When Heaven invades Hell

Philosopher and philosophical theologian Josh Rasmussen and his wife Rachel just published a novelistic defense of universalism. Josh is a far better philosopher than theologian. I'm going to quote and comment on some representative passages from the novel. 

So, perhaps some forgiveness for some souls will come after an age of separation.”

Moses replies sharply, “But what about the unforgivable sin, Adam?”

Moses points down at the scroll. “Look! Here it is written, ‘whoever blasphemes against

the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.’ The words are plain. Never means never. Are you going to tell me that never doesn’t mean never?”

Adam smiles. He asks, “Where does meaning come from, Moses? Does not your own experience create the meanings you associate with words?”

Adam then touches the text on the scroll and pulls his finger upward. Golden words appear above the scroll. The words are translated in your mind as follows:

‘Whoever may speak evil in regard to the Holy Spirit hath not forgiveness for an age, but is in danger of age-enduring judgment.’

Different people, depending on their experiences, will read the scroll according to different interpretations.

“So, what if the meaning in someone’s mind concerning what the scroll says is inconsistent with the meaning in someone else’s mind? Where will you find the truth then?”

Different people, depending on their experiences, will read the scroll according to different interpretations.

“So, what if the meaning in someone’s mind concerning what the scroll says is inconsistent with the meaning in someone else’s mind? Where will you find the truth then?”

Adam shares his reasoning with Moses:

“Our experiences unlock our understanding of the Lord’s revelation. To have sight, we must have the Lord’s light. Where we do not have light, we do not have sight.

“Let me tell you, Moses, what I see most clearly. By the Lord’s light inside my heart, I see that love creates boundaries of protection. Joshua and Rachel Rasmussen, When Heaven Invades Hell (Great Legacy Books 2020), chap 5, 72-74.

i) This gets into complicated debates over the locus of meaning. Is meaning located in the text or the reader? In one sense, a text must have a recognizable meaning to the reader. So the reader brings something to the text. But there must be something in the text to recognize. So that's something the text brings to the reader. As a rule, authors write to be understood. They draw upon a cultural preunderstanding which the author and the target audience share in common. So even though there's a sense in which the reader must complete the process of communication, the reader is expected to interpret the text in a certain way. To recognize what the text means is not to determine what it means. Authors write with an ideal reader (the implied reader) in mind. 

ii) In folk theology, the Holy Spirit gives Christians the correct interoperation of Scripture. Josh seems to be making a similar claim. But the Bible doesn't promise that, and interpretive diversity among Christians belies that. Some unbelievers have a more accurate understanding of Scripture than many believers. For instance, a critical Bible commentator.

“We suffer by the sight of this beast’s suffering. But would our suffering end if this beast were no longer in our sight? It would not. We would still suffer, knowing that this beast is suffering somewhere separated from our presence. Even if the suffering of this beast were blocked from our sight—and removed from our memory—that would still not eliminate all suffering in heaven.

“Remember, the Lord also suffers as the beast suffers. Can the Lord, the Ruler of Heaven and Earth, choose not to see or even remember the suffering of this dark soul? It is written, ‘If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.’ Where could we possibly send a soul to escape the Lord’s sight? I tell you, the suffering of even one soul, even the darkest of souls, will be felt by the Lord.

“Children of the Most High, I present to you a mystery: how can heaven be fully heaven while there remains the pain of seeing someone in hell?”

The quiet whisper of the Lord replies, “My heart is large enough for all the cosmos to fit inside.” The Lion’s gaze then returns to the dark orb and the suffering beast.

The desire for the suffering in heaven to end builds. As it builds in size and power, something strange happens...Suddenly, a violent shock wave erupts from the singularity...Everyone watches in shock.

Lucifer is no longer in his cage of torment. The beast is now free, chap 8 (104).

“When I brought Lucifer, who was the Dark One, into heaven, I protected him inside an orb... chap. 10 (125).

The Lion walks close to the pitiful creature who is rolled up in a ball on the ground. Instead of towering over the creature, the Lion kneels on the ground beside him. Tears stream from the Lion’s glossy eyes, down his cheeks, and onto His mane. Emotions of love pour out of the Lion’s chest in the form of gentle waves. The waves flow from the Lion’s chest to the dark creature beside him...The multitude joins the Lion in expressing love toward the beast. Waves of love roll out of every being, chap 9 (105-6).

The Lion turns to Lucifer and speaks: “This first insight is about you, my beloved angel.

Lucifer, you have a great power to affect my emotions. I traveled through the caverns of darkness to reach you. But when I stood in your presence, you felt something inside of me. Do you remember what you felt? You said you sensed fear in me. You were right, Lucifer. I was afraid.

“You, my dear angel, didn’t understand my fear or your power. You had the power to make me tremble. I trembled at the thought of losing you...“All beings are connected. Every being affects me...“My love for Lucifer was so great that I would do anything to restore him to wholeness. If I could suffer the torments of hell a million times over in his place, I would do it... chap 10 (123-4).

i) Freewill theism ranges along a continuum. The view of God expressed in these passages represents what happens when that's taken to a logical extreme. Creatures wield power over God. He's an emotional hostage to our uncontrollable actions. Because he's afraid of losing us, we can pull his strings. It's like parent and child trading places. 

ii) In the acknowledgments, the authors thank Jerry Walls (among others) for his "inspiration and valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this book". That's a window into his own position. He recently published Does God Love Everyone?: The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism. For Jerry, the worst possible thing you can believe is to deny that God loves everybody. But the universalism in the novel represents the consistent alternative. Everyone including Satan will be saved. 

iii) Then there's the feminist angle, where Josh and Rachel make Eve a heavenly counselor, font of spiritual insight and wisdom.

iv) I wonder if part of the problem is due to the pernicious influence of C. S. Lewis. My immediate point isn't to bash Lewis, but the use people make of  him. For instance, it's striking how many professing Christians get their eschatology from The Great Divorce. The popularity of Lewis fosters a mentality in which many professing Christians begin with fiction as their source of theology. An inspirational fictional story. 

