Infinite Punishment for Finite Sins
Within mainstream Abrahamic religions, it is a common belief that God will punish unrepentant sins committed against finite beings with eternal punishments and this is prima facie objectionable. This thread is an attempt at exploring, with the community, whether it is just for God to punish such sins eternally or not.
One response that I am aware of is the Thomistic response, which essentially claims that the sin is in part evaluated relative to the dignity of the being offended; and since sinning is against God and God is infinitely good, it follows that any sin carries with it infinite demerit. Therefore, although the sin itself was inflicted upon something finite by something finite the sin was, at least in part, against God and so something with infinite merit must be given to suffice justice (and that's why Jesus dying saves us from our sins since Jesus is God: the one thing that has infinite merit).
The problem with this, by my lights, is that the God was not the one offended. It makes sense to say that, e.g., torturing a rabbit is lesser of an offense than torturing a human (even if it be in the same manners) by appeal to the dignity difference between them relative to their natures respectively; however, it doesn't make sense to me to say that, e.g., torturing the rabbit is a lesser offense if a judge ordered one not to do it prior to doing it than if they had done it without such an order. A third party, who may have the authority to dictate right and wrong action, is not the offended party nor the party that commits the offense; so, to me, the dignity being offended by a finite being when committed on a finite being must be finitely demeritorious: God is a third party, of which is the source of goodness, which was and cannot be the offended nor offender.
What are you guys' thoughts?
One response that I am aware of is the Thomistic response, which essentially claims that the sin is in part evaluated relative to the dignity of the being offended; and since sinning is against God and God is infinitely good, it follows that any sin carries with it infinite demerit. Therefore, although the sin itself was inflicted upon something finite by something finite the sin was, at least in part, against God and so something with infinite merit must be given to suffice justice (and that's why Jesus dying saves us from our sins since Jesus is God: the one thing that has infinite merit).
The problem with this, by my lights, is that the God was not the one offended. It makes sense to say that, e.g., torturing a rabbit is lesser of an offense than torturing a human (even if it be in the same manners) by appeal to the dignity difference between them relative to their natures respectively; however, it doesn't make sense to me to say that, e.g., torturing the rabbit is a lesser offense if a judge ordered one not to do it prior to doing it than if they had done it without such an order. A third party, who may have the authority to dictate right and wrong action, is not the offended party nor the party that commits the offense; so, to me, the dignity being offended by a finite being when committed on a finite being must be finitely demeritorious: God is a third party, of which is the source of goodness, which was and cannot be the offended nor offender.
What are you guys' thoughts?
Comments (230)
We can see in John precisely this connection to the law Moses brought...
So breaking any of the laws of the Old Testament, commiting Sin, doesn't matter, you'll still be ushered into the Kingdom of Heaven just for believing in the equation of Jesus Christ.
Thus every Law of Moses, every Sin, can be forgone, cause Jesus doesn't give a damn whether you sin or not.
Just do as Jesus does: transvaluate values, live to your own equation, and bridge distances.
The beatitudes of Jesus Christ show its pretty easy to be blessed:
And as Clément Rosset points out in Joyful Cruelty pg 26:
Which as I've already claimed numerous times before reading Rosset's book, Nietzsche vibes with Jesus in this exact manner: absolute beatitude.
Quoting POPE John Paul II
I'm literally over here telling it like the fuckin Pope, without even knowing it, because that's how fucking legit my interpretation is... Pope John Paul II, has my back. :strong:
And I'm an atheist...
FYI, I am pretty sure this line, at least in its widely accepted Western form, comes in good deal earlier, through St. Anselm of Canterbury (although I've found many ideas in theology, like philosophy, are never truly new). And in Saint Anselm a "penal substitution" theory of salvation is dominant. Whereas in the East a doctrine of "Original Sin" never took root (at least not Augustinian Original Sin, the Orthodox often call it "Ancestral Sin" to differentiate), and, while the language of [I]sacrifice[/I] remains, the language of "healing" (Christ the Physician of Souls) and transfiguration often plays a larger role. You can see this in the relative stress put on key events. The Crucifixion plays a larger role in the West, particularly in some Protestant denominations. Whereas the Incarnation and Resurrection are given greater focus elsewhere, and in the East the Transfiguration is often raised to a level with these other events (if still being the least of them).
You can even see this in church decoration, with the most obvious single item in most Western churches being a crucifix right at the center of the church where all can see, whereas the images that dominate Eastern churches will be Christ Pantocrator (Christ Almighty, Ruler of All) on the central dome of the church (surrounded by icons of the prophets and saints), and at the center of the iconostasis the image of Mary the Theotokos (the Incarnation) and Christ as man (or the "Royal Doors" will also have the Annunciation, Gaberiel announcing the Incarnation to the Blessed Virgin). By contrast, May will be off to the side in a Western Rite Roman Church and generally wholly removed (along with any imagery except for the crucifixion) from most Protestant churches.
The art is a nice way to see theological emphasis, and attempted explanations of salvation tend to work within this framework of emphasis.
There are three broad paradigms I think one can identify here: infernalism (Hell as temporally unending punishment), annihilationism (the eventual destruction of unrepentant souls, also an "eternal punishment" in that it never ends), and universalism (the eventual reconciliation of all and total destruction of all sin) All seem to be very old and each have been advocated for by some of the universal Fathers and Doctors of the Church (the more influential saints). Notably, most ancient universalists, unlike modern ones, still think people go to Hell, just not forever. Indeed, they tend to think virtually everyone goes to Hell for purgation for some time, Mary and Christ might be the only sure exceptions (and Christ still goes for the Harrowing). And they tend to think salvation and deification come exclusively through Christ (so they would be exclusivists in modern terms).
I would agree that infernalism has a number of extremely difficult logical challenges. Probably the biggest is that no one ever knowingly chooses the worse over the better but for weakness of will, which implies that all evil involves less than perfect freedom and so less than perfect culpability. I think it easily has the least support from Scripture of the three views, although all three could find support.
I've talked to @boundless about this at length, but I am pretty sure we share an opinion on this. David Bentley Hart's "That All Shall Be Saved," and Talbot's "The Inescapable Love of God," are pretty good on this topic. I thought the latter made the case a bit better, although Hart's take has more philosophical depth and some good explanations of the classical tradition. Talbot's work can be found on Google for free easily, but it is the first edition and he says he added a lot for the second. They also come from distinct traditions, Hart Orthodox, Talbot American Evangelicalism.
Of course it isn't. Very little of the bible has even a remote connection to justice as we perceive it.
God's original sin was inventing the very concept of sin. Eve's sin - the original sin - was wanting to know the difference between good and evil. Before they ate of the apple, Adam and Eve were ignorant and amoral, unaware that there is a distinction between right and wrong. So how could they sin?
They were punished simply for disobedience and we all are punished for the curiosity with which our species was imbued by its maker - that is, for being the creature God created. (And we, in our various religious zealotries, have continued to punsh memebrs of our species for being as our God made them).
So, how does one escape the tremendous burden of sin one has not actually committed? By murdering a man who did nobody any harm, because he was brought into existence for the purpose of being the only sacrifice God considered worthy to mollify Himself. Then the people who carried out the necessary ritual killing are punished by other God-fearing people for that God-demanded act.
Does any of that sound as if the author were interested in what's fair and proportionate?
It's not about right and wrong; it's about power.
It's more important to be a rule-enforcing, righteous, God-fearing man than a humble follower of Christ, loving his neighbour.
None of this even attempted to answer the OP: what we are exploring here is whether or not it is just for an unrepentant sinner to be eternally punished for their finite sins.
Yeah, I just don't find that plausible. Just because God creates us, it does not follow that God can do whatever He wants with us (so we can't just be His private property).
You are correct that God is offended as a 3rd party in the interaction of sin (for a sin is to will against God's plan: against infinite goodness); however, this doesn't seem to make it true that God being offended in this way should be treated like the offended party (relative to their dignity). For example, if a judge orders you not to murder and you go murder anyways, then the judge is one of the parties offended; however, they are not offended in the same way as the victim. It seems plausible to me that the murder is evaluated in terms of the dignity of the victim in conjunction with the severity of the act itself; but this doesn't seem to extend to 3rd parties who are offended but not the victim. Disobeying the judge may carry with it more punishment, but it doesn't really make the crime itself any worse. In the case of killing an innocent rabbit vs. a human, it seems plausible that the object in the act does make a substantial impact of how immoral the act is.
To make Acquinas' argument hold, to me, we would have to posit someone making God the victim; and that is impossible since God is immutable.
Yes, sinning is to will against God--infinite goodness--but why would this entail infinite demerit for that sin?
This was a wonderful summary: thank you!
However, how would you propose a sin carries infinite demerit? Do you agree that it doesn't?
I completely agree that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, does not depict God accurately nor justice; but I am wondering what reasons one may have for accepting that God does justly, eternally punish unrepentant sinners. I simply don't see how that would make sense, since a sin could never have as the object of its act God and so would never have infinite demerit.
Infernalism is absent in Jewish tradition. As I understand it, the souls of the truly wicked will be annihilated (those whose souls are beyond purification), while the run-of-the-mill sinners will undergo purification in Gehenna and then reunite with God. The truly righteous spend no time in Gehenna.
Then there's the resurrection, which is Jewish dogma according to Maimonides' 13 Principles of Faith. I've heard several versions of this, depending on the text. In some, only the righteous are risen. In others, the righteous are risen to reward, while the unrighteous are risen to punishment.
The scariest accounts in the Jewish tradition enlarge the number of the unrighteous and make them non-existent. As it says in Malachi on the day of judgment:
"Then you will trample on the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act"
I sometimes wonder what nothingness entails. All I can figure is that being is good according to the creation account.
Quoting Bob Ross
In eternal pain? No. In their souls being annihilated? That may very well be just. I don't see non-existence as necessarily being a punishment.
The problem I see here is demanding sense or reason from religion.
Interesting account: I am not familiar with Judaism.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
The issue I see here is alluded to in your last sentence here: is it really punishment to just, e.g., kill off Hitler? I don't think so; and this would be unjust, then, for God to do so but just in the opposite kind of way than the idea of eternal punishment. It seems like, by my lights, a just God would have to punish people finitely and proportionately for their sins; then perhaps annihilate or reunite them.
Firstly, that doesn't matter: the OP is about if it would be just for God to eternally punish sinners.
Secondly, Christianity crucially advocates for repentance: one has to repent and give themselves to Jesus as their Lord and Savior to be saved. That is a core and central aspect of Christianity.
I am not talking about religion per se: I am talking about theology. It may be the case that no religion has good reasons to believe in eternal punishment; however, I am interested in if there are any good reasons whatsoever.
God punishing sinners, God's Angry Judgements, are brought to man under the law of which Moses portrays. And ANYONE BREAKING THOSE COMMANDMENTS WILL BE CONSIDERED LEAST IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
John 1
16 And of his fulness we all have received, and grace for grace. 17 For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
Matthew 5: 19 He therefore that shall break one of these least commandments, and shall so teach men, shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Breaking any of the 10 Commandments of sinning and guess what you're still IN the Kingdom of Heaven.
Repentance and Atonement is of Judaism, and has nothing to do with Christ.
This is the common Jewish view. Some souls are beyond repair; others can be purified and brought into the divine presence. The truly wicked will face justice and then go to oblivion.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
"I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance. - Luke 5:32
None.
Theology is a systemmization and apologetics for religion. Some theologian always finds an excuse for whatever injustices and cruelties his religion espouses, from slavery to ritual slaughter.
God gave Job the most succinct answer: "Because I can."
It's actually penance... not repentance.
Quite a difference. We can see in 30 Jesus is more just than the Pharisees and Scribes as the Beatitude dictates by still dining with publicans and sinners. He doesn't exclude them.
Penance is a duty, an action in Christianity that's like prayer, alms giving, or as we can see in the very next few lines... Fasting.
Repentance is a change of heart and mind, a feeling of sorrow for your actions.
That's from Douay-Rheims, which is the most accurate to the Latin Bible.
Ok. So you're going Greek -> Latin -> English. Why not just do Greek -> English like most translations? The Greek is there.
The earliest Greek transcripts (150-200 CE) show this:
??????? ??????? ???????? ???? ?????????? ??? ?????????
Metanoia is the word in question here, which is repentance. Virtually all the Christian Bibles (NKJV, ESV, RSV, etc.) agree on this at least the ones that translate from Greek.
I was reading Martin Buber's "Two Types of Faith" today, and he just happened to note in the chapter that I was reading that the Hebrew teshuva (repentance) is rendered metanoia by the Greek translator.
As Clément Rosset discusses in his book Joyful Cruelty on Joyous and Melancholy thinkers.
Jesus the Glad Tidings, and Beatitudes describes the latter. This is why Jesus seeks to change their mind. Not so that they can express melancholy through sorrow and regret, because that defeats the purpose.
Repentance is the Latin translation of metanoia.
But let us look at the difference between Meta and Para in Greek, which are closely related, but Meta connotes: after, beyond, with, and among something, where as para connotes: beside, alongside, beyond, against.
The latin translation of metanoia (one towards the light) into repentance (very much sorrow) is more akin to the Greek paranoid (the mind turned against itself).
Furthermore:
Thus we can see metanoia is a change of the mind towards Joy because metanoia is a change with something, not towards regret and sorrow (a change against the mind from lacking) and again considering the Beatitudes (Joy) is what makes one blessed under Jesus' Equation then I can't accept the Latin Repentance for Metanoia. It's the same way the Latin mistranslated "Public" for "Social."
Jesus isn't there to judge and make people feel bad... he's there to wake them up, to see the light of his beatitudes, his mental architecture.
Jewish hell is no longer than 12 months and it exists only to purify you of your sin, not to punish. So I'd change your "mainstream Abrhamic religions" to be "Christianity." Quoting BitconnectCarlosI think that's right, but that number would probably be around a dozen or so for all time and it doesn't play much a role in Jewish theology.
Actually hell plays such a limited role, it's not uncommon that Jews don't really know what the theology is around it. They'd understand Yom Kippur and repentance, but not so much eternal damnation and rewards.
Also, consistent with the issues raised in the OP is Judaism's (an Abrahamic religion) acceptance that there is a difference between a sin against God and a sin against person, requiring that forgiveness of a transgression against a person be asked of the person offended, and not just of God. That is, God can't forgive me for lying to you. I have to ask you for that forgiveness.
And I have to ask three times, and then if you still don't forgive me, I'm forgiven, and now you're the dick, not me.
Eternal punishment is also promised in Islam as well.
Hi,
I believe here you are neglecting the fact that, in theistic religions, it is assumed that the sinner has a personal relationship with God, who is assumed to actively love the sinner. 'Sin' is seen as any action that weakens or even breaks that relationship, which is assumed to be the Highest Good for every human being. Also, in said religions it is explicitly assumed that in our ethical behavior, the way we engage with others etc, are an expression of how we relate also to God.
To use an analogy, in a family, if one of the child mistreats one of his sibling, he is also affecting his relationship with my parents (who love all siblings). Or another: if I hurt a person, I also affect, in some ways, my relationship with all people who love that person.
Quoting Bob Ross
I believe that the problem of this kind of argument is that even it is 'objectively' true, one still has to evaluate the 'subjective' component of the sinful act.
By this I mean that it seems reasonable to say that, in order to evaluate the 'degree of culpability', one should take into account both the seriousness of the crime (the 'objective' component) and the degree of awareness and consent that one has in commiting the crime (the 'subjective' component). For instance, one can be found to be "not guilty by reason of insanity" after having commited a crime.
So even if 'objectively' an act against God is 'infinitely bad', it is reasonable to think that there can be mitigating factors in the associated degree of culpability associated with that action - for instance, a lack of maturity, being subject to external influences beyond one's ability to resist, some kind of weakness of will or awareness and so on.
Given that human beings are, of course, finite beings and considering the finiteness of our lives, the ambiguities present in it, the uncertainty of the time of death etc the question becomes: can a human being reach a level of culpability that deserves a punishment of unending pain (of some sort)?
Personally, I lean to answer 'no' to this question even if the 'sin' is 'objectively infinitely bad'.
Note that the current 'official' Catholic teaching is that only unrepented mortal sins deserve an infinite punishment and these sins require, other than the 'grave matter' (the act itself), two other factors: 'full knowledge' and 'deliberate consent' (see the section on the Gravity of sin, in the Catholic Catechism.). I bet that a supporter of this kind of view would say that a human being can have the sufficient degree of knowledge of consent to deserve the infinite punishment. I honestly can't see how that is possible, considering the finitiness and ambiguities in our life, but that's another story*.
Note also that nowadays some theologians seem to say that 'eternal hell' is a choice, that is the damned choose their destiny and God merely allows them to experience what they asked for. A great problem of this kind of view is that it is also claimed that somehow the damned just can't change their minds and repent after death. Such an inflexibility is said to occur only after death, and one is left to ask why it is so. IMO, if we consider that during life one is said to be able to repent until the last moment, it seems that this inflexibility is actually a form of punishment (at least in the form of 'abandonment'). Hence, even in these 'free will models of (eternal) hell', it seems to me that the same question about how can deserve a punishment of unenending suffering, even if such a suffering is due to the perpetual refusal of the damned to repent.
But IMO all 'infernalist' models at the end of the day assume that 'eternal suffering' is an adequate punishment. Hence, all infernalist models IMO are subject to such an objection, even if one grants that, indeed, offences against God, which is assumed to be the Highest Good for us, are infinitely grave.
(Thanks @Count Timothy von Icarus for the mention BTW)
* Edit: This of course doesn't mean that we cannot have a very high degree of responsibility and culpability. But perfect/infinite culpability seems to me out of reach for human beings.
To me one very interesting semi-exception to this is Michelangelos depiction of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel this being an aspect of the west rather than the east. It has symbolism galore (including that of the entry into Hell being placed right behind the space where the Pope is meant to stand maybe as a reminder of why the Pope ought to be and remain someone of virtue and not succumb to corruption) but, maybe most pertinent: if one focuses on the empty spaces of blue rather than on the details of individuals one will make out the outline of a skull hence of death, or more spiritually appropriate, of the death of ego (this in its dualistic sense wherein there is distinction between self and other - without which there can be no existent corporeal life). God, the Highest Good, being often enough deemed to be egoless awareness of infinite being and understanding which grounds all that exists.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I wont here comment much on infernalism although it can be noted that even certain Buddhist schools of thought share the same roundabout notion of temporary Hell(s) that can occur for some (just as they share the idea of Heaven(s)) but as to annihilationism and universalism, Ill present the following hypothesis:
Iff God is the Highest Good as infinite intellect devoid of ego and also ultimate end/telos of all that exists, then the closer the cosmos at large approaches God:
a) The more the identity (here in part defined by the intentions of the individual) of sinners (e.g., he who willfully and gleefully commits crime(s) again humanity or its parts: as a sub-example, a guy who robs a liquor store at gunpoint simply for the thrill of getting away with it, thereby committing a crime against his fellow men) will by entailment vanish from the cosmos thereby speaking for annihilationism for the closer the cosmos at large approaches Gods being the less willful deviation from Gods being of the part of individuals will occur, this by entailment of cosmic proximity to God.
b) The more those who have been and remain relatively aligned with the Highest Good will become increasingly selfless, hence non-egoistic, hence egoless, this until that very ultimate point is reached wherein all perfectly unify with the Highest Good in so becoming perfectly selfless, resulting in a final state of divinely simple, all-encompassing, completely unified, and infinite intellect-endowed-awareness that is utterly devoid of (dualistic) ego. Here, while the identity of sinners irrespective of their degree in so being will all vanish to include their tendencies of intention (and I presume we can all acknowledge ourselves to be less than completely and perfectly good, hence to engage in some measure of "sin" at least at times), the very essence of their/our being, the very core of who we are so to speak, shall nevertheless persist in living in perfect and complete unity with God. Thereby speaking of universalism.
To be clear, this can only logically apply when assuming the premises of non-physicalism and of the reality of God as the ultimate telos of the Highest Good and the ground of all being as pure, divinely simple, egoless essence of infinite intellect.
But, given these two premises, then annihilationism and universalism seem to me to both be equally entailed in the process of a closer cosmic approach, and hence proximity, to God. And ultimately, likewise, in a complete and perfect unification with God. Within this context of presumptions, there will be a cosmic death of all empirical egos bar none which, in turn, will give birth (so to speak) to the utterly blissful and timeless life of an infinite and divinely simple pure/transcendental ego whose understanding of being (of its own nature) becomes absolute/complete. (Maybe needless to add, at this juncture, then, all forms of infernalism that might have previously taken place for some can only then cease to occur.)
I grant this is utterly different from conceptualizations of being placed either into an Eternal Heaven or else an Eternal Hell after ones death by an overseeing deity. Also, although it addresses the cosmos at large, there is nothing in any of this to nullify the possibility of a multitude of potentially awaiting non-eternal heavens or hells this on the way toward the ultimate end of a perfect and complete unification with God.
I mentioned all this to provide my own outlined perspective be it idiosyncratic or not regarding the OPs request for personal thoughts regarding the matter.
----
p.s. Although not customary for Abrahamic religions, there is no cogent reason for why reincarnations in the ream of corporeal being cannot also occur given the premises just addressed. And as we all might know, sometimes, for some, Heaven and Hell are different places on Earth in the here and now.
p.p.s. Forgot to mention, all such proximity to God being then contingent on the free will of individuals, both individually and collectively.
That sounds like Anselm, as Count pointed out.
On the issue of Hell and punishment there has been a tectonic shift since the 19th century. See for example, "Universalism: A Historical Survey," by Richard Bauckham. What this means is that the propulsion in an anti-Hell direction is more cultural than rational, and the recent works on the subject produce more heat than light.
Here is a basic Thomistic approach:
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.87.3
Interesting. So, in respect to the topic of the OP, this being eternal hell/damnation - rather than any transient period of hell or purgatory, irrespective of how long the latter might end up being:
If eternal hell/damnation in fact does occur, then God cannot logically be the ultimate telos/end of all that exists/occurs - for those eternally damned cannot ever, for all eternity, approach God teleologically as their ultimate end, and this irrespective to changes in their psyches constituency and character that might occur over the span of eternity.
Am I reading this right?
Is there a particular part of my post that your interpretation is seizing upon? I am trying to understand the connection.
Yes, the main part:
Quoting Leontiskos
... With all four objections to eternal punishment being if not refuted then denounced - with many offerings of certain portions of scripture.
This is what the "am I reading this right?" question was addressing.
--------
So again, logically, if eternal punishment does in fact occur, is God to then be understood as not being the ultimate telos/end of all that exists?
Okay. It just seems like a separate question from my post, unless you think something from the post elicits or naturally causes that question.
Here is how I would phrase one of your arguments:
1. If someone is damned, then their teleological end is not fulfilled
2. If Hell is not empty, then someone is damned
3. Therefore, if Hell is not empty, then God cannot be the teleological end of all that exists/occurs
See, I don't find this argument to be valid. Therefore I would ask you to spell it out further, rather than me guessing at what might get us to the conclusion.
There are different problems, but I think the primary one is the idea that if something does not fulfill some end then it doesn't have that end as a final cause. For example, on that reasoning if an acorn does not grow into an oak tree then it does not have the final cause of an oak tree. But I don't see how that could be right. A teleological ordering does not depend on each individual reaching the end in question.
I already spelled out the argument here:
Quoting javra
Since its you who does not find this argument valid, I would ask you to express which part(s) of it you, in fact, find to be invalid. To be blunt: since you explicitly affirm that you deem the argument to not be valid, then you must know why you deem it invalid.
"If some acorn does not become an oak tree, then the oak tree cannot logically be the ultimate telos/end of all acorns - for that acorn cannot ever, for all eternity, approach oakness teleologically as its end."
Abrahamic religions, just as all religions, are made for people living in a society. Religions give us answers to questions that we cannot get logical answers, like what is morally right or wrong or how one should live ones life well. Earlier, they gave us stories of our genesis, which we didn't have any understanding of. And of course, religions tell us what happens to us when we die.
The eternal damnation or eternal bliss is one answer to make people follow the moral rules how to live given by the religion. Some would say it's a way to control people.
I understand that this wasn't the answer you are looking for, but perhaps a more of a theological discussion. Eternity creates naturally many questions: what is life after death, when it's not 40 million years, not 5 billion years, but eternity. :wink:
That's a pretty standard ad hoc response. If an oak tree is not an acorn's ultimate end, then what is? And who cares whether or not it is "ultimate"? Does Aristotle or Aquinas somewhere claim that "ultimate" (whatever that means) ends are not able to be frustrated?
OK, you. The fully grown acorn become tree is in and of itself a/the unmoved mover of all that exists. You got me.
You have a penchant for ignoring the parts of a post that are more crucial. For example, you said:
Quoting javra
But you had already ignored the answer given, namely:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
And similarly, in this case you chose to ignore this:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
This is not what you originally posted and what I replied to. You might notice that even clicking on the link, as of now, leads one to a post in which no such thing is stated.
Shame. Or maybe the lack of it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Whom else but Aristotle originated to concept of an "unmoved mover"? And this asked of someone whose supposedly an authority on "classical" theology?
Have your last say to make yourself look righteous at the expense of others. I'm done here.
Of course it is. The mods are free to check edit history or whatnot to confirm that no edit was performed.
Quoting javra
Then as Aristotle pointed out, it must be terrible for you to be alone with yourself.
(Yet another red herring that altogether avoids the question posed. Yet more avoidance of any semblance of philosophical dialogue.)
It would be interesting to see someone try to flesh out this argument. Certainly an eternal punishment is temporally infinite. But what is it about sin that is supposed to be finite? We have something like this:
1. To repay a finite transgression with an infinite punishment is unjust
2. All sin is finite
3. Therefore, Hell is unjust
We could say a lot about this, but the most pressing matter is to focus on the term "finite" from premise (1) and what is meant by it. Aquinas' interlocutor is thinking of a transgression with finite duration or malice. You yourself are thinking of a transgression against a finite being (and this sets up Anselm's argument). But to take an easy and recent example, the Vatican recently released a document claiming that human beings have infinite dignity. Although it was a sloppy document, it is echoing a cultural presupposition (and, ironically, a presupposition that is often wielded against the doctrine of Hell). If we follow that cultural lead and say that humans have infinite dignity, then Anselm's argument in fact holds vis-a-vis humans; and what is sinned against is not therefore finite.
In any case, the claim that it is "prima facie objectionable" won't hold unless we understand what is supposed to be finite about a particular transgression.
I will just chime in that here the objection 2 seems weakest to me.
Punishment delivered as a means of deterring other would-be transgressors is punishment oriented towards an end that is distinct from retribution. But clearly it will not deter anyone from sinning to continue to punish sinners after the Judgement, assuming that those who have been beatified are incapable of sin. One only needs a continuous deterence policy when the people one is hoping to deter are capable of transgressing.
But the larger issue is that, if one takes infants to be born under the rupture in the order St. Thomas refers to, this could be read as saying:
"All men are subject to damnation from conception, since they cannot repair the order that is ruptured in Adam. And they can do nothing to repair this order themselves."
I.e. the Calvinist vision.
But the reply to objection four could be used just as well by Calvin in arguing for the impossibility of most men receiving any mercy from God, since the means of repair can only come from God, and it will remain unrepaired for so long as it is not repaired. But then there is no point even thinking in terms of human justice, since all are under condemnation and it is only lifted if it is lifted ("at God's good pleasure.") This remains just as true for infants and children who die without the sacraments, yet pace (later) Saint Augustine (who I feel might only be taking up the position to skewer the Donatists re ineffective baptisms) mainstream Catholic theology says God repairs this rupture for those who have died (either by way of beatitude or by way of sparing them from active punishment in Limbo).
Yet I would say rather that a means of repair does exist, that this is the key point of the Gospel, where Christ tells us to "repent," and mourns that Jerusalem has not repented, so that he might gather it up in his wings. This is, of course, a repair accomplished "by God," but it is also one attainable by man. So, to objection four, which seems the main point, the idea then has to be that repentance is not an option for the damned. For, were the damned alive and guilty of the same sins, they could repent and be saved. But can the dead not repent? Or if they repent are they punished anyhow?
Dante pointedly dodges this question by not having a single sinner in the Inferno take any responsibility for their sins or show any repentance.
Anyhow to the OP, I am now realizing in my rambling first post it probably would have been more helpful for me to note that all sin was generally taken as being primarily a sin against God. And I would agree with this, the idea of God as some sort of disengaged "third party" to sin does not make a lot of theological sense.
The question of whether eternal punishment is justified seems to me to be different from the question as to whether eternal punishment is theologically sound. The two need not go hand in hand, and indeed they usually don't go together, with the claim that God would be justified in punishing repetent sinners, but shows mercy instead, being a common one.
