Once Loved Always Loved is a large book (10″×7″) consisting of seven lengthy chapters totaling 355 pages. Its chapters average over 50 pages of mucho words. The book would be considerably longer if it was smaller in size. I share this otherwise trivial information because it impacts my review. In this series I hope to devote one blog article to each chapter. In order to prevent the articles from becoming tomes in themselves, I will have to give short shrift to one or more sections of each chapter or skip over them altogether, as you will soon see. Consider yourselves forewarned. 😀
If we wish to understand the final end of humanity, states Andrew Hronich, we must apprehend the significance of God’s initial act of divine creation. From out of nothing the divine Creator has freely brought the cosmos into being. He was not compelled by either internal or external forces to create. The world might not have been; God might have chosen otherwise. “Is the act of creation,” Hronich asks, “a display of the benevolence of God or of extreme malevolence?” How we answer this question will shape our interpretation of God’s plan of redemption in Jesus Christ. “Our view of the Alpha will ultimately determine our view of the Omega.”1 We begin with the beginning of the story; only thus will we understand the concluding chapter and the story as a whole. If God has freely and intentionally spoken the universe into existence (“Let there be . . . “), then it is itself theophany, a historical revelation of the Creator in movement to final consummation. But our cognitive process also works in the reverse: comprehension of the Omega necessarily informs our comprehension of the Alpha. The end discloses the eternal motivation for divine creation. “The rationale for the first cause,” explains Hronich, “is the final end that prompts it.”2 So it would seem that beginning and end must be thought together, with the consequence that all assertions about the final future are necessarily assertions about God and his character. Or as one biblical scholar puts it: “All eschatological statements can finally be reduced to, and their validity tested by, sentences beginning: ‘In the end, God . . .'”3 To speak of the eschaton is to speak of the God who eternally wills a specific end of the world: “every statement about God is ipso facto an assertion about the end, a truth about eschatology.”4 All theology is eschatology; all eschatology, theology.
Yet how do we know what the final end will be? Here Hronich displays his evangelical background. We must turn to the Holy Scriptures, he tells us. Our insight into the end comes from our exegesis of the “propositional statements which God makes concerning Himself”5—and specifically from our exegesis of those statements that speak of the incarnate Word of God. The divine plan for the world is disclosed in a single word: Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen, is the self-revelation of the Creator and thus the revelation of the final end. He was “always God’s plan to sum up and unite humanity in Himself.”6 To quote Robinson again:
Christians have seen the end of the Lord. To them eschatology is neither the peering of curiosity nor the prising of argument into a future state. The telos has been declared in the fait accompli of Jesus Christ. In Him “it is finished,” into Him all things have been gathered up. Whenever the finis may come, there can be no other end to the universe: God will be all in all.7
The Last Judgment is nothing more nor less than God bringing to completion his redemptive work in Jesus Christ. But if Jesus is himself the consummation of this work, then questions are immediately raised concerning the traditional doctrine of eternal damnation. How can hell be? Has God failed to faithfully enact his good will? Is he a weak or flawed Creator? Is Jesus truly good?
At this point Hronich makes a curious move. Quite honestly, I was hoping for a longer elaboration of eschatology, yet he breaks off from his instructive eschatological reflections and jumps to a discussion of divine foreknowledge and the philosophical proposal that goes under the name of Molinism. The logic of this shift initially confused me, but perhaps the connection lies between the cosmic conclusion as eternally willed by God and his prevision of this conclusion. In any case, as we recall from the first article in this series, Hronich claims that the premises of the common defenses of hell ultimately lead to universal salvation, and he specifically names Molinism as one such defense.
Molinists maintain that God possesses what they call middle knowledge: prior to his creation of the world, God knows all contingent truths and counter-factuals regarding what free creatures would and will do in all possible historical scenarios. In his middle knowledge, God then chooses one possible world to actualize. Molinist perditionists struggle to explain why God would foreknowingly choose to create a world in which the eternal damnation of a portion of humanity is a metaphysical necessity rather than creating one in which all will be saved.