Bryan's stalled chess game

Bryan Cross recently reviewed Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years after the Reformation, by Kenneth Collins & Jerry Walls, in Faith and Philosophy 35/4 (October 2018), 485-491. 

i) It's worth noting who didn't write the review. It wasn't written by a cradle Catholic. It wasn't written by a graduate of a Catholic seminary. It wasn't written by a Catholic Bible scholar or church historians at a Catholic seminary or pontifical university. It wasn't written by a Catholic theologian. It wasn't written by a priest, monsignor, or bishop. It wasn't written by the prefect for the CDF. 

Rather, it was written by a Catholic layman and evangelical convert to Catholicism. It was written by a self-anointed spokesman for Catholicism. Whenever I read Bryan, I'm struck by how he presumes to pontificate (pun intended) for Catholic theology. But how representative are his views within the hierarchy or mainstream Catholic academia? Or is this an idealized abstraction that's out of step with official currents in Roman Catholicism? 

ii) I've skimmed the book Bryan is reading. I read the parts that interested me. For purposes of this post, I'll assume that Bryan accurately represents the stated positions of Walls and Collins in the book. I won't go back to compare his representations with theirs. They can do that on their own if they choose to respond to him. I did reread their section on the sufficiency and perspicuity of Scripture before writing this post. 

iii) It's somewhat roundabout to review a review. I don't necessarily frame the issues in the same way as Collins and Walls. And Bryan wasn't responding to me, so he can't be faulted for failing to engage my arguments, since that wasn't his aim. So my response is orthogonal to this particular exchange. I speak as an interested third party, overhearing their exchange. 

Salvation for all

i) I'd like to revisit an exchange I had with Jerry Walls a while back. According to what's become a stock objection to Calvinism, the Calvinist God is (allegedly) able but unwilling to save everyone.

ii) Now that's only a problem on two assumption, one being: the God of freewill theism is willing, but unable to save everyone. However, that claim isn't obviously true. For instance, some freewill theists are universalists. They believe God will wear down the resistance of unbelievers. He's got all the time in the world. Eventually, they will see the light. So critics like Jerry have to show that freewill theism doesn't suffer from the same problem it ascribes to Calvinism.

iii) In addition, the objection only has teeth if you think God is less than good unless he saved everyone he could. But that doesn't chime with my moral intuitions. Irrespective of Calvinism, it's by no means obvious to me that God isn't good in case he damns Pablo Escobar, Charles Manson, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, Ted Bundy et al. Pick your villain. Even if I wasn't a Calvinist, freewill theism hardly entails that God can't be good unless he saves ISIS thugs who burn people alive and vivisect children with chainsaws–assuming he was able to do so. 

iv) So the point of this exercise is to respond to the freewill theist on his own grounds. I'm not conceding his standards. But the question is whether there are limitations on what even a Calvinist God can do in that regard. 

v) As I pointed out to Jerry, the statement is ambiguous. Who's the everyone that God can save? Suppose God regenerated "everyone" in the womb. Would that save everyone?

It would save everyone in that timeline. But regenerating "everyone" in the womb will produce a different world history than a world in which God doesn't regenerate everyone. Some people who are born into a world where everyone isn't regenerate won't be born into a world where everyone is regenerate. As a result, some people are heavenbound in a world where everyone isn't regenerate from the womb who won't be heavenbound in a world where everyone is regenerate from the womb, because they won't exist in that alternate timeline. So even in deterministic universalism, there still are losers. People who miss out on heaven. 

vi) To that, Jerry responded two different ways. One response was to play the Epicurean card. There are, however, serious philosophers like John Martin Fisher who argue that nonexistence, be it prenatal or postmortem, is a deprivation. Cf. J. Fischer, ed. The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford 1993); J. Fisher, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford 2009). 

Let's take a comparison. Suppose I'm a teenager. There's a classmate who's competing with me for the affections of a pretty cheerleader. But I have a time machine. If I go back in time, I can erase him from the space-time continuum. My action will replace the current timeline with a new timeline that has a very similar past, only he doesn't exist. Instead, on the alternate timeline, his parents had conjugal relations a half hour later, conceiving a different son. 

I suspect many people would say that's tantamount to murder. Yet my rival classmate never existed in the new timeline. He has no idea what he's missing. From Jerry's Epicurean perspective, is there anything wrong with a time-traveler who scrubs people from the timeline who happen to cramp his style? 

vii) Another response was to invoke postmortem salvation. Jerry said the Calvinist God could regenerate unbelievers after they die. That wouldn't change world history in this life. So there'd be no losers, only winners. 

What about that? One stock objection to Calvinism is that God's choice of who's elect and reprobate is (allegedly) arbitrary. Let's grant that objection for the sake of argument. 

But by that logic, it's still arbitrary that only the folks in one world history are saved. Even if everyone in that world history will ultimately be saved, what about all the folks who still miss out on heaven because God didn't instantiate an alternate timeline in which different people exist and go to heaven? 

So for Jerry's argument to go through, it requires the Calvinist God not merely to instantiate a world history in which everyone is saved, but to instantiate a multiverse in which every conceivable person in infinitely many world histories is saved. 

