“The concept of retribution is that the evildoer should be deprived of happiness to in proportion to the wrongfulness or harmfulness of the act. The proportionality objection to hell would not be that a certain amount of time passing is going to take the guilt away, but rather that no action is infinitely bad or infinitely harmful, and so the proporitionality requirement can be met in a finite length of time, and the eternity of hell isn't necessary. It doesn't imply that guilt diminises with time, it just says that after a certain amount of happiness is deprived from the wrongdoer, the punishment can end, because the crime has been paid for. So the reasoning in the Polanski case doesn't apply here.”
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2009/10/retribution-hell-and-roman-polanski.html
This is confused. By his own admission, opponents of everlasting punishment regard the duration of the punishment as, itself a punishment. And they equate disproportionate punishment with disproportionate duration.
Therefore, their objection only makes sense under the presumption that guilt diminishes over time. If not, then why would the everlasting duration of the punishment be unjust? Unless the damned are less culpable with the passage of time, why would the duration of the punishment be disproportionate?
“There are two standard responses to it. One if that in the case of sin, the offended party is God, and therefore sin, (unlike crime) can and always does deserve an infinite punishment. That seemed more plausible back when people were thought of as standing on different levels of the Great Chain of Being, and a crime against a nobleman was thought more heinous than a crime against a commoner, for that reason only.”
i) That’s a skewed way of putting it. Let’s state the principle more accurately. Social obligations are often a matter of degree.
For example, we have laws against animal cruelty. Let’s say it’s wrong to inflict wanton harm on a dog. However, it’s worse to inflict wanton harm on a child.
Likewise, it’s worse to cheat your own mother than it is to cheat on a spelling test.
Our greatest obligations are to God, since he is the source of our being and wellbeing. Therefore, the worst sins are sins of ingratitude towards our Maker.
ii) I’ve also pointed out on many occasions that “infinite” is a misleading world to characterize everlasting punishment.
“What is more, there is a statute of limitations for many crimes, but no statute for the most heinous crimes. But hell, presumably, is for sinners of every type, and Protestants at least reject the idea that some sins are ‘venial’ and do not threaten a person's salvation.”
This assumes that damnable sins fall short of heinous sins. Where’s the argument?
I think we have to go back to the context of your using Grayling's employment of the Polanski case in the defense of hell. There are some important differences between this kind of criminal case and the problem of sin. Grayling would not have been making his case if Polanski had served his full sentence and was about to be released. The point is that our judicial system allows people to be released from their punishment once proportionality is reached (with a lot of other considerations thrown in as well). The passage of time without punishment doesn't release one from guilt, that was Grayling's point. In our judicial system, the doing of time in prison "pays one's debt to society."
ReplyDeleteYou are the one using the criminal reasoning to justify hell. But the analogy to the criminal justice system is precisely what propels the proporitionality objection. To get a defense of hell of the ground you have to argue either that the case is different with sin because it is against God, or argue that the damned sinner is unrepentant and therefore reoffends continuously. Those are precisely points at which the criminal justice analogy breaks down.
In my view the retribution analogy
is too closely connected to the concepts of criminal justice to justify hell, and that is why I think of hell primarily as a natural consequence of the fact that one is rebelling against the source of goodness itself. If you're doing that, you can't be happy, and here case of Aslan and the dwarfs and the Great Divorce helps us see that. No fire and brimstone is necessary to make us miserable if we are trying forever to find happiness apart from the Source of happiness.
VICTOR REPPERT SAID:
ReplyDelete"Grayling would not have been making his case if Polanski had served his full sentence and was about to be released."
Except that Grayling makes some statements which go beyond that. Statements of a more absolutist nature:
"Few people would be inclined to forgive and forget in the case of Nazi SS officers who committed atrocities during the Second World War. If a former Nazi mass murderer is found, he is arrested and prosecuted no matter what his age and condition of health. Why? Because the Nazi crimes are the kind that we cannot forgive, and we try to prevent them happening again by stating clearly that perpetrators of them will never be safe from prosecution: for such crimes there is no forgetting, no time limit and no hiding place."
Here he says certain crimes are so heinous as to be unforgivable. If you apply that logic to hell, if the sins of the damned are unforgivable, then why would it ever let up?
" To get a defense of hell of the ground you have to argue either that the case is different with sin because it is against God, or argue that the damned sinner is unrepentant and therefore reoffends continuously. Those are precisely points at which the criminal justice analogy breaks down."
I responded to those justifications on their own terms because you brought them up, and not as a fallback argument in case the jurisprudential analogy broke down.
Grayling: "Few people would be inclined to forgive and forget in the case of Nazi SS officers who committed atrocities during the Second World War. If a former Nazi mass murderer is found, he is arrested and prosecuted no matter what his age and condition of health. Why? Because the Nazi crimes are the kind that we cannot forgive, and we try to prevent them happening again by stating clearly that perpetrators of them will never be safe from prosecution: for such crimes there is no forgetting, no time limit and no hiding place."
ReplyDeleteVR: But prosecution does have a stopping place, surely. There is a limit on the amount of punishment ?Grayling would want to be perpetrated on Polanski or even the
Nazi war criminals. Withing the framework of these limits we ought not to refrain from punishment (I don't like atheist Grayling's talk about not forgiving, because we are supposed to forgive those who trespass against us, and Christ asked his Father to forgive the very people who had arranged his crucifixion).
Suppose we were to ask Grayling "What if we had the power to inflict and eternal punishment on Polanski, or Himmler for that matter. Should we do it?" I don't think Grayling would agree.
Proportionality is the basis of the idea of retributive punishment as we know it in the criminal justice system, and this goes back to Scripture. Why is it an eye for an eye? Because that's the upper limit on punishment, so that we don't inflict vengeful pumishments.
It is a model for divine punishment, but the analogies break down in important ways. Apparently some wrongdoing, for Grayling, ought to be punished regardless of how much time has passed. Penal substitution theory says that all sin will be punished or atoned for.
The following are some questions I've been pondering. If anyone wants to answer, I'm listening.
ReplyDeleteJohn Gerstner once said/wrote words to the effect that there will be more justice in heaven than in hell because all the saints will enjoy all the benefits that Christ purchased by his active obedience, and because all the sins of the elect were paid for by Christ's passive obedience on the Cross.
In light of that, what would you all say to a universalist who would say that because the wicked will never be fully punished for their sins, that therefore God will not be able to execute full justice. Hence, the traditional view of hell is wrong on it's own grounds.
Would the fact that sinners in hell will continue to sin and so merit more punishment solve that problem?
Here's how W.L. Craig says it, "Sin cannot go unpunished, since God is perfectly just, and so these sins in the afterlife must also be punished. Hence, because sinning goes on forever, so does the punishment. So even if we concede that every sin deserves only a finite punishment, hell is unceasingly self-perpetuating."
Do all individual sins deserve a finite punishment? Or an infinite punishment (or an infinitely long punishment) because of the infinite greatness of the one we offend (i.e. God)?
And since some sins are greater than others, does that mean that while all sins deserve to be punished for an eternity, the intensity of the punishment, per sin, can vary?
I've never read Cur Deus Homo, but I've wondered how sins deserving everlasting punishment could be atoned for in just a few hours by the suffering of the Son of God on the Cross.
How would you all answer these questions?
In the meantime, I'll read some systematic theologies.