Making Nonsense of Hell
Amanda Marcotte, who’s never met an opposing argument she couldn’t caricature, approaches Ross Douthat’s case for the existence of Hell without showing the slightest desire to understand what he’s saying, opting instead to interpret his arguments and analogies in terms of her misguided beliefs about what makes us theists tick and her dismissive view of all-things-not-her-worldview.
Not content to call Douthat wrong or the idea of Hell nonsense, she has instead fashioned a world in which Douthat is a fanatic, morally childish “religious authoritarian,” who, by publicly pondering Hell, has “revealed himself to be a foot-stomping toddler with sadistic control issues, as opposed to someone with a mind sharp enough to deserve a well-paid column at one of the world’s largest newspapers.”
Hell is easy to dismiss as stupidity for Marcotte because, as she declares, “it is true that a god who would allow people to go to hell is evil, full stop. You cannot believe god is good and would allow a hell.” Full stop, now! No consideration of thousands of years of argumentation concluding the opposite. That a well-paid columnist at one of the world’s largest newspapers taps into a long intellectual tradition is just one more revelation (the good kind) that he’s a sadistic toddler. Why? Because Amanda Marcotte, scourge of authoritarianism everywhere, authoritatively says so.
Marcotte continues her creative interpretation in the framing of his arguments. She absurdly assumes that Douthat believes in Hell as a place for people unlike him, but also as a fantastical idea people like him use to control others. And where Douthat sees the possibility of enslavement to glands, genes, and sin, Marcotte sees only an obsession with sex and preventing people from experiencing unauthorized orgasms.
A question for Marcotte: if Hell is an invention of religious authoritarians fashioned to control the masses, why does the chief international rival of Wolfram & Hart, that exemplar of religious authoritarianism called the Roman Catholic Church, not bother naming names of Hell’s denizens? Sure history has no short supply of public champions of unauthorized sex, and yet to this day the Catholic Church presumes that no particular human person resides in eternal torment. It names saints, yet fails to name the unsaved. Perhaps there’s more to this Hell business than meets the eye of the panda?
Douthat says: “If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either.”
It seems to me that this presumes life is not a gift, but a test that you either pass or fail. If you pass, then your existence is a gift. If you fail, then your existence is a curse.
And of course who would make an informed choice in favor of eternal torment and against paradise?
And of course who would make an informed choice in favor of eternal torment and against paradise?
Well, according to a traditional account: Lucifer, for one.
I don’t follow Douthat’s logic in the sentence you quote. However, a life in Hell doesn’t cease to be a gift; it just becomes a gift that’s wasted.
You have to admit that Douthat is not exactly at his best in this IMO rather poorly argued opinion piece. On the other hand whom is he kidding – this sort of fundamental question does not exactly lend itself to be tackled comprehensively within a NYT column or a blog reply.
But yes I doubt most of us around here would have the stomach to fully embrace the glorious 1950 version of hell that Mr. Douthat seem to miss so dearly .
I found Douthat’s arguments less than satisfying, yes.
“And of course who would make an informed choice in favor of eternal torment and against paradise?”
Don’t we all know people who voluntarily choose to be miserable instead of accepting the joy that is all around them? I’ve done so many times myself. Just click around – the blogosphere abounds with such folks.
Although is is sad, it is not difficult to envision lots of people who refuse to make the right choice when offered paradise.
Have you ever known anyone who chose eternal torment by fire? Or even, say, a week of being slow roasted? People do not choose extended periods of intense agony. And nobody can hold up under torture for an extended period of time. It’s one thing to nurse a grievance or stubbornly refuse to let go of things that are causing you to be unhappy, but I still maintain that nobody would chose eternal torment. Nobody!
I concur with David. Nobody would freely choose hell, being fully informed of the consequences of their choices. In that sense, free will is essentially a snare.
“it is true that a god who would allow people to go to hell is evil, full stop. You cannot believe god is good and would allow a hell.”
Like it or not, this statement is hard to deny. If God is omniscient, why would he create someone like Judas, who “it would have been better if he had never been born”. God knew that when creating Judas, and yet he created him, knowing full well his existence would be torture. That is hard to reconcile with the idea of love.
Why wouldn’t anyone freely choose Hell? People choose a life of misery over a life of joy all the time. I don’t see why an eternal choice would make that much difference.
After grace, I take the question of Heaven or Hell to be a matter of whether and what we love. We are ultimately given what we love.
In other words, I don’t conceive one’s destiny in the afterlife as determined by an accumulation of points, but by a disposition of one’s soul. I therefore find fault with Douthat’s sports analogy, but I get what’s he’s saying by it.
Reminds me of the concluding words of the epilog of a Twilight Zone episode:
youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnevk-6h6aI&w=480&h=390
People choose a life of misery over a life of joy all the time
Yes, but not freely. Nobody in their right mind, when presented with an opportunity for happiness or sorrow, would freely choose sorrow. All choices people make are because they see a perceived good in their choice. The issue is that often the perceived good is illusory (e.g. if I lie on my resume, I’ll get the job), and only in retrospect is the choice seen as problematic (I got hired for a job I’m not qualified for, and now I’ve been exposed and humiliated). If someone had full knowledge of the consequence of their choices, they would never make poor choices, unless they were insane. The reality is that people often make poor choices because of circumstance, either internal or external, that coerce them into making a less-than-ideal decision. But that isn’t free will.
Under that framework, our poor choices are nothing more than mistakes caused by our lack of foresight. Is a mistake, no matter how serious, within a limited and temporal framework, really deserving of eternal and everlasting torment? Isn’t that disproportionate?
If someone had full knowledge of the consequence of their choices, they would never make poor choices, unless they were insane.
Why couldn’t a heart perverted by hatred or apathy also embrace evil with full knowledge of where that evil will lead?
Do our actions in this life have only temporal consequences for ourselves and others?
“People choose a life of misery…all the time”
No, they don’t. People make a series of bad choices–usually with a few good ones also in the mix–that eventually result in their finding themselves in a life of misery. Misery is the result of a combination of human error and bad luck. It is never the result of a deliberate choice, made with a realistic vision of the probable outcome of that choosing.
This is also true of Lucifer, btw. His choice was not hell, but increased personal glory and power.
(Dan) Yes, but not freely. Nobody in their right mind, when presented with an opportunity for happiness or sorrow, would freely choose sorrow.
(Rodak) No, they don’t. People make a series of bad choices–usually with a few good ones also in the mix–that eventually result in their finding themselves in a life of misery.
This conflates two different issues: it is true that people only choose things under the aspect of the good. But it is entirely possible to choose misery as if it were good. This may be due to error and bad luck; it may be just throwing a tantrum; it may be a passive aggressive attempt to get back at someone; and so forth. People freely do choose misery all the time; and they freely choose lesser goods, or even things that will make them miserable, over greater goods. In choosing them they do indeed treat them as good in some way; but this does not mean they don’t freely choose them, and it doesn’t mean it’s merely a matter of innocent error and bad luck (although it might on occasion be). There is a such thing as willful perversity, and sometimes the error is due to the vice, not the reverse. Vice can lead one to mark miseries as better than the good in some way. In a sense, that’s what vice is. Always grasping for more is itself a form of misery; virtuous people have noted that for ages. But to the person with the vice of pleonexia, any misery in it is itself treated as better than self-restraint: better to have the misery of itching if that’s the only way to have the pleasure of scratching.