Jerry could duck that by playing the Epicurean card, but I just discussed problems with that. Or he might try to dodge it by withdrawing the charge of arbitrariness, yet that's one of the primary objections that freewill theists level against Calvinism. 

viii) Yet a universalistic multiverse may still be arbitrary, inasmuch as there's no logical cutoff regarding how many possible persons to create. Is there any upper limit on the number of conceivable persons? 

And these alternate timelines will generate scenarios in which, say, someone who wasn't tortured in one world history will be tortured in another world history. Likewise, there will need to be an indefinite number of Incarnations to redeem the lost. Even hypothetically, there seem to be limitations on what even the Calvinist God can do in that regard. 

“Rome”, “Roman”, and the source of “anti-Catholic bigotry”

Walls, Collins, and “Rome”

The charge has been raised that because Walls and Collins use the abbreviations “Rome” and “Roman” for “the Roman Catholic Church” (instead of simply calling it “the Catholic Church” all the time), that some kind of “anti-Catholic bigotry is behind it.

In titling their work “Roman but Not Catholic”, authors Ken Collins and Jerry Walls have staked out some property amidst two different and competing concepts, that are not altogether accepted (it seems) by Roman Catholics. I’ve already mentioned Turretin and his complaint that by claiming the title of “The Church”, he said, “[Roman Catholics] think they can, as with one blow, beat down and settle the controversy waged against them …” by simply “hiding themselves under the specious title of the antiquity and infallibility of the Catholic church” (Turretin, “Institutes”, Vol 3. pgs 2-3).

This is how the Roman Catholic Church seeks to win arguments: by co-opting the meanings of words. And for sure, both of the words, “Roman” and “Catholic” (the latter also being available with a small “c”) have generated their fair share of contention. So defining them is going to be very important.

“Roman but Not Catholic”: Authors Jerry Walls and Ken Collins

Jerry Walls (l) and Ken Collins

This is part of a review series I’m going to be doing on the Jerry Walls and Ken Collins work “Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years after the Reformation” (Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Academic, 2017). The work is unique in that it explores very many of the historical developments that led to the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church that we see today.

I want to first briefly talk about the authors of this work. They are not the kind of traditional authors that one might find mentioned on this blog.

For example, in an earlier comment, a good Reformed friend wrote, “Never thought I would buy a book authored by Jerry Walls”. Jerry certainly has a reputation here at Triablogue, most notably for a work and a sentiment entitled “Why I’m Not a Calvinist”.

The Roman Catholic Problem with Reality

“Rome has a problem with reality”

In the end ... [Rome] has a problem with reality

I’ve been reading through an advanced copy of the text of “Roman but Not Catholic”, by Jerry Walls and Ken Collins. I’ve just finished Chapter 7 (of about 20 chapters), and I came across this nugget:

In the end, Rome not only has a problem with the church, the living body of Christ well beyond its walls, but also has a problem with reality, a reality that is right in front of its eyes ...

They make this statement in the context of a discussion that those who leave the Roman Catholic Church are still under some kind of anathema. It is in the context of conciliar documents, present and past, and of Canon Law, which is still on the books and in fact was revised in 1983. They make this statement in the context of a section entitled “Giving Rome the Benefit of the Doubt”.

I’ll look forward to explicating this “problem with reality” in a review series that I’m planning to do when the book is released October 17.

“Mere Protestant” Confession Seeks to Reclaim the Word “Catholic”

By 1529, a dozen years after the start of the Reformation, there was an on-going dispute, both political and theological, between Martin Luther’s German Reformation, and the Swiss Reform led by Ulrich Zwingli. In an effort to bring the two sides together, Philip of Hesse, a local Protestant ruler, brought Luther, Zwingli, and a number of other Reformers (including the Stephan Agricola, Johannes Brenz, Martin Bucer, Caspar Hedio, Justus Jonas, Philipp Melanchthon, Johannes Oecolampadius, and Andreas Osiander) at the castle hall at Marburg for what has become known as the “Marburg Colloquy”. Primarily a political conference, the colloquy nevertheless marked the start of a long-standing division. According to Alister McGrath’s account:

This attempt foundered on one point, and one point only. On 14 articles, Luther and Zwingli felt able to agree. The fifteenth contained six points, on which they were able to reach agreement on five. The sixth posed difficulties. Luther and Zwingli reluctantly were forced to declare that they had not “reached an agreement as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine.” From Alister McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (p. 183). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

This week, more than 250 Protestant leaders and theologians published what they call a “Reforming Catholic Confession”, “A ‘Mere Protestant’ Statement of Faith to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation”.

Just on the surface, I don’t like the word “catholic”, because of the kinds of confusion it can lead to, but this statement seems to genuinely re-capture and re-establish the proper meaning of that word.

C.S. Lewis: “Newman makes my blood run cold ...”

In his introduction to the work, “Roman but Not Catholic”, co-author Jerry Walls writes, “We have heard from lots of people who have read John Henry Newman’s famous essay on doctrinal development and found his arguments compelling. I thought it might be helpful to hear from persons who have read Newman but found his arguments deeply confused and his conclusions badly overstated.”

Apparently, C.S. Lewis was one of those people.

C.S. Lewis: “Newman makes my blood run cold ...”

C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm chpt. 6
HT: Steven Wedgeworth on Facebook.

Purgatory now

C. S. Lewis helped to popularize the notion of purgatory among quasi-evangelicals. That's a reason not to get your theology from Lewis.

One issue is how we define purgatory. Suppose we define purgatory as means of weaning believers from the attractions of sin. On that definition, this life is purgatory. God uses this life to wean Christians from sin. By experiencing the deleterious consequences of sin, it helps Christians to foster an aversion to sin. Sin has short-term attractions, but it causes long-term suffering. For Christians, life in a fallen world is remedial punishment. 

