The Liberal Doctrine of Hell and Universalism: a Transcendental Approach

The Liberal Doctrine of Hell and Universalism: A Transcendental Approach

By Daniel L. Broadstock BA (Hons), B.Ed

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy

University of Divinity 2017

Abstract

In this thesis I have applied a Kantian methodology to present a new approach to the problem of Hell. I have engaged with two leading perspectives in this debate, the ‘liberal doctrine of Hell’ and the doctrine of Universalism, and pursued dialogue with leading theologians of each view; Jerry Walls and Jurgen Moltmann respectively.

The liberal model of Hell is a modern attempt to revitalise the doctrine by recasting its nature and purpose. Rather than an instrument for the punishment of sin, the liberal model interprets Hell as God’s response to human freedom. This theory holds that God has constituted human beings with free volition of the will and desires a free relationship with them. As it is possible to resist this invitation, he has also created Hell as a place of eternal separation for those who reject him. While the invitation of grace is never withdrawn, some will remain there forever. Universalism is the view that all human beings will be saved.

I have sketched a general outline of these views, illustrating them with reference to arguments proposed by key thinkers in their respective fields. I conclude that they constitute an antinomy; an a priori dilemma abstract from experience and therefore unresolvable by philosophical reasoning. I suggest that the problem of Hell can be resolved by employing a theological adaptation of Kant’s transcendental idealism: eternal separation and universal salvation can both be true, if understood as compatible manifestations of different levels of reality and perception.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express gratitude firstly to my supervisor, Dr. Sandy Yule. He has supported me with patient encouragement and gentle wisdom, leading my thinking in new and profitable directions.

My thanks are also due to my parents, who taught me first about God’s love. They have supported and encouraged this project, whilst sensitively avoiding indelicate questions about its subject and the imminence of its deadline.

I am grateful for the support of MCD University, and for the use of its excellent library.

I owe thanks above all to God, who breathes life to reason.

Table of Contents

Introduction 7

1. The Traditional View: Augustine and Arminius 23

2. Kant: Transcendental Idealism and the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason 33

3. The Liberal Doctrine of Hell: Jerry Walls 50

4. Universalism: Jurgen Moltmann 72

5. A Transcendental Approach to the Problem of Hell 92

Conclusion 121

Selected Bibliography 123

INTRODUCTION

‘Capricious’, ‘mean minded’, ‘utterly monstrous’. These are the words used by comedian Stephen Fry to describe God in an interview in February, 2015. Asked what he would say if he were confronted by God at his death, Fry replied, ‘I’d say, bone cancer in children? How dare you. How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that's not our fault? It’s not right. It's utterly, utterly evil.’1 The philosophical term for this view is ‘anti-theism’ or ‘protest atheism’.2 Anti-theism is an expression of disbelief in God that goes beyond atheism. Where the atheist claims that there is inadequate evidence to justify belief in God, the anti-theist charges theism with moral abhorrence. Fry is suggesting that, even were he to discover that he was mistaken and that God existed and loved him, he would want nothing to do with him. He believes that the moral conditions by which God governs the world renders him unworthy of worship. For all the popular interest that interview generated, it was a modern restatement of an ancient criticism. Perhaps the most famous statement of anti-theism occurs in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In the chapter named ‘Mutiny’ Ivan Karamazov passes judgement upon God. Like Fry, Ivan focuses his moral disgust upon the suffering of children. Ivan describes an atrocity practiced by Ottoman janissaries who would befriend children only to slaughter them before their mothers.3 For Ivan, no Christian theodicy can rationalize the existence of such evils; ‘Without it, they say, man would not be able to survive upon earth, for he would not know good from evil. Why recognize that devilish good-and-evil, when it costs so much? I mean, the entire universe of knowledge is not worth the tears of that little

1 Telegraph Reporter, "Stephen Fry's 'God Is Evil' Interview Shortlisted for Religious Award," The Telegraph, accessed 04/01/2016, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/12200734/Stephen-Frys-God-is- evil-interview-shortlisted-for-religious-award.html.

2 Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 146.

3 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), 312.

8 child addressed to “dear Father God”.’4 For Ivan, neither the damnation of wrongdoers in Hell nor even the coming of God in glory could atone for the suffering of a child. Neither the punishment of the sinner nor the reconciliation of perpetrator and victim can atone. The promise of future justice is not enough for him:

I don’t want harmony. Out of a love for mankind I do not want it. I want rather to be left with sufferings that are unavenged. Let me rather remain with my unavenged sufferings and unassuaged indignation, even though I am not right. And in any case, harmony has been overestimated in value, we don’t have the money to pay so much to get in. And so I hasten to return my entry ticket.5

‘That’s rebellion,’ says his brother Aloysha. Ivan does not want salvation, because to be saved is to consent. He is a conscientious objector: he would rather go to prison than acknowledge the authority of the court. In this, Ivan represents the paradigm of damnation suggested by the liberal doctrine of Hell: Hell is not the place to which God banishes human beings. Rather, Hell is the place from which human beings banish God. * The doctrine of Hell relies upon the conviction that humans can and will be held morally responsible for their actions. This in turn rests upon assumed frameworks of divine and human agency: God’s freedom to judge, and the genuine moral responsibility of human beings. Christian theologians have suggested varied interpretations of this agency, ranging from libertarian freedom expressed by both God and humanity, to absolute divine sovereignty, and any number of compatibilist models in between. Meanwhile, the popularity of any one interpretation of Hell has waxed and waned as our understanding of freedom and moral responsibility have contested and evolved. While the doctrine remains alive and well amongst a broad cross-section of theologians and believers, the concept itself has come under increasing attack on moral, theological and philosophical grounds from theists and atheists alike.6 A prominent view now held by those who defend the doctrine consists of a free will theodicy. In this view, for which

4 Ibid., 316.

5 Ibid., 320.

6 Jonathon L. Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3-23.

I use the term ‘The liberal doctrine of Hell’7, Hell is understood as God’s response to human freedom. It is merely the provision made for those who wish to be separate from God. While God desires the salvation of all, he will not compel the compliance of any human being to ensure this outcome. Instead, he sustains them in Hell, where they may enjoy the illusory satisfaction of self-worship. This is not a punishment, and the invitation to repentance and salvation is never withdrawn. But however long God pursues the damned, some will resist him forever. This view is a relatively modern response to an ancient dilemma. Given the relative youth of this view, it is timely to assess the current state of this debate, the arguments and chief premises of its protagonists, and the primary theological and philosophical traditions upon which it draws.

Methodology

The overall aim of this project will be to assess the claims of the liberal doctrine of Hell in the context of its dialogue with Universalism, and to suggest a possible solution to the controversy. I will sketch out the various theological claims and assumptions that animate these competing views, and assess the force of the arguments which they present. In order to illuminate the contours of this debate I will take Jerry Walls and Jurgen Moltmann as my primary dialogue partners, both of whom are prominent exponents of Liberalism and Universalism respectively.8 Wall’s relevant work, 'Hell: The Logic of Damnation' is, in my judgment, the most sustained and rigorous defense of the liberal doctrine of Hell to date.9 It incorporates a broad and representative range of arguments deployed by other theologians in this field. As a Universalist, Jurgen Moltmann constructs his soteriological framework upon interpretations of human freedom which differ sharply from Walls, and as such he will serve as a theological counterpoint to the libertarian defense of Hell. My investigation of the debate itself will be confined largely to my evaluation of these

7 John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God's Final Victory: A Comparative Case for Universalism, Blomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 127.

8 In this thesis, the term ‘liberal’ or ‘liberalism’ will refer narrowly to the Liberal doctrine of Hell, except where otherwise indicated. 9 Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation, vol. 9, Library of Religious Philosophy (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

10 two figures, as their views are among the best developed and representative of their respective positions. I shall also take Kant’s epistemic philosophy as a key resource for negotiating the dispute between universalist and liberal approaches and suggesting a possible means of resolving it. I will engage with Augustine as a significant representative of the traditional formulation of Hell as a conceptual baseline for examining the theological premises of the two positions, and evaluating their relationship to Christian doctrine. I regard Augustine as an appropriate thinker for this purpose on the grounds of his formative influence upon the doctrines of Hell, grace and freedom.