Theologically, the focus on "extrinsic punishment" and "extrinsic reward," seems less helpful, and it becomes a philosophical problem when it leads into voluntarism, such that "good" is just proper calibration of action, thought, and belief towards extrinsic goals. This is something Pope Benedict XVIII avoids here:
[I]
47. Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Savior. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation as through fire. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.[/I]
Yet aside from being an "opinion of recent theologians," this is also a conception right at home with many of the earlier Church Fathers.
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.87.3
I'm not sure how the argument here is persuasive. It is said that during life it is always possible to repent. During life, then, the will is not invariably fixed in sin.
So, the 'fixation' in sin must come after death. But why?
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.87.3
I think that one can retort here that all punishment that humans can make are finite, not infinite. Even if death penalty lead to the annihilation of the person, it would probably be still a 'finite' punishment since people are finite beings and the suffering experienced by the person would be finite. If hell lasts forever, however, the amount of suffering of the damned is infinite, even if the punishments were 'mild'.
Furthermore, in human justice one should also take into account the safety of others. So, say, a life sentence does not necessarily entail that society would banish the person 'forever and ever' but simply that the person is considered so dangerous that the best course of action is held to be life imprisonement. Human justice is not perfect. Of course, it can be read the way Thomas reads it, i.e. an endless banishment, but it isn't necesssarily so.
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.87.3
In my post, for instance, I never claimed that punishment must be corrective. In fact, I worked within a purely retributive account of justice.
And I argued that even if one accepts Anselm's view that sin deserves an infinite punishment because iti is against God, who has infinite dignity, it can be argued that one should take into account the limitations of human life.
Since death is assumed here as a 'point of no return', consider this simple example.
Two men A and B commit a murder. They are discovered while doing it by police and they initiate a gunfight with the police in order to not get caught. Both murderers are shot in self-defence by police. Murderer A is killed on the spot, while murderer B is hurt, taken into hospital just in time to avoid death and then goes to prison. During his time in prison, for some reason murderer A sincerely repents.
It's clear to me that A and B had unequal opportunities to repent for their crimes. Murderer B was more lucky. He didn't live because he was a 'better person' than murderer A but simply because he wasn't shot in the wrong place and was brought to the hospital in time (and saved by the hospital staff). For all these reasons outside of his control, B got the chance to repent which A didn't simply due to the fact that he was shot in the wrong place and/or died because he didn't arrive at the hospital in time or whatever.
Given that the times and circumstances of death are uncertain and beyond the control of people, death just seems an arbitrary cut-off.
Of course, if one takes into account the fact that human beings are finite in their understanding and capabilities in general, it is even more difficult to understand how a form of 'unending suffering' is a just recompense for sinners.
Not sure how these objections are just 'cultural' and not 'rational'.
Even if it were true, this would only true 'objectively' (see this post). One still has to take into account the 'subjective' aspect of sin.
Even in our legal systems, responsibility for crimes is mitigated or even denied by, for instance, 'reason of insanity'. In evaluating the severity of culpability one seemingly has to take into account the capacities of the transgressor. Can a human being reach the level of perfect culpability once the limitations and finiteness of human life are taken into account?
You are grossly miseducated.
https://www.openbible.info/topics/accepting_jesus_as_your_savior
-- Acts 17:30
-- Luke 15:10
-- Acts 2:38
-- 2 Peter 3:9
Etc.
I dont think Judaism itself dictates a 12-month purgatory (e.g., there are plenty of jews that believe in eternal punishment); and Islam is also an Abrahamic religion.
Or, to the infernalists' point, it seems that some might refuse to turn towards God. Universalists make a good point that it makes no sense for a rational nature to flee from the Good forever, if only because movement will continue until it finds rest in the Good. Yet, just as St. Gregory of Nyssa sees an eternal ascent into the Good, an asymptotic approach to the infinite, one can envisage a similarly unending movement away from the purifying light that burns. Moreover, if one has disfigured the Imago Dei enough, are we still talking about a rational nature?
Or perhaps the Augustinian curvatus in se, the curving inward of the self in sin, becomes so extreme that, like a black hole, there is no escape velocity capable of pulling away from its gravitational pull.
I don't really find these questions to be resolvable in terms of philosophy. The case in Scripture seems more concrete though.
For, it is obvious that aion is [I]sometimes[/i] used in the Scriptures to mean less than "infinite temporal duration" but also seemingly as an adjective for the uncreated, that which is without beginning or end (at least plausible). This can render a different reading of Matthew 25, and at any rate, annihilation is as much an infinite punishment as continuous extrinsic torment. So too, a lesser reward (because one has made oneself incapable of a higher beatitude) might itself be a sort of punishment. But this requires a perhaps less than straightforward reading of Matthew 25.
On the other hand, the New Testament is full of quite explicit references to "all," "the entire cosmos," "all in all," "every knee," etc. And the difficulties in rereading the inclusivity out of these seem fairly monumental, requiring us to attribute to the Apostles a seeming inability to write clearly such that straightforward readings of their words will result in us taking away the exact opposite of "what they really mean." "All" must really mean "some," "especially" means "exclusively," "not just us [Christians] but the entire cosmos," means "just the elect," and "all were made vessels of wrath that mercy might be shown on all," means "all were made vessels of wrath that mercy might be shown on some."
I think it would be fair to say that the decline in support for infernalism has pernicious causes in a culture whose ethics has become hung up on only the worst sort of offenses, and a general comfort with sin and lack of concern with the spiritual life, etc. But it also has certainly been helped by the widespread expansion of access to critical texts and education in Greek, that make at least some of the efforts to radically re-read what New Testament texts appear to say in a straightforward manner appear to be little more than doctrinal massaging. A good infernalist response to these issues, IMHO, cannot rest on trying to bulldoze through these passages by explaining that "all in all," really means "all in some."
And this is where I take umbrage with some historical narratives that try to dismiss the history here are little more than "some Church Fathers let too much Greek philosophy into their though and followed Origen, and this trend lasted a good deal longer out East because they were isolated." Because that isn't how the position was primarily argued, from abstract philosophical grounds, but rather by pointing to the straightforwardly universalist sounding lines of Scripture that appear in virtually every New Testament book, but particularly in St. Paul's epistles.
Your take is very interesting. I would say, despite it not pertaining to your take directly, I still dont see how sin is objectively infinitely bad (viz., infinitely bad).
To me, the subjective vs. objective factors in sin is false (albeit it useful for conveying your point); since an act is the volition of will, so it stems from this subjectivity which you described and so two people are held unequally culpable for a sin are not committing the same sin. We like to say colloquially, e.g., that the schizophrenic and the normal personor the child and the adultwho both directly intentionally killed an innocent person in the same manner have committed the same murder (objectively, as you put it); but they havent: the intentions, wherefrom the volition arises, is drastically different. In fact, the schizophrenic, in this case, has not committed (objectively) the act of murder assuming they are hallucinating to the point where in the hallucination they are committing valid self-defense or perhaps manslaughter.
In short, the problem with your objective vs. subjective distinction is that acts have embedded into their identity intentionality to which it correspondse.g., murder is the intentionally killing of an innocent person in the manner where the intentionality is towards killing THAT innocent person.
Now, I would say, in this light I have depicted, this distinction is erased and the question becomes: are some acts, of which are sins, simply not deserving of infinite punishment?
For example, if you believe that a child that shoots someone and kills them while insufficiently understanding what a gun is cannot be held morally culpable to the same level as an adult who does understand guns who does the same relevant things and that this child cannot be held accountable to the point of infinite punishment, then I submit to you that you believe the act of shooting someone with insufficient understanding of what a gun is does not carry with it, objectively, infinite punishment.
Perhaps I am misreading Acquinas, but it seems as though, even in your excerpt, he is arguing that sin is the disruption of God's order and, as such, incurs a debt of eternal punishment.
This may true, but it isn't necessarily true; and I don't believe that religions were created with this in mind: they were seeking the truth the best way they could. Just because we can retrospectively determine that they got a ton of stuff wrong, given our understanding now, doesn't mean they were making stuff up to "get answers to questions they can't get a 'logical' one for". That's a very shallow interpretation of religion.
That man's telos lies in God does not mean that man reaches his end. On a deflationary evolutionary naturalist view, man's telos is to reproduce. That doesn't mean all men will eventually have children.
There is a more nuanced question of whether or not God would allow sin to exist forever, or if perhaps God's hands are tied in that God cannot both create free creatures and ensure that all shall reach their end in God. However, to my mind, sustaining this problematic becomes more fraught when it has to rely on the accident of the time of one's death marking an absolute limit on repentance, if only because there is no strictly logical reason why this must be so. Indeed, there is no logical barrier to reincarnation, etc. Hence, we rely on revelation. But in turning to revelation we see what appear to be claims of the total conquest of sin (as opposed to its sequestration and eternal persistence), e.g. that God shall be "all in all."
But nothing would seem to preclude things not attaining to their end. Hart makes a similar sort of argument, but it is crucially different. He says a rational nature stays in motion until it reaches its natural ends, and so barring extrinsic limits, it will move forever, at the limit turning towards its true end.
But wouldn't that be philosophy, the love of wisdom, and science?
Quoting Bob Ross
What I mean here is that you simply cannot get a logical, objective answer to what is morally right and wrong. It's not a question of retrospect or our ignorance. The question is inherently subjective, hence you cannot get an objective answer to. Science can tell us what the World is like. Not how it should be.
Let's say that the child that killed the innocent person actually knows that shooting people can kill them. And, indeed, he intended to kill. Still, I would say that the degree of culpability is far less than that of an adult who commits an analogous act with the same intention. The sin is, as you say, different.
But I believe that the distinction of subjective and objective aspects of a sinful act can be a good heuristic. After all, in the example you propose, an innocent person has been killed by another and the dynamics of the crime is the same. So, of course both acts have that in common. They differ, of course, in the degree of responsibility of the transgressors. We cannot apply the same standards in evaluating the seriousness of the crime of the child and the adult (or, for that matter, an insane adult cannot be regarded as having the same responsibility of an adult with normally functioning mental faculties). So, yes, I agree with you that the sin is different, but the act itself can be regarded as the 'same'.
In the section of the Catholic Catechism I linked to in my first post in the discussion we read, for instance:
Note that the Catechism accepts that the same act can correspond to very different sins.
The 'grave matter' is the 'act', i.e. the 'objective' component. In our example: the killing of an innocent person. The degree of knowledge and consent is the 'subjective' component. And the evaluation of the seriousness of the sin should take into account all the aspects of the sin. So my question is: if one takes all aspects into account, can a human being get that degree of culpability that deservers some form of eternal torment as a just, adequate punishment?
So, I agree, the distinction can actually create confusion. But it shows very well a deep problem in the "a sin against God is infinitely bad because God has infinite dignity" perspective.
Quoting sime
But, on the other hand, our experience seems to be fundamentally temporal. A process. Not something static. If time stops, can we really speak of beatitude or torment?
As you said, I mostly agree with you. And I also agree on this:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Regarding this:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I see what you mean. An universalist might say that the self of these criminals is extremely corrupted, but not irremediably so (for God). An afterlife purgatorial experience is the process in which such a wicked person is restored to being a proper 'image of God'. Does this lead to a complete replacement of the wicked person with a better version of themselves? Yes, in a sense. The wicked is, in some sense, annihilated in order to recover 'that person should have been'.
Universalism IMHO can use without problems the annihilationist language and up to a point take it literally. Up to a point, of course.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The main problem that I have with infernalism (and to a lesser degree, also annihilationism) is that it relies upon an inflexibility of the fate after death. Unless one completely denies any role of free will in our salvation, during this life it is said that we can repent (and also fall) until the last breath. After death, we can't either fall if we are saved or be saved if we are damned. But why? Why should death be this kind of absolute 'cut-off' of our possibilities to spiritual progress?
The main problem with universalism seems to be that it has a kind of determinism in it. Salvation is an ultimately irresistible process. Can we be really free in such a scenario? Of course, in a sense yes. But the possibility of saying 'no' to any kind of loving relationship seems to be necessary for it being meaningful. At the same time, however, the possibility of restoring the loving relationship after the rejection seems to also be a necessary component of a loving relationship. IMHO this would mean that the possibility of salvation remains forever. Hence, I believe that philosophical arguments can lead us to endorse a reasonable hope of universal salvation, in the sense that it will remain always a possibility (if one assumes the existence of a loving God).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
While I mostly agree with what you say after this (see below for the exception), it is also true that such texts has been interpreted in a way that precludes universalism, as you also point out. I agree with you, however, that the most natural reading of those passage is universalist.
But the New Testament also include many passage that indicate a division between the saved and the damned. And while one can argue that they can be read in a way that such a division is not truly final, they don't explicitly tell us that the division isn't final.
The Scriptures are therefore ambiguous. I don't believe that any kind of exegesis can fully resolve the matter, no matter how one tries. And honestly I am not sure of what to make of this. Maybe it is a good that the Bible is ambiguous for some reason. Maybe it is simply inconsistent on this point. This is one of the reason why I am an agnostic (although I have a strong sympathy towards theistic universalism in general, and the Christian version in particular).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
While what you see here makes sense, IMHO part of the reason why the West lost its interest in religion and spirituality actually is the extreme forms of infernalism that have long dominated the scene. The highly legalistic approach to spirituality in the West, the doctrine of the 'massa damnata' according to which even infants who die unbaptized are condemned at least to an eternal separation from God etc have contributed to a mass 'spiritual exhaustion'. Perhaps if the religious doctrines especially in the Dark Ages and in the early Modern age weren't so rigid, extreme etc, people would be less distant from religion in general (I suspect that you actually agree with this, but IMO it was worth to point out).
Edited for clarification
Exactly, have you heard of the doctrine of the Trinity?
"What you did not do for the least, you did not do for me." (To paraphrase the Gospel).
I think this is a good point and, upon thinking about it more, I think it is per se possible that a sin could carry with it eternal punishment; but the kinds of sins we commit historically are not.
I am thinking of something like this:
1. A punishment which incorporates any form of infinitude must have as its corresponding offense one which has in that same form an infinitude. (principle of proportionality in justice)
2. No form of infinitude exists in any offense possibly made by creatures which have or currently exist in the universe.
3. Therefore, the punishment for any given offense possibly made by creatures which have or currently exist in the universe cannot contain any form of infinitude.
For all intents and purposes, I dont think it matters if the infinitude is in terms of duration of the crime, repetition of the crime, the dignity of the offended party, etc. In the case of humans, which are the only example we have of a being capable of moral scrutiny, there has been nor are there any cases of an offense where (A) the offender was of infinite dignity, (B) the offense hadat least in partinfinite duration, or (C) the offense hadat least in partinfinite repetition.
If (to your point) Hitler were to be a creature which was eternally carrying out mass genocides, was torturing someone for eternity without any break, or a human (to your Vatican point) had infinite dignity and he tortured them; then it would be proportional to punish, by some means, with an eternal punishment.
To Vatican, I would say this is just their attempt at keeping up with the times; but humans do not have infinite dignity, nor is that possible.
The dignity of a thing is relative to its nature such that one closer to God is higher than one more remote; and God is has the highest dignity and is the only one with infinite dignity because He is perfectly good. Humans cannot be perfectly good, for their essence is never capable of being identical to their existence; and this is impossible because the only being capable of having the two identical is the kind of being which is subsistently existent (and humans do not possess subsistent existence inherently from their essence).
Thats why Being itself is the only thing that can possibly be perfectly good.
Okay, but what is the basis of this? Is it something like this?
1a. A punishment which incorporates any form must have as its corresponding offence one which has that same form.
2a. Infinitude is a possible form (or meta-form)
3a. Therefore, a punishment which incorporates any form of infinitude must have as its corresponding offence one which has that same form of infinitude
More precisely, you seem to be saying that a punishment of infinite duration can only be meted out for a transgression of infinite duration. And according to 1a this carries with it the claim that a punishment of a 10 minute duration can only be meted out for a transgression of a 10 minute duration, etc. The Aquinas quote from above addresses this:
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.87.3
-
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, but if you want to argue for a disproportion of punishment, then you must specify what is supposed to be infinite and finite. Is it duration? Is it that the punishment has infinite duration whereas the transgression did not have an infinite duration?
The Bible breaks down into sections.
The only section I'm concerned with are the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which primarily focus on the life and teachings of Jesus.
Acts, on the other hand, chronicles the actions of the apostles and the growth of the church...
I know this may be hard for you to rationalize because you're quite poor at following anything outside of your prejudice...
Just because you find the word sin or repent in the Gospels doesn't mean that Jesus is passing Judgement.
And I already destroyed the poor accuracy in the interpretation and translation of the Greek word Metanoia, into the word Repentance. Which you yourself are too poor of a mind to even counter.
Meta = a change with and among, to move beyond, and has nothing to do with the sorrow or shame of repentance. Repentance is an improper translation of metanoia.
Or do you think Facebook changed its name to "Sorrow and Shame"? :roll:
No, you're just poor at reasoning in general.
You're trying to assert a different meaning for the original word within the Greek Bible (metanoia, a change of thought towards the Beatitudes [the teachings] of Jesus) to your dumb understanding (repentance, a feeling of very much sorrow about ones actions).
Which is why you ought to use the Douay-Rheims Bible. The Douay-Rheims translation was produced by translating the Latin Vulgate, which was the official Bible of the Catholic Church for centuries. The Vulgate was translated from the original languages (Hebrew and Greek) by St. Jerome in the 4th century.
This is why PENANCE is used rather than REPENTANCE in the Douay-Rheims Bible. And the Latin Vulgate because St. Jerome understood that METANOIA doesn't equate to REPENTANCE but rather PENANCE.
You're the idiot pointing to some poor translation of the Bible and saying "see this shit translation says repent."
That you didn't know the Beatitudes are the teachings of Jesus Christ, but thought the Apostles opinions on Christianity were, is fucking wild also...
Just goes to show you don't know shit about your own belief system.
It seems to me that there is a plausible trade-off between duration and intensity in terms of punishment. One might justly meet out a short, but intense punishment for a sin that occured over a long duration or vice versa.
The problem I see for St. Thomas here is that the claim that breeches in the order of man's conformity to the will of God continue forever itself has to presuppose that universalism is false. If universalism is true, then God is eventually "all in all," and all such breeches are repaired "at the end of the ages" (perhaps after "the age to come").
If universalism is true, there are no human, or even demonic crimes that have infinite effects. By the same logic, if annihilationism or infernalism are true, there are indeed such crimes.
The difficulty for both sides is that appealing to this seems to require begging the question and assuming that one of the positions is the case in order to make a claim about the duration and effects of any creatures' transgressions.
And I don't know if it works to say: "well the breech would be infinite if God didn't act," because I think this has to rely on a sort of nature/supernatural distinction that I find extremely unhelpful and hard to justify. Absolutely nothing happens without God, and so of course God is required for any repair. God is also required for baptism, for reference, for the sun to rise, etc.
Yes, that is a good argument. :up:
There is quite a bit of literature on that objection, most of which I have forgotten. In any case, Aquinas does not say that deterrence is the only object of punishment. He would surely agree with you that the medicinal aspect of deterring others ceases to exist in the eschaton. If the objector had claimed that all punishment is merely medicinal/deterring, then I believe Aquinas would have attacked that premise. That is a premise that is present in our culture but was not present in Aquinas'.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In my opinion Limbo plays a more central role in Thomas' thought than is usually recognized, and there is nothing truly punitive about the natural beatitude of Limbo.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Catholic doctrine is firm that the dead cannot repent.
The tricky thing about this thread is that it is philosophical, not theological. Theologically speaking, Christian tradition accepts that the demons are damned and will never repent, and therefore you already have a precedent for the sort of conclusion that a universalist wants to reject. The purely philosophical spectacles perhaps have no need to take such a theological datum into account.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Rather than a dodge, I see that as highly consistent with Christian tradition.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, and that is worth pointing out in relation to the OP.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Okay, that's a fair point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. I think that's fairly easy to avoid, but it is inevitably woven into this thread.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We can say that many early Fathers understood the gaze of God to fall on the saved and the damned alike (with a different effect), but this does not mean that those "many" were universalists. Only a very small number of them were. ...I should probably just state outright that I disagree with Hart (and even Balthasar), and I think they distort the tradition.
But as you say, we can understand a universalist conclusion in different senses. It could be necessary according to justice, or it could be gratuitous according to mercy. I think the latter possibility is much more credible than the former qua Christianity. Yet for someone coming from a purely philosophical perspective in the 21st century, the idea that (eternal) Hell is unjust is at least understandable. Indeed, a very quick way to get at the infinitude question is to note that 21st century philosophers generally do not believe in angels, demons, the higher nous, and the eternal stakes that accompany such a paradigm. In a similar way, a new convert who reads Lewis' essay, "The Weight of Glory," would probably be blown away by the elevated anthropology.
(P.S. What source were you quoting Benedict XVI from?)
I will try to come back to these thoughtful posts. Time is short today.
The point you are making is true, and also elementary. :up:
(I highlight this only because the error continues to persist.)
Pope Benedict's quote is from his encyclical Spe Salvi.
Quoting Leontiskos
Just a quick note here. I believe that questioning the ethical soundness of 'endless punishment' doesn't necessarily imply believing in universal salvation. That is, one can argue that 'endless punishment' is unjust and still assert that not everyone will be saved. One can certainly say without contradiction that nobody deserves to be eternally punished and that nobody deserves eternal bliss.
Universal salvation of course implies that all punishment will be temporary. But universalism says much more than merely asserting the finite duration of punishments: that all will, ultimately, be saved and experience eternal blessedness. I don't think that universalists claim that eternal bliss is 'just' since nobody actually deserves it. It is seen as a gift of God's grace and mercy.
On the other hand, I believe that it is legitimate to question the doctrine of 'eternal hell' even from a purely retributive (and proportional) account of justice, as I pointed out before. I think we shall keep the issues separate here. Rejecting the infinite duration of punishment doesn't necessarily imply the acceptance of the doctrine of universal salvation.
Ok, let's say we go with penance.
"I came not to call the just, but sinners to penance."
If penance is a duty, then sinners are still bound by duty. We can adopt a non-judgmental attitude about it, but duty hasn't vanished. If one hasn't fulfilled a duty, then one has fallen short; one has done less than what is required or expected of them. What do we call falling short of a duty, then?
Thanks, that was my guess.
Quoting boundless
That's true, but universalism in the first sense I noted and rejection of Hell really do go hand in hand. They are logically distinct positions, but that sense of universalism logically entails the rejection of Hell on the grounds of justice. What threads like this are concerned with is precisely the thesis that Hell is unjust.
Quoting boundless
Hart has recently further popularized the thesis that Hell is unjust, and if a Christian views Hell as unjust then salvation is not undeserved. That is, if it is unjust for someone to not be saved, then salvation is not gratuitous.
(I assume it goes without saying that the traditional doctrine of Hell is a doctrine of eternal Hell.)
Edit: Can you give me a snapshot of your religious affiliation and background? It will help me respond on point. I myself am a Catholic with an affinity for Orthodoxy.
Yes, but is this sin against God, whereof God is not the thing directly offended nor the offender, warrant eternal punishment?
I dont see how eternal punishment can be theologically sound if it is unjust: God is perfectly just, so God cannot eternal punish if it is unjust to do so.
Grace is an another essential aspect of most theological theories; but it does not override justice. Viz., grace does not partake in unjust things and justice must still be served.
Religion can go hand-and-hand with philosophy: specifically theology. It doesn't always, but it can. Religion is about worship through tradition; theology on the nature of God.
Ok, so you are taking a moral anti-realist position; but theology tends to presuppose moral realism.
I missed this. To use an analogy, imagine that a pipe breaks and the water that was flowing through it is now flowing out onto the ground. This is an order being disturbed, and as long as the pipe remains broken, the water will continue flowing out onto the ground. It will flow out onto the ground for all eternity if the cause/pipe is never repaired. Put crudely, Aquinas is saying that we are able to break our own pipes in ways that we cannot repair, and that Hell flows out of this.
I am not taking a principle of equality but, rather, proportionality. It is not that a, e.g., sin that happened for 10-minutes has to be punished with a punishment that lasts 10-minutes; however, the punish must be proportionate. I cannot put to death a person for stealing one turnip.
In the case of a punishment that has any sense of infinitude in it (e.g., infinite duration, repetition, etc.) it seems always disproportionate to the sin (like the turnip example) because the sin, being finite in every way imaginable (in practical affairs), does not remotely approach any infinitude.
E.g., a 10-minute sin of adultery cannot be proportionate to an eternally repetitive punishment of being cheated on. That violates proportionality: dont you think?
I am saying any combination of a sin that itself contains no form of infinitude with any punishment that contains at least one form of infinitude. This means that neither the offender nor offended parties are of infinite dignity and the durations were finite.
This could be, e.g., stealing a loaf of bread and eating it with a punishment of having your things stolen for an infinite amount of times; or stealing a loaf and eating it with a punishment of feeling pain for all eternity (with no break).
This is interesting; because one could make the argument that some disruptions (viz., sins) could cause an infinite causal chain of disturbances of the proper; and I would say if this were to happen, which is very unlikely, then it would have some sort of infinite demerit and may be punished (potentially) by eternal punishment.
It is also worth noting that it may be proportionate to punish a sin that did contain infinitude in a finite way: I am not sure. Sometimes we punish by way of absence of fellow reward; e.g., all these kids get a cookie but that one kid that misbehaved: the kid gets punished by way of others being rewarded. So it may be proportionate to punish those who have committed a sin of infinite demerit with the absence of eternal life in heaven. I'll have to think about it; however, what I am arguing is that a punishment that itself involves an infinitude cannot possibly be proportionate to a sin that contains no infinitude: whether that be in duration or dignity.
What was saying is that eternal punishment might not take place even if it is not unjust. One does not need to claim that it is unjust in order to argue against it.
My point was that God is not the offended party like the victim: God cannot be a victim. So God may be offended, and it is right to point out every sin is an offense against God, but God is not the offended party of which we take into consideration its dignity to calculate the correct punishment.
With respect to the Trinity and the sacrifice, you would be right to say that God was the victim there: I just don't think God can be a man.
Twelve months is the max. Not everyone stays the full term. The word here is 'Gehenna,' the same one Jesus talks about in the gospels and we would translate to hell. Jewish tradition says that Gehenna was created before the world and is much more vast.
I agree with that, if that is what they are saying. I think one could argue that God has a propensity for graciousness; but grace doesn't override justice. God would still have to punish those who do wrong: grace goes above and beyond what is owed, justice is about what one is owed.
In the case of Christianity, God is the one that takes on the burden of sufficing justice through Christ; and this is how God is able to be gracious and just (as you probably know very well).
I would argue that they would have the same culpability; for children are given less because we assume they dont have such knowledge. If we assume that this child does completely understand what they are doing like an adult and have not been swayed by someone else (as children are quite maleable), then why would we not try them as an adult?
Yeah, thats fine for conveyance purposes; but, again, the intention is inextricably linked with their knowledge; so the degree of knowledge to me is a part of the act. I am just splitting hairs here though: just ignore me (:
It depends on if the act is indeed of infinite demerit, I would say. For if one knows what they are doing and does it overwhelmingly freely; then how would one not be held fully liable for it?
If murder is a sin that carries infinite demerit, the perpetrator knows this, the perpetrator knows that they should not murder, the perpetrator does it for the fun of it (and not of necessity or coercion or what no), then why would they not be held culpable to the highest order?
Well I try, It's a bit complicated, I guess.
Currently I would say 'none' as I am agnostic. As I said in one of my previous posts, I have a strong sympathy with theistic universalism (both Christian and non-Christian).
I was raised Catholic and for some years I was quite religious. During adolescence I started to have doubts about it and gradually I distanced myself form Christianity. During the last decade, I gradually became more and more interested in Eastern religions, Buddhism especially. During the last years I grew more sympathetic to theistic worldviews and since last year I studied a lot of Christian theology, especially the universalist-leaning authors (both ancient and modern).
I do acknowledge the importance of joining some spiritual tradition since 2018 (when I was at the 'peak' of my 'Buddhist' period, so to speak). But for several reasons, I seem to be incapable or unwilling to do that. Some of these reasons are simply psychological, others are more philosophical (e.g. philosophical doubts about doctrines (such as the traditional position on hell etc), doubts about some ethical norms and so on).
Not sure if this helps.
Quoting Leontiskos
If by 'Hell', you mean the traditional 'eternal Hell', yes, I agree that universalism is also based in considering eternal torment as unjust as a punishment. But also annihilationists raise the same concern. And, if we go outside Christianity, for instance many Indian religions (both theistic and non-theistic) would raise the same concern, without however endorsing a form of universal salvation.
IMHO the greatest problem of infernalism is the claim that the fate is irrevocably fixed at death, which in my opinion implies that eternal hell must be a retributive infinite punishment imposed on the damned (and not, say, the natural result of a choice as some free-will defenders of the traditional view claim). Even if one accepts that eternal torment is logically possible, that is an additional claim.