And what is more, it’s not as if there’s anything ad hoc about this position; some variation of it is a position of almost every major school of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and analogues can be found elsewhere in certain strands of Buddhism and certain strands of Neo-Confucianism. It’s not as if it’s just some arbitrary position thrown out there. If the Epicureans, Stoics, and Neoplatonists can all agree on something, it’s not as if it can just be dismissed as unreasonable.
This is a common problem with common arguments against hell; they are sledgehammers trying to do what needs scalpel-work.
Whether the church confirms or denies sinners or saints is no difference to me. To believe in a God that would let us be damned to an ETERNAL, PAINFUL place is not God. There is even NOTHING THAT I COULD DO that warrent such a punishment. To believe that is cognitive dissonance. Holding two opposing ideas at the same time.
Hmm. I’m the opposite. My sins merit me nothing less than separation from God.
My only observation is that when conservatives (and oddly enough, liberals) talk about sending people to Hell, it is always for sins they never do: homosexuality, murder, genocide, abortion, etc. But it is never for the sins that people do every day, like usury, cheating the worker for his wage, preventing the orphan and widow from getting health care, etc. People say “communist” like it’s diabolical, but what about “usurer” (which is really just another word for “capitalist”, right?) Wouldn’t Ayn Rand be on the Index of Forbidden Books, but how many good Catholics read her thinking that it is an act of virtue.
I am all for sending people to Hell, as long as it is the Hell that is used by the God who judges for the orphan and widow.
Agreed. Justice will have its due, no matter what type of sin we fall prey to.
I wonder if maybe if it is the everyday sins that are more dangerous – those are the ones that become habitual, that deaden our hearts to the Lord.
Eternal life is relationship with God: “Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.” John 3:17. No one can gain eternal life if they do not have a relationship with God. Either they have not responded to God’s offer of faith, or they have broken a relationship with God they had at some point. So anyone who dies without having a relationship with God will not “go to heaven”. QED. It follows that God sends no one to Hell, but that we all, through our free will, determine our eternal destiny by our response to or rejection of God’s offer of faith.
“To believe in a God that would let us be damned to an ETERNAL, PAINFUL place is not God.”
So, Adolph Hitler is in heaven? Mao tse-Tung?
There are some serious questions here, but I cannot help responding with an old joke instead (with apologies to Unitarians):
Q: What is the difference between and Unitarian and a Universalist?
A: A Universalist believes God is too good to damn, and an Unitarian believes he is too good to be damned.
The question for me is was there an afterlife before the resurrection? If not, then do we have to conclude that the resurrection made hell possible for mortal sinners? Or is hell more of “sheol” in the Old Testament, which would mean in the Catholic sense, that the existence of mortal sinners’ will end at their death.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to offer the argument that one cannot freely love if one is not free, but I’m thinking that if intellectual curiosity hasn’t scratched that itch and humility hasn’t stopped assertions on a pretty basic matter that common sense should suggest has been contemplated over thousands of years, I’m doubtful my contribution will make a difference to such a reader.
To me, the issue is less the idea of retribution than the problem of why any punishment would consist of everlasting torment — especially a torment that is in many cases way out of line from the mortal sins for which divine retribution is exacted.
No they probably are not in heaven YET. But I do believe that one day they will be reunited with God. That’s the whole point, it’s not an either/or situation, Yes they are, No the’re not. We don’t know God’s real plans, it’s his plan not ours. We don’t know what the hereafter brings. I believe in accountalbibty, I just don’t believe in an ETERNAL, PAINFUL HELL.
Do you believe they are in hell? Maybe we should pick out more names that way we can find the exact amount of sin that we can commint. Is Paul Newman in Hell, how about Elisbeth Taylor, it gets real sticky then because it gets VERY, VERY CLOSE TO US.
A good book to read is Rob Bell’s “Love Wins”. Think of your children, or you niece’s or nephews? Would YOU ever creat a punishment for them that was totally ETERNAL and PAINFUL? I doubt it, God feels the same way about all of his children and us.
Part of your question is have I ever thought about this stuff? Yes, I have. Yes I have pondered the fate of others and I believe that God is Just, Fair and Loving.
Reading Bell’s wiki, it appears that the limited amount of traditional theology if any he has been exposed to he has rejected.
This is going to come of snobbish, but when something is popular but not respected by one’s peers it is likely garbage. Just reading the reviews, it is quite apparent that has as much familiarity with the counterarguments as Ms. Marcotte.
I think this is unkind. Bell is an Evangelical, not a Catholic and not anything else. I haven’t read the book yet, but I am reasonably sure he argues very much from within the Evangelical tradition. I think what you may be reacting to is that he doesn’t consider Catholic thought on Hell. I don’t think he has to. He’s not a Catholic.
Actually Rob Bell grew up in Christian Household in Okemos, Michigan. Then he attended the famous Wheaton College, a Christian College. I believe that actually he gave serious thought about what he had been taught and tried to find truths that were real for him(and therefore real for others). He’s not anti Christian, he just tries to dispell those things that may not be relevent.
The reason why he has even stirred up such controversy is because he has had some success as a religious author, he is a minister, and he’s a follower of Jesus. If anyone but him had written his books they would have been roundly ignored.
I believe it was a Lourdes where Mary showed the children hell. When they asked how could God send someone to such torture, Mary replied that they choose to go there by their rejection of God and once they are there they resent God all the more and refuse any chance of reconciliation. It is not God who chooses to separate himself from us but we choose to separate ourselves from him, this is what sin is. Ultimately through mortal sin we choose to permanently separate ourselves from God, those in hell do not see their responsibility for their own status and blame God. Thus hating him more and insisting the separation continue.
As to whether there was an afterlife before the resurrection, Jesus answered that to the Sadducees when he reminded them that they worshipped the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac. He then pointed out that God was the God of the living and not the God of the dead. Clearly Jesus thought there was an afterlife before the resurrection.
This doesn’t make any sense either. So we lose will power permanently. We hate God permanently. Whatever Love we had turns to Permanent Hate. Doesn’t make sense and it never will. Even all the discussion of Hell shouldn’t let us believe that God has a place that lets us be punished forever. If we truly believe in (again) a FAIR, JUST & LOVING GOD then the least he could do is to extinguish us forever. To see that we die and suffer no more. Eternal punishment is not God.
Let me turn this whole discussion on it’s head. I don’t believe in permanent Heaven either. God is not static, changeless. Heaven is not static, changeless. Heaven is not permanent. If it was, THAT WOULD BE HELL.
Maybe somebody mentioned this already in the thread, but….read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis for some good clear theology of Heaven and Hell.
I think part of the problem in these discussions about heaven and hell, is that we have such silly and misinformed views of heaven and hell.
Heaven is not a place in the clouds where people have lots of fun, hang out, eat good food, enjoy pleasures, play beautiful music on harps, and generally have a big party. It’s a state where one has a face-to-face, loving relationship with God forever. Hell is not a place where people are imprisoned, poked by demons wielding hot pokers, and feel really thirsty. It’s a state where one actively rejects having a loving relationship with God, hating Him forever. (I like what Paul said, about people resenting God more and more.)
