Is Universalism Incompatible with God’s Love? A Response to Eleonore Stump

by Thomas Talbott, Ph.D.

In an article entitled “The God of Love,”¹ Professor Eleonore Stump argues that universalism, understood as “the thesis that God unilaterally brings it about that all human beings are brought to heaven,” is “not only not a consequence of God’s love; it is not so much as compatible with God’s love.” A lot here depends, of course, on what it might mean to say that “God unilaterally [my emphasis] brings it about that all human beings are brought to heaven.” For even as someone who believes in the metaphysical necessity of universalism, that is not a claim I would likely ever endorse myself; and I’ll return to this issue at the end of these reflections. But I want to begin here with an important point of agreement. For, not surprisingly, I fully agree with Professor Stump’s emphatic rejection of perhaps the most popular understanding of hell to be found among the Christian laity: the idea that hell consists of something like an everlasting torture chamber.

According to Professor Stump, “not only is it deplorable to think of hell as God’s torture chamber”; there is in fact no “place where God exacts endless retributive punishment from those whose sins do not merit [and could not possibly merit] what they receive there.” God is not, after all, “an incompetent accountant, who assigns infinitely enduring pain for finite evil done.” Early on in her article, therefore, Professor Stump declares, “I will reject the popular conception of hell [as God’s torture chamber], which I repudiate, and assume instead the Thomistic conception” of hell. Beyond that—and this may come as a surprise to some—she also rejects the common supposition “that what is needed for salvation is a conscious commitment to a set of [correct] religious beliefs,” such as certain beliefs, I presume, concerning the nature and work of Jesus Christ. And finally, she thinks it “a confusion to think of hell as a place at all. It is rather the condition of a human being who repudiates love and so lacks [at least temporarily, I would add] even the will to have a good will.” So here is perhaps her most important paragraph on the topic of saving faith:

The necessary and sufficient condition for entry into heaven is the will of faith, that is, a will for a will that wills the good, that loves God’s goodness and rejects its own evil. . . . [T]his is a will that God infuses into everyone who does not reject it. To be a person in hell, then, is to be a person who lacks even the will to have a good will, and who lacks it because he spurns love. Such a person is not a basically nice person who unfortunately just happens not to be an adherent to Christian theological beliefs. Rather, a person in this condition shares something of the condition commonly attributed to Satan. As he is typically portrayed, Satan is characterized as an intelligent being who does not even want to have a will that wills the good.

Consider more closely now the crucial idea here that God infuses “the will of faith, that is, a will for a will that wills the good . . . into everyone who does not [freely] reject it.” If someone with free will does freely reject the will of faith within a given timeframe, what implication does that carry for later timeframes? Does it exclude any chance of a later change of heart in which this same person freely chooses to repent and hence freely chooses to cease rejecting the will of faith? If so, then in what sense is the idea of someone continuing to reject the will of faith both freely and forever even a coherent idea? Instead of addressing such questions directly, Professor Stump compares the condition of those who reject the will of faith to that of Satan himself: “As he is typically portrayed,” she writes in the above quotation, “Satan is characterized as an intelligent being who does not even want to have a will that wills the good.” But that merely raises a further question in my mind. Many Christians believe that, having rebelled decisively against God, Satan’s condition is now hopeless in this sense: at no time in the future will he ever again have the power to repent or to have a change of heart, so to speak. More specifically, at no time in the future will it be psychologically possible for Satan to cease rejecting the will of faith. One might even wonder whether God now has any love for Satan at all or makes any grace available for him to reject. So given such a picture, in what sense is Satan now a free moral agent even if he was such at the time of his original rebellion?

Now whatever view one might hold on the issue of whether God’s love extends even to Satan himself, Professor Stump makes abundantly clear her own acceptance of the view that God’s love does indeed extend to every human being. She thus considers a man whom she calls “Jerome” and imagines him to be an example of someone “who permanently rejects God’s love.” Accordingly, Jerome “lacks union with God,” she suggests, “just because Jerome himself refuses it.” And that raises the question of how we are to understand the claim that Jerome (or anyone else) “permanently rejects God’s love”? Some have speculated that a hardened sinner like Jerome might opt for annihilation as a way of finally and conclusively rejecting God’s love for him. But even though Professor Stump never addresses directly the idea of a self-chosen annihilation, she nonetheless rejects the idea, even as I do, that God would ever annihilate someone whom he truly loves. She thus writes concerning Jerome, “There is nothing [left] to love if God annihilates him.”

