The appeal to "free-wiil" self-damnation is probably one of the most insanely stupid arguments one can imagine.
1. There is no such thing as "free- will" in the sinner. The destruction of our nature by the indwelling of sin makes the ability to freely choose impossible. Christian philosophers such as Thomas Talbot have posited that "only when the ability to choose is unaffected by internal and external constraints can one be said to have the ability of utilizing a free choice." Those who appeal to the idea of a "free-will" theodicy of eternal hell are conflating the ability to make choice with the freedom to choose rightly. They are not the same.
2. The idea that God's salvific response is somehow tied to His observing within the sinner some faint desire for union with the Divine is equally ludicrous. I am one of millions (billions perhaps?) who was brought to Christ against his will. (Think C S Lewis "watching with horror" the approach of faith). The sinner desires one thing: his sin. If God had respected that "free-will" in me, I would most likely be long dead from the self- destructive behaviors I cherished.
3. How are we supposedly making a "free-will" choice for our own damnation when we have not seen that which we are choosing against? To say that the sinner will somehow tenaciously cling to his sin in the presence of indescribable beauty and love strikes me as patent nonsense. Faced with the choice for the first time ever, between the horror of its own nothingness without Christ, and the love standing right before it, what soul will turn from Christ? As Talbot has said, we all tend to make choices that are in our best interest. Is the choice in the next life, if this is what it boils down to - a moment of choice, any less made in self-interest? I think not!
Talbot further states that only deranged person would choose against his best interest, and in justice, such people are not punished, but worked with to bring them to healing.
The Roman culture was obsessed with law and punishment, and this thinking, helped by Augustine in no small manner, took over the thinking of the Church.
Doubting Thomas was shown the wounds in Christs hands and side after he publicly declared he would not believe otherwise and commanded to be not unbelieving but to believe. Saul was knocked down while actively persecuting the church and picked up and commanded to preach the gospel as Paul. “Free will” doesn’t seem to matter to the risen Christ as much as His promise in John 12:32 “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will drag all people to myself.”
Wonderful article thank you for sharing it! “He who sins is a slave to sin”. All sin so all are slaves. Slaves are not free. “If the son sets you free you will be free indeed.” Only the risen Christ sets humanity/slaves free!
That podcast you guys did was incredibly inspiring for me. I need to listen to it again…and I would love to hear more of your thoughts on Tomberg! Thank you both for your work.
Man, I just yesterday read George Macdonald's sermon Justice and now this! Thanks Jordan for all your work, will be praying for you and your family this Triduum.
Enjoyed very much the article above and the comments below.
Thoughts:
Respecting free will and respecting final choice may be seen as two different things. A potential lover who tries unsuccessfully to woo the beloved, may not accept the initial response, because of the persistent nature of love-- but alas, may accept the final decision; the final decisive answer, that is. And this is no affront to love, but rather a loss of reciprocation. God likewise loves and seeks loving response. Sometimes tenaciously, when he is resisted. But the loving response, however it reflects the proffered love, must be a genuine response and not a passive reflection.
I am surprised that Kierkegaard's invaluable input on this topic, contained in his teachings on the nature of despair ("The Sickness Unto Death" and elsewhere), got no mention.
Universalism, far from being a slight to God's justice, might be a testament to the persistence and triumph of his love. The sufferings of hell, which are only "as eternal" as the resistance of the individual soul, are real and merited suffering, and yet love wins in the end; either through baptism into the Spirit and water in this life, or through withdrawal of the Spirit and fire in the hereafter, Love wins --literally--come hell or high water.
The manner of God's threatening us may in fact morph with the maturity of the Church's thought. We threaten little kids with spankings, older children with restriction of privilege (capacity), adult children with loss of fellowship. All of these spring from lack of honoring the parent, the first command, yet they operate according to the understanding of the child. A first century Christian may not have been particularly horrified to learn that hell is (to put it Kierkegaard-ly) a final disrelationship of the self to itself, a failure through fear or rebellion, to be transparently related to oneself before one's creator. But the notion of suffering unquenchable fire that consumes without consuming (as God revealed himself to Moses in the bush)... well, that's terrifying. The five year old understand the paddle, the twenty-five year old the tragedy of being disowned.
