Category: soteriology

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C.S. LEWIS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HELL AND A NEW WORLD

C.S. Lewis never wrote about politics very much, but in the eighteenth letter of The Screwtape Letters he has his devil, Screwtape, say the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.  

This philosophy could be seen as what has always been the dominant politics of the world—or the sin of pride in its structural or corporate manifestation—whether the rulers were soldiers, priests, hereditary aristocrats, or business people.  Capitalism, with its “war of all against all,” its social Darwinism, is the locus of the Devil’s philosophy in the current age.

Many Christians simply accept Churchill’s dictum that history is “just one damned thing after another.”  Whatever he meant by that, they see it as an essentially meaningless and contemptible series of events and eagerly await the Christ to come back and wipe it all out, taking us to heaven.  They are disappointed in life, and want it to be punished.  And for what they imagine to be their admirable otherworldliness, they think they shall be rewarded with a new world that has no connection to and very little similarity to this one.

What is a resurrection?  It is a rebirth, a new person, but a person not entirely discontinuous with the old person.  It is the old person who has died but is transfigured and reborn.  Otherwise, there is no resurrection, but simply the death of one person followed by his or her replacement by another who is entirely someone else.

Thus it is, I believe, with the new Earth that is destined to be born.

The Christian’s approach to history should not be that of an unloving parent troubled by a chronically and seriously sick child, hopefully counting the days down to when that child shall die and the parent be presented with a healthy replacement.  The parent wants the child to be saved, not replaced, and this is what we should want for the world—not just for the individuals within it. 

Much of Christian eschatology, unfortunately, is simply a disguised desire for genocide, geocide, even.

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HELL IS POLITICAL

Many of the early Christians were very cheerful, very good, very fearless.  There was a real danger they might have no fear of death; and this would never do.  Christ came to defeat sin and death, and death is a much reduced master if he is not feared.  Fortunately, there was an answer: the Christians’ faith in the resurrection could not be easily shaken; but it could be more easily twisted.

Enter hell.  The solution was simple.  If people do not fear anything in this life because their deepest faith is in the life to come, make that life to come uncertain: not by denying its reality, but by making that reality potentially terrifying.  Tell them that they very well will live forever after they die, but that they must step very carefully in this life or end up in perpetual torment.

And so death, the retreating ancien regime, poisoned the wells for the advancing revolutionaries who were overthrowing him; he re-established his foothold on Earth in the very midst of a church that was to lead the revolution against him.  For now, Christians again lived in fear.  And their fear of the next world gave them all the vices and weaknesses people experience when their fears are only of this one.

The pagan world of the Middle East had believed in a dark and shadowy afterlife, a world of shades and shadows, of ghostly spirits who had forgotten their Earthly lives and wandered forever in gloom.  This miserable fate had been thought to await all but a few privileged ones favoured by the gods for whatever reason.  But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.

Thus it is that in wars and revolutions, the enemy puts up such resistance that one looks back longingly, like the Hebrews in the desert after leaving Pharoah, upon a time that was miserable, but less miserable than now.  Would it not have been better to make bricks without straw under a tyrant than be where we are now?   Would it not have been better to submit to death, its power and propaganda, to be “realistic” and bow to his “natural” reign, than rebel and find ourselves cast into the flames?

But not so fast.  For death never had power to make a hell, only the fear of it.  Death never cast us into the flames but only into the fear of them.  Death has enlisted us against ourselves in his war against us, and we need not commit this self-betrayal.  Nor need we believe that the rise of hell as a propaganda pinion of the Church was ever inevitable, or, even if inevitable, need we see it as anything other than a tremendous bluff, which itself is doomed inevitably to fall.

Hell is decidedly political.

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THE ODDS OF SALVATION

They say that humans must have free will to be important, to love and be loved.  Therefor, it is inevitable some will choose to reject God.  And choosing to reject God is to put oneself in hell.

Therefor, they say, hell is justified.

