The Future of Hell

Part III: Video of the Talk (w/ Q&A) & Some Closing Thoughts

Parts 1 and 2 of this miniseries provided the text of the talk I delivered this past February at Mount St. Mary’s University, for their second annual Msgr. Tinder Lecture in Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Below sits a video recording of the entire talk and subsequent Q&A (which begins at 53:40). Then follows four brief reflections on certain themes in the Q&A.

I won’t address every question here. But the following themes merit a little more attention. With these remarks I terminate this miniseries.

1. “Shift in rhetoric?” The second interrogator says that while he’s convinced I’ve shown a marked shift in Catholic tradition regarding the doctrine of hell, the shift is “rhetorical” rather than “substantial.” His main question thus becomes: Were this a shift in doctrine rather than rhetoric, how could we retain prior doctrinal affirmations?

   To this I offered a twofold response. First, his questionable distinction between rhetoric and substance is not a distinction found in any of the magisterial texts themselves. It’s true that something like this general principle appears in the CDF’s Mysterium ecclesiae (1973) and in a few other places. But where and why and how to apply it remain a hermeneutical and theological task, not a principle one can invoke at whim to wave away the substance of actual change (or to use the cited document’s language, “imperfection”). Florence says Jews who do not join themselves to the Catholic church before death go straight to hell. Post-Vatican II teaching is that they will not, and, as I cited, recent commissions propose that they needn’t even believe in Christ as the Messiah or Son of God in this life to be saved. The most obvious reading of this shift is that it is what it seems to be: an actual change, nay even a reversal of the church’s literal teaching regarding the Jewish people. Notice: those who would dismiss this as a substantial change indulge in a non-literal reading of magisterial texts in the very act of applying the rhetoric-substance distinction in this case (and others). In other words, this type of traditionalist suddenly becomes an advocate of the allegorical reading of magisterial texts to support his own idea of what the inspired, authoritative tradition must be like: he reads Florence next to Vatican II, he invokes a distinction neither magisterial text invokes, he then reads the shift through the conjured framework, finally he offers a non-literal reading whose meaning contradicts the very letter of the texts on either side of the shift. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to such “hermeneutics of continuity” in principle. It’s just that its supporters usually wield the “hermeneutics of continuity” against all such attempts—as this interlocutor was doing against my own proposal. Better to drop the charade: every interpreter of scripture and magisterium plays the allegorist at some point. We are all of us embarked; we are all of us already caught up in the act of “synthesizing” and “creative reading” and “allegorizing the inspired authorities”—as it should be! But then this means that anyone who in the name of the “hermeneutics of continuity” objects to a development towards Catholic universalism on the basis that it would fail at “retention” of prior doctrinal affirmations, performs a contradiction. If you can be a legitimate post Vatican-II Catholic thinker and wield your rhetoric-substance distinction to explain away the literal contradiction between Florence and Vatican II, then objecting to my proposal in principle simply severs off the very branch upon which you hang your fidelity to the living church and its magisterium. You must drop the pretense that you glide above such creative, speculative syntheses. Your loyalty to the magisterium today depends on it.

   It’s worth relating this last point to the examiner’s second question, which was this: Given the “appeal” of universalism (by which I suppose he meant that universalism makes the gospel seem more astonishingly good than it otherwise seems), why wouldn’t it have been present in the church’s earliest kerygma, i.e. the apostolic teaching?

   The premise is question-begging, for one thing. I do happen to think this idea is taught in scripture, both in explicit fashion (1 Tim 2.4 and 4.10; 2 Pet 3.9; Rom 5.18 and 11.32) and in more suggestive ways (e.g. Rev 21.24-7, as explicated in the talk). So the assumption that universalist themes are later accretions to a kerygma wholly innocent of them is precisely an assumption I dispute. In fact, consider one uncontroversial data point. The very early Christ-hymn in Philippians 2 says that “every tongue will confess” that Jesus Christ is Lord (Php 2.11). But Paul also says, at least if we’re to take his own words as more than mere rhetoric, that “no one can say that ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12.3). And since the Holy Spirit marks a person out as belonging to God, as a “deposit” that “guarantees what’s to come” (2 Cor 1.22)—salvation—then it seems rather plain that the earliest kerygma as presented in Philippians 2 very naturally implies a Christian universalism.