Hronich explores the Molinist defense of hell in depth, but I lack the competence to comment on the accuracy and cogency of his complex analysis. Our author clearly deems the Molinist defense of hell flawed, if not metaphysically and morally absurd. Bottomline: even if the Molinist attribution to God of a perfect comprehension of free futuribles is plausible—and many philosophers find the notion of middle knowledge incoherent—is it plausible to think that, out of the billions and billions of possible worlds, no possible world exists in which all human beings will, in their grace-enabled freedom, choose to embrace the divine gift of salvation, either in this life or the next? Molinists do not and cannot know that such a possible world does not exist. They only have their dogmas and intuitions. We may, therefore, reasonably posit the existence of a possible world in which all are saved. If so, then surely the God who desires the salvation of all (1 Tim 2:4) would choose to actualize it. Our present world is that world.
On the other hand, if a universalist possible world does not exist (William Lane Craig calls it transworld damnation), then God is faced with two mutually exclusive choices:
- to not create the world, thus voiding “ahead of time” the infernalist conclusion, or
- to create one of the possible worlds in which hell is an inevitability.
A truly good God, Hronich argues, will of course choose the former, thus obviating further discussion, as there is no one around to debate the wisdom of his choice. If he chooses, has chosen, the latter, then we may reasonably infer that our Creator is a moral monster and is reprehensibly responsible for the interminable suffering of the lost. As Gordon Knight observes:
[According to Molinism] God knows that in creating many of God’s creatures, he is ensuring that they will spend eternity in hell. True, God does not causally determine the choices that lead to the damnation of these persons. Nevertheless, the counterfactuals of freedom ensure that if these individuals are created, they will be damned. Therefore, merely in the act of creation God is guaranteeing for many of God’s creatures an eternal life that is much worse than never having existed at all. . . . On this Molinist scheme God does not force anyone’s decision, but this does not prevent God from being utterly manipulative in his attitude towards creation. Let us allow that Bob would freely reject Christ in any possible circumstance. Let us further allow . . . that in such rejection, freely made, Bob is responsible for his own fate. Neither of these allowances justify Craig’s claim that a Molinist, damnation-friendly deity can also consistently be viewed as good and loving towards each of God’s creatures. For, while in this example Bob is responsible, so too is God. One does not, in general, lose all responsibility for an action just because it involves another person’s free choice. If I knowingly give the keys of a car to Sally, who happens to be drunk, I share a responsibility in the outcome, even though it was Sally’s free decision to drive while inebriated. Likewise God, in creating persons whom he knows will never accept Christ, shares a responsibility for the resultant suffering in hell.8
I would only add that God does not just share responsibility for hell; he is directly and exclusively responsible, for he has created a world which will necessarily produce hell. The libertarian choices of human beings is quite irrelevant to the equation.
Yet the God of the gospel is not a moral monster; in his creative and redeeming love, he only wills the good; therefore this world of ours is the world in which all human beings are destined for glory—if Molinism is true. Q.E.D.
After dealing with Molinism, Hronich moves to a discussion of open theism—the view that God does not infallibly know the outcomes of free rational beings. He knows possibilities, probabilities, likely trajectories; but does not possess certain foreknowledge of the future. Open theist defenders of hell affirm the infinite love of the Creator but insist on the possibility that human beings may in the end definitively choose eternal separation from the God who is love. God respects this final choice because of the value he puts on libertarian freedom. Loving communion requires free consent; it cannot be coerced. Hronich criticizes this position along the lines laid out by Thomas Talbott: a truly loving God will not allow his creatures to do irreparable harm to themselves and will thus intervene to protect them from themselves. If necessary, he will allow them to suffer the consequences of alienation from God (let’s call it “cold turkey”). Eventually they will realize that the hell they have chosen cannot bring them happiness, and they will turn to God for their salvation. God will then deliver them from their ignorance and heal their disordered desires, thus making possible a truly free, rational, and wholehearted decision to embrace the good and bliss they truly desire for themselves, which is identical to the good and bliss God desires for them.