Universalism is clearly also based on the view that sin is more like an illness, a terrifying illness-like corruption that causes damage to both the sinners and others. Universalists generally think that 'hell' is like a bitter and painful medicine that is seen as necessary to heal the soul to an uncorrupted state (as you probably already know...).
Quoting Leontiskos
To be fair, in his book 'That All Shall be Saved' (p. 51-52) Hart seems to explicitly deny this construal of this thought:
Well, the reason we don't treat them in the same manner is because we assume, reasonably I believe, that children are too immature to qualify as proper moral agents and not because they are 'younger'.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, actually I think that your point is valid. It is an useful abstraction. But it can be misleading.
Quoting Bob Ross
Well, I guess that then it would be just to give the appropriate retribution (at least in the case of retributive proportional justice we are assuming now).
But IMHO one should consider also the claim that acting rationally is also acting for the good for oneself. That is, acting rationally is acting in a way that leads truly to one's own well-being.
If a moral agent knows with perfect clarity that an action is actually detrimental for himself or herself and still chooses to do that, is the action done freely?
But even if we assume that such a scenario is possible, it is debatable that in our present life we have enough clarity of mind to be perfectly culpable. It seems to me that our knowledge is imperfect, we are influenced in some ways to external circumstances in a way that in part is outside of our control and so on.
So, I repeat my question: can a human being really have the sufficient knowledge and deliberative power to be deemed as worthy of an infinite/perfect culpability and consequently infinite punishment?
Quoting Bob Ross
As your example shows the murderer seems to value more his or her 'fun' than his or her long-term - in fact - eternal fate. Which, in my opinion, shows that the murderer in this example is not really acting rationally.
If I truly believe that some kind of action brings a fate of eternal torment to me, it seems that doing it would be foolish on my part. Can a foolish action be truly free?
Just like, say, if I am dying of thirst, assuming that I want to live and that I know that drinking water can save my life, my refusal to drink water seems a completely irrational act. Of course, if I have some kind of insanity I might refuse to drink water or if I am coerced by someone or something to not drink I won't drink, but in both cases I am under the influence of some kind of ignorance, coercion or whatever, i.e. situations that I am not really free.
Sin puts distance between man and God under the laws of Judaism, where as Jesus EMBRACES even the sinners to bring them into his fold. Hence why he sits with them unjudgingly. To lead by example of his beatitudes and TEACH them a better way of life through SHOWING his example. To AWAKEN and bring them into the LIGHT.
That Christians here don't understand that is wild af.
That you thought Jesus was a judging cunt to toss bitches asunder into God's angry wrath... that's you all projecting your own hate as if that's what Jesus stands for. BUT some how you apes forgot Jesus represents God's UNDYING GRACE and TRUTH.
John 1:17 For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
TRUTH didn't come by the Apostles, TRUTH isn't in the LAWS OF GOD which MOSES brought...
Jesus brought TRUTH AND GRACE...
So let the sink in for a moment...
All the JUDAISM before Jesus is not the TRUTH.
Sin, Repentance and Atonement, and all the other Judaic traditions are UNTRUTH to the BEATITUDES OF JESUS CHRIST.
The BEATITUDES are the TEACHINGS OF CHRIST. Nothing else. Not what the Apostles like Paul say... he's the resentful cunt most of you Christians worship...
And yall make a whorship out of Christianity by worshipping Paul rather than taking in the lessons of Jesus Christ and his beatitudes.
??I agree; however, in your hypothetical we were hypothesizing a child which indeed had the same maturity as an adult and, consequently, my argument seems immune to this rejoinder.
?
:up:
??
I would say so, because freedom of will is to will in accordance with ones will.
??
Hmm, I would say acting rationally is about acting in accordance with reason; which pertains only to the form of thinking and never its content. ??To me, a rational agent could be a Hitler or a Ghandi; so long as ones course of action is in accordance with logic and reason. ??Irregardless, lets say we consider rationality to encompass some aspect of the contents of reasoning (in conjunction with its form): wouldnt a rational person will what is good, then? For what is good is what should be; and if we are being purely rational, without egoism, then it seems as though we would grasp that what is good is what matters; and this sometimes includes ourselves. E.g., the father that sacrifices himself for his children in an act of fatherly heroism is surely not acting irrational by sacrificing himself knowing well that it will not lead to his own well-being; but, rather, it is exactly the understanding, through reason applied impartiality to reality, that it is good, and perhaps obligatory, for him to protect his children at all costs.
??I dont think, in practicality, humans are perfectly culpable (at least most of the time); but they tend to do things sufficiently freely where they are culpable. I am not following why an infinite punishment would require perfect culpability. Was Hitler perfectly culpable? Maybe not, but he was sufficiently culpable of his crimesdont you think?
The infinitude, by my lights, of punishment is not a reflection of some perfect culpability involved; but, rather, as a proportionate punishment to the sin. To your point, if the sinner is not sufficiently culpable, then we may excuse their action; but, again, this is really muddied speech for this sinner didnt commit the act we thought they did because of such-and-such factors involved.
??
I see your point; but it is still an act in accordance with ones will, so it is free. What do you mean by freedom?
Curiously, I agree entirely with this statement but I think the Scriptures strongly support Hell on balance. For example, Hart's move with aion is extremely old, and writers since at least Augustine have been pointing out that it is pretty wild for someone to take something like Matthew 25:46 and interpret aionion differently in the two instances within a single verse. That is a good example of my difficulty with universalist Biblical interpretation. If we handed Mt 25:46 to someone who has no horse in the race, they would easily come to the conclusion that aionion means the same thing in both instances, and that "aionion zoen" ("eternal life") is not meant to be temporary.
Or from John Henry Newman:
Other famous difficulties for the universalist are the eternal damnation of the demons and Matthew 26:24. Augustine covers most of this in City of God XXI, which is as fresh today as it was then. A very tight and charitable analytic critique of Balthasar's position can be found in Kevin Flannery's, "How to Think about Hell." Regarding the Pauline passages, many of the best Pauline scholars such as N. T. Wright find the universalist's interpretation highly puzzling. In general I would say that it's not a coincidence that the tradition leans so heavily against universalism, and universalism has always struck me as a conclusion in search of an argument. On my view the philosophical case fares better than the theological case.
But I'm going to try to stick closer to the philosophy in this thread, both because the OP focuses on it and because it is Holy Week in Rome.
It does, thanks. That is very similar to my own story. Raised Catholic, fell away in adolescence, became interested in Buddhism and Eastern traditions, and then reverted back to theism and finally Catholicism in college.
Note that I wrote what follows before I had read this post of yours. I will try to return to the remainder of this last post of yours later on.
---
Quoting boundless
It would be hard to quickly introduce you to a very old and deep tradition. Edward Feser has a recent article on the topic, although it is now behind a paywall, "Aquinas on the Fixity of the Will After Death."
But the quote you take from Aquinas says nothing about death. The claim is that humans can fix their end, which strikes me as uncontroversial.
Quoting boundless
Is there one in particular you want to pursue? I'm not sure I have time to try to speak to them all.
Aquinas doesn't say anything in the text I quoted about the fixity of the will at death, so your points are not properly responding to what he is saying. If you don't think the human will is ever fixed, are you therefore of the opinion that someone can leave Heaven and go down to Hell?
Let me address your culpability point:
Quoting boundless
There is a generaland in my opinion, unfortunatetrend in Catholic theology towards this argument:
1. Humans are not capable of the level of freedom and consent necessary for mortal sin
2. Therefore, no humans commit mortal sins
3. Therefore, no humans go to Hell
It should be simple enough to note that (1) is strongly contrary to Catholicism, and that this argument therefore does not derive from Catholic tradition in any substantial sense. If historical Catholicism believes anything at all, it is that humans are capable of mortal sins. :lol:
More generally and philosophically, this goes to the point I made above about C. S. Lewis', "The Weight of Glory." If one has a low anthropology where humans are not capable of much and therefore cannot be held responsible for much, then the conclusion that one cannot incur eternal consequences is ready to hand. A world where the denial of free will is somewhat common is a world where this low anthropology is in the air. I realize you claim that humans are capable of a great deal, just not Hell, but the general point stands.
Yet from a Christian perspective it is not at all clear that the low anthropology supports the capax Dei. That is, if humans don't have the power to sin mortally, then they probably also don't have the power to accept a gift of salvation, or to be deified. The "eternal consequences" that humans cannot effect are bidirectional. Created freedom always has a dual potency, and this is precisely why "Corruptio optimi pessima" (the corruption of the highest is the lowest). It's no coincidence that the same world which holds to a low anthropology has also lost its grasp on human dignity and nobility. The reprobate and the saint disappear simultaneously.
I agree with all of that, technically speaking.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Appealing to what, though? Aquinas has independent reasons to believe that a breach that has not been repaired by the time of death will never be repaired, and therefore he is not begging the question. I'm not convinced that universalism is really on his radar at all, which is why I wouldn't say that he has presupposed something about it.
I think there are good arguments for the fixity of the will at death even though its not a hill I would die on. But I dont find it plausible, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, to say that the will can never be fixed in anything other than God.
I would prefer to postpone a properly theological discussion at least until the Roman Easter Octave has concluded, even though in my opinion the most secure and relevant premises to this debate are theological. With that said, I am not opposed to exegeting Aquinas, as I am the one who inserted him into this thread.
Philosophically, there is some merit to an argument that
Yes, and I also think that a 100 minute punishment would violate proportionality in the exact same way. That was my point. I am not saying that it must be exactly 10 minutes to be proportionate, but equality and proportion are related, after all.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, and I have been asking you what form of infinitude is at stake. Is your answer to that question, "There is some form of infinitude at stake, but I am not able to say what that form is"? I mean, if you don't know what is infinite, then how do you know that something is infinite? Specifically, you seem unwilling to commit to the position that the duration is what is infinite, but I only want you to commit to some object of infinitude.
Quoting Bob Ross
It's not really related to causal chains. Suppose there is a pipe that helps control water levels in the Great Lakes. Water flows through that pipe at 10 gallons per minute. Now suppose you break the pipe and it is never repaired. If the Earth is destroyed four billion years from now then 2.1024e+16 gallons of water would have flowed through that pipe.* And you might say, "Ah, I merely broke a pipe. I didn't cause 2.1024e+16 gallons of spillage." But in fact you did cause 2.1024e+16 gallons of spillage, by breaking the pipe. The counterargument that breaking a pipe is disproportionate to 2.1024e+16 gallons of spillage simply does not hold water.
The likely objection is that someone could not possibly be expected to know that by breaking the pipe they would cause 2.1024e+16 gallons of spillage. To this the traditional Christian would say, first, that our acts involve more culpability and knowledge than we wish to admit, and second, that there are those who break the pipe and fix their end in sin, the mysterium iniquitatis. Hitler is often taken as an unobjectionable example of this. If we reach the point where this is taken to be rare but possible, then I will be satisfied.
- :up:
* Assuming, of course, a cuendillar pipe, which raises questions about how you managed to break it. :wink:
Sure, and the claim has never been that the only people who hold Hell to be unjust are universalists of type 1.
Quoting boundless
You keep assuming that premise, but I see no reason why one would have to hold to the fixity of the will at death in order to believe in Hell.
Quoting boundless
This will ultimately run up against objections to Manichaeism if the illness has no proper cause. In Christianity even when sin is conceived as an illness the proper cause of that illness is a volitional act, whether Adam's or Satan's.
Quoting boundless
Then Hart would seem to be logically committed to a Limbo of some kind, at least theoretically. He thinks God cannot damn the sinner and he also thinks the sinner does not deserve salvation. The deserts of the (existing) sinner are therefore something in between those two options.
Would you elaborate on why you think this? Is it not in God's power to have a trinitarian existence and to take human form? Does your thinking change if the man is a perfect man?
1 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain, and when he was set down, his disciples came unto him. 2 And opening his mouth, he taught them, saying:
3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.
5 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
6 Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
8 Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.
10 Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake
These 8 lines is how one becomes blessed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Nothing more, Nothing less. Any one of those according to Christ.
Noone here can debate this. And they are the only lines that pertain to what it takes to become blessed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven under Christ.
If you want to do your Judaism, go for it. But that doesn't matter to Jesus. Only his beatitudes.
That's one sense, yes. Another is having the power of 'contrary choice', i.e. having the real possibility to autonomously choose an option instead of another.
But note that even if one accepts the notion of 'free will' in these two senses, if one assumes that the moral agent is a rational agent, it seems that to be rational and free one should be able to choose what he or she thinks is the 'better choice'. That is behind a true IMHO rational choice would be the one which is in accord with one believes is the 'better' choice.
If I am dying of thirst and I want to live, I am clearly 'free' to refuse to drink water. But if I am sufficiently aware that if I drink water I'll survive and I value my own life, choosing to not drink water seems to me an insane choice, i.e. a choice where some factors are constraining my liberty (or maybe somebody is forcing me to not drink water or whatever).
So if we accept 'free will' as the ability to act deliberately between options, we however must assume that, in order to be considered rational, the ethical agent must choose the 'better'. Otherwise, why should one choose at all?
Quoting Bob Ross
I made a clear mistake before by talking about the well-being. Try however to consider 'be able to choose what one considers the better option' as a definition of 'rational freedom'.
Clearly the heroic father chooses to sacrifice his life to save the life of his child because he thinks it's the 'better option' (and I also think that he would think that it is better for him).
Also, a wicked murderer might think that killing innocent people act in that way because he clearly believes it is the 'best thing to do' (assuming that there is no insanity, external cohercion etc here).
Quoting Bob Ross
So let's say that a man truly believes that what killing innocent people 'for fun' leads to a state of unending pain for him while he is also aware that refraining to do that allows him to escape that terrible destiny. Despite this awareness and without any coercion of any kind (of internal and/or external factors) or some moment of insanity, he still does it.
To me the choice would be completely inintelligible due to the profound incoherence. Being totally incoherent, it isn't in my opinion a rational choice. What do you think?
Interesting, thanks!
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok, I think I know something about that (if I am not mistaken, St Thomas bases his arguments on St. John of Damascus' views). I just don't find it pervasive. But IMO it is a digression.
Quoting Leontiskos
I was thinking about what Aquinas says here:
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.87.3
I am simply not buying this, especially if one says also that during life one can repent until the 'last breath'. So, either one says that during life it's possible to fix irrevocably the wil in sin or one should adequately explain why such a thing must happen after death. Consider this passage from Spe Salvi (the encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI quoted before):
In the case of the damned, either the 'irrevocable destruction of the good in themselves' can happen during life or not. If it can happen then redemption can be impossible even during life in some cases. If not, then I do not understand how redemption is impossible. If it's impossible, then that very impossibility is a punishment of some sorts (either an active punishment or a definitive abandonment by God). I hope I made my reasoning clearer.
Quoting Leontiskos
St Augustine said: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you". If one accepts that the union/communion with God is the highest good, when such a state is reached, one has simply no reason at all to abandon the state of eternal bliss and fulfillment. That's why I think that (if classical theism is true) one can't fall again.
In the state of hell, it's different, after all. One is in a state of torment and frustrated desires.
Quoting Leontiskos
Correct. But of course this is persuasive only if one already believes that one can commit a mortal sin as defined by the official doctrine of the Catholic Catechism and that if one dies without repenting from such an act he is eternally condenmed to hell.
The related section of the Catechism defines mortal sin as:
The fact that mortal sin requires a certain degree of knowledge and consent is where things get confusing. I doubt you believe that, say, a 5-year old child is capable of a mortal sin (even if you say to him or to her that, say, murdering innocent people qualifies as such and he or she does that). But if one considers the finitiness of our lives, the intricate web of relations and influences between a human being and the cultural, social and even physical context where he or she lives and so on, when we can safely posit the 'cut-off' between 'being able to commit a mortal sin' and 'being unable to commit a mortal sin'? For instance, at which age does one get the ability to commit a mortal sin?
I am just unconvinced by this. Also, what you say later about heaven is different. Eternal beatitude in heaven is a gift of God - not a 'just recompense' but God gives more that what is deserved. And supposedly one in Heaven has his or her innermost desires perfectly fulfilled, has full knowledge to experience the 'best possible state' and is actually experiencing perfect beatitude. It's clear to me why, in these condition, a truly rational agent would have the will fixed to remain in communion with God.
Ok!
Quoting Leontiskos
I thought that the standard Catholic doctrine is just that: the orientation of the will of the damned is irreversibly fixed at death (otherwise, repentance could be possible after death, and those who do a post-mortem repentace would be still eternally damned, a possibility that the standard Catholic doctrine IIRC rejects).
But anyway, I agree that 'eternal hell' doesn't logically imply the fixity of the will at death. But IMO it is a central issue, isn't it?
I see various possibilities here:
1) Eternal hell is a just punishment that anyone that die in a state of mortal sin (to use Catholic language*) rightfully deserves. Even if the damned repents, it must suffer eternally because it is what justice requires.
2) Eternal hell is a just punishment that anyone that die in a state of mortal sin rightfully deserves. The damned's will is irrevocably fixed at death (or even before?) and they can't repent (because they can't desire it).
3) Eternal hell is a just punishment that anyone that die in a state of mortal sin rightfully deserves. But if one sincerely repents in Hell, then, he or she is mercifully allowed to go out from it (whether this means that the repentant goes to Heaven or not is irrelevant here).
4) The damned can condemn himself or herself forever if he or she persist forever in sin. That is, he or she can at any time repent, but there is the possibility that he or she never does and, in fact, continue forever to remain in sin (this is more or less C.S. Lewis' view).
(1), (2) and (3) require that eternal hell is a just punishment for a mortal sin (or the equivalent term in a different tradition). But note that (3) and (4) are compatible with a type of confident 'hopeful universalism' or at least that in eternity hell might be emptied (a confident hope, not a certainty, of course).
Clearly, if either (1) or (2) is true, then any kind of hope in a empty hell seems to me an irreasonable hope, if mortal sin is something that people can do.
Anyway, only (4) is compatible with the view that eternal hell is not retributive, God forever offers the possibility to everyone to repent and that the damned choose their state (and continue to choose that despite God's attempts to turn their wills).
I do believe, however, that 'infernalism', i.e. the possibility that some will eternally be in hell, in the case of (4) is just incredibly unlikely. I know that C.S. Lewis would say that no one (or very few) among the damned will repent. But IMO this is questionable. In either case, in scenario (4) - and also in scenario (3) - no one is forever beyond hope.
That's why I believe that in order to 'justify' hell, one must believe that eternal hell is a just punishment in a proportional, retributive justice. And to return to the topic of the discussion, I believe that this necessarily implies that human beings must be able to be perefectly/infinitely culpable to deserve that.
IMHO if there are mitigating factors it seems to me that an unending torment can't be a proportional, adequate. There must be no mitigating factors to ensure perfect culpability. I am questioning that it is possible for humans (at least in this life).
I hope that this helps.
Quoting Leontiskos
I believe that universalist generally assume that the cause of sin are volitional acts.
Quoting Leontiskos
I disagree. I believe that he thinks that no one deserves salvation but God will forever act in order to save all and accomplish (perhaps after an incredible number of ages) that design.
I'm not sure why you say that the sinner is in a limbo.
*One is free to use an equivalent term if one doesn't like the Catholic language used here (in fact, I believe that my thoughts here are pertinent for any 'infernalist' view, not only the 'official/traditional Catholic one...).
Just to clarify, I don't believe that denying the possibility to be perfectly culpable is denying free will or moral responsability. In fact, assuming that we are enough free in this life to be perfectly culpable is in my opinion an idealized view of human beings. I don't think we enjoy such a degree of freedom or autonomy.
Of course, this does not mean that we cannot deserve very severe punishments. I ma just questioning that we can deserve infinite ones.
We're speaking of Christianity, and thus Christ. Not the Judaism he rejected.
No. One can say that sincere repentance is still needed to escape a state of eternal torment. But there is no 'time limit' after which repentance is just impossible.
For instance, if I mistreat people I love. When I acknowledge that I made a mistake, I can experience repentance and a desire to be better in the future (in fact, without such a desire it would be something like 'regret'*, maybe, not 'repentance'). Think about it as the pain one suffers because of surgery. Such a pain is necessary for healing.
I believe that healing (both physical and psychological) can be a painful process. But sometimes experiencing that pain is necessary to get better and be better. Even in human relationship, if I, say, treat badly someone I love, acknowledging the mistake can be painful but that pain might be a necessary step for healing and reconciliation.
*I am not anglophone, but I think that 'regret' can mean simply 'wishing to not having done an action', while 'repentance' is, in fact, a sincere acknowledgment of having being wrong coupled with a sincere desire to be a better person and reconcile with whom one has offended, mistreated or whatever.
Here's the point: metanoia, is the Greek word where as the Latin translation is purposefully altered to mean something vastly different:
Metanoia (????????) in Greek literally means a change of mind or a transformative rethinking. It implies an internal shift in perspectivealmost existentiala turning toward a new way of being, seeing, or living. Its often active, forward-facing, and creative.
Repentance, from Latin paenitentia (root of penitence), is soaked in guilt, punishment, and moral debt. It implies sorrow for wrongdoing, often linked to confession, penance, and shame. It's passive backward-facing, tied to regret.
Repentance creates the "Pale-Criminals" Nietzsche speaks about in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The shameful doer of a single deed that defines them.
In repentance shame defines.
I think that maybe yes, if one is wicked and refuses forever to change one's heart, then yeah I guess that technically speaking it is a logical possibility. Maybe one can forever confirm such a choice. But if repentance is also forever a possibility, then, hope remains.
But if repentance is a possibility (and if one who repents is allowed to get out of the state of torment (sooner or later)), then no one is actually beyond hope (at least of escaping the state of torment).
That's why I think that the main problem with 'infernalism' isn't just 'eternal torment' as a possibility. But the view that at some point the destiny is irremediably fixed coupled with the view that we can earn an unending punishment of perpetual torment.
Note that an annihilationist also posits an 'unending punishment' in some sense. But the advantage here is that the annihilationist doesn't posit a punishment of infinite suffering. So, probably, the annihilationist escapes the objection in the sense that the punishment is never claimed to be 'infinite' in an important sense. Of course, whoever gets annihilated isn't 'saved' but at least doesn't experience pain.
(Please not that I am an agnostic BTW. So I'm not sure this can be said to be 'my view'...it is certainly a view that I have sympathy for)
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
I get what you mean but I do not know* of any Greek (or even Syriac) Christian author according to whom some kind of remedial suffering is not needed for salvation. I mean even universalist ones do not deny this and, in fact, ancient Christian universalists thought that the very/extremely painful remedial experience of the temporary hell is necessary for salvation for those who are not saved during life (during which some remedial suffering must occur).
Acknowledging e.g. to having been wrong, to have done shameful deeds, to have ruined the relationship of loved ones and so on can be quite painful. But it is a necessary step for healing. If I refuse to experience the pain that comes from that acknowledgment, maybe the result is that I will in fact experience a worse fate because I refuse to experience what is necessary to heal.
So, while your point might be true, I don't think that it has support from ancient writers. But note that 'penance' in the sense of an excessive self-mortification conveys the notion that suffering must go beyond what is necessary. In this sense, yeah, If one intends 'penance' in this sense, then it seems to be truly a mistranslation.
*I am just an amatheur, so do not take my word as 'exhaustive'. But I do not recall any ancient universalist that believed that repentance can be entirely without pain.
(IIRC, even in psychoterapy it is acknowledged that in some cases the patient must confront with one's shortcomings, fears and so on and such a confrontation, while painful, is necessary to heal. If one refuses to do that confrontation in these cases, psychoterapy is useless...)
I am sorry but I have to leave now. I hope to manage to come back tomorrow. Sorry in advance for the possible delay in my answer.
Doesn't make a difference what people think, unless they think they know better than Jesus, which goes to show they're fluffing their own ego at that point.
The text is the text, and well, we see that the authors of the original Greek Bible chose metanoia, so saying that you dont know of any writers or authors... well, you're glossing over the facts of the words in favor of a poor translation through reification.
If you have children, here's hoping (facetiously) they don't learn a poor version of mathematics all because someone wanted to put their own spin on the concepts of math... 7+4 = 11 regardless of how you may want to twist it to some other value.
The only hell a person might go through is their own bad conscience, if they ever stoop that low to feel a bad conscience to begin with. Not by way of Jesus, as Jesus does not judge, for he was sent into the world as God's undying Grace. One need not feel any torment over past actions.
Everything else is reified through Judaism.
If you want to argue against eternal or everlasting punishment (depending on your view of time) and whether it's just or not, I think there is a simpler way to argue the point.
Most Christians, for example, argue that God is omniscient, which means that God knows everything that can be possibly known. It certainly would be reasonable to conclude that before God created you, he knew who you would become and, at the very least, would know many of the choices you would make freely. So, as part of his omniscience, he would know before creating you that you would probably make choices that would lead to eternal punishment. If God knew this before creating you, then creating you would be inconsistent with his moral character because the outcome would be devastating for that person. Why would any loving being create a person whose ultimate end would be torturous? Even a being that is not omniscient could reasonably deduce such an outcome. At the very least this is an argument against eternal punishment and is inconsistent with how many religious people define God.
This is just a general response to your opening statement.
That phrase does not appear anywhere in the post you cited. Perhaps you are responding to the wrong person.
Sure.
Quoting boundless
It could be relevant but I don't see it as philosophically central.
Quoting boundless
I don't think you understand what Aquinas is saying, because what Aquinas says there does not contradict the possibility of repentance "until the last breath."
Along the same lines, Aquinas might say that at a wedding a couple, "fixes the end of union, and have the will to unite, until death do them part." This in no way implies that the couple will never divorce. When Nietzsche talks about eternal recurrence he is engaged in a very similar idea to Aquinas.
Incidentally, a lot of people believe that wedding vows are impossible, and it is for the same basic reason that they believe mortal sins are impossible. The idea is that humans don't have the power to incur such lasting consequences, in this case such lasting promises.
Quoting boundless
That is a reasonable argument. I would say that their evil can become subjectively irrevocable during life, but that the Catholic Church holds out hope for their repentance based on factors external to their person. For example, a saint might shake them out of their complacency. It may be worth pointing out here that if everyone turns out fine in the end, then there is no ultimate need to evangelize or even help others.
Note that a corollary to your premises is that irrevocable destruction of the good only ever occurs at death, and not because of death. As if, coincidentally, anyone who ends up in Hell is on a declining path that bottoms out at the exact moment of death, and not a moment before.
Your basic idea here is that death is an arbitrary cutoff, and you are working that idea via the Church's doctrine that no living person is beyond repentance. I think the basic response is that death is not an arbitrary cutoff from God's point of view (nor from Aquinas' philosophical perspective). The notion that the time of our death is arbitrary is already a denial of God's providence. Theists do not believe that people have untimely deaths and get unfairly damned by sheer luck.
One reason I find the fixity of the will at death reasonable is because it is an epistemically conservative position. Infinite reincarnation is much less epistemically conservative, as are accounts of formative post-death experience. The slogan YOLO (you only live once) is widely shared even in pluralistic societies, and that same basic epistemic intuition undergirds the fixity of the will at death. I do not find plausible the idea that our earthly lives are too short for moral or spiritual formation, or that we have some good reason to think that our earthly lives are accidental, such that our destiny-orientation will be fundamentally changed by temporal experiences outside our earthly course. If humans can fix their end, then the point at which it is fixed can always be called "arbitrary" by someone or another. I see no reason to believe that the natural human life is not sufficient for the moral and spiritual responsibilities enjoined on it by Christianity. ...Heck, we even see in aging people a tendency to become "fixed in their ways," as if fixity increases in proportion to natural death. Empirically speaking we seem to have asymptotic habitus.
Quoting boundless
Okay, so it seems that you think that the human will only ever arrives at unmovable rest in God himself. That it can never place its (permanent) end in something other than God. That sounds like Hart, and it carries with it no philosophical difficulties, but I think the difficulties begin to arise when we move beyond philosophy, into theology and particularly Scripture.
Quoting boundless
Flannery draws a nice comparison between Hell and the problem of evil. A similar argument could be made: if humans are not able to rest in evil, then why do so many humans rest in evil? If Hart were right about the ineluctability of the good, then there would be no such phenomenon as the chronic addict. The universalist is again and again forced to impose a strong dichotomy between the created order and what they think is a better arrangement, "What is and what should never be." If the premises of universalism were true then it seems to me that Satan and Adam would never have fallen at all, there would be no evil, there would be no chronic addiction, there would be no child starvation, etc. If the good were ineluctable in the way that the universalist posits then the created order would look entirely different.