Well put. I’m often asked why universalism, if it’s so central to faith, has only relatively recently become central. I usually say (after correcting the notion that it’s a new idea at all) that we are still in the earlier church after a mere two millennia, and that we can barely handle one major insight at a time. But God is patient—for him a millennium is like a day. Ergo etc.
I knew there was a variety of approaches to hell throughout the history of the Church, but I had no conception of the clear trajectory that you have laid out here. Thank you for doing this research and putting it all together in such a clear manner. Eagerly awaiting the next chapters! ☀️
There’s something kind of amusing reading St. Bonaventure say that God “most cruel[ly tortures]” in His punishments, and yet not see the problem in that.
When you say Hell imagery appears twice in the OT, are you including Deuterocanonical books or a 66 book canon. I have seen some people appeal to Judith. It would make sense if we saw more Hell imagery later on after more Jewish Hellenization.
I was thinking primarily of the primary canon. If we include the deutero-canonical books, we'd have a few more instances of each sort of eschatology on offer.
I’m very curious as to what makes you a Catholic rather than an Eastern Orthodox Christian? I have recently been struggling with Catholicism after having been Catholic for 3 years due to the seemingly never ending list of dogmatic changes, some of which this post highlights. How does one get out of the inevitable conundrum that the ordinary and universal magisterium taught something then flipped a century or two later? How is there stability? Would love to hear your thoughts.
I don't consider the changes in Catholic dogma as something to despair over, since I think it means that maybe, just maybe, Catholic tradition actually lives. Not that sheer change is in itself always good. But sheer unchangingness, at least here below, surely indicates either a corpse that doesn't move or a mere concept sufficiently void of content that it need not grow more determinate. The latent "essence" or "spirit" of Catholicism, as Drey put it in the 19th century, is precisely "living tradition." The entire point of the Christian faith is that God's immutability does not exclude God from identifying himself with the mutable--for he "grew in wisdom and stature before God and men." God in Christ is that God who can be the identity of the one who grows and the One before whom he grows. Now, on the level of finite history or comprehension, this growth sometimes entails reversals *from a certain, limited vantage*. The Church used to teach the moral licitness of human slavery; now it doesn't. On the finite, plain level, that is indeed a reversal. No denying it. But then the reversal here is simultaneously the result of the Church's own deepening of its own fundamental claims, especially regarding the dignity of every single human person in the light of God as Creator and as creature (God is both as Christ). So was the reversal a mere loss or "switch"? Again, on the level of this specific issue, it was the latter. But from the perspective of the whole mystery of Christ, it was an emphatic gain and a sort of confirmation. Any tradition that cannot accommodate this delicate, at times paradoxical movement of God's self-revelation in history, is doomed either to lie (about itself, about history, about God, etc.) or to become corrupt. And since the initial distress over learning of the Church's many changes derives in part from a concern over the corruption of Truth, then one ought to consider carefully the way one's own assumptions regarding how the Truth must unfold actually leads to the very corruption it wanted to avoid. Therefore I see the actual changes in the Church's history--no matter how much apologists (propagandists) try to conceal them--as evidence not only that this tradition is alive, but that it is divine; for the divine is infinite and circumscribed by no merely propositional continuity or immutability. The Truth speaks, "I am the Truth." Thus the Truth is just as much a first-person reality as a third-person "fact." This alone--Christ alone--is the fundamental continuity of his own Body through history. All else, by my lights, is either merely finite or actively deluded.
Mind you, none of the above is an *abstract* claim about other traditions, Christian or otherwise. Indeed I'm committed to Vatican 2's own teachings that other traditions not only have seeds of truth or partial truths, but even objective means of grace that can and do lead to salvation (see Francis Sullivan's detailed argument to this effect in his *Salvation Outside the Church?*). Nevertheless, precisely from my conviction that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, I would expect a true tradition, and indeed the church "in" which Christ "subsists," to change, sometimes radically--and to have changed often.
In light of the Synod of Valence, which was not the only synod to oppose the Augustinian perspectives, is it possible to speak of varying Latin sub-traditions/parties present since antiquity? Such that different periods have preferred one party’s account over another’s without wholly removing the alternative from the spectrum.
