Does Anyone Really Reject God?

Kyle has written another post on hell, this one dealing with what he says, with at least some degree of accuracy, is the historically common belief among Catholics that many people will go to hell while few will be saved. (Personally, I have no opinion on the question of what ratio of people will go to heaven and hell, and other than warning people away from the one and towards the other, I can't really think why one would have much of a position on the matter.)

It seems to me that there are two main points which Kyle martials to his cause. His first is that if many are damned, then God's will has been frustrated, and unless we are prepared to think God a failure, we can't think that many are damned:

If you say, as much of Christianity does, that God created the universe and specifically human beings–creatures made in his image and likeness–for the purpose of participation in the love life that is God, and you also say that most people will refuse this destiny, then logically you’re led to say that, overall, creation won’t achieve its purpose. Overall, it is a failure. Overall, the purpose for which God created goes unrealized. Overall, God’s desire and will are not done. This would seem to make God, as Creator, something of a failure, even if you can, through some dexterous theodicy, get God off the hook for the damning decisions of his hellbound creatures.

This is, as I recall, a complaint that many of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation (or Revolt, if you prefer) were big on. If we allow that God created each of us with the purpose of knowing, loving and serving Him and being united with Him forever in heaven, and if we also allow that in sin we may reject God and separate ourselves eternally for Him, then by this line of thinking man may defy the will of God and frustrate His providence, and God is thus not all powerful. The most extreme solution for this is to claim that God actually intends some people to be damned (predestination) and that He crated them for this purpose. Thus, God's will is never violated since He wanted those souls damned anyway.

Kyle, of course, being a less dour fellow, is taking things in the opposite direction: God doesn't want us to be damned, and we can't believe that God's will isn't accomplished, so obviously none (or few) go to hell. It seems to me that either course essentially assumes that God doesn't will humans to really have free will. If we believe that God really wills us to have free will, then it by no means follows that if people use that free will to reject God that His creation is a "failure".

The second point Kyle makes relates to whether anyone ever really chooses to reject God:

From my own place, the doctrine that many are doomed to fire and brimstone and endless replays of One Direction hits just makes no sense. My own senses lead me to deny the observation of Fr. Longenecker that “every verifiable bit of evidence from history and yesterday’s newspaper reveal the total depravity of many men’s hearts and their spitting hatred of all that is beautiful, good and true.” I can’t think of one person who, in total depravity and rightness of mind, hates all that is beautiful, good, and true. Not one. Even the worst of sinners are motivated by something they value. That many people’s hearts are totally depraved and hateful of every swell thing just doesn’t correspond to reality.

This, it seems to me, is the more key question. Kyle wrote similarly here a little while back:

I know people who sin, of course, and do so knowing it's wrong, but none of them mean to put themselves above God or in opposition to him, as if that's their motivation. Either they justify it or presume God's mercy, in which case they would seem to have a lack of full knowledge, or they have fallen due in part to their weakness, which would suggest a lack of full consent. You're describing moral sin in such a way that very few people are really guilty of it. That sounds nice, but it doesn't sound like what the church says, certainly not the traditional idea that few will be saved and many will be damned.

Once again I'm reminded of a someone more dour version of the same concern: one of my friends I used to debate religious issues with as the teenager was always insisting that no act was really good because no one was ever totally motivated by "the good" and not by other more practical or selfish concerns. It seems to me that Kyle is, in a somewhat similar manner, arguing that no act is ever a total rejection of God because we always act with some other object in mind as well, in addition to the knowledge (assuming we have that knowledge) that we are acting contrary to God's will.

There's a sense in which I would agree with this.  During this life, no rejection of God is total, since we still have the chance to repent.  Our experience of God in this life is not direct and total, and our rejection of Him in this life is, likewise, not yet total.  That is why (contra one of Dante's innovations) we cannot be damned until the individual judgment, after death.

However, we do reject God often -- sometimes more gravely than others, sometimes more knowingly than others.  We do this whenever we put our own will above God's and choose to do what we want rather than what we know to be God's will, what we know to be good.