Quoting boundless
I think one only has to believe in the notion of mortal sin. If you don't believe in Hell, then you don't believe in mortal sin, at least not really. This is because mortal = mortality = death = finality. In Scripture death itself is a consequence of sin.
Quoting boundless
This is an example of an elaborate argument for the idea that there is no such thing as a mortal sin. Such arguments are almost always epistemic, as this one is. If you want me to engage an argument like that you will have to make it more formal, as dangers of emotion and rhetoric become rather pronounced in these areas.
Quoting boundless
Yes, that is a reasonable account. :up:
Quoting NotAristotle
Well, the motivation would be: "I will continue to suffer if I never repent". Yes, maybe some won't take seriously this kind of thought. But for how long? Assuming, also, that 'in the the world to come', one has an increase of knowledge about God, why one's sins were sins and so on, maybe one would take more seriously the possibility to repent.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Let's consider a serial killer who repents for his heinous crimes. Would you really think that a sincere process of repentance would not involve suffering?
Also, I would say that healing itself can be quite painful. If repentance is a turning away the will to the good by fully acknowledging that one has wickedly and taking responsibility for one's own wicked acts, I would say that the pain can be necessary for this process of 'turning away'. I really can't see why suffering goes against the 'turning of the will'.
The repentant criminal is none other than Nietzsche's "Pale Criminal" who hangs his head in shame and is now defined as the doer of one deed that not defines his identity, some deed that is an externalized anchor of the past...
Metanoia (????????) in Greek literally means a change of mind or a transformative rethinking. It implies an internal shift in perspectivealmost existentiala turning toward a new way of being, seeing, or living. Its often active, forward-facing, and creative.
Repentance, from Latin paenitentia (root of penitence), is soaked in guilt, punishment, and moral debt. It implies sorrow for wrongdoing, often linked to confession, penance, and shame. It's backward-facing, tied to regret.
Jesus seeks to transform through the Beatitudes, which are connected with Joy, not shame and guilt, as he didn't come to pass any judgements.
John 3:17 For God sent not his Son into the world, to judge the world, but that the world may be saved by him.
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.87.3
Ok. I try to start from the beginning. Aquinas says that one can fix his will in sin. The infinite duration of punishment is due to the fact that the damned has a fixed will in sin therefore the damned can't repent because he will never will never want to do that.
To me this mean that at least after death, according to Aquinas, the sinner can't turn away the will from evil. During life, as I understand it, the sinner can fix his will in evil but at any moment he can end such a fixation by repenting.
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm not sure the two cases are the same. One can fix his own will in marriage and sincerely take the vow but a certain point he can 'fall'. One can make a lasting promise but one can break the promise, because the will isn't invariably fixed either in the good in this life. Of course, I would say that breaking the lasting promise here is wrong (assuming the spouse is still loving and faithful), but it seems to me standard Christian understanding that even the righteous can 'fall' at any time.
So, yeah, I can imagine that one can fix his will to remain in sin 'forever' but it doesn't necessarily imply that the will at a certain point must become irrevocable.
Quoting Leontiskos
I honestly think that the idea 'if everyone will be ultimately saved, then evangelization is useless' suffers from various problems. First, if there is a temporary hell, one might still want to avoid that others avoid that. Second: people might actually turn away from evil if they feel loved. Not sure why you think that evangelization becomes useless if universal salvation is true.
Regarding the rest... I'm not sure how to respond then. If some are saved by 'external factors to their person', then why only some?
I would assume that standard Catholic teaching is that any kind of 'external intervention' alone is insufficient without some 'internal intervetion' from the sinner.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok. But if the irrevocable destruction of the good happens before death, then, some might be in a hopeless state before death. I honestly never heard that, at least nowadays, the 'official doctrine' says that.
Or maybe you're saying that the prior fixation in sin causes the destruction of the good at death. But again, I would have thought that traditional catholics generally believe that 'until there is life, there is hope'.
Quoting Leontiskos
I am not sure what to respond here. Let's take the example of the two murderers I made before:
"Murderers A and B kill together an innocent person. They are discovered by the police and in the gunfight are both shot by the police, who shot in self-defence. Murderer A dies on the spot. Murderer B is taken into hospital and saved from the medical staff. During the time in prison, murderer B repents."
I believe that this kind of scenario is actually somewhat common. From an outside perspective at least, it would seem to me that the two murderers are not given the same chance to repent. Note that in the example I made, all actions that lead to A's death and B's survival are done by humans who are exercising their free will.
If death isn't arbitrary, as you say, but occurs for anyone at the 'right time', doesn't this imply some kind of determinism?
Quoting Leontiskos
But why don't you believe that if the damned become more aware of God in the next world they just can't repent, especially considering that, if there will be torment in hell, they'll also suffer?
I see what you mean, but at the same time, aren't humans beings with finite knowledge and finite will-power? Why an increase in knowledge can't bring at least some sinners to repent after death?
Quoting Leontiskos
I quoted Augustine from the 'Confessions', not Hart. Augustine famously said that our heart can only find rest in God (and God made us for Himself). Not sure why see this particular thing as controversial.
A fuller quote of the same passage:
Isn't what Augustine says here uncontroversial?
If one is in communion with God, one's heart is at rest, so one has no reason to 'fall again'.
IMHO using the 'fixity' of the destiny of the blessed to argue that the fate of the damned must be 'fixed' because otherwise the blessed could also fall again doesn't consider that in the case of the blessed, there is a clear reason why the blessed would not want to fall away.
If the damned's will is fixed in evil it must be due to a completely different reason.
Quoting Leontiskos
Maybe the possibility to do evil (note the word 'possibility') is necessary for everyone to be eventually in full communion with God. So the universalist could still say that the existence of evil is compatible with the view that ultimately all we be saved.
Regarding the chronic addict, I am not sure. Again, I would say that if the 'chronic addict' goes to Heaven, probably the communion with God will free the addict from his or her addiction.
Quoting Leontiskos
One can believe that mortal sin lead to annihilation, for example. Like 'eternal torment', annihilation too is of course irrevocably final. I'm not sure that mortal sin as understood in these terms necessarily imply that the consequence is 'unending torment'.
Outside what you think that Scriptures say, are there any other reasons why do you think that the traditional view of hell is preferably over some kind of annihilation?
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, one can certainly say that "I believe that Scripture and Tradition say that and are infallible (at least in issues like this one)" but it isn't a philosophical argument. I am not saying that everything we believe must be philosphically justified.
I honestly I don't see why I 'should' make the argument 'more formal'. And as I just said the problem isn't IMO the possibility of a final punishment but actually it is that I don't find the reasons why a punishment of unending torment can be an adequate, proportional punishment for human sins, when one takes into account the finitude of human beings.
As I also said, I believe that an annihilationist can argue that annihilation can be a 'finite, final punishment' becuase the suffering experineced in that case is finite. But unending torment is a different kind of thing. The punishment in the latter case involves an infinite amount of suffering.
I believe that, considering the finitude of human beings, it is a normal question to ask why a human being might really deserve a punishment that involves an infinite amount of pain.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
I believe that we have simply different ways to understand what a 'repentance' even in the 'active, forward-facing and creative' sense might imply.
I believe that repentance is also a process of healing and such a healing might involve potentially suffering.
I also believe that acknowledging past mistakes as mistakes, wicked acts as wicked acts etc and take full responsibility for them is part 'repentance'. Of course it doesn't stop at that as it is a re-direction of the will towards the good, which is often 'active, forward-facing, and creative'. But that it doesn't involve suffering it seems to be impossibile (maybe not in all cases, but still).
Of course, suffering here is not 'the point'. It doesn't mean that one must seek to suffer. One should seek healing. Healing and the redirection of the will is the point. But maybe some remedial suffering is necessary for that.
I don't know. This makes totally sense to me. Not sure why you imply that 'metanoia' must involve only positive emotions.
Suffering isn't an absence of joy or sadness...repentance is different from suffering also, attempting to equate the two as the same, well, of course we won't see eye to eye.
It didn't say that it did, but it shows Jesus doesn't demand one to be repentant, but rather to achieve metanoia, a transformed mindset vs a bad conscience.
The bad ruminant cannot achieve joy because they're stuck with undigested feelings of shame and guilt.
Jesus has nothing to do with shame and guilt.
Thus... repentance is not a feeling Jesus demands of his followers.
Hence the "glad tidings" of Jesus.
But you've already deviated from the text. The text says:
That's a kind of syllogism, and you are trying to contradict a conclusion without addressing the premises, which is a form of begging the question. We can formulate it this way:
1. A man fixes his end in sin
2. Therefore he has the will to sin, everlastingly [or: he sins in his own eternity]
Note that nowhere here is the claim that a man fixes his will in sin.
So the first question to ask regards (1). Do you disagree with (1)? Do you think (1) is impossible, or something?
Quoting boundless
But I've already pointed out that the quote says nothing at all about death. How are you interpreting Aquinas to be saying something about death when he in no way mentions death? We can't engage Aquinas if we are not attending to the words he writes. In that case we are not engaging Aquinas at all, and are really engaging something else, perhaps a strawman.
Quoting boundless
No one is saying "must." What is being said is, "Can." And if we couldn't will something for eternity then how could we fix our end in that something? If one can fix their end thenceteris paribusthey can will that end for the term appropriate to the act, and for eternal beings this term is eternity. Someone who thinks we can't will marriage for life will not get married, or admit that a couple can properly perform the act of fixing their joint, earthly end. Someone who admits that the couple can perform that act must also admit that the end can be willed for the term of earthly life.
Quoting boundless
Well read what I actually wrote: "If everyone turns out fine in the end, then there is no ultimate need to evangelize or even help others." What do you think about that?
I'm going to leave it there for now. This conversation is beginning to sprawl and becoming unwieldy, and what is needed is for you to attend to the words and arguments on offer, rather than deviating from those words and arguments. If you don't properly read and interpret the words of Aquinas or myself, then I fear that multiplying words will do me no good. Maybe narrowing the conversation will make it easier to attend to the actual words being written.
You are sort of the king of ad hominem, no? If there is insufficient ad hominem on TPF, you show up and remedy the problem. :roll:
The impermanence of emotions and sensations isn't necessarily in conflict with the thought that an emotion or sensation is temporally unbounded. Consider for instance the mood of grief. On the one hand the mood is all absorbing and the grieving cannot comprehend an end to their grief and locate it on a timeline, yet on the other hand the emotions of grief do in fact come to an end, in spite of the inconceivability of the end when in the state of grief.
If God wills to save every human being and repentance is necessary for salvation, evangelization is a way to cooperate in the process. If universalism were true, ultimately God's will will be realized, independently of people choices to evangelize or not. But this doesn't make evangelization irrelevant. It would be still a way to cooperate with God for the sake of others.
So yeah maybe you are right here, ultimately the result will be the same, but evangelization would be still important.
BTW, even for an anti-universalist the question of evangelization (or spreading one's theistic religion to make the argument more general) is IMHO no less mysterious. If people need to be evangelized in order to be saved and end up not being evangelized because some believers refuse to evangelize (or live wickedly), these people end up outside salvation which would be a problem if God wants the salvation of every human being. That is, the salvation of a person would then depend also on the choices of others.*
*Edit: note that the argument here also applies if christians are unable to evangelize a given person, despite their efforts. That is if being evangelized by Christians is a necessary condition to being saved, and we assume God wants that all human beings will be saved, then it follows that the accomplishment of God's salvific will for that given person can depend on the actions of others and/or their ability to perform their task to evangelize.
So the question of the role of evangelization in the salvation is IMHO a mysterious topic even in the anti-universalist case, at least if one assumes that God wants the salvation of every human being.
I think the best argument against 'universalism' is what I believe is called the 'pastoral argument', that is at least some people would not bother to strive for salvation if they hear that, eventually, all will be saved (incidentally, I believe that ancient universalists tended to not spread that doctrine exactly for this reason...).
Quoting Leontiskos
I believe that my problem isn't (1) but perhaps (2), but I'm not even sure of what that means. Perhaps you are right that I am misunderstanding, I'll try my best now to clarify.
That is, I believe that one can fix his end in sin/evil (and have the, at least implicit, intention to remain 'fixed' in that end) but I doubt that such a fixation can be irrevocable (at least in this life, where we are obviously in a state of limited knowledge, limited freedom of the will and so on).
If however what (1) says is that one has the power to irrevocably fix his own end in sin/evil, then yeah I have my doubts about it even if the intention is to remain in sin/evil forever.
But note that this doesn't contradict the view that God's help and one's faith (trust) in that help is necessary for salvation. I believe that a human being, no matter how strives to be perfectly good, can't avoid make mistakes, errors and so on. There is a disconnect between how we should be and how we can actually live. So, I tend to believe that human beings can't invariably fix our end in God/good and this is why faith in God's help. If one sincerely strives to be good, one has the intention to be always good but this doesn't imply that such an intention ('fixing one's end in') is irrevocable.
BTW, even if one could fix one's end irrevocably in sin/evil I still can't concede that a finite human being can deserve an infinite amount of suffering as an adequate punishment. I can concede that annihilation can be an adequate punishment in such a case because it involves a finite amount of suffering and annihilation is, in some sense, an irrevocable, unending, punishment. But not 'unending pain' (of some sorts).
So, hoping that I made myself clear and I have now a better understanding, could you please answer this question: assuming that, indeed, a human being mind is invariably fixed in sin/evil, why do you believe that a punishment of unending pain is a deserved punishment? Why not, say, annihilation which is still an 'unending' punishment in some sense?
If you believe that because you have trust in the traditional view of hell, that's ok, I guess. But here we are discussing the matter philosophically. In my opinion, the traditional view has difficulties to be justified even in a retributive proportional understanding of 'justice' for the reason I explained in my previous posts and even in this one, where I argued that even if one's fixation in evil/sin is irrevocable, then, the traditional view of hell doesn't necessarily follow.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think I can agree with that. But I believe that, unfortunately, even if one has sincerely that will at the moment of marriage, one's will might not irrevocably set. A 'change of mind' (in this case for the worse) is indeed possible. One might seek help from faith in God's help that this bad change of mind won't occur.
So, I guess that I can say that in the case of 'fixing one's end in sin', my point is similar. While one can will to remain in sin forever, such a will is not necessarily irrevocable. If one's will isn't irrevocable, then there is still hope in repentance, in turning away from sin.
In the former case breaking the oath by failing to love at a certain point the spouse is of course a negative 'change of mind' (just like in the case when one breaks the oath to follow the good, to love etc in general). But in the latter case, the possibility of 'breaking the oath' is actually a good thing.
Do you agree with this?
Quoting Leontiskos
I made my sincere efforts to understand your and St Thomas' words. Probably, I got it wrong again. I admit that it is possible. But I now believe that I have a better understanding. What you (and Aquinas) seem to say here is that can make an 'oath' to evil/sin. Yes, we can make oaths. But for the better or the worse at least in this earthly life I don't think that we have the power to be irrevocably faithful to the oaths.
Furthermore, even if we are able to make irreversible 'fixing of the wills'/'oaths', I still believe that one has not show why such an irreversible 'fixation' deserves a form of 'unending torment' as an adequate, proportional punishment even in a purely retributive framework.
Yes, I would agree that the point is to change one's mind and orient it towards the good. But still, I believe that in order to do that, arguably, as a precondition one has to acknowledge one's moral failures and take responsibility for them. I believe that this can be quite a painful and hard experience. This 'purgation' might be the necessary precondition to sincerely change one's mind.
This doesn't mean that one has to indulge in shame and guilt. But certainly, one has to face the awareness of one's moral failures and take responsibility for them, which I believe it is actually a hard thing to do.
Quoting sime
Ok. But temporal unboundedness is not the same as 'timelessness'. If the mood is unchanging (i.e. the 'flavour' of experiences), experience still seems to remain a process.
I can't imagine a 'timeless' suffering. And I even suspect that an 'eternal bliss' would be an unending process of good experiences. But in contrast to suffering, the experience of 'positive awe' might actually be an approximation of what a 'timeless bliss' might feel like. So, in the case of 'eternal bliss', it may be timeless, after all. I have more difficulties to imagine a 'timeless' negative experience.
Quoting boundless
Please note the words 'can' and 'might'. I am allowing the possibility that for some the repentance could not be accompanied by suffering. But maybe some kind of suffering for the reason stated above is necessary.
Doesn't this point back to the controversy surrounding the Pelagian heresy though? Man, on the orthodox view, [I]cannot[/I] know and strive towards the Good on his own. His nous (intellect and will) are diseased and malfunctioning. Even in writers accused of being Pelagians like St. Jonn Cassian have a large role for grace and the sacraments in the very possibility of the healing of the nous, which is itself a precondition of knowing and choosing the Good [I]as good[/I] (i.e. known and willed as good).
The eternal consequences man can effect as man aren't bidirectional. For man to have this capacity in the upwards direction would mean something like Pelagius' conception of the righteous man who attains merit warranting beatitude on his own.
The other issue is that movement upwards, towards God, is classically conceived of as making us "more free." St. Paul used the language of "slavery in sin." So movement in either direction is not the same. As the Imago Dei becomes more disfigured by the curvatus in se of sin man also loses his capacity for self-determination.
TBH, I find the dialectical of nature and grace to generally be unhelpful. I think they are the same thing, looked at from different aspects. If one takes something like Ferdinand Ulrich's conception of "being as gift" it's "grace all the way down." Or, more appropriately, Eros all the way up, Agape all the way down, which is why St. Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love" terminates in "love of creatures for God's sake," or "with God's love."
At any rate, I think the larger issue would tend to center around God (and us as Christians) wanting "what is truly best for every creature." It is hard to see how eternal torment could ever be "truly best" for someone, nor how, if we are called to forgive everyone, we should ever want eternal torment for anyone. Is the benefit of God's justice for the damned greater than their suffering? But what of the late repenters? Wouldn't God's mercy be a violation of justice here?
Consider a man born out by the Indus, who never had a chance to hear of Christ and dies as a young adult. He grows up in a violent culture, perhaps part of a low caste. And he does wicked things. Perhaps not abhorrent things, but "lower level mortal sins." And he cannot repent and turn to Christ, for he has never heard the name of Christ. Thus he dies in his sins. Might he benefit from purgation, or even the retributive punishment of justice? Sure. But after the first 9,999 billion years of suffering, does justice still require additional torment to be met out for his 20 miserable years on Earth? More to the point, is continued torment "what is truly best" for him?
Even if one has a strong place for retributive justice, there is a point at which, at least on human scales, it becomes sadistic. There is a plotline in Pierce Brown's Red Rising series where a side character admits to having kept an enemy alive through high tech medical means for decades after decades while subjecting him to all the tortured futuristic science can provide. He has good reason for his wrath. If I recall correctly, the high caste captive had betrayed him, violated his wife, and killed his family, and likely done this to others on a regular basis. But of course, we find the endless nature of the retribution, that it goes on for human lifetimes to be gratitous and indeed demeaning for the original victim. When the side character decides to move on and kill the man, he has attained a sort of moral progress. Yet, depending on how God's "eternal punishment" is conceived, it puts God in the role of the punisher who, though initially justified, seems by all human measures to be demeaning himself by extending his vengeance indefinitely.
The risk here, as I see it, is that if one just passes over this disconnect one opens up a chasm of total equivocity between God's justice and man's, between God's goodness and man's, of the sort that plagues Protestant theology and sets up renewed Euthyphro dilemmas and voluntarism.
This is a thorny issue. If beatitude in union with God is the natural end of all rational creatures, then it would seem that the denial of this end could be seen as a punishment by itself. Yet, we normally don't think of withholding rewardsi.e., of withholding aid towards a dessert we cannot attain to on our ownas punishment.
What exactly is the nature of the punishment in Hell though? Is it a denial? Is it primarily regret as in St. Isaac of Nineveh? It is sensuous torment, as in the image of Hell as a cosmic torture chamber or some subterranean Satanic kingdom?
I think this is an important issue because it is perhaps not "universalist" to deny that any soul is subjected to sensuous torments of infinite duration (the "cosmic torture chamber"), although it could also be seen that way. If everyone is "beatified to the extent they have made themselves able," this still might allow for a gradation (e.g. the metaphor of all cups filled to the brim, but some cups being smaller than others). And this "differential cup size" might also be taken as a punishment, although it is perhaps a punishment God cannot revoke through mercy without simply replacing sinners with new versions of themselves.
Or perhaps, punishment could consist in the very denial of beatitude and the grief this brings, something like Dante's Limbo. The problem there though is that, unless the will is extrinsically fixed some how, it seems that the damned in Limbo are striving to know and follow the Good as much as they are able.
At any rate, I think Hart would say that focusing on the gratuity of salvation as framed within the confines the infernalist lays out for it misses the point. Creation itself is completely gratuitous; man does not create himself, so it is still "grace all the way down" as seen from the top.
There is also an issue where soteriology ends up reducing the whole of the Christian life to avoiding extrinsic punishment and meriting extrinsic reward. The idea that sin is its own penalty tends to get washed out by the scale of retributive justice.
These look like thoughtful posts. I am aware of many exceedingly able-minded theists who are capable of defending the traditional doctrine of Hell, but don't spend a lot of time on it because of its negative nature. It would be like if someone claimed that murder never happens, and then in order to refute them you had to engage in the dark business of investigating and presenting cases of murder. C. S. Lewis actually said that writing The Screwtape Letters was very taxing for this same reason.
With that in mind, I am going to postpone a response until at least Easter Monday.
Great post!
I wanted to make just some thoughts on this.
In some of the strictest 'free-will' conceptions of hell, the unending suffering isn't due to the fact that the will becomes irremediably fixed. The claim is that sinners in hell will continue forever to confirm their choices, even if they are invited in Paradise.
And yet, if St. Augustine was right when he said that our heart is restless until it rests in God, the movements of heart will continue forever. The damned would experience at least perpetual disappointment and forever will seek to rest their heart. So, if unending hell isn't a punishment of God but the result of a perpetual confirmation of one's own choice of being self-excluded from God, one has to leave at least open the possibility that the damned will at a certain point come to sincerely repent (and God in this doctrine of 'eternal hell' would still accept the repentance due to the fact that damnation is purely the result of the choice of the damned). This would not be strictly 'universalistic' as a scenario but certainly if this is the case there would be reason to hope that nobody is forever beyond hope.
If, on the other hand, one assumes that the damned, despite the perpetual disappointment, will certainly never repent, one should explain where this kind of 'fixation' comes from. Personally, in this latter scenario, I believe that the free-will model collapses in a retributive model, where at least the damned is abandoned to his or her fate ('complete desertion' to use the expression of St. John of Damascus term in the Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (Book 2, ch 29 'concerning providence'), who, despite asserting that damnation is due to the stubborn refusal of salvation made by the damned, unending hell is still seen as a form of (retributive) punishment. As an aside, the Damascene has the closest conception of hell of C.S. Lewis that I have encountered in ancient Christian writers). Furthermore, if there is no desire of the Good in the damned in this latter scenario (assuming that the fixation of the will in evil would to just that), would they still experience disappointment? If they do experience disappointment, it would seem that they are still seeking the Good, albeit in the wrong places. If they are still seeking the good, would they be completely beyond hope? So, maybe, disappointment in frustrated desires can't a part of the torment of the damned in this scenario. In any case, if the will is irrevocably fixed, the punishment must be thought as a extrinsical 'deserved' punishment in my opinion.
Yes, that's true. That's C.S. Lewis' view in The Great Divorce. The damned are damned just in that they spread out into ever greater isolation and multiplicity according to their own free choices. They can start the painful pilgrimage to Paradise whenever they want, it's just that they see no reason to. They are "at home in Hell." They have made themselves thus.
I am not sure how this is supposed to correspond to "every knee bowing," "all praising God," and "God being all in all," though. It rather suggests the eternal survival of sin, and that some knees will never bow and that some lips will never praise. Whereas visions that involve more extrinsic punishment have knees bowing and lips praising, but only through coercion not sincerity. I suppose God might be "all in all" here, but God is beatitude in some and torment in others (sort of what Pope Benedict says). The difficulty here is that this direct contact with God, experienced as torment, seems incapable of improving the sinner. Hence there is this weird thing where contact with a mortal evangelist might reform man right up to the moment of death, but eternal (painful) union with God Himself is insufficient to ever bring about such change.
Maybe, although Lewis' vision doesn't seem inconsistent. His damned spread out in space more and more over time, moving further and further from others as they become folded more inwards and become more spiteful towards all others. Hell is in some ways an education in vice (although some do leave it, and all are free to leave it). People sit around moping all day in a world much like ours.
But, even if these people are "eternally moving" the image is of them diffusing into an ever expanding space. If space is always expanding at a rate at least equal to movement, there is no need for eternal movement to necessitate a return to the "center" of the space. To use a mathematical example, I am pretty sure Poincaré's recurrence theorem only holds if the system is closed and not expanding. Of course, the question would be if man's eternal life is actually infinitely expansive in this way. I suppose the counterargument from people like Talbot would be that man cannot drift arbitrarily away from the Good and still retain a rational nature (and thus still be man). They would have to be replaced by some other substance.
That seems fair to me, since I have never seen a good argument for why the will must necessarily be fixed in this way.
I mentioned Dante avoiding the problem of repetent sinners earlier because he does have souls in Hell (Limbo) who do seem to have repented and live in "hopelessness" despite this. His ultimate vision is somewhat unclear though, because he ultimately makes appeals to divine justice being unknowable, even to the beatified (a voluntarist problem perhaps), but provocatively includes some Pagans in Purgatory and Paradise.
Agreed, it seems implausible. But, of course, those who insist in the non-universalistic readings of those passages mention that there are other passages in St Paul's epistles which affirm that some categories of sinners will not enter in God's Kingdom (if we want to restrict ourselves to St Paul's writings, where most apparently universalist statements are to be found). Of course, these can be read as not implying that they will never enter in the Kingdom, but such a reading is already a harmonization.
That's why I don't think one can rely only on exegesis in these kind of discussions.
I do believe, however, that maybe the point you made about equivocation leads to the strongest arguments that one can make regarding this kind of discussions (and one can also support it with various scriptural passages, I think). To make just an example, if one says that any kind of acceptable meaning of 'justice' involves the fact that people cannot be punished due to other people faults, then St Augustine's position of the 'massa damnata', where everyone inherits guilt, is automatically ruled out as a correct description of how divine justice operates. Also, if one says that a 'just judge' must also take into account the capacities of the transgressors when deciding the punishments, then St Anselm's view that any sin is justly punished with an unending punishment is also automatically ruled out or seriously modified (for instance, the current Catholic Catechism explicitly says that in order for a sin to be mortal one has to commit it with sufficient intent and awareness).
Of course, if one insists that divine justice can punish people for the sins of their ancestors and we have no right to question that idea, then any discussion becomes impossible.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
interesting, thanks. The point you make about the ever expanding space is very good (and BTW yes Poincare's recurrence argument is valid for finite, closed systems). But IMHO it doesn't preclude the possibility of post-mortem salvation. So, my point that nobody is ever 'beyond hope' I think remains valid.
Regarding, Talbott, yes, I would suppose so. But I don't think that defenders of free-will models of hell would find it convincing. Still, if they are consistent they must leave open the possibility of post-mortem salvation. I didn't know that Lewis allowed that possibility for some of the damned.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Same. At the end of the day, most supporters of the traditional view of hell have adopted a retributivist model of some sort where eternal punishment is deserved.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Thanks for that. Despite being an Italian I never read the whole Comedy, only some famous excerpts (I have some difficulties to read poetry, actually).
Regarding the first kind of souls, after all, if one accepts a form of unending torment as a deserved punishment, post-mortem repentace can be irrelevant. If after repentance one is still being punished, one can argue that the punishment is still just.
Of course, if God gives mercy to the repentant and delivers them from the deserved punishment, but the punishment is deserved, so God could refrain to do that and remain just. Of course, if God's mercy requires to deliver the repentant sinners and God's justice requires to punish them eternally, then one has a conflict between God's mercy and God's justice. So, I suppose the 'simplest' way to resolve this problem is to say that the damned can't repent after death.
On the other hand, if one doesn't accept that unending pain can be a deserved punishment for human beings, then things change (IMO the contention about the possibility for humans to justly deserve a punishment of an infinite amount of suffering is the central one in this debate).
Regarding, Dante's choice to include Pagans in Purgatory and Paradise. It's very interesting indeed.
What do you think it means to "fix one's end"? Or even to fix an end? Are you familiar with this language?
Quoting boundless
One could argue for annihilation from philosophy, but not, I think, from Scripture/theology.
Quoting boundless
Again, if one can philosophically prove that X is unjust, then X is unsupportable via Scripture/theology/tradition. That's why universalists like Hart try to prove such a thing.
Quoting boundless
Again:
Quoting Leontiskos
What you say is of course true, and there is no incompatibility here. The doctrine of Hell does not entail that everyone goes to Hell. You require a much stronger thesis, namely, "One cannot have the will to sin everlastingly."