This may undercut the current Hopeful Universalism state as a full/permanent development (more of a pendulum swing I guess), but perhaps it would open things up to recognize the existence of the full universalist party that has also been present but less popular.
Not sure if I would be committed to this arrangement, just thinking out loud.
I think the way to put is that the Augustinian heritage in relation to other prominent strands in Christian tradition highlights a fundamental tension that's basically never resolved. And ultimately I'd argue that a fuller synthesis, a "Catholic universalism," alone can resolve that tension (between God's own responsibility for the outcome of creation and our variously true or false participation in that outcome). This then opens two contrary perspectives that are not, from my vantage, absolutely contradictory: "from within" the unresolved tension, the move to hopeful universalism is most certainly a dramatic development; but "from the synthesis" or the view of the whole, it is but one moment as essential to the whole as Augustine's own predestinarianism is.
I like this way of putting it. Especially that Hopeful Universalism is a development in any case.
Ironically, Catholic Universalism would solve the tension between Divine sovereignty and human responsibility in a similar way to reformed evangelicals (by affirming both), but with critically different content and so an inverted outcome: God is sovereign, and so ensures that all are saved (rather than that the mass are damned and the elect saved). Creatures are responsible, but as children of the Good they are in process of learning to be truly responsible and so to participate rightly in their own salvation (rather than being “originally” or personally responsible for their eternal damnation).
The appeal to "free-wiil" self-damnation is probably one of the most insanely stupid arguments one can imagine.
1. There is no such thing as "free- will" in the sinner. The destruction of our nature by the indwelling of sin makes the ability to freely choose impossible. Christian philosophers such as Thomas Talbot have posited that "only when the ability to choose is unaffected by internal and external constraints can one be said to have the ability of utilizing a free choice." Those who appeal to the idea of a "free-will" theodicy of eternal hell are conflating the ability to make choice with the freedom to choose rightly. They are not the same.
2. The idea that God's salvific response is somehow tied to His observing within the sinner some faint desire for union with the Divine is equally ludicrous. I am one of millions (billions perhaps?) who was brought to Christ against his will. (Think C S Lewis "watching with horror" the approach of faith). The sinner desires one thing: his sin. If God had respected that "free-will" in me, I would most likely be long dead from the self- destructive behaviors I cherished.
3. How are we supposedly making a "free-will" choice for our own damnation when we have not seen that which we are choosing against? To say that the sinner will somehow tenaciously cling to his sin in the presence of indescribable beauty and love strikes me as patent nonsense. Faced with the choice for the first time ever, between the horror of its own nothingness without Christ, and the love standing right before it, what soul will turn from Christ? As Talbot has said, we all tend to make choices that are in our best interest. Is the choice in the next life, if this is what it boils down to - a moment of choice, any less made in self-interest? I think not!
Talbot further states that only deranged person would choose against his best interest, and in justice, such people are not punished, but worked with to bring them to healing.
The Roman culture was obsessed with law and punishment, and this thinking, helped by Augustine in no small manner, took over the thinking of the Church.
Doubting Thomas was shown the wounds in Christs hands and side after he publicly declared he would not believe otherwise and commanded to be not unbelieving but to believe. Saul was knocked down while actively persecuting the church and picked up and commanded to preach the gospel as Paul. “Free will” doesn’t seem to matter to the risen Christ as much as His promise in John 12:32 “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will drag all people to myself.”
Here is a piece I wrote on my blog site about so-called "free-will"
https://http4281.com/2017/07/03/gods-hand-our-free-will/
Wonderful article thank you for sharing it! “He who sins is a slave to sin”. All sin so all are slaves. Slaves are not free. “If the son sets you free you will be free indeed.” Only the risen Christ sets humanity/slaves free!
Would love to invite you back to Grail Country once you wrap this up.
That podcast you guys did was incredibly inspiring for me. I need to listen to it again…and I would love to hear more of your thoughts on Tomberg! Thank you both for your work.
I'm working on a new Tomberg series and outlining a course on Meditations On The Tarot, so stay tuned, and thanks for your kind words.