With this second understanding of heaven and hell, I think it’s easier to see why both places must exist as a logical consequence of us having free will and it’s easier to see how an all-good God and Hell can coexist. Because God is love, God wanted to live forever, not with automatons or robots, but with intelligent creatures who could willingly enter into loving relationships with God — but that necessarily creates the risk that some of these creatures might use their freedom to reject that relationship.
I have been thinking about the kerfuffle over Rob Bell’s…well, what to call it? A suspicion? A conclusion? A suggestion? Anyway, he is positing that there is no hell because God loves us so much.
I think this is wrong. I think there is a hell, because God loves us so much.
I think Bell gets it wrong by underestimating the love of God.
You see, I am confident that nobody ever goes to hell who except those who, in the end and irrevocably, prefer something else to God.
Since all goodness in anything comes from God, and since every created thing exists as a signpost pointing, in some fashion, to its creator, a person who prefers something else to God may get it, or if he doesn’t get it he can keep on seeking it…but either way, he will find no good in it, because he has excluded from his enjoyment of it the only thing which made it good to begin with.
A person who seeks something in preference to God will continually seek what was once a source of pleasure long after he no longer finds any pleasure in it, because the only thing which ever made it pleasurable was the scent of God which hung around it. Once that scent has been eliminated, the pleasure of the created thing itself becomes a bore.
This is why a person who gets pleasure from sex or drink or drugs always has to “up the dose.” The thrill is gone, and he just can’t get it back.
Those in hell are those who continue to prefer something other than God over God. I suspect many of these will say that they sought and got their heart’s desire, and to hell with the consequences…but they will say it bitterly, because what they got, in the end, somehow never satisfied.
Some will say they were always courageous in speaking truth to power, and some will say that they gave up everything for the love of their life, and some will say that they made sure to provide well for their dependents, and some will say that they never gave in to complacency in seeking religious truth, and most boast that they were true to themselves and that they did it “My Way,” and probably all will say that at least they weren’t such thoroughgoing rotters as all those sanctimonious prigs and ignoramuses who went to church.
But when it comes down to it, they will all see clearly the choice: “I can continue to have THIS THING, which the Christians call sinful but which certainly seems alright to me…I can continue to hold on to it, or at least continue to lust after it, to long for it, to dream of it, to itch for it…or, I can give up this created thing around which I wrapped my life and thoughts and desires, admit it to have been a foolish mistake and an unhealthy fetish, and humble myself before God who, apparently, was right all along, and learn, however haltingly, to love Him, to surrender entirely to the One with whom I spent my entire prior existence disagreeing.”
Put that way, the second option doesn’t sound easy…and it’s actually far harder than it sounds.
I don’t know whether some of these folk will in fact submit to that ripping up of everything that they thought important, everything by which they defined their own essence, everything which they held high and unsullied, everything which they ranked above the contemptible notions and behaviors of the religious folk they sneered at during this life.
Will anyone, starting with such an attitude, reverse course so radically? Perhaps some will. Perhaps all of them will. Perhaps none of them will.
If they submit to it — if they can swallow the bitter bite of humble pie and drink to the dregs that scalding draught of surrender and repentance and contrition, then all will be well: After that it is only a matter of changing their muddy slimy clothes for shining white garments, after which comes the feast and the discovery, by gift of God, of their True Names.
If they don’t, though? What then? If we are speaking of those who have died, then have died to time; they are outside it. There is no “later” in which they could change their minds any more. They have seen what God is about, the whole package: And they hate it. They are not willing to walk a mile in a saint’s moccasins to find out what it is like seeing the love of God from the inside, because standing outside it, they either find it too repulsive, or think it inferior to their own ideas.
They will, simply and seriously, tell God to go f*** Himself and the horse He rode in on, and stomp off in a huff. Someone once said hell is a state of mind; I think that’s not quite right, but in some ways it’s not unlike an everlasting case of the sulks.
What then, for these souls who reject God? Well, He loves them so much that the one thing He will not take from them is their freedom to be what they have chosen to be. He created beings who, being free, could love. They can also choose not to love, or to love in a perverted way which in the end decays to something indistinguishable from hatred. But choice is what makes love possible, so He will not take that away. He will not convert persons into automatons, even if the persons in question knowingly prefer self-destruction over Him.
Some will object that no person could ever knowingly prefer self-destruction to eternal Joy, no matter how bitterly difficult they might find the process of submitting to that Joy.
But experience of actual human beings tells us differently. We know plenty of people who simply will not do the obvious thing, the healthy and sane thing, that they and everyone around them know they ought to do. The addict will not give up the drug, the woman will not give up her bad-boy lover, the man will not give up rescuing the psycho-chick, the layabout will not give up avoiding productive work and difficult effort, the wounded heart will not give up holding a grudge and nursing the injury from pain into unforgiving hatred.
Those of you who find Christian orthodoxy contemptible: What if you find that, after all, in eternity, the Christians were right? I am not posing this as an apologetic argument; I am asking you to evaluate honestly what your emotions would be.
What if you found that God really had forbidden gay romances? Really had forbidden women priests? Really had commanded you to forgive that scumbag who treated you shabbily? Really had wanted you to humble yourself to learn lessons in holiness — lessons about what really matters in life — from some simpering butterface of a prim Pentecostal preacher’s daughter or mantilla-wearing Catholic wallflower who was a virgin when she married and had six kids and whose idea of a big night out involves Ryan’s Family Steakhouse or Red Lobster?
What if you found that, for whatever reason, as your role in heaven, God had appointed you to be the go-fer or janitor or baggage-handler or assistant secretary for a person like that, for as long as it took and possibly for all eternity?
Would that seem like hell to you?
If you tried it, you might find after an eon or so that God had assigned you to a saint such as you never met or recognized in earthly life: Someone to whom Teresa of Calcutta might deeply bow, someone who, once you understood her heart, was such a wellspring of love and joy and grace that you found yourself unworthy to untie her sandals. But we are speaking of how you might feel before discovering that.
If you detect in yourself any predisposition to say, “Well, if going to Heaven means I’ll have to associate with them, if I’ll have to bow and scrape before some such creature as that, I’ll have none of it” …then you have detected in yourself, however faintly and excusably, the mindset which Milton assigned to the Devil: “Better to reign in hell, than serve in Heaven.”
You will get your heart’s desire, never fear. But it is during this life that you get to choose what kind of heart you have, and what kind of desires it produces.
That is why it is so important now to look to the state of your own soul, to find out who, through your daily choices and attitudes, you are making yourself to be. For you are created in the image of God, and like Him you are a little creator: By your free will you are making yourself.
Not without Him are you crafting yourself! If He were not giving you grace and divine power for this purpose at every millisecond, this would be impossible: You would perhaps collapse into mere animality and really be what materialists say that you already are: A deterministic automaton in a clockwork universe. But He is constantly lifting you above that, keeping the free-will of your soul on life support, enabling you to choose in the hopes that you might choose love, forgiveness, humility. This freedom is His constant gift, just like your physical existence, which would itself collapse into nothing were it not for Him constantly willing you and everything else to be.
But His constant upholding of your free will, like His constant upholding of your physical existence, does not compel. He does not make you an automaton; He does not predestine any one to hell; men do not sin because He willed them to do so. No, He holds this world together by the Word of His power, and predestines you by His grace to be able to choose, to be able to decide who and what, in the end, you will turn out to be. The choice is still yours, in both the physical and spiritual realm. Just as, in the physical, you can’t make yourself never to have existed but you can, by your own hand, turn yourself into a decaying corpse before your time, thus defeating God’s purpose for your body, so too, in the spiritual realm, you cannot destroy your immortal soul but you can reject the grace God gives you, killing whatever spiritual vitality is there and stomping on the embers until there is nothing but gray ash, defeating God’s purpose for your soul.