Contention

In this Thesis, I will suggest the Kantian diagnosis that the debate between Liberalism and Universalism constitutes an ‘antinomy of pure reason’. That is, the question of whether human beings could eternally separate themselves from God is so abstract from our material experience that it is impossible to arrive at a conclusion with epistemological confidence. The logic on each side is sufficiently plausible and resilient that we will not resolve the problem by any amount of argumentation. Instead, I will argue that a theological adaptation of Kant’s transcendental analysis supplies us with a possible means of overcoming the impasse. By applying the same ‘Copernican revolution’10 by which Kant resolves the incompatibility between freedom and determinism, I will suggest that a similar revolution of perspective can overcome the contradiction at the heart of the problem of Hell. Universal Salvation and eternal separation could both be true, if understood as compatible manifestations of different levels of reality and perception.

Literature Survey

Academic literature relevant to this question consists of the relevant works of Immanuel Kant and his interpreters, in addition to a range of philosophical and theological works which fall under the following four soteriological categories:

 The Traditional View: The will of God determines that some will be saved, while

10 Paul Guyer, Kant (New York City: Routledge, 2006), 51.

others will be consigned irretrievably to Hell. Hell is understood as an outworking of God’s sovereign justice, which is expressed in the eternal and intentional punishment of sin. St Augustine is arguably the most significant historical representative of this perspective, which includes both Calvinist and Arminian subsets, and remains the view of many contemporary theologians. While Arminianism holds that grace is received by free will, and in this sense human beings may ‘choose’ salvation or damnation, it retains the traditional purpose and character of Hell.11

 Cosmic Universalism: The will of God determines that all will be redeemed, either by decree or by his very nature. Salvation is understood to reach beyond the judgement of individual human beings to encompass the cosmic totality of creation. This view includes eastern concepts of Apokatastasis12 and includes Moltmann, Origen and Schleiermacher among its leading proponents.13

 The Liberal Doctrine of Hell: God desires the salvation of all, yet either is unwilling to override individual autonomy in order to ensure that outcome, or the free choices made by individuals render them spiritually suitable for either communion or alienation from God. This view is promoted by figures such as Jerry Walls, John Sanders and Richard Swinburne.14 15 16

 Free Will Universalism: The nature of libertarian freedom will inevitably result in the universal acceptance of salvation by human creatures. God permits human beings to reject him, but it is inconceivable that they should choose to do so eternally.

11 The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, s.v. "Hell."

12 Richard J. Plantinga, Thompson, Thomas R., Lundberg, Matthew D., An Introduction to Christian Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 209.

13 The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, s.v. "Universalism."

14 Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation.

15 John Sanders, "A Freewill Theist's Response to Talbott's Universalism," in Universal Salvation? : The Current Debate, ed. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge (Cambridge: W.B Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2004).

16 Richard Swinburne, "A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell," in The Existence and Nature of God, ed. Alfred J. Freddoso (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983).

Theologians such as Thomas Talbott and Eric Reitan have developed this view. This view is closely related to Cosmic Universalism, but represents a distinctively modern form of Universalism which is distinguished by its engagement with the liberal doctrine of Hell.17 18

Kant

Of Kant’s considerable canon, material for this thesis will be primarily drawn from the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’19 and the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’.20 It is primarily in these works that Kant develops his transcendental analysis, which will be the critical perspective from which I suggest my own approach to the problem of Hell. In the second work, Kant describes his ‘postulates of practical reason’, of which he includes God, freedom, and immortality. A brief summary of Kant’s formulation of these postulates shows how and why Kant arrives at his transcendental solution to the paradox of freedom, which will then be the model for my proposed solution to the problem of Hell. A full exposition of literature interpreting Kant’s influence on modern theology is beyond the scope of this Thesis.21 However, as the solution to the problem of Hell proposed in Chapter Five depends upon a certain interpretation of Kant’s concepts of ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’, it is worth making a brief survey of how these categories have been interpreted.

In order to resolve the conflict between what he regards as the indisputable reality both of personal freedom and material determinism, Kant distinguishes between ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’. Those things which we sensually perceive, such as physical objects and their qualities, he assigns as ‘phenomena’. He argues that these are merely appearances, or intelligible patterns which human consciousness imposes on reality with the help of formal concepts such as time and space. The reality of things-in-themselves, which he calls

17 Thomas Talbott, "The Inescapable Love of God," (Florida: Universal Publishers, 1999).

18 Reitan, God's Final Victory: A Comparative Case for Universalism.

19 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer, Wood, Allen W., trans. Paul Guyer, Allen, W. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 20 Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Practical Reason," in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 21 Readers interested in such an account may begin with Dorrien (2012), Anderson and Bell (2010), Insole (2016) and Michalson (1999).

‘noumena’, lies below these appearances and cannot be perceived directly. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant gives the following definition of this ‘transcendental idealism’:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that time and space are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something in themselves (independent of our sensibility).22

The question of how to interpret this doctrine has sharply divided Kantian scholars since the publication of the first Critique. Whereas some have accepted a face-value interpretation that Kant is really alluding to a world beyond the senses, others (often aiming to ‘rescue’ Kant from what they take to be an untenable and contradictory hypothesis) have suggested other ways of reading this dichotomy. Christopher Insole has succinctly summarized the history of this debate:

Speaking briskly, the interpretative options are these: when Kant talks about noumenal reality and things in themselves (and other synonyms), (i) he does not really mean it; (ii) he does really mean it, and in so doing, goes beyond what he should talk about, according to his own system; (iii) he does really mean it, and in doing so, does not go beyond what he should talk about, according to his own system.23

According to Insole’s classification, option (i) is a so-called ‘deflationary’24 interpretation, in which Kant’s language is retained, but is relieved of the apparently fantastical burden of reality beyond the senses.25 This view holds that the noumena/phenomena distinction is not to be taken literally, but serves as a ‘shading concept’ or normative check on the pretensions of human reason to exceed its abilities. Option (ii) is held by those who believe that Kant was sincere, but in positing imperceptible things in

22 Kant, 369; ibid. 23 Christopher J. Insole, The Intolerable God: Kant's Theological Journey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2016), 95-96. 24 Ibid., 96. 25 Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).

14 themselves, transgressed the epistemological boundaries set by his own critical philosophy. This view has been held by scholars such as Peter Strawson26 and Jonathan Bennett.27 Option (iii) is maintained by those who believe, not only that Kant did truly assert the reality of things in themselves, but was justified in doing so. Insole himself defends this view,28 as does Robert Adams29, Karl Ameriks30 and Desmond Hogan.31 Insole describes this ‘noumenal affection’ interpretation as the view that

The “noumenal realm” is the ground of the world of appearances, whereby noumenal objects affect us. When they “appear to us” we call these appearances ‘phenomena’ or ‘that which appears,’ These noumenal objects bring about our experience, which experience is always mediated through our forms of intuition, space, and time. Although we understand that our experience is always on this side of this mediation, coming downstream of the world as it is in itself, even though we cannot know anything substantial about this world, except that it does indeed ground our experience. So as well as being committed to a notion of noumenal affection [the view that we are affected by the nature of noumenal objects], we also understand that we suffer from principled ignorance about noumenal reality.32

In short, therefore, Insole is proposing an interpretation of transcendental idealism that takes noumena seriously as a practical reality, while maintaining the limits placed by Kant’s epistemology on the ability of human consciousness to perceive and define that reality.

