I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty. Why were prostitutes prosecuted in some cases and in others respected and fawned on?
People sold themselves for jobs, for the pay check, and if they only received a high enough price, they were honored. Why were some caught, not others? What was good and evil? Never would I recover from this wound, this ugly knowledge I had gained of what men were capable in their treatment of each other. The vision is also, perhaps more harrowingly, characteristic of how the idea of Hell has shaped perceptions of our own time. Torturous places such as the Gulag, the gas chamber, death row, and the detainment site are often comprehended, and depicted, as new iterations of perdition.
Just ask the pastor at most local churches, or the subway preacher with his brimstone-heavy pamphlets. And some spiritual leaders, intent on presenting a less vengeful God, have attempted to soften or, in some cases, to abolish Hell—mostly to the anger and the anxiety of their co-religionists. Earlier this year, Pope Francis had one of his periodic chats with Eugenio Scalfari, the ninety-four-year-old atheist Italian journalist. More to the point, he has already made it his business to clarify that Hell, properly understood, is less a place than a state—namely, the state of remoteness from the love of God, an inevitable downside of the gift of free will.
Here he echoes C. Lewis, who considered Hell a choice. What kind of deity draws such a hard line between his friends and his enemies, and holds an eternal grudge? Surely the loss of Hell—even the idea of such a loss—should come as a bit of a relief. Thomas Aquinas argued the opposite, half a century before Dante got to work. Awful, I know. But think of our own justice system, and also of the various means by which we now claim access to the missteps of our fellow-citizens—tax liens, criminal records, mug shots, bad status updates screenshotted or automatically archived.
Think of the camera in the courtroom. Think, too, of those Americans for whom even the mildest criticism of the police constitutes a kind of heresy. It might be helpful to regard them as secular Thomists, who, displaying a certain imaginative immiseration, think of a free and ordinary life in the way that their ancestors once thought of perfect blessedness in Heaven.
A few years ago, a minister who used to preach and prophesy at my church—which, by then, had moved from the little room south of th Street to a former Elks Lodge and community theatre a handful of blocks north—started posting on Facebook about how his study of the Bible had helped him conclude that nobody will be damned.
The sacrifice on the Cross was redemption enough for the entire world. The minister was looking for a response, and it arrived quickly. Some confronted him after service on Sundays. Their worm will never die Mk 9, And they will go away to eternal punishment Mt 25, Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire Mt 25, Throw him into the darkness outside Mt 22,13; Mt 25, Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels Mt 25, The Third Meditation has been presented as having something to do with the question of whether the saved can be happy in heaven if others are damned, which is a fatuous question and one that could not be further from my real concerns.
So, while I have not had to struggle with serious challenges to my views, I have been obliged to restate them repeatedly. At times, this has been easy enough, if not necessarily effectual. It takes little effort, for example, to explain that the issue of Meditation Three is not whether we can be happy in heaven in the absence of certain other persons. A heroin addict is happy when high, after all, no matter what his circumambient conditions, and no doubt God could preserve us in an opiate ecstasy forever if he so chose.
The issue is at what price that happiness is to be purchased, and whether we can actually be saved as the persons we are — or as persons at all — under those terms. We cannot, incidentally. Again, in the case of Meditation Two, the basic issues are quite simple. There the difficulty lies in convincing readers to relinquish their certitudes regarding what they imagine they know about the text of scripture, as a result of long indoctrination fortified in most cases by misleading translations.
It is an image of the final disposal and destruction of the dead, not of their perpetual suffering. But, no matter the imagery he employed, absolutely nowhere did he describe a place of eternal misery.
In general, in fact, New Testament scholars are keenly aware that neither Jesus nor Paul advanced a picture of eternal torment like that of later Christian teaching. Where that later language came from — appearing as it did roughly a generation after the time of the apostles — is a matter of some debate.
The historian Dimitris Kyrtatas , for instance, attributes much of it to the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter. Whatever the case, though, the critical consensus is that the New Testament contains, for the most part, two kinds of language about the last judgment: one that seems to portend the final destruction of the wicked at the threshold of the restored creation in the Age to Come and another that seems clearly to promise universal salvation.