Quoting boundless
If you don't think we have the power to be faithful to oaths then you presumably don't believe we have the power to make oaths, just as the person who does not believe that a couple has the power to be faithful to their marriage vows does not believe in marriage. This goes back to my point that some don't think humans are capable of much (e.g. oaths, vows, eternal consequences, etc.).
Quoting boundless
Okay, good.
Quoting boundless
I don't see a problem with any of this. I think what you are saying is, "Salvation couldn't possibly depend on human choices," and the Judeo-Christian tradition just disagrees with you on that.
Quoting boundless
In order to oppose universalism, one does not need to hold that all must be explicitly evangelized by humans in order to be saved. What we are asking about is the motive towards salvation. On universalism there is no ultimate motive towards salvation. If the essential goal is salvation, then on universalism the essential goal is inevitable, and need not be sought or pursued. Subsidiary goals can of course be sought, but they won't have any effect on that essential goal.
Quoting boundless
Yes, I believe that is precisely what we are discussing.
I don't think we properly recognize how illogical it is to keep a doctrine secret "exactly for this reason." In fact it seems downright sinful to mislead someone in that manner, namely to try to persuade themvia an omissionto labor for something that requires no labor.
If we are charitable then the universalist is relying on paradox, but to formalize a paradox doctrinally in favor of one side of the paradox is surely inadmissible.
It makes sense to me that if God is truth, and people choose to reject truth in their lives, then God cannot be at union with these people while still respecting their free will. It could be that when you die, you are with God whether you like it or not, and depending on your disposition, this is experienced either as bliss or as torture. Or it could be that since a sinner does not like God, God sends them far away out of respect for their free will, and they experience this as torture. Now, if it is possible to destroy a soul, then it would make sense that a benevolent God would choose to do that as punishment in place of torturing them. If it is not possible to destroy a soul, then eternal torture would seem to be the only possible outcome of a person choosing on purpose to reject God.
My understanding of the "unforgivable sin" is when someone knows perfectly well what good and evil are, but chooses to call good evil and evil good. Most sins would be forgivable, because if a person sins out of ignorance or weakness, then he could repent. But if a person willfully chooses evil and calls it good, then by he nature of the act, he does not want to and cannot repent. This is backed up by the fact that when Jesus talked about this, it was when Pharisees saw him heal people (an obviously good thing) and said that he did it by the devil (calling an obviously good act evil). Also, the Holy Spirit is called the "Spirit of Truth", so it would make sense that the sin against the Holy Spirit would be to sin against truth itself.
Apart from Calvinists and some Lutherans, no Christians really believe in total depravity. Calvinists don't accept a bidirectional potency, and it is true that for the hardcore Calvinist everyone else is a Pelagian, but I'm not sure Calvinists deserve much credit.
More generally, I don't think the anti-Pelagian tradition precludes a bidirectional potency.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think you are conflating a bidirectional potency with the idea that the two directions must be exactly parallel. Just because movement in either direction is not the same does not mean that there is no bidirectional potency. Indeed, I have never claimed that movement in both directions is the same.
There are mysteries in grace and mysteries in evil, and therefore the nature and relation of the two potencies is quite mysterious, but I don't see any of that supporting universalism (or the other extreme, which is a kind of extreme pessimism).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If you don't distinguish between nature and grace I don't see how you could talk about Pelagianism at all.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Do you think the doctrine of Hell requires that God or Christians must not want what is truly best for everyone? If so, why?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You are presupposing injustice here and then finding it in your conclusion. It could be simplified, "Suppose someone does something that does not merit Hell, and God gives him Hell. That's unjust." Yep, but no one thinks that God gives undeserving souls Hell.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Here's what you yourself said:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
...and yet you are focusing on extrinsic punishment objections. Even Dante avoids those. I actually don't know of any theologians whatsoever who think in terms of extrinsic punishment. The passage I gave from Aquinas addresses this directly, with his points about the "disturbing of an order."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think it's pretty basic logic. Something cannot be gratuitous and due at the same time.
Honestly, I don't find Hart to be a very good philosopher or theologian.* Above all he is a rhetorician, and a caustic, uncharitable one. Reading Hart and reading Christopher Hitchens is more or less the same thing, with a different topic and a slightly different style. If I want puffed up abuse with a small side of argument, those are the sort of people I read. If I want serious engagement, I look elsewhere.
I say this because people who lean on Hart tend to eventually draw on that same sort of rhetoric, and the arguments then become thin. The reason Hart appeals to that abusive rhetoric is apparently because he can't "get the job done" without it. Here on The Philosophy Forum I think we need to keep the arguments front and center and not become lost in rhetorical polemics. Beyond that, I want to preempt the idea that Hart counts as an authority, especially for "infernalists"one of Hart's characteristically rhetorical labels. If someone wants to use one of Hart's arguments then they will have to present them in their own words, and try to find logic in the midst of all that bluster.
When this topic was popular a few years back I tried reading Hart, but it was impossible. The book is not written to convince or persuade. So I turned to Balthasar's first volume on the topic and read that instead. The arguments were fairly bad, but at least the conclusions were more modest.
As I said earlier, I think some forms of universalism are philosophically defensible, but I think they fail when confronted with Scripture and tradition.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Lewis' images in The Great Divorce or The Four Loves are quite good. Dante, Aquinas, or even Milton also offer good images. The basic Orthodox approach where the damned are burned by the face of God or love of God is another. More simply, here on Earth it is not hard to find cases of unrepentance, hardness of heart, hopeless fixation on evil, extreme hatred, etc. I need look no further than my own heart to see the basis and possibility for Hell.
Beyond all that, I don't see a need to put God in the dock, especially given that the philosophical attempts at demonstrating injustice don't seem to hold up. There are lots of revealed truths that I don't perfectly understand. That's not a problem unless I want to reject everything that I can't understand well.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I have never found this objection very interesting. It's as if folks are super concerned about physical fire or sensuous tormentsand this might be a materialist hangup. I could tell them that there will be no physical fire but there will be estrangement from God, and they would be relieved. That relief is a kind of irony all its own, as if estrangement from God is small change compared to the prospect of physical fire. :grin:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't really buy all the claims in this thread of, "Might be taken as a punishment." I want more rigorous argumentation than that. I mean, democrats might take an unequal gift as a punishment, but so what? What does it matter that an irrational person might take something as a punishment? I would rather talk about things that are real punishments.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It is standard orthodoxy to say that there are different levels and experiences in both Heaven and Hell. Once this and the possibility of Limbo are recognized I think many of the injustice arguments dissolve.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This sort of thing looks like a false dichotomy. It's a pretty old idea that Hell is sin as its own punishment, and that retributive punishment need not be extrinsic.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What are you reading, here? Romans 14? Philippians 2? Again, if we give someone with no horse in the race these verses, will they think they have anything at all to do with universalism? Apart from the fact that such an interpretation contradicts all sorts of other things that Paul himself says, the literal meaning of such phrases has to do with military conquest. For instance, the metaphor applies in a special way to Satan, whose knee will bow, and yet there is nothing implied about Satan being saved or rejoicing in this submission.
With universalism there is a very real danger of wishful thinking - of seeing things that are not there, stretching interpretations beyond their proper bounds, or (in a case like Hart's) using rhetoric as a compensatory strategy. Hart's interpretation of aion in Mt 25:46 is a spectacular example of this. In general I would be cautious of Hart's claims when he is high on his rhetoric horse (e.g. his claims about Biblical scholarship and aion). His ability to mislead is quite unparalleled. N. T. Wright's review of Hart's New Testament translation highlights what happens when a rigorous scholar comes up against Hart's polemically-motivated decisions.
* Granted, he often has his finger on the most pressing and popular theological controversies, even before they emerge as such, but the way he addresses such controversies strikes me as rushed and superficial. The slapdash precedent may be bad for the theological guild altogether - as if we must pronounce strong conclusions on the most difficult and upcoming theological issues even before they are allowed to properly emerge.
To be fair, no. But I think that your example of the wedding made it clear. It is like making a oath. Am I wrong?
Quoting Leontiskos
I see. But can philosophy and scripture/theology contradict each other? If, say, a given interpretation of a scriptural claim is found to be inconsistent with other important doctrines, can we still accept it?
Just to make an example. If one accepts that God doesn't punish people for the sins of something else, can we accept the notion of 'inherited guilt' (I am not going to make a biblical case for the premise, as we in a philosophical forum)? I would say that the latter notion is inconsistent with the former. Philosophy is also helpful to find out these kinds of things.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok.
Quoting Leontiskos
But there is a problem, here, I believe. You still have to explain why there is absolutely no hope of break the fixation of the will in sin. I might concede that logically it might be possible for someone to everastingly confirm the choice to sin. But here in this life, it is assumed that we can repent.
If someone makes an oath to be faithful 'as long as he lives' to a terrorist group, he might still break that oath even if when he made the oath he was convinced of the cause. Of course, he might not and we can imagine that the more time he remains faithful to this commitment, the more difficult is for him to renounce it. But he can still change his mind (i.e. repent) at any time and hopefully he does.
So the mere possibility to orient one's view in sin doesn't necessarily imply that the orientation is irrevocable. But if I am not mistaken, it is assumed that at a certain point, this orientation becomes irrevocable.
At most it seems that you are claiming that 'everlasting fixation of the will in sin' is a possibility. But, unless, one is not allowed to repent, then repentance is also a possibility.
Quoting Leontiskos
I assumed that it is normal to say, in Christianity, that we 'by ourselves' cannot be morally impeccable, at least without the help of God.
In the case of marriage, I don't see how 'making a sincere oath' necessary implies the ability to remain always faithful to the oath (in fact one can ask God's help to remain faithful precisely because of this). It certainly expresses the sincere intention to respect the oath, but failing to mantiain is also a possibility.
I didn't know that this is controvarsial thing to say.
In general, I don't think that an ability to make a oath implies an ability to remain faithful of it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Sorry, but I think you misunderstood the point I was making. Let me try to explain it again. Let's assume that God desires the salvation of each human being.
Let's assume that 'being evangelized by other people' is a necessary condition for salvation. Let's say that a given person fails to be evangelized because those who could evangelize him or her for some reason could not. Then, this 'missed evangelization' would be a decisive factor in the eternal destiny of the person we are considering, even if he or she did nothing to avoid being evagelized. So, this 'missed evangelization' is the product of external circumstances out of control of him or her. But if 'being evangelized by other people' is a necessary condition for salvation, here we have a person that lost salvation becuase of something that could not control, outside his or her power of choice.
So, if 'being evangelized by other people' is a necessary condition for salvation, it would follow that the salvation of a given person can depend on the choices of others, their abilities or even on circumstances that no one can control. Here it seems that we have a case that one can miss salvation due to factors outside one's choices.
Waht do you think about this? Note that even a proponent of a 'free will defence of hell' (of any kind really) would not accept that one can lose salvation for factors different from one's choices. That's why I believe that this is a problem to at least some 'traditionalist'.
Quoting Leontiskos
But universalists still might say that repentance is needed for salvation. One might say that conversion is needed either in this life or after death and being evangelized might be necessary to being able to convert in this life. Not sure why you are insisting that the belief that everyone will be ultimately be saved implies that one can't find rational motives for evangelization, especially if one believes that it is a necessary condition to be saved in this life (I don't believe that all universalist agree on this point, but even if one doesn't believe that being evangelized is a necessary condition for being saved in this life, I would still say that there are rational motives to evangelize...).
Quoting Leontiskos
Again, not sure how this follows. See the paragraph above. If one still believes that repentance is necessary, them 'it's not something that requires no labor'.
Anyway, I agree with you the pastoral argument is the strongest one. But maybe it is not fatal for universalists.
Explain how "unending torment with no possibility of improvement," could ever be in "someone's best interest?"
Look at it this way:
Is God is capable of showing mercy on everyone? If the answer is "yes," then you have to explain how it is that it is better for sinners not to receive mercy. If it would be better to receive mercy than justice, and you receive justice rather than mercy, then this cannot be "what is best for you," on pain of contradiction.
But God does show gratuitous mercy on some, and presumably receiving mercy is "what is truly best for them." So how do we explain the difference?
Second, it also needs to be "better for the sinner" that the "second death" of Revelation really be "eternal life, but one of punishment" or else the same situation exists vis-á-vis annihilation.
Of course I'm supposing injustice here. What I'm describing would be considered gratuitous and cruel if any human being did it. It would be cruel and demeaning to the person meeting out "justice" to keep someone alive just to punish them for 100 years, let alone 10,000.
Man's justice is, of course, not God's justice. But it seems like the two terms are in danger of becoming wholly equivocal here if the response is just "something is not evil when God does it."
I am focusing on extrinsic punishment because human beings, while alive, are capable of repentance. If human beings utterly lose this capacity at death, it would seem to require some sort of extrinsic limitation that is placed upon them at death. A capacity they once had is now limited. If man has this "dual potency," it is apparently being constricted at the moment of death.
Whereas if the damned can repent and turn towards God, then the punishment also seems to be extrinsic.
An oath is an example, yes. It is the language of "means" and "ends." So you might say, "I am going to go to the grocery store today." That would be an example of setting an end. Then you might say, "I will use my car to get to the grocery store." That would be an example of a means to your end. We could say that you have fixed an end regarding going to the grocery store. For further explanation, see ST I-II.1.
When Aquinas talks about someone who "fixes his end," what he presumably means is that someone fixes an end for himself qua person. Marriage is a good example of this because the couple is fixing their joint end in a way that is more substantial than merely going to the grocery store. In this way there is a sense in which one can define their own life vis-a-vis some desired end, or decide that some end is supremely desirable (and one could here think about Paul Tillich's talk of "ultimate concerns").
To fix an end of any kind does not entail that one will never change their mind, but it does entail that one can pursue the end without changing their mind. Hence my point about "can" rather than "must."
Quoting boundless
Well, as I said, "if one can philosophically prove that X is unjust, then X is unsupportable via Scripture/theology/tradition." Truth does not contradict truth, but not all philosophy and theology is true.
Quoting boundless
Why do I have to explain that? Why don't you have to explain why there is no ability to fix one's end? That's my point about Aquinas: fixing one's end is uncontroversial.
Quoting boundless
On what basis? Theologically, it is assumed that we can repent in this life. It is also theologically assumed that we cannot repent beyond this life. So I don't see the argument.
Or we could just reify C. S. Lewis' imagery and say that repentance is always logically possible, but some will never repent. That is an orthodox position. It may or may not be a tenable position within Catholicism, but I don't really want to research that minute question.
The broad stroke simply says that humans are eventually capable of definitive decisions. I don't find that claim problematic.
Quoting boundless
And if you want to think that way then I would just say that what is psychologically impossible can be logically possible. Someone who is confirmed in a certain decision or way of life will not change their mind, even though it is logically possible. These logical debates are ultimately debates of post-mortem anthropology, which strike me as unfruitful.
Quoting boundless
I think you are committing logical errors here, primarily modal errors. If one can promise lifelong fidelity then one must be capable of lifelong fidelity. If one is clearly incapable of lifelong fidelity then one cannot promise lifelong fidelity. You actually agreed to this earlier when you agreed that the person who does not think couples can fulfill the marriage vow do not in fact believe in marriage. It doesn't make any sense to say that the marriage vow is impossible to fulfill and nevertheless promote marriage.
Quoting boundless
Suppose you make a promise that you know you can't keep. Are you promising or lying? I'd say it is merely lying.
Quoting boundless
Here's what I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
Strong exclusivism has problems, but they are not the problems of the doctrine of Hell. Tying the two together is no good.
-
I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
Your reply was that a universalist might hold that evangelization is, "a necessary condition to be saved in this life."
I don't understand your argument. Are you saying that if the universalist doesn't evangelize someone then that person won't be saved in this life? Hasn't your whole point been that there is no reason to limit our actions to this life? If nothing changes at death then who cares whether they are saved in this life?
Quoting boundless
If an end is inevitable then it need not be pursued. A necessary means to an inevitable end is already a contradiction, if the means is supposed to be contingent.
If I give my kid a choice between broccoli and a candy bar, and I accept his choice of the candy bar, does it follow that I don't care about his best interest? Respecting freedom is a pretty sound motive. To spin this and claim that I don't care about my son because I allowed him to choose would be a pretty tendentious interpretation.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is mercy just a magic wand that God waves which solves every problem? Traditionally mercy is not seen that way. At the very least it requires a kind of repentance, and repentance is a free act.
I have noted in the past that universalists and Calvinists are extremely close, in that both tend to be quasi-determinists who deny human freedom in one way or another. In either case the outcome is predetermined and freedom is not a real variable. I even suspect that we will see more and more Calvinists follow Barth in that universalist direction.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
And to do so is to beg the question. Suppose you said, "What if someone does absolutely everything in their power to cooperate with grace and God damns them anyway?" I would give you the exact same answer, "Then God would be unjust. Why would you presuppose that traditional Christians think God would do that?" It is a strawman. No one thinks the guy who commits a few minor sins will be disproportionately punished for all eternity.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I said earlier:
Quoting Leontiskos
So let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that death has no substantial effect on us or on our ability to repent. What then? Does it suddenly follow that humans are unable to make definitive decisions (in which they persist)? Does it follow that in the Judeo-Christian tradition the will of intellectual beings can never be fixed in anything other than God?
As far as I am concerned, there are two basic questions here:
1. Is it philosophically demonstrable that the doctrine of Hell is false?
2. Given Christian Scripture and tradition, is the denial of Hell reasonable?
I think the answers are both 'no'.
I'd say we are most concerned with the first question, and I am not yet convinced that either of you would be willing to answer that question in the affirmative. If we agree that the answer to (1) is 'no', then it's not at all clear what we are arguing about.
But this analogy is not comparable because presumably your child is capable of later recognizing that broccoli is better for him (perhaps from the consequences of eating too many candy bars). And presumably, when he is no longer constrained by ignorance about what is truly best or weakness of will, and asks for the broccoli, you will give it to him. Nor do we need to suppose that choosing the candy bar removes any future capacity to choose the broccoli.
Further, if he can choose candy bars for eternity and never regret his choice, this would seem to indicate that candy bars are an equally fulfilling good in which man can find his absolute rest (to stretch the analogy a bit too much perhaps).
I think it just follows from a non-voluntarist notion of freedom. Here would be my contention: no one chooses the worse over the better but for ignorance about what is truly best, weakness of will, or external constraint.
Exactly what sort of "freedom" is being respected here? It seems to me that it is inchoate, irrational, impulse towards some end. It cannot be that ends other than God are known as being better than or equal to God (they aren't). So such a choice arises from ignorance, weakness of will, constraint, or else some sort of irrational impulse of will that, in being arbitrary, hardly seems to be "free."
And I think this goes as well for the post-Reformation Catholic theology that starts positing that rational natures can find their natural end in anything other than Godthat anything other than the Good itself can fully satisfy an infinite appetite for Goodness.
I don't know what you mean by "definitive decision." Is this supposed to be some sort of decision whereby, even if we realize we made a mistake in our decision, we will forever continue to be committed to our mistake? But any such commitment would be wholly irrational, born of some sort of defect of will.
The classical theological answer for why man will not be capable of sin in Paradise is that his intellect and will are perfected such that he knows God as truly best and suffers no weakness of will. Man doesn't sin in Paradise for the same reason that someone who is perfectly empowered to walk never trips and falls, not because his will becomes extrinsically fixed by some "definitive choice."
To say that man's will can become definitively fixed in anything but God is to say that man's appetite for infinite Goodness and the Good itself can be fully satisfied (and thus come to rest) by some other (finite) good. That doesn't make sense to me, nor does it make sense with the idea of Hell as a punishment. The person who has come to rest in an end is satisfied. On this view, the sinner is satisfied in sin, no longer desiring anything else.
Plus, the descriptions in Scripture of Hell are not of some attractive, finite good people settle upon instead of God. The "outer darkness" is a place of great wailing and gnashing of teeth. So, no I don't think people can make definitive choices in favor of their own suffering and perdition if this is to mean that, even if they came to know the truth about what was truly best, or ceased to suffer from weakness of will, they would still somehow choose suffering and the absence of the Good. At any rate, such a choice would be wholly irrational and arbitrary, not a "freedom in need of respect."
You seem to be relying on the assumption that one can be equally "free" in choosing the Good as in choosing the nothingness of evil. I think this only makes sense on some sort of voluntarist conception of freedom as bare choice (which I don't think [I] actually[/I] makes much sense, because it makes "freedom" collapse into arbitrariness).
Edit: Now, the idea of people drifting ever further from God and never finding rest is another concept, but this would essentially be a slide towards complete nothingness and seems more to me like annihilation, with the end state being the passage of sin into absolute non-being, rather than the eternal survival of sin in some middle state between nothing and apokatastasis.
Thanks for the clarification, I think that I understand better now.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Good points here! To me this raises an interesting question, though. I believe that most (?) Christians assume that one can't be righteous in an inerrant way without God's help. Our will and our knowledge is impaired and we need God's grace to avoid falling (and not just 'stumbling'). If I am convinced by this thesis how can I make a vow to be rightheous or even to be faithful to God if I am myself aware that I am unable to follow perfectly this vow?
Regarding the couples, I also believe that the couple can ask God's help to be able to commit the vow. So, they might believe that with God's help, they are able to respect the vow even if they themselves are not.
In what follows, I'll concede however that you are right here.
Quoting Leontiskos
I see what you mean but even if we assume that we can make definite decisions, the traditional thesis that there is no possibility of repentance after death raises the inevitable question of why it should be so.
If despite being able to make definite choices even in this life we can still repent in this life, it means that having make a definite choice to fix one's will in sin and being able to repent (at least in principle) are not mutually exclusive. Section 1861 of the Catholic Catechism says explicitly that repentance for a mortal sin is possible during life.
If committing a mortal sin is making a definite choice and this doesn't logically preclude the ability to repent, this would mean that in the afterlife the damned are not granted the possibility to repent (either by active punishment by God or by 'desertion' in St. John of Damascus' view).
If, even in principle, the damned could repent, then why we can be sure that some will never repent? If repentance after death is a possibility, then we can't exclude the possibility that all will ultimately repent. Both eternal (self-)damnation of some and repentance of all are possible scenario and we can hope for everyone. This would mean that we can legitimately hope for everyone. So, to me, the view you are expressing here is not logically inconsistent with a hope of universal repentance.
On the other hand, if the damned can't repent, this would imply an infinite retributive punishment of sorts. And in this case, the main question of the thread would arise (how a human being can merit a punishment of unending suffering...)
Quoting Leontiskos
I believe that among the universalists there is no consensus about inclusivism vs exclusivism, for instance. So, I would imagine that on this point there is no agreement.
What I said is that a universalist that believes that 'being evangelized' is a necessary condition to avoid post-mortem purification then the universalist has of course a very rational motive to evangelize.
But even this is not necessary to have a rational motive. An universalist might simply think that 'evangelizing' is a good thing to do, that it can help to avoid the temporary punishment both for him/herself and for others. There are plenty of rational motives that I can see.
Consider, for instance, a patient that suffers from a disease that causes to him suffering but doesn't lead to irreversible damage if left untreated. A doctor sees him and knows that a drug can help him to recover from the illness and to stop his suffering. I highly doubt that anyone can claim here the doctor has no rational motives to prescribe the medication.
Quoting Leontiskos
Note that even if the argument were true, this would not exclude the possibility of the redemption of all, if the damned can still repent.
Anyway, if the damned retain their rationality, if they are aware that they can only find peace in God, they would understand that repentance is the better, more rational option. I would say that there is a reason that might explain this apparent determinism and still affirm the necessity of a sincere repentance.
Quoting Leontiskos
It depends about what you mean by 'philosophically demonstrable'. I believe that here we are discussing if the traditional view of Hell is consistent with a proportional retributive model of justice. Also, we are discussing if the view that the damned are beyond hope after this life is consistent with a 'free-will defence' of the traditional view of Hell.
As I explained in my posts, I do have my own doubts that there is consistency in both cases.
Considering that Christianity isn't the only theistic religion, I also believe that the discussion we are having here has a wider scope than being a discussion about a specific doctrinal aspect of Christianity.
BTW, I believe that the discussion we are having is also a very interesting way to explore what some concepts of 'justice', 'punishment' etc might imply, a reflection of what abilities we human beings really have and so on.
So, even if we are discussing under these kinds of things in the particular context of a religious doctrine, our reflections can give us interesting food for thought that can be applied in other contexts.
Okay, great.
Quoting boundless
I don't think that really matters. Let's suppose that when one enters into a marriage one believes that one will not be able to be faithful to the marriage vow unless the spouse is helping them. It makes no difference. That condition is already wrapped up in the ability to fulfill the vow. There is no need to think that someone who undertakes a vow must believe that they can fulfill it without outside help. They only need believe that they can fulfill it.
For example, if you join a monastery and take a religious vow, it is both true that you cannot fulfill the vow without God's help, and that you can fulfill the vow. This is because you can fulfill the vow with God's help, and when you take the vow you are presupposing that God will be there to help you. "With God's help," may even be part of the explicit formula of the vow.
Quoting boundless
Right.
Quoting boundless
My point is that if the traditional position on the fixity of the will after death is such a hangup for you, then just ignore it. It changes nothing so long as we agree that humans can make definitive decisions (in which they in fact persist).
(It may be worth pointing out that universalists don't need to deny the fixity of the will at death. The fixity of the will at death has much to be said for it, and many universalists don't find it reasonable to question. Instead they claim that we don't have inside knowledge on what happens in someone's soul before they die. I.e. Everyone may secretly repent before they die.)
Quoting boundless
If you want to hold that we can't be sure that some will never repent, go ahead and hold that. It doesn't logically imply universalism.
Quoting boundless
Rational grounds for hope are always different than rational grounds for assent. What you are effectively doing is switching from Hart's position to Balthasar's, where Balthasar is merely recommending hope. My answer is basically the same: philosophically speaking, sure; theologically speaking, no. By my lights verses like Matthew 26:24 exclude universalism, whether hopeful or firm. If no verses like that existed, then universalism would be theologically possible.
Quoting boundless
And question (1) <here> becomes more and more pertinent as we move along. There is a way in which you and @Count Timothy von Icarus are not paying much attention to what kind of thesis you are supposed to be arguing for. It begins to look like a, "Ready, shoot, aim," approach to the topic.
Quoting boundless
The same question arises: why is avoiding post-mortem purification so important? It's not important at all compared to the avoidance of Hell. It seems to merely be a motive of expedience.
Quoting boundless
But again, I never said there are no possible rational motives. I said . The evangelization doesn't need to be done. Of course, it can be done. We are capable of doing all sorts of things that we don't need to do. But it does not need to be done.
See, for example, this clip from N. T. Wright at 13:38. That's a pretty basic Biblical anthropology, where, "human choices in this life really matter."
Quoting boundless
I was explaining why the universalist has no ultimate motive, not why the damned don't repent.
Quoting boundless
What I mean is, Do you think you can demonstrate it on purely philosophical grounds?
Quoting boundless
We could ask whether Prometheus' punishment could be retributively just under any circumstances. I would say 'no', but that whole framing strikes me as a strawman. I don't personally know of theists who propose such a thing or who worship Zeus.
Quoting boundless
A purely philosophical case is in no way a specifically Christian case.
-
Quoting boundless
That's true, but I don't want to spend my free time endlessly discussing Hell. If we want to have a discussion of justice, I would rather do that in a less fraught context. For example, my thread from a different forum, "Is Justice based on Equality?"
Marriage is also "until death do we part," an oath to stay faithful to an imperfect human being within set bounds of responsibility. I don't think this is really analogous to the will becoming irreversibly and intrinsically"fixed" in anything other than the Good (which would seem to imply an end to appetite, a rest and satisfaction of the will in a finite end).
The more appropriate analogy would be pledging one's eternal soul to a person, or to Satan. I think people can choose to enact such pledges, but they cannot rationally continue in them forever. Holding on to such an oath would be akin to Jephthah burning his daughter.
This is why I initially assumed some sort of external, extrinsic block on repentance or extrinsic punishment despite repentance. I don't think the idea of the will becoming forever at rest in finite goods, or in evil (in the absence of Goodness) makes sense if the will is conceived of in terms of intellectual appetite.
I agree.
I would say that it would be rational if this man is reasoning in accordance with Reasons principles; and it is a rationally free choice, to use your term, if this mans rational choice is in accordance with what he sincerely believes. None of this per se negates the possibility that one sincerely believes that killing innocent people at the exchange of their well-being is the best option. I agree it would be irrational in the colloquial sense of the term, but it meets the criteria you set out for rational freedom.
I think for your view to work, you would have to demonstrate how it is impossible for someone to believe it is the better choice to do something which will be grave to their own well-being over one which preserves or (perhaps) increases iteven in the case that a normal person would not find it reasonable to choose the former over the latter.
