’s assertion of incompatibility initially seems airtight.

Yet there is an immediate problem: all Christian universalists, whether patristic or modern, agree with Stump that salvation requires the free union of wills, divine and human. This is as true for Origen and St Gregory of Nyssa as it is for modern universalists such as Sergius Bulgakov, Thomas Talbott, and David Bentley Hart.⁴ Each advances their own speculations on how God might providentially bring the wicked to embrace his forgiveness and love—ranging from purifying “fire” and the healing of the passions, deliverance from ignorance and delusion and the restoration of rational freedom, to transformative encounter with God in his infinite Goodness, Truth, and Beauty—but each affirms the free decision of the sinner as a necessary condition for eschatological blessedness. The alleged incompatibility of the universalist proposal and human freedom must therefore be dismissed as a generalization too inaccurate and imprecise to be accepted.

I also find curious Stump’s categorical claim that the omnipotent God cannot effect the free conversion of the wicked, given that so many Latin theologians have advanced doctrines of predestina­tion that presuppose precisely this divine power and competence. St Augustine of Hippo, St Fulgentius, and St Thomas Aquinas immediately come to mind.⁵ Those within this tradition call it efficacious grace. I understand this is a contentious position in the Catholic Church, but it is difficult for me to see how it can be rejected out of hand. In the words of Augustine:

For this reason we must see how it is that we say what the apostle most truthfully said of God, “who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). Since not all are saved, but many more are not saved, it seems that what God wills to happen does not happen because a human will frustrates the will of God. . . . The words of the Lord in the gospel make the matter even clearer when he rebukes a wicked city with the words, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Mt 23:37) as if God’s will had been overcome by the will of men and the most mighty one were unable to do as he willed because the very weak prevented him by not being willing. Where is that omnipotence that has done whatever it willed in heaven and on earth if he willed to gather together the children of Jerusalem and did not do so? . . . But he gathered together the children he willed to gather together despite her unwillingness, for in heaven and on earth he did not will some things and do them and will others but not do them, but he did everything he willed.⁶

Clearly the Doctor of Grace does not believe that the Omnipotence can be frustrated by the recalcitrant wills of fallen human beings. “Therefore this grace . . . is rejected by no one,” he asserts, “no matter how hard-hearted he may be.”⁷ Augustine teaches that faith is a beneficent gift of God. This gifting does not coerce the sinner against his will; it liberates the will and directs it to its proper object. “God produces the acts of the will in the minds of human beings,” writes Augustine—“not so that they believe against their will, for that is utterly absurd to say—but so that they become willing from unwilling.”⁸ And again: “Who is drawn if he is already willing? And yet no one comes unless he wills to come. Therefore he is drawn in a marvelous way so that he wills, by him who knows how to work in the human heart itself.”⁹

Hence we may conclude that Augustine would vigorously disagree with Stump’s view that God is helpless when confronted by definitive rejection. Raising the dead is his specialty.

Long ago I became persuaded that as the transcendent wellspring of being, God’s relationship to the world is best understood as noncompetitive and noncontrastive: God differs differently.¹⁰ He does not inhabit the same metaphysical plane as his creatures. He is not other to us as a being among beings, nor does his willing compete with our willing. We are not autonomous agents living out our lives on a deistic stage. Everything that is depends upon God’s continuous outpouring of being. James Ross offers this beautiful image: “The being of the cosmos is like a song on the breath of a singer.”¹¹ At every moment we are being sung ex nihilo into existence. Consequently, the transcendent Creator need not force us to do anything: coercion is excluded by his radical difference from finite beings and his immanent presence within the depths of our existing; his relationship with us is too close, too intimate, too interior. God does not operate on us from the outside; he does not act upon us as objects, one billiard ball hitting the other; nor does he manipulate us through nefarious means. God is the infinite source and prime mover of our thinking, decisions, and activities. He makes us who we are as free personal agents. Within this noncontrastive account of divine transcendence and immanence, freedom signifies the absence of determination by other creatures. We are free when we are the subject of our deeds and not compelled by external finite forces. Freedom does not and cannot mean that we are independent of our Creator. Consider a novelist. The author of a novel does not make her characters do something; she makes them doing it. So it is with God. He does not make us act; he makes us acting.¹² God is the direct and primary cause, with ourselves as the simultaneous secondary cause, of our intending and doing. Philosophers term this explanation double agency or dual sources. To therefore think of our Creator as violating our personal integrity by his beneficent bestowal of virtues and powers is, I suggest, a category mistake. It assumes a competitive relationship between Creator and creature, as if our freedom requires the absence of supernatural agency and gifting. Our willing, rather, flows from and is enfolded within the divine willing. In him we live and move and have our being. Herbert McCabe elaborates:

God’s activity, then, does not compete with mine. Whereas the activity of any other creature makes a difference to mine and would interfere with my freedom, the activity of God makes no difference. It has a more fundamental and important job to do than making a difference. It makes me have my own activity in the first place. I am free; I have my own spontaneous activity not determined by other creatures, because God makes me free. Not free of him (this would be to cease to exist), but free of other creatures.

The idea that God’s causality could interfere with my freedom can only arise from an idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature—a part of the world. We see an ascending scale of powerful causes. The more powerful the cause, the more difference it makes. And we are inclined to locate God at the top of the scale, and to imagine that he makes the most difference of all. But God does not make the most difference. He makes, if you like, all the difference—which is the same as making no difference at all.¹³

While the double agency position may not mandate Augustinian predestination, it is certainly compatible with it.¹⁴ God turns us to himself not by coercive intrusion but by “the sweet attractiveness of truth and the force of our own desire and delight in it.”¹⁵

Humanity is intrinsically ordered to eternal happiness. We are created for God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. Hence we may speak of predestinating grace as a blessed necessity that liberates persons for the realization of their eschatological end. This grace must succeed, for the Good is its final cause. As the Bishop of Hippo puts it: “They receive the Holy Spirit so that there arises in their minds a delight in and a love for that highest and immutable good that is God.”¹⁶ Grace disenthralls the will from its enslave­ment to disordered desires and enables the apprehension of the captivating truth of the gospel. Grace bestows a liberty that cannot resist grace. It cannot be otherwise, for in our postlapsarian condition we cannot heal our hearts of stone. Jesse Couenhoven elaborates:

In his late works, Augustine writes of the gift of charity, the principle of love that changes the sinner’s fundamental orientation from one of carnal concupiscence to one of love for God because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that is made possible through incorporation into Christ. This gift—which is an internal work, not merely a divine manipulation of external circumstances—draws us into the good by giving us a renewed knowledge of and delight in the good. . . . More accurately, operative grace gives libertas back to sinners. Like the medicine of Christ that it is, the Holy Spirit mends the will’s sickness, its dysfunction, and its inability for good and replaces it with a power for good more like God’s own. This is not an alien power, because we were made to have this power for good. In addition, such divine surgery does not violate human free choice, since liberum arbitrium consents to the leading of the voluntas, which is transformed by the Spirit. To the contrary, grace’s healing makes choice more powerful since by orienting it toward the good, it is made truly free and (eventually) less fragmented. Thus, for Augustine, faith is both a deterministic gift from God and the result of human consent.¹⁷

The indwelling Spirit is the decisive difference between Adamic freedom (the ability to choose between good and evil) and the freedom of grace (the necessary embrace of the good): by the gift of charity, we now love and delight in the irresistible Goodness of God. We are perfected not by the addition of a created quality but by uncreated grace, the dynamic and enlivening presence of the Holy Spirit. “In the absence of this uncreated grace,” Stephen Duffy comments, “choice there may be, but not ordered choice begotten of love above all and in all.”¹⁸ The freedom granted by grace thus anticipates the eschato­log­ical liberty the saints enjoy in heaven. Although Adam and Eve were created with a natural desire for God, they were not perfectly united to him as the saints are; they were not yet deified. The blessed so partake of the divine nature that they share in the divine inability to sin.¹⁹

We may, by way of analogy from finite causal relations, call this determinism; but not all determinations are inimical to human flourishing, and divine determinations never are. True liberty is not the capacity to make alternate choices between this and that—and certainly not between heaven and hell—but the ability to flourish as creatures ordered to deification in Christ. That God acts unilater­ally to deliver us from our passions and grant us freedom in the Spirit is restoration of our authentic selves; that he predestines us to eternal happiness in his Trinitarian life is the ultimate expression of his love and the glorious fulfillment of our divinely ordained destiny.