In his book, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology, Gary Dorrien describes this interpretative controversy as concerning the extent to which Kant’s idealism was ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’. Dorrien defines these as follows:

Subjective and objective idealism are both idealistic in claiming that reality depends upon the ideal or the rational. Subjective idealism, however, binds the

26 Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966). 27 Johnathan Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 28 Christopher J. Insole, Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem, Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology (UK: Oxford University Press, 2013). 29 Robert Adams, "Things in Themselves," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 4 (1997). 30 Karl Ameriks, Interpreting Kant's Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 31 Desmond Hogan, "Three Kinds of Rationalism and the Non-Spatiality of Things in Themselves," Journal of the History of Philosophy 47, no. 3 (2009). 32 Insole, The Intolerable God: Kant's Theological Journey, 97.

forms of experience to the transcendental subject. In subjective idealism, the transcendental subject is the precondition of the forms of experience, and the ideal or the rational is subjective or spiritual. Objective idealism, on the contrary, detaches the forms of experience from the transcendental subject. Here the forms of experience apply to the realm of being as such, and the ideal or the rational is archetypal and structural.33

In other words, subjective idealism is the view that reality emerges from and is defined by the transcendental subject, whereas objective idealism asserts that the experience of the transcendental subject is in some sense conditioned and defined by the nature of things in themselves. In the first view, Dorrien explains, ‘We have not direct knowledge of reality; immediate objects of perception are the ideas of a perceiving subject…the reality of an independent world must be inferred from our representations.’34 Whereas objective idealism maintains that ‘the ideas of the knowing subject [are] determined by the intersubjective world of the concepts of the understanding…the ideas of the individual mind are not primary in Kant’s system.’35 Dorrien ascribes the first view to H.A Pritchard, P.F Strawson, Jonathan Bennett, and Robert Paul Wolff and the later to Karl Ameriks and Henry Allison. Dorrien himself subscribes to a ‘patchwork’ or ‘mixed’ theory which argues that both elements are present in Kant’s work. 36

I will not attempt to mount a full survey of these issues before a general discussion of Kant’s philosophy. It is sufficient merely to get a sense of the controversy that surrounds Kant’s transcendental idealism and the questions that will inform the solution to the problem of Hell that is predicated on it. We will therefore return to this subject in Chapters Two and Five.

33 Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 14. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 15. 36 Ibid.

The Liberal Doctrine of Hell

Perhaps the most comprehensive formulation of the liberal view is Jerry Walls’ 'Hell: The Logic of Damnation'. In this work, Walls seeks to defend the coherency of a liberal view of Hell from both Calvinism and Universalism. Walls proposes that Hell can arise only from a consistent and decisive rejection of God, which proceeds from the deformation of moral character. Walls does, however, allow for the possibility of post-mortem repentance, and argues that justice demands that every person receive a ‘minimally sufficient amount of grace, which would effectively dispose them to receive salvation’, either in this life or the next.37 He believes that this concept of ‘optimal grace’ deflects objections against divine goodness on the grounds that some persons might be damned due to ignorance or hardship without which they could have been saved. But the crux of his argument is that, even supplied with this optimal grace, human beings are by nature capable of rejecting God forever. Walls’ book develops themes commonly found amongst proponents of the liberal view, especially those popularised by C.S Lewis. Lewis’ essay, 'Hell' encapsulated this view: ‘I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end; that the doors to hell are locked from the inside.’38 C.S Lewis argued that the damned are so utterly confirmed in self-worship that, not only are they impervious to any renewed attempt at redemption, but that the bliss of heaven would be repellent to them. To the Universalist, Lewis argues that God has already accomplished everything he could possibly do to bring about their salvation:

“What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? But they will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.’39

More recent literature has focused on presenting a coherent account of an eternal rejection of God. John Sanders’ article, A Freewill Theist’s Response to Talbott’s Universalism allows that God may ‘fail’ in his purposes to bring about the salvation of an

37 Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation, 89. 38 C.S Lewis, "Hell," in The Problem of Pain (London: Centenary Press, 1940), 115.

39 Ibid., 130.

17 individual, while his overarching purposes remain undefeated. ‘This God takes risks and leaves himself open to being despised, rejected and crucified. The creator and sovereign lord is one who suffers with, because of, and for his creatures. God is the ‘defenseless superior power’ who in grace makes himself vulnerable to us by making it possible that his every desire may not be fulfilled.’40 Sanders argues that the choice of alienation from God proceeds from the ‘irrationality of sin'. God would have to transform us into ‘Godlike’ beings in order to guarantee universal salvation.41 VanArragon denies that it is impossible for a soul to eternally reject God. Rather, he argues that we have no compelling reason to believe that every sinner would make the correct choice, even if they were provided with adequate knowledge, understanding and incentive.42 Barnard draws upon the compatibilist philosophy of Frankfurt’s hierarchical will to argue that the residents of Hell might consist of ‘wantons’: ‘these creatures still have first-order desires, and since they are maximally confirmed lovers of self, they persist in their first-order desires to love self for eternity.’43 Sickler similarly argues that ‘infernal voluntarism’ (the notion that those who reside in Hell do not do so against their wishes) can explain the existence of Hell, while undercutting the Universalist assumption of unanimous human desire for heaven. He believes that this ‘diminishes what may appear as the unnecessarily harsh exclusivity and vindictiveness of Christianity by affirming that God has been working to reveal himself in all religions, and that the choice of our eternal destiny ultimately rests with us.’44

40 Sanders, "A Freewill Theist's Response to Talbott's Universalism," in Universal Salvation? : The Current Debate, 175.

41 Ibid.

42 Raymond J. VanArragon, "Is It Possible to Freely Reject God Forever?," in The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology, ed. Joel Buenting (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010).

43 Justin D. Barnard, "Compatibilism, "Wantons", and the Natural Consequence Model of Hell," in The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology, ed. Joel Buenting (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010). 44 Bradley L. Sickler, "Infernal Voluntarism and "the Courtesy of Deep Heaven"," in The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology, ed. Joel Buenting (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010).

The Traditional View: Retributive Punishment

The ‘Traditional view’ has remained the dominant paradigm of Christian thought throughout the main body of its history. While it is now in competition with other views, its historical proponents continue to be influential, and there remains a large body of Christian philosophers and theologians committed to its defense. Perhaps no historical theologian has done more to shape and impress the contours of the Traditional view upon the Christian mind than St. Augustine. For Augustine, human salvation, and indeed, the very possibility of human goodness, is located in the gratuity of divine grace. Humanity is dependent upon the active intervention of God to turn its will to salvation.45There is no trace in Augustine of the view that autonomous human freedom governs its own destiny, but rather, that God is the determinative force of soteriology, in both the causal process itself, and in the final judgment. Augustine’s Hell is the instrument of God’s punishment of sin, to which he commits some and saves others.

Daniel Strange presents a contemporary response to Universalism in his article A Calvinist Response to Talbott’s Universalism, in which he describes his view as ‘a convinced separatism between believers (who go to heaven) and unbelievers (who go to hell which is both retributive and eternal), and a soteric particularity concerning God’s love and the extent of the atonement.’46 Strange argues that the fundamental flaw in Universalism is that it is ultimately human-centric rather than theocentric. In this view, ‘sin’ is infinite rebellion against God, which justly invokes infinite punishment. The damnation of sinners represents the righteous victory of God over evil and sin, and the establishment of his glory. Strange also argues that the dogmatic universalist view restricts divine freedom. How can God truly be free if he ‘must’ save all? Rather, he argues that the power of redemptive grace proceeds, as for Augustine, from its gratuity.47

45 St. Augustine, "On Grace and Free Choice," in On Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

46 Daniel Strange, "A Calvinist Response to Talbott's Universalism," in Universal Salvation? : The Current Debate, ed. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge (Cambridge: W.B Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2004), 145.

47 Ibid.

Free Will Universalism

Amongst contemporary contributors to the debate, perhaps none have done more to stimulate controversy and renewed discourse than Thomas Talbott. A prominent advocate of Universalism, Talbott’s work has concentrated on reinterpreting the formulation of freedom traditionally employed by the liberal view, and revising traditional notions of orthodoxy, eschatology and justice. Talbott formulates his argument by drawing upon three premises which he believes to be contradictory:

1. God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally in the sense that he sincerely wills or desires the redemption of each one of them.

2. Because no one can finally defeat God’s redemptive love or resist it forever, God will triumph in the end and successfully accomplish the redemption of everyone whose redemption he sincerely wills or desires.