In the intermediate state, we''ll presumably remember the deleterious consequences of sin. However, the intermediate state won't have the temptations to sin that bombard us in this life. So purgatory, in a traditional sense, is superfluous and misplaced. 

A Conditional Problem for Adherents of Universal Divine Love

https://www.jamesagibson.com/2017/06/22/a-conditional-problem-for-adherents-of-universal-divine-love/

Purgatorial presuppositions

1. What are the presuppositions of purgatory? The basic argument is twofold: (i) sinners cannot enter heaven; (ii) Christians are still sinners when they die. Hence, there must be a period of postmortem sanctification to render them sinless. 

2. But what's the basis for the assumption that sinners cannot enter heaven? I can think of roughly three or four prima facie arguments:

i) Rev 21:27 is stock prooftext. 

However, even if we grant the relevance of that passage to the issue at hand–which is dubious (see below), that of itself, doesn't explain why it's the case. It's just a statement of fact. What's the underlying rationale? 

ii) It might be argued that sinners cannot enter into the presence of God, the heavenly angels, and the saints. That's incompatible with God's holiness (1 Jn 3:2), and the general holiness of heaven.  

iii) It might be argued that the saints in heaven can never commit apostasy. Never lose their salvation or fall from heaven. But that must mean they are sinless.

iv) It might be argued that sin is incompatible with heavenly bliss (e.g. Rev 14:13; 7:16-17; 21:4).

3. Let's run back through the list:

i) One ambiguity is how the word "heaven" is defined. Is that used to denote the intermediate state of Christians or the final state of Christians? On the face of it, Rev 21:27 has reference to the final state, not the intermediate state. In the narrative of Revelation, this is after the return of Christ and the final judgment. So it doesn't speak directly to the period between death and the final state. In the same book, Rev 6:19-11 is more germane to the intermediate state.

Therefore, Rev 21:27 doesn't prove that sinners can't enter heaven, if we're using heaven as a synonym for the intermediate state of Christians rather than the final state of Christians. Mind you, this doesn't mean sinner can enter heaven, in that sense. But one needs a better argument. It could be true, but perhaps we lack sufficient information to say whether or not that's true.

ii) The problem with this rationale is obvious. Jesus mingled with sinners. God appears to sinners in theophanies. Seers (e.g. Isaiah, Daniel, John the Revelator) have visions of heaven, which seem to be (temporary) out-of-body experiences. So there doesn't seem to be any impediment in principle to God's compresence or Christ's compresence with sinners in heaven. Likewise, heavenly angels appear to sinners. Sinners survive these encounters. 

iii) This is more interesting. From the standpoint of Reformed theology, God preserves the elect from apostasy even though they can still sin. So, in theory, people in heaven could still be sinful, but not be in danger of falling from heaven. I'm not saying that's true, just addressing the logic of the rationale.

In addition, even assuming that someone can become sinless through a gradual process of sanctification, which is not a given, it's unclear to me how any incremental process could make it impossible for someone to sin. Impeccability seems to require a special act of grace by which God preserves an individual from sin. But if God can instantly render a Christian impeccable, then, a fortiori, God can instantly render a Christian sinless. If God can do the greater, he can do the lesser (argumentum a maiore ad minus). That, however, nullifies the rationale of purgatory at one stroke. 

iv) That's more complicated. Certainly heaven is supposed to be an improvement over life in a fallen world. A better place (Heb 11:16). Sin is a source of misery. 

Again, though, it may be necessary to distinguish between the intermediate state and the final state. The saints in Rev 6:9-11 don't seem to be blissful! 

There are various ways in which heaven (i.e. the intermediate state) could be a great improvement, could be a far happier condition, without requiring the saints to be sinless. For instance, there will be no crime in heaven. No persecution. There won't be the opportunity to commit certain sins. 

My point is not to deny that the saints are sinless. My point, rather, is that the supporting arguments fall short of demonstrating that contention. From what I can tell, traditional theological assumptions on this question are underdetermined by the available evidence. 

A quick argument against purgatory

http://www.jamesagibson.com/2017/04/26/a-quick-argument-against-purgatory/

"Traditional" Baptists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op7382KHwgc&feature=youtu.be

So Calvinism is beyond the pale, but it's fine for "traditional" Baptists to give a platform to a man who promotes purgatory, postmortem salvation, flirts with open theism. 

Gee, Officer Krupke!

Got into a debate with Jerry Walls on Facebook:

Walls

The obvious question is why God does not determine all persons to choose the good, and thus avoid not only the evil of this world, but also the evil of eternal misery in hell. Indeed, if compatibilism is true, it seems God could determine all freely to choose the good and avoid hell.

Hays

One of the problems with that objection, as I pointed out to Jerry on more than one occasion, is the ambiguity of "all persons". The way he frames the alternatives suggests a comparison between two possible worlds containing the same set of people, in one of which only some are elect, while in the other all are elect.

But that's deceptive and incoherent, for a world in which everyone is elect will have a different history with a different set of people. Although everyone who exists in that world is heavenbound, there are people who were heavenbound in a world where everyone isn't elect who won't exist in a world where everyone is elect. So there are many hidden losers in Jerry's contrast. Many people who miss out on heaven because they don't exist in a world where everyone is elect. 

When Jerry says the Calvinist God could save everyone, I suspect the picture that conjures up in people's minds is something like this:

There's a possible world A where God damns Judas. Let's say that's the real world. Then there's a possible world B where God saves Judas. 

