I’ll comment on some statements in this post:
My God's Final Victory co-author, John Kronen, has been pushing me a bit on my arguments in this "Damned Sinners" series. Specifically, he's been stressing that there's an idea embraced by supralapsarian Calvinists (not by infralapsarian ones) that I don't seem to take seriously enough in these posts. And he's suggested that it's this failure to take that idea seriously that might've led someone like Steve Hays to think that the Problem of Damned Sinners could be so quickly dispensed with.
I think John has a point. You see, on supralapsarian Calvinism the ultimate purpose of creation is to display God's majesty, which is found both in God's merciful love and in His justice. But this theology assumes that God cannot fully display both together (an assumption that I think wreaks havoc on some of the most important and profound understandings of the Atonement, by the way, but I won't get into that here).
Actually, the double-edged design of Christ’s ministry is Biblical. For instance:
And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed” (Lk 2:34).
Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (Jn 9:39).
Back to Reitan:
Or, put another way, this theology takes it that the act of neutralizing the negative value of sin with a punitive response produces a meta-level good (the display of divine justice) that wouldn't have otherwise existed. On this theology, the problem of explaining why there is so much wickedness in a world created by a morally perfect God is answered as follows: God wants wicked people to be there, because only then can His justice be fully put on display through His smiting of them.
This summary is true up to a point, but one-sided. It’s not merely that sin is necessary to manifest the justice of God. Sin is also necessary to manifest the mercy of God.
At first blush that might seem counterintuitive. We associate judgment with justice rather than mercy. Conversely, we associate salvation with mercy rather than justice. However, grace and mercy, to be gracious and merciful, must be discretionary rather than obligatory. As Scripture puts it:
2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God…4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due (Rom 4:2,4).
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph 2:8-9).
Back to Reitan:
As such, damnation and reprobation don’t simply demonstrate the justice of God, but the grace of God. For salvation and damnation, election and reprobation, are correlative. Mutually interpretive. Each clarifies the nature of its counterpart–like light and darkness.
But here's the thing: this theology strikes me as so morally awful that the thought that there are people out there who really embrace it at a fundamental level (not just playing pious lip service to it out of communal allegiance) makes me spiritually nauseous. I think that if I could get myself to really believe that deep down anyone wholeheartedly embraced this idea, I'd be pushed in the direction of a species of supralapsarian Calvinism in which God created supralapsarian Calvinists so as to have vessels of wrath on which he could heap his just outrage against people who harbor such awful convictions.
I'm kidding of course. I'd remain a universalist even if I could be convinced that anyone wholeheartedly embraced supralapsarian Calvinism. Really. My point is that since my aversion to this theology is so potent, part of me doesn't believe that there are people who honestly think it's right; and so I find myself developing my arguments as if there were no such people--and this means that some of what I say may end up begging the question in relation to anyone who really does embrace this theology deep down.
Reitan is a universalist. Universalism is superficially appealing. But think about it for a moment. You can only be found if you are lost. Assuming that God saves everyone, why does anyone need to be saved in the first place? If the God of universalism has the power to save all the lost, does he not have the power to keep them from losing their way in the first place? Why does he put them through hell to get them to heaven?
Is this justified by a soul-building theodicy, in which a fallen world where everyone is saved is better than an unfallen world where no one is lost or doomed? Is so, then the universalist thinks God wills sin for a meta-level good. To cultivate certain virtues or insights unobtainable apart from evil.
Even so, that’s a pretty ruthless process to achieve the desired end. It takes the sheen off universalism. God’s creatures literally take a hell of a beating (albeit a purgatorial hell) to achieve enlightenment.
One answer I anticipate runs something along the following lines: "It's a mystery we can't understand, but we know it's true because of divine revelation in Scripture." But even if you grant a high view of Scripture according to which Paul's use of the "vessels of mercy/vessels of wrath" language (Romans 9:22) was God-inspired…
I don’t regard that as an appeal to mystery. Rather, Paul is giving a rationale.
In Romans 11, the "hardening" of Israel against God, and the concomitant divine repudiation, is described as a stage in a process aimed at saving both "the full number of the Gentiles" and "all Israel" (vs. 25-26). This chapter ends with the striking claim that "For God has bound over all men to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all" (vs. 32). This starts to sound as if, on Paul's view of things, each of us is both a vessel of wrath and a vessel of mercy, albeit at different stages in our moral and spiritual evolution--and it sounds as if serving as a vessel of wrath is always in the service of the ultimate goal of mercy being shown to all.
But, of course, at other points it doesn't sound as if he's saying this at all. Limiting ourselves to Paul's epistle to the Romans, sometimes Paul sounds like an outright and blatant universalist (e.g. Romans 5:18-19 and elsewhere)…
That has some traction for Arminians, who generally share the same semantic approach to universal quantifiers. But, of course, Calvinists don’t construe universal quantifiers that way, so that’s not a starting point we share in common with Reitan and his ilk.
The attempt to read the whole, to understand the parts in light of the whole, and to extract from such a complicated text a coherent theology that does justice to the whole given the apparent tensions and conflicts--that task isn't easy. And it seems to me that part of what Christians who pursue such a task need is to recognizing when a particular interpretive effort has, for example, implications that clash with the voice of conscience, or produces internal problems that raise concerns about consistency.
i) Reprobation doesn’t clash with my conscience.
ii) Even if it did, my conscience is only as good as the God who produced it. As such, conscience has limited value as a theological criterion, for the appeal is ultimately circular. At best, a God-given conscience mirrors the God who gave it. But what if the Calvinist God gave me my conscience?
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