So if a perfectly loving God would never allow someone he loves to opt for a freely chosen annihilation, why suppose that he would permit someone like Jerome to continue freely rejecting his love forever? And why cannot God eventually correct Jerome simply by permitting him to experience, if necessary, the very condition of separation that he has freely and confusedly chosen for himself? The answers to such questions no doubt require a more complete explanation and a more complete account of free will than proponents of a free will theodicy of hell have typically provided.

Rationality and the Limits of Possible Freedom

Most proponents of a free will theodicy of hell accept, even as I do, some form of a so-called libertarian conception of free will, according to which free will is incompatible with the thesis of determinism. For according to the latter thesis, every event that occurs in time, including every choice that you or I might make, will be the product of causal conditions that lie either in the distant past before we were born or in eternity itself.

Every choice that you or I might make, in other words, will be the product of conditions over which we have never had any control whatsoever. So the libertarian conception of free will is clearly incompatible with the thesis of determinism. But most libertarians rarely take as seriously as they should important arguments for the conclusion that free will is also incompatible with indeterminism (understood as sheer arbitrariness or random chance);² and if free will should turn out to be incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, as some have claimed it is, then in what sense do we even have a coherent concept here?³ Quite apart from the issue of coherence, moreover, the assertion of at least some indeterminism in human behavior hardly provides, all by itself, a sufficiently complete account of human free will. As I have written elsewhere:

For not just any uncaused event, or just any agent-caused choice, or just any randomly generated selection between alternatives will qualify as a free choice of the relevant kind. At the very least, moral freedom also requires a minimal degree of rationality on the part of the choosing agent, including an ability to learn from experience, an ability to discern [normal] reasons for acting, and a capacity for moral improvement. With good reason, therefore, do we exclude small children, the severely brain damaged, paranoid schizophrenics, and even dogs from the class of free moral agents. For, however causally undetermined some of their behaviors might be, they all lack some part of the rationality required to qualify as free moral agents.⁴

The threshold of rationality that moral freedom requires is also relevant to the coherence issue mentioned above. For it seems as if, on the one hand, reason must proceed in accordance with its own self-determined principles and canons; hence, a reasoning mind could never function properly in a closed deterministic system in which every belief someone holds today is the product of causal conditions that already existed in the distant past. As Warner Wick once put it, “all talk of truth . . . would be utterly pointless if there were nothing to it but causal influences that induced me to say or think this, while causing you to opine that”;⁵ or, as C. S. Lewis once put it, “rational thought is not part of the system of Nature. Within each man there must be an area (however small) of activity which is outside or independent of her. In relation to Nature, rational thought goes on ‘of its own accord’ or exists ‘on its own.”⁶ But it also seems as if, on the other hand, the ability to reason with some degree of accuracy, given the available information one has when choosing between alternatives, is also what distinguishes an undetermined choice from a purely arbitrary event or that which is wholly a matter of random chance. Any undetermined choice, especially when made in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, or even serious delusion, will no doubt include at least some elements of random chance. Even then, however, the relevant rationality is what enables one to learn important lessons from one’s mistakes, from one’s miscalculations, and, most important of all, from the consequences of choices that one makes despite knowing that they are morally wrong.

So are there good reasons for Christians to believe that anyone who is intelligent or rational enough to qualify as a free moral agent could permanently and freely reject the love of God? I seriously doubt it. For consider a two-fold assumption that seems implicit in many Christian teachings and exhortations: first, that the highest possible good for created persons (true blessedness, if you will) requires a proper relationship (or even a kind of union) with their Creator, and second, that a complete severance from the divine nature, without even an implicit experience of God’s love, would be a truly horrific experience. As C. S. Lewis once wrote concerning the divine nature, “Union with that Nature is bliss and separation from it [an objective] horror.”⁷ If that is true, then it seems quite impossible for any sinner to continue freely rejecting God’s love forever.

Here is why. At any given time T, a sinner like Jerome either remains rational enough to qualify as a free moral agent or he does not. If he does not so qualify, then two consequences follow:

1. He is no longer in a position to reject God’s love freely, and
2. God can restore the required rationality without in any way interfering with a nonexistent freedom.