The problem with that comparison is that it's only true in a qualified sense. Yes, there's a possible world in which Judas goes to heaven. However, that can't be affirmed in isolation to other considerations. It depends. 

The existence of Judas is the end-result of a chain of events in the past. If the past is the same in that possible world, then God can save Judas. 

But what Jerry has in mind is a possible world in which everyone is saved. And there are, indeed, possible worlds in which everyone is saved, consistent with Calvinism.

Problem is, a world in which everyone is saved will have a different past. That past won't lead up to Judas. Although God can save Judas, God can't save Judas in a world in which God saves everyone else. For there is no Judas to save, given that alternate history. 

By the same token, Mary Magdalene is a end-product of the same past that produced Judas. A world in which everyone is saved won't include the Magdalene. She is saved in a world where Judas is damned.

Walls 

As I have pointed out before, God is not limited by causal chains, given the assumption that he determines all things. He can extend causal chains as long and as creatively as necessary to save all persons in the actual world. Or he can directly act to reveal himself at the moment of death and directly determine all persons to "freely" accept his grace. So no reason why saving all would require a different past.

Hays

You're missing the point. If someone exists, God can save him. But what you're overlooking or evading is that a world in which everyone has saving grace will exclude people who would exist in a world where everyone doesn't have saving grace. 

Take children conceived through premarital or extramarital sex. In a world where everyone has saving grace, fewer people would be born as a result of sexual sin. Hence, a world where everyone has saving grace will have an alternate history with a different set of people.

It's unclear what you're attempting to say. Predestination utilizes causal chains. That's one of the distinctions between predestination and fatalism.

Walls 

No, I am assuming this world, with its actual history and inhabitants. God could surely find a way to determine all people to accept his grace, either with post-mortem chains of events, or moment of death encounters in which he would reveal himself and determine a "free" response of faith.

God utilizes them as he will, or bypasses them as he will. He is not bound by causal chains.

Hays

i) That's an overstatement. Even an omnipotent God can't directly produce a second-order effect. Jacob can't be the grandson of Abraham unless Abraham existed.

ii) Postmortem salvation is at odds with Calvinism. So you can't interject that to show that universalism is consistent with Calvinism. If you're attempting to show that the Calvinist God could save everyone, you must confine yourself to Calvinist assumptions and draw inferences from that. You can't smuggle in a principle that's alien to Calvinism. 

iii) As for deathbed conversions, it's unclear what your scenario envisions. Did you have in mind a scenario in which everyone is a lifelong unbeliever until they undergo a deathbed conversion? If so, that's a different world history.

iv) Or did you have in mind a scenario in which all lifelong unbelievers have a deathbed conversion? If so, is their conversion experience evident to observers at their bedside? But if every lifelong unbeliever had a public deathbed conversion, that would change the future. For some people would be impacted by stories of deathbed conversions. 

v) Or did you have in mind a scenario in which all lifelong unbelievers have a secret deathbed conversion? If so, it's unclear what that hypothetical is supposed to prove. Since, in the nature of the case, that's an unverifiable postulate, why should we take it seriously? 

I mean, one could just as well postulate that for all we know, every Christian secretly renounces their faith at the moment of death and pledges allegiance to the devil.

Walls 

Yes, I was thinking of conversions at the moment of death that are not observable by anyone else. That is one way God could save all persons, given the exact history of the world.

Hays

i) Jerry, that's an ad hoc rescue. You're resorting to makeshift fixes to patch up your original argument. But since there's no reason to suppose every lifelong unbeliever has a deathbed conversion, that's concocting a hypothetical, not because you have any evidence to believe it's true, but to salvage your position. That's a way of rendering just about any position unfalsifiable. It's not a philosophical virtue. 

It's like atheists who evade the Resurrection by saying Jesus may have faked the Resurrection, since, for all we know, he might have had a secret twin brother who died on the cross in his stead. Or maybe Jesus faked the Resurrection because he's really an E.T. whose advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 

ii) In addition, it's unclear what that's supposed to accomplish. Presumably, your objective is to dissuade people from believing in Calvinism. However, you've postulated an unverifiable defeater or undercutter. Suppose God saves everyone in this life or the afterlife. Or he indetectably saves lifelong unbelievers on their deadbed. And let's say that disproves traditional Calvinism (i.e. reprobation, double predestination). 

Problem is, the disproof is unavailable to Calvinists in this life. They only discover that after they die. So, given your setup, that hypothetical can't figure in how we assess Calvinism in the here and now. 

It's like saying, what if a century from now the bones of Jesus are discovered. And somehow, these can be ID'ed as his bones. 

But since I won't be alive a century from now to witness that discovery, the hypothetical has no relevance to my Christian faith.

iii) We have accounts of some unbelievers' last words and gestures. Take Stalin's final moments, recounted by his daughter:

At what seemed the final moment, he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over the room.

It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death ... . The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can't forget and don't understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/11/twenty-letters-to-a-father/303396/

Or the last words of Joan Crawford: "Dammit…Don't you dare ask God to help me!" 

Or the last words of W. C. Fields, "Goddamn the whole f***ing world and everyone in it! Except you, Carlotta" (his mistress).

iv) Jerry's attitude parallels the bleeding heart liberal who can never see the value of retributive justice for its own sake. Punishment is only good if it has deterrent value or remedial value. He seems to treat sin as misfortune. 

Unlike Jerry, I don't prioritize the divine attributes. I don't think some "parts" of God are better than other "parts". I don't think love is better than justice or justice is better than love. Both are essential goods. 

Maybe Jerry developed "optimal grace" from watching West Side Story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7TT4jnnWys

Does God hate the reprobate?

