The Future of Hell

Part II: How This Doctrine Might Develop Still

Actual doctrinal development not only can but demonstrably has sometimes meant deepening the meaning of doctrine in ways that would have once seemed like patent contradiction or mere reversal, but that, in retrospect, were but moments when we mistook a partial truth for the whole truth. In such cases, we more clearly perceive not only the whole but the very distinction between partial and whole.

Nicaea I, for example, anathematized anyone who claimed that the Son differs from the Father by essence or hypostasis. Chalcedon demanded that they differ by hypostasis alone. A term once forbidden later become required. Granted, Chalcedon’s hypostasis means something rather different from Nicaea’s. But what’s the difference, exactly? Chalcedon itself scarcely spells that out. It rather points toward some greater whole; it was for the Church thereafter to seek the exact details of that whole.

I offer in our final moments some suggestions for further development in each the three aspects we’ve traced—hell’s cause, character, and census.

Cause. As the passage above from Gaudium et spes indicates and as John Sachs saw, a fundamental shift in Christian eschatology in our era is the way “the distinctly Christological perspective” dominates.¹ Karl Rahner: “Christian anthropology and Christian eschatology are ultimately Christology.”² This is a point that most free will defenses of hell have yet to reckon with. If it is inherent to human freedom to be able to reject God forever, then Christ did not possess human freedom. Some argue, as Joshua Brotherton does, that Christ isn’t directly relevant to a proper conception of “integral human freedom” because Christ the God-man was “necessarily exempt” from “the dark reality of human resistance to divine grace.”³ But this is the wrong lesson to learn from Christ’s two natures. If Christ possesses integral human freedom, then resistance to divine grace is precisely not integral to human freedom. Rather, resistance to divine grace is a sign that we are not yet free, that we are becoming truly, integrally, humanly free.

This begins to upset the easy analytic opposition of freedom vs. (pre)determinism. Our actual, historical, personal resistance to God’s will resists this false dilemma. I am never simply free or moved by grace. I am becoming free by the work of divine grace. The static either-or, “free or determined,” is simply unable to capture the concrete history or process of becoming truly free in the Spirit—of salvation in fact rather than merely in theory.

Happily, we’ve another option here, which I’ll call the “logic of the whole of concrete life” as opposed to an analytic dissection of what Rahner called “abstract existence.”⁴ Our options are not either God permits evil indefinitely out of respect for freedom (the new hell) or God wills all evil for inscrutable reasons. That God wills a life, an entire process that both incorporates and ultimately brings a person, through that person, to their own true selves—this transcends the limits of the freedom-determinism antinomy. The very fact that freedom has a history means that its logic cannot be fully expressed by any one or two moments abstracted out of that history. That God permits evil in any moment does not yet say anything about what God wills for what is accomplished through—and often despite—all a person’s moments. The instant you abstract the logic of the concept of freedom or determinism is the moment you abstract from any actual person. But God wills that all persons be saved; God neither creates nor saves abstractions. Nor then does an abstract logic yet touch upon the real mystery of salvation, the mystery of grace’s hidden and relentless work in and with us to reveal us to ourselves—in Christ, in whom our very life is “hidden” (Col 3.1–3).

Indeed, freedom cannot be suppressed. Indeed, we in our self-deluded sin “create” hell, something God didn’t will should be. But then the logic of love’s work, which aims to destroy what we’ve made of ourselves in sin—Paul’s “ancient man” or the desert Fathers’ “false self-images”—is no longer the logic of free-or-determined. No less than when I’m moved by beauty or love, when I assent to grace, my specific reasons for assent won’t be, “because I’m free,” but will include a myriad of subtle, specific, personal, nearly indescribable reasons of heart and mind, reasons I perceived in the very act of being moved by grace to perceive the truth of grace.

This is the logic of love, the vital unity of freedom and determinism. And if love’s their unity, then neither part considered in isolation can explain the act of their being unified in a life, a person. But how does this happen? What’s the cause of this salvation, and thus of its opposite? I don’t see why we should expect an abstract account here. The catechism eschews one, for instance, when it comes to the general resurrection. Its “how” exceeds “our imagination and understanding; it is accessible only to faith.” And yet the Eucharist “already gives a foretaste of Christ’s transfiguration of our bodies…” (1000). Well then, why not of all souls? That, after all, is exactly what our third and fourth Eucharistic prayers now request of God.