So I say again: Make yourself today, and tomorrow, and every day, the type of person who will not, upon meeting your Maker, tell Him to go to hell.
For that is the danger. He is not an unjust judge. No one goes to hell except those who desire it. They desire it because they desire something other than God, and when heaven and earth have passed away and the Word of God which is with God and is God and through whom all things were created is all that remains, the only way to have anything other than God is to flee His presence. Hell is in some sense the refuge from Himself which God provides for those who scorn His love: He loves them that much.
But today, right now, the important thing is to not become that kind of person. We all have that tendency in one area or another of our lives, so we must fight it. We must consciously resist the pull.
Choose you this day whom you will serve. Make Him, and the love from His heart, the center of the quest of your life. Repent everything that seems to divide you from Him. Cast off every weight and the sin which so easily entangles — entangles because it is attractive, because you want it more than you want Him — and run headlong into His love, into His heart.
Do that, and keep on doing it, and it is very likely that when this life is over, you will very naturally fall into His arms in relief and triumph, and be glad to be there.
But for those who in this life make themselves in another image? When they die, they find Heaven not at all to their liking. Never fear: There is an alternative.
Another good book to read is “Your God Is Too Small” by J. B. Phillips. He does dispell the myths of Santa Claus, Old Man, Heavenly Bosom, Resident Policeman, God-In-A-Box theories. He’s divided his book into Destructive God Images and Constructive God Images. It’s a classiic that has been around for about 60 years.
Get a wide ranging conversation on hell going, and one is pretty quickly reminded of the observation that many Americans are Palagian Universalists — they believe they everyone is going to heaven, and doing so because they deserve it.
The whole question of hell and universalism boils down (hah) to the question of human freedom. Key quotes regarding freedom from scripture: Christ’s “the truth will set you free” and Paul’s “I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.”
I see two possible definitions of human freedom:
1) human freedom is a spirit of arbitrary self-determination.
2) human freedom is a spirit of creative goodness.
I’m just an amateur philosopher and theologian, of course. But I see these options as two understandings of freedom that people talk about, but don’t seem to articulate. They seem to coexist side-by-side, getting mixed up here and there. One ‘freedom’ is an arbitrary choice that transcends ‘reason’. The other ‘freedom’ is the divine spark that makes love and goodness and reason possible. I don’t understand why we use the same word–freedom–for two very different ideas.
Does anyone else see this distinction?
Nate, I believe we have no freedom outside of God’s Love. I do not know about hell other than hell can be lived here on earth. It is experienced when love is absent. I have seen people who have never experienced love and how this life seems like an eternity of suffering for them. If we are graced with the awareness of God’s Love then we have moments of freedom to choose. Outside the awareness of God’s Love choices are made within the context of what is known. Within the awareness of God’s Love choices are made dependent on one’s interpretation of the meaning of the experience of God’s Love. Freedom or lack of freedom is relative to one’s experience and understanding of the depth of God’s Love. I am convinced that for most of us the true freedom of choice occurs outside the influence of the body at death when we are able to meet God within the safety of Jesus’ empathic knowledge of and compassion for the suffering of human beings.
“Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Nate, I’m not sure if this is the same thing, but here goes: Some people, myself included, had a childhood image of the soul as a chalkboard upon which our good and bad deeds were marked. (I can’t connect to Douthat’s article, but someone said that he uses a kind of scoreboard thinking – he may have this same kind of thinking). It’s sort of an inanimate thing, a record, kind of like your browser history.
I’ve come to think of the soul more as your will. To stick with the computer analogy, it’s your operating system, with all the software and viruses you pick up over the years. It’s not what you’ve done, but who you are, and unfortunately a lot of people seem to be conciously, deliberately oriented away from God.
Nate:
I agree that there are different definitions of freedom, but for me, neither of the two you presented quite matches my understanding.
But perhaps by “freedom” you are not intending to target the same idea as “free will?”
For me, to say that I have “free will” is as much as to say that I, as an “I,” actually exist. It is related to “cogito ergo sum,” except in this case it is “I choose, therefore I am.” (I am not sure whether this would be “lego ergo sum” or “opto ergo sum.” The cognates are both part-right: I legislate my own personal policy, therefore I am; I self-determine from amongst many options, therefore I am.) In any case it is a denial of philosophical materialist determinism as regards human choices.
I suppose this is what you meant by your definition “a spirit of creative goodness?” For of course when we choose, we alter ourselves; and if that choice produces action or inaction which affects the future of the universe around us, we alter the universe. We are, in this ongoing but very limited way, co-workers with God in the creation both of ourselves and the universe. So it is certainly creative. Whether it involves “goodness” or not depends on the choices made.
Anyway, that the “freedom” which is pertinent to the context of discussing hell.
The other kind of “freedom,” I think, is Political freedom, which is something in a different category altogether and not very analogous. I define “political freedom” as existing when government does not exercise force against us wrongfully, which is to say: to either (a.) deter us from doing something morally right or morally neutral, or (b.) deter us from doing something morally wrong, the character of which does not justify the use of force to prohibit it.
But even when we are not politically free, we remain free willed persons, as in the case where a Chinese Christian refuses to renounce Christ even when being tortured in prison by his government. Hence the separateness and non-comparability of the two concepts.
As for your first definition of “freedom”: You give it as “a spirit of arbitrary self-determination”: I think this is a misunderstanding of political freedom (not by you, but by the folk who see it that way).
The “arbitrary” part of that definition comes in because people are not distinguishing between God’s Law and Man’s Law: They think that because something is not illegal, it is not immoral; or, that because they have a political right to do it, it must be morally good.
For me, the failure to make this distinction comes from a failure to understand what government is: Government is a collection of the people’s armed employees, who are tasked to use force on behalf of the people.
Now of course there are certain things for which I may legitimately use force against my fellow man (e.g. protecting an innocent party from wrongful attack by a rapist, a murderer, a robber). But there are other things which don’t rise to the use of armed force (e.g. protecting an innocent party from the discomfort of having to listen to Justin Bieber). However close a call it may be, it simply isn’t quite morally justifiable for me to shoot or lock up Justin Bieber to prevent him inflicting the moral wrong of his music career on others.
From this we see that there are some moral wrongs which, while certainly contrary to God’s Law, may not legitimately be prohibited by force under Man’s Law. It is not because they are not wrong; it is only because their wrongness is not sufficient, or not of a character or category, to justify armed force to prohibit or punish them. In short, one of God’s Laws is that we are not always permitted to use force to enforce God’s Laws. And if we are not, then neither are our employees, whether we call those employees bodyguards or a private security force or a government.
Thus there is freedom of religion: Renouncing or defaming Christ is of course profoundly morally wrong under God’s Law; but it is, in the confusing term, “a political right” because no politician may legitimately criminalize it. Doing so would be a wrongful use of force, and thus itself a moral wrong.
Now that means that “political freedom” is really a very particular thing: It is not arbitrary at all. The “arbitrariness” comes in by error: It comes in when people think that because something is legal, it is morally permissible, which is obviously wrong: Many immoral things fall under the category of things which do not rise to justifying force to prevent them.