3. Some human sinners will never be redeemed but will instead be separated from God forever.48

Talbott asserts the incompatibility of these propositions in order to refute both the doctrine of Hell, and the charge of heresy traditionally levelled against Universalism. For Talbott, Christians are on firmer ground, both theologically and exegetically, in abandoning the third premise rather than premise 1 or 2. However, unlike Walls, Talbott does not believe that human freedom relieves the incompatibility of these premises. While accepting a role for human volition in soteriology, Talbott disputes the proposition that human freedom could ever opt for eternal alienation from God. In Talbott’s view, such a choice could be indicative only of inadequate knowledge, or the compromise of the will by spiritual or moral illness: ‘a free choice of the kind [C.S Lewis] attributed to the damned seems deeply incoherent, even logically impossible.’49 No just God could accept the outcome of such a choice. In her article, 'The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for all Christians', Marilyn McCord Adams characterizes the doctrine of Hell as a constituent of the problem of evil,

48 Thomas Talbott, "Towards a Better Understanding of Universalism," in Universal Salvation? : The Current Debate, ed. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge (Cambridge: W.B Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2004), 7.

49Ibid., 5.

20 which is not reprieved by the traditional theodicy: ‘I deny not only that we human beings do have, but also that we ever had, ideal agency. Therefore, I conclude, that reasoning about it is relevant at most to the abstract and not to the concrete problem of hell.’50 John Kronen and Eric Reitan have extensively rebutted the doctrine of Hell in their book, 'God’s Final Victory: A Comparative Case for Universalism', challenging the suggestion that any human could justly deny the purposes of God eternally.51

Cosmic Universalism

Jurgen Moltmann, the second of my principal contemporary dialogue partners, has written extensively upon the question of universal restoration. For Moltmann, salvation of human beings is subordinate to the cosmic recreation of heaven and earth.52 He argues that liberals have excessively elevated the value of the will, reducing the soteriological function of God to merely the execution of human choices: ‘here the human being in his freedom of choice is his own lord and god. His own will is his heaven – or his hell. God is merely the accessory who puts that will into effect.’53 Like Adams, he denies the perfect agency of human beings: ‘The first sin is committed out of free choice, the second out of habit, and the third out of an inward compulsion. The result is what Augustine accurately described as non posse non peccare – I am unable not to sin.”’54 Instead, he believes that victimhood and perpetrator coexist within each person, and that true salvation consists of the defeat of evil within human beings, by which we are transformed and reconciled with God and each other. Moltmann instead locates the reality of hell within existential human suffering, in which God participates through the work of Jesus Christ. Moltmann’s relevant work is most explicitly set

50 Marilyn Mccord Adams, "The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians," in Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 323.

51 Reitan.

52 Jurgen Moltmann, The Coming of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1996), 235-55.

53 Jurgen Moltmann, "The Logic of Hell," in God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jurgen Moltmann, ed. Richard Bauckham (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 43.

54 Nik Ansell, "The Annihilation of Hell and the Perfection of Freedom: Universal Salvation in the Theology of Jurgen Moltmann (1926-)," in All Shall Be Well: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann, ed. Gregory MacDonald (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2011), 431.

21 out in his book, 'The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology'.

Harmon’s article 'The Subjection of all Things in Christ: The Christocentric Universalism of Gregory of Nyssa' explores Gregory’s approach to salvation from both exegetical and philosophical perspectives. Harmon argues that Gregory shares Origen’s conception of the eastern doctrine of ‘Apokatastasis’ (ultimate restoration of all souls to a pre-existent state), and describes his biblical inspiration from texts such as Corinthians 15:22- 28 and, Philippians 2:10-11 which he believed implied the finitude of evil and the eventual reconciliation of all things with God.55 Tom Greggs’ article 'Apokatastasis: Particularist Universalism in Origen' explores the thought of one of the earliest universalists. Greggs argues that Origen’s universalism is not clearly and consistently affirmed throughout his writings, ‘certainly, for pastoral reasons Origen seems nervous about a doctrine of Universalism in, for example, his homiletic writings.’56 Nonetheless it remains relatively uncontroversial that a universalistic strain is present throughout much of Origin’s writings, in which he affirms the hope that all will be reconciled with God, who will be ‘all in all’.57

Devries’ and Gerrish’s article, 'Providence and grace: Schleiermacher on justification and election', explores the universalism of the 19th Century theologian. They argue that Schleiermacher’s soteriology proceeds from his cosmological framework of the ‘God-world’ relationship. He believed that ‘the idea of a single decree or plan that encompasses the whole is undermined...by a concept of divine causality as occasional or arbitrary.’58 God’s saving grace is not distinguished by individual salvation, but by his will to the corporate redemption of all creation. His will is cosmic in scope, and does not permit any variation in soteriological outcomes, for this would be to anthropomorphize the exercise of his will. Indeed, skepticism of Hell resurfaced during this period, as theologians such as

55 Steven R. Harmon, "The Subjection of All Things in Christ: The Christocentric Universalism of Gregory of Nyssa (331/340-C.395)," in All Shall Be Well: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann, ed. Gregory MacDonald (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2011), 49. 56 Tom Greggs, "Apokatastasis: Particularist Universalism in Origen," in All Shall Be Well: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann, ed. Gregory MacDonald (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2011), 31.

57 Ibid., 34-35.

58 Dawn; Gerrish Devries, B.A, "Providence and Grace: Schleiermacher on Justification and Election," in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Marina (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 203.

Schleiermacher were joined by clerical figures such as F.W Farrar, who outlined his Universalism in a series of lectures called 'Eternal Hope'. Farrar was particularly derisive of those who took pleasure at the prospect of the damnation of others:

I know nothing more calculated to make the whole soul revolt with loathing from every doctrine of religion than the evil complacency with which some cheerfully accept the belief that they are living and moving in the midst of millions doomed irretrievably to everlasting perdition.59

Overall, cosmic universalism as I have defined it is distinguished by its skepticism that soteriological outcomes (either for Heaven or Hell) could be determined by human freedom. However the human will interacts with grace, salvation is ultimately an act of God’s agency, by which he reconciles and restores all creation.

This literature survey has by no means been exhaustive. The scale of Christian thought on this subject precludes its summary here in full. Rather, I have presented only a brief account of each of the major perspectives which are active in the current debate. I shall begin my inquiry with an evaluative statement of the traditional view, represented by Augustine and Arminius. I will then establish Kant as the critical perspective from which I will assess the debate. I will outline Kant’s postulates of practical reason in order to illuminate his conceptual influence on each view and deploy Kant’s transcendental idealism as a philosophical resource for reaching my own conclusions. I will then engage with the work of Jerry Walls and Jurgen Moltmann as my chosen representatives of liberalism and universalism, outlining their chief arguments and theological assumptions. Finally, I will conclude by presenting my own transcendental approach to the problem of Hell.

59 F.W. Farrar, ""Hell" - What It Is Not," in Eternal Hope: Five Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey, November and December, 1877 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904), 69.

THE TRADITIONAL VIEW: AUGUSTINE AND ARMINIUS

St. Augustine

Regarded as a theologian of pre-eminent authority, Augustine represents one of the most influential voices in the Christian interpretation of human nature.1 Augustine’s fame derives partly from his architecture of two key doctrines: grace and original sin. His formulations of these concepts are profoundly hostile to the philosophy of the Enlightenment that would follow, and to liberal models of free will, both of which depend upon a radical reinterpretation of the traditional Christian doctrines which Augustine helped to establish. For Augustine, human salvation, and indeed, the very possibility of human goodness, is located in the grace of God. Unaided, the human will is thoroughly corrupted by the hereditary influence of Adam’s sin and receives the just penalty for its guilt.2

A leading partisan in doctrinal controversy, Augustine’s thought in this area was sharpened by his public dispute with the British monk, Pelagius, who regarded Augustine’s theology of original sin as Manichaeism clothed in Christian rhetoric.3 While little of Pelagius’ work survives, his remaining writings attest to his belief that humans contain within themselves the capacity to do what God requires of them.4 Denying Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, Pelagius argued that God would not require us to do what we are unable to do: ‘[Such a person says] that man is to be damned by him for doing things which he was unable

1 David Vincent Marconi, Eleonore Stump, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, Second ed. (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1.

2 Eleonore Stump, "Augustine on Free Will," in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. David Vincent Meconi, Stump, Eleonore (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 167. 3 B.R Rees, Pelagius: A Reluctant Heretic (USA: The Boydell Press, 1988), 12.