But is it actually inevitable, given the free wills of billions of souls, that some will reject God?  What is this “inevitable” mathematically speaking?  What percentage of the total number of souls should we expect will be saved given this inevitability?  50%?  25%?  1%?  Even given billions of souls, is a 25% salvation rate more likely than 100%?  If one flips a coin 100 times one can predict mathematically what the odds are it will be heads every time.  The odds that it will be heads 50 times are presumably much greater.  But a coin is a known quantity.  Its result is random (the random is not predictable, except in a broad statistical sense) not freely chosen.  The odds against it turning up heads 100 times out of 100 are extremely low.  If we treat free souls like flipped coins, it seems impossible that all shall be saved. But are we not, in assuming a significant number of lost souls, making a mistake in treating them like flipped coins?  Must freedom be unpredictable?  Random?  Arbitrary?

Does freedom operate according to the laws of chance?  And if not, why should all being saved be less likely than, say, half?

Why could not the perfect freedom of all guarantee the salvation of all?  What is the more likely result, and how do we know?

POSTED JULY 31, 2023

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ECKHART TOLLE AND CHRISTIAN SALVATION

What if Christian soteriology, in its concern with how to get God’s grace and be saved, has been little more than an unwitting attempt to resist that grace?

What if our strategy, unbeknownst to ourselves, has been to keep salvation somewhere beyond planet Earth and eternally in the future?  If we take the position that universal salvation is the truth, then soteriology might be, on the psychological level at least, a grandiose and perverse attempt to keep that inevitable salvation at arm’s length for as long as possible.

Reading Eckhart Tolle, one encounters repeatedly the idea that the ego, which is a false self, constantly tries to create various situations and narratives which sustain its existence.  This leads to a great deal of unnecessary drama and pain.  We are accustomed, in the religious or spiritual world, to look at ego moralistically.  But this is something Tolle does not do.  He seems to see the ego as a persistent force that causes us problems constantly, sucking the life out of us, but he views this more as a problem than a sin.

For Tolle, the ego lives on time, thrives on time, and needs some kind of narrative (and not even necessarily a self-praising one.  It can even be the opposite) to keep itself alive.  To be fully present in the now is the death of the ego, and something it militates against constantly.  The reason we spend most of our lives in the past or the future, and in ways that are not necessary or beneficial, is because the ego cannot live in the present, and must keep us distracted from it.

What would a deep-seated conviction of God’s eternal, unconditional, and irrevocable love for us mean to the ego?  It would mean the ego’s death.

Where would one find such a deep-seated conviction?  Where would one experience God’s love?  In the present, and the present only.  But to avoid this conviction of divine love (such avoidance being what the ego wants) we must limit our soteriology to the level of eschatology: the last things, some future events.  Salvation must be of the future (an uncertain future at that) and of the future only.

We look to the second coming of Christ in the future because we don’t know how to find him in the present.

We become lawyers of the Bible because we see the Bible as a book of the past and we do not know how to live now.

Take none of this to mean that the Bible is “outdated” or needs to be “made relevant”; please also note that I do assert a literal second coming of Christ, entailing a radical rebirth of the world and eventually of all people.  But if Christians spend much of their time trying to parse the book of Revelation to know exactly how and when he is coming, or if they ignore and despise the world around them because it is not ancient scripture, it may well be because they deny the Christ of the present, of the here and now.

Christ yesterday, Christ tomorrow, never Christ today.  The Christ of the Now is too frightening.  “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, but we only think we are seeking.

If only we do such-and-such then Christ, truly, will love us (in the future).  Conversely: oh look at the dear Bible and see how Christ loved us (in the past).  No Christian would deny that Christ loves us now of course, but it is one thing to assert this as a doctrine and quite another to embrace it in one’s attitudes or spiritual practice.  Alas!  Jesus loves us, but Jesus is elsewhere, waiting to come back.  We fold our hands piously and sit with woebegone faces staring at the heavens, waiting for the love to come.  Christ is always elsewhere, be it time or space.