Character. “Some recent theologians,” wrote Benedict XVI, think

“the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Savior. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgment. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms us and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves…totally ourselves and thus totally of God.”⁵

Augustine was right about this: love’s logic cannot be reduced to God’s mere non-interference with the human will. Divine love, Christ himself, drags us to himself (Jn 12.32).⁶ Ratzinger himself, despite offering versions of the free will defense, also claimed that Gaudium et spes “represents an advance on Lumen Gentium” whose “salvation optimism” is tempered by human resistance to grace. The latter, he wrote, “lays too much stress on man’s activity,” whereas the Christological universalism of Gaudium et spes “decisively acknowledged that the way of salvation is God’s affair and cannot be defined by us.”⁷

Now if we are hell’s cause, and if the Church now teaches that hell might ultimately be empty, then notice the decidedly peculiar character of hell’s existence, which we’re to affirm de fide: we confess that the hell that exists might in the end not exist at all. If hell’s existence might not finally exist, then I see no reason why hell’s eternity must be eternal in the supposedly commonsense way we assume. Indeed, we might expect that sin and evil, whose origin virtually everyone agrees is paradoxical or absurd, would appear in its end no less paradoxical or absurd. If it is God, after all, who as creator defines us; and if Von Balthasar was right to see in Christ’s descent to hell Christ’s own perpetual, seemingly impossible disruption of the “presumptuous” claim on the part of the damned to remain forever damned—then what is legitimately “eternal” or indefinite to the damned isn’t therefore actually eternal in the sense of irreversible.⁸

Consider two precedents for a paradoxical sense for hell’s “eternity,” one from scripture, the other from tradition.

1. In the book of Revelation, the book containing all our favorite imagery for hell, the “kings of the earth” are God’s enemies. Demonic spirits inspire them for war against God’s people (Rev 16.14), they “fornicate” with the harlot of Babylon (Rev 17.1–2, 18; 18.3 and 9), they fight alongside the Dragon’s beasts against Christ, and they are destroyed no less than three separate times (Rev 6.14–16; 17; 19.21). These are the “great men” who lead the “inhabitants of the earth,” whose names are not written in the Book of Life (13.8; 17.8). After Christ vanquishes them with the sword from his mouth, they are presumably thrown into the lake of fire with all those whose names aren’t in the book of life (20.15). You’d think that’d be the end of them. But they appear yet again in the next chapter, in the New Jerusalem:

“The nations will walk by [this city’s] light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it” (Rev 21.24).

Ah, the spoils of war! Not exactly:

“People will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Rev 21.26–7).

At the very heart of scripture’s imagery of hell, then, we find this paradox: those of whom it is said that “the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever [eis aiónas aiónōn]” (Rev 14.11) also appear in the new creation, purified of falsehood, made utterly true.

2. St. Maximus the Confessor is, I think, a principal inspiration for Von Balthasar’s theology of Holy Saturday (not merely Adrienne von Speyr). In his allegorical reading of Jonah, Maximus interprets the reference in Jonah’s prayer to rising waters and the “eternal bars” closed upon him as an image of “the final, ultimate abyss” (Jon 2.5 –6). The eternal bars are our own “innate attachments to material things,” our deluded obsessions that drag us down into “the darkness of ignorance, the land of eternal darkness.”⁹ Our doom appears indefinite. But then Christ’s descent accomplishes the unthinkable:

“He even willingly descended into the ‘heart of the earth,’ where the Evil One had swallowed us through death and was keeping us prisoners; and when He snatched us away through the resurrection, He led up the whole of our captive nature to heaven…. For it was necessary, truly necessary, for the Light and Power of God to enter into that land of darkness and eternal bars [οἱ μοχλοὶ οἱ αἰώνιοι], so that, dispelling the darkness of ignorance (inasmuch as He is the Light of the Father), and breaking the bars of evil (inasmuch as He is the enhypostatic Power of God), He might free our nature, which the devil had cruelly bound in these conditions, giving it the inextinguishable light of true knowledge and the unshakeable power of the virtues.”¹⁰

Then Maximus offers an elaboration close to one Augustine once mocked.¹¹ He notes that God’s categorical threat to destroy Nineveh (Jon 3.4) in three days’ time doesn’t seem to come to pass. Maximus doesn’t see it the way Augustine feared many did. He doesn’t think this means that God’s threats—even “irrevocable” ones—are merely rhetorical. Instead, he takes a more paradoxical route:

“God in truth both destroys and saves the same city; the former, by making it desist from its error; the latter, by bringing about its acquisition of true knowledge—or rather He destroys its error through the revitalization of its faith and realizes its salvation by the death of that error.”¹²

And Nineveh, Maximus assures us, represents “our common human nature,” “the holy Church,” and “each individual soul, which through faith and a good conscience has set aside the ‘earthly image’ of the old Adam,” clothing itself in the “heavenly Adam” (1 Cor 15.49).

Eternally bound and broken by Christ. Irrevocable destruction and paradoxical salvation. Death and resurrection—is this not the very logic of Christian conversion (Gal 2.20)?

