Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought - Thomas Talbott (5): Restricting the Scope of God's Love

The Inconsistent Triad

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.


Return to Part 1
Back to Part 4

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Let's now look at how Talbott addresses the Augustinian notion of God's "restricted love".

The Augustinian reasons as follows:

God's saving grace is irresistible in the end, and yet everlasting torment in hell will nonetheless be the terrible fate of some; therefore, God does not love all created persons equally and his (electing) love is thus limited in its scope.

In the end, it's fairly simple.  Grace is "irresistible" (proposition 2), yet everlasting separation is true (proposition 3).  Therefore, it must be the case that God does not love all people equally in the sense that God wills their salvation.

If a person is not saved it is because God doesn't want them to be saved.  His electing love, being irresistible, cannot and must not extend to them.  Period.

For some people this salvation equation is sheer theological fact.  "Mysterious" as to the reasons for God's "free" choice to save some and not others, but not mysterious in it's sheer necessity.  On the other hand, for those who either (1) come from a tradition that doesn't hold to the Augustinian version of "irresistible" grace or (2)come from a tradition that does view salvation through the lens of the Augustinian version of "irresistible" grace but didn't realize the necessity of this limited scope of God's salvific will, this is a scandalous assertion.  Shocking.  For some, heretical.

The assertion naturally leads to some important theological questions like:

What??  

God doesn't want all people to be "saved"?  

How and where do we see such an idea defended philosophically?  Biblically?  Theologically?

What about those parts of scripture that would seem to indicate that God does indeed want all to be "saved"?

1 Timothy 2:4 is one example of an isolated verse commonly used to affirm God's desire to save all people without exception:

who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (NRSV)

For a person who needs to restrict the scope of God's (electing) love and sees this verse as holding some sort of authority, this verse is a problem.  What can be done?  But here is how Augustine explains it :

"the word concerning concerning God, 'who will have all men to be saved,' does not mean that there is no one whose salvation he doth not will...but by 'all men' we are to understand the whole of mankind, in every single group into which it can be divided...For from which of these groups doth not God will that some men from every nation should be saved through his only-begotten Son our Lord."  (Enchiridion) 

So for Augustine, "all" must merely mean "all kinds" or "some" individuals from "every group".  This is the necessary exegetical move.  God simply cannot be said to will the salvation of all people (as defined in proposition 1) and maintain any Augustinian theological coherence as defined by the acceptance of propositions 2 & 3.  So any Bible verse that seems to say otherwise ("all" as meaning literally "all people") cannot really be doing so.  It must be shoved off to the side or dismantled.

The logic of it is not difficult to see.  Simple.

Now some proponents of the Augustinian view of "limited election"argue, quite simply, that God does not love the non-elect at all.  Others, like the contemporary philosopher Paul Helm don't argue that God doesn't "love" all people or that "love" is not of God's very essence.  Instead, Helm seems to dismantle the connection between God's love and God's salvific will.  Helm argues that God's loving nature or God's loving actions towards human beings do not necessitate that God's redemptive love extends equally to all people.  The argument goes, just as there are differences within the created order (male/female, etc), there can be differentiations with respect to God's redemptive purposes.  Essentially, God being love in God's essence and being loving towards God's creation does not mean that this love is necessarily and finally redemptive in nature.

Helm does not here seek to throw out the language of "love" but rather to rework it's semantic content to fit into an Augustinian framework by:

1. creating a special category of "love" called "redemptive love" and arguing that the former does not necessarily entail the latter
2. viewing divine love on a sort of sliding scale, the minimum level of which may be called "love" but doesn't include the will to save

Jeff Jordan takes a similar approach.  He argues that God's love need not be maximally extended for it to be love.  He finds the idea of "equal love" to be an impossibility because love is not defined by uniformity.  In other words, divine love need not be salvific in it's aims for it to be divine "love".

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A lot of foundational things to work through here.  Personally, I'd prefer to see the language of "love" thrown out all together than see it's semantic content be reduced to a rubble of Augustinian equivocation.  Preference aside, the implications of going down this path are, I think, stunning and disastrous.

For me, the questions that arise out of this section are:

1. When does "all" mean "all"?
2. What is the connection between who God is and what God does?
3. We may very well be dealing with definitions of "love" that are are semantically different.  So what do we mean by the word "love"?  
4. Does God being "loving" entail that God wills the ultimate good of the object(s) of his love?  Or can "love" will something less (and far worse) that the ultimate good of the beloved and still be called "love"?
5. What are the protological (in-the-beginning) implications of a limited love?

continued

Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought - Thomas Talbott (4): Postulating a Final and Irreversible Division within the Human Race

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.


Back to part 3

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You may notice that proposition (3) is fairly unspecific:

Some humans will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from him forever. 

This is by design.  It could mean a lot of different things.

• Hell as a realm where the wicked receive retribution in the form of everlasting torment.
•  A place of "spiritual torment" experienced as despair and anger, etc.
• Annihilation (cease to exist).
• A self-created hell sustained by rejecting God (the "doors locked on the inside" per C.S. Lewis)
• A realm in which God will try to make people as "comfortable" as possible.
• The experience of God's love as wrath.
• Etc.

Any of these viewpoints accept (3) as true.  All represent a form of a final and irrevocable division in humanity - a division between those who are reconciled to God and those who are not.  No doubt there could be more.

But let us put aside the nature or experience of this "separation" or "non-reconciliation" for the moment and instead ask the following question:

If there is to be such a final and irreversible division within the human race, just what accounts for it?

Recall Talbott's Inconsistent Triad:

There are two very different explanations for this final division.

For Augustinians, the explanation lies in the mystery of God's freedom to extend his love and mercy to a limited elect and to withhold it from the rest of humanity. 

For the Augustinian, God owes humanity nothing and is perfectly free to give grace to whom he chooses and withhold it from whom he chooses.  Talbott references Calvin's interpretation of Romans 9.  Jacob is taken into grace.  Esau is hated.  And this outside of ANYTHING that either of these two individuals had done, good or bad.  God, in his sovereignty, does not want to save Esau.  Period.  (We'll come back to this view of God's "freedom" later on).

In contrast to the Augustinian view, we have (what Talbott calls) the Arminian view.

According to the Arminians, the explanation lies in our human free choices.  Thanks to God's grace, we ultimately determine our own destiny in heaven or hell.

Arminians hold that God offers his grace to all, but that people freely reject it thus securing their separation.  God would save all and is not willing that any should perish, but the effectiveness of grace requires a certain "acceptance".  God can't just "override free-will", which would be "unloving".

Given the staunch disagreement as to the reasons for this "final and irreversible division", it shouldn't be surprising that each side critiques the framework, intelligibility, and implications of the other.

Arminians portray the Augustinian view as inherently unjust, even monstrous.  They point towards the scripture verses that posit God's universal salvific will and love.

Augustinians critique the Arminian explanation as contradicting St. Paul's clear teaching that salvation is wholly a matter of grace.  Even an "acceptance" of grace constitutes a sort of earning.

If the ultimate difference between the saved and the lost lies in their superior free choices that the saved have made during their earthly lives, then why shouldn't they take credit for this difference or even boast about it?  Why shouldn't they say: "Well, at least I'm not as bad as those miserable people in hell who were so stupid as to have freely rejected the grace that God offers to all." 

Nor could a sovereign God fail to reconcile the chosen objects of his love.  Such a defeat is inconceivable.

While the theology and terminology contained in these two very different approaches requires elaboration, both are compelling.

As such, a universalist would agree with their critiques of one other, arguing that the problem lies in their prior and largely unquestioned commitment to the acceptance of proposition (3).


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