Tag: universalism

Posted on

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  But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.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.

Posted on

“HOW CAN UNIVERSALISM BE TRUE IF…?”

Under the breath of many Christians who raise objections to universalism you can hear them say, “but universalism has always been a minority tradition.  How can all the infernalist greats like Augustine and Aquinas be wrong?  How can so many pastors, priests, and ministers—including some who are hardly of the intolerant, fire-breathing sort—be wrong?”  Indeed.  (In fact, according to David Bentley Hart, for the first few hundred years of Christianity universalism just might have been more than a minority position.  But let that go for now.)

Well, we should not forget what a shock it must have been to the Roman Catholic world to be confronted by some obscure German monk in the early 16th century and told that the Pope himself, the Vicar of Christ, was wrong, terribly wrong, in a number of very serious ways.  Besides, is Christianity or is it not a revolution?  If it is, (and it is) it should not be too surprising to expect it might change drastically in a number of ways over the years, that it might teach us things that either are in scripture but have never been seen there, or which might not be in scripture at all.  (I am leaving aside for the time being the question of whether universalism is scriptural or not.)  But must the truth of God be small enough that it can be packed in one book and tied up in a bow with no significant, new developments for almost two thousand years?  How were Jews during and shortly after the time of Christ expected to follow Jesus if religion is simply a matter of following extant texts in ways that were already prescribed?  Wasn’t Jewish scriptural tradition always evolving anyway? And were not its ways of reading far more creative than some of the arid Christian fundamentalism one encounters?  And what of the pagans?  Were they not being asked by Christianity to throw over—contemptuously even—certain of their beliefs and practices that had been held dear for countless generations?  If Christianity upset the apple cart of history some two thousand years ago, we should not be too surprised if within Christianity itself old certainties are to be overthrown.

Or are we to believe that it is only the hallowed “us,” the Christian tradition, which has no need of revolution?

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen,” is not a reference to human understanding, even of the most enlightened sort.

Posted on

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?

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.”