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Does Hell exist?

It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them. Saint Isaac of Nineveh, circa 650 CE

Would God, who knows the fate of everyone ever born, or who will be born, consign some of his creatures to eternal torment in Hell? This is the question raised by those who believe in Hell. Can you really imagine a loving God who would do this? David Bentley Hart can’t, and I follow his argument in That All Shall Be Saved.

But doesn’t the New Testament tell us that bad people will go to Hell?

If you read the Bible closely, you will see that it says nothing about eternal Hell. Paul believed that all are bound in disobedience to God. But only so that God might show mercy to us all (Romans 11:32). Not one word in Paul, or the Gospel of John, refers to an everlasting Hell. First Timothy says simply that God “intends all human beings to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth.” (2:4) This is called the doctrine of universal salvation or universal reconciliation. People may go to Hell, but they will be redeemed like all the others when Christ returns.

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C. S Lewis, A Grief Observed and my grief

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed and my grief.

This is my second post on C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, the story of his loss of his beloved wife, Joy. Their relationship is portrayed in the movie, Shadowlands.

In my first post, I compared Lewis’ loss with the accounts of a pair of literary writers, Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion. In this post I compare Lewis’ loss with my own recent loss of my wife of forty years, E. This post feels different; my loss is still so raw.

Lewis lost his faith—for a little while. I have less faith to lose.

Actually, it’s not quite true to say Lewis lost his faith in God. He lost his faith in a benevolent God, imaging that God inflicts pain because he can.

Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’? (p 41)

What reason, he asks, can we have, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is good? Doesn’t all the evidence suggest the opposite? What have we to set against it? We set Christ against it. But what if Christ were mistaken? “Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning.” (p 42)

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Kierkegaard on Prayer. Who Knew?

Three times I’ve posted on Kierkegaard. I thought I understood him. He is an existentialist for whom belief in God is a subjective truth. The decision cannot be justified; one can barely give reasons. All one can know is what one knows about any subjective truth: that it is based on a decision to believe it. No wonder that Kierkegaard is often called the first existentialist.

Recently I came across a book of Kierkegaard’s prayers. You could say I should have known about his prayers before. Perhaps I should of, but philosophers don’t write about this aspect of Kierkegaard’s work. Neither do most theologians. It seems irrelevant to most of them. It shouldn’t be. The prayers turned my view of Kierkegaard upside down.

Kierkegaard’s prayers

I’ll just summarize the content of several of the prayers. You will lose the poetry, but you’ll get the idea.

“Thou hast loved us first” (prayer 8), Kierkegaard asks God to help us avoid the seductions of the world, and to love others as much as we love ourselves.
“Thy forgiveness” (prayer 21). We are to forgive others seventy times seven. Will you, God, ever tire of forgiving us?
“For faith” (prayer 27). Teach me not to get bogged down in stifling reflection, but simply to have faith.
“To know thy will” (prayer 37). Keep us vigilant so that we may work for our salvation through fear and trembling.* But “grant that we may hear also a gentle voice murmuring to us that we are Thy children, so that we will cry with joy, Abba, Father.”

The first sentence of the last prayer sounds like the Kierkegaard I am familiar with, the author who dwelt on the anxiety and dread that accompanies the life of the faithful. But the second sentence is like that of a little boy rushing to sit on the lap of his beloved father. Abba is best translated here as “daddy.”

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Karl Barth: Did his adultery affect his theology?

Karl Barth is an interesting creature (a favorite term of his). He led the German church’s resistance to the Nazi takeover of the Protestant church. He was removed from his teaching position, and deported from Germany when he refused to sign the loyalty oath to Hitler. After the war he returned to Germany, where he helped restore the church. He was the most influential theologian of the twentieth century (though I think I’ve said this about a couple of other theologians). Barth was on the cover of Time magazine on April 20, 1962.

God as the opposite of man

Barth is best known among theologians for his book on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and Church Dogmatics. The latter is over six million words long, in five volumes. It was incomplete at the time of his death.

Barth was a great critic of liberal theology, the reigning theology of the day. Liberal theology said that the claims of Christianity must stand in continuity with the highest moral ideals of a culture. If no continuity exists, the gospel will be morally unintelligible. Basing Christianity solely on revelation, said Adolf von Harnack, erases the history of Israel and the church (Reader, p 56).