But if he does so qualify, then God can indeed correct him, as a last resort if necessary, simply by honoring his own free choices and allowing him to experience the very horrific condition of separation that he has freely and confusedly chosen for himself. That, by the way, is also how I would interpret the New Testament image of the outer darkness (where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth). This image, as I interpret it, represents separation from the divine nature as far as this is metaphysically possible short of annihilation, and the experience of such total separation would exclude even an experience of a physical environment or of interacting with other people. It would be as if one were existing alone in sheer nothingness. For when Paul quoted the poet Epimenides of Crete in order to make the point that “in him [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), he seems to imply that God is not only our moral and spiritual environment, but our physical environment as well. In any case, here is how George MacDonald describes the loneliness and terror of the outer darkness in his great sermon “The Consuming Fire”:

Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God—that one living death. . . . For let a man think and care ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him—making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though he knows it not. But when God withdraws from a man [or permits the man to withdraw from God] as far as that can be without the man’s ceasing to be; when the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in a ceaseless vertigo of existence upon the verge of the gulf of his being, without support, without refuge, without aim, without end . . . with no inbreathing of joy, with nothing [including the faintest experience of love] to make life good, then will he listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door.⁷

If MacDonald was right about this, as I believe he was, then the outer darkness just is the condition of separation that those hardened sinners who reject God and his love have confusedly chosen for themselves. So I see no way to avoid the following conclusion. For as long as those sinners who continue rejecting God’s love remain rational enough to qualify as being morally responsible for their actions, experiencing the outer darkness would shatter every illusion that some good (or desirable end) is available apart from God. It would finally elicit a cry for help, therefore, of a kind that, however faint, is just what God needs in order to begin and eventually to complete the process of reconciliation.

John Milton’s Portrait of Satan

Return now to the issue of whether God’s love, as well as an offer of forgiveness, extends not only to every human being, but even to Satan himself. Like Professor Stump, I am a fan of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and I certainly agree with her that in this great epic poem hell turns out to be more than a place of punishment; it is, more basically, the unavoidable condition of someone who rejects God and his love. For my own part, however, I am especially impressed by how incredibly confused and deluded Satan is in Book I, by how many delusions he has lost by Book IV, and by how close he comes to repentance here as well. But even though Milton’s portrayal of Satan seems to me as unrealistic in the end as his depiction of immortals fighting each other with swords, cannons, and the like, it is nonetheless enormously insightful in specific contexts. Milton’s artistic challenge was to portray Satan as both the Arch Fiend (virtually the incarnation of pure evil), on the one hand, and as a free and morally responsible agent, on the other. That he was unable to unite both portraits into a believable whole in no way diminishes his artistic achievement.

So consider first the wholly arrogant and utterly defiant character in Book I, where we find his so-called “heroic speech,” part of which so many like to quote: “To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: / Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (Bk. I, lines 262-263). Remarkably, right after being driven out of heaven by superior power, Satan then entered a place he calls hell exclaiming: “Hail horrors, hail / Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell. / Receive thy new Possessor” (250-252). But from whence comes the absurd assumption that anyone other than God can rule in hell or have any control over it at all? As Satan later comes to recognize, moreover, he can have no control, apart from repentance, over what happens to him in hell or anywhere else. Still, he does have control over his own mind (and his continuing defiance), and that seems to be the source of his confusion here. He thus describes himself as

One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (252-255)

Satan’s control over his own mind and his ability to cling to an attitude of defiance is evidently, then, the source of his illusion that he “Can make a Heav’n of Hell,” with the illusion that “Here at least / We shall be free” (258-259), and with the illusion that “Here [in hell] we may reign secure” (261). Worse yet, he seems totally oblivious of the fact that, by rejecting God and his love altogether, he is in effect choosing the outer darkness (where he would have no one to rule over and no environment of any kind to experience). It is a tribute to Milton’s art, however, that by Book IV Satan has already lost most of the illusions that made his “heroic speech” of Book I possible in the first place.

So now consider, by way of contrast, the more pitiful (and even human) character that Satan displays in Book IV. Here an awakened conscience, so essential to moral freedom, leads him into despair. As Milton puts it as part of the narrative, “Now conscience wakes despair / That slumber’d, wakes the bitter memory / Of what he was” (Bk. IV, lines 23-25). His awakened conscience also leads Satan to acknowledge the extent to which “Pride and worse Ambition threw me down” (40). He even upbraids himself for being so stupid in “boasting I could subdue / th’ Omnipotent” (86-87) and also acknowledges the extent of his own guilt: “Ah wherefore! He [God] deserv’d no such return / From me, whom he created what I was / In that bright eminence” (42-45). A little later we encounter the lament that Professor Stump quotes so appropriately:

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell. (73-75)

But in addition to that lament, I think it important to point out that, because Satan has not yet lost his rationality altogether, he seriously contemplates the idea of repenting, as if this might be a genuine possibility for him: “O then at last relent: Is there no place / Left for repentance, none for Pardon left?” (79-80). Granted, he still retains the illusion, which would itself easily be shattered in the outer darkness, that he can continue to rule over the legions of fallen angels in hell, perhaps even forever, and to receive worship and praise from them in return. That illusion together with the fear of being shamed in front of those he had deceived is simply too much for him to endure, and he thus finds himself unwilling to repent. It seems to me, however, that had Milton’s art not been the slave of his theology, perhaps Satan would indeed have repented in Book IV. That certainly seems to have been the direction he was heading.

