Category: universalism

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PROBLEMS WITH THE FREE WILL DEFENSE OF INFERNALISM (#1)

I’m not going to undertake here a thorough refutation of the free will defense of infernalism,  but just present a few thoughts.

The free will defense of infernalism states that in order for humans to truly love and be loved, we must have free will.  In order for us to be more than robots, we must have the ability to choose freely whether to love God.  And therefore, if we truly are free, some of us may well choose to reject God, and that must mean we get hell.  C.S. Lewis said, “some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot” (“The Shocking Alternative” from Mere Christianity).

But what is seldom pointed out is that if free will is so important to our value in the eyes of God and to our eternal fate, why does each of us have so little of it?  I do not argue that we have no free will, simply that our free will is only partial, incomplete.  I consider it a fairly obvious axiomatic truth that we have some power of choice, at least.  Others may disagree with me and say free will is entirely illusory, but if they are right, everything I or they say on the matter is moot anyway: I have no choice over what I am saying here, and you have no choice how or whether to respond to it.  There is no point worrying about the matter.  (However, if those who say we have no free will are right, we have no choice anyway whether we worry about these things or not, and so on.) 

That being said, how much free will do we have?  It seems each and every one of us has chosen sin to the point where we deserve perdition and can avoid it only by the grace of God.  It seems to be a standard theological claim that without the resurrection and grace of Christ, we’d all go to hell, and we’d all deserve it.

Funny how literally billions of people, all quite free, just happen to fail to make the right choice.  If you gave an exam to billions of students and every last one failed, you might come to the reasonable conclusion the exam was unfair.  (On the other hand, if we really do want to blame the billions of students instead, keep in mind the professor who wrote the exam up is the same one who tried to teach them in the first place.  We would have reason to question his competence.)  In fact, we are told not only that it is impossible for us to be sinless by our own efforts, but that it is the sin of pride to see it otherwise.

In other words, we are all inevitably damned by our own free will.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Indeed, I believe this quotation to be true.  And if we were able to count up all our various crimes we might each of us truly say, “I might have sinned even more, but I chose not to; I might have sinned much less, but I chose not to,” and so on.  I do not understand sin as sin in the most serious sense without the concept of free will.  One might err in a state of unfreedom, but one must have some freedom to truly sin.  But the record would seem to indicate that without exception we all freely choose to do what must make us deserving of damnation.  (Of course, if we take up the idea instead that we are born deserving damnation because of the sins of distant ancestors, so much for the idea of free will.  Clearly, we have no more freedom than robots after all, and the free will defense of hell falls.)

Either way, it seems this “free will” is a trap.  Nor is this changed by the fact that any given sin of ours on any given occasion could have been avoided.  It seems we all inevitably freely choose to sin from time to time (that is, if the sin is not inevitable on any given occasion, it will inevitably and frequently come nonetheless, and freely) and therefor become hell fodder.

The free will defense of hell tells us therefore that we need this free will in order to truly enter heaven, but that this same “free will” inevitably leads to us deserving the opposite.

Now, if we are in the midst of this paradox, that of inevitably freely choosing to sin, but we are told we still have enough free will to warrant our crimes serious enough to receive damnation, why might we not turn this on its head?  Why not say that we shall all inevitably freely choose to accept the love, grace, and forgiveness God offers us and thereby be saved?  C.S. Lewis and the infernalists object to this, but I don’t think they can do so without having to note that the same God who so cherishes our freedom in order to make meaningful eternal union with him possible, seems to have presented us in the meantime with a very strange sort of freedom indeed.  When we are offered the grace of salvation we must be free to reject it or that grace is naught, it seems, but the same free will so necessary to our salvation earlier bound us powerlessly to be damned.  We are forced to need salvation, but not forced to get it.

Let me put this another way.  If we can claim we were free when we inevitably damned ourselves, why can we not be predestined (all of us) to receive salvation and say we accepted that in freedom also?

I said earlier that we must have freedom to truly sin.  But is it not also the case that we must have as well unfreedom in order to sin?  That is, must we not also be tempted to sin?  And is not temptation, especially when we consider that it conflicts with our better impulses, a form of unfreedom?  Who, being free from temptation, would choose to be tempted?  Is the recovering alcoholic, torn between putting her life together and having another, potentially disastrous drink, more free that someone who just doesn’t want that drink at all?  To be tempted is to have a will or desires divided against themselves, and this does not sound like freedom to me. 

But this is where the story of Adam and Eve, quite frankly, screws us up.  The way it is so often read leads us to think their fall into sin actually makes sense.  They knew they should not eat the apple, but they were tempted, and fell.  We all have this experience.  But that is because we are free, but less than perfectly free.  Would not a perfectly free Adam and Eve not be tempted to begin with?  To understand their story, we would have to look at them through pre-lapsarian eyes, which is something we do not have (and hence, perhaps also a reason why Lewis could not imagine the creature he said he could not imagine).

In other words, sin, though real, does not make sense.  And that is why hell does not make sense either, because it cannot exist without sin.  (You may counter that if sin exists despite not making sense, hell might then exist anyway, but I would ask you on what basis.  The existence of sin is experiential.  On the other hand, many of us have suffered greatly, but I take it we have no direct evidence of the hell the infernalists are talking about.)