Hronich then transitions into a discussion of God’s universal Fatherhood, citing various biblical passages. He believes that an affirmation of the universal fatherhood is necessary for a right understanding of God and his care for humanity. In the words of Thomas Allin:
The essence of Christianity perishes in the virtual denial of any true Fatherhood of our race on God’s part. Follow out this thought, for it is of primary importance. We lose sight of the value of the individual soul, when dealing with the countless millions who have peopled this earth and passed away. What is one among so many? we are tempted to say, forgetting that the value of each human being is not in the least thereby altered. Each soul is of infinite value, as if it stood alone, in the eyes of God its Father.
And more than this, we are altogether apt to forget another vital point, to forget whose the loss is, if any one soul perishes—it is the man’s own loss, says our popular creed. But is this all? No, a thousand times no. It is God’s loss: it is the Father who loses his child. The straying sheep of the parable is the Great Shepherd’s loss [Luke 15:4-7]: the missing coin is the Owner’s loss [Luke 15:8-10]. In this very fact lies the pledge that he will seek on and on till he find it [Luke 15:4]. For only think of the value he sets on each soul. He has stamped each in his own image: has conferred on each a share of his own immortality— of himself: do but realize these things; put them into plain words till you come thoroughly to believe them; and you must see how impossible it becomes to credit that unworthy theology, which tells you that such a Father can ever permit the work of his own fingers, his own offspring, to perish finally.9
I personally find Hronich’s presentation unsatisfactory, as he fails to interpret the divine Fatherhood in terms of the Holy Trinity. God is first and foremost Father because he is the eternal Father of his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. It is only by our incorporation into the sonship of the Son (however and whenever that incorporation occurs) that God “becomes” our Father. This is the revelation given in the New Testament, upon which the assertion of universal divine Fatherhood rests: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt 11:27). Hronich’s intention is good. He wants us to see that the Creator is a good father who only wills the good of his children. As his children, we are of infinite value to him. I concur, but to talk about the divine Fatherhood apart from Jesus the Son is misleading at best and unitarian at worst. Hronich’s case would have been considerably stronger if he had grounded it in its proper Trinitarian context. But I will say no more and move on to the next section.
The concluding section is titled “Concerning Eternal Bliss.” This is the strongest section of chapter one. Given Hronich’s introductory comments on eschatology, it makes sense for him to conclude the chapter with a discussion of the bliss of the saints. How can they enjoy perfect and supreme happiness, he asks, while knowing that their family and friends (and even strangers) are suffering the torments of hell? Yes, the damned are wicked and evil, thoroughly and irredeemably entrenched in their malevolence, anger, pride, lust, and malignant narcissism—yet they suffer intolerably, interminably. How can their agony not touch the hearts of the redeemed? Yet the doctrine of hell insists that the saints are and must be indifferent to their torment. Their unbounded bliss has no room for pity, grief, and sorrow. Such emotions would only diminish their ecstasy. Readers of Thomas Talbott and Eric Reitan, as well as readers of this blog, will recognize the argument.10 It constitutes one of the most powerful objections to the doctrine of eternal perdition in the universalist arsenal, and our author elaborates it admirably.
Hronich begins his presentation with a powerful statement by the famous 20th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher:
If we now consider eternal damnation as it is related to eternal bliss, it is easy to see that once the former exists, the latter can exist no longer. Even if externally the two realms were quite separate, yet so high a degree of bliss is not as such compatible with entire ignorance of others’ misery, the more so if the separation itself is the result purely of a general judgment, at which both sides were present, which means conscious each of the other. Now if we attribute to the blessed a knowledge of the state of the damned, it cannot be a knowledge unmixed with sympathy. If the perfecting of our nature is not to move backwards, sympathy must be such as to embrace the whole human race, and when extended to the damned must of necessity be a disturbing element in bliss, all the more that, unlike similar feelings in this life, it is untouched by hope.11
Schleiermacher is responding to a long tradition in Western Christianity that the joy of the saints is heightened by seeing the excruciating, but deserved, sufferings of the reprobate. “O the mercy and grace of God, for he has saved us from this terrible doom!” Jonathan Edwards well captures the sentiment:
When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different front it! When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!