Jerry Walls says Calvinists think the divine hatred passages are clearer and Calvinists have to explain away the divine love passages he brings up. 

i) As I recall, there's only one divine "hatred" passage that's a major prooftext for reprobation, and that's Mal 1:2-3 filtered through Rom 9:13. 

ii) Although there are some direct prooftexts for reprobation or double predestination, there's also indirect evidence based on the relationship between doctrine. As Vos puts it,

"It is true that the Bible also teaches the principle of preterition, by way of implication, as a corollary of certain other fundamental doctrines. No more is necessary than to combine the two single truths, that all saving grace, inclusive of faith, is the supernatural gift of God, and that not all men are made recipients of this gift, to perceive immediately that the ultimate reason why some are saved and others passed by can lie in God alone. In so far every confession which adheres to these two primary facts—and no Calvinistic confession could for a moment hesitate to do so—is also bound to imply the doctrine of preterition."

Vos gives some additional general evidence in the same article:

http://www.biblicaltheology.org/bidp.pdf

iii) And here's another fine article by Vos that's directly on point:

http://www.biblicaltheology.org/sdlg.pdf

iv) Then there's the question of how to construe emotive ascriptions for God. In general, I take these to be anthropopathisms. I think divine "hatred" for sin/sinners means divine disapprobation for sin/sinners. 

v) I don't think it's reasonable that God would literally get angry. Even apart from Calvinism, if God is omniscient and omnipotent, how can he get angry about events he sees coming a mile away, which he can prevent?

Or, even if he's not omniscient (open theism), he knows that he's setting in motion a chain reaction that may have disastrous consequences. It would be self-incriminating for God to be angry about a situation he had a hand in causing. 

And in Calvinism, why would God be angry about something he predestined. It's like a novelist getting angry at one of his characters. If he doesn't like the character, don't include it in the novel!

vi) I view love/hate passages as rhetorical antithetical parallelism. And I think in that context, "love" is a legal synonym for choosing while "hate" is a legal synonym for rejecting (or an antonym for choosing). 

vii) I don't think these reflect divine emotion. I think it's more about divine policies. 

viii) Now, it maybe that from a freewill theist standpoint, they think reprobation is tantamount to divine hatred. If God doesn't elect someone, that's a hateful way for God to treat a human being. That, however, wouldn't be interpreting Reformed theology on its own terms, but imputing connotations to Reformed usage from a frame of reference extrinsic to Calvinism and hostile to Calvinism. So that's very confused on their part.

ix) I don't think God has to hate someone to reprobate them. 

x) Love is frequently defined as acting in the best interests of another. But that's a very problematic definition for freewill theism. In freewill theism, God doesn't act in the best interests of individuals. Rather, he acts for the common good, which is often at the expense of individuals. 

In freewill theism, God doesn't intervene to protect individuals from harm, because, according to freewill theism, too much divine meddling would be detrimental to the common good. But even if we grant that contention for argument's sake, it means that unfortunate individuals get the short end of the stick. 

Jerry tries to offset that with his theory of postmortem damage control. But that shows strains in freewill theism. 

xi) Let's take the science fiction trope of ETs from a dying planet. They discover that earth has the natural resources they need to survive. 

Suppose, because they're inhuman, they have no natural rapport with humans. Emotionally speaking, they have no more empathy for human suffering than a lion has for a gazelle. 

It isn't evil. They aren't malevolent. They don't wish us ill. But they don't care about humans at an emotional level. They don't desire "union". They don't seek reciprocity. 

However, let's say the aliens are very ethical. Even though it would be simpler for them to conquer us, colonize the planet, and exterminate humans, they believe that would be morally wrong. 

Despite their overwhelming technological superiority, which gives them total leverage, they work out a compromise with humans. They will share the planet with us. And they will use their technology to improve human quality of life. 

What they lack in emotional compassion they make up for in intellectual or ethical compassion. 

That may not be definable as love, but it's an analogy worth exploring (perhaps). 

Another comparison would be angelic love. Are angels capable of loving humans, in the emotional sense, desire for union, reciprocity? If not, they might still be like the ETs. 

xii) Regarding love, freewill theists use human analogies. For instance, they're fond of the parental analogy. But that creates problems for their position.

If it lay within his power, a good human parent would intervene to prevent harm to his children. Freewill theists may say good parents have to let children make their own mistakes. But that's a facile overgeneralization. Sure, there's the specter of helicopter parents. That goes too far. 

But there are other cases where a parent would be negligent not to step in. So that analogy cuts both ways. Some parents are overprotective while other parents are negligent. It isn't all-or-nothing.

xiii) In addition, human parents love their own children far more than they love the children of strangers. So parental love isn't equitable, but partial.

xiv) A freewill theist might object that I've misconstrued the analogy. God is everyone's parent. So he loves all his children.

However, even if we grant that contention for discussion purposes, it isn't that simple. As far as human analogies go, parents of growing children should be studiously impartial. Even if they have a favorite child, they should conceal their bias.

But the situation with grown children is different. Adults have adult responsibilities. Some grown children are admirable while some grown children are appalling. I don't think grown children are entitled to the same "unconditional love" as growing children. There's nothing inherently wrong with a parent having a favorite grown child if, in fact, one grown child is caring and considerate while the other grown child is selfish and indifferent. 

Of course, in Calvinism, God doesn't elect or reprobate people in reaction to their behavior. But I'm just dealing with theological analogies that freewill theists are wont to use. 

xv) Then you have romantic love, which is exclusive. Even promiscuous men and women may have one person who's the love of their life. One person who holds a special place in their heart. Unrivaled affection.

