His new book is God and the Pandemic. TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Related Stories. But It Happens All the Time. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance. The two great commandments that are our job description for life, in both this world and the next, express this plan: We must love God wholly and we must love our neighbor as ourself.
And in order to love we must know, get to know, as endlessly as we love endlessly. This never gets boring, even on Earth: getting to know and love more and more someone we already know and love. It is our clue and our preparation for our eternal destiny of infinite fascination. George Macdonald answers this question with a counter question: "Will we be greater fools there than here?
This is a divinely designed, essential part of our joy. We are not designed to be solitary mystics, lovers of God alone, but to be, like God himself, lovers of men and women as well. Just as Jesus on Earth loved each person differently and specially—he did not love John as he loved Peter, because John was not Peter—so we are designed to love people specially.
There is no reason why this specialness should be removed, rather than added to, in eternity. Our family and special friends will always be our family and special friends. In this life a child begins to learn to love by loving mother, then father, then siblings, then pets.
The concentric circles of love are then gradually expanded, but the beginning lessons are never abandoned. There is no reason to think God rips up this plan after death.
Some Christians believe they will cease to exist altogether; others believe those who reject Jesus will suffer an eternity of agonising regret. There is a belief among some Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians that there is a transitional state between this life and heaven known as Purgatory.
These Christians believe this is a place where human souls can be purified and made ready to spend eternity with God. Purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible, but the concept has existed since the early centuries of the Christian church. During the 16th century there were substantial upheavals in the Christian church.
Churches which have been founded since then Protestant churches do not have this belief in purgatory. Fr Martin Newell cp has been arrested for climate protests. He tells us why he believes in civil disobedience for the greater good. But if someone does accept any two of these propositions, as virtually every mainline Christian theologian does, then such a person has no choice but to reject the third. So that leaves exactly three primary eschatological views. Because the Augustinians, named after St.
So here, then, are three quite different systems of theology. For if we think of such separation as a state of being estranged or alienated from God, or if we think of it as simply the absence of a loving union with God, then 3 is equally consistent with many different conceptions of hell, some arguably milder than others. It is equally consistent, for example, with the idea that hell is a realm where the wicked receive retribution in the form of everlasting torment, with the idea that they will simply be annihilated in the end, with the idea that they create their own hell by rejecting God, and with the idea that God will simply make them as comfortable as possible in hell even as God graciously limits the harm they can do to each other see Stump This lack of specificity is by design.
For however one understands the fate of those who supposedly remain separated from God forever , such a fate will entail something like 3. Alternatively, anyone who rejects 3 will likewise reject the idea of everlasting torment as well as any of the supposedly milder conceptions of an everlasting separation from God. Now when the Fifth General Council of the Christian church condemned the doctrine of universal reconciliation in CE, it did not, strictly speaking, commit the institutional church of that day to a doctrine of everlasting conscious torment in hell.
But it did commit the church to a final and irreversible division within the human race between those who will be saved, on the one hand, and those who will be hopelessly lost forever, on the other.
If there is to be such a final and irreversible division within the human race, just what accounts for it? These two very different explanations for a final and irrevocable division within the human race, where some end up in heaven and others in hell, also reflect profound disagreements over the nature of divine grace. Because the Augustinians hold that, in our present condition at least, God owes us nothing, they also believe that the grace God confers upon a limited elect is utterly gratuitous and supererogatory.
III, Ch. XXIII, sec. But the Arminians reject such a doctrine as inherently unjust; it is simply unjust, they insist, for God to do for some, namely the elect, what God refuses to do for others, particularly since the elect have done nothing to deserve their special treatment.
The Arminians therefore hold that God offers his grace to all human beings, though many are those who freely reject it and eventually seal their fate in hell forever. But for their part, the Augustinians counter that this Arminian explanation in terms of human free will contradicts St. A Christian universalist, of course, might insist that the Augustinians and the Arminians are both right in their respective criticisms of each other.