   Even if this weren’t so, the interlocutor’s objection is an argument from silence, and one that, as I pointed out in my response, would undermine infernalism far more thoroughly than it does universalism. But even if this too weren’t so and unambiguously inflexible infernalist passages adorned the New Testament’s pages (they don’t), one would still need to ask whether any theological synthesis were possible (yes, this puts me at odds with Von Balthasar’s anti-synthesis approach, which, to be honest, I regard as another synthesis under the guise of its denial). This recalls the way another questioner attempted to trap me, as it were, by reading a few infernalist-sounding passages from the apostolic Fathers—2 Clement, Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr. Suppose they’re all unambiguously infernalist (and I would in the last case especially). So what? Would this same questioner like us to confess with Justin Martyr that Christ is “a second god” subordinate to the Father? I suspect not. But notice that here again we have a performative contradiction: this questioner in fact does not think that just because an apostolic father made a certain claim that this claim expresses the full truth of the matter (as in the case of Justin’s Christology in light of later developments), and yet he’s arguing in principle as if this were so in the case of universalism. Yet another sign that the questioner hasn’t studied the branch upon which he sits.

2. “What about St. John Damascene?”. Another questioner claimed that my emphasis on Augustine as opposed to, say, John Damascene was “misleading.” Why “lean into the Augustinian stuff” (as he put it)?

   To this I replied that my emphasis on Augustine simply reflects the magisterium’s own emphasis on Augustine for, oh, about 1200 years or so. That would seem to mean that if one wishes to speak responsibly about the way hell developed in the Catholic (Latin) West, one should privilege Augustine above the Damascene. Now, if this interlocutor wants to make his own speculative proposal that privileges the Damascene’s approach to eschatology over Augustine’s, by all means, do so. And, as I mentioned in the response, it is true that the current catechism appeals to him for just the point the questioner was after: the distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will.

   Two problems here, though. First, the appeal to John’s distinction doesn’t really resolve what I argued was a perennial and unresolved tension illustrated and exacerbated by the development I traced: that the outcome of creation is “God’s affair” (to quote Ratzinger again), and yet, if infernalism proves to be true, then that same outcome actually resists God’s own will for the outcome. Citing John’s distinction merely restates the tension; it doesn’t resolve it. This is clear from the fact that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic catechism cites not the Damascene but Origen for the point that God does not force anyone, violating their freedom, into heaven. Then again, no universalist in Christian history has ever denied that (including Origen). Second, less of a historical than a theological point, the antecedent-consequent distinction can’t resolve the tension I’ve underscored for the simple reason that it assumes merely one side of that tension. Recall what the distinction actually means: “prior” or antecedent to factoring in the decisions of any rational being, God wills for all rational beings to be saved; but “posterior” or consequent to factoring in the decisions of any rational being, God settles, so to speak, for what those decisions make possible in fact. This means that God’s antecedent will makes exactly no decisive difference in the ultimate fate of any actual rational being. What really makes a difference—indeed the absolute difference between heaven or hell—is actually the rational creature’s own decision for or against God, which God himself therefore reacts to in his permission of whatever consequence that creature’s own decision might produce. And so this distinction merely enshrines the rational being’s own decision as the factor that God must accommodate, even if that accommodation entirely opposes his own “antecedent” will for that creature. It is the creature, not God, who is ultimately responsible for creation’s outcome. Which seems pretty obviously to deny that God is the creator of creation’s completed character. No wonder Thomas himself moved away from this distinction and towards an Augustinian predestinarianism, which, conveniently, this questioner never mentioned after citing Thomas’s use of John.

   The presumption that the free will defense of hell is obviously correct has forced many would-be champions of tradition to take up a most untraditional procedure. Augustine? He shouldn’t be emphasized too much for Catholics! Thomas? He never changed on all these questions! The whole, massive, radical development that’s occurred across all the pages of tradition? Mere rhetoric, nothing substantial. Indeed, one questioner resumed his interrogation after the event. Supremely confident in the cogency of the free will defense, he subjected even Benedict XVI’s picture of the coming judgment to critique: When he portrayed (in Spe Salvi 45-7) divine judgment as gazing upon Christ’s face, whose glory will “burn away” our falseness until we become true, this, the examiner claimed, “violates our freedom,” since in this picture we’re never said to want our falseness to be thus purified. This was a seminarian. His commitment to tradition was so absolute that he was willing to read current magisterial texts in the most woodenly literal manner and critique them for even hinting at an eminently traditional idea, namely that God can and would do anything, even something against our momentary and deluded will, in order to heal that will unto salvation. For those keeping count, I’m suggesting that my speculative proposal is far more authentic to the living magisterium’s own performance and recommendation than these supposed apologies for tradition, whose procedure includes opposing Augustine’s basic theological principles and critiquing Benedict XVI’s magisterial teaching on hell. Shocking, I know.