Thesis: God the Father has predestined humanity to eternal glory in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

In my judgment, the argument from efficacious grace is the most elegant and robust defense of the universalist hope now on display.²⁰ Yet as compelling as I find Augustine’s construal of absolute predestination (minus reprobation), my faith that God will save all does not rest upon it. It firmly rests, rather, upon the Father who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ as absolute, unconditional, omnipotent love. At this point I would normally shift into preaching mode, quite likely choosing the three parables of Luke 15 as my text: the good shepherd, the woman and the lost coin, the forgiving father. These parables authorize the preacher to speak of the love of God in terms of such extravagance and prodigality that even the most sentimental among us will be scandalized.

Here is the critical difference between universalists and proponents of eternal damnation: universalists are horrified by the claim that God would condemn his children to everlast­ing torment. St Isaac the Syrian speaks for all who confess the greater hope:

It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them—and whom nonetheless He created.²¹

For Isaac, Gehenna belongs to God’s providential and merciful care for humanity. Its purpose is not retributive but remedial and restorative and is therefore of limited duration. To think otherwise, he declares, is blasphemy:

The Kingdom and Gehenna are matters belonging to mercy, which were conceived of in their essence by God as a result of His eternal goodness. It was not a matter of requiting, even though He gave them the name of requital. That we should further say or think that the matter is not full of love and mingled with compassion would be an opinion full of blasphemy and insult to our Lord God. By saying that He will even hand us over to burning for the sake of sufferings, torment and all sorts of ills, we are attributing to the divine Nature an enmity towards the very rational being which He created through grace.²²

And so the saint prophetically announces that the all-loving God will one day demonstrate his “immense and ineffable compassion” by releasing the lost souls from their Gehennic purgations and raising them into glory and joy.²³

Isaac confronts us with two incompatible apprehensions of the divine love—a love that would never condemn the wicked to everlasting perdition and a love that does. Consider the dual wills distinction invoked by Stump: God antecedently wills the salvation of all human beings; but once human history gets launched, he consequently wills the eternal damnation of those who die in a state of incorrigible impenitence. In this sense, his consequent will represents an “unfulfilled desire” in God. This then raises the question whether God is disappointed by humanity’s rejection of his offer of salvation. No, replies Stump, “because that outcome is in accordance with God’s consequent will. God is not disappointed in having his will fulfilled.”²⁴ That God cannot be disappointed by the fulfillment of his will follows from the classical understanding of divinity, yet it seems odd that Stump would speak anthropomorphically of God having unfulfilled desires. This cannot be the case for the eternal, immutable, and simple Creator who is infinite in his perfection. God, as the scholastics say, is actus purus. His desiring is his willing. In reality, therefore, the antecedent and consequent wills of God are merely different ways of thinking about the one volitional act that is the divine essence. The dual distinction only arises when we consider the creaturely objects of God’s willing (ex parte creatorum)—specifically, when we think of human beings before and after the Final Judgment.²⁵ Abstractly, we might say that God desires the salvation of every human being; but concretely he wills the salvation of those who die in a state of grace and wills the reprobation of those who die in a state of mortal sin. The consequent spells out the salvific conditions that were unstated in the antecedent. Hence there are no unfulfilled desires in God. If he had truly wanted a different outcome, he would have willed differently.²⁶

In the eschaton, when God is all in all and the cosmos has become theophany, the meaning and content of his antecedent will will be fully disclosed in the enactment of his conse­quent will; the conceptual distinction then ceases to obtain. As Hart observes: “Given the metaphysics and logic of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, any distinction between what God wills and what God permits necessarily collapses at creation’s eschatological horizon; so too any distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent wills.”²⁷ God’s antecedent willing equals his consequent willing equals his eschatological willing equals his eternal willing. The eschaton reveals, manifests, embodies the eternal character of the Creator.