4 T. H. L. Parker, "Predestination," in A Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson (London: SCM Press, 1981), 266.

24 to avoid, so that God…seems to have sought not so much our salvation as our punishment!’5 Pelagius rejects the notion that the direct intervention of grace is necessary for humans to do good, observing that Christian virtues are found amongst pagans also. Rather, the advantage of being a Christian was exposure to the inspiration and guidance of the life of Christ as a guide to moral judgement.6 Instead, Pelagius emphasises the potency of the human conscience, by which we are able to conform ourselves to the Law. Far from innate depravity, Pelagius argued that God has endowed us the faculty of free volition, by which we may choose to live a perfect life, if we are sufficiently steadfast in will: ‘For [God] did not leave man naked and defenceless…but provided him with a better armament inside, that is, with reason and wisdom, so that by means of his intelligence and mental vigour…man alone was able to recognise the maker of all things and to serve God by using those same faculties which enabled him to hold sway over the rest.’7 According to Pelagius, God has naturally endowed us with all that is necessary to live a holy life. The existence of human evil is attributed merely to an inconstancy of the will, not to an inevitable predilection of the human soul. This view was encapsulated by the Pelagian adage that ‘God would not bid what He knew human beings could not do.’8 But this view is anathema to Augustine.

Gratuitous Grace

Insistent that Pelagius’ views were contrary to the Gospel, Augustine campaigned publicly for the Briton’s condemnation for heresy, in the course of which he wrote a number of formative documents on the subject of grace and free will. At the heart of Augustine’s doctrine of grace lies the concept of gratuity.9 This is the argument that we do not receive grace because we are worthy, but rather that we are made worthy because we have received grace. One cannot earn salvation by earnest good works, nor can one disqualify oneself with

5 Pelagius, "Letter to Demetrias," in Pelagius: Life and Letters, ed. B.R Rees (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1988), 53.

6 Ibid., 39. 7 Ibid., 37. 8 Peter King, ed. Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), XV.

9 Augustine, in On Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, 181.

25 heinous acts. Without grace, knowledge of the Law merely condemns human beings who must inevitably fail to observe it.

The essence of Augustine’s retort to Pelagius is that human nature has been corporately depraved by evil, rendering it utterly incapable of righteousness. Human beings are able to perform good works only when directly enabled by God’s grace. 10 The path to sanctification is unnavigable by the human will acting alone. Not only deeds, but the very desire for good itself, and the persistence in doing good following the initial intervention of grace are gifts from God, inimitable by the human will acting alone.11 Consequently, says Augustine, how could anyone earn salvation by good works if they cannot be rightfully credited to them? He replies, ‘it seems to me that the only way this question can be resolved is for us to understand that our good works, for which eternal life is rendered, themselves belong to God’s grace, in line with what the Lord Jesus says, “Without me you can do nothing”.12

He quotes extensively from Paul in defence of this view; ‘What do you have that you have not received? But if you have received it, why do you glory as though you had not received it?’13 Similarly, from Timothy he points out, ‘every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of Lights.’14 Augustine illustrates this particularly by reference to the testimony of Paul’s own life, in which Saul, foremost amongst the enemies of the Church, is transformed by grace into its champion. Indeed, just as it is impossible for humans to earn salvation by strength of will, so is it for them to reject God’s grace. It is inconceivable that God’s purposes in the redemption of his Elect should be thwarted. Augustine insists that ‘the Almighty is able to turn to belief even perverse wills hostile to faith.’15 For Augustine there is no philosophical obstacle to universal salvation. It is not that he cannot save all, but that he will not.

10 King.

11 Ibid., xix.

12 Augustine, in On Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, 153.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 164.

However, while Augustine’s exposition of the doctrine of grace was a useful weapon with which to combat the Pelagian heresy, it seems to have universalist implications. After all, if God is able to turn even ‘perverse wills’ to belief, what is to prevent him from engineering the salvation of every will? Indeed, Augustine believes that the prospect that some could be damned against the wishes of God is forbidden by his omnipotence: ‘The ones who have been elected...are foreknown and predestined. If any of them perishes, God is in error. But none of them perishes, since God does not err. If any of them perishes, God is overpowered by human vice. But none of them perishes, since God is not overpowered by anything.’16

A universalist interpretation of this is obviously unacceptable to Augustine, who holds the reality of eternal damnation to be an indisputable revelation of scripture. In order to account for the existence of Hell, therefore, Augustine must propose an internal impelling cause (a cause originating from within God himself) which would deter God from accomplishing universal election. The concept of gratuity is Augustine’s solution to this problem. Augustine argues that not only is God’s grace given gratuitously, but that gratuity is contained in the concept of grace itself; grace is gratuitous just as a triangle has three sides. Augustine’s doctrine of grace is therefore defined by two criteria: (a) Grace is not obligated, and (b) Grace is not deserved.

Criterion (a), that grace must not be obligated, rests upon Augustine’s objection that if God must confer grace either in recognition of good works or in accordance with divine law, then it ceases to be grace. Augustine accuses the Pelagians of diminishing grace to a transactional entitlement, rather than a mysterious work of divine mercy. Helm and Jenson, among other theologians, invoke this distinction, arguing:

If God cannot but exercise mercy as he cannot but exercise justice then its character as mercy vanishes. If God has to exercise mercy as he has to exercise justice then ‘mercy’ would not be mercy. For the character of mercy is such that each person who receives it is bound to say ‘I have no right to what I have received. It would be perfectly consistent with God’s justice had I not received it.’... A justice that could be unilaterally waived would not be justice, and a mercy which could be unilaterally waived would not be mercy.17

16 Augustine, "On Reprimand and Grace," in On Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, 197.

17 P. Helm, "The Logic of Limited Atonement," Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 3, no. 2 (1985): 50.

Therefore, that some receive grace and others do not is necessary for grace to exist at all. It is not human freedom that ultimately matters here, but God’s freedom. God is under no obligation to save all, because God is under no obligation to do anything. That God saves any at all is itself a miracle of divine mercy.

In upholding criterion (b) that grace is not deserved, Augustine argues that Hell is the just penalty for all human beings. Punishment is the appropriate response to human degeneracy. Were God to withhold grace from all people it would do nothing to diminish his justice. That God should grant grace to some does not relieve others of responsibility for their sin; they remain subject to God’s righteous judgement. It is not that the Elect are the only ones to be treated justly, it is rather that they are the only ones to be treated unjustly, in that they escape the penalty of their sin.18 In order to illustrate this distinction, consider that each year the President of the United States bestows a number of pardons upon non-violent offenders. It would seem strange if it were suggested that consequently all prisoners convicted of the same crime ought to be pardoned, or that they had therefore not been deserving of their imprisonment. These pardons are an act of special magnanimity, which does nothing to diminish the legitimacy of criminal system as a whole. Similarly, the bestowal of grace upon the elect neither negates the culpability of the non-elect, nor implies a universal entitlement to election. To the Pelagians, therefore, Augustine argues that grace cannot be earned, if it is to be grace, and to the universalists he argues that God’s grace can be under no obligation to save all who are righteously condemned.

This view had been adopted as orthodox doctrine by most Western theologians since Augustine’s formulation of it. However, it has been troubled by moral objections, particularly since the Reformation. Believing neither age, ignorance nor ‘enslavement to sin’ excuses humans from the responsibility for Adam’s transgression, Augustine considers the following to be deserving of condemnation:

(a) People who have not heard the gospel; (b) people who have heard it, and were changed for the better, but did not receive perseverance; (c) people who have heard the gospel and were unwilling to come to Christ, that is, to believe in Him, for He said: “No one comes to me unless it be given to him by my Father”; (d) young children, who could not believe because of their age, but who could be released from the original

18 Strange, in Universal Salvation? : The Current Debate.

wrongdoing only by the bath of rebirth and yet perished in death without having received it.19 Few Christians could read this list without a feeling of unease. Augustine asserts that Hell is filled with those who seem to have had no opportunity to avert their fate, either by youth or because God does not enable them to do so. Those acts which are usually regarded as essential for salvation, such as faith in Christ and moral repentance, are impossible for them, except that they are enabled by grace to perform them. Augustine acknowledges that this is a challenging proposition, particularly the suggestion that some might live faithful Christian lives and yet not find themselves among the Elect. To this he replies by means of appeal to the mystery of the divine will: ‘My reply is: “I do not know.” Not with arrogance, but recognising my limitations I heed the apostle, who says: “Who are human beings to answer back to God?”…To the extent that He deigns to make his judgments clear to us, let us give thanks; to the extent that He keeps them hidden, let us not grumble against His plan but rather believe that this too is the most beneficial for us.’20 But this appeal to mystery is not enough for Christians who see a positive contradiction in the notion of a loving, graceful God who condemns human beings to eternal suffering where he could easily have saved them.