Theologians, who have egos as much as the rest of us, must find some clever way around universalism if God’s love is to be rendered an uncertain thing and the ego left with a good toehold, at the very least, in our lives.  Hence, the torment of soteriology: is he saved?  Is she saved?  Am I saved?  How do we know?  What do we do?  Have we done it enough yet?  For if universalism is not true, or if it is only a pious “hope” that some patronizing doctrine allows us (condemning us for “dogmatism” or “presumption” if we insist that universalism is true) the ego can thrive: especially on its plans, constructions, narratives on how it will get into heaven and even how, perhaps, others will not.

It is my contention that if there is something we must do to be saved, we shall do it, somehow, sooner or later, both freely and inevitably.

The good news of our inevitable salvation in Christ is bad news for the ego.  The dramatic narrative is ruined if there is an inevitable happy ending for everyone.  How does the ego feed off the prospect of eternal bliss if everyone gets it?        

It can’t.

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REVENGE IS THEOLOGICAL

Revenge is theological.  To be abased or abused by another causes one to see one has lost value in the eyes of that other.  But who is that other?  Why does he or she have authority?  If the other is the other and no more than that there is no especial reason to elevate the other’s opinion of oneself to a higher status than one’s own opinion of oneself.  Suppose I think myself a worthy fellow.  Then someone treats me as if I am unworthy.  Why should I believe him rather than myself?  But it happens that we do tend to respect the other’s opinion not simply as a judgment on us, whether an accurate judgement or not; the other’s abuse of us is not simply an expression of a judgement.  The abuse is experienced as a making of that judgement the truth.  To pronounce guilty, in this sense, is to make the object of that pronouncement guilty.  This is no case of “guilty as charged,” but “charged, therefore guilty.”  Just as God’s “fiat lux” does not express a wish for light or the expression of a truth that light would be a good thing, but does in fact cause the existence of light, so the abuse we receive makes us deserving of it.  This perception or feeling, however irrational, is the experience of abuse (leading to desire for revenge) no matter how truly we may argue the abuse was undeserved and does not pay due respect to our true self.

The abuser, therefore, is treated as being the manifestation of God’s power and authority.

God, therefore, has proclaimed us into unworthiness via his messenger.  What are we to do?  We cannot “prove” our innocence as one might do in a trial, or in the appeal of a faulty verdict.  Or rather, on a rational and evidential basis we might indeed prove our innocence, but such proof is rendered null and void by the idolatry that treats the abuser as a manifestation of God.

Therefore, we must abuse, even kill the messenger.  If we can do this, we can show to ourselves that he or she was not God’s messenger to begin with.  If his power to hurt us indicates God’s authority, our power to hurt this messenger negates him as God’s messenger.  The authority of the abuse against us is vitiated.  To get revenge is to say to the abuser “no, you are not the voice and power of God.”

But perhaps, at the darkest level, to get revenge is to unseat the offender from being the voice and power of God, as if the offender really had been that.  Note that this is not a case of proving the abuser to be a false prophet.  Prophets are not killed because they are false but because they are true (or seen as such).  Likewise, the abuser is believed (at some deep level at least) to be the true power and authority of God.  However, the avenger aspires to change this state by the injury or destruction of said abuser.

Convicted by The Truth (regardless of the fact this “truth” may be a blatant falsehood) one therefor assaults The Truth, assaults God through assaulting his “prophet.”  One therefore treats God like a puppet who can be forced; this action is tragic.

Perhaps, therefore, when God says, “revenge is mine” he may well be not only delineating the difference between human and divine responsibilities but saying that he shall not be our puppet.

Revenge, therefore, is unfaithful and idolatrous.  But it also reflects a belief in God, a passionate need not to be rejected by him.  Perhaps it is the case, therefore, that those who can be greatly provoked without experiencing the desire for revenge are either people of great faith (whether or not it is linked to a specific religion or set of doctrines) or very thoroughgoing atheists.  Revenge, in effect, is for believers who lack faith.

So, revenge is not a matter of “tit for tat” as it is usually conceived: a spiritual or moral Newtonian motion where an action demands an opposite and equal reaction.  If you hurt me and I therefore want to hurt you, that is not the same as the firing of a gun causing recoil.

Revenge is not a matter of justice, not even retributive justice, but an attempt at the justification of the self.  This justification is attempted through an assault on God, the source of all justification.