Recall, in any case, Professor Stump’s description of Satan as “an intelligent being who does not even want to have a will that wills the good.” How should we understand such a description? Is there some intelligible motive or some perceived benefit for oneself that someone might have for not even wanting “a will that wills the good”? What Milton’s portrait of Satan in fact illustrates, as I see it, is the sheer irrationality of not even wanting such a will. It also illustrates the essential role that ignorance, misperception, and, above all, serious delusions concerning the conditions of one’s own happiness must play in any intelligible decision to reject God and his love. As I have again written elsewhere:

But these very conditions [e. g., ignorance and various delusions] are also obstacles to free choice of the relevant kind. If I am ignorant of, or deceived about, the true consequences of my choices, then I am in no position to embrace those consequences freely; and if I suffer from an illusion that conceals from me the true nature of God, or the true import of union with God, then I am again in no position to reject him freely. I may reject a caricature of God, or a false conception, but that would be a far cry from rejecting the true God himself. Accordingly, the very conditions that render a less than fully informed decision to reject God intelligible also render it less than fully free.⁸

This also illustrates an important asymmetry in my own concept of moral freedom, which always requires that one has surpassed a minimal threshold of rationality. But it does not always require a power to act otherwise, and this is where the asymmetry arises. When one acts in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception—as we all do at the beginning of our earthly lives—and ends up acting wrongly or just choosing less than the best available option, moral freedom always requires a power to act otherwise. But when one acts in a context of full clarity and ends up doing the right thing for the right reasons, moral freedom does not always require a power to act otherwise; and I’ll give three examples in the following section.⁹

But because I have discussed each of these examples in a previous entry (see “James Dominic Rooney’s Critique of Universalism,” posted about a year ago on November 20, 2022), some readers of that entry may find the following section a bit repetitive, even though there are some differences, and may want to skip over it.

Freedom without a Power to Act Otherwise: Three Examples

My first example is almighty God himself. As the most rational of all possible beings, God never acts in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, or delusion; to the contrary, whenever there is a best thing to do in a given set of circumstances, God always knows exactly what it is. And because he always acts in a context of such full clarity, he is in fact the freest of all possible beings. According to Titus 1:2, for example, God cannot lie. Or, if you prefer, it is a necessary truth that he never lies. It is likewise a necessary truth, surely, that God never breaks a promise. Are we to conclude, therefore, that once God makes a promise, he no longer acts freely when he keeps that promise, or that he never acts freely when he communicates a truth (rather than a lie) to someone? Of course not! For as Edward Wierenga once pointed out in an important article on this topic, the stipulation that divine freedom always requires a power to act otherwise “amounts to saying that God is free only when it does not matter what he does.” Why? Because such a stipulation only leaves “room for God’s freedom in circumstances in which any choice he makes is on a par with any other, where he might as well choose blindly or randomly, and that is not a significant amount of freedom.”¹⁰

Similar remarks apply to the perfected saints in heaven, which is my second example of when freedom does not require a psychological possibility of acting otherwise. These perfected saints make choices and continue acting in a context of full clarity concerning both the consequences of remaining united with God and the consequences of rejecting his love. Having experienced firsthand union with the divine nature and the bliss that this entails, they also have a clear vision, uncorrupted by delusions of any kind, of why it would be self-defeating and utterly irrational for them to reject God’s love. It is no longer even psychologically possible, therefore, that they would intentionally perform such an irrational action as that. In fact, insofar as acting in accordance with one’s own rational judgment concerning the best action in a given situation is a sufficient condition of acting freely in that situation, as I have argued in greater detail elsewhere,¹¹ a power to act otherwise would simply be a power not to meet that sufficient condition of acting freely.