As Kyle points out, we invariably do this with some sort of proximate good in mind.  Our goal is not simply to offend God or to reject good, but to achieve something or other that we think of as a good -- that is, "a good" in the sense of some thing which we desire.  Even if I do something out of sheer orneriness (say, someone I dislike asks me to do A, and so I choose to refuse to do A simply to defy that person) I am still seeking a good of sorts in that I'm seeking some (perhaps illusory) sense of satisfaction in commanding my own actions. 

The thing to keep in mind, however, is that when we set our own will above God's and seek "goods" other than that which is good, we reject God even if that is not our sole object.  If I defraud Kyle, I may at a certain level do so in order to achieve the "good" of absconding with the riches produced by his philosophical blockbuster, but at the same I am choosing to put my will (to take what I want) above God's will (which tells me "Thou shalt not steal.") 

If I make a life of defrauding people, I build for myself a warped understanding of the good.  The more I live by that warped conception of the good, the more I train myself to reject the true good which is God's will.   

This is the sense in which people often describe all sin as being at root idolatry.  Even if I tell myself "I'm just weak" or "I'm counting on God's mercy" or "I don't agree with God on this one", when I form a habit of choosing my will over God's will, I form a habit of rejecting God and putting myself in isolation from Him. 

I think it's not a bad image to look on the individual judgment in terms of a final choice to either embrace or reject God, however it's important to see that decision in the right terms.  This is not a simple question of "would you like everlasting happiness or unhappiness?" in which every person would obviously have the same answer.  After all, we know that Lucifer, one of the chief among God's angels, rejected God utterly.  Why?  Did he simply get fed up with happiness and decide he wanted to suffer instead?  No.  To the soul which refuses to embrace God's will, union with God is no happiness.  Isolation may be suffering, but it is a suffering chosen because to the rebellious will union with God is suffering too.  When we build the habit of putting our own wills above God's, as we wrap those decisions in price or self-definition, we turn ourselves into the sort of people who would find it very painful to embrace God's will totally.  Perhaps I simply have a much darker view of humanity than Kyle, but I find it quite believable that someone would rather reject God than reject all the actions and beliefs which he holds in opposition to God.  Sometimes people even state things in exactly those terms.

How To Think About Hell

Kyle Cupp has a post up about hell which I think merits some response. I'm going to quote rather extensively in order to try to be sure that I'm responding to Kyle's thoughts and not my own.

From childhood through my teenage years and into college, whenever the topic of hell arose in conversation or whenever I was presented with some depiction of hellish torments, I would feel my heart descend into my gut–sometimes gently and noticeably only a little, at other times with the momentous speed of a great plunge. I would on occasion awaken, heart pounding, from nightmares of demons and devils and their hunger for my soul. Satan and his minions were very real to me and very active in my imagination. To keep them at bay, I wore a scapular and held on to other pious arms.

These terrors have long since passed. I no longer live in fear of hell, a state that, for me, is somewhat irrational. As someone who does not rule out the existence of such a place or the possibility that I may find my flesh eternally cooked to well done (unwell done?), I really should still respond to these prospects with at least a little fear and trembling. Such would be the appropriate responses, no?

That I don’t fear eternal tortures suggests perhaps that I presumptuously believe myself to be safely among the elect or perhaps that I really, deep down in unexplored pits, disbelieve in the existence of hell. After all, if I were captured by terrorists and threatened with torture, no doubt I’d be a nervous wreck, unable to eat or relax or function in a dignified manner. I face the possibility of eternal torture, and yet my bowels work just fine. I don’t lose sleep. I don’t worry. I don’t think about hellfire when diving headfirst into some delicious sin or even afterwards when I feel guilty for having done wrong. I make no efforts to feel the appropriate fear that the prospect of hell should elicit. I’m troubled only be the hurts I cause this side of eternity.