Put more simply: The bad definition of freedom is “I can do anything I want,” which of course is too short to be clear. The corrective to it is: “You can do anything you desire without violating Man’s Law so long as you do not thereby initiate force or fraud against your fellow man to deprive him of his life, liberty, or property. But among the things you may do which do not violate Man’s Law there remain things which you may do which still violate God’s Moral Law; do these things, and although you may not go to jail, if you do not repent you will go to hell, and not because God arbitrarily sends you there out of pique, but because the unrepentant choosing of these things necessarily constitutes a preference, both expressed and actual, for hell over the Beatific Vision.”
People who reject Hell ultimately believe God is a Rapist. They believe that God WILL make someone LOVE Him NO MATTER WHAT! And THAT belief repulses me. Because God is NOT a rapist. He will not force us to Love Him if we choose not to. Amanda Marcotte does not have to love God if she does not want to. Even after death. God is good like that.
Amen to Nate’s comment! It is as if we don’t WANT to have freedom. Because then that would be scary, wouldn’t it? That would mean how we live now actually has meaning.
Well said!
Do you love Amanda Marcotte? Why shouldn’t she reject hell, it appears to lack love. If we lack love for others, do we create hell or are we in hell?
I think that if someone did make a choice for eternity in Hell, then that would be clear evidence that they suffered from a spiritual illness. Jesus is quite good at healing all kinds of illnesses, including pathological kinds where people think that don’t want to be healed.
God Bless
Extremely well said!
Chris, IF someone wants to be healed. Do you really believe God would force Himself on someone who clearly says NO? You also reject Christ’s very clear statement that the path to Heaven is difficult and few make it.
God forced Himself into my life. Thank God! He kept stalking me and kept giving me hints that He was real and then He revealed His luminous light to me and from that light He said in a voice neither male nor female, “I love you.” That is when I returned after 40 years of hating the Catholic faith.
In response to Mr. Cupp’s remarks, Yea, You’re right, we don’t get to heaven on points. It’s not a game and God will not be mocked. We become one with God by being as Loving and Fair and Just as God. Attributes that we really can’t fake for God’s benefit.
Yes we are separated from God by our sins, temporarily. I just don’t feel that there is a punishment that merits total permanent damnation.
Also I believe that the whole of the universe is God’s territory. Not part of it, all of it. If hell were to exist, as a separate place, it’s God’s Hell.
I’ve noticed also that the same people that are so insistent of Damnation Hell are not currently and equally as vocal about “Yea, there’s a devil too. And witch’s.” It’s because we really don’t believe in them.
The thought that Rob Bell’s remarks are speculation are certainly no more speculative than anyone else’s. In fact it’s kind of funny when you think about it because we keep using WORDS to talk about a supposed real place.
You keep viewing this as “punishment.” What about someone’s choice to stay away from God? God does NOT send a person away. The person chooses to keep the heck away from God. Very different. And we know, from mystics, that God grieves because people choose to not love Him. Mother Theresa has posted in every single home “I thirst.” In her encounter with God, she came to understand that God thirsts to have Humanity love Him. He CLEARLY does not force people to love him.
Would we be having this discussion if we were talking about human beings? A man loves a woman and she rejects him. But damn it, she cannot reject him because that would cruel in your worldview! So he forces himself to be near her every single day and every hour. She cannot escape because that would be cruel!
We clearly see this as abuse and stalking. Yet somehow the rules change when it comes to God. Why? And IF we believe that our human relationships are practice for our divine relationship and even crucial for our divine relationship, this analogy takes on even more significance.
You keep viewing this as “punishment.” What about someone’s choice to stay away from God? God does NOT send a person away.
David – you argue as a lawyer – a very skillful one, from all the evidence. I wonder who you regard as your “clients”?
Christ was obviously using that story to make a point. That said, I read that as Christ honoring the choice made by the reprobate to ignore His presence among them when they had the chance to help them/Him, and thus, in serving Him, to conform their lives to His own. They chose another path: Christ allows that choice.
Exactly, Matt. The people FIRST chose to reject God at EVERY opportunity. God does NOT reject the people. These people seem to want the benefits without any of the Love that is needed. It is as if they have lived their whole lives rejecting Love they have no desire to choose it at the last.
And David, the Punishment is what people have chosen. It is like when my students come up to me and say “what grade did you give me.” I don’t give out grades. The students choose to earn their grades. They choose to do an assignment . . . or not. The consequences are theirs.
And David, lastly, thank you for bringing this discussion back to Jesus and Scripture because people who believe in universal salvation clearly have not spent time reading what Jesus has to say about that.
All this talk about choice really skirts the real issue here – if God is omniscient, he would know that the creature he was about to create would ultimately reject Him and suffer an eternity of torment. So why, if He is truly loving, would he follow through and create that creature anyways? Isn’t that incredibly contradictory?
On technical matters of theology, I defer to some of my more-knowledgeable fellow bloggers; that said, my answer to your question is, I don’t think it is. We Catholics believe that God gives us freedom to choose him or reject him; the choice is ours. He offers every human being all the Grace we need to to get us to heaven. If we choose to reject it, that’s on us. God omnisciently knowing the choice we will make does not, according to Catholic belief as I understand it, diminish the fact that it is still our choice. Is it possible that you are limiting your thinking about this to a human-biased perspective? “If I were God, I’d make sure everyone I loved went to Heaven…”?
I would add that assuming any particular person “must” be in Hell is also imposing upon God our human vindictiveness or failures of mercy. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Idi Amin, [insert favorite historical villain here] may very well be in heaven, basking forever in the beatific vision. It may be unlikely from our perspective, but God has consistently surprised me with the depth of His mercy. (That said: speaking personally, I’d much rather die with the sacraments after living a life serving the poor than, say, in a bunker with Eva Braun after perpetrating genocide…)
I am wondering how you explain the “eternal fire” part. Putting people in an eternal fire sounds like punishment to me. People may choose to be separated from God, and God may allow them the freedom to make that choice, but why is one of the consequences of that choice physical suffering?
We might interpret the words of Jesus metaphorically, but I believe real physical suffering is generally considered to be part of the experience of Hell.
Are physical suffering and mental suffering really that far apart, David?
I mean, have you ever had your heart broken?
People, me included, do things all the time that they know for a fact will add to the suffering of those in the world, including ourselves. Do I drive a car to work? Where was my shirt made, by whom, and under what working conditions? Do I even care to know? That guy sleeping in a doorway I stepped over to get a coffee this morning – why is he there? Do I even care?
As a logistical matter, we could eliminate all world hunger in a matter of days, and yet the bottom line is, we don’t – we have never even cared to attempt it – even though I think we know on some level that to do this would give us inexpressible joy.
We walk away from love all the time, David, even though love is why we are here. I know I do. It makes me incredibly miserable and diminishes me, and yet I do it. I am – really, all of us are – deeply broken.
Matt,
I don’t know that there is anything left for me to say without repeating myself. The language of the Bible clearly indicates to me that God judges, and based on his judgments, he either rewards or punishes.
I’ve had this line used on me before, but I have never had occasion to use it myself: I’m not telling you what I say. I’m telling you what God says. :P
And I would say that physical and mental suffering are far apart. If I had to choose between mental anguish for all eternity and physical anguish for all eternity, I would chose mental anguish.