At the Final Judgment one of two antithetical construals of the divine love will thus be confirmed:

• The divine love will be unveiled as conditional and delimited: God wills the salvation of sinners only if they repent. Love saves and love damns: “So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 13:49-50); or
• The divine love will be unveiled as absolute, unconditional, illimited, comprehensive: God wills the transfiguration of all in glorious apokatastasis. And so the prophetic words of the Apostle Paul will be fulfilled: “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).28

Stump tells us that God loves the reprobate, even though he has condemned them to dwell in interminable suffering and torment. They have been cast into the outer darkness and severed from the source of life and happiness. Their everlasting misery is, as ecclesial tradition has long taught, their just punishment. St Bonaventure states the scholastic maxim: “God cannot permit any misery to exist in us except as a punishment of sin.”²⁹ In his goodness, God does not tolerate the suffering of his rational creatures unless it is inflicted, directly or indirectly, as divine punishment. The maxim obviously has it limits. Clearly God does permit suffering in history that cannot be justified by his justice (original sin notwithstanding). That he permits privation and torment in his good world can only be excused by his promise that through the wounds and death of Jesus he has redeemed evil and will heal and Christify its victims. In the words of John the Seer: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4). Yet I do maintain that the Bonaventurean maxim is directly applicable to the eschaton. In itself, suffering is an evil. If interminable eschatological torment is justified—if it can be justified—it is solely by adverting to the divine justice. This, I submit, is the fatal flaw of the free-will model of hell: it ultimately collapses into good old-fashioned retribution.

We may no longer paint lurid pictures of hell, but the horror remains and rightly so. Everlasting perdition is the worst possible end for human beings. Forever imprisoned in what Stump calls their second nature (the vicious nature they have acquired for themselves³⁰), the damned are overwhelmed by the suffering generated by depraved appetites divorced from all goods, ceaselessly subjected to the ferocious attacks of their accusing conscience, all hope for a meaningful and happy existence extinguished, hatred and despair mercilessly devouring heart and mind. Theirs is a phantasmagoric, night­mar­ish existence. What is hell but madness and never-ending agony? If the image of a torture chamber is deemed inapposite, then think of a medieval asylum for the insane.³¹ If God still loves the irredeemable, it is more akin to hatred than love. “God loves every man, and every creature also, in that he wills some good for every one of them,” states Thomas. “But he does not will every good for every one, and is said to hate some in so far as he does not will for them the good of eternal life.”³² The divine wrath forever rests upon the impeni­tent.

We might try to relieve God of final responsibility by assigning him the role of passive observer.³³ The reprobate have freely brought this fate upon themselves—they have damned themselves—but that is a difference without a difference. In the Last Judgment, God confirms and eternalizes the rejection of the reprobate precisely as divine punish­ment. Hence we must speak of a dual willing and dual responsibility: divine damnation coin­cides with self-damnation; but it is God who has the last word. His will be done. Self-damnation is divine damnation. The Scriptures, without exception, cast God in the role of Judge who issues the verdict and announces the sentence. This is what must be the case because it is the last judgment. God has brought fallen time to a close. There is no more time for repentance and thus no more time for forgiveness. There is only the settling of accounts. God wills and eternalizes the impenitence of the wicked, with the attendant suffering this finalization inevitably brings. He condemns them to the fate they have chosen. Such is the God of the post-Justinian tradition of the Church.

Stump has advanced a free-will defense of eternal perdition. This leaves her vulnerable to one damning objection: God was free not to create rational beings. Surely this is what the Triune Deity of absolute love would have done if he could not ensure the eternal blessed­ness of all. Hence the challenge of Hart’s aporetic triad:

• God freely created the cosmos ex nihilo.
• God is the Good and wills himself as the final good of rational creatures.
• God will condemn a portion of his rational creatures to everlasting torment.³⁴