Indeed, if there is any truth to what I have said here, it might illustrate in some way the Christian belief that we cannot justify ourselves.  Only God can do that for us.  “Revenge is mine,” he says in Romans and Deuteronomy.

Revenge is inspired when one first commits the idolatry of taking another person’s judgement of oneself as coming from God, and ends up assaulting God himself to achieve the justification ruined by this very idolatry.

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TWO WAYS WITH GOD

Christianity seems to present us with God’s good books and his bad books.  How do you tell which one you are in?  Christianity seems to present us with either a great thundering about how sinful we are because we are disobedient, unloving, too unconcerned with the poor, etc.–in other words, we are faced with God’s justice–or Christianity presents us with a God saying never mind, I love all my broken children, and I know you can be nowhere near what I want you to be on your own efforts.  Relax.  I always love you no matter what.

The young rich man is told he must give all he has to enter the kingdom of heaven–an apparently impossible task.  Later in that tale we hear that with God all things are possible.  I always wonder what, exactly, is it that is possible?  Is it possible for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of God without having given his riches to the poor?  Or is the meaning instead that God will help the rich man to give up his riches in order to enter the Kingdom?

Which one is it?  How does God look upon me right now?  Can one be in the good books and the bad books both at the same time?  How do we get into God’s good books and know we are there?  It is very well to say here are the commandments, or here are the two great commandments upon which all the law hangs (love God with all you’ve got and your neighbor as yourself) but we know we are going to fall short here.  How close to the mark must we get before we are in the good books as opposed to the bad ones?  Or are our efforts here irrelevant?

Christianity has tormented us for two thousand years with such questions, and with no answer that I can see, except for those who have been given one on some mystical level.

When we say that God welcomes sinners, do we really mean it, or do we just mean “sinners” in an ironic way.  It seems to be the conservative way to be highly censorious of those society already treats as garbage, putting temptation before them and then blaming them when they fall.  The liberal way, on the other hand, is to treat “sinner” ironically and dishonestly.  All too often what is meant here is simply a person who is a sinner in a conservative’s eyes but not in a liberal’s.  Let’s get over a sentimental idea of “sinner.”  It is easy enough for liberals to castigate conservatives for being harsh on prostitutes, for example, or drug users, the poor, and other underdogs.  When the liberal says “sinner” he doesn’t mean literally “sinner,” but actually “those whom conservatives falsely label as guilty.”

Well, if God welcomes those people, it’s not such a big deal, is it?  Why would he reject helpless innocents, if that’s what they are, just because conservatives do?

When Mary Magdalene wept and washed Jesus’ feet with her own hair, she presented us with the quintessential image of the repentant sinner.  Personally, I am not inclined to judge prostitutes harshly.  The chief cause of their situation, as far as I am concerned, is poverty caused by economic injustice.  I’m not even sure that prostitution, as such, is always and inherently immoral.  But if the whole message of this Biblical incident is taken to be that prostitutes are not such bad people as the world makes them out to be, I think we have missed something.

And for the pharisee who said “I thank you that I am not like other men” there is always another pharisee thanking God he is not like the first pharisee, and another pharisee after that one . . .

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KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL; FRANCOIS JULLIEN

“Knowledge of good and evil” in the book of Genesis may not mean realizing the truth that good and evil already exist.  Knowledge of good and evil is not a “fall from innocence” in the sense that one had not heard of or even imagined evil but then comes to know of it.  The knowledge of good and evil comes about in the context of a non-dualistic universe where there is only good, and it needs no evil to set it off, to be its foil.  But to know good and evil is to fracture good into both, to create evil, unnecessarily.

The “knowledge” of good and evil here is not only an abstract knowledge, but more like “cleaving unto,” a knowledge in the erotic sense.  One emerges in a fallen world where good seems to need evil (even in the imagination) to exist as good.  This may well be the greatest evil of the situation.  (See also Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a marvellous exploration of this idea of “necessary evil.”)  One is leaving behind the knowledge (in both senses of that word) of an entirely good world, to a world where this pure good cannot be imagined, cannot be made workable, even as a theory.  To the fallen world, the world where good and evil are known, a world of pure good seems an absurdity.