The question, for those who assume that the New Testament must be uniform in theology and I confess I am not of their number , is which of these two kinds of language can better explain the other? The former, after all, if the destruction of the reprobate is understood simply as total annihilation, would seem to reduce the latter to vacuous hyperbole. The latter, however, can conceivably explain the former in terms of a harsh purification that destroys the sinful self, but only for the sake of the resurrection of the redeemed creature.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Anyway, while I do sometimes find the misreadings vexing even if I fully appreciate how convenient they often are for the critics , and while I think That All Shall Be Saved speaks for itself more than adequately, I have nevertheless learned over the years that understanding is always a collaboration. Both sides have to do their parts. So, perhaps it would be prudent to provide a brief guide to each here, for those whom it might assist.
It is also a well-established principle of Christian thought, metaphysical and theological, that God is infinitely good and so can never directly or positively will evil.
He may perhaps permit a natural evil such as suffering or death to occur, but only as providentially leading to a greater good; he cannot will it as an ultimate reality without thereby morally willing something evil.
Even if God allows only for the mere possibility of an ultimately unredeemed natural evil in creation, this means that, in the very act of creation, he deemed this reality to be an acceptable price for the ends he desired and thereby, morally speaking, has willed it positively.
In acting freely, all the possibilities to which the agent knowingly consents are things he or she has willed directly, as intrinsic conditions of the end to be achieved; one cannot positively will the whole without positively willing all the necessary parts of the whole whether those parts exist in fully actual form or only as real possibilities.
Hence, that final intentional horizon is of necessity a revelation , not only of the nature of creation, but of the nature of God. For any intentional act that is not conditional upon some prior necessity is a revelation of the moral nature of the agent. But that model is nonsensical. Of course, in this life none of us has perfect freedom. But, to whatever degree we are free, it is because we can form judgments and make choices; and, conversely, to the degree that we lack rational competency — that we are deprived of full understanding and sanity — we are not free.
What, after all, makes any choice a free act? Principally, an end, a telos , toward which it is oriented. To act freely, that is, one must be able to conceive a purpose or object and then elect either to pursue or not to pursue it. One must have some rational index of ultimate ends that are desirable in and of themselves in order to judge lesser, more immediate ends. You prove this every time you choose a salad at lunch rather than a plate of broken glass.
I desire a particular work of art, say, because I have a deeper and more original longing for beauty, which that particular artwork can partially satisfy; and this ultimate horizon of desire for beauty gives me an index for that evaluation, judgment, and choice.
We need not even posit that these transcendentals have some sort of real existence to affirm this though, of course, Christians are obliged to believe in the reality of Truth and Goodness and so forth. We need only recognise that such an orientation is the necessary structure of thinking and willing, and that every finite employment of the will, to the degree that it is free, depends upon this deferral of rationales toward ends beyond the empirical.
Otherwise, the physicalists would be right: what we take as free will would actually be nothing but a delusion generated by what is, in reality, a sequence of purely physical consequences generated by purely physical antecedents. My argument, therefore, is not that we cannot reject God, but only that we cannot do so with perfect freedom. The power of choice in itself is not true freedom of the will. In a sense, a lunatic has a far larger range of real options than does a sane person, but only because he or she also has far less freedom.
Behind one waits a fierce and famished tiger, ready to devour him; behind the other, a beautiful maiden, ready to become his wife. These are the only two fates permitted him. And he does not know which door is which. In Hinduism, it was also possible to alleviate the torment of hell by offering gifts to the priests,' says Professor Thomassen.
In Hinduism and Buddhism, deeds performed in this life will shape your next life. As well as different kinds of earthly life, you could also end up on different levels of heaven or hell.
The ultimate goal is to liberate yourself from the eternal dance of rebirth. In both of these religions, the fear of hell serves as an incentive to religious piety. While you can buy yourself free from torment in Hinduism, it works more like a law of nature in Buddhism, according to the professor. The Christian conceptions of hell may have been influenced by Eastern religions such as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.
This spring, Professor Thomassen retired as editor of Numen , the international journal on the history of religions. The final issue he edited was a special issue on conceptions of hell in different religions, a theme issue that stemmed from an international conference on hell held in Bergen two years ago. One of the topics researchers investigate in this special issue is what functions these conceptions of hell might have.
In many religions, hell has an instructional function while at the same time serving as a threat deterring people from committing sinful acts.
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