I would have to ask if all of us are deeply broken, how can we be held so fully responsible for the choices that we make that the consequences are infinite?
If we are really talking about eternity here, in the sense of time that goes on without end, that is a truly staggering concept. No doubt everyone has heard that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce all of Shakespeare. Well, one person striking a random key on a typewriter once every billion years will eventually produce everything that was ever written and could ever be written, and there would still be an infinite amount of time left after all the possibilities were exhausted.
I would have to ask if all of us are deeply broken, how can we be held so fully responsible for the choices that we make that the consequences are infinite?
I don’t think anyone goes to Hell for being broken. Hell is for those of us who refuse to be healed.
Good reply Mr. Nichols. That’s actually my whole point, we aren’t punished. That’s the word others use. I don’t believe in punishment.
I believe in Love lessons. I believe that God is saying, “Gee, that selfishness thing didn’t really work out for you very well, did it. Would you like to try something else?” And again, and again, and again until “Yea, show me what you got!!!”
You’re right though, God does not send us away and “he also never stops us from returning”, What father would? Again all of my words are about that Hell is not permanent and hell is not eternal punishment. I believe that God really does have True Love, True Justice, True Fairness. He doesn’t say “I’m Omnisciently Fair unless you do this. I’m Completely Just, unless you do that. I Unconditionally Love you but the first time you cross me you’re out of here.”
I do believe in an accountability, I just don’t know what that is. That would be speculation. I just know that I don’t believe it will be in a permanent, eternally, punishing hell.
Let’s pretend, like you may believe, that it’s a contest of wills. That certain souls choose to perish forever. I don’t believe that mine, yours or anyone else’s will is stronger or longer than God’s will. Again he is Omnisciently Patient. More importatinly, I don’t believe that any soul will say “Yea, give me more of the rack. I’ll show you.” Do people make endlessly bad decisions. Yup. But not for eternity. Of our own free accord, no matter what state we are in, some lesser some greater, we will all voluntarily return to him, with his blessings.
That’s a God I can fully embrace.
Aren’t you assuming that people know God?
For the Catholic, this seems pretty simple:
IV. HELL
1033 We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”
1034 Jesus often speaks of “Gehenna” of “the unquenchable fire” reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost. Jesus solemnly proclaims that he “will send his angels, and they will gather . . . all evil doers, and throw them into the furnace of fire,”and that he will pronounce the condemnation: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire!”
1035 The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
1036 The affirmations of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church on the subject of hell are a call to the responsibility incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny. They are at the same time an urgent call to conversion: “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
Since we know neither the day nor the hour, we should follow the advice of the Lord and watch constantly so that, when the single course of our earthly life is completed, we may merit to enter with him into the marriage feast and be numbered among the blessed, and not, like the wicked and slothful servants, be ordered to depart into the eternal fire, into the outer darkness where “men will weep and gnash their teeth.”
1037 God predestines no one to go to hell;620 for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. In the Eucharistic liturgy and in the daily prayers of her faithful, the Church implores the mercy of God, who does not want “any to perish, but all to come to repentance”:
Father, accept this offering
from your whole family.
Grant us your peace in this life,
save us from final damnation,
and count us among those you have chosen.
David asks People may choose to be separated from God, and God may allow them the freedom to make that choice, but why is one of the consequences of that choice physical suffering?
Again, the problem here is that what our state of existence after our death is going to be like is completely incomprehensible to us living in time in a 3-dimensional space on the physical body called Earth. But this is the way I see it: as human beings, we are all created by God in such a way that our very being is fulfilled only by living with God in heaven. The alternative – being separated from God forever – would be a complete frustration of our being and would necessarily mean an unimaginably painful torment and agony. The only thing close to describing this agony of being separated from God is “eternal fire.”
So it’s not: I choose to be separated from God, and I would be fine except for the fact that God then punishes me by putting me into a pit of eternal fire.
Instead it’s rather: I choose to be separated from God, and being separated from God is an unimaginably painful torment, kind of like being in a pit of eternal fire, but I still choose that separation anyway.
Matt, Do you think we get a choice after death if we want to be healed or not?
Ronald – I’m at the edge of my understanding of theology here, but I would say that if we die being open to being healed, then we experience that “healing” in purgatory after death; if we die not being open to being healed, then God will not force us to be healed against our will.
I suspect that some of the confusion above re: Hell as punishment or as inevitable consequence of bad choices comes in part from the failure to attend to another truth, namely that, in the end, a definitive decision for the good we will pursue is possible. In this life, of course, our choosing, for good and for ill, is piecemeal, partial, flexible. However, this is not itself what makes us free. Indeed, our general incapacity to make a clear, clean, choice in a definitive and lasting way is a limiting feature of human action (such as, e.g., the angels, who know by direct intuition and choose absolutely whenever they choose, do not experience, but they are not less free than we are). It does not make moral choice unreal or impossible. We can, after all, be morally responsible for failing to act rightly with morally sufficient knowledge. We do not need divine clarity to act responsibly. (Consider, e.g. Matthew 25!)
However, the fact that in via we generally choose only partially does not mean that we are not, over the course of our lives generally or potentially by an extravagant act of will, tending towards a definitive and thus final choice, a choice of who we will become in freedom. We anticipate this truth through vows, which do not restrict our freedom but rather exhibit it through the capacity to donate oneself (to a spouse, to God, etc.) even without knowing what will be in the future. Vows only echo and imitate the sublime act of true freedom, namely the definitive pursuit and embrace of God as good, made possible by grace and our conformity to Christ in the Holy Spirit.
We can, nonetheless, make a definitive decision for some other good, a good which, if we had, would make us miserable (since we are made for God), yet the absence of which as final and total good makes us miserable and unfit company for God and those who love God. We would hate them, and they, in truth, would hate what we have become, a irreconcilable enemy of Love. Should we arrive at this state, as the Scriptures tell us, God does consign us to the Lake of Fire. Said simply, God does in fact punish unrepentant sinners with eternal Hell, precisely because this is where they have made themselves fit to be, albeit where they will be miserable.
If we think of Hell as simply an eternally painful continuation of us persons and they are now, still choosing in a piecemeal way, not yet being definitively committed to anything absolutely, then an eternal Hell is hard to understand. When we realize that we on the way to making ourselves (or, if we cooperate, being made by God) into someone who can and will definitively choose, the revelation of eternal reward for the blessed and unending misery for the damned it, at least, less confusing.
Thank you, Fr. Holtz. You remind me why I hold such high esteem for your order.
Everyone here would stand to gain a great deal by examining the difference between efficacious grace and sufficient grace. Once you understand that difference, you will be startled out of your skin, trust me.
Universal Salvation hinges upon God bestowing efficacious grace upon all men and women from every age. It does not hinge upon human freedom. Human freedom hinges upon grace!
I totally agree Nate. Are you saying that those who are blessed with efficacious grace act as a sort of conduit to spread sufficient graces to the rest of humanity? In other words “We are known by how we love one another.” Do those who possess efficacious grace still possess the vulnerability to sin and to distort the expression of the Will of God and thus lead others in error?
I have been thinking about this discussion & it dawned on me that people who cannot imagine how Hell can exist are people who lack imagination. One of the conclusions from the 9/11 Commission was that the US suffered from a general “failure of imagination.” I believe we lacked imagination because we have been safe for so long. I see that here. We cannot imagine how a Good God can give us the freedom to reject Love because we cannot comprehend how anyone would want to reject something good.
