Happy God vaporized your mom?

randal says:

Saturday, February 19, 2011 at 7:04pm

I outline the possibilities in the chapter on hell. If one holds on to eternal conscious torment then they have the following options.

1. They will suffer because their loved ones will suffer but that suffering will be minimized because of the compensating joys of heaven. This is a possible position but I don’t know anyone who has held it.

2. They will be indifferent to the fate of their loved ones. Again this is possible but I don’t know anyone who has held it.

3. They will be unaware of the fate of their loved ones. This position has been suggested by many theologians but it is intolerable for numerous reasons including the fact that it turns the new heavens and new earth into a charade.

4. They will rejoice in the damnation of their loved ones because those loved ones will be revealed to be despicable God-haters. This has been defended from theologians like Tertullian and Aquinas down to John Piper and J.I. Packer in the present age. It is a logically consistent position but also strikes me (and I think any honest person) as reprehensible and absolutely implausible.

This leaves us with two possibilities. First there is annihilation. Our unredeemed loved ones will be destroyed. In that case heaven can begin after our healing from their loss. Second, universalism: they too will be redeemed.

It seems to me that only the annihilationist and universalist positions provide a satisfactory response to the problem of loved ones in hell.

http://randalrauser.com/2011/02/happy-with-your-mother-in-hell/

Quite a few issues here:

Since Randal is sizing up the options on purely sentimental terms, let’s begin by sizing up his two alternatives on sentimental terms:

i) Per annihilationism, would Randal be happy if God vaporized his mom? Wouldn’t that make him bitterly resentful of God?

It reminds me of those revenge movies about the reluctant hero. You know the basic plot. A patriotic Green Beret is court marshaled when his no-good superiors make him the fallguy for their malfeasance.

So he retires to the mountains of Colorado, where he leads a quiet, contented life on his ranch, with his wife, kids, dog, and ponies.

One day there’s a knock at the door. His country needs his services. But he refuses.

Then, for whatever reason, the bad guys come after his family. Slaughter his loved ones.

So he hunts them down one by one and dispatches them with Dantean ingenuity.

How would Randal feel about God if God liquidated his mom? Would that foster warm fuzzy feelings? Or would he harbor a grudge?

ii) Per universalism, how would Jessica Lunsford feel if God forgave John Couey? What if your loved ones are hateful to me? Universalism suddenly loses its showroom sheen.

Moving along:

iii) There’s no verse of Scripture which says God will damn a Christian’s loved ones. Maybe he will, but it’s not as if that’s a given.

iv) Conversely, we could work back from Rev 21:4: if God will wipe away every tear, then he will restore whatever we need to be whole again.

v) Christians can also pray about the afterlife. We don’t have to be passive. Christians are free to pray about the kind of afterlife we’d like to have. What would make us feel fulfilled.

Of course, our prayers may sometimes be off-target, but that’s true prayer generally.

vi) In Calvinism, regeneration precedes faith. Even if a loved one didn’t die in the faith, that doesn’t ipso facto mean he died unregenerate. Perhaps God already planted the seed, but it hadn’t had enough time to blossom here-and-now. What we pray for in this life may blossom in the next.