Alas, I feel as if there are further and more elusive developments to make on all this, but I must end here for now.  There is something about philosophy and theology that always seems to avoid complete closure.  This essay threatens to become a book.  Indeed, one reason I blogged little until recently was my fear I could say nothing without saying everything, and that doing so was impossible anyway.  But I then decided to accept the necessary lack of thoroughness needed to get anything done.  Better a series of imperfect blog posts than that handful of long and perfect articles that are never written.

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A Meditation on Embracing the Darkness

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was no rhetorical question.  Jesus did not know the answer.  If those last words of Jesus were not asked for real, if they were just some show to say to an unappreciating world, “look how much I’m suffering for you!” then Jesus was never fully incarnated, never had the full deal of the shittiest elements of the human experience, which includes not understanding why suffering and injustice exist: he was merely slumming.

Both trees—the tree Adam and Eve ate from and the tree Jesus died on—are absurd.  That is the whole point.  It makes no sense that from a creation that was good in every respect a choice was made that brought sin and death into the world.  It makes no sense that omnipotent God, the ground of all being, must suffer death for life to prevail.  If we could make sense of evil, that would mean God had ordered a proper place for it in the creation, or that evil was a force outside his control and rivalling him.  Christianity rejects both these positions.

Jesus did not die absurdly so we could make sense of our own pain.  He embraced the darkness and absurdity that we also are in.  His resurrection indicates there is an answer to his question, but we do not know what it is.

I know this is not a rational answer to the problem of evil.  My point is that this side of the grave there isn’t such an answer even imaginable.  But let me say that the cross and the Resurrection are grounds for faith in the unimaginable.

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That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (2019) Yale University Press – by David Bentley Hart

A Quick Review

Christianity has a long-lasting problem: apparently, a just, merciful, and loving God will consign some persons to eternal suffering, or at the very least, eternal annihilation.  There seems to be a deep psychological or even ideological aversion to universalism, which is the idea that all persons, sooner or later, will be saved and eternally united with God.  So deeply entrenched is this aversion, that on the live chat feed of a YouTube featuring David Bentley Hart discussing universalism with several theologians, someone actually said (apparently in all seriousness) “universalism is depressing.”

David Bentley Hart is a Christian of the Eastern Orthodox Church and a scholar of religion.  His book is a defense of Universalism.  I have read defenses of universal salvation before, but none so bold as David Bentley Hart’s.  In fact, the last chapter, “Final Remarks,” begins thus:

Custom dictates and prudence advises that here, in closing, I wax gracefully disingenuous and declare that I am uncertain in my conclusions, that I offer them only hesitantly, that I entirely understand the views of those that take the opposite side of the argument, and that I fully respect contrary opinions on these matters.  I find, however, whether on account of principle or of pride, that I am simply unable to do this. (199)

I laughed out loud for sheer delight when I read this, because it is time the infernalist position not only be rejected, but rejected without quarter.  Indeed, Hart is even critical of Hans Urs von Balthasar, sometimes referred to as a “hopeful universalist,” because he wants to hold the infernalist and universalist positions apparently found in scripture “in a sustained ‘tension,’ without attempting any sort of final resolution or synthesis between them…. I [Hart] cannot quite suppress my suspicion that here the word ‘tension’ is being used merely as an anodyne euphemism for ‘contradiction’” (102-03).  It is encouraging to hear a scholar of Hart’s repute take such a bold stand.

The book addresses and refutes on a rational basis the usual objections to universalism.  One of these is that for human life to be meaningful humans must be free, and that genuine free will requires that individuals be free even to choose eternal hell, and that therefor damnation for some is at least possible.  Part of Hart’s critique of this view involves assailing the conception of freedom implied here.  Another objection to universalism is that God, being God, can do what he wants and is outside our paltry understanding of what we might call just, good, or loving, etc., and therefor can torture certain persons forever without in the least diminishing any of these qualities in himself.  Hart deals with this objection handily too, as well as others, showing that we cannot defend infernalism by letting our conception of the divine retreat into some ineffable mystery as a cover for sheer cruelty.

One thing this book does not do is undertake a thoroughgoing scriptural analysis of what the Bible might be saying about hell, nor does it pretend to do this.  Hart restricts the book mostly to a rational refutation of the idea of eternal hell.  I don’t know what his stance is on Biblical inerrancy or infallibility, but he is not prepared to sacrifice reason to scripture, if scripture speaks nonsense.

I have been asked more than once I the last few years whether, if I were to become convinced that Christian adherence absolutely requires a belief in a hell of eternal torment, this would constitute in my mind proof that Christianity should be dismissed as a self- evidently morally obtuse and logically incoherent faith.  And, as it happens, it would.  (208)

But it is not Hart’s contention that scripture does speak nonsense on this score.  He presents around the middle of the book numerous Bible passages which state or strongly suggest universalism.

To me it is surpassingly strange that, down the centuries, most Christians have come to believe that one class of claims—all of which are allegorical, pictorial, vague, and metaphorical in form—must be regarded as providing the “literal” content of the New Testament’s teaching regarding the world to come, while another class—all of which are invariably straightforward doctrinal statements—must be regarded as mere hyperbole.  (94)

If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.  (95)

Nor does Hart back off and give annihilationism (the belief that the damned are not tormented forever, but at some point annihilated) any quarter.

Hart is unintimidated by authority (Augustine or Aquinas, for example) or some idea of what we are “supposed” to believe according to such persons.  He has a distinct attraction to certain of the early church fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa.  Calvin, however, comes in for some very hard knocks here.  In a YouTube somewhere (I quote from memory) Hart has joked, “some people think I hate Calvin.  And that’s because I do.”