Scare tactics?
But these
objections rest on misunderstandings, or at least fail to take the argument on
in its strongest form. To see what is
wrong with the first objection, consider an analogy. Suppose someone is driving a car at 100 mph
toward a cliff. Whether from the
passenger seat or (hopefully, for your sake) by cell phone, you urge him to
slow down and change course, warning that he is headed for certain death. Suppose a third party interjects: “Oh come
on, resorting to scare tactics is a cynical, manipulative way to get someone to
change his ways! Sure, you might
terrorize him into slowing down, but only out of fear rather than a sincere appreciation
for safe driving practices. Why not
instead exhort him in a way that is likelier to transform his inward attitudes?
For example, why not laud the beauty and
reasonableness of safe driving? And why
not reassure him that in any event we may have good hope that he won’t go off the cliff?”
Is this wise
and morally refined advice? Of course
not. It is foolish and sentimental advice,
sure to result in the driver’s death. There
are two problems with it. First, it
treats the driver’s bad behavior and the prospect of his going off the cliff as
if they were only contingently related – as if the bad behavior had no inherent tendency to lead one off the
cliff, so that you may or may not bring it up when trying to reform the
behavior. In reality, of course, going
off of the cliff is the inevitable result of the bad behavior, and to leave it
out is not only to fail to tell the whole story about the nature of the bad
behavior, but to leave out the most
important part of the story.
Now, in the
same way, being in thrall to sins of greed, lust, envy, wrath, pride, and so on
of its very nature tends to harden
one’s soul into an orientation away from God and toward something less than
God. And that means that the more
hardened one is in such an orientation, the more likely that that is what one’s
soul will be “locked” onto at death. One
will, as it were, then go “off the cliff” toward which one had been speeding
prior to death. But to be forever locked
onto an end other than God is just what it is to be damned. So, to warn sinners of hell is not some
unnecessary exercise in scare tactics, any more than warning the driver of his
certain doom is. Rather, as with the
warning to the driver, it is simply to give a complete description of where
someone’s behavior will of its nature inevitably lead him if he does not change
course.
That is the
traditional Christian understanding of the effects of sin, and the Thomist
tradition gives one
possible way of understanding the underlying metaphysics. Whether or not you agree with that understanding
or the proposed underlying metaphysics, the point is that it is a mistake to
interpret the threat of hell as a mere scare tactic that has nothing to do with
motivating inward moral transformation.
On the contrary, it is precisely a warning of what a failure to achieve a
genuine inward moral transformation will inevitably lead to.
But that is
by no means to concede that scare tactics are always out of place. That is the second point illustrated by the
driving example. If a guy is speeding
toward a cliff, what charity demands is not reassuring
him that everything will be OK, but precisely scaring the hell out of him so that he’ll change course. Similarly, sometimes warning someone of the
prospect of hell can be the best way, maybe even the only way, to get him to
reconsider the sort of evil life he is living.
Yes, fear of
punishment is not the whole of the story of the moral life, or even the most
important part of the story. No Catholic
defender of the doctrine of hell denies that; on the contrary, such defenders
emphasize that perfect contrition,
sorrow out of love of God, is the
only way a person can be saved outside of sacramental confession. But it simply does not follow that fear of
punishment is never even part of the
story. It can be precisely the first
step in the process of inward moral transformation, even if it is far from the
last step. Everyone knows that this is
true in everyday life – that the prospect of prison, or financial ruin, or
death, or loss of reputation or friends or family, can lead a criminal, a drug
addict, an adulterer, or a greedy person, to reconsider the path he is on. There is no reason at all why fear of hell
might not do the same.
Christ’s urgency
It would
also be quite silly to pretend that the argument from urgency is something
defenders of the doctrine of hell have added
to Christ’s teaching. No, the
argument is rather that the reality of eternal damnation is the only way to
make sense of the urgency that is already
there in Christ’s own teaching. Consider
some passages just from Matthew’s Gospel:
For I tell you, unless your
righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter
the kingdom of heaven.
(Matthew 5:20, RSV)
If your right eye causes you to sin,
pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members
than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut
it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than
that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30)
Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few. (Matthew 7:13-14)
And do not fear those who kill the
body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and
body in hell. (Matthew 10:28)
But I tell you that it shall be more
tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.