I am glad you are doing this - looking forward to it. Any idea on when (approx) these will be released?
It's a big project, it's going to be while. I do have a delightful conversation with Esther Meek coming out VERY soon though, as early as later today.
Any progress on this new course? Make sure to advertise and let people know about this as people will be interested, I am sure.
That’s fantastic news 🙌
Man, I just yesterday read George Macdonald's sermon Justice and now this! Thanks Jordan for all your work, will be praying for you and your family this Triduum.
Enjoyed very much the article above and the comments below.
Thoughts:
Respecting free will and respecting final choice may be seen as two different things. A potential lover who tries unsuccessfully to woo the beloved, may not accept the initial response, because of the persistent nature of love-- but alas, may accept the final decision; the final decisive answer, that is. And this is no affront to love, but rather a loss of reciprocation. God likewise loves and seeks loving response. Sometimes tenaciously, when he is resisted. But the loving response, however it reflects the proffered love, must be a genuine response and not a passive reflection.
I am surprised that Kierkegaard's invaluable input on this topic, contained in his teachings on the nature of despair ("The Sickness Unto Death" and elsewhere), got no mention.
Universalism, far from being a slight to God's justice, might be a testament to the persistence and triumph of his love. The sufferings of hell, which are only "as eternal" as the resistance of the individual soul, are real and merited suffering, and yet love wins in the end; either through baptism into the Spirit and water in this life, or through withdrawal of the Spirit and fire in the hereafter, Love wins --literally--come hell or high water.
The manner of God's threatening us may in fact morph with the maturity of the Church's thought. We threaten little kids with spankings, older children with restriction of privilege (capacity), adult children with loss of fellowship. All of these spring from lack of honoring the parent, the first command, yet they operate according to the understanding of the child. A first century Christian may not have been particularly horrified to learn that hell is (to put it Kierkegaard-ly) a final disrelationship of the self to itself, a failure through fear or rebellion, to be transparently related to oneself before one's creator. But the notion of suffering unquenchable fire that consumes without consuming (as God revealed himself to Moses in the bush)... well, that's terrifying. The five year old understand the paddle, the twenty-five year old the tragedy of being disowned.
Well put. I’m often asked why universalism, if it’s so central to faith, has only relatively recently become central. I usually say (after correcting the notion that it’s a new idea at all) that we are still in the earlier church after a mere two millennia, and that we can barely handle one major insight at a time. But God is patient—for him a millennium is like a day. Ergo etc.
I knew there was a variety of approaches to hell throughout the history of the Church, but I had no conception of the clear trajectory that you have laid out here. Thank you for doing this research and putting it all together in such a clear manner. Eagerly awaiting the next chapters! ☀️
intensely grateful to see this post, thank you Jordan! keep it coming!
There’s something kind of amusing reading St. Bonaventure say that God “most cruel[ly tortures]” in His punishments, and yet not see the problem in that.
Absolutely fantastic. Really looking forward to the next parts.
Is this available as a video too? I'd like to watch if so. Thx!
I do plan to release the video with Part 3!
When you say Hell imagery appears twice in the OT, are you including Deuterocanonical books or a 66 book canon. I have seen some people appeal to Judith. It would make sense if we saw more Hell imagery later on after more Jewish Hellenization.
I was thinking primarily of the primary canon. If we include the deutero-canonical books, we'd have a few more instances of each sort of eschatology on offer.
Thank you for the response. I bet you’re right.
I’m very curious as to what makes you a Catholic rather than an Eastern Orthodox Christian? I have recently been struggling with Catholicism after having been Catholic for 3 years due to the seemingly never ending list of dogmatic changes, some of which this post highlights. How does one get out of the inevitable conundrum that the ordinary and universal magisterium taught something then flipped a century or two later? How is there stability? Would love to hear your thoughts.