It is as simple as that. Nor should one suppose that this Augustinian understanding of limited election is totally bereft of contemporary defenders. Neither is it possible, he appears to argue, that God should love equally each and every created person. Two critical problems arise at this point. First, why suppose that the deepest love for others in the sense of willing the very best for them always requires identifying with their own interests? And second, why suppose that God cannot identify with incompatible interests anyway?
Indeed, why cannot a single individual identify with incompatible interests or conflicting desires of his or her own? But why, then, cannot a loving mother, for example, care deeply about the incompatible interests or immediate desires of her two small children as they squabble over a toy and care about these incompatible interests, however trivial they might otherwise have seemed to her, precisely because her beloved children care about them?
The impossibility of her satisfying such incompatible interests hardly entails the impossibility of her identifying with them in the sense of caring deeply about them. In any case, the vast majority of Christian philosophers who have addressed the topic of hell in recent decades and have published at least some of their work in the standard philosophical journals do accept proposition 1 and also reject, therefore, any hint of Augustinian limited election.
Behind the Augustinian understanding of hell lies a commitment to a retributive theory of punishment, according to which the primary purpose of punishment is to satisfy the demands of justice or, as some might say, to balance the scales of justice.
And the Augustinian commitment to such a theory is hardly surprising. For based upon his interpretation of various New Testament texts, Augustine insisted that hell is a literal lake of fire in which the damned will experience the horror of everlasting torment; they will experience, that is, the unbearable physical pain of literally being burned forever. The primary purpose of such unending torment, according to Augustine, is not correction, or deterrence, or even the protection of the innocent; nor did he make any claim for it except that it is fully deserved and therefore just.
Such is the metaphysics of hell, as Augustine understood it. For many Augustinians view the agony of hell as essentially psychological and spiritual in nature, consisting of the knowledge that every possibility for joy and happiness has been lost forever.
Hell, as they see it, is thus a condition in which self-loathing, hatred of others, hopelessness, and infinite despair consumes the soul like a metaphorical fire. So why are Christians required to love even those whom God has always hated? Edwards and other Augustinians thus hold that the damned differ from the saved in one respect only: even before the damned were born, God had already freely chosen to exclude them from the grace and the redemptive love that God lavishes upon on the elect.
So why, one may wonder at this point, do the Augustinians believe that anyone—whether it be Judas Iscariot, Saul of Tarsus, or Adolph Hitler—actually deserves unending torment as a just recompense for their sins? The typical Augustinian answer appeals to the seriousness or the heinous character of even the most minor offense against God. Anselm illustrated such an appeal with the following example.
Suppose that God were to forbid you to look in a certain direction, even though it seemed to you that by doing so you could preserve the entire creation from destruction. If you were to disobey God and to look in that forbidden direction, you would sin so gravely, Anselm declared, that you could never do anything to pay for that sin adequately. So either the sinner does not pay for the sin at all, or the sinner must pay for it by enduring everlasting suffering or at least a permanent loss of happiness.
But what about those who never commit any offense against God at all, such as those who die in infancy or those who, because of severe brain damage or some other factor, never develop into minimally rational agents? These too, according to Augustine, deserve to be condemned along with the human race as a whole. II, Ch. I, sec. As these remarks illustrate, the Augustinian understanding of original sin implies that we are all born guilty of a heinous sin against God, and this inherited guilt relieves God of any responsibility for our spiritual welfare.
Augustine thus concluded that God can freely decide whom to save and whom to damn without committing any injustice at all. For the Augustinians, then, the bottom line is that, even as our Creator, God owes us nothing in our present condition because, thanks to original sin, we come into this earthly life already deserving nothing but everlasting punishment in hell as a just recompense for original sin. Although this Augustinian rationale for the justice of hell has had a profound influence on the Western theological tradition, particularly in the past, critics of Augustinian theology, both ancient and contemporary, have raised a number of powerful objections to it.
One set of objections arises from within the retributive theory itself, and here are three such objections that critics have raised. According to most proponents of the retributive theory, the personal guilt of those who act wrongly must depend, at least in part, upon certain facts about them. A schizophrenic young man who tragically kills his loving mother, believing her to be a sinister space alien who has devoured his real mother, may need treatment, they would say, but a just punishment seems out of the question.
