This month, Bishop Barron did another Q/A, this time from non-Catholics:
1. I didn't watch the whole thing since not all of the questions interest me. He did a pretty good job of fielding the question about alleged pagan parallels because Jesus and mythic heroes.
2. He also gave an adroit answer to how a loving God can send people to hell:
It's like someone at a party, everyone is having a great time, but you've decided, because you're in a kind of a funk, to sit sullenly in the corner and refuse to participate. Not only are you happy in yourself but the party around you is making you more unhappy. If you're in a really bad frame of mind, who are the most annoying people? Those who are in a good mood.We're often our own worst enemies. Drug addicts. Choosing contrary to self-interest.
There's a grain of truth to those explanations. They're useful up to a point.
But what was glaringly absent from his justification is any reference to the punitive function of hell, even though that's fundamental to the biblical concept.
In Scripture, damnation isn't primarily about rejecting God's love but retributive punishment from wrongdoing. The theme of eschatological justice, which is hell's primary rationale in Scripture, has disappeared from Barron's concept of damnation.
That may be because Barron is a hopeful universalist, so he believes in remediation rather than retribution.
In contemporary Catholicism as well as contemporary freewill theism, the concept of damnation and warrant for damnation has been recast in terms of love rather than justice. It's all about rejecting God's love, not about just deserts.
In a meaningful universe with morally accountable creatures who make meaningful decisions that have meaningful consequences, I think one could flesh out from reason alone (not revelation) an argument that concludes that God must, if He is God, be (among other things) retributive. It isn't a pleasant thing to think about, but the cosmic teddy bear deity of modern thinking really isn't God in the classical, biblical sense. And if we bring revelation into this, God clearly reveals Himself as retributive throughout scripture.
ReplyDeleteMusing further: would divine simplicity also play a role in this too? Under simplicity, God's love (say) is (among other things) His justice. If one could argue that a lack of retribution constituted a lack of love to some agent, then that would mean a lack of retribution would imply some privation in God's love, which would contradict the principle that God lacks nothing.
As I age, a lot of purported problems of Christianity really don't seem like actual "problems" more than they appear to me as modern complaints that God does not conform to our first-world western conditioning. I have zero problems psychologically with just retribution. Maybe I'm too medieval in outlook.
I saw on National Catholic Register a link to a catholic site that has asked Baron to discuss his views on potential universalism and he refuses.
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