In both the OT and NT, the Bible uses marital metaphors for God. Yet it doesn't use those for God's relationship with the world, but his relationship with Israel or the Church. 

xvi) In Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea, God casts himself in the role of a jilted lover or cuckold husband. I think that's blatantly anthropomorphic. However, freewill theists often takes those sentiments at face value. But that creates a problem for their position, because romantic love is discriminating–the antithesis of indiscriminate love.  

Debunking an over-used Irenaeus quote on “Papal Succession”

In this definitive work on Irenaeus
the city of Rome is not even mentioned.

Someone posted this quote from Irenaeus in response to Jerry Walls’s comment on Facebook about the Roman Catholic Church having claimed to have “compiled the Bible” (and by the way, Jerry agrees it is "Simplistic, self-serving hubris":

The great early Father, St. Irenaeus in the mid-100’s felt a little differently (Against Heresies III, 2-4):

[T]hat tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere.

The blessed apostles, then, having founded and built up the Church, committed into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate. Of this Linus, Paul makes mention in the Epistles to Timothy. To him succeeded Anacletus; and after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement was allotted the bishopric. This man, as he had seen the blessed apostles, and had been conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the apostles still echoing [in his ears], and their traditions before his eyes. Nor was he alone [in this], for there were many still remaining who had received instructions from the apostles....

Soter having succeeded Anicetus, Eleutherius does now, in the twelfth place from the apostles, hold the inheritance of the episcopate. In this order, and by this succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us. And this is most abundant proof that there is one and the same vivifying faith, which has been preserved in the Church from the apostles until now, and handed down in truth.”

Jerry referred them to Peter Lampe; someone else commented that “if you don’t have a succinct answer, you probably don’t have an answer”. Here is a succinct response that I posted:

Powerful love

Some recent exchanges I've had on Facebook with Jerry Walls and his entourage:

Hays

i) I don't object to satire. However, satire is only amusing if it's clever. To be witty, it needs be clever. Jerry's efforts at satirizing Calvinism are too sophomoric to be entertaining. I don't think they're amusing, not because I find them offensive, but because they're witless. 

ii) Satire carries the peril that, in the nature of the case, satire caricatures the target. If people judge a position by the satire, then they are judging a caricature of the position rather than the actual position. This, in turn, fosters uninformed contempt. 

The only people who are inclined to find his satires amusing are freewill theists. So he's playing to the choir. There is, though, a moral and spiritual danger in pandering to prejudice. Playing to an audience that's only to happy to equate a hostile or spiteful parody with the actual position. Indeed, the reaction of Jerry's groupies bears out that point. 

iii) Calvinists have no problem singing joy to the "world". That's only incongruous on Jerry's interpretation of the "world".

Tait 

And to your second post: you can make difficulties out of God's love or God's power (or both, to be sure). For some reason, Calvinists seem to find the former the more reasonable and appealing approach. That seems odd, given our excellent reasons for thinking that our power is even less like God's power than our love is like God's love."

Hays

i) Your comment was directed at a different commenter than me. That said, Calvinism doesn't set God's love in opposition to God's power. Rather, it's Arminian polemicists like Jerry who posit a false dichotomy between God's power and God's love in Calvinism. 

For instance, because God loves the elect, he deploys his power to ensure their salvation. There's no tension between divine love and divine power in that case. To the contrary, God's power facilitates his love in that case.

ii) Jerry harps on the question of whether a Calvinist may consistently say that God loves the reprobate. Suppose he can't? That would only be a damaging statement if one assumes that God morally defective unless he loves each and every sinner. Speaking for myself, I don't think there's anything inherently objectionable about God not loving the reprobate.

iii) That said, it isn't necessarily incongruous to say the Calvinist God loves the reprobate. For one thing, even the Calvinist God can't save every possible person. Although the Calvinist God could create a world in which everyone is saved, that comes at the expense of many people who wouldn't exist in such a world. In principle, the Calvinist God could regret his inability to save every possible person. He could love those he predestined to damn, but damn them anyway, for a world in which everyone is saved has a different history than a world in which some people are saved and some people are damned. Some people go to heaven in a world where some people are damned who wouldn't even exist in an alternate timeline. Not all hypotheticals are compossible. 

iv) Theoretically, the Calvinist God might create a multiverse in which some people who are damned in our world are saved in a parallel universe. If that existed, there's no presumption that God would reveal it to the denizens of our world, or vice versa. 

"through which I read things such as 1 John's affirmation that God is love…"

The statement that God is love is entirely consistent with Calvinism. 

"John 3:16's similar affirmation."

That, too, is entirely consistent with Calvinism. 

"The fatal flaw of Calvinism is the assumption that God's power must look like human power, while God's love doesn't have to."

That's not a Calvinist assumption. Exclusive love is a commonplace of human experience. Indeed, human love has an inextricable element of partiality. Humans always love some people more than others.

Keep in mind that it's typically freewill theists who pose a dichotomy between divine and human love. On the one hand they say God's universal love is necessitated by his nature. It isn't possible for God to refrain from loving everyone, for that's an essential divine attribute. On the other hand, human love, to be real love, must be free either to love or to withhold love.

There's that central tension in freewill theism. Is love libertarian or necessitarian? They say it's necessitarian in reference to God, but libertarian in reference to man, then turn around and tell us that Calvinists have an unrecognizable concept of love. But, of course, it's freewill theists who make divine and human love radically disanalogous.

Walls 

Yes, a libertarian free choice to create others with whom he would share his love.

Hays 

So, Jerry, you're saying that God can either love or not love sinners? His essential nature doesn't mean he must love sinners?