It is in this context then, that in order to save us from this situation, to restore us to a world without evil, Christianity offers the solution of belief in Christ.  At this point the words of Francois Jullien become illuminating:

“Because it involves ipseity—selfness in itself—believe takes on a whole other meaning.  ‘Believe in’ (pisteúein eis, πιστευειν είζ), John often writes.  And, in fact, everything rides on the shift from ‘believing that’ [croire à] to ‘believing in’ [croire en].  What we believe when we believe that is from the start limited, constrained, objectivized (even when the belief is that God exists).  But believing in—i.e., in a self, in an ipseity—is not undefined but infinite.  When I say ‘I believe in you’ I have no limit in view.  Moreover, believing that can be detailed and itemized: I can believe that X is and not that Y is, and thus make a selection.  But belief in is by necessity whole; it calls for an absolute.  When I say that I believe in you I no longer wonder “what” in you I believe in.  To put things differently, believing that entails a necessary measure of credulity, even if I have good reason to believe, because I might just as easily not believe what I believe.  I recognize its hypothetical character (e.g., belief that Santa Claus exists).  Whereas belief in is not credulous but trusting.  By the phrase ‘believe in yourself’—one that a parent might say to a child, or vice versa, or that one lover might tell another—I mean that I am counting on you, that I am expecting something of you, that I am placing my hopes in you, in you as yourself, in your ipseity, or that I am expecting everything of you.  Thus belief in entails a self, an ipseity, on both sides.  When I believe in someone I involve the entirety of myself.  What I believe in in the person in whom I believe is what he himself reveals of himself, but also what he conceals within.  Belief that might be open to convincing, but its truth will still rest on insufficient grounds; I would prefer knowledge that was certain.  But the truth of belief in, precisely because it entails an as-in-oneself, will not be measured by a truth subject to proof; it is its own guarantee and can claim no other.  You must believe in me, says Christ, and not believe what they say of me.  But hasn’t the Church, with its dogma, been compelled to shift from belief in (ipseity) to belief that (identity)—and made the latter into the ‘faith’ that tempers its armor?” 

(Francois Jullien, Resources of Christianity English edition, 2021, Polity Press, pp. 82-84)

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UNIVERSALISM AND A CHRISTIAN LEFT

In That All Shall be Saved (Yale UP, 2019) David Bentley Hart says,

“The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.” (78)

It is one thing to argue that a just and loving God might annihilate or even torture forever some of his children.  Infernalists and universalists clearly are on opposite sides of the fence here; the issue is usually argued on the basis of reason, scripture, or both.

But what does it mean spiritually or psychologically to believe in an infernalist God?

What does it mean politically?

I think that Christian infernalists are houses divided against themselves.  As Hart asserts, probably many Christians only think they believe in hell.

But might it be that infernalism has hamstrung the church?  Might it be that laying our arguments for infernalism aside, the infernalist position sets up a God who, even if he can be justified on logical or scriptural grounds simply cannot be loved?  I believe so.  The god infernalists love (or think they love) is not lovable.  This cannot be stressed enough.  It is all very well to take a hard line on divine sovereignty and say that since God is God there are no ethical constraints above him to which he must comply.  But if what God does with this infinite right and power strikes us as abomination, how are we to love him?  We cannot.  We may proclaim that it is ourselves who are totally depraved in objecting to hell and to such a God, but whatever one makes of that argument we still cannot love the God of hellfire we claim to believe in.

If a Nobel Prize winning mathematician told you that 2+2=5 you might choose to believe he is right, even if you cannot see how.  But you have disqualified yourself from ever doing mathematics again.

And if a cruel and monstrous god is supposed to be love itself, that makes it more difficult for us to truly love ourselves or each other.  This is true in both the personal and political spheres.

So what is going on?

Why this insistence on the divine bogey, the horrific Nobodaddy?

Once one has swallowed the balderdash of infernalism, one can believe almost anything.  If an omnipotent deity wants to save everyone, but cannot because his hands, supposedly, are tied by our free will, what other social, political, economic monstrosities can be rationalized and accepted?  Feudalism, patriarchy, capitalism—one can do a song and dance and accept their necessity or even goodness if one can believe the holy, just, and loving creator of the universe will roast certain of his children over an open flame forever.