Though we will address criticisms of the traditional view more fully in later chapters, let us briefly consider some of the difficulties with Augustine’s doctrine of grace by means of analogy. Imagine that a mother comes to a river and, despite her repeated prohibitions of them swimming there, finds her two children in danger of drowning. She has warned them many times of the river’s dangerous currents, and so they are entirely at fault for the predicament in which they now find themselves. Nevertheless, the mother hurls herself into the water and drags one child to the safety of the bank. She decides that she will only save the first child, even though there is time to return to the river and save the second. Consequently, the second child drowns. Surely she has committed a grave moral failing. We would not excuse her actions by saying that both children were certainly going to drown if not for her intervention, and that she had fully expressed her love by saving the first child, while leaving the second to its deserving fate. Rather, we would think that she had demonstrably failed to meet her responsibilities as a parent and made herself complicit in the death of her second child.

19 Augustine, "On Reprimand and Grace," in On Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, 195.

20 Ibid., 199.

However, perhaps this analogy fails because God is not under the same obligations to human beings as a parent is to her child. Perhaps the woman’s parentage of the children implies a moral duty to save both children, while God is under no such duty to redeem all people. Surely though, the parent is prompted to plunge into the river not at the behest of abstract parental responsibility but at the instigation of the love and protectiveness she feels for her children. It is at least biblically and theologically plausible that God shares these feelings for human beings, and therefore troubling that he should not respond in the same way. A parent who loathed her children might discard her responsibility to save them, but it is inconceivable that a loving parent should choose to save only one child if she were able, safely and conveniently, to save both.

Imagine that, instead of the mother, a stranger had happened upon this scene and, despite having no direct responsibility for the children, comes to their aid solely at the instigation of the love and mercy he bears for all humankind. We have a moral expectation that human beings, even strangers, will rightly give this kind of assistance to each other if it is safe to do so. In the same way, what could cause God to save some when he possesses the means to save all, even if he had no obligation to do so? While we may accept that God does not ‘owe’ us anything, that God might choose to save some and condemn others seems capriciously arbitrary. By Augustine’s own account of virtue there is no reason that God should love and care for some more than others. If we are equally degenerate, there can be no greater merit in saving one particular human being than another. Nor should the prospect of universal salvation threaten God’s freedom. That God should save all human beings does not mean that he was coerced to do so, anymore than the mother should need compulsion to rescue all her children.

The only plausible reason to guess that a loving, generous parent might refrain from rescuing her drowning children is to suppose that they had cast themselves into the river with the intention to drown, and forbade their mother to follow. As we will see, this is the model of damnation suggested by the liberal doctrine of Hell.

Arminianism

Arminianism represents one attempt to respond to these problems. Since Augustine’s triumph over Pelagius his views remained generally unchallenged within Christian thought, even by the Reformers (most of whom, if anything, took Augustine’s views even further). This changed decisively with the rise of Arminianism. The Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius broke from the Augustinian consensus in holding that, while the arousal of faith depended upon the work of grace through the Holy Spirit, the atonement was universal in scope and accessible to those who would receive it in faith.21 Unlike Augustine, Arminius argued that grace could be resisted. The work of grace was to awake the human soul from its depravity, but it would not compel the will as Augustine had thought. By this, Arminius hoped to show that God desired the salvation of all human beings but was unable to accomplish it. God held open the gates of Heaven to all, but would push no one across the threshold.22 This can be characterised as a form of ‘conditional election’: ‘persons are elected on the condition of being in Christ by grace through faith…Those who believe in Christ are predestined to salvation; their faith is, in a logical sense, prior to predestination.’23 While this view was by no means unique in Christian thought (Julian of Norwich seemed to believe this, for one), it was only in a response to Arminius that a significant Christian movement converged around this principle. Arminianism settled deeply into the Methodist and Baptist denominations of Protestantism and inspired celebrated leaders and preachers such as John and Charles Wesley.

Despite this innovation, Arminians remained close to Calvinists on questions such as the providence of God and the total depravity of the will. Arminius was not a Pelagian. He believed that human beings depended upon the direct intervention of grace for salvation, which awakened the possibility of repentance and faith by human beings. Similarly, he retained the Augustinian character of Hell itself, which was to proclaim the glory of God by the punishment of sin, arguing that ‘God’s love of righteousness and hatred of sin and unbelief, which govern his will to condemn impenitent unbelievers, are the impulsive cause

21 Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in Dutch Reformation (Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1971), 340-42. 22 Keith D. Stanglin, McCall, Thomas H., Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace (United States of America: Oxford University Press, 2012), 136.

23 Ibid.

31 of reprobation.’24 The difference lay not in Hell itself, but in the relationship between grace and the human will. Where Augustine imagined that grace seized the will irresistibly like a rider mounting a horse, Arminius understood grace to work upon the soul by persuasion. By grace God offers human beings an invitation, which they may accept or reject. The rise of Arminianism therefore created a theological foundation for a soteriological model in which the human will plays a crucial and central role.

Consequently, however, Arminianism does not get all the way to a liberal model of Hell as it is often formulated today. Arminius also affirmed the finality of damnation which imposed an intentional, eternal punishment for sin. He did not regard Hell as a holding place for those whom God had not yet convinced to accept his grace, but was intentionally designed to inflict retributive suffering. Judgement was still to be passed and executed irretrievably in the moment of death. The opportunity of salvation expired at the end of their life.

This retention of Augustine’s Hell goes some way to accounting for the restless urgency with which the Wesleyan preachers sought to bring their flocks to faith. For the classical Arminian, those who have not accepted the grace of God through a personal relationship with Christ are living on borrowed time. Classical Arminians face the task of convincing a prisoner on death row to accept an offer of clemency before the sentence is passed. Because God has not ordained the elect and the damned, all those who die beyond a state of grace are a tragic and unnecessary loss. We can see in Wesley the driving conviction that souls cannot be permitted to be lost for the lack of another sermon, another devotion, another hymn. Indeed, Wesley epitomises the authentic Arminian. If one was sincerely convinced that the only impediment to an eternity of conscious suffering for a fellow human was a failure to persuade, then it would seem to be a grave moral failing not to spend every wakeful moment, like Wesley, in urgent and impassioned evangelism.25

So, while Arminianism relieves some of the moral and theological objections to Augustinian soteriology, it leaves many in place. It does nothing to avert objections to the punitive model of Hell and the justice of applying eternal punishments for apparently limited sins, committed in varying states of ignorance and duress. It does not proffer any reasons to suppose that mortal death should be the singular, final and eternal moment of judgement. It

24 Ibid. 25 A. Raymond George, "Methodism," in A Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson (London: SCM Press, 1969), 213.

32 denies the possibility of post-mortal moral progress and change. Indeed, it seems to exacerbate many of these questions. If God desires the salvation of all people, it is not obvious why he should abandon this aim once the individual has died, nor why he should reject the repentance of the convicted soul. God appears to give up rather too easily. Despite these questions, the spirit of Arminianism has proved popular with those seeking to give a more palatable account of Hell, and it is largely in the hands of Arminians aiming to resolve these objections that the liberal model of Hell has evolved.

Therefore, whether Calvinist or Arminian, the Traditional view is distinguished by three primary characteristics:

1. Some will be damned forever, either because they did not receive grace, or because they failed to respond to grace.

2. There is a certain temporal point after which soteriological outcomes will be irrevocably confirmed. Either at the point of death or at a ‘final judgement’ some will be consigned eternally to Heaven and some to Hell. No human act can reverse this outcome once this point has passed.