3. “Why live a life of virtue?” This question came, I think, from a student. I do not therefore blame him. I get the same question from my own students. It’s admittedly more vexing when it comes from a priest or a professor of theology, as it sometimes does. Specifically, the student put it this way: “If I take the universalist conclusion as true for me, why would I be incentivized to live a life of virtue…a Catholic life?”

   This question exposes stakes that are often ignored in these debates. The stakes are the very basis for faith, the reason for belief, the motivation for goodness, the nature of the truth’s address to our whole person. I first respond that this is not so much an objection to universalism as it is an objection to grace itself. If, after all, the blood of Christ and grace of God forgive my sins and save me, “should I sin all that more that grace may abound?” Paul: “God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” (Rom 6.1-2 KJV). We need no incentive other than God for God to be worth loving, believing, and following. Our subjection to God is our liberation from all that’s violent, untrue, and endlessly disappointing. Our love for God is our “love for love itself,” as Augustine once put it. If ever you’ve loved loving, even if your loves were somehow perverted, you were loving love itself all the while. And God is love. The reason for uniting ourselves to God is revealed in the uniting. Obedience to Christ is obedience to a God who never once thought of being a tyrant; obedience is therefore supreme and absolute and irrevocable liberation. In fact, it is your sole and true creation. It is you, truly you. How could you want anything more than everything you are meant to be, everything that makes anything worthwhile at all and for you? If we imagine that we require the threat of hell to render the gospel sweeter still, then we concede in principle that the gospel does not reveal God, or else that God is not sweetness itself. Children, admittedly, sometimes need extra incentives. But even these are offered with the sole and ultimate aim that the child become such that she no longer wants or needs such incentives to love the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Are we not to become spiritual at some point? Must the church perpetually infantilize us with an eschatology that is but the promise of perpetual arrested development?

4. “How can we trust the church?” Hence my reply to this final question. In light of the church’s actual, historical life and teaching, which undeniably include such radical developments and even reversals on the literal or objective dimension, how can we trust anything the church teaches?

   I reply: We do not trust the church because it delivers and preserves immutable propositions. We do not trust the church because its life is ever immaculate (as Vatican I at times implied). We do not trust the church because it delivers the philosophical system (Fides et Ratio denies this, in fact). We do not trust the church for the sake of “Western civilization” or because we fear moral relativism. We do not trust the church because her body bears no disfigurement. We trust the church because it is Christ’s own Body, even when broken and rent to pieces. Christ himself is the continuity in the “hermeneutics of continuity.” The church’s one substrate, one foundation (1 Cor 3.11), one “identity” that persists through even the most objectively sever changes over the ages, is Jesus Christ himself—his very person. A person is not an idea, a proposition, a ritual, a culture, or a system, and (God forbid) certainly not a “civilization.” If then we cling to the church for any other reason than that she bears, births, mediates, and “hands over” Christ himself to us so as to make us members of himself, his own Body—well, then we deny either that Christ is the Truth or that Christ is a person, the infinite person of the triune God. And so while many Catholic infernalists online, sometimes (not always) wearing a Dominican habit, mutter “development” with an eye-roll and a sneer, a truly Catholic devotion to mother church longs precisely for such developments as signs that Christ, the living God-human, really is offering himself in the Eucharist, which constitutes the church’s actual identity in history; and that Christ himself is the true and original tradition. As Johann Sebastian Drey (that great nineteenth-century Catholic Tübingen theologian) once said: that the Father eternally “hands over” his very essence in generating the Son, in the Spirit—this, and this alone, is the original and ongoing and only “tradition” there ever was.

I close with a promise. The lines merely sketched in this talk will be developed, God willing, by my dear friend and colleague, Roberto De La Noval and I, in a book we’ve planned (but still need to write in full) tentatively called, Catholic Universalism: A Modest Proposal. The promise is that we’ll do everything necessary to make it comprehensive and substantial. That might take a few years. But we refuse to cut corners, to rush out of impatience, or to publish with Routledge. The matters are too grave, too beautiful, too lovely.