In effect, the church has corrupted itself by holding a form of moral idiocy close to its heart.  It does not help that the idiocy of infernalism has been believed by many people who are by no means idiots.  It seems that most thoroughly respected and even brilliant theologians have believed it.  The idiocy has been believed by people with loving hearts and a true desire to know Christ.

It is also notable that it tends to be the more politically and socially conservative of the church who are most likely to believe in hell and to emphasize it.  Could this situation be one of the reasons why Christianity and the Left have so often been at odds and even outright enemies?  By this I mean not only that leftists object to infernalism, but that there is something in the beliefs and attitudes behind infernalism that are inimical to the entire leftist project.

(It seems to be a common phenomenon to find people who are theologically brilliant, but politically obtuse.  Likewise, some of the most acute and perceptive political thinkers are blind or ignorant when it comes to matters of religion.)

Not that there has not always been a Christian Left, of course, but in his 2017 Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Penguin) Alec Ryrie asserts, “The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left” (7).

It is time for this Christian Left to arise.  We must tell the world that infernalism is not fundamental to the faith.

Even if one makes the case that the secular left from the 19th century onwards owes its sense of justice to Christianity, this is no reason for religious triumphalism.  What it means is that while the Church largely fumbled the ball by siding with the powerful, opposition to oppressive systems and ideologies like capitalism has been left largely to a secular Left, thereby deprived of the greater strength and spirit it might have had.

At numerous times and places the secular Left has had a stronger and more Christian ethic than the church.  I am convinced the church’s frequent hostility to the secular left comes in part from an unacknowledged moral envy the church has sometimes had when it failed to help the poor the left was in solidarity with.  Could it be the church’s ethic and spirit has been crippled by infernalism?  Could it be that a more ethically sensible Left found itself unable to cleave to a religion that demanded eternal torture for some malefactors?  I by no means advocate that Christianity should give up infernalism in order to gain more converts.  One can only justify universalism in the name of truth: whether or not that gets you more or fewer converts is not relevant.  But perhaps the secular Left has been more morally intelligent on numerous occasions.

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DOES UNIVERSALISM VIOLATE FREE WILL?

One of the defenses of infernalism is that in order for human beings to be human, to be worth something as opposed to being simply robots, we must have free will.  We cannot truly be with God unless we freely accept him.  And if our will is truly free, then it must be possible for us to reject God.  And the rejection of God must necessarily lead to damnation.  Therefore, we are told, universalism must violate free will, since it states that all shall be saved and this seems impossible if everyone is free to reject God.

Let me deal with just one element of this whole argument here.  According to the standard Christian view, we are all fit for hell to begin with.  Our own sins, or original sin inherited from Adam and Eve or something of the sort, has made it just and fitting that we be damned.

No exceptions are acknowledged here.  Simple justice, we are told, means that of all the billions of human beings existing or who ever existed they all deserve to be damned, and would be damned but for the mercy of Christ.

It seems peculiar that of the billions of humans who lived or ever will live, they all chose or will choose to sin badly enough to be damned.  For surely, to deserve such a horrible fate one must have at least freely chosen the wickedness one is damned for.

Now this is a very strange free will indeed.  Apparently, without exception, we have all freely chosen a path of sin bad enough to deserve hell.  You would think that at least a handfull would have chosen to be sinless.

But one laughs at this of course.  Sinless?  Impossible.  Even the greatest saints sin and sin seriously, as they are the first to admit.

So where is that famous free will then?  How is it that when universalism wishes to storm the gates of hell and liberate all, we are told this violates free will; but when each and every one of us is born in a world where we are inevitably doomed to freely merit damnation one hears not a peep about how our free will is violated, and that therefor God cannot tolerate the situation to exist?