Barth’s opposition to liberal theology is influenced by his own historical experience. If theology is not rooted in scripture alone, then it’s too easy to move from judging scripture by creaturely needs, as he puts it, to judging scripture by the needs of the Führer. It is not difficult to read the history of the German church this way, which ended up accepting a bishop approved by Hitler, and a ban on converted Jews.

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Moltmann’s Crucified God in light of the recent death of my wife

Jürgen Moltmann, a German theologian about whom I’ve written a couple of posts looks at God not from on high, but from the perspective of a God broken on the cross. God is a God who suffers for us and with us.

I think this is the best way to think about God, but I’m not sure how much comfort it provides. I write this post within several weeks of the death of my wife after a long and painful illness. I’m sure it makes a difference in my attitude toward Moltmann.

The Crucified God, the work Moltmann claimed as his favorite, wrestles with Christ’s cry of abandonment, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani). It is with these words, and the image of a dying Christ on the cross, with which all serious thought about God must begin.

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Review of N. T. Wright, Simply Jesus

Most of my posts express an opinion. This post is a little different, sticking more closely to the text of N. T. Wright’s Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters. About much I disagree with Wright, but his is such a fine example of a scholarly work accessible to educated laymen and women that it deserves a special place. I’ll save most of my criticism for the conclusion.

“I have done my best,” says Wright, “to explore the meaning of the phrase Jesus used as the great slogan for his project, the kingdom of God.” (loc 108) His answer is that the kingdom of God is now, not just in the future. God’s kingdom is not where we go after we die; it’s where we live now.

When Jesus healed people, when he ate and drank with ordinary people, offering forgiveness freely to those who stood outside society, it wasn’t just an example of a future reality. This was reality itself. This is what it looked like when God was in charge. This is what it means when Christ teaches us to pray “on earth as it is in heaven.” (p 106)

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Consenting to die

Thoughts on consenting to die.

Do not go gentle into that good night;

Old age should burn and rave against the close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

These lines are from a famous poem, but Dylan Thomas is wrong. Simone Weil gives us some of the reasons. For Weil, heaven and hell are essentially the same. Both are a cover for nothingness. We come from the void and we return to the void. Heaven is the nothingness of consent to the void. Hell is the refusal to accept nothingness as the destiny of the soul. The only difference is whether we accept or refuse this nothingness. In consenting to die, we share in the transcendent value of God (McCullough, p 188). Why? Because we no longer belong to a world in which the self and its desires come first. Or as Weil put it, “The self is only the shadow of sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a being.” (GG, p35)

When I consent to die, I thank God for my existence, the tremendous, miraculous fact and privilege of existing. I did not have to be; nothing that exists had to be. My existence on this earth is a gift beyond measure. But because I live, I must also die. Not just every living thing, but every thing that exists must die.* Only the time scale varies, from minutes for some insects, years for human beings, to aeons (a billion years) for the earth itself.

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The Kingdom of God is Within

The kingdom of God. I’ve always wondered what the term “kingdom of God” meant. What I’ve learned is that it’s complicated. The term kingdom of God (βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦo) occurs 162 times in the New Testament. It’s important because it concerns our relationship with God. Is the kingdom coming for us? Do we make it ourselves through the work of our hearts and hands? Is God’s rule now or sometime in the future? Or both?

There seems to be no difference between the terms kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew uses the latter because Jews, who were his primary audience, would have been uneasy with frequent references to the sacred name of God (Turner, p 41). Mark and Luke refer to the kingdom of God, and so shall I.

The kingdom of God can refer to the second coming of Christ, when the world would be become God’s kingdom (Weiss, Schweitzer). Or, the kingdom of God can refer to the new world already begun by Christ, the first advent. We must work to make it happen, but at the same time it is already here, in the work of those who would bring it about. This is called realized eschatology, or a variant, inaugurated eschatology, depending on the degree to which you think the kingdom is already present. But using the right term is not so important. Important is the idea that the kingdom of God has, in some measure, already begun with the life and death of Christ (Perrin, pp 1-2).

If the kingdom of God has begun with the life of Christ, what are we to do? How does it happen? One answer is that it happens because individuals have made the kingdom of God their own. Inspired by their own experience of the kingdom of God, some men and women work to make the world in its image. A variant of this view (it seems like all there are is variants) is that the kingdom of God is unfolding in the course of history, and best realized in utopian communities and the like. Personalism is associated with this view in Catholic theology (Alford, pp 59-63). As for me, it seems as if history is headed in the wrong direction, at least in the terrible twentieth-century.

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