(Matthew 11:24)
Therefore I tell you, every sin and
blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not
be forgiven. And whoever says a word
against the Son of man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy
Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.
(Matthew 12:31-32)
I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every
careless word they utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by
your words you will be condemned. (Matthew 12:36)
Just as the weeds are gathered and
burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they
will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw
them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.
(Matthew 13:40-42)
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like
a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it
was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but
threw away the bad. So it will be at the
close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the
righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and
gnash their teeth.
(Matthew 13: 47-50)
You serpents, you brood of vipers,
how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? (Matthew 23:33)
Afterward the other maidens came
also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But
he replied, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ (Matthew 25:11-12)
For to every one who has will more be
given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has
will be taken away. And cast the
worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their
teeth. (Matthew
25:29-30)
Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I
say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to
me.’ And they will go away into eternal
punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:45-46)
Now, I
submit that anyone reading these for the first time and with no knowledge of
the dispute over universalism would naturally take Christ to be saying that
there will be a day of judgment where the wicked will be condemned forever,
that there are sins that will never be forgiven, that this sorry fate cannot be
escaped, that few will avoid it, that it is so dire that it is better to lose
an eye, a hand, or even one’s whole body than to fall into it, and that there
is a finality to this judgement that entails an urgency to repent now in order
to avoid it.
Of course, annihilationists
would say that the damned don’t suffer
forever but are simply destroyed
forever. I have
argued against this view elsewhere, but what matters for the moment is that
even the annihilationist agrees that Christ’s words entail an irrevocable
condemnation of the wicked for their failure to repent of the sins of this
life. What you cannot get out of passages like these is the universalist view that
all will in fact be saved, that every sin will be forgiven, that no one will be
condemned forever, etc.
Universalist non-urgency
There is a
kind of Orwellian perversity to the universalist’s way of dealing with texts
like these. Out of one side of his
mouth, he admits – he has to, because
it is undeniable – that such passages seem incompatible with universalism. It’s just that he modesty proposes that there
are other ways of reading them that can be reconciled with his position. Even David Bentley Hart, in That All Shall Be Saved, acknowledges
the “highly pictorial and dramatic imagery of exclusion used by Jesus to
describe the fate of the derelict when the Kingdom comes” (p. 117). And he concedes that “the idea of an eternal
punishment for the reprobate – in the sense not merely of a final penalty, but also of endlessly
perduring torment – seems to have had a substantial precedent in the literature
of the intertestamental period, such as 1 Enoch, and perhaps in some early
schools of rabbinic thought” (Ibid.).
But though he allows for the “possibility” of reading Christ’s words
that way, he insists that there is “nothing in the gospels that obliges one to
believe this” and says that we simply cannot make “any dogmatic pronouncements
on the matter” (Ibid.). As I noted in a
previous post, Hart also resorts to such agnosticism when dealing with
passages in Revelation that don’t sit well with universalism.
Now, when
you consider any one passage in isolation, you may or may not think the
universalist can cobble together some sort of case. But the arguments are always strained,
lawyerly in the worst sense of trying desperately to open up some loophole by
which the obvious implication of the text might be escaped. (Again, see my
previous post for discussion of some of the problems.) And when all the relevant scriptural passages
are considered en masse, the idea
that you can reconcile scripture with universalism just falls apart. The idea that none of the relevant passages should be taken at face value, and
that the vast majority of readers have for two millennia been getting all of them that badly wrong, is just
too silly for words. And that is, of
course, why, as Hart admits, “just about the whole Christian tradition” (p. 81)
has always rejected universalism.
But now the
universalist speaks out of the other side of his mouth. Having cobbled together a tentative strained
universalist reading of this passage,
a tentative strained universalist reading of that passage, a tentative strained universalist reading of a third passage, and so on, he suddenly dumps
the whole lot of these sophistries on you and pretends that they together amount
to a demonstration that there is
nothing in scripture that is incompatible with universalism. He pretends that the burden of proof is now on the critics of universalism to show
otherwise. By such sleight of hand, what
has always been considered heterodox is now presented as having the presumption
in its favor, and what has always been considered orthodox is put on the
defensive.
Thus do we
have John Milbank matter-of-factly
asserting: “Of course it is Edward Feser who is heterodox and not DB Hart.”
Yes, of course. And of course, we have always been at war
with Eastasia.
Related
posts:
0 Comments