God bless
I don't consider the changes in Catholic dogma as something to despair over, since I think it means that maybe, just maybe, Catholic tradition actually lives. Not that sheer change is in itself always good. But sheer unchangingness, at least here below, surely indicates either a corpse that doesn't move or a mere concept sufficiently void of content that it need not grow more determinate. The latent "essence" or "spirit" of Catholicism, as Drey put it in the 19th century, is precisely "living tradition." The entire point of the Christian faith is that God's immutability does not exclude God from identifying himself with the mutable--for he "grew in wisdom and stature before God and men." God in Christ is that God who can be the identity of the one who grows and the One before whom he grows. Now, on the level of finite history or comprehension, this growth sometimes entails reversals *from a certain, limited vantage*. The Church used to teach the moral licitness of human slavery; now it doesn't. On the finite, plain level, that is indeed a reversal. No denying it. But then the reversal here is simultaneously the result of the Church's own deepening of its own fundamental claims, especially regarding the dignity of every single human person in the light of God as Creator and as creature (God is both as Christ). So was the reversal a mere loss or "switch"? Again, on the level of this specific issue, it was the latter. But from the perspective of the whole mystery of Christ, it was an emphatic gain and a sort of confirmation. Any tradition that cannot accommodate this delicate, at times paradoxical movement of God's self-revelation in history, is doomed either to lie (about itself, about history, about God, etc.) or to become corrupt. And since the initial distress over learning of the Church's many changes derives in part from a concern over the corruption of Truth, then one ought to consider carefully the way one's own assumptions regarding how the Truth must unfold actually leads to the very corruption it wanted to avoid. Therefore I see the actual changes in the Church's history--no matter how much apologists (propagandists) try to conceal them--as evidence not only that this tradition is alive, but that it is divine; for the divine is infinite and circumscribed by no merely propositional continuity or immutability. The Truth speaks, "I am the Truth." Thus the Truth is just as much a first-person reality as a third-person "fact." This alone--Christ alone--is the fundamental continuity of his own Body through history. All else, by my lights, is either merely finite or actively deluded.
Mind you, none of the above is an *abstract* claim about other traditions, Christian or otherwise. Indeed I'm committed to Vatican 2's own teachings that other traditions not only have seeds of truth or partial truths, but even objective means of grace that can and do lead to salvation (see Francis Sullivan's detailed argument to this effect in his *Salvation Outside the Church?*). Nevertheless, precisely from my conviction that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, I would expect a true tradition, and indeed the church "in" which Christ "subsists," to change, sometimes radically--and to have changed often.
Thanks for this. I was curious about the image you used — did you list where it came from somewhere I missed?
It’s an instance of the famous Resurrection (anastasis) icon. This one comes from the Church of the Holy Savior in Chora (Istanbul), I think.
Thanks.
In light of the Synod of Valence, which was not the only synod to oppose the Augustinian perspectives, is it possible to speak of varying Latin sub-traditions/parties present since antiquity? Such that different periods have preferred one party’s account over another’s without wholly removing the alternative from the spectrum.
This may undercut the current Hopeful Universalism state as a full/permanent development (more of a pendulum swing I guess), but perhaps it would open things up to recognize the existence of the full universalist party that has also been present but less popular.
Not sure if I would be committed to this arrangement, just thinking out loud.
I think the way to put is that the Augustinian heritage in relation to other prominent strands in Christian tradition highlights a fundamental tension that's basically never resolved. And ultimately I'd argue that a fuller synthesis, a "Catholic universalism," alone can resolve that tension (between God's own responsibility for the outcome of creation and our variously true or false participation in that outcome). This then opens two contrary perspectives that are not, from my vantage, absolutely contradictory: "from within" the unresolved tension, the move to hopeful universalism is most certainly a dramatic development; but "from the synthesis" or the view of the whole, it is but one moment as essential to the whole as Augustine's own predestinarianism is.
I like this way of putting it. Especially that Hopeful Universalism is a development in any case.
Ironically, Catholic Universalism would solve the tension between Divine sovereignty and human responsibility in a similar way to reformed evangelicals (by affirming both), but with critically different content and so an inverted outcome: God is sovereign, and so ensures that all are saved (rather than that the mass are damned and the elect saved). Creatures are responsible, but as children of the Good they are in process of learning to be truly responsible and so to participate rightly in their own salvation (rather than being “originally” or personally responsible for their eternal damnation).
Exactly so.
https://substack.com/@stevenberger/note/c-108623287