The other thing this discussion reveals to me is that I have serious doubt whether people who reject Hell have ever experienced evil in their own lives. And when I say evil, I mean the senseless, brutal, ugly that breaks through the la la las and reveals what humans are capable of choosing to do to each other.
Lastly, if you don’t believe in Hell, it is pointless to utilize holy water, confession, even prayer. What is the point?
Sophia reading your comments I get what you are saying. But theologically what I can’t get around it what was the afterlife like before the resurrection. If there was no afterlife then we have to conclude that Christ’s resurrection not only opened up heaven, but hell as well. If there was an afterlife before Christ what was it? Was it a purgatory or “Bosom of Abraham” like existence? I can’t imagine it being what we would consider hell, because then we would have to accept that God let every soul enter hell despite their works on earth until Christ was sent as a sacrifice. If we chose to reject God’s love are we then choosing to enter hell or are we choosing to no longer exist which would be more of the Old Testament meaning of “sheol”
Natalie:
I think it’s probably not helpful to assume that “afterlife” carries with it an experience of time like what we experience on Earth. Speaking as a physicist, I am confident that time on Earth is not at all like our human experience of it: “before” and “after” are human constructs which have meaning only on a human scale, but not in any fundamental way which would make sense on a macro- or micro-cosmic scale. From such perspectives, which are still very much part of our material world, relativistic and quantum physics deviate tremendously from “before” and “after” as we “know” them. Since they don’t have universal meaning in the material world, it would be odd to expect that “before” and “after” should have meaning outside the material world.
What I’m saying is that to ask “what was the afterlife like before the resurrection” is like asking “who were you before your parents were born?” I’m not claiming to know the answers to these questions, just to say that I know I don’t know the answers in the usual sense of drawing from my experience.
Frank M.,
Human beings are physical creatures, and if there is a resurrection of the body, we will still be physical creatures after that. I can’t imagine a human being without time. Of course, just because I can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it is impossible. Also, it is by no means clear what time is.
The greater problem with an afterlife either before or after the Resurrection of Jesus is the idea that souls go somewhere without bodies. I don’t see how it can be said that a soul enters or leaves the body.
I posted this above but my iPad made it a sub-comment instead of its own comment. I think this is an important issue that only Matt has attempted to address so far:
All this talk about choice really skirts the real issue here – if God is omniscient, he would know that the creature he was about to create would ultimately reject Him and suffer an eternity of torment. So why, if He is truly loving, would he follow through and create that creature anyways? Isn’t that incredibly contradictory?
Consider Judas – Jesus said “woe be to the one who betrays me. It would have been better had he not been born”. This is clear evidence that God knew in advance that Judas would suffer eternal torment, and yet created him anyways. Doesn’t that bother anyone?
Yes Dan. Did Christ mean that Judas would suffer eternal torment or that he would suffer the torment of human judgment as long as humans exist in our present state? Is the eternal torment that Judas suffered the intensity of pain that he experienced when he believed that he had lost God’s Love forever? Or, would he suffer eternal torment temporarily in the sense that he would be exposed to what it is like in the eternal experience without God? Then again, is there such a place that exists without God when God is through all and in all? Who knows?
It doesn’t bother me. The possibility of people choosing to reject God seems like a necessary risk of creating people who have the free will to love God. So I think it would feel a little bit like cheating on God’s part for God to say “I want to create people who have the free will to love me, but I will not allow the creation of anyone who abuses that freedom.”
So why did God want to create people with free will, knowing full well that some people would suffer eternally? He was not compelled to do so. What in God’s nature demand that his creatures suffer eternally? Can we really say that such a being is intrinsically good?
So why did God want to create people with free will, knowing full well that some people would suffer eternally? He was not compelled to do so..
You’re asking why did God create the world and create people? I’m not sure, but I think the answer is related to the fact that God is Love and that He longs to share life with other loving beings.
You’re asking why did God create the world and create people? I’m not sure, but I think the answer is related to the fact that God is Love and that He longs to share life with other loving beings.
Yes, but apparently not all of them. Some of those beings will be tormented eternally (whether self-inflicted or not is irrelevant). That’s not congruent with love.
As I understand it, this bothers us human beings because we live in time, so the idea of being predestined to commit a horrible act seems un-God-like. But God is not a human being, He is I AM and is beyond time and everything is “now” for Him. So the dinosaurs going extinct is now; Eve talking to the serpent is now; Abram deciding whether to travel to Caanan is now; etc. From our point of view, it seems cruel. From God’s point of view, we simply have the gift of free will. From our point of view, we have time to repent and return to God. After we die, we’re not in time any longer.
We have the gift of will, I doubt that it is free unless we are united to God’s Love. Bruce, I cannot agree with your understanding of God and time. It is not that simple.
I think all this theory blinds us to the reality of what this actually means.
So how many of you, knowing that if tonight you had sex and knew you’d get pregnant, knowing full well that the child would be born with an untreatable medical condition in which they would spend every moment of their waking life in excruciating agony, never with a second of relief, would still choose to have sex that night?
I don’t think anyone would think that would be a good, or even marginally moral, decision. So why would we, who are evil, choose not to do it, yet God, who is good, chooses this, and worse! Not just a little worse, but eternally worse!
Could you say that such a being would truly be acting out of love?
Dan,
Realize that your question amounts to “why did God create the world, when there is evil in it?” It’s a question that people have wrestled with for ever.
Not quite – there is a subtle but very important difference between asking “why is there evil” and “why must temporal evil be punished eternally”? The former can be explained in the context of love much more easily than the latter, which under no circumstances corresponds with any form of love that I can recognize.
You also completely dodged my question by turning it into something else. It’s easy to avoid the contradiction if you ignore it. So I ask again, can you give me a direct answer to my question?
If you can’t, let’s not pretend that this isn’t a significant and serious issue by throwing it on the “it’s a mystery” pile. It’s not just a mystery, it is an outright contradiction.
I’m not trying to dodge the question. I’ll repeat what I said above: The possibility of people choosing to reject God seems like a necessary risk of creating people who have the free will to love God. So I think it would feel a little bit like cheating on God’s part for God to say “I want to create people who have the free will to love me, but I will not allow the creation of anyone who abuses that freedom.”
In other words, if you want to create a free human being, you have to take the risk that that free human being will make the choice to reject you for all eternity. Of course, God is all-knowing, so I think He foresees who will make the choice to love Him and who will make the choice to reject Him for eternity. But I think it would be strange if God would take affirmative steps to prevent the people who were going to reject him from being conceived, and if God only allowed those people who He knew would choose Him from being conceived. It seems kind of like cheating – violating the rules of the game, ie, if you want a group of free beings, you have to take the risk that some of the beings will reject you for eternity.
This touches on another “mystery”. (And when I say “mystery”, I’m not trying to dodge the question. I’m just saying that it is an important question that we should contemplate, but which we might not fully understand with our human minds – and that we might only understand in Heaven. God being a Trinity is another example of mystery.) The other “mystery” I’m thinking of is the “happy fault of Adam” mentioned at Easter Vigil: it appears that Adam had to have committed evil in order for the great good of the Passion/Death/Resurrection of Jesus to happen. Maybe the answer is this: God allows evil to happen, so as to bring greater good out of evil. And maybe that answer applies to your dilemma: God allows the evil of people choosing to reject Him for eternity, so as to bring out the greater good of people choosing to love Him.