Similarly, the personal guilt of those who disobey God or violate the divine commands must likewise depend upon the answer to such questions as these: Have they knowingly violated a divine command?
To what extent do they possess not only an implicit knowledge of God and the divine commands, but a clear vision of the nature of God? To what extent do they see clearly the choice of roads, the consequences of their actions, or the true nature of evil? Second, virtually all retributivists, with the notable exception of the Augustinian theologians, reject as absurd the whole idea of inherited guilt. So why, one may ask, do so many Augustinians, despite their commitment to a retributive theory of punishment, insist that God could justly condemn even infants on account of their supposedly inherited guilt?
The implication of such language, which we also find in Augustine, Calvin, and a host of others, is that humankind or human nature or the human race as a whole is itself a person or homunculus who can act and sin against God. XIII, Ch. The reasoning here appears to run as follows: Humankind is guilty of a grievous offense against God; infants are instances of humankind; therefore, infants are likewise guilty of a grievous offense against God.
But most retributivists would reject this way of speaking as simply incoherent. II, sec. One can even understand the claim that we are morally responsible for doing something about our inherited defects, provided that we have the power and the opportunity to do so. But the claim that we are born guilty is another matter, as is the claim that we are all deserving of everlasting punishment on account of having inherited certain defects or deficiencies.
So even though the Augustinians accept the idea of divine retribution, they appear at the same time to reject important parts of the retributive theory of punishment. Third, if, as Anselm insisted, even the slightest offense against God is infinitely serious and thus deserves a permanent loss of happiness as a just recompense, then the idea, so essential to the retributive theory, that we can grade offenses and fit lesser punishments to lesser crimes appears to be in danger of collapsing.
Many Christians do, it is true, speculate that gradations of punishment exist in hell; some sinners, they suggest, may experience greater pain than others, and some places in hell may be hotter than others. I, Ch. But many retributivists would nonetheless respond as follows. If all of those in hell, including the condemned infants, are dead in the theological sense of being separated from God forever, and if this implies a permanent loss of both the beatific vision and every other conceivable source of worthwhile happiness, then they have all received a punishment so severe that the further grading of offenses seems pointless.
Once you make a permanent and irreversible loss of happiness the supposedly just penalty for the most minor offense, the only option left for more serious offenses is to pile on additional suffering.
But at some point piling on additional suffering for more serious offenses seems utterly demonic, or at least so many retributivists would insist; and it does nothing to ameliorate a permanent loss of happiness for a minor offense or, as in the case of non-elect babies who die in infancy, for no real offense at all.
All of which brings one to what Marilyn McCord Adams and many others see as the most crucial question of all. How could any sin that a finite being commits in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and illusion deserve an infinite penalty as a just recompense? See Adams , Another set of objections to the Augustinian understanding of hell arises from the perspective of those who reject a retributive theory of punishment. According to Anselm and the Augustinians generally, no punishment that a sinner might endure over a finite period of time can justly compensate for the slightest offense against God.
Anselm thus speculated that if no suffering of finite duration will fully satisfy the demands of justice, perhaps suffering of infinite duration will do the trick. In the right circumstances punishment might be a means to something that satisfies the demands of justice, but it has no power to do so in and of itself.
It is no use laying it on the other scale. Why not? Because punishment, whether it consists of additional suffering or a painless annihilation, does nothing in and of itself, MacDonald insisted, to cancel out a sin, to compensate or to make up for it, to repair the harm that it brings into our lives, or to heal the estrangement that makes it possible in the first place. So what, theoretically, would make things right or fully satisfy justice in the event that someone should commit murder or otherwise act wrongly?
Whereas the Augustinians insist that justice requires punishment, other religious writers insist that justice requires something very different, namely reconciliation and restoration see, for example, Marshall, Only God, however, has the power to achieve true restoration in the case of murder, because divine omnipotence can resurrect the victims of murder just as easily as it can the victims of old age.
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