Census. All of which leads to my final provocation. If we pursue the logic of love in hell’s cause and the paradox of existence and eternity in hell’s character, then such a “Catholic universalism” could prove to accommodate even the letter of what’s true in traditional eschatologies. On this view, hell’s census is both very full and entirely empty. The false selves melt away in the presence of Christ’s gaze, gradually and painfully revealing the true, as Benedict XVI envisioned. They are utterly destroyed, like Maximus’s “Nineveh” or Paul’s “old Adam.” And yet this same process makes them true, united in burning love to Christ. And the very division effected opens hell to us as a broken eternity, one with which we once identified but that we now gaze upon as a sacrament of Christ’s eternal victory and our eternal establishment in truth, never again to wallow in indefinite despair. Even the medieval delight in hell’s punishments is here redeemed. As Justin Shaun Coyle has it, “the shadow’s eternal destruction guarantees her [own] beatitude.”¹³

Conclusion

In two short millennia, the doctrine of hell has changed in significant ways. The changes have moved clearly toward the final efficacy of God’s will for the salvation of all, attentiveness to the paradoxical character of concrete existence in all its forms (in evil and in love), and confidence in the ability of Christ not merely to find but to bring back the last sheep.

I leave you with this. In their 2007 study of the fate of infants who die before baptism, the ITC made the following astonishing claim, which Pope Francis (RIP) repeated just last year:

“From a theological point of view, the development of a theology of hope and an ecclesiology of communion, together with a recognition of the greatness of divine mercy, challenge an unduly restrictive view of salvation. In fact, the universal salvific will of God and the correspondingly universal mediation of Christ mean that all theological notions that ultimately call into question the very omnipotence of God, and his mercy in particular, are inadequate.”¹⁴

At the end of his own study of the question, Fr. Francis Sullivan imagined someone objecting to this development on the grounds that we cannot be sure of what has not been revealed. “Here I would like to ask,” he replies, “is it certain that it has not been revealed that unbaptized children go to heaven?” He suggests two reasons for thinking that, although not yet explicitly defined, it has been revealed that these children go to heaven:¹⁵

First, “the sincere will of God for the salvation of every human person.” Second, “the tender love of God for little children, which was revealed by Jesus” when he beckoned the little children come to him against the apostles’ own intentions.

“I think that anyone who seriously meditated on these two truths and applied them to God’s providence…could well become convinced that God in his loving mercy does for those infants what the sacrament would have done, so that nothing can hinder them from coming to him and living with him forever.”¹⁶

I hope to have given at least some grounds for the same sentiment regarding future doctrinal development around hell. The Lord is so very good, and so he wants all. And the Lord is entirely capable—he knows us better than we know ourselves—and so he’ll get to all, whatever form grace must take, including the infernal fire that divides wheat from chaff in each and all.

(The third and final Part of this miniseries will include video/audio of the original talk and Q&A, followed by some closing reflections on that whole experience.)

1. John R. Sachs, S.J., “Current Eschatology: Universal Salvation and the Problem of Hell,” TS 52 (1991): 241. So too Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Some Points of Eschatology,” in Explorations in Theology, Vol. 1: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989 [1960]), 255ff.

2. Karl Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions,” TI V, 335.

3. Joshua R. Brotherton, “Universalism and Predestinarianism: A Critique of the Theological Anthropology that Undergirds Catholic Universality Eschatology,” TS (2016): 609.

4. Rahner, “Hermeneutics,” 337.

5. Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, 47.

6. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 155: “The processes that prepare one’s heart to take delight in God are not only hidden but actually unconscious and beyond one’s control.”

7. Joseph Ratzinger, in Herbert Vormigler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967–9), 5:162.

8. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale.

9. Maximus, QThal 64.5–6.

10. Maximus, QThal 64.7.

11. Augustine, De civ. Dei 21.18.

12. Maximus, QThal 64.27–8. This exegesis of Nineveh and understanding of divine judgment are in Origen, who uses Nineveh as an example of the way God’s apparent severity leads always to salvation. Origen adduces Paul’s transformation for the point as well: “In Scripture we always note that those acts which are ‘unpleasant-seeming,’ as I will name them, are listed first, then those acts which seem gladdening are mentioned second. I will kill and I will make alive [Deut 32.39]. He did not say, I will make alive and then I will kill. For it is impossible that what God has made to live would be taken away by himself or by someone else. But, I will kill and I will make alive. Whom will I kill? Paul the traitor, Paul the persecutor. And I will make alive so that he becomes Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ [2 Cor 1.1]” (Hom. in Jer. 1.16). Thanks to Ambrose Andreano for reminding me of this passage.

13. Justin Shaun Coyle, “May Catholics Endorse Universalism?” accessed here.

14. International Theological Commission, “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised,” approved by Pope Benedict XVI on January 19, 2007, §2. Pope Francis quotes and expands this principle into theology’s “fundamental criterion” in his letter to the newly appointed head of the DDF, Cardinal Fernandez (accessed here). My emphasis.

15. Again, this is not a contradiction. Rather such a phenomenon—a truth revealed yet undefined—is an inevitability if we’re not to indulge a docetic ecclesiology (as most analytic philosophers and apologists do as a matter of course).

16. Sullivan, “Development of Doctrine,” 14.