3. All human beings are deserving of Hell, the purpose of which is the punishment of sin.

This is the conceptual baseline from which liberal and universalist theologians depart. The problem of Augustine’s soteriology remains the question of why some should be saved when all could be. In Arminianism, the question is why the invitation of grace should expire with the end of human life. Universalism responds to these problems simply by denying all three of the traditional premises outright. Alternatively, liberals attempt to rescue the doctrine by retaining some version of the first premise, while abandoning the second and third. However, to make this philosophical leap from the Traditional view to the liberal doctrine of Hell it will be necessary to look beyond Augustine and Arminius, to one of the greatest philosophers of his age.

KANT: TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM AND THE POSTULATES OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON

Immanuel Kant is one of few philosophers credited with a genuinely transformative impact upon the course of human thought. It is of even greater distinction that this effect took place within his lifetime. Few intellectual disciplines have been left undisturbed by Kant’s revolution, upsetting the established wisdom of his time in ontology, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. For Karl Barth, ‘it was in this man and in his work that the eighteenth century saw, understood and affirmed itself in its own limitations…Kant...stands at the turning-point of his age.’1

However, while Kant’s intellectual achievements were monumental, his interest in the formal discipline of theology was limited. Philosopher of God he may have been, but not one for whom the authority of Church doctrines held any great sway. ‘Religion within the boundaries of mere reason’ encapsulates Kant the theologian;2 Kant was not concerned to remain within the fenced pastures of Christian orthodoxy, but to construct theological concepts that abided within, and were constrained by the limits of, human reason. Barth observes that Kant ‘did not, like Rousseau, go to Holy Communion, did not, like Lessing, call Luther to witness…Instead, when the university of Konigsberg was proceeding in solemn procession…Kant used to ostentatiously step away from the procession just as it was entering the church’.3 Those inquiring into the doctrinal controversy of Universalism and Hell will not find many pages devoted to that subject within his many works. The rise of Deism amongst the intellectual elite of the Enlightenment reflected the decline of biblical and church authority within the academic class to which Kant belonged.4 The only lines of theological enquiry regarded to be worth pursuing were those suggested by the demonstrable findings of the natural sciences, or the logically indisputable concepts of clear and distinct reason.

1 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (London: SCM Press, 1972), 266. 2 Immanuel Kant, "Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason," in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood, Giovanni, George Di (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 Barth, 267. 4 Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, Third ed. (United States of America: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117.

Dorrien summarises the character of this emerging modern theology as consisting of ‘three layers’:

Firstly it is the idea that all claims to truth, in theology and other disciplines, must be made on the basis of reason and experience, not by appeal to external authority…secondly, liberal theology argues for the viability and necessity of an alternative to orthodox over-belief and secular disbelief…[and] the third layer…[reconceptualises] the meaning of Christianity in the light of modern knowledge and values. It is reformist in spirit and substance, not revolutionary.

Indeed, his ambivalence to the doctrines of the Church is central to his theological legacy. Gary Dorrien argues that ‘Kant’s influence in modern religious thought is unsurpassed by any thinker…the dominant forms of liberal theology flowed out of German idealism’ (Kantian Reason, 2). Gordon E. Michalson argues that Kant’s devastating critique of the metaphysical traditions of Christianity was crucial to the rise, not only of liberal theological movements, but of philosophical atheism in the 19th century. He claims that, while Kant’s religious philosophy was vitally important in the development of ‘mediating theology’ which attempted to reconcile Christian faith with modern culture, ‘a philosophically reductionist philosophy reveals him to be a more significant precursor to atheistic humanism than is typically supposed.’5 Insole describes Kant’s tradition of philosophical theology as ‘theological rationalism’, but ‘rooted in a classical tradition, where philosophy is ordered not only toward the true but also to the good, and so toward a capacious understanding of human happiness’.6 There is no doubt that Kant foreshadowed and influenced the thought of Frederic Schleiermacher and the revolution of liberal theology which he and others wrought and consolidated.7 But he was, nonetheless, neither clergyman nor dogmatic theologian, and his interest in such matters was subject to his central philosophical project expressed in his major works.

It is not my intention to conduct a thorough assessment of Kant’s philosophy, but rather to illuminate those parts of his work which might serve as a potential groundwork for interpreting the contours of the contemporary debate, and then to apply these concepts to

5 Gordon E. Michaelson, Kant and the Problem of God (UK: Blackwell, 1999), 5. 6 Insole, The Intolerable God: Kant's Theological Journey, 5. 7 Jacqueline Marina, ed. Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 253-54.

35 shed new light upon it. The legacy of Immanuel Kant to the theological questions we are investigating is to provide concepts by which we can diagnose the conflict between the universalism and liberalism, and through which we can aim to make progress. Of most significance will be Kant’s formulation of antinomies, which arise from his scepticism of metaphysical reason, and his transcendental theory of freedom. These are the potential philosophical resources for resolving the lingering objections which trouble the doctrine of Hell. A sound understanding of these concepts will also require a brief review of his epistemology and moral philosophy,.

The Postulates of Pure Practical Reason

In the Critique of Pure Reason,8 generally regarded as the epitome of his genius, Kant sought to outline an epistemological system to describe forms of knowledge which human reason is capable of obtaining, and the manner in which those judgments are formed.9 In short, he aimed to forge a middle course between the conflicting epistemological systems of Descartes, who held that knowledge begins with the clear and distinct insights of pure, abstract reasoning, and Humean empiricism, which insisted that the totality of human knowledge arises from direct material experience.10 Instead, Kant understands human judgements to fall within two categories: ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’. Analytic judgements are those which derive entirely from abstract reasoning, by analysing the meaning of a concept itself. These judgements are tautologies, such as ‘all bachelors are unmarried’.11 According to Kant, ‘analysis’ in this sense is the only knowledge which pure reason can arrive at. It is able to formally define and describe a concept, but it cannot support speculative judgements about how these concepts are applied in the world.

Defining ‘synthetic’ judgment is one of the defining ambitions of Kant’s philosophical project. He aims ‘to uncover the ground of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments with appropriate generality, to gain insights into the conditions that make every

8 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 9 C.D Broad, Kant: An Introduction (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2. 10 Guyer, 243. 11 Broad, 4.

36 kind of them possible’.12 Kant believes it is necessary to apply such synthetic judgement in order to form complex knowledge about the world. For Kant, synthetic judgment consists of a synthesis of sensuous perception, ordered and interpreted into intelligible schemata imposed by reason; the senses collect impressions from the world and reason sorts these impressions into comprehensible patterns of understanding.13 The validity of synthetic judgement depends upon this interpretative relationship between a posteriori experience and reason. Without reason, sensible impressions are merely unrelated events from which we cannot recognise patterns and relationships.14 I can observe that when I drop my pen it falls to my desk. I can observe this hundreds of times. But without the synthesis of reason I cannot infer a general law of how my pen behaves when I release it above a surface. But without experience, reason becomes unfettered from verification and liable to come to unreliable conclusions. Certainly, Kant believes that, without experience, the speculations of pure reason cannot be proven to be true.

Therefore, Kant warns against any attempt to construct formally complex concepts derived purely from speculative reason, in which concepts are not merely analysed in constituent parts (such as the property of bachelors being unmarried), but are rather synthesised with other abstract concepts to establish universal and necessary laws. An example of such an abstract judgement includes the statement that ‘everything that happens has a cause.’15 Kant sees this as a synthetic judgement a priori, in which experience plays no direct role. Experience can supply knowledge of particular causes and corresponding effects, but it cannot justify the claim of an absolute and universal rule governing this relationship. In asking how one might arrive at the conclusion of such a law, he writes, ‘it cannot be experience, because the principle that has been adduced adds the latter representations to the former not only with greater generality than experience can provide, but also with the expression of necessity, hence entirely a priori and from mere concepts.’16

Rather, Kant believes that these synthetic a priori judgements are indemonstrable, and without the grounding of experience, it is possible to argue the opposite with equal validity.17

12 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 132. 13 Guyer, 53. 14 Ibid. 15 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 131. 16 Ibid., 132. 17 Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (USA: Blackwell, 1999), 76.