One may coherently affirm any two of the above propositions but not all three simultaneously. As far as I can see, the only escape from the dilemma is to tweak proposition #2: for a greater (unknown) good, God may sacrifice the infinite good of some. But this is a Faustian bargain that nullifies the gospel!  “Christ died for the ungodly!” (Rom 5:6). The New Covenant is sealed in the precious blood of his only begotten Son. “It is by one and the same act,” Michael Dobbs reminds us, “that God wills both his own goodness as his proper object and the existence of creatures as ordered to his goodness.”³⁵ The latter is comprehended within the former. If God eternally wills himself as our final good, does it make sense to speak of a higher good than theosis? To this one end the Father predestined his sons and daughters in the Son before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:1-10); to this one end the eternal Word assumed human nature as Jesus Christ, the son of the Blessed Virgin Mary; to this one end he suffered death on the cross, rose from death on Easter morning, and ascended into heaven to present to his Father a redeemed and glorified humanity united in himself—the New Adam (Rom 5:12-19). In the words of St Athanasius: “God became man so that man might become God.”³⁶

God eternally wills deification—that we become gods in God—as the consummation of humanity and the theophanic manifestation of his Trinitarian love; therefore there can be no higher good, and no good reasons, that would justify hell in the New Creation, just as there can be no good reasons to explain why God, ante praevisa merita, would predestine some but not all to eternal glory. In both cases, the defenders of these two doctrines find themselves appealing to the inscrutable wisdom of the Deus Incognito in order to condone the unconscionable. At this precise point, we must reject all such appeals and firmly ground our reflections upon God’s self-revelation in the incarnate Word. As Thomas F. Torrance writes: “God is not one thing in himself and another thing in Jesus Christ—what God is toward us in Jesus he is inherently and eternally in himself.”³⁷ There is no other God hiding behind the back of Jesus; just so, there is no other Good but the God of Pascha. In the infinite depths of his infinite being, our Creator is absolute Love. He wills absolutely the good of those whom he summons to become God. Whether antecedently or consequently, therefore, he cannot will the everlasting suffering of any. To do so would be to betray himself and sunder the immanent relations between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Everlasting suffering is an evil and cannot be eschatologically and morally reconciled with the divine identity of the Holy Trinity. And if God has freely created the cosmos when he need not have, we may infer that his Paschal intentions for humanity will be accomplished. Omnipotent Love must triumph—necessarily, assuredly, indubitably. In the words of the Angelic Doctor: “Since, then, the will of God is the universal cause of all things, it is impossible that the divine will should not produce its effect.”³⁸

I reiterate: theosis is the predetermined telos and fulfillment of humanity, eternally willed in the same divine act in which God wills himself as his supreme Good and End. No other eschatological ends for mankind have been divinely decreed. Thus St Gregory of Nyssa:

But whenever the time come that God shall have brought our nature back to the primal state of man, it will be useless to talk of such things then, and to imagine that objections based upon such things can prove God’s power to be impeded in arriving at His end. His end is one, and one only; it is this: when the complete whole of our race shall have been perfected from the first man to the last—some having at once in this life been cleansed from evil, others having afterwards in the necessary periods been healed by the Fire, others having in their life here been unconscious equally of good and of evil—to offer to every one of us participation in the blessings which are in Him, which, the Scripture tells us, “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor thought ever reached.” But this is nothing else, as I at least understand it, but to be in God Himself; for the Good which is above hearing and eye and heart must be that Good which transcends the universe.³⁹

In the transcendent life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creation will be made new—evil annihilated, suffering expunged, humanity restored and transfigured, the cosmos glorified. God will be all in all. Therefore, proposition #3 is false.

Universalists reject all conditionalist construals of the divine love.⁴⁰ The God of the gospel wills the infinite good of all human beings, without limit or qualification. He commits himself to fulfill in all sinners the essential conditions of deifying union. He is the good shepherd who recklessly abandons his flock to search for the one lost sheep and is not satisfied until he finds it and restores it to his flock. He is the woman who frantically turns her house upside down to retrieve the one lost coin. He is the Great High Priest who offers himself on the cross in atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. He is the Crucified who shatters the gates of hades and rescues all its inhabitants.⁴¹ He is the theanthropic Messiah who rises from death and inaugurates the New Creation. In the words of the John the Elder: “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

That evil, both in the form of the wicked themselves and in their “deserved” torments, should abide eternally was powerfully denounced by the 19th century Anglican theologian Thomas Allin as the greatest of heresies:

What are all heresies, all errors, that have stained the church of God, compared with this supreme heresy, this dualism, which seats evil on the throne of the universe, a power enduring as God himself? The torments, physical and mental, of the popular hell, awful as they are, recede into almost nothing as compared with the far more awful spectacle of God vanquished, of God trying to save but failing, and watching his children as they slowly sink beneath the endless sway of evil; of God’s Son returning, not in triumph, but in defeat; of the cross so far prostrate, paralyzed, vanquished.⁴²

I do not know how to negotiate the differences between the universalist vision and the dogmatic commitments of the Catholic Church. I once asked the Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson how God’s love can be described as unconditional, given the plain teaching of Scripture. His reply: “Go back and reread the Bible.” I eventually came to realize that a hermeneutic change and paradigm shift was needed. So it may be for Catholicism. Nothing less than the gospel is at stake. For many the greater hope is judged too good to be true. I therefore proffer the wisdom of George MacDonald: “If you find what I tell you untrue, it will only be that it is not grand and free and bounteous enough. To think anything too good to be true, is to deny God—to say the untrue may be better than the true—that there might be a greater God than he.”⁴³

(Revised: 29 August 2023)

Footnotes

1 Eleonore Stump, “The God of Love,” Church Life Journal (13 April 2023).

2 Eleonore Stump, “Dante’s Hell, Aquinas’s Moral Theory, and the Love of God,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (1986): 194-195.

3 Stump, “God of Love,” fn. 1.

4 For patristic universalists, see Ilaria Ramelli, A Larger Hope? (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2019); for discussion of the above-mentioned modern universalists, see Alvin F. Kimel, Jr., Destined for Joy (Amazon, 2022).

5 On Augustine, see Jesse Couenhoven, Predestination (New York: T&T Clark, 2018), 19-49. 1. In addition to Couenhoven, my interpretation of Augustine is deeply informed by Han-Luen Kantzer Komline, Augustine on the Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

6 Augustine, Enchiridion 97.

7 Augustine, Predestination of the Saints 8.(13).

8 Augustine, Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian II.157.

9 Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians I.37.

10 I found the following works particularly persuasive: Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation (New York: New York University Press, 1967); Herbert McCabe, “Freedom,” God Matters (Springfield: Templegate, 1987), 10-24; Herbert McCabe, “Causes and God,” Faith Within Reason (Continuum, 2007), 48-66; ibid., “Evil and Omnipotence,” 67-93; and Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988).

11 James F. Ross, “Creation II,” in The Existence and Nature of God, ed. Alfred J. Freddoso, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 128.

12 Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 103-108. Also see Robert Matava, Divine Causality and Human Free Choice (Boston: Brill, 2016).

13 Herbert McCabe, “On Evil and Omnipotence,” 75-76. Also see Roberto De La Noval, “Pelagianism Redivivus,” Modern Theology (2023): https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12894. Noval writes: “How one conceives of the nature of divine transcendence, and more specifically the quality of God’s activity vis- à-vis God’s creatures, determines what kind of theodicy for hell a theologian will offer.”

14 On the compatibility of predestination with double agency, see W. Matthews Grant, Free Will and Divine Universal Causality (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 171-181. On the infallibility of grace in Aquinas, see Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 145-168; and Taylor Patrick  O’Neill, Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin (Washington: Catholic University Press, 2019), 13-67. For a contrary take, see John Dool, “Predestination, Freedom, and the Logic of Love,” Logos, 11 (2008): 105-125.

15 Phillip Cary, Inner Grace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 109.

16 Augustine, The Spirit and the Letter 3.5. Augustine would add that to achieve its proper end the grace of conversion must be supplemented with the grace of perseverance: “For, since they will not persevere unless they both can will to and do will to, they are given the ability and the will to persevere by the generosity of divine grace. Their will is, of course, set afire by the Holy Spirit to the point that they are able because they will to so strongly, but they will to so strongly because God makes them to will.” Grace and Rebuke 38.

17 Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 100.