When we talk about rationality in colloquial circles, sometimes we merely mean what is reasonable from the purview of a healthy member of our species (or a healthy agent); and this is a much more narrow definition than previously outlined.
There seems to be a lot being said with very few words in that thread you shared; and I would worry that it is too loaded and runs the risk of being an ad hominem and potentially a straw man attack on theists. I would challenge you to demonstrate how someone like. e.g., Aquinas believing in eternal punishment is analogous to a psychopath that likes torturing dogs for fun: I'm not seeing it.
Sorry for the belated response!
My answer was that there are three kinds of things that can be quantified over for the sake of this discussion as it relates to infinitude: (1) dignity, (2) duration, and (3) repetition. My point was that you can pick any of them or all of them for our discussion and my argument will apply.
Dignity refers to the value of the thing in question relative to its nature (and ultimately how good that nature is relative to perfect goodness); duration refers to the amount of time something occurred; and repetition refers to how often it occurred.
The reason my argument will apply to any of the three is not because it is in principle applicable to all three types but, rather, because historically we have not seen any credible examples (by my lights) of any of the three being infinite as it relates to sins. Viz., we have not seen a person take as the direct object of their sin (i.e., the directly offended party) a being with infinite dignity (although someone might argue that God as an offended party in sin counts as a directly offended party); we have not seen a sin committed for infinite duration; and we have not seen a sin committed by a person with infinite repetition.
I agree with your assessment here; and I would point out that no matter how many gallons of spillage happen due to this person it would not warrant infinite demerit unless the water that spilled was infinite in volume, was spilling for infinite duration, or was itself or a casually derived offended party was of infinite dignity. None of these three are the case in every human example of sin.
This was my complaint with Acquinas, because he attempts to tie the infinite demerit of a sin to Gods infinite dignity since God is an offended party; however, God is not an offended party in the same sense as, e.g., if a human had infinite dignity and was killed by this water spillage: one is an offended party insofar as their authority has violated (in the case of God) whereas the other is causally affected by the sin.
Another noteworthy aspect of this, albeit separate from everything else I have said, is that it also doesnt seem just to assign infinite demerit to any immoral act against a being of infinite dignity merely because they have infinite dignity. For example, if humans have infinite dignity (which I dont concede), then it would not follow that every transgression against a human is thereby of infinite demerit (and thereby requiring infinite punishment)does it? If I, e.g., insult God with my words, is that equally as immoral as if I were suffocate His will out of my community (by promoting evil)? They would have to be if all transgressions against an infinitely good being are infinitely bad.
I would characterise the thread quite differently. You can read Lewis' argument and comment on it. The punishment of the damned is infinitely disproportionate to their crimes.
Well according to the Bible :
Mark 3:28: "Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter".
Mark 3:29: "But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin".
These are the rules of the game for the believer. The believer recognizes the book as authority for their religious life. This sin stated as an eternal sin, not a finite sin. Thus, the punishment is proportional.
So what.
Quoting Richard B
An eternal punishment for a transient sin is proportional? Not seeing it.
I know for a non-believer, yep.
But for a believer, there is a rule given by the creator, and the creator decrees there is one eternal sin that cannot be forgiven.
This is accepted or not. Sort of like accepting Euclids axioms and seeing what follows. For example, A point is that of which there is no part. What hell is that? O.k. I will accept it and see where this goes.
One commits an eternal sin according to God not a transient sin according to Lewis.
or at least insensitive.
The usual problem of evil is that a theistic god who creates hell is not a nice person; the Lewis extension to that is that those who worship such a god are also not nice people.
And of course there are all sorts of what if's and maybe's.
And of course they make up reasons not to think of themselves as wicked.
But this is an argument worthy of consideration. Uncomfortable as that may be.
Lewis' further question concerns how those who do not agree with those who accept divine command theory and the existence of hell ought deal with those who do.
Have another look at the article. see what you make of it.
1. It is not in God's power to be a Trinity: it is God's nature to be a Trinity. To say it is in His power is to imply that God chose to be or willed it to be the case, when really God's nature necessitates that He is three persons in one.
2. God cannot take human form (in a literal sense); however, He could create and animate a human. The idea of a hypostatic union of Jesus only makes sense to me, in principle, if his will is the upshot of God the Son.
3. God animating a human, so to speak, such as Jesus (let's say), would entail a human that will's perfectly in accordance with God's will; and so this being would a perfect human in will but still imperfect in toto. Every human is necessarily imperfect in total because their essence does not entail existence. Now, would it count in favor of the view that this man has God's will as his own (in literal sense) if the man were completely unblameworthy? Yes. Is it possible that a man could be unblameworthy and not have God's will as his own? Yes, but it would be highly improbable.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But isn't this tantamount to the denial of (moral) evil? Flannery rightly points out that arguments against Hell are very similar to arguments against evil, or for the claim that evil ought not exist.
If what you say is true then sin and (moral) evil do not exist at all, and of course Hell cannot then exist either. You could actually read my thread, "Beyond the Pale," as an inquiry into the rational grounds for moral blame, which is in turn related to the question of whether moral evil is possible. It's a difficult question that our culture struggles with in a special way, but nevertheless I don't see how such a thesis is compatible with Christianity. For Christianity moral evil does exist.
Let me quote Flannery given that this is such a ubiquitous issue:
Quoting Kevin Flannery, How to Think About Hell, 476
(To look at the mysterium iniquitatis and conclude that evil does not exist, or to look at the mystery of goodness and conclude that goodness does not exist, strike me as concrete instances of the low anthropology referenced earlier. The ideaso tied up with our own cultureis that responsibility does not exist, whether deserving praise or blame. The dual potency goes hand in hand with that responsibility. This is also related to a transgression of Przywara's Analogia Entis, where one consideration is allowed to trump all others.)
2. What do you mean by "upshot?" Jesus is considered the Word of God, what God the Father has spoken, according to my faith tradition.
3. Disagree with 3 on the basis that I don't think Jesus is "animated" by God (as though he were once inanimate) but rather is God fully just as He is fully a person who shares in the divine life of the Godhead and is eternally begotten by, and consubstantial with, the Father.
How merciful.
No worries.
Quoting Bob Ross
And my point is that if you don't pick one of them then you simply don't have an argument at all.
It's like if I said, "If one wanted to argue against factory farming they could do so on the basis of animal welfare, environmental issues, or sustainability." The natural response would be, "Are you going to produce an argument against factory farming? If so, you'll need to pick one of the three and put together an actual argument. Until you do that there is no argument being proposed."
Quoting Bob Ross
Aquinas' point is precisely that the water spills out for a potentially infinite duration. "So long as the disturbance of the order remains the debt of punishment must needs remain also."
Quoting Bob Ross
You've already been told by multiple people that Aquinas doesn't do that at all, and that you have Anselm in mind. If you want to characterize Aquinas, I would suggest quoting him, or at the very least quoting a secondary source.
Thanks for the response and the link, I'll read.
As a short premise, I didn't change my mind. I just see more subtlety in the 'free will' defence of semi-traditional hell view. Although I don't consider them convincing, you did make good points.
Anyway, let's say that the sinner does, indeed, have the ability to make a 'oath to evil' (or 'mortal sin') and the ability to commit to it perpetually. Let's consider the following propositions:
Given that this life is finite, of course, the actualization of the first proposition here cannot be realized in this finite life. But if we assume that after death, life will be infinite, it might be reasonable to make. Anyway, it seems a traditional theological assumption that all three the above propositions are valid in this life.
So, it seems clear to me that the abilities of the first proposition cannot logically exclude the other two propositions. So, the ability to repent is not excluded by having made 'oaths to evil' (or 'mortal sins'). Let's say that Bob dies unrepentant and goes to hell. There are no logical reasons to assume that in the after life he can't sincerely repent and, assuming that God would still save anyone who sincerely repents, Bob can be still saved after death.
So, here at least from a logical standpoint, it seems to me that if some are beyond any hope for salvation, for them, after this life, either the second proposition or the third. Let's John is in this category of the damned. Either John lost the ability to sincere repent or if he still has it, God would not save him even if he sincerely repents.
I believe that there are two problems here.
First, Bob and Jack are given different chances for salvation. If Bob can still repent and be saved, why can't Jack also be saved? There seems to be a lack of impartiality here.
Second, in the case of Jack, if we assumed that the second and the third propositions are valid in this life, this means that repentance and salvation are possible even if one makes an 'oath to evil'. And making an 'oath to evil' doesn't by itself lead to perpetual damnation. Perpetual damnation is possible only if either one at a certain point is not able to repent or if after a certain point God doesn't save someone who makes a sincere repentance. Assuming that God would always save the sincere repentants, this would imply that some cannot make a sincere repentant if there is no hope for salvation for them.
Hence, it seems to me that if 'perpetual damnation' is not an extrinsic punishment but a possible result of our ability to make 'oaths', then no one would be completely beyond hope. Repentance would still be a possibility.
So my contention here is that the hopeless state of (some of?) the damned cannot be explained solely on terms of their ability to make oaths.
BTW, I didn't know that Balthasar allowed the possibility of post-mortem salvation. Interesting.
Regarding your points about evangelization, I think we are talking past each other at this point. I am not really sure why you think that believing in the traditional view of hell is so fundamental for evangelization, if you also agree that universalists would still have their valid reason to evangelize. But it is a tangential discussion.
I see what you mean. But my point is that even if one allows the possibility to make and commit to a 'definitive oath to evil' this alone doesn't preclude the possibility of repentance after death (and salvation if one accepts that God would still save the repentant). So, my point is that even if one accepts that view, one would still have to assume that no one would be beyond hope unless either the possibility to repent is denied or the salvation for the sincere repentants is denied at a certain point.
So, yes, I agree with you that even if that assumption is true, one would still invoke some extrinsic constraints to explain perpetual damnation.
Futhermore, if one assumes that evil is not infinite, one might say that at a certain point the 'restless state' of the will, will exhaust the 'resources' of evil and then turn to the good.
Yes, we can say that one can be rational and evil, in the sense that if one sincerely believes that evil actions are 'right', then doing them is consistent.
BUT if one believes in an objective morality, then one must assume that here the 'rational evildoer' is mistaken in their belief.
So, if 'rational choice' merely means 'act according to one's belief', this would mean that one can do evil acts rationally if he or she is mistaken about what is good and what is evil. So, there is ignorance here that might decrease the culpability.
In one sense, this quite true. Evil doesn't have an essence; it is a privation. I think this understanding is pretty mainstream in the West (e.g. St. Augustine), and it certainly is in the East. It is absolutely true that evil [I]ought[/I] not exist, and thus Hell ought not exist either. The Fall is the result of [I]irrational[/I] rebellion. Both man and the demons' rebellion is something blameworthy, something that ought not have occured.
Evil exists in the world though, and in the hearts of men. We need not deny this. Evil exists as privation and imperfection, the tendency of creatures towards multiplicity and non-being.
Hence, I don't think considerations I mentioned erase moral blame. Freedom, self-determination, self-governance, knowledge, etc. have contrary opposites (e.g. unity/plurality, true/false). We can be more or less free, more or less aware of what is truly best, and so more or less culpable for "missing the mark" in our thoughts and deeds. Spiritual sickness is not blameless, since people enable their own sickness and freely partake in their own degradation.
This is reflected in the architecture Dante's Hell. Upper Hell has the less severe sins of weakness of will. Lower Hell contains the sins of malice, evil that is known as evil and committed anyway in the pursuit of some finite good judged to be higher than the Good Itself. Dante puts the Hitlers and Stalins of his epoch fairly high up. The lowest pits are reserved for sins of fraud, the fullest twisting of the intellect away from God, and into the self (and ultimately towards nothingness). These aren't just sins that are particularly vile, but also those that are hardest for man to escape because, having enslaved his intellect to the passions, he can no longer recognize Good as Good or evil as evil. This is the maximum extent of the curvatus in se, and I suppose that one argument for a Hell of infinite temporal duration might be that this curving inwards approaches something like a black hole at the limit, a point at which no light can escape.
I don't think this in anyway precludes retributive justice, let alone remedial punishment. People know evil as such and still embrace it; they have a right to be punished. The reduction of justice solely to remediation (rather than the restoration of right) degrades justice into something like breaking a horse.
The question is not whether punishment is deserved, but whether punishment of infinite temporal duration is deserved. I have already mentioned why I think such punishment must either be extrinsic, or involve the destruction of the soul's rational nature (a sort of annihilation). The latter could be considered an intrinsic punishment that one does to oneself, but would also imply a capacity to deface (and lose) the Imago Dei absolutely, beyond any capacity to repent, which is at odds with a lot of theology (closer to Plato than Aristotle in some ways too).
At any rate, I don't think voluntarism actually helps here. The voluntarist will, to the extent that it chooses evil in the absence of the informing intellect, is acting arbitrarily. If it doesn't make sense to punish people for being sick (and I think it [I] does[/I] make sense, because such sickness does not remove all freedom or culpability), it makes even less sense to punish them for some sort of bare remainder of uninformed will, whose action can only be random.
The question of the Fall and thus the problem of evil is a difficult one indeed. The explanation that most resonates with me is that man, in order to "be like God," had to freely transcend his own finitude in turning towards the transcendent Good (the same with the demons). But they failed to do this, choosing rebellion instead.
I'm not even sure what position this is supposed to be responding to. Objections to "punishment of infinite temporal duration" tend to focus on the duration and extrinsic nature of such a punishment (since this is how it is normally framed; the accident of one's state at death being the deciding factor) or the fact that this implies a sort of "eternal survival of sin." It is not an objection to the existence of suffering per se. The more famous examples of universalism (or theology that seems to imply it) mention Hell and punishment quite often. In his essay on the early deaths of infants St. Gregory of Nyssa points to an indefinitely long punishment for the worst offenders for instance. And a lot of theology that is pointed to as implying universalism in its grand scale also doesn't ignore suffering and Hell.
The corrupted nous is often seen as "painting beauty/goodness" onto what lacks it (e.g. when Dante's vision "transforms" the putrid siren into an alluring woman in Canto 19 of the Purgatorio). If people can be complicit and culpable vis-á-vis their own degradation then they are to some degree responsible for such misunderstanding. This is particularly true if they turn back to evil after having received healing (e.g. Hebrews 6:6).
It's just like how drunkenness might explain crimes but need not absolve them, since people generally choose to impair their judgement in this way. We still hold drunk drivers accountable in a way we do not hold people accountable if they have a stroke while driving.
I'd agree that evil, being nothing, must eventually be "exhausted." It is, in this case, not evil, but finite goods that will be exhausted. C.S. Lewis has the damned traveling ever further from one another, spreading out into absolute solitude. But to me, this suggests that motion must also stop in the other direction. Eventually there is nothing good left to impel motion and one has stasis in nothingness, which would seem to me to track with a sort of annihilation, a will and intellect oriented towards nothingness, and so contentless.
That the "Outer Darkness" is a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth suggests an appetite for Goodness though. Talbot reads this as the maximum withdrawal of God from the creature, leaving them to experience the absence of Goodness as a final (but in his view remedial) chastisement.
St. Maximus is sometimes read as a universalist (it's really his grand metaphysical vision that most suggests this IMHO), but some of his work suggests that the damned are reformed and at rest, but not deified. From Questions and Problems:
This makes more sense if we recall that in the Ad Thelassium Maximus says that experience of God (union with God) is beyond knowledge (building off I Corinthians 13), just as St. Gregory Palamas seems to have direct experience of God occuring above any sort of separation of intellect and will.
You're welcome. If you are referring to the thread on a different forum, beware that it may be a bit hard to follow. I was tailoring it to individuals rather than to a general audience. In any case I think a thread like that would shed more light on justice than a discussion of Hell. Hell is a hard case, and it is better to begin with easy cases ("Hard cases make bad law").
Quoting boundless
That's fair, and I appreciate that you are taking care with this conversation.
Quoting boundless
Sticking with Aquinas, to fix one's end in sin is not to form an intention towards evil (or in an extreme case, an oath towards evil). For example, adultery is a sin, but when a man commits adultery he is not doing it for the sake of evil. He is doing is because he desires the romance and sex, and chooses to pursue it. He values the romance and sex more than he cares about not-committing adultery.
As I see it this question of understanding how an evil act could ever be performed is much closer to the heart of the issue, and it bears on my last post to Count Timothy.
Quoting boundless
Let me repeat and elaborate:
Quoting Leontiskos
Universalism is the belief that all will be saved, and this is largely what you and I have been discussing in this thread. But now you are switching to a different topic, namely the topic of "Hopeful universalism": the belief that one can or should hope that all will be saved. These are two different things.
Hope positions are always easier to defend than assent positions, and the same holds here. Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a book in 1979, Was dürfen wir hoffen? ("What may we hope?"). As you know, David Bentley Hart wrote a book in 2019, That All Shall Be Saved. Hart was one-upping Balthasar by switching from the topic of hope to the topic of assent or assertion.* What you are now doing in the thread is shifting back into Balthasar's more modest position.
Specifically, if we say that no one ever moves beyond the possibility of repentance, then Balthasar's position is secured, but Hart's is not. So what you say is right: if no one ever moves beyond the possibility of repentance, then hopeful universalism is rationally permissible.
Quoting boundless
Sure - I think you are technically correct. But I don't find the psychology and anthropology convincing. To make the point quickly, we could say that a man who has been addicted to opium for 70 years is logically permitted to stop using opium, but this is undue "logicalism." Although it is logically possible, that's just not how reality works. Human acts form the habits and the soul towards an end. There may be creatures who do not move towards fixity in an end, but they are certainly not humans. I take it that these claims are much more empirically sound than the idea that reversal of one's fundamental orientation is always possible, no matter what has come before.
(We might even begin to ask what it means to say that the opium addict is "logically capable" of abandoning opium.)
Quoting boundless
You may have misunderstood me, because I don't think he did. He tended toward what I said here:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting boundless
I think it is a central point of the discussion. Let me elaborate on the logical error that I see:
Quoting Leontiskos
This is basically your position:
Suppose that next week you and your spouse will be taken to Brazil, and there is nothing you can do about it. You know with perfect certainty that you will end up in Brazil. Your spouse says to you, "Let's buy plane tickets and fly to Brazil next week." You respond, "There is no need. We will be in Brazil next week no matter what we do. It would be a waste of money to buy plane tickets." Your spouse will only desire to buy tickets insofar as they don't realize that there is no need to buy tickets (and this explains the secretive universalists you referred to).
The universalist has no more ultimate reason to evangelize than the man has a reason to buy a ticket to Brazil. Buying the ticket is irrational. I think this argument actually destroys the notion of universalism in the Christian context, hook, line, and sinker. Folks who accede to universalism literally act this way, and that's perfectly logical. They become uninterested in pursuing the inevitable end. The Unitarian Universalists are a great historical example of this.
* He was even playing on the English title of Balthasar's book, "Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?"
Okay, agreed.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well then let me explain why I think your contention undermines moral culpability and the possibility of moral evil. You give a threefold dichotomy, ignorance, weakness of will, and external constraint:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is one evil or morally culpable on the basis of ignorance? It seems not. Is one evil or morally culpable on the basis of weakness of will? It seems not. Is one evil or morally culpable on the basis of external constraint? It seems not. If moral culpability and moral evil are not possible on any of the three exhaustive options you have provided, then they are not possible at all.
Indeed, your whole argument here is that universalism is inevitable because humans could not but choose otherwise. Given your understanding of human choice, humans could never choose evil, and therefore they could never fail to choose God. You apparently view humans as something like Roomba vacuum cleaners, which may make a few wrong turns but will never ultimately fail. This is why Flannery's analysis is so relevant. Evil itself would not exist if this theory of choice were correct, and the Problem of Evil goes hand in hand with the problem of Hell.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If they do it continually throughout life, why cannot they do it continually throughout eternity? Can one take a mulligan on their entire life?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, agreed.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This "maximum extent of the cuvatus in se" is already its own punishment, and need have no temporal limit if humans and angels/demons are indeed eternal beings who do not cease to exist.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I haven't seen anyone propose it, so no biggie.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Precisely the position that you've set out, namely the one that logically entails the impossibility of moral evil. Else, you are basically trying to justify a position where moral evil is possible for x amount of time but not x+y amount of time, which is a rather difficult task.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The idea that one can deface the imago dei is written up and down throughout Scripture. In that there is some similarity with Aristotle, but universalism is basically just a form of Platonism, of the ineluctable Good. I don't think you get to universalism from Scripture or from empirical data (Aristotle). You basically need to be ultimately committed to Platonism, and thus allow Platonic theories to override these other considerations. It's no coincidence that your theory where evil is basically derived from ignorance is so closely bound up with Socrates' approach.
By Jesus, I am referring to the man; and by the Son I am referring to God as the Word. For you, I would imagine that Jesus refers to the man and the Son as a union of some sort; however, I think it is still useful to separating out the concepts of the Son qua God and qua man. Jesus, as a man, cannot be fully God but could be, as a person in the sense of his will, God the Son working through the material body of the man.
To say that Jesus is fully God and man is contradictory; for they have contrary essences. What I mean by Jesus will being the upshot of the Son is that Jesus as a man could be united with God insofar as his will is the will of the Son (literally speaking); however, this does not make Jesus fully God (in a literal sense).
This is disanalogous: your example here states multiple different arguments for why factory farming is wrong without providing an exposition of any of them, whereas my argument establishes that all three forms of infinitude (relevant to judging sins) are absent in practical sins which entails that infinite punishment would be disproportionate.
My argument is simple:
P1. If the dignity of the offended, the duration of the offense, and the repetition of the offense are finite, then it is disproportionate (and thusly unjust) to inflict a punishment that requires the sacrifice of something of infinite dignity, infinite duration, or infinite repetition.
P2: All human sins, thus far, are finite in the dignity of the offended, the duration of the offense, and the repetition of the offense.
C: Therefore, it is unjust to punish those who committed those sins with a punishment that requires the sacrifice of something of infinite dignity, infinite duration, or infinite repetition.
Now, one might object:
I suppose it is possible that most or all human sins, thus far, are open cases like a continuous water spillage; but I would find that implausible. How is someone who steals and does their time in jail akin to this continuous water spillage? Likewise, wouldnt this argument require that the universe is eternal (for the sin would have to causally affect for eternity)?
Duly noted: perhaps I am thinking of the wrong person. I will re-read Aquinas on that part.
I don't see that you have. P2 is merely an assertion. There has been no argument to "establish" it. In fact we've already seen Aquinas rebut the idea that the duration of the punishment must be proportionate to the duration of the offense.
Quoting Bob Ross
Well remember how the analogy began:
Quoting Leontiskos
The "order" is charity, or friendship with God, and Hell is basically the absence of that friendship. To destroy a friendship is like breaking a pipe, on my analogy.
But yes, humans are eternal beings on Christianity.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sounds good. :up:
Agreed!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I see it, the classical notion that evil is 'privation of the good' and not a substance seems to lend itself in a universalist or annihilationist direction.
Evil is parasitic on the good, and evil can't exist without the good. Being a corruption, without the corrupted substance it can't exist, just like a parasite can't live if the host dies or if it is eradicated from the host.
If someone destroys the good in itself in an irrevocable way (as Pope Benedict put it in the case of the damned in hell), it seems that there is a kind of annihilation as you say. The 'imago Dei' is destroyed. But if it is destroyed, how can evil remain if its existence is parasitic?
On the other hand, even the universalist can use the annihilationist language without much problems: the sinner is destroyed and the 'image of God' is healed.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, I remember that part. If God is truly omnipresent, however, there can be no situation where God is absent. Maybe it should be understood in this way: in their refusal to acknowledge God, the damned try to ignore God and seek the good for them elsewhere. But once finite goods end and each damned is totally alone, there is an intolerable feeling of loneliness and privation that impels a response in their heart.
Also the universalist could use the view of St Isaac of Niniveh that 'hell is regret' to explain repentance. The definitive encounter with God removes all kind of ignorance and mistaken beliefs one had. The damned, then, acknowledge their errors and experience a painful, but remedial regret that eventually leads to their healing. The direct confrontation with the truth can't be resisted, maybe.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Interesting, thanks. But if they are at 'rest', I would argue that they have lost their innermost desire for communion with God. Are still, then, the same entities after this 'restoration'?
As St. Augustine put it, if our heart is restless until is united with God, it would seem that the damned should be restless.
Whether St. Maximus was a universalist or not, it would seem that St. Gregory was. IIRC, he even speaks about a 'universal feast' after the purgation is complete and other statements that all beings do not fall out from the Kingdom of God. It would not make any sense to call a 'universal feast' something were a part of the participants is actually suffering.
But maybe the term 'apokatastasis' doesn't necessarily mean 'salvation' and Maximus was only making a lexicographic point here. TBH, I did not read the works of St. Maximus, only secondary literature.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Ok, thanks. Probably the universalist reading here is that the 'direct knowledge' would trigger a repentance.
OK, thanks. Anyway, yes, probably using hell to make a discussion about justice isn't the best idea.
Quoting Leontiskos
Thank you!
Quoting Leontiskos
But one should have the sufficient awareness that is making is wrong, right? Maybe not an explicit 'oath to evil' but still a deliberate decision to be 'faithful' to a lesser good.
The problem that I see with how the notion of 'mortal sin' is formulated is that it is legalistic. The view you presented here isn't.
Quoting Leontiskos
I did read Balthasar's book BTW. But I could have missed the reference about post-mortem repentance (if I am not mistaken, in a quote of St Edith Stein there is that suggestion, however, but I have also read that she later expressed reluctance about the 'hope for all'...).
Anyway, I still am not convinced that 'universalism' proper is rejected if the necessity of repentance is affirmed. Maybe, the direct encounter with God triggers a response in the hearts which makes repentance inevitable and/or maybe it is the suffering itself that does at a certain point. Of course, however, if one still says that in any case freedom involves the power of 'contrary choice' then, yes, the 'hopeful' position still stands and the 'universalist proper' doesn't.
BTW, I do find weird that among Christians the 'hopeful' position is quite rare. Either some are irrevocably damned/annihilated or all will be saved. The 'middle way' seems not to be accepted.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok! The more one is addicted, the more is difficult to heal from the addiction. I also believe that addiction is a very good analogy for evil/sin.
But what traditionalists do not seem to allow is the possibility that experiencing the painful consequence of having remained in sin might not lead to repentance. In a sense, we see it even in this life. It's much more difficult to change their mind for those who do not experience painful consequences of their choices. So, I don't agree that experience suggests one outcome over the other. I get your point, but again I am not persuaeded by it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, here you seem to assume that the 'ultimate reason' is necessary for evangelize. But as I said before, a universalist has many other reason to share his or her views.
Also, your example of the travel to Brazil is misleading IMHO. A better analogy would be that if I don't buy the ticket, I can't take the plane and I have to go there without a plane. The point is that you seem to neglect that most universalist would still say that there is very painful process for the damned which while finite it's presumably far worse than one can imagine.
A better analogy is one of an illness where you are presented two choices. If you take a painless drug now, you are healed without much suffering. But if you wait, you have to undergo a very painful treatment, where both the pain from the illness and the treatment is hard to bear. So, even if the final result is the same (being healed), the process might be very, very different. In this case, the doctors would have a very good reason to try to convince the patients to take the first medication.
I don't see this. If someone suffers from weakness of will and cheats on their spouse we normally consider them blameworthy. So too if they inappropriately strike someone in a rage; it's their fault. Weakness of will is often precisely what we mean by "blameworthy."
Certainly, there are instances of weakness of will were we find people to be more or less culpable in. Pete Hegseth getting blackout drunk and commiting adultery on a work trip (his [i]defense[/I] against sexual assault claims IIRC) is blameworthy because middle aged men elevated to levels of high office (and subject to espionage attempts) hopefully have better self-control. Phineas Gage becoming quarrelsome and impulsive after a railroad spike took out most of his frontal lobe is less his responsibility. Self-determination and self-government isn't something people either have or don't have, but rather something that must be cultivated to some extent, even if human nature allows some individuals to transcend bad circumstances as well (e.g. Epictetus becomes free as a slave while his masters remain slaves to their vices). We also tend to blame Ivy-educated Wall Street criminals more than African child soldiers for this reason, even if the crimes of the latter are more visceral and clearly wrong.
Likewise for ignorance. Negligence can be blameworthy. Sometimes people are also responsible for enabling the external constraints they find themselves dealing with.
What makes serial killers so disturbing isn't just their strong appetite for cruelty, which would merely make them akin to vicious feral dogs, but also the way they bend reason to their evil ends. Yet you see the same thing to a lesser degree all the time. This capacity for reason denotes culpability. In philosophy, reason is often bent towards defending a notion of freedom and human nature that attempts to have man usurp the place of God for instance. This is blameworthy. There are cases where people should, or do know better. This is self-determination turned towards finitude.