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GOOD-GOD/BAD-GOD: THE JUDGE OFFERS HIS “LOVE”

Let me dare the following rant, at the risk of feeling ashamed of myself later.  For religion has its religiously correct attitudes which reign us in, and in the name of avoiding sin we curb thoughts that may need to be aired, to be pondered, lest we miss something.  People complain of “toxic positivity” in our culture, and sometimes rightly.  Religion has its own versions of this, wherein some thought or feeling that steps outside the doctrinally correct is immediately stifled.  The good Christian folds his hands prayerfully and smiles grimly inside, intoning, “think doctrinally correct thoughts, think doctrinally correct thoughts,” like those lamentable characters in that horrific story, “It’s a Good Life,” thrusting all rebelliousness from their minds lest their omniscient tyrant hear them.  Must Christians hunch their shoulders through life in mortal dread whenever the traditional wisdoms are questioned?  And for Christ’s sake anyway, what has he to fear from my thoughts or words?  You may say WE have something to fear of our thoughts and words, very well.  We also have something to fear of NOT saying them.

Thus:

You can’t tell people that if justice were done they would be tortured forever, and then in the next breath tell them you love them.  Humans are not made this way.  Here is what God, according to some Christians, is saying to us constantly: “you are a worthless sack of shit, and I love you.”  No.  This does not work as love.  This is the manipulative, Good-God/Bad-God.  And there is no sense saying we SHOULD be able to humbly accept the love of someone who thinks we deserve eternal torture, that we are being PROUD: the fact is, we don’t, and we can’t.  How can you oblige someone to do the impossible? (even assuming the impossible should be done in this case even if it could).  And obligeing us to accept in gratitude the gift along with the supposely graciously suspended judgement does not work.  If we are wholly evil, and nothing but wholly evil (and we must be to deserve eternal damnation) there is nothing there to love.  And there is no point saying, “God does not love us for something in ourselves, but because it is his nature to love.”  This is blather.  “Love” is not an intransitive verb.  It has an object.  And if this is not the case, we must say simply, “God loves,” but we cannot truly say “God loves us,” if indeed, there is nothing good there to be loved.  For how can God love evil?

Nor must we say therefor that we seek to be loved through merit, because parents love their babies, and what merit has a baby performed?  The baby is in some way good in their eyes, and we tend to agree with them.

No matter how evil we are, no matter how much we need the mercy, if there is not someone beneath the rust of spiritual ruin to receive that mercy, then who is it who is being loved?  Perhaps God simply loves himself then?  Then who are we?

There is no point exorting humans to be good and then saying they can’t do it, and judging them for inevitable failure.  “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory”; does not reason pipe up here and say that if not one has been righteous there is more going on than countless billions of people, all of whom just happen to be evil?  Might there just be something systematic about this evil none of us could escape of our own efforts?  Liberals have been mocked for being soft on criminals, saying they are in some way “victims of society.”  But what kind of “society” is it, when every bloody citizen of it is a criminal?  I think there is a wee bit of a structural problem here that nobody can escape.  Sin is that structure.

What are we to say to God, then?  “Love me according to my deserts?”  God does not love according to deserts, does he?  Was this not the mistake of the pharisees?  Thinking they could buy or earn God’s love?  Is it not free?  And we don’t quite bloody know, each of us, exactly what our deserts are anyway.  Certainly we cannot claim somehow to have earned eternal bliss.  Nor can we claim, in truth, we SHOULD have.

Good-God/Bad-God is Blake’s Nobodaddy, hypocritically pretending to love freely while all the time reminding you of what a rotter you are.  “Just think what I MIGHT have justly done to you,” he mutters under his breath.

Enough!  Enough!  All this nonsense, and maybe this meditation itself, is simply another attempt to keep justification hovering in the background as a dark and powerful shadow, even as we try to accept with trembling gratitude the Master’s love.  “Oh Lord, please judge me positively for eschewing my worthiness…”!  Yes, let us say we are too proud to accept unmerited love, then.  But we are too filled with self-loathing also to accept that love.  Ah, but the sages, say, that self-loathing is a form of pride.  Perhaps it is: a form of pride we learned from those same sages teaching us humbly to loathe ourselves!

No, what is needed steps outside, beyond even what I am saying here.  What is required is a miracle.