This will give them a joyful sense of the grace and love of God to them, because hereby they will see hew great a benefit they have by it. When they shall see the dreadful miseries of the damned, and consider that they deserved the same misery, and that it was sovereign grace, and nothing else, which made them so much to differ from the damned, that, if it had not been for that, they would have been in the same condition; but that God from all eternity was pleased to set his love upon them, that Christ hath laid down his life for them, and hath made them thus gloriously happy for ever, O how will they admire that dying love of Christ, which has redeemed then} from so great a misery, and purchased for them so great happiness, and has so distinguished them from others of their fellow-creatures! How joyfully will they sing to God and the Lamb, when they behold this!12
Are we not horrified when we read these words, and if we are not, what does that say about the state of our souls? Are not the damned our brothers and sisters for whom Christ died on the cross? Are they not our neighbors whom our Lord bids us to love as we love ourselves? Or does the nature of love change in heaven? In her autobiography, St Teresa of Avila shares a vision of hell granted her by the Lord. She expresses gratitude that God has delivered her from the terrible fate of the lost, but then goes on to say:
This vision, too, was the cause of the very deep distress which I experience because of the great number of souls who are bringing damnation upon themselves. . . It also inspired me with fervent impulses for the good of souls: for I really believe that, to deliver a single one of them from such dreadful tortures, I would willingly die many deaths. After all, if we see anyone on earth who is especially dear to us suffering great trial or pain, our very nature seems to move us to compassion, and if his sufferings are severe they oppress us too. Who, then, could bear to look upon a soul’s endless sufferings in that most terrible trial of all? No heart could possibly endure it without great affliction. For even earthly suffering, which after all, as we know, has a limit and will end with death, moves us to deep compassion. And that other suffering has no limit: I do not know how we can look on so calmly and see the devil carrying off as many souls as he does daily.13
Is this not the nature of holy charity, a willingness to offer oneself as a sacrifice to deliver others from their sin and suffering? No, love does not change in heaven. Unfortunately, St Teresa could not see that her response of compassion must also be true of the saints who enjoy the beatific vision.
Hronich surveys the various attempts by Calvinists and Arminians to lessen the force of the heavenly bliss objection. He finds the arguments intellectually wanting and morally abhorrent and advances morally compelling refutation. Here moral intuitions divide, and the reader is confronted with a choice: Which God do we believe in, will we believe in?
Footnotes
[1] Andrew Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved (2023), 1.
[2] Ibid.
[3] John A. T. Robinson, In the End, God, special ed. (2011), 23; quoted in Hronich, 2.
[4] Robinson, 29; quoted in Hronich, 2.
[5] Hronich, 2.
[6] Ibid., 3.
[7] Robinson, 93; quoted in Hronich, 3.
[8] Gordon Knight, “Molinism and Hell,” in The Problem of Hell, ed. Joel Buenting (2008), 112; partly quoted in Hronich, 13.
[9] Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant, annotated ed. (2015), 71; partly quoted in Hronich, 39. Also see Thomas Erskine’s remarks on the divine Fatherhood in his letter to J. Craig.
[10] See “Eternal Damnation and God’s Love for the Blessed.”
[11] Friedrich Schleiemacher, The Christian Faith, 2nd ed., ed. H. R. MacIntosh and J. S. Stewart (1928), 721; quoted in Hronich, 33-34.
[12] Jonathan Edwards, “The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous; or, The Torments of the Wicked in Hell, No Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven,” The Works of President Edwards (1817), IV:512; partly quoted in Hronich, 34. Now contrast this response to the vision of the damned:
“When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand what St Paul meant when he said, ‘I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren.’ But he will no longer understand those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each other, ‘Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbours no more.’ St Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God’s glory as for the man’s sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?–who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?” George MacDonald, “Love Thy Neighbor,” Unspoken Sermons, Series One.
[13] Teresa of Avila, Autobiography, chap. XXXII.
(Go to chapter two)