Walls 

No, I am saying he can create or not create other beings with whom to share his love. Like a married couple deciding to have or not to have a baby. But having chosen to create, he will love all he creates. But you already know exactly where I stand on all this.

Hays 

i) Which therefore concedes my original point that there's a drastic dichotomy between the way freewill theists define divine and human love. Thanks for the confirmation.

ii) Presumably, you think parents have the libertarian freedom not to love their kids. So your parallel is disanalogous at the critical point of comparison.

iii) Before the advent of contraception, married couples didn't really choose to have children. Rather, the choice was whether or not to have sex. And, of course, there's not much point to a Platonic marriage.

Tait 

You are going against Paul Helm there. At least he argues that Calvin thinks God has libertarian freedom, and appears to agree with the position he ascribes to Calvin. Actually I think Calvin agrees with you. The traditional view, in contrast, would be that God does have libertarian freedom with regard to creation."

Hays

It's a lot more complicated than that:

1. "Libertarian freedom" is a term of art. The way in which contemporary philosophers explicate the concept can't just be read back into 16C theological discussions. The concept has undergone a lot of development since Calvin. And there are different models of libertarian freedom.

2. To my knowledge, there are two basic models of libertarian freedom in contemporary philosophy:

i) Ultimate sourcehood

On that definition, God has libertarian freedom because God is paradigmatically the source of his own deliberations, choices, and actions. That follows from divine aseity.

ii) Principle of alternate possibilities

On that definition, an agent is free if he could do/choose otherwise given the same antecedent conditions. The past is identical right up to the point where the agent might have chosen differently.

In application to God, however, that's only partially true. Although it's true that God could have chosen otherwise, that can't be defined against the backdrop of antecedent conditions or the past, since God has no past or external antecedent conditions leading up to his choice. Certainly not if God is timeless. And there were no conditions outside of God prior to creation.

iii) Other complications in traditional debates over divine freedom include a range of knotty issues regarding absolute power, ordinate power, nominalism (e.g. Scotus, Ockham), Buridan's Ass, and the principle of sufficient reason (Leibniz).

Selective intuition

In addition to Jerry Walls, I recently responded to another commenter on his blog. To quote myself:

Although the Holocaust is a cliché, it's a convenient example of a paradigm-evil. But I could easily use a different example. Take a refugee camp for Cambodians. What if Jerry tells that God would not be good unless he loves the Khmer Rouge?

My point is not that this necessarily disproves the universality of God's love. My point, rather, is that Jerry's facile appeal to "fundamental moral intuitions" is context-dependent and person-variable. What seems to be morally intuitive often turns on the particular example we use to illustrate the claim. Change the audience, change the illustration, you may get a radically different reaction. 

Jerry himself presumes to speak on behalf of others when he appeals to moral intuition. He acts as though everyone naturally shares his intuition, and it's only prior commitment to Calvinism (why not Thomism?) that forces some people to deny what in their hear of hearts they know to be true. But that's trivially easy to counterexample.

"Let Jerry explain to Orthodox Jews that he believes God did not want the Nazis to do what they did because He loves all people and does not want the Nazis to do evil or their victims to suffer evil."

And let Jerry explain to Orthodox Jews why the Arminian God did so much less than Dietrich Bonhoeffer to stop the Nazis. 

"Let Steve Hays then explain to them that God willed that the Nazis should be evil and go to hell, and that they should do to Jews the evil things that they did, and that God also willed those Jews who did not believe in Jesus to go to hell after enduring hell on earth from the Nazis."

i) There are no nice theodicies. The problem of evil isn't, in the first instance, with any particular theodicy of evil, but with the fact of evil. 

ii) It's not willing evil for its own sake, as an end in itself. Rather, willing evil to achieve certain second-order goods. Goods unobtainable apart from evil. In a fallen world, just about everyone exists as a direct or indirect result of evil. Remove the evil and you remove everyone whose existence is the side-effect or end-result of some evil or evils in the past. In a sinless world, other people would take their place. So there are tradeoffs.

iii) Your final objection is not to Calvinism in particular, but Christian exclusivism in general.

iv) There's an asymmetry between my position and Jerry's. Unlike Jerry's glib, selective appeal to "fundamental moral intuitions," I haven't predicated my own position on allegedly universal moral intuitions. Therefore, the fact that Jewish listeners might take umbrage at my theological alternative doesn't turn the tables on my own position. 

v) We walk a tightrope when we present a theodicy. On the one hand, some theologians like Cornelius Berkouwer and David Bentley Hart find the very notion of a theodicy blasphemous. For them, any justification for the existence of evil makes evil justifiable. There's no evil, however horrendous, that can't be excused. It can't be as bad as it seems. They think that sanctifies evil. 

Mind you, the implication of their position renders the occurrence of evil inherently inexcusable. God had no justification for what happened. But the logic of that position is to either deny God's existence or God's goodness. So that's clearly unacceptable from a Christian standpoint. It's a question of locating ourselves on the right side of the knife edge when we formulate a theodicy. 

vi) Keep in mind that, in some measure, the complaint cuts both ways. Maimonides thought Christians were heretics and idolaters (due to their belief in the Trinity, divine Incarnation, and deity of Christ). Those are damnable sins. Just as you have Christian exclusivism, you can have Jewish exclusivism. 

vi) Although it may offend some listeners to say that everything happens for a reason, the alternative is to say that some things, especially the very worst things, happen for no good reason whatsoever. 

Yet that makes the suffering and death of victims meaningless. But if they think about it, how is that any consolation to the survivors? 

People are often conflicted about evil. It may seem pointless, yet they want to know why it happened. Well, it can't be both. Either it has some ultimate purpose or not.