Dan writes, ‘Consider Judas – Jesus said “woe be to the one who betrays me. It would have been better had he not been born”. This is clear evidence that God knew in advance that Judas would suffer eternal torment, and yet created him anyways. Doesn’t that bother anyone?’
You’re assuming that God could know something was going to happen, without the thing actually happening. I’m not sure God does hypotheticals. I doubt he thinks one thing through, stops, and then changes certain parameters and thinks it through again; and then when he’s done considering the options, picks one of them and actually does it.
On the contrary, I think when God thinks something, it’s actual. If God knows that Judas will betray Christ, it’s because Judas will betray Christ, and not because God first imagined Judas betraying Christ and then went ahead and set up the conditions in which it would become actual.
Therefore, the only way Judas could not betray Christ, would be for God to have an entirely different plan for the world, in which Judas doesn’t betray Christ. But if he’s going to prevent that evil, why allow other evils, or any evil at all? Why allow Christ to be crucified? If there’s no evil there’s no hell for Judas or anyone else to go to. In which case salvation is unnecessary, and so is a Savior.
So essentially, you’re just presenting the problem of evil and asking if it bothers us. To which my answer is, no, it doesn’t. Evil is part of the world in which I find myself. There could have been other worlds, but there aren’t (at least none that concern me). I find that Christianity gives the best account of, and solution to, the evil that I see around me (and within me), of any philosophy or theology I have encountered. As they used to say in some old commercial, I can’t remember which: “If you find a better [product], buy it!”
I like the way Cardinal Newman put it (at least, one of the ways he put it): Basically, heaven will be like church. People who don’t like church won’t like heaven, because heaven is doing what we do in church — worshiping God — for eternity.
(This is a simplified version of what he said, from memory, so forgive me if I don’t have it exactly right.)
Frank M., What do you think of quantum entanglement?
I think quantum entanglement is probably not very relevant to questions about hell :-) Feel free to email fam squiggly-at-sign muenn.net for off-line discussion.
What I did mean to say is that physics does not reveal “the mind of God” nor answer any question even close to whether or not hell, or angels, or God even exist, as some people have claimed. Rather, by showing us how wildly different observed reality is from the way we ordinarily experience it as human beings, we can put new perspective on our limited perspective. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” can take on new meaning when we have a bigger picture of the heavens and the earth.
David, Did you ever have an out of the body experience?
Dan writes, “there is a subtle but very important difference between asking “why is there evil” and “why must temporal evil be punished eternally”? The former can be explained in the context of love much more easily than the latter, which under no circumstances corresponds with any form of love that I can recognize.”
God made us to have eternal souls. He gave us the freedom to form our souls in the way we choose. To eliminate the possibility of hell takes away that freedom. It also takes away any ultimate deterrent to living a life of complete and utter depravity (to the extent we’re capable of that). Saying, “if you’re evil you’ll die some day and won’t get to live forever” is a negative deterrent. Saying, “if you’re evil you will suffer eternal punishment” is a positive one — there is justice; there will be reckoning; you will pay.
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The whole point is that evil acts committed by human beings are not “merely temporal”. Precisely because we have eternal souls, our moral choices are not merely temporal but have an eternal bearing and contribute to forming our eternal nature and destiny.
In the context of this understanding, it doesn’t make sense to draw a dichotomy between temporal moral choices and eternal punishment. It’s a single continuum. That’s like drawing a dichotomy between drugs taken in adolescence and the effects on our brains in later life, as if the two should rightfully be separated and have no effect on each other. By the nature of things, they do have an effect on each other. Drawing an artificial line between them, and calling choices on one side of the line “temporal”, and the effects of those choices on the other hand, “eternal”, doesn’t make them separate in reality. The one follows from the other.
Agellius, Would it also follow that the soul would also be free to choose beyond its temporal existence when without the physical limitations of the senses it then encounters its loving Creator in Christ and realizes the hell it had lived without this source of infinite love which it was created with and for?
p.s. That would be real justice.
Thales, A human being that is “free” will not reject God.
I’m not sure why you’re saying that, Ronald. “Being free” by definition means being able to reject God.
Thales, I should clarify my definition of freedom. In my opinion a person who is free is free of delusions or false beliefs. Then that person is free to be open to God. Freedom in that sense cannot reject God but can only accept God. It is the entrapped person that rejects God for personal gain. Now, when a soul leaves the body it is entrapped as it once was?
Sorry, Ronald, I don’t quite understand what you’re asking, as I’m not sure what you mean by “entrapped”.
Hell is a mystery I’ve pondered all of my life (over five decades and counting), and I’m afraid it makes even less sense to me now than it did when I was younger. There were many years when I thought the question was settled in my mind for the very reasons many have mentioned here — that it provides ultimate justice, as well as ultimate meaning and seriousness to the choices we make. Most importantly (to me), Jesus himself is said to have spoken of it on many occasions, and in terms of horrific physical torture to boot.
And yet, when all is said and done, I just can’t fathom how a God who Jesus said loves us the way a Father loves a child could devise a creation in which many of His children end up in physical torment…permanently. Oh, yes, apologists such as CS Lewis have devised more sophisticated models of eternal torment, but eternal is eternal. And torture is torture.
Why would an all-good God want that? And if He doesn’t want it, why make it so? After all, it’s His world.
I know the argument from free will. And the claim that our choices have to have ultimate consequences for us to take them seriously. But how is the choice to love *free* if not choosing to love means burning in Hell for eternity?
Somebody always brings up Hitler. And yes, justice demands some form of stiff punishment in the afterlife for those who’ve done horrific deeds on earth, especially for those who’ve never been punished at all. Undoubtedly it’s easier for those who’ve suffered unjustly at the hands of tyrants or, say, serial killers to believe in Hell, or something like Hell. But Catholic doctrine, to be consistent, has to extend Hell as punishment to anyone who has commited mortal sin. Yet most mortal sins are in no way equivalent to genocide or serial murder. To be consistent, the Church has had to teach that anyone who’s missed Mass on Sunday is worthy of Hell(!). That seems ludicrous. But what about someone who dies committing their first act of adultery? Or name-a-serious-sin? At some point you have to say this act earns Hell, and to somebody else that’s going to seem ludicrous…unless, of course, you’re talking about Hitler. But what’s the alternative? Is the problem the definition of mortal sin, or the concept of Hell itself?
I don’t claim to have answers, but as I’ve said, the older I get the more I question the ease with which Christians argue for an all-loving God on the one hand and a God who created, or at least allows to exist, a Hell to torture those who fail to return His love on the other.
How is that freedom? How is that love?
If we’re honest, we may have to admit we can’t solve the problem. But I think we have to admit there is one.
Ronald writes, “Would it also follow that the soul would also be free to choose beyond its temporal existence when without the physical limitations of the senses it then encounters its loving Creator in Christ and realizes the hell it had lived without this source of infinite love which it was created with and for?”
No, I don’t think that follows. What you leave out is any explanation of how our attitude toward God would suddenly change upon our death. Our faith teaches us that the attitude we form in our worldly bodies is the one we must live with for eternity. I submit that that attitude is what will determine how we view God, as well as our past life: whether life without God was hell and whether life with him will be heaven.