If I wanted to be optimistic, I would say that I am not afraid because I recognize that God, who loves me and died for me, is perfectly trustworthy. I can trust him and be not afraid. This is the reasoning of apologist Mark Shea, who argues that hell should not keep believers forever in a state of servile fear because God wants everyone to be not afraid and to be rather in happy, loving communion with him. Speaking to the overly scrupulous, Shea remarks:

Hell is not a threat by God. It’s a diagnosis of the stakes for which we play and the consequences of being the sort of fallen creatures we are in the sort of universe this is with the sort of God who made it. When the doc says “If you persist in your behavior without change you will get liver cancer and you will die” he’s not threatening you. He’s stating a fact. The cancer is not being sent by the doc to kill you. It’s the fruit of the stuff you are doing. The doc is there to heal you. But the healing requires the diagnosis.

Jesus’ diagnosis is that our race is sick with sin. Hell is the fruition of a life obstinately ordered toward sinful selfishness. The endstage of sin is hell just as the endstage of cancer is death. It’s not an extra added punishment for sin. It’s just what sin fully is. So it’s not something God does to us. It’s something we do to ourselves.

This sounds awfully nice, but the comparison here doesn’t really work. God doesn’t just diagnose the sickness of sin and promise healing; God created a universe in which horrific eternal suffering is a consequence for not living according to the moral rules of the universe–rules everyone, everywhere breaks. Rules that are almost always difficult and impossible to follow all of the time. Hell may not be a threat from God, as Shea says, but if it’s part of the universe and might be the whole of your future, then it’s rationally something to fear. Like, a lot. Any religion that preaches the possibility that you will go to hell preaches the message, “Be afraid.” That God has also said “Be not afraid” doesn’t cast the reasonableness of fear into the outer darkness.

Let me start with Kyle's claim that the existence of hell is a message of "Be afraid!" from God to us. What do we mean when we say that we fear something? I think in this context, we are afraid of things that we consider bad which might happen to us against our will.

But in Shea's description of sin and hell which Kyle is responding to, damnation is not something that happens to us against our will, it is something that happens to us because of our will. If we utterly reject God and refuse to be with Him for eternity, God will grant our wish. Having endowed us with the dignity of free will, it would be inconsistent with God's nature for Him to do otherwise.

Kyle doesn't attack this conception of sin and hell, but some of his statements seem to suggest disagreement with it. For instance, he says, "God created a universe in which horrific eternal suffering is a consequence for not living according to the moral rules of the universe–rules everyone, everywhere breaks. Rules that are almost always difficult and impossible to follow all of the time." The implication seems to be that the unfortunate sinner could want very much to be happy with God for eternity in heaven, but without thinking much about it he committed some little sin that everyone does all the time -- that it's almost impossible to avoid -- and now, against his will, he finds himself in the fires of hell.

However, what Shea is saying (and what I think is indeed the correct way to understand sin and hell) is that sin is not just the performance of some action which God arbitrarily imposes heavy penalties upon. Sin is the rejection of God. Sin is putting oneself in God's place and following our will rather than his, consciously and deliberately.

This necessarily means that our damnation can never happen against our will. We can't reject God without rejecting God. I could perform some action which, if I fully understood its meaning and gravity, would constitute a rejection of God, but if I did so without fully understanding the action's meaning and import I would not incur the full effect. My action might have the same destructive effects on the temporal lives of myself and others that it would have if I had committed it in full knowledge and culpability, but it would not have the full effect on my relationship with God (of which my eventual salvation or damnation is the culminating expression) if I performed the act without full knowledge and intent.

Now, there is a sense in which we should be afraid of hell, but it's a different kind of "be afraid". We should regard our relationship with God with gravity, and make an effort to think seriously about how our actions affect that relationship -- just as we would with any other relationship that we treasure.

Take, for instance, your relationship with your spouse. It doesn't make sense to be afraid that you will somehow end your marriage and leave your spouse without meaning to. However, it does make sense for you to examine your actions in terms of how they affect your marriage. After all, if continuing your relationship with your spouse is important to you, it would make sense to examine your actions in terms of whether they bring you closer to or further from your spouse.