Finally, as my third example, consider a young mother who is filled with love for her newborn baby. Given her motherly instincts and her love, she would no doubt find the idea of abandoning her beloved baby in a garbage dump somewhere absolutely unthinkable and would likewise find it psychologically impossible not to care for her baby in any given situation where continuing to do so remained an available option for her. If one should say, as I do, that she continues to act freely in the matter of caring for her baby, one can also say, perhaps, that such a free action is compatible with its being determined by her present desires, intentions, and state of mind. In no way does it follow, however, that any of her present actions are produced by a chain of causes that originated either in the distant past long before she was born or in eternity itself. In fact, she might not even have been born herself had slightly different choices been made (concerning the precise timing of a sexual encounter, for example) the night she was conceived.

So the bottom line is that moral freedom never requires a power to act otherwise unless someone suffers from serious delusions concerning the best course of action in a given situation. Such delusions are impossible in the case of God, are no longer possible in the case of a perfected saint’s choosing to remain united with God, and are incompatible with anyone acting in a context of full clarity concerning the best course of action or the right thing to do in a given situation.

Must an Infinitely Resourceful God Act Unilaterally in Order to Save All?

Return now to the suggestion that, according to universalism, “God unilaterally brings it about that all human beings are brought to heaven.” Just how should we understand the term “unilateral” in the present context? One way would be to presuppose a rigorous theological determinism in which God causally determines, either directly or indirectly through secondary causes, every event that occurs and every state of affairs that exists in his creation. And this would surely imply that, for anyone who ends up in heaven, God unilaterally brings it about that this person is brought to heaven. As Professor Stump herself points out, “If God had not willed to create human beings with free will, then all states of affairs would have been up to God alone”;¹² and as I have already indicated above, I fully agree that no morally significant free will could exist in the context of such theological determinism. So is Professor Stump here contending that universalism could be a metaphysical necessity only in the context of a rigorous theological determinism? That strikes me as a gigantic non-sequitur.

Here is a very different picture. Suppose that among the millions upon millions of created persons God must eventually deal with millions upon millions of unique spiritual needs; suppose further that, as created beings, our own free choices, often made in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and even serious delusion, typically determine the precise nature of our own spiritual needs at any given time; and suppose, finally, that God will not continue forever protecting hardened sinners from the consequences of their own free choices. If necessary, in other words, God can always permit hardened sinners to experience the very life of estrangement and misery that they have freely and confusedly chosen for themselves. For the only alternative would be for God himself to interfere with the freedom of hardened sinners by never permitting them to achieve what they think they want: a complete separation from the divine nature. That is also why our worst choices are sometimes the most useful to God in teaching us the lessons that we ultimately need to learn. It also explains why the delusions that lead to a rejection of God and his love cannot endure forever in anyone who remains rational enough to qualify as a free moral agent. Here is how I have summed it all up elsewhere:

So in that way, the consequences of our free choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, are a source of revelation; they reveal sooner or later—in the next life, if not in this one—both the horror of separation from God and the bliss of union with him. And that is why the end is foreordained: all paths finally lead to the same destination, the end of reconciliation, though some are longer, windier, and a lot more painful than others.¹³

Now even though I here summarize my own view, I am neither defending it in the present context nor asking anyone else to accept it. For my intention in the present context is merely to draw a contrast between my own view and that of a theological determinist. If God responds to each of us differently depending upon our unique spiritual needs; if our own free choices help to determine what these spiritual needs in fact are; and if, beyond that, God employs our own free choices as a means of teaching us the lessons we need to learn and of “bringing us to heaven” in the end, would that qualify as a case where “God unilaterally brings it about that all human beings are brought to heaven”? That is not how I would ever employ the term “unilaterally” in the present context.

Footnnotes

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

2 For some of these arguments, see Thomas Talbott, Understanding the Free Will Controversy: Thinking through a Philosophical Quagmire (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022), Chapter 3 “Indeterminism and Random Chance.”

3 See, for example, Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

4 Thomas Talbott, “Universalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, J. Walls (ed.), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 452,

5 Warner Wick. “Truth’s Debt to Freedom,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 73 (1964): 535. All of the italics belong to Wick.

6 C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 27.

7 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1955), p. 232.

8 George MacDonald, “The Consuming Fire,” in Unspoken Sermons (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 2004), p. 31.

9 Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), p. 174.

10 For a similar view, see Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

11 Edward Wierenga, “The Freedom of God, Faith and Philosophy, 19 (2002): 433.

12 See Chapter 4 “Rationality and the Nature of Moral Freedom” in Understanding the Free Will Controversy.

13 Of course someone could believe that even apart from the issue of free will, our physical universe nonetheless has a good deal of indeterminism in it.

14 Inescapable Love of God, pp. 193-194.