Kant illustrates this conundrum through a successive series of ‘antimonies of pure reason’, in which he outlines a series of synthetic a priori propositions, such as the idea of there existing an absolutely necessary being, and then argues alternately (with, in his view, equal plausibility) that they are both true and false.18 In this way he attempts to show the impotence of abstract philosophical arguments, such as the ontological and cosmological proofs of God, and criticises all theology founded entirely on speculative reason, as opposed to natural theology, which is grounded in experience, and therefore fertile terrain for synthetic judgement.19 His intention is to disturb reason from ‘the slumber of an imagined conviction’, and remove God, freedom and immortality from the realm of pure reason to the discipline of ‘practical reason’ which concerns the formulation and application of moral concepts.20

Kant believes that the concepts of God, immortality and freedom are all forms of such speculative philosophical reasoning, and therefore, they cannot be proved with any epistemological confidence. If their demonstration relies solely upon the resources of a priori reasoning, Kant thinks, they will be equally and interminably vulnerable to both proof and disproof.21 However, he does not discard these concepts. Rather, they are central to his moral philosophy. But instead of seeking to establish them by means of philosophical conjecture, he calls them ‘postulates of pure practical reason.’22 What he means by this is that they are propositions which are necessary presuppositions of any intelligent thought and knowledge. Before we can consider anything at all we must allow that God, freedom and immortality exist. They are the bedrock of human consciousness, and the necessary groundwork of the capacity of human beings to observe the ‘moral law’.

He argues that, if we are aware of ourselves as subject to a universal moral law, as he thinks we are, then we must be able to fulfil the moral law, for we cannot be under an obligation to perform any act which is impossible for us. Therefore, he postulates the existence of freedom as a necessary presupposition of our ability to perform any moral act, and postulates the existence of God and immortality as a necessary presupposition of the possibility of moral perfection. For Kant, freedom,

18 Ibid. 19 Marina, 253. 20 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 460. 21 Broad, 2. 22 Guyer, 244.

insofar as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason, constitutes the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason; and all other concepts (those of God and immortality), which as mere ideas remain without support in the latter, now attach themselves to this concept, and with it and by means of it get stability and objective reality, their possibility is proved by this: that freedom is real, for this idea reveals itself through the moral law.23

The moral law is therefore the axis upon which Kant’s philosophy turns. Its exposition is ultimately the goal and inspiration of his entire project. Kant captured the centrality of this theme with his famous statement that ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’24 Expressed in his famous ‘categorical imperative’, true morality is understood as ‘duty’, which means to act in service of the moral law solely from the conviction that it is right, rather than that it is pleasurable. This is the basis for his expression of the postulates as belonging to ‘pure practical reason’. The postulates are practical, because they are revealed by the observable reality of the moral law, and they are pure because they guarantee the possibility of human beings observing the moral law perfectly, and solely in the interests of duty.25 This, for Kant, is ‘holiness’: the dutiful observation of moral obligations.

Freedom

23 Kant, in Practical Philosophy, 139. 24 Ibid., 269. 25 Guyer, 243.

It is striking to find such a radical formulation of libertarian freedom within the writing of Kant at a time when the apparent revelations of Newtonian physics were leading many philosophers to believe that the whole concept was impossible. Indeed, the young Kant held this very opinion.26 In affirming the capacity of the human will to conform itself to the moral law, Kant was defying not merely the entrenched theological orthodoxy of the Church, but the perceived disclosures of the natural sciences. We have seen that the Pelagian notion of moral self-correction was demolished by Augustine’s interpretation of original sin and banished from the sphere of western orthodoxy. However, by Kant’s day the chief objection to free will, at least amongst the academic class of the Enlightenment, was not the Fall but rather the emerging insights of science. The dominance of Aristotelian natural philosophy was giving way to an experimental scientific method championed by figures such as Galileo, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

It appeared to Newtonian scientists that the natural world was ruled by immutable and universal physical laws which would govern the movement and reaction of physical objects in predictable patterns.27 Exemplified by the famous illustration of one billiard ball striking another, all things were thought to operate according to an unyielding and unbroken causal series. While it was by no means universally agreed that the province of these laws included the activity of the human mind or soul, it was increasingly doubted that an exception to this theory should be granted to the human brain (and therefore, in their view, the human will). This thesis was eventually expressed most famously by Pierre-Simon Laplace, who argued that it was only our limited knowledge of material circumstances that prevented science from being able to predict future events with flawless accuracy. Laplace thought that if something were able to obtain a perfect knowledge of the present, and calculate its implications, it would thereby obtain complete knowledge of the future:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an

26 Ibid., 246. 27 Outram, 99-113.

intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.28

This thesis appeared to pose a threat to the plausibility of human volition. If every event, including human actions, could be predicted simply by analysing the position and velocity of atoms, then the human will was excluded from exercising any meaningful or independent influence over its circumstances. Certainly, it would be impeded from fulfilling the criteria ordinarily required to fulfil a libertarian model of freedom: an equal ability to actualise state of affairs A or B.29 The utility of the will would be reduced merely to mechanically executing actions in a determined series, even if it appeared subjectively to be a free choice.

Kant did not live to see Laplace publish 'A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities'.30 Yet, as a young man he had been convinced by the deterministic thesis that free will was incompatible with Newtonian mechanics. In 1755, Kant had written that ‘Whatever does not happen could not happen…thus, by tracing one’s way along the inexorable change of events…one eventually arrives at the first state of the world.’31 However, Kant’s increasing confidence in the governance of the moral law demanded that he find some way to reconcile these apparently indisputable propositions. He came to believe that ‘the fundamental source, not a speculative worldview…If metaphysics started there, with philosophical modesty and the power of freedom, it could do something enormously useful, establishing the universal rights of humanity.’32

Kant’s solution to this apparent contradiction is known as ‘transcendental idealism’. He proposed that the perceptions of the senses, which observe an unbroken causal series of natural events, do not constitute a true impression of reality as it really is.33 Rather, space and time are constructs of human consciousness which order empirical sensation into patterns and structures interpretable by the human mind. He distinguished between the world of the

28 Laplace, P., 1820, Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités forming the introduction to his Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, Paris: V Courcier; repr. F.W. Truscott and F.L. Emory (trans.), A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, New York: Dover, 1951 . 29 Robert Kane, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 10. 30 Laplace’s essay was published in 1820, sixteen years after Kant’s death. 31 Guyer, 246. 32Dorrien, 37. 33 Guyer, 57.

41 senses, which he called the ‘phenomenal’, from the ‘noumenal’, the world of ‘things-in- themselves’, of which we can have no direct knowledge.34 The human mind imposes order and structure upon the empirical data it receives, and it is only on this level that we engage with the world. While phenomenal impressions does not disclose the truth of things as they are, they are nevertheless not a fantasy, but related to the noumena in some way: ‘all concepts and with them all principles, however a priori they may be, are nevertheless related to empirical intuitions, i.e. to data for possible experience. Without this they have no objective validity at all, but are rather a mere play, whether it be with representations of the imagination or the understanding.’35 Kant believed this distinction was an epistemological necessity, for, ‘if the understanding cannot distinguish whether certain questions lie within its horizon or not, then it is never sure of its claims and its possession, but must always reckon on many embarrassing corrections when it continually oversteps the boundary of its territory…and loses itself in delusions and deceptions.’36

While this direct ignorance of noumena does not impair our ability to function, it prohibits our knowledge of the innate truth of things. Kant supposes that the appearance of deterministic causation incompatible with the causal efficacy of the will arises from a human mental faculty of imposing order on the data it receives. Rather, he believes that the will is active on the noumenal level, influencing events in the world of phenomenal representations, despite contrary appearances.37 As an intelligible expression only within time and space, natural causation is not then an objective characteristic of ‘things in themselves’:

Now this acting subject, in its intelligible character, would not stand under any conditions of time, for time is only the condition of appearances but not of things in themselves…In its empirical character, this subject, as appearance, would thus be subject to the causal connection, in accordance with all the laws of determination…but in its intelligible character (even though we can have nothing more than merely the general concept of it), this subject would nevertheless have to be declared free of all influences of sensibility and determination by