18 Stephen J. Duffy, The Dynamics of Grace (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1993), 118.

19 Jesse Couenhoven, “Augustine’s Rejection of the Free-Will Defence,” Religious Studies, 43 (2007), 288.

20 See John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God’s Final Victory (New York: Continuum, 2011), 127-151; David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 171-187.

21 Isaac of Nineveh, The Second Part 39.6.

22 Ibid. 39.22.

23 Ibid. 39.6.

24 Stump, “The God of Love.”

25 James Chastek, “On the Antecedent And Consequent Will,” Just Thomism (24 January 2022).

26 If you beginning to think that a measure of disingenuity underlies the statement “God antecedently wills the salvation of all but wills the damnation of some by his consequent will,” you are not alone. It cannot be the case that when God brought the cosmos into being he did not know that some individuals would be damned. God is not surprised. He creates and damns in one eternal act.

27 David Bentley Hart, “What God Wills and What God Permits,” Public Orthodoxy (5 May 2020).

28 Commenting on 1 Cor 15:28, St Gregory of Nyssa writes: “Therefore, when every evil authority and ruler in our midst has been destroyed, and when there is no longer any passion lording over our nature, it is entirely necessary once there is nothing else holding power against us to subject all things to the ruler over all. And subjection to God is absolute alienation from evil. When, therefore, we all come to be outside evil by imitating our first fruits, then the whole batch of our nature, mixed with the first fruits and made one in accord with the conjoined body, will receive in itself the governance of the good alone. And thus, when the entire body of our nature has been mingled with the divine and pure nature, that subjection said to be the Son’s takes place through us, since the subjection successfully accomplished in his body refers to him who worked in us the grace of subjection.” On Christ’s Subjection 16.

“For his handing over the kingdom to the Father has the same meaning as bringing all people to God, by which we have ‘access in one Spirit to the Father.’ Therefore, at the time when all enemies are under God’s feet by having received the divine footprint in themselves, and when death has been destroyed . . . , then by the subjection of all of us—not understood as slavish humiliation but as kingship, incorruption, and blessedness—the one who lives in us is said by Paul to be subjected to God. He is the one who perfects our good through himself and does what is well pleasing to himself in us.” OCS 28.

29 Bonaventure, Breviloquium III.5.3.

30 Stump, “Dante’s Hell,” 196.

31 For an Orthodox reflection on the sufferings of the damned, written from a free-will perspective, see Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2013), vol. 6. Stăniloae offers a more serious and honest reflection on the infernal torments than attempts to diminish and minimize their severity (Hell Lite).

32 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.23.3. Thomas is here speaking of predestination, but his statement applies equally to the free-will defense of hell.

33 If the dual account of divine and human agency is correct (summarized above), God can never, in fact, be a passive observer of the free acts of rational beings, including their sinful acts: he does not will sin but he necessarily wills the act of sin. If he did not, sin would not exist. As Aquinas writes: “The act of sin is a movement of the free will. Now the will of God is the cause of every movement, as Augustine declares (De Trin. iii. 4, 9). Therefore, God’s will is the cause of the act of sin” (ST I/II 79.2). See W. Matthews Grant, “Aquinas on How God Causes the Act of Sin Without Causing Sin Itself,” The Thomist 73 (2009): 455-96.

34 Hart, TASBS, 89-91.

35 Michael J. Dobbs, The Unchanging God of Love, 2nd ed. (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 208. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 74-76.

36 Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.3.

37 Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, 2nd ed. (New York: T&T Clark, 2016), p. 243.

38 Thomas Aquinas, ST I.19.6.

39 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection.

40 On the difference between unconditional and conditional love, see Kimel, 45-93.

41 That Christ rescues every soul in hades is asserted both by many of the Eastern Fathers and the liturgical hymnody of the Orthodox Church. See Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011).

42 John Allin, Christ Triumphant (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 36.

43 George MacDonald, Donal Grant, chap. 45.

* Those who have read my rejoinder to Fr Rooney’s critique of this article will notice that in my post-publication revisions I have incorporated material from it. This piece is now 2,300 words longer.

** I want to thank Tom Belt, whose assistance in the composition and revision of this article was invaluable. Needless to say, responsibility for all flaws and blunders rest completely with him. 😜

(Go to “Eleonore Stump and Hell”)