People obviously do choose evil. Sometimes they choose evil because they cannot resist temptation. They know cheating on their spouse is wrong, but they do it anyway. Sometimes they rationalize their behavior, and might even convince themselves that what is wrong is actually good. "It's ok for [I]me[/I] to cheat because I am a higher sort of man beyond the strictures of plebian morality." They put their intellect into the service of evil, into the pursuit of finite goods and falsity. This doesn't absolve them of blame. Rather, this is precisely what blame consists in, having the capacity to receive the light, and to know the light as light (even if vaguely), and loving the darkness instead.
My point was not that man cannot choose evil; he clearly can, although this is a (sometimes known) misordering of goods. My point was that the will's infinite desire for Goodness cannot be fulfilled by evil, or by merely finite goods. A pretty common argument against materialism runs: "if materialism is true, there is no reason for us not to find full satisfaction in the finite, material goods we see around us. Evolution should not lead us to desire an infinite Good. But man has an infinite desire for Goodness, indicating an orientation beyond the material."
If man's natural desire for Goodness and Truth cannot find rest in evil and falsity, in the absence of what is desired, then the rational soul stays in motion and hungry until it has attained its ends. It is never satisfied. Motion continues indefinitely, until it turns back towards its natural end. Hence, if it never turns back towards Goodness and Truth (repentance) it must either:
A. Be externally constrained from turning towards what actually fulfills their appetites (making the punishment extrinsic).
B. Have lost its rational nature and rational appetites, which is in some sense to have become a different substance and so to have been annihilated.
Anyhow, on your view, if man chooses evil as evil, and finds his rest in evil (i.e., he no longer has any impetus to ever turn back towards Truth and Goodness), in virtue of what does he make this choice? My point is this: It cannot be because he knows that evil is truly a better end; it isn't. It cannot be because his will is attracted to evil as evil. All goodness, even what merely appears good, participates in the Divine Goodness. To chose evil as evil would be to choose absolutely nothing. But sinners don't want nothing, rather they prize finite goods over the infinite Good. Satan, classically conceived, is seen as wanting to rule out of pride. He attacks mankind precisely because he isn't pursuing nothingness as nothingness.
I'm not sure exactly what is supposed to be "free" here except for a bare will that is uninformed by either the intellect or the object of desire. Evil, being nothing, has nothing of its own that can attract the will. It is precisely this sort of choosing that doesn't seem blameworthy to me, because it is wholly inexplicable, "for no reason at all." Being arbitrary, it is random. There is no culpability in this sort of bare remainder of will that is uninformed by intellect and is equally capable of gravitating towards and finding its rest in non-being/evil as God.
Man has real choice precisely in the process of becoming self-determining and self-governing, and transcending his own finitude. The more culpable sinner has succeeded in this to some degree, only to bend themselves backwards onto finite goods.
Deface, yes, but not utterly destroy. I sort of meant this in the opposite way I think you took it though. It is Plato who thinks the wicked man ceases to be truly human, and to be a rational nature. For Aristotle, man cannot lose this nature without becoming something other than what he is (the original being annihilated).
The entirety of a syllogism is a mere series of assertions; but I can elaborate. I have been thinking about this more since the creation of the OP, so my explanation might veer off a bit therefrom.
An immoral act is evaluated relative to the (1) the object(s), (2) the end(s), and (3) the dignity of the offended party (parties) involved. The order of importance is 3, 2, and 1; and 3 is a subtype of 1. EDIT: it isn't really coherent to say 3 is a subtype of 1, I should have called 1 "the means".
3 holds the most weight, when considering punishment, because the thing offended (i.e., the object of the offense) is what is owed justice and punishment is about justice; and, so, punishment must firstly evaluate the value of the thing offended to determine how severe the punishment should be. E.g., skinning a rabbit alive is not as bad as skinning a human alive, disobeying the wishes of a random fellow-citizen is not as bad as disobeying a court order by a judge, etc. The objects and ends (1 and 2) could be identical in every regard and the dignity of offended party could cause the punishment to vary significantly.
2 holds the second-most weight because, after determining what was offended, what was intended by the culpable party is what is most closely tied to culpability itself (since morality is about right and wrong behavior as it relates to rational deliberationto willing freely through thought which necessarily is determinable through ends that one had in store for the act). E.g., a person that runs over a kid because they were distracted with their phone hasnt done something as bad as running over that same kid purposefully even thought the kid has the same dignity in each scenario. Likewise, the objects involved (1) are tied to the ends (and intentionality) of course, but their could be a divergence; and what was intended is how we investigate the act since an act is a volition of will.
The last aspect, which holds the least weight, is the objects involved as it relates to the means. E.g., a person that murders someone else by way of murdering someone else to get their body to fall on the other persons body (to kill them)(perhaps they shoot someone on top of a building so that they fall 1,000 FT onto the target victim thereby murdering both for the sake of murdering the one) is doing something worse than someone who just, ceteris paribus, murdered the same target victim because a part of the means was bad.
A sin is just an immoral act that has as one of its offended parties God. A sin, therefore, has at least two offended parties: the object of the sin (as the object of the act) and God (as the perfectly good being which wills the perfect order to things).
For the latter, a being with infinite dignity has been offended and this part of the sin does not fall prey to my OPs argument; however, the punishments varying by objects or/and ends would have to be distinguished in varying by somethingI am not sure what that would necessarily look like. E.g., having the end of killing this tree for no reason other than to go against Gods will is worse than killing the same tree in the same manner but self-gratification: both are against a being of infinite dignity, but they have different weights in terms of the ends one had; likewise, disrupting Gods will by being mean to someone in a relatively trivial manner (so to speak) is not as bad as disrupting Gods will by murdering someone: both are against a being of infinite dignity, but they have different objects (and ends, but I am emphasizing objects here) and dignities of those objects which were offended. Does this mean that it would be proportionate for God, if He did not forgive someone for their sin as it relates to offending Him, to infinitely punish them with some kind of infliction? Maybe: I dont know.
For the former, no object of the act can have infinite dignity because it is a contingent being and none of them have been of infinite repetition (historically); however, to your point, it is in principle possible that the universe continues for infinite time and that some sins which are not rectified would spill out infinitely. If theres nothing infinite about the act or its consequences, then it cannot be proportionate to punish the person responsible for the act with something infinite because something infinite is disproportionate to something finite.
Sure.
Quoting boundless
Yes, that's basically right. But the key is that what is chosen is in fact a good, albeit a lesser good. It is not evil simpliciter.
Quoting boundless
There are various reasons why Roman Catholic praxis tends towards legalism, but the theological undergirding is not really legalistic.
Quoting boundless
I said that Hart's position is not secured, not that it is rejected. Indeed, if Balthasar's position is secured then Hart's conclusion can't be rejected. The securing of Balthasar's position entails that Hart's conclusion is possible, for we cannot hope for the impossible.
Quoting boundless
I don't find it odd. I don't think hopeful universalism is compatible with Christian revelation. Let me quote the crucial line, with the originally emphasized 'if':
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't think Christians can uphold that 'if'. I said why here:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting boundless
Right, but it is broader than addiction. It is 'habit' or even 'phronema'. Humans mold themselves into definite shapes, and as far as we can tell, those shapes are not reversible (after a point). Minor moldings can be reversed, but even that can be quite hard. I think these discussions tend to overlook the empirical data that molded patterns or phronemata have a telos of stability or fixedness. Once this is seen universalism looks more and more like a deus ex machina.
Quoting boundless
I think you probably included more negatives in this phrase than you intended.
Empirically, reversals do happen, and they often happen in the way that you illustrate. Also empirically, reversals do not always happen.
Quoting boundless
As I've said, the universalist has non-necessary reasons to evangelize, but no necessary reasons. That's a big difference from the traditionalist. It also contradicts the urgency with which the Gospel is presented in revelation.
Quoting boundless
Well your idea that "I have to go there" contradicts the premise that "you and your spouse will be taken to Brazil." You are presumably thinking of universalists who believe in purgatory, but this broader issue is another problem with universalism: how exactly are the unbelievers to be forced "to go there"?
I would suggest facing the analogy more squarely. If I will inevitably end up in Brazil no matter what I do, then why do I have to do anything? Your contention that I have to do something is part and parcel of the logical error I have been trying to point out. If I will end up in Brazil no matter what I do, then I don't have to do anything at all (in order to arrive in Brazil). If arriving in Brazil is the ultimate and most important goal, then that's all that needs to be said.
Now maybe someone wants to go to Brazil early. Or maybe someone wants to sit in first-class rather than coach. For these lesser goals, one might have to do something. But in the end it won't matter at all, especially given the way the universalists in this thread have been talking about things that "could be seen as a punishment" (e.g. "A sub-equal condo in Brazil could be seen as a punishment").
Quoting boundless
So on your analogy the most significant universalist motivation is avoidance of pain, whereas the most significant traditionalist motivation is avoidance of death. What's worse? Pain or death? I don't think there is a real comparison here. And the urgency with which revelation presents the Gospel is apparently not compatible with a mere lessening of pain. The analogy is apt given the way that revelation speaks about the ultimate stakes as death, not pain.
Again, the difference is between expedience of means and arrival at the end. Arriving at the end is by definition enormously more important than doing so via an expedient means. Universalism dissolves any possibility of not arriving at the end, and is left only with admonitions about the expedience of the means to that end.
The God that would condemn you to eternal punishment after giving you free will to do whatever you want to do is a hypocrite. If God wanted you not to do anything objectionable, why give you the ability to do objectionable things? Is it a test? Is God using his creations for entertainment, like watching TV? If we are all a part of God, why would God condemn a part of itself to eternal punishment?
No, I don't think so. "Bears are furry; water is wet; and Bob's last name is Ross." On your reckoning that would be a syllogism, given that it is a series of assertions.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, this is an interesting and thoughtful theory. :up:
I am not going to enter into prolonged interaction with the theory given that it feels a bit like a new OP.
Quoting Bob Ross
The first question to ask is whether there are, using your definitions, immoral acts which are not sins. You seem to be presupposing that there are immoral acts which are not sins, and that these immoral acts are (likely) not proportionate to infinite punishment. Are you claiming that there are immoral acts which are not sins?
Quoting Bob Ross
I agree with that. What we are asking is whether you have the burden of proof to show that there is nothing infinite about human acts (or at least immoral acts that are not sins); or whether I have the burden of proof to show that there is something infinite about human acts. The reason I think you have the burden of proof is because you are the one who started the thread. But let's consider Aquinas' argument:
Quoting Bob Ross
And if this is right then the act which causes the infinite "spillage" would itself be infinite insofar as it is the true cause of an infinite effect. The question seems to ask whether humans are capable of acts which incur eternal consequences:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Okay, thanks for the correction. Usually when someone speaks about things like ignorance they aren't speaking about things like negligence, but I see that you meant to include the latter in the former.
Nevertheless, the more central reason I interpreted you that way is as follows. First, an edit I added that you may have missed:
Quoting Leontiskos
Your argument:
1. No one chooses the worse over the better but for ignorance about what is truly best, weakness of will, or external constraint.
2. Therefore, no one chooses anything other than God for x+y amount of time.
My counterargument asks why (3) does not follow:
3. Therefore, no one chooses anything other than God for x amount of time.
Or to Flannery's point: why does anyone choose anything other than God at all?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I pointed out to boundless, there are basic empirical problems here. If humans rest in things other than God in this life, then why couldn't they rest in things other than God in the afterlife? I don't think you are appreciating the acuity of Flannery's point.
As I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
My view is that this life and our choices in this life really matter. Your view seems to entail that this life and our choices in this life don't really matter. That someone can choose ends other than God for their entire earthly life, and then everything will just be reversed after they die. That the nature and shape of this life is entirely incommensurate and unconnected to our eternal destiny.
"We already have such evil in the world: sinners who separate themselves from God and liveeven humanly-speakingfrustrated, resentful lives" (Flannery). If we can do that for 80 years, why can't we do it for eternity? You are required to say that the bigger picture is just entirely different and incommensurable with the earthly picture. On your theory of will unrepentant evil is possible for x amount of time but not x+y amount of time. I'm not sure what basis there is for such a theory. Nevertheless, I grant that if there were no evil then the Platonic theory of will would be a really excellent theory; and that if Socrates were right in claiming that evil merely flows from ignorance then it would also be an excellent theory.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think you are probably aware that Thomists do not think man chooses evil as evil. The damned have chosen a lesser good.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Here's the argument:
1. Humans by definition desire God
2. Therefore something which does not desire God is no longer human (and has therefore been "annihilated")
Note first that I strengthened the argument by avoiding "rational nature." I don't think we just automatically seek God because of our rational nature, as if Pantheism were true or as if salvific faith were the result of a logical syllogism. This goes back to the tension between Hart's position and classical notions of Pelagianism and grace.
In any case, are you right that a substantial change must occur for someone to be damned? We can talk that way metaphorically, but I have no good reason to take such a claim literally. I don't find the underlying Platonic theory of the will overly certain, and I think there are better sources which contradict it, such as the empirical data we have from earthly life and Scripture.
Presumably their identity perdures, and therefore there is no actual annihilation. We could ask various questions here, such as, "Do the damned desire God?" I would say that unfulfilled desire is part of Hell, but that the desire is not accompanied by repentance. So Hell in the afterlife is presumably a lot like the Hell we occasionally see in this life, and that's probably why Jesus connected the two.
But if someone wants to elevate that Platonic theory of the will to an extremely high place, then I can understand why they would hold to universalism. I just wouldn't understand what grounds we could have for that manner of elevation.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Let's save your trope about libertarian free will until we have finished this topic of the Platonic view of the will.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right: can the imago dei be destroyed? I think it can. Scripture certainly depicts individuals who are beyond help or return, and I would venture to say that this is because they have destroyed their imago dei. I am convinced that Orthodox scholars like Fr. Stephen De Young are correct in saying that deification (as becoming an icon/idol of God) vs. "demonification" (as becoming an icon/idol of a demon) is a central theme in Scripture. Indeed, Scripture presents a kind of parity between angels/demons and humans, where the same possibilities of eternal life and eternal death are available to both angels/demons and humans. This is why Augustine's anti-universalist argument about the demons is so strong, and it is also strong because the Platonic theory of the will should apply to demons too.
-
I think a basic critique you are making is something like, "Your view of evil is problematic." I would say that every view of the mysterium iniquitatis is problematic, and that trying to explain it perfectly is a fool's errand. What I want to do is stick to the most credible sources in forming a judgment. I don't find much credibility in a Platonic theory of the ineluctable good, at least when compared with the empirical nature of this earthly life and Scripture.
Ok.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok, I get that.
Quoting Leontiskos
I see, thanks for the clarification.
Quoting Leontiskos
I see what you mean. As I said, however, it's difficult to harmonize what the Bible seems to say in various places. For instance, 1 Tim 2:3-4 seems to say that God's will is that all people shall be saved. St Augustine in Enchiridion, ch 103 tires to harmonize this passage with the belief in eternal damnation by saying that the 'all/everyone' in an exclusive manner and he proposes two possible readings: either 'all people' should be understood as (I paraphrase) 'God wants to save the people that will be saved (but some will not be saved)' or 'God wants some people from all classes of people to be saved'. This is because St Augustine assuemed that God's plans will be realized and that some will be eternally damned. Another example is St John Chrysostom's reading of 1 Cor 3:11-15 in his Homily 9 on 1 Corinthians, where he identifies the 'fire' mentioned here with the fire mentioned in Mark 9:47-49, where St John says that the 'salvation through fire' actually means 'damnation', because the damaned are saved from annihilation, but it's not true salvation (note that Mk 9:49 says that 'everyone will be salted by fire' and St. Paul in that passage doesn't mention a third group. So, I do understand why St John felt he had to harmonize the verses in the way he did... I know however that the passage in Corinthians is generally understood to refer to Purgatory, but I found interesting that St John read in that way. After all, it is interesting that St. Paul simply didn't mention a third group there).
Of course, one can accept, say, St Augustine's reading but it is a contrived way IMO to save the appearances. If one says that God actually wants all people to be saved, then, one must admit that God's will might not be realized if one will never be saved.
I also believe that St John Paul II said that despite what that verse you cite about Judas, the Church never made any definite pronouncements on people who are forever in Hell and this includes even Judas.
Personally, as I said, I do not know what to make of all this ambiguities I see in the Bible. I do not see it as clear as you see it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok, but anyway as I see it, if you allow the logical possibility that one can repent, then the logical conclusion is simply that no one will be beyond hope of repentance (assuming that they will exist forever). The conclusion is inexcapable.
So either the damned - or some of them - will lose the ability to repent or even if they do, they will not be given mercy from God. If we assume that they will lose the ability to repent, it seems to me that, based on what we have said so far, the damned will either not given the possibility to do so or they will not be allowed to do so. So, in other words, it is either an active punishment of God or a complete 'abandomnemnt/desertion'.
But it it is so, then, we have to think eternal damnation as an extrinsic punishment again.
Quoting boundless
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, thanks for the correction.
Quoting Leontiskos
I doubt that a Christian universalist would say that evangelization or repentance is unnecessary. They do allow that both can also happen after death. Also, I believe that universalists would say that God's help is needed for salvation.
But anyway, do you think that the main reason that one should have to evangelize, do good etc is to avoid unending torment?
Quoting Leontiskos
Let's say that the illness is actually fatal. The doctors try at first to convince the patient to take a painless drug. The patient refuses because of, say, pride. Then, the patient's pain worsens, the doctors then try to gove the patient a more heavy medicine but the patient refuses again. Then the patient's pain becomes intolerable, the doctors try to convince the patient to take a more serious medication. Maybe at a certain point, the patient will be convinced by his painful experience to take the serious medication, which will cause itself pain but it will lead to his or her healing. So, maybe, one can say that while the illness is, in fact, fatal, at a certain point the patient will be persuaded by the pain from the illness itself to take the medication.
Or maybe the illness is not fatal but leads 'only' to agonizing pain but the patient refuses to take the medicine. If the pain could go along forever, will the patient simply forever say 'no' to the medication if he or she will suffer agonizing pain?
Furthermore, the doctors here merely do not want to avoid death or pain but want that the patient will heal and be well. So the motivation isn't just to avoid pain/death but also to give the patient well-being.
Assuming that the medicines are necessary for the patient's well-being, compassionate doctors will try to convince the patient to accept them as long as is possible for them to do so.
The 'hard' universalists would say that at a certain point the 'patient' (sinner) will be convinced to take the 'medication' ('salvation') possibly by the painful experience (where the pain might be regret, a painful experience of loneliness and so on). The 'hopeful' universalists would say that there will be always hope that the 'patient' will be convinced. The traditionalist would say that the 'patient' at a certain point is beyond hope or is actively condemned to not take the 'medication' or even to not desire it.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to respond in the following days. I hope to come back by mid or the end of next week.
I think we have to establish a proper methodology if we are to avoid begging the question in these matters.
The first way to do that is to speak and listen at a single pace. I think Matthew 26:24 is incompatible with universalism, and presumably I don't need to explain why. You seem to, "See what I mean." So then, speaking and listening at a single pace, you might go on to present something in Scripture that you see as supporting universalism:
Quoting boundless
I'm not very concerned with what Augustine says (and he may well be stretching the text). I'm more interested in your argument that 1 Tim 2:3-4 supports universalism.
Verse 4 does seem to support universalism in a prima facie way, but I think that if we simply bring in the immediate context of v. 1 that thesis loses a lot of its steam. "God wills all men to be saved, and therefore it is good and acceptable in his sight that we pray and intercede for all men." The rationale here does not seem to imply universalism, given that praying for a man does not guarantee his salvation. The rationale is that God has a goal and that we contribute to that goal with prayers and intercessions. The fact that the prayers and intercessions are fallible isin this contextactually evidence that the goal is fallible. If Paul had omitted vv. 1-2 then vv. 3-4 would have had a more universalistic ring.
Further, I think the fallibility of God's (antecedent) will was the most plausible exegetical interpretation in the first place. "God wills to save all men," does not mean, "God will save all men," and this is particularly true in the Hebrew context. Finally, I don't see how this cuts against non-universalism, for I don't know of any non-universalists who deny the universal salvific will of God. Note too that in the verses preceding verse 1 Paul is talking about those who have made shipwreck of their faith, which is certainly in tension with the interpretation that all will be saved. Similarly, verse 15 gives an explicit condition for salvation, thus implying that the condition (and the salvation) may not occur. So I think the initial interpretation is incorrect, and that there are also three contextual cues that the interpretation is incorrect.
Now let's look at your objection to my verse:
Quoting boundless
I don't find this to be a strong argument at all. A pope's comments are worth very little in comparison with Scripture, especially when he is not teaching formally. I also think that the claim that the Church has never pronounced on anyone who is lost is demonstrably incorrect, and involves a remarkable whitewashing of ecclesial history (but we don't need to get lost in that debate). In fact, if someone thinks the Church has never made such a pronouncement, apparently they haven't read Matthew 26:24, where the Head of the Church seems to do exactly that. Of course, someone could argue that Judas is saved and nevertheless it is better that he had never been born, but that seems like an impossible argument. I think those who try to engage in those sorts of mental gymnastics must be pre-biased (literally pre-judiced) in favor of a particular outcome.
That was our first step. I pointed to Matthew 26:24 and you pointed to 1 Timothy 2:3-4. At this point in the theological discussion, both of us having presented one pericope, I think the universalist interpretation is less plausible. I think the Matthew text has more anti-universalist weight than the Timothy text has pro-universalist weight.
Quoting boundless
So it is odd to look for someone who you think made a bad argument (e.g. Augustine or Chrysostom), isolate their bad argument, and then infer that the oppose conclusion must be true. This is a form of invalid reasoning. I could also find people who made (putatively) bad arguments for universalism, but this would not disprove universalism. Better to actually try to make an argument for universalism from Scripture.
(I actually pointed out the problems with two scriptural arguments presented in this thread, in <this post > and <this post>.)
Now let's take another step in the theological discussion. A second verse that I find quite convincing is Luke 13:23-28. I don't know how one could read that without bias and come to the conclusion of universalism. Granted, if there were verses that support universalism as strongly as these sorts of verses oppose universalism, then the "harmonization" question would become pertinent.
Quoting boundless
Yep, again:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting boundless
I don't follow much of this, grammatically or logically. You may have to restate it in a different way.
Note that if Matthew 26:24 is true then Judas will not be saved. I'm not too concerned about whether his lack of salvation has a logical cause, or a psychological cause, or some other cause. Either way the outcome is the same. And again, at some point we have to wonder whether your term "logical possibility" has a specific meaning at all. It looks a lot like a tautology, "If everyone can repent forever, then everyone can repent forever."
Quoting boundless
I spoke about evangelization, not repentance, and I think an intellectually rigorous universalist would have to admit that evangelization is not necessary. Even on your own analogy the only reason to evangelize is to lessen pain, and the lessening of pain is in no way necessary.
Quoting boundless
I think that if our ultimate goal does not require evangelization, then evangelization is not ultimately necessary. The goal is salvation, not avoiding unending torment. Nevertheless, try to make sure that your arguments rise above a mere emotional appeal.
Quoting boundless
And maybe he won't. We have no empirical or Scriptural reason to believe that every patient eventually takes medicine. Just the opposite.
Quoting boundless
As has so often been the case in this conversation, you keep saying "maybe" when your conclusion requires that you say "necessarily." "Maybe" won't cut it for universalism, and we have already put hopeful universalism to bed (by agreeing that it is philosophically possible on the supposition of the 'maybe').
Quoting boundless
God here begins to look like the guy who tortures you until you finally give in. Or who sets up the universe in such a way that you will suffer until you finally give in.
Quoting boundless
Sure, and that's why the Church keeps at it.
Quoting boundless
Yes, correct.
Quoting boundless
If the "hard" universalist says that at a certain point the patient will be convinced to take the medication, then the traditionalist says that some patients will never take the medication.
Quoting boundless
No problem at all!
Thats fair. What I should have said is that the major and minor premise of a syllogism are both assertions.
Fair enough.
In principle, a sin is a concept which extends the concept of immorality; such that the former is an offense, at least in part, to God. We could also word this as the immoral act is simultaneously a non-sin and sin act: the offended party which is not God being the non-sin immoral act, and the offended party as God as the sin immoral act. I prefer to just say sin is any immoral act which, at least in part, offends God to keep things simpler.
True, but I think this burden is sufficed given that humans have finite dignity, a human cannot repeat a sin infinitely since they live for a finite duration, and the consequences of the sins cannot be infinite if the universe is not eternal. I think all three of those statements are widely accepted as true.
Sure, but the key point is that if you give a controversial premise then you must defend it. P2 is part of what we are differing over, and therefore it cannot be assumed (without begging the question).
Quoting Bob Ross
But that doesn't answer the question I asked. If there are no immoral acts which are not sins, then your defense doesn't work (because in that case there is no immoral act that does not offend a party with infinite dignity).
Quoting Bob Ross
If humans are not eternal then Hell doesn't exist. If humans are eternal then it is possible for an act to cause infinite "spillage."
Quoting Leontiskos
I am largely noting the ridiculousness, given I am a non-believer.
Lewis doesn't seem to understand that nature of belief, for this purpose. It isn't Evil if it comes from God. Plain and simple.
If you abandon human notions of goodness, evil and justice, then you can say anything and get away with it. The idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God being good, given the suffering in the world is incoherent because the only coherent notion of goodness we have to work with is the human one.
It amounts to a form of willful blindness that allows the God that the believer cannot, for other reasons give up, to be exonerated and thought to be not only good but the source of all good in some incomprehensible way. "God moves in mysterious ways".
To me it seems totally irrational and morally repugnant. And you only have to look at the history of the church to see how this irrational and immoral notion of good predominated and has led to unspeakable human suffering. As if life were not already difficult enough. It's truly a pernicious and disgusting mode of thought!
No, you are absolutely correct; and thats what I was arguing. The aspect of the sin which pertains to offending God is an offense against a being with infinite dignity; but whether or not the sin as it pertains to the direct object offended (e.g., the other human, the dog, the tree, etc.) is not.
Theres two interesting points here:
1. With respect to the sin qua offending God, are all sins thereby equal?. If infinite dignity warrants infinite demerit and offending God is to offend something with infinite dignity, then the part of the sin which offends God warrants infinite demerit. Every immoral act is a sin because every immoral act goes against Gods will, so, therefore, every immoral acti.e., every sinwarrants the same infinite demerit. This doesnt seem right though: like I said before, murdering a human vs. a rabbit doesnt seem to violate Gods will the same and thusly to the same degreebut how then could they have the same demerit? It seems like infinite dignity does not per se warrant infinite demerit of an act which offends it.
2. With respect to the sin qua offending the direct object (e.g., the human), an infinite punishment seems disproportionate to such an act or choice with finite duration and repetition which pertains to two or more beings with finite dignityunless, to your point, the consequences are infinite.
Hell doesnt have to exist for God to punish you after you die; at least not in the strict sense of being a place absent of God for eternity. Likewise, we are talking about the causes in the universe of ones sins and not in Hell; so I dont understand how humans being eternal in the sense of living in another place than the universe after dying necessitates their act in the universe may have infinite spillage. A human could be eternal in this sense and the universe is finite in time; which would mean that their sin would not be capable of infinite spillage.
I agree, and those points follow from the argument you gave. I am just looking at that argument and seeing where it leads.
Quoting Bob Ross
So then instead of, "If humans are not eternal then Hell doesn't exist," you could read, "If humans are not eternal then eternal punishment doesn't exist." It doesn't matter. The point is that if humans are not eternal then there is nothing to object to (and the person who believes in Hell obviously believes humans are eternal).
Quoting Bob Ross
I said that for Aquinas the infinite spillage flows out of the broken relationship between two eternal beings, namely God and a human. So if you believe that God and humans are eternal then the infinite spillage is possible. The question of whether "the universe" is eternal is not relevant to the argument I gave.
Further, those who believe that damning folk for eternity is a good thing show questionable moral judgement.
I thought by 'eternal' you meant having a part of oneself that is not subject to time. I don't see how this is necessitated from eternal punishment; e.g., God could revive people.
did you mean kindness?
That's a good point: I like that.
Sure. We are talking about goodness in relation to treatment of others, we are not talking about being good at sports, or art or science or whatever, no?
From fellow feeling, empathy, compassion, love. It can be observed in many other animals, it's not unique to humans. Where do you think it comes from?
I think the real issue is that when considering the dignity of the offended the punishment is supposed to proportionately reflect it; but how can a finite punishment proportionately reflect a being that has infinite dignity being offended?
With a being with finite dignity, we could scale up or down the punishment depending on the ends, means, and circumstances involved when the dignity is the same because the dignity has a finite weight (because it is finite itself and so a proportionate weight will likewise be finite); but with an infinitely meritorious being, this gets tricky fast.
