These posts relate to the article "Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought" by Dr. Thomas Talbott as published in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This essay strikes an excellent balance between being concise and being thorough in laying out the arguments and viewpoints of various Christian schools of eschatological thought without resorting to caricatures. His project is careful to present each of these viewpoints at their strongest, for only then can productive dialogue occur.
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We need a bit more background before we can move into the substance of the three primary eschatological viewpoints.
It's worth mentioning at this point, I think, this this essay is concerned with heaven/hell as eschatological finalities, not merely as metaphors for present existence.
Some may find such a clarification to be needless, it being so obvious as to go unsaid. We hear "eschatological" as meaning "future". And of course we are dealing with heaven and hell as future realities. Of course it's about the afterlife. What else would it mean?
Others may be opposed to this characterization. There is much scholarship to suggest that references to "judgment" and "hell" (rather "gehenna" or "sheol/hades" since the word "hell" is a translation) or that too much focus on "heaven" is somehow fundamentally opposed to a very earthy resurrection, and posits an escape from the world rather than existence in a restored one. The argument goes, then, that heaven/hell entirely miss the point of how these terms would have originally functioned, and that the eschatological component should (at the very least) be minimized. While I'm somewhat sympathetic to aspects of this, the truth is that in no way do such views eliminate the question of eschatological finality all together. It is not either/or.
Think of it this way. There are roughly 8 billion people on the planet today. Estimates are that there have been 107 billion people who've lived throughout human history. That means that 99 billion people have lived and died. From a Christian perspective then, the terminology of heaven/hell is not being used simply to refer to the demythologized experience of those alive on planet earth at this current moment in time, but also to all those people who have come and gone before us.
The eschatological question does not ignore the present. But neither is it only about the present moment.
It is a cosmic question, one that transcends space and time.
Bottom line, if you prefer different terms to heaven and hell, then by all means use them. If you don't care much for the scholarly historical-critical side of things, don't sweat it. The important issue is not the precise terminology that is used (as we shall see).
Now about this word "salvation". When we talk about "salvation" then, we're talking about something ontological, something that relates to the nature of what it is to be human.
Talbott states that:
"The Christian interpretation of this human condition thus postulates an initial estrangement from God, and the Christian religion then offers a prescription for how we can be saved from such estrangement."And also that:
"the highest possible good for created persons (true blessedness, if you will) requires that they enter into a proper relationship (or even a kind of union) with their Creator."Essential to the connotation of "salvation" is that of divine estrangement and the experience that something is not right. Something is less than complete. We live our lives "in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception". We "repeatedly misconstrue our own interests and pursue them in misguided ways." We are both perpetrators and victims of our own and others choices, but are also subject to "such non-moral evils as natural disasters, sickness, and especially physical death itself."
Something is wrong. If there is disagreement on this point there is very little need to read any further other than to satisfy an intellectual curiosity about a supposed "Christian" solution to a problem that doesn't exist, a human condition that is really no "condition" at all.
However we conceive of this salvation - as a place, an experience, a state of mind, here or there, then or now - we are here focused on how various Christian thinkers across the centuries have addressed the issue of the extent to which this salvation will be experienced by human beings as a finality.
But leave aside those particulars of the nature of "salvation", "heaven" and "hell" for a moment. Let's organize the ways of thinking about this against the backdrop of 3 inconsistent propositions.
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Here Talbott introduces the Inconsistent Triad - 3 statements that cannot all be true:
(1) All humans are equal objects of God's unconditional love in the sense that God, being no respecter of persons, sincerely wills or desires to reconcile each one of them to himself and thus to prepare each one of them for the bliss of union with him.
(2) Almighty God will triumph in the end and successfully reconcile to himself each person whose reconciliation he sincerely wills or desires.
(3) Some humans will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from him forever.Or to make things more succinct:
(1) God wants to "save" everyone.
(2) God has the ability to "save" all that he wants to "save".
(3) Some will be forever separated from God, the nature of that separation notwithstanding (eternal conscious torment, annihilation, etc.)
Thus we are then left with three primary eschatological views. Talbott labels these as (1)Augustinian, (2)Arminian and (3)Universalist. We could, of course, label these three primary views differently and/or place other traditions under these headers.
Generally speaking:
Augustinians accept (2) & (3), but reject (1). Augustinians believe that God could save everyone, but doesn't want to do so.
Arminians accept (1) & (3), but reject (2). Arminians believe that God wants to save everyone but doesn't have the power to do so.
Universalists accept (1) & (2), but reject (3). Believers in universal reconciliation believe that God has the power to save everyone and also wants to do so.
To put it into a single sentence, God is either able to able to save all but doesn't want to, wants to but can't, or is both able to and wants to.
As we shall see, it really is that simple. Complex arguments appear more simple against the backdrop of the Inconsistent Triad.
We'll dig into the Inconsistent Triad more in the next post. It's a very important piece in understanding the method and flow of the essay.
In the meantime, consider the triad and the implications of the three views. Are the three statements truly incompatible? Which are you intimately familiar with? Have you thought about heaven/hell within this framework?
continue to part 3
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