Sure, no one can be a perfect spouse. Just as Kyle says that it's well neigh impossible for us fallen creatures to do God's will every single time, we none of us are perfect spouses. We do things that are selfish or short sighted. In our human relationships, this means that it's at times even possible for us to hurt another so badly, without meaning to make a definitive break, that we find ourselves with an irreparably ruptured relationship before we realize what we're doing.

With God, however, we have a relationship with One who is both all knowing and all merciful. There is no point when God is going to say to us, "I just can't trust you anymore and I need to cut myself off from you lest you hurt me again." We can't, after all, hurt God. And He knows what goes on in the depth of our hearts better than we do ourselves. Thus, the only rupture that can occur between us and God is the one we make. We are only cut off from his mercy and forgiveness if we refuse to accept it.

Choosing Hell

This post originally ran (I've cleaned up a few typos, but otherwise left it unchanged) back in 2006, but the topic has been on my mind, and having found it via Google while researching the topic of the Fundamental Option I decided to rerun this one rather than writing a new one.

Quite some time back, Pontifications ran a post about the theory of "fundamental option", which it seems is the theological term for the idea that one's salvation is based upon a fundamental choice that one makes either for or against God.

This image for the determination of one's salvation has a certain utility in that it is simple and evocative. C. S. Lewis uses it in The Last Battle, where all of Narnia's creatures face Aslan and swerve either to his right (with loving expressions) or to his left (with hate in their eyes). And yet, like any image or illustration, applying it absolutely leads to distortion. The 'encounter God and choose' image helps to emphasize that God's judgment is not some arbitrary judgment imposed upon us. It also helps to explain how someone externally appearing to have sinned many times might be saved, while someone who to all appearances led a virtuous life, yet held pride in his heart, might reject God and be condemned. And yet, taken as an absolute of 'salvation by choice alone' the theory of 'fundamental option' becomes just as much a heresy as 'salvation by faith alone'.

John Paul II said as much in Veritas Splendor:

To separate the fundamental option from concrete kinds of behavior means to contradict the substantial integrity or personal unity of the moral agent in his body and in his soul. A fundamental option understood without explicit consideration of the potentialities which it puts into effect and the determinations which express it does not do justice to the rational finality immanent in mans acting and in each of his deliberate decisions.

It is keeping this integrity between the human agent's identity, will and action that is the difficult balance for most of us, I think. Our culture tends to think of each choice as a totally free activity. Thus, the idea of experiencing for an instant the clarity of the Beatific Vision and in that instant choosing for or against God seems like an isolated decision point, unencumbered by past decisions. Indeed, some use this view to support the claim that perhaps all will be saved, because no one (when truly seeing God for what He is) would reject Him.

And yet, classic Christian moral theology does not support this view of total personal freedom. Virtue is often described as 'the habit of doing good' while attachment to sin is that moral habit which, once one has sinned, makes it hard to make the right choice in the future. Thus, the first time you lie in order to get out of a difficult situation, you struggle to make it come out convincingly and fear for days that your lie will be found out. But with each transgression the lie comes more naturally, until it becomes nearly impossible to tell the truth in a difficult situation -- the convenient lie comes out without even thinking.

It is because we are changed as moral agents by our past choices that our fundamental choice for or against God at the particular judgment cannot be divorced from the moral decisions we have made throughout our lives. Each time we sin or resist sin, makes it harder or easier to make that decision at the moment of personal judgment.

Perhaps, as in so many other things, the analogy of marriage is useful. One can, as a moral agent, choose at any given point in one's marriage to do something that is good for or bad for one's spouse. And yet, a given man with a given history can make it harder or easier to treat his wife well by building a history of good or bad behavior. While, in theory, a man who has lied and mistreated and been unfaithful to his wife can still, at any given decision point, choose to treat her well, he has vastly decreased both his ability to treat his wife well, and also his knowledge of what his wife truly wants, and thus his ability to treat her well even if he wants to.