Well, I believe that some universalists would argue that that passage on Judas means that it would be better if was aborted. Not sure I am find it convincing - after all, it is undeniable that it does seem to suggest that he would be better for him to have never coming into existince. Assuming that you are right and it disproves even 'hopeful' universalism, it's hard to get a coherent theological picture from the Bible*.
What you say about that 1 Tim 2:3-4 is also true. Even if we accept that 'everyone' really means 'all human beings without exception', the text merely says that it is God's desire to save everyone. To make another example John 3:17 taken at face value would imply that God's intention is to 'save the world'. This of course doesn't by itself imply that, indeed, everyone will be saved.
But on the other hand, IMHO the Christian tradition has been insistent to describe God in classical theistic terms. God is omnipotent, omniscent, God's will is changeless and so on. How can God desire the salvation of the 'world' if He already knows that some will not be saved? If God is omnipotent, can God's will be frustrated?
So, it would seem to me that a classical theist way to understand the passages that seem to indicate God's universal salvific will is to simply deny that God's will is to 'offer the possibility of salvation' to all or something like that. Otherwise, the loss of someone would be a tragedy, a frustration of God's changeless plans.
* There are, indeed, some Biblical passages that seem to indicate that God 'changed his mind'. In Exodus 32:7-14 we do find a passage like that. Taken literally, it says that God changed his mind. But a classical theist would find such a literalist way to interpret the passage unacceptable. So, it would seem that nobody takes literallyeverything that the Bible says about God. Interestingly, if Moses' prayer did change God's plans, this would actually reinforce give an additional argument to the universalists. 1 Tim 2:1 says that we shall pray for everyone because it actually helps them. Anyway, a classical theist reading of the passage of the Exodus is clearly 'on surface' against what the text 'literally' says.
It seems to me then that a 'exegetical debate' doesn't give us compelling arguments.
Quoting Leontiskos
Probably you are right. But then, if we want to really have a theological debate, we need to get a coherent picture of God, it would seem.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, sorry for that. Anyway, I didn't want to 'prove' universalism by questioning their arguments. I just wanted to point out that even in those times there wasn't a consensus on how to interpret some ambigous passages.
Anyway, point taken, I should have at least clarify why I 'invoked' St Chrysostom's thoughts.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, that's a tautology, but it is a tautology that follows from what we have been saying and agreeing upon. We agreed that in this life it is said that it is always possible to repent, even if we can fix in sin our own will. So the possibility of repentance can't be excluded by the claim that we can make 'mortal sins'. Arguably, this is also true in the afterlife, unless either it is seen as an extrinsic punishment of God or God doesn't give them other chances to repent. But why would God not allow the possibility of a sincere repentance at a certain point?
Does God change His mind? Did God decide from the start that the possibility of salvation is offered during life and after death there is no chance?
Asking these questions is important to understand the picture of God a doctrine is making.
Quoting Leontiskos
Frankly, I am not sure why you think I am making 'emotional appeals'. I'll just ignore this insinuation.
The point is that an universalist might still say that evangelization (in some form) is needed for repentance. Of course the universalist says that salvation can happen after this life, so evangelisation is this life isn't strictly necessary for salvation. But it is certainly a cooperation to God's salvific plan (which is the salvation of all in the universalist view).
Quoting Leontiskos
In philosophical discussions I use always terms like 'maybe', 'it seems' and so on because I recognize that I can be wrong. I can't exclude that I might miss something in my reasoning, so I'll say 'it seems to me', 'maybe' ans so on.
Quoting Leontiskos
You seem to have missed the point here. In the analogy it isn't God who tortures but the illness. If you like, remove the word 'illness' and think about, say, a substance abuse. Arguably, the torment of the patient would be caused by free actions of the patient himself or herself, at least initially. The compassionate doctors will try always to heal the patient. Assuming that the doctors will try forever to heal the patient, will the patient at a certain point be irrecuperable.
Quoting Leontiskos
And yet, at a certain point, it seems that God and the Church simply stop to do that. Is it because the sinners at a certain point will be irrecuperable? If so, why?
Quoting Leontiskos
Good!
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, I agree.
But note one thing, however. Let's assume that the illness is caused by the patient's free choices (like in the case of substance abuse). That is, the patient is actually responsible for his or her ill-being.
In both the 'universalist' and 'traditionalist' cases, the doctors want to save the patient. Only in one case, however, the doctors' will is realized. In the other, it won't.
In the form case, the end is the hoped one.
In the latter case, the end is tragic. Of course, it is not a refutation of the latter scenario, but it is interesting to note that.
It seems like the same conclusion would follow even if the text means that it would have been better for Judas to have been aborted.
Quoting boundless
I think that's right. I think we could find lots of examples in Scripture where God desires or wills to do something and yet that thing does not ultimately materialize.
Quoting boundless
Classical theism has always distinguished God's antecedent from consequent will (or else has drawn other divisions that amount to the same thing). That said, the body of literature on foreknowledge or predestination and future contingents is very large.
Quoting boundless
All we need to ask is whether it is more plausible to affirm or deny universalism, given some text. Whether the text pushes us in one direction or another. What someone finds "compelling" is fairly subjective.
Quoting boundless
I'm glad you agree.
Quoting boundless
Fair enough.
Quoting boundless
I think my example of the opium addict contradicted this idea. Empirically speaking, it seems that it is not always possible to reverse direction. Doctrinally speaking, we do not foreclose hope for the living. But here we are talking about the "logical" point, and that is what I was questioning. That is what seems tautological.
Quoting boundless
Based on what argument? It seems like you want to assume that the afterlife is no different than earthly life, and I can't think of any reason to assume that. Almost everything we do in earthly life is changed by death. Why think the ability to repent is different? There is nothing else in earthly life to which we would be tempted to say, "I'll save that for after I die," and yet you seem to think that repentance could be saved for after we die. That cuts across the grain of all our earthly experience, and I think Christianity is being deeply rational when it says that repentance too cannot be postponed until after death. The urgency found in Scripture testifies to just the opposite.
Quoting boundless
Right, and as I've said, the logical contradiction is more pronounced than that. The universalist can say that Z is inevitable, that Z cannot occur without Y, and that Y cannot occur unless we do X. But this is a contradiction. They are holding that Z is inevitable and that it depends on a contingent X. Nothing which depends on a contingent event is inevitable. The universalist who thinks the free and contingent act of evangelization is necessary is actually involved in a logical contradiction. This is why universalists who leave religion behind are being eminently rational.
Quoting boundless
Okay, sorry, I must have misread you.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting boundless
Where does the illness come from? It comes from the universe that God set up. So it still looks like the universalist God "sets up the universe in such a way that you will suffer until you finally give in."
If suffering tends to produce a certain outcome, then infinite suffering will necessarily produce that outcome. On this view there are some people who decide to love God freely, and there are others who are forced to love God after an extended period of suffering pushes them into that outcome. Even on Manichean dualism this looks like a problematic view, namely because it is coercive.
Quoting boundless
Because that's what reason tells us. It's also what Scripture tell us. Death constitutes a finality. That's the reasonable position. It is far less reasonable to hold that things can be postponed until after death than to hold that things must be done before death. The position that repentance can be postponed until after death can be logically possible and highly unreasonable at one and the same time. Perhaps we have been focusing too heavily on logical possibility. On purely philosophical premises, everything apart from a formal contradiction is logically possible, which means that almost everything is logically possible.
Quoting boundless
Yep.
Okay, but I don't know of any theists who hold that God artificially extends human existence in that manner.
1. There is a way the world ought to be only if there is a God.
2. There is a way the world ought to be, even though the world is not the way it ought to be.
3. Therefore, there is a God.
Interested in your thoughts.
Why do you say that?
I think there must be a source of kindness. People aren't always kind, so people can't be the source of kindness. Only one who is kind necessarily, God, could be the source of kindness. People are sometimes kind. And so there must be a God who is the source of that kindness.
I am a theist that does not believe in an eternal immaterial mind/soul but that because God is all just God must resurrect at least those that did not get proper reward or punishment during their lifetimes [to reward or punish them].
We think there is a way the world ought to be because it is far from being the way we would like it to be, so I don't see how God comes into it. If there is a way the world ought to be and if there is a God who could have made it that way, then why didn't he?
2. is kind of a redundant expression: if the world was the way it ought to be, then the world would be as it ought to be, so if there is a way the world ought to be and it is not, then that the world is not as it ought to be is a given.
3. I can't see any way in which "therefore there is a God" follows, unless it is simply stipulated in the first premise, in which case it is a circular argument. Also are we talking about the human world or the natural world or both?
Ok, I'll try to check.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, sometimes it's just seem hard to change direction even in this life. I can agree with that. But sometimes, religious literature itself make some incredible examples of redemption in cases of people that seemed beyond any hope for that (both inside Christian traditions and outside... if you read the case of Angulimala, in the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures, you find an incredible case of 'change of mind' of a criminal that occurred during the encounter with the Buddha).
In any case, I believe that experience is indecisive here. Given these extreme cases, I would say, however, that we have good ground to believe that the 'change' can always happen (and that's one reason why I think that, say, death penalty is incompatible with Christian beliefs).
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, I don't think that if there is a future life, it will be like this one. My point was based in these assumptions:
If one accepts these propositions, the simple logical conclusion (whether or not one thinks that God's salvific will will inevitably be realized) is that repentance will always be possible, unless in the after life some kind of fourth proposition is true. Like, say:
I believe that the second propositions here would contradict the second proposition in the first series. In the case of the first here, it certainly would raise the question on why God would place a 'time limit' if He truly wants the salvation for all. The third would remain. Here, one must assume that one can be incurable even for God, so it's logically impossible even for God to save the irremediably obstinate (I believe that St John of Damascus had this view). If I am not misunderstanding you, you would choose the third option here. After all, you do not view this matter in a legalistic way (in which case, you probably would have reasoned like in the second option here).
While this possibility doesn't contradict the three propositions of the first series, it is difficult to me reconcile it with the properties of God that classical theism abscribed. For instance, how can God's ominiscence allow the possibility that God wants the salvation of a persons even if He knows that that person will not be saved? But I'll probably need to do some readings on this topic.
Quoting Leontiskos
Out of curiosity, do you believe that being evangelized is a necessary requirement for salvation? What about those who never heard the gospel, are they beyond any hope?
Quoting Leontiskos
You're welcome.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, I see it more like an education. That's why I mentioned the substance abuse thing.
Let's say that in order to live in a true communion with God, one must sincerely accept God. For any person, the communion with God is the highest good, so any person will find true satisfaction only in communion with God (something like even St. Augustine would say...I don't think it is controversial for you). However, God let us the possibility of rejection, because if there were not such a possibility, we would not be able to freely accept God's grace. However, if one rejects God, such a person would act against one's own nature, after all, and would experience painful consequences (like, say, deciding to do a substance abuse and experiencing the consequences associated with that). The more one rejects God, the more one deprives himself the highest good for him. The experience of painful consequences of these rejections (whether in the form of remorse, the experience of exclusion and so on) could lead to a 'change of mind', precisely because the sinner here finds no ultimate satisfaction elsewhere and might become aware that his or her rejections were, after all, mistakes and then choose the good (also, if we accept that evil is privation, it would seem that it isn't inexhaustible).
So, in a sense, yes, I would say that it is the assumption that God's salvific will is universal and created people in a way that their heart is restless unless in communion with God that seems to provide an 'apparent determinism'. If you don't think that this is compatible with free will, then, the reasoning above definitely supports the idea that nobody will be beyond hope (unless one can be indeed 'incurable' even for God).
If, however, one assumes that God's salvific will is universal and created people in a way that their heart is restless unless in comunion with God and someone will never be saved, at a certain point God's salvific will is not realized and so one might ask why God allowed that possibility.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok, I see. It is just difficult to me to reconcile there can't be 'other chances' after a life of finite and uncertain duration with the idea that God's salvific will is indeed universal and God created us in a way that our hearts cannot find any ultimate satisfaction outside communion with God, assuming at least that immortality will be given to all.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok, thanks!
Quoting Leontiskos
I hope that I clarified thay my difficulty is that I can't seem to able to reconcile the traditional doctrine of unending hopeless torment with other various traditional doctrines (all of them, I suppose can find support in Scripture). It's difficult to me that one can sincerely believe in something that finds incoherent or in a group of ideas that seems difficult to reconcile with each other. So, I don't think that I would be persuaded by an 'exegetical debate' if I am not persuaeded that, indeed, the traditional doctrine of hell is indeed compatible with other traditional doctrines.
Edited for clarity (I hope)
Okay, fair enough. I would agree that if humans are not eternal by nature then Hell doesn't make sense, similar to the way that it would not make sense to punish someone for 200 years if they only exist for 100 years (or more generally, to act on a substance for x+y duration if the substance only exists for x duration). And I don't think we need to explore too deeply the idea of God artificially prolonging the existence of a substance.
Yes, there are definitely those cases, which is part of why we don't give up hope for the living.
Quoting boundless
What is decisive, if not experience?
Quoting boundless
What evidence do we have that change takes place after death?
Quoting boundless
But don't you think we will be able to repent in the afterlife, as we can in earthly life? Isn't that precisely what you are claiming?
Quoting boundless
No, that's simply not the logical conclusion. Maybe try to write an argument with inference rules if you think that is a valid conclusion.
The additional premise you need is
Quoting boundless
But it's a strawman. No one has said that God decreed an arbitrary time limit. What is being said is that every piece of evidence we have shows death to be definitive. The only organic opposition to this conclusion is found in traditions which hold to reincarnation, which nevertheless does not posit progress in a disembodied state.
And there is also Scriptural evidence for such a view. The first example that comes to mind is Luke 16:19-31.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting boundless
I think you need to face up to this logical contradiction in your view, as I've been pointing to it for quite awhile now. Do you have any answer to this argument about the fact that something cannot be contingent and inevitable at the same time?
I don't think one can logically hold that evangelization is necessary unless they reject universalism. Regarding evangelization and sacramentality, <here> is a conversation about a helpful historical study, hosted by a Balthsarian.
Quoting boundless
That's right, and I've explained why your view rejects that possibility. To say that one can reject God for a finite amount of time but not forever is to say that one can never ultimately reject God.
Quoting boundless
Ergo: coercion, as I've explained. On this view the makeup of creation coerces humans to eventually accept God. They literally have no other option.
Quoting boundless
The idea that no one can ultimately reject God contradicts the idea that God can be rejected in a meaningful sense.
Quoting boundless
That's fair, but it's worth noting that Christianity has found Hell to be more compatible with Christianity than universalism to be compatible with Christianity, for 2,000 years, to such an extent that the universalist position has been extremely historically rare. The literal logical contradiction with the urgency of evangelization is a great example of why universalism is incompatible with Christianity.
Like so many issues, if one approaches this objectively then I think universalism loses by a long shot. Suppose we take an agnostic who has no "horse in the race" and give them the Bible, or Christian tradition, or arguments from experience, or philosophical deductions. Would they come to the conclusion of universalism if they have no predetermined desire for it to be true or false? I don't think so. I don't think they will come to the conclusion that any of these sources support universalism. Another way to see this is to note how much of Christian tradition and Scripture universalists end up shrugging off. For example, Hart is forced to translate Matthew 25:46 as, "And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age." This is completely nuts, as the text is clearly paralleling two eternal destinies: punishment and life. If Hart wants "the chastening" to be temporary, then he has to admit a temporary Heaven. :grin: I am just not capable of that level of mental gymnastics.
Note too that when I wanted to attend to methodology, presenting one verse at a time and seeing whether the set of pro-universalist or anti-universalist verses looks to possess more force, I was prepared to present a large number of verses that are strongly anti-universalist. You ignored my question about Luke 13:23-28, which was the next piece of evidence I had planned to present. The point is that I have been acting merely defensively in this thread. If I were to go on the "offensive" and start providing all of the Christian evidence for Hell then I believe the scales would tip even further.
Sorry - I am getting tired of this conversation. I feel like I've answered the points you've raised and now I'm just repeating myself. For example, I have explained multiple times the contradiction between a contingent means and a necessary end, and you keep offering long considerations that do not actually help you in avoiding that contradiction.
We could have another 30,000 word exchange on the interview with Lusvardi, but I don't want to do that. As I said, I don't want to spend so much of my free time discussing Hell. I think we've had an interesting and fruitful conversation, but I don't want it to go on forever. Maybe this is a good place to stop. Or at the very least, let's draw it to a close in the next few posts.
Here is Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) speaking to the doctrine more directly than he does in Spe Salvi:
Quoting Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life
As I said some time ago, I am an agnostic and I wanted to make this discussion philosophical/theological but not exegetical or mainly exegetical. Not because I don't believe that exegesis is unimportant, but because I simply I do not have the education to make a serious exegetical discussion. Also, I don't know all the Christian universalists' answer to the verses and passages you cite (which might vary BTW among the universalists). Finally, I don't think that I am going to be persuaded about these kind of arguments, unless I find a convincing philosophical defence of the traditional doctrine of hell. To me none of the defences that I read have been convincing, mostly due to the fact that, in my opinion, they are difficult to reconcile with other, in fact, traditional doctrines.
If you are right about your claims regarding Scriptures and/or Tradition either these two things are true: (1) the traditional doctrine of hell is true or (2) Scriptures and/or Tradition are wrong in this respect.
Having made this premise, let's consider again what we said before and the things about which we agreed upon.
First, about repentance. It seemed to me that we did agree that the possibility to commit mortal sins, orienting the will to sin, alone is not enough to explain the thesis that it is at a certain point it's simply impossible to repent.
(Incidentally, I believe that the dogma that during this life it's assumed that it's always possible to repent lends support for this conclusion. it's interesting that you seem to say that experience here suggests to us that in some cases even during this life repentance is not possible... to me this would contradict the dogma.)
So, either the future life will be quite different from this life and the orientation of the will, will be inalterable for the sinners or not. If it will be, then, the thing remains unexplained. You mention that change of the will is not possible while disembodied, but at the same time you also believe in the resurrection (why, however, change is not possible while disembodied is something not obvious to me). But, anyway, the orientation of the will alone isn't enough to explain that the damned are beyond any hope. I believed we did agree with this.
This leads, in my opinion, to the conclusion that something else is needed to explain the hopelessness about the fate of the damned, especially if one believes that God, indeed, has a universal salvific will. It would appear to me that if God's desire/will is to save everybody, then creating the conditions that someone might be beyond any hope of salvation at a given point is problematic. The only possibility here is to claim that the sinner can become incurable even for God.
A problem with classical theism, however, is that God is assumed to be omniscent and, if I recall correctly, God already knows how everything will end. So, in this case, it is weird to me to think that God would desire that everybody if He already knows that some will never be saved*. So, probably, this means that what God wants is just to offer salvation to everybody, rather than to save everybody (which however is difficult to reconcile with the view of a God that desires and actively acts for the best of the creatures He loves... also it is quite strange to say that God offers salvation of everybody but He doesn't want that those who He is offering salvation will accept it). Or, maybe, the classical conception of Omniscence has to be modified. Or maybe I did misunderstood the concept.
Regarding the 'cohercion' part, well, I am not sure that this is coercion. After all, if one believes that the human highest Good is communion with God, then, it simply part of the human nature to have some kind of inclination for that Good, which maybe at some point would orient the will to that Good. Anyway, even if you were correct, it would not exclude the hope in universal salvation.
FInally, regarding the evangelization, you continue to think that the traditional view of hell is essential for it. It might be. I don't know. But to me the traditional view of hell is necessary for evangelization if either (1) one believes that all the unevangelized will go to the traditional hell or (2) believing in the traditional view of hell is necessary to evangelize or (3) if a Christian doesn't evangelize will go to the traditional hell. Perhaps, there are other possible reasons that I am not understading right now.
I said that universalists generally allude to other possible motivation for evangelization, which you don't find convincing.
Anyway, I want to thank you for this discussion. It is has been an interesting discussion for me. Possibly, you are right that it's time to stop the conversation for now at least.
*Edit: or even if God expects that some will not be saved without 'truly' knowing it.
Let me give my diagnosis, which is more general.
When we draw a conclusion we require premises. In this conversation we have to be mindful of where the premises are coming from. So if someone says, "Eternal punishment is unjust," we need to ask about where their premises about justice are coming from. And if someone says, "Eternal punishment is incompatible with God," then we have to ask where their premises about God are coming from. And if someone says, "Eternal punishment is incompatible with Christianity," then we need to ask where their premises about Christianity are coming from.
The difficult thing in this conversation is that you keep claiming to make arguments from "logical possibility." The problem is that there simply is no such thing as an inference to an empirical state of affairs from logical possibility. We cannot infer a particular fact about reality from "logical possibility." Granted, one can say, "Hopeful universalism is justified on logical possibility," but this is merely to claim that hopeful universalism does not contain within itself a logical contradiction, and as I've said, most things do not contain within themselves logical contradictions.
So as soon as the conversation moves from, "My position is not logically impossible," to some stronger and more substantive claim, the discussion naturally becomes enormously more complicated. At the beginning of the thread I was the one claiming that eternal punishment is not logically impossible, or else that it is not impossible given certain minimal premises, and it is obviously very hard for opponents to argue that eternal punishment is impossible. In order to do that, they have to supply premises, but since there is some unfamiliarity with philosophical argumentation, therefore many have no clear sense of what sort of premises they are drawing upon to try to justify their claim that eternal punishment is impossible. Strictly speaking what is needed is a formal argument for the conclusion.
Quoting boundless
Right: if we hold to the single premise about the possibility of mortal sin, then we have excluded hopeful universalism. Note though that "mortal sin" may not be the best term for this, given its orientation towards death (as a definite reality and state).
Quoting boundless
This is a matter of two different premises, which I tried to explain earlier. The idea is that the dogma does not bear on metaphysics, but rather on hope. We are not to give up hope while someone is still alive.
Whether that is a true dogma would be interesting to investigate. At the very least it is a strong doctrine.
Quoting boundless
Sure, but this pertains to the burden of proof. I don't see that I have the burden of proof regarding the idea that death presents an endpoint for human activities, particularly activities of change. When you phrase it in such a way one is led to believe that the a priori or assumptive position is hopeful universalism, and anyone who wants to challenge that position has the burden of proof.
Or in other words, you want to draw the conclusion of hopeful universalism, and yet that conclusion is not in any way secured by the claim,
1. If we assume the mere premise of the possibility of mortal sin, then hopeful universalism is not excluded
2. We assume and agree to the premise of the possibility of mortal sin
3. Therefore, hopeful universalism is not yet excluded
4. Therefore, hopeful universalism is true
(4) does not follow. Put differently, no one has claimed that the hopelessness of the damned follows from the mere premise of "mortal sin" (or the ability to place one's end in something other than God).
When I say that "mortal sin" does not exclude universalism (or hopeful universalism), this is a very minimal claim (because I do not actually limit myself to the premise of "mortal sin"). This part of the discussion goes back to Aquinas' response to the first objection. What he is doing there is responding to an objection; not giving a sufficient argument for Hell.
(Incidentally, I think Hart's conclusion is disproportionately reliant on the premise of Platonic metaphysics, namely the ineluctability of the Good. I've covered this in my exchange with @Count Timothy von Icarus. Similarly, I think the intuitions of the West now oppose Hell, for all sorts of reasons. So I am not surprised that Westerners are intuitively opposed to Hell and thus believe the burden of proof lies elsewhere.)
Quoting boundless
Again, this is either the topic of foreknowledge and future contingents or else the topic of predestination and future contingents, both of which are very large topics with lots of different ideas, solutions, objections, etc. It's actually a much larger topic than universalism.
But the general idea of a free will defense is quite simple: God is free and humans are free, and whenever one free being desires or wills that something happen for another free being, as long as that effect is contingent upon the patient's freedom it is not necessary or inevitable. The idea of willing something contingent is a basic notion between free beings. So on Christianity God wants all free beings to be saved but he does not force them, and their fate is not necessary/inevitable.
Quoting boundless
We have a situation where everyone will do something no matter what. There is no possibility for them to do anything else. If that isn't coercion then I'm not sure what is. As far as I know, the only theologians who would not see that as coercion are, ironically, Calvinists. Most theologians would say that if an agent necessitates an outcome vis-a-vis agents, then the agents are being coerced. Only Calvinists explicitly reject the idea that necessitation is sufficient for coercion.
Quoting boundless
If God coerces everyone to be saved then universalism is true. No need to hope.
Quoting boundless
Rather, I've pointed out that universalism is incompatible with rational motivation towards evangelization, not that Hell is the only possibility. The problem is that on universalism the end is inevitable, and it is irrational to deploy contingent means in order to achieve an inevitable end. Evangelization is only rationally motivated if the end is contingent.
Quoting boundless
Sounds good. I'm glad it has been helpful. I think it was fruitful and I appreciate your candor and thoughtfulness. I think this was a good summary post that you wrote. I am happy to give you the last word unless you actually want me to respond to something further.
This is essentially the old question of: "why was man not created perfect, such that he did not fall?"
I agree, it's a difficult oneone theologians have grappled with from the begining. One obvious point to bring up is that, if God's essence is unknowable, then man never had full access to the Good that would attract the willthat Good "on which the ranks of angels dare not gaze."
But for historical man, the answer is easier. Man is born into sin: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me (Psalm 51:5). St. Gregory Palamas describes the truly relevant death that entered through Adam as separation from God, sin. But sin is also slavery, the opposite of freedom.
They don't though. Who, upon laying hold of finite goods, says "I am complete, I want for nothing," and then goes catatonic because they have reached absolute rest? Absolute no one. That's an empirical fact pointing in the other direction. Man is constantly striving in pursuit of finite goods. The vice-addled man doesn't "get enough" and then desist from his vices. The junkie doesn't shoot up and then say, "I am now complete, I will no longer strive after junk," just as the billionaire isn't content with their first hundred billion, nor the conquerer with just half of Europe. People attain fleeting satisfaction from worldly goods, that's it.
Humans have an intrinsic appetite for an infinite goodness. This is what defines the rational soul, its orientation towards Goodness and Truth themselves. This is one of the phenomenological arguments for the existence of such an infinite good (at least as an intentional object) that is rolled fairly often. Even atheists like Leopardi acknowledge "the insufficiency of every pleasure to satisfy the spirit within us." Likewise, it's often a facet of human life that is commonly rolled out to refute materialism. If materialism were true, we [I]should[/I] be absolutely satisfied by finite goods, but we aren't.
To choose something is not to find rest in it.
I don't think that's the case though. Were it so, it would mean that human life and history is only given meaning by a final reward or punishment that is extrinsic to history (and really, it would be the punishment that matters, since you're saying universal reward would render life meaningless). History would have no telos outside the extrinsic eschatological horizon. I would imagine that even many defenders of a hell of infinite duration would not want to argue that human life and history is only given meaning by the threat of damnation. That would be to elevate damnation to the force that gives human existence meaning.
Right, Aristotle and Thomas both say man cannot choose to be oriented towards the Good or not, only the means of pursuing goodness. That's why I don't get why you are calling this specifically a "Platonic" view of the will. It's all over the patristics and scholastics.
Now many of the patristics hold to perpetual punishment, but they do so in quite extrinsic terms. John Chrysostom, for instance, describes an end to sin, but continued punishment for the damned. St. Maximus is less clear, but there it also seems that any punishment would have to be an extrinsic limit on the damned. My point was that the wholly intrinsic punishment makes no sense outside a theory of the will as ultimately not oriented towards the Good, but rather as an arbitrary power. Otherwise, the soul would always be oriented towards repentance as its natural end (and presumably could be motivated towards this end).
This also jives better with Scripture in many ways than something like "people choosing lesser goods in a sort of false contentment for eternity" (e.g. Lewis' vision). The terms used for Hell are positive, "chastisement/punishment." The images are of an outer darkness filled with wailing and a lake of fire. I do not get the impression that Hell is something people will positively choose in any respect, which is another reason why the idea of a wholly intrinsic punishment has never sat well with me.
The second question is whether an extrinsic punishment of infinite temporal duration is just, discussed earlier.
The end of all things is God, so it's true that it is not the rational soul that uniquely specifies this end. However, the rational soul includes our attraction to Goodness and Truth. A human being without these would be a human being without a will and intellect, which is, IMO, no longer a human being.
That point seems ancillary to the discussion though.
Let's start from here. "It is good because God loves it," points out that good is derived from God. There is an equivalence proposed by Alston..... "We ought to love one another because God commands us to do so." So, loving your neighbors is morally good because God commands us to do so. It should follow then that doing anything bad is to go against God's commands.
Now, going against God's commands..... that should be real offensive to God.
As an extra, the Christian God can forgive any amount of sins that you may commit.... unless you blaspheme the holy spirit. That is when you're beyond saving.
Matthew 12:3032: "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.