Jan 7, 2023·edited Feb 16Liked by David Bentley Hart
The tale of your friends' son hit close to home. I, too, am on the spectrum and had a similar experience when I was a young boy of nine. I remember lying in bed for many nights, crying for the injustice of it all. And from fear, too. "Am I going to Hell?" I thought. "Is being sad and afraid enough to condemn me to Hell, too?" These thoughts plagued me. My mother had to come sleep with me because I had become so inconsolable. As we lied together in bed, she would hug me and pet my hair, trying to calm me down. Finally, I calmed down but only after she told me that God couldn't possibly send anyone to Hell. Not even the most depraved psychopath. Still, it damaged my faith and it took fifteen years for me to return to the Christian faith.
Whether with, or without, the aid of Frank Robinson, David, this hits the ball far beyond the diamond, the park, or the stadium into the deepest and highest blue erasing the artificial barriers between the "natural" and "supernatural" to be joyfully and lovingly received by all creatures of God's Good
"These rules tell us that one might think the concept of an eternal hell truly obscene, or that it makes existence itself seem like a cruel burden visited on us by a merciless omnipotence, but one must never be so indiscrete as to say so."
Should that say "indiscreet"? Or is there some sense of "indiscrete" of which I am unaware?
In creating, God wills a world in which I come to be and and am eventually brought into communion with Him. Does He also thereby will the meandering path I freely take to that final state?
Reading the anecdote you began with was incredibly touching, because an exactly analogous situation occurred in my own life. When attempting to convert to Catholicism, I had to consider the possible existence of eternal Hell. I had grown up a non-denominational Protestant in a church where the word 'Hell' was less likely to be said than obscenity from the pulpit, so I had had little to no interaction with the idea. Naturally, I promptly had the mother of all mental breakdowns upon realizing the (what I thought to be obvious) consequences of such a dogma, and almost left Christianity because of it.
Eventually, I stumbled onto "God, Creation, and Evil" through the blog Eclectic Orthodoxy. It was almost unsettling; point after point was exactly what I had thought, though much more developed and thought out. I firmly agree that "the truths [the book] points out are fairly obvious"; of course, I was (and am) by no means a philosopher, wholly unacquainted (at the time) with ideas such as the classical construal of freedom or the distinction between God's antecedant and consequent will, but one doesn't need philosophical subtlety to call a spade a spade (and by a 'spade', of course, I mean 'a monstrously abhorrent blasphemy of such high order that it renders the Christian mythos a poorly crafted Lovecraftian nightmare'). Perhaps "poorly-crafted" is a tad superfluous when referring to Lovecraft, but the point stands.
Anyways, pass my thanks to Roland for his wonderful thought, thanks to you for writing down said thoughts with your customary editorial flair, and God bless you both.
Thank you for sharing this, Dr. Hart. It is a breath of fresh air to know a more about the nuance of Christian thought on the afterlife, and it’s so fun to read your denouncements of faulty ideas.
I do have a few questions I would like to add to the wider conversation that have slowly bubbled to the top of my thick and murky logic:
1. My immediate family and many close friends are evangelical Christians. The simple rebuttal I hear most often against universalism is that if everyone is saved, why should we evangelize or care about other people’s eternal future? “They gonna get saved anyway, doesn’t matter what I do.” Seems to be something they can’t stomach. How to help them see with new perspective even if it doesn’t change their minds?
2. Why did Jesus die for our sins? Why did he seem to suffer so greatly that he even sweat blood? Was he a weakling or did he really have the weight of the universe’s evil on his shoulders? If the latter is true, then why should anyone suffer even a temporary discomfort or purging at the end of life? Does not purgatorial fire render Christ’s sacrifice as somehow incomplete or insufficient to fully save us? We also need to have our pride, selfishness, lust, evil thoughts, etc., burned away before we can be made whole and be capable of experiencing heaven’s bliss.
3. Perhaps the existence of evil is evidence that God is not all powerful or all knowing? Kind of changes the discussion, I know. It seems to me though that any evil or suffering existing for eternity (hell) would not be incompatible with God’s perfect goodness unless God is indeed omnipotent and omniscient. If God is simply limited in power and knowledge, then hell and God’s goodness can coexist. Yes, it demotes God to a demiurge which is not the confession of Christian tradition, but still, I wonder, heretic that I am.
Ah, yes. A typo that no one noticed.
The tale of your friends' son hit close to home. I, too, am on the spectrum and had a similar experience when I was a young boy of nine. I remember lying in bed for many nights, crying for the injustice of it all. And from fear, too. "Am I going to Hell?" I thought. "Is being sad and afraid enough to condemn me to Hell, too?" These thoughts plagued me. My mother had to come sleep with me because I had become so inconsolable. As we lied together in bed, she would hug me and pet my hair, trying to calm me down. Finally, I calmed down but only after she told me that God couldn't possibly send anyone to Hell. Not even the most depraved psychopath. Still, it damaged my faith and it took fifteen years for me to return to the Christian faith.
Whether with, or without, the aid of Frank Robinson, David, this hits the ball far beyond the diamond, the park, or the stadium into the deepest and highest blue erasing the artificial barriers between the "natural" and "supernatural" to be joyfully and lovingly received by all creatures of God's Good
Creation! Y'r David Clark McAlpin
Masterful. Irrefutable. The Good News.
"These rules tell us that one might think the concept of an eternal hell truly obscene, or that it makes existence itself seem like a cruel burden visited on us by a merciless omnipotence, but one must never be so indiscrete as to say so."
Should that say "indiscreet"? Or is there some sense of "indiscrete" of which I am unaware?
In creating, God wills a world in which I come to be and and am eventually brought into communion with Him. Does He also thereby will the meandering path I freely take to that final state?
Reading the anecdote you began with was incredibly touching, because an exactly analogous situation occurred in my own life. When attempting to convert to Catholicism, I had to consider the possible existence of eternal Hell. I had grown up a non-denominational Protestant in a church where the word 'Hell' was less likely to be said than obscenity from the pulpit, so I had had little to no interaction with the idea. Naturally, I promptly had the mother of all mental breakdowns upon realizing the (what I thought to be obvious) consequences of such a dogma, and almost left Christianity because of it.
Eventually, I stumbled onto "God, Creation, and Evil" through the blog Eclectic Orthodoxy. It was almost unsettling; point after point was exactly what I had thought, though much more developed and thought out. I firmly agree that "the truths [the book] points out are fairly obvious"; of course, I was (and am) by no means a philosopher, wholly unacquainted (at the time) with ideas such as the classical construal of freedom or the distinction between God's antecedant and consequent will, but one doesn't need philosophical subtlety to call a spade a spade (and by a 'spade', of course, I mean 'a monstrously abhorrent blasphemy of such high order that it renders the Christian mythos a poorly crafted Lovecraftian nightmare'). Perhaps "poorly-crafted" is a tad superfluous when referring to Lovecraft, but the point stands.
Anyways, pass my thanks to Roland for his wonderful thought, thanks to you for writing down said thoughts with your customary editorial flair, and God bless you both.
By any chance, could we have the actual text of the Greek translation? A learner of modern Greek asks...
Thank you for sharing this, Dr. Hart. It is a breath of fresh air to know a more about the nuance of Christian thought on the afterlife, and it’s so fun to read your denouncements of faulty ideas.
I do have a few questions I would like to add to the wider conversation that have slowly bubbled to the top of my thick and murky logic:
1. My immediate family and many close friends are evangelical Christians. The simple rebuttal I hear most often against universalism is that if everyone is saved, why should we evangelize or care about other people’s eternal future? “They gonna get saved anyway, doesn’t matter what I do.” Seems to be something they can’t stomach. How to help them see with new perspective even if it doesn’t change their minds?
2. Why did Jesus die for our sins? Why did he seem to suffer so greatly that he even sweat blood? Was he a weakling or did he really have the weight of the universe’s evil on his shoulders? If the latter is true, then why should anyone suffer even a temporary discomfort or purging at the end of life? Does not purgatorial fire render Christ’s sacrifice as somehow incomplete or insufficient to fully save us? We also need to have our pride, selfishness, lust, evil thoughts, etc., burned away before we can be made whole and be capable of experiencing heaven’s bliss.
3. Perhaps the existence of evil is evidence that God is not all powerful or all knowing? Kind of changes the discussion, I know. It seems to me though that any evil or suffering existing for eternity (hell) would not be incompatible with God’s perfect goodness unless God is indeed omnipotent and omniscient. If God is simply limited in power and knowledge, then hell and God’s goodness can coexist. Yes, it demotes God to a demiurge which is not the confession of Christian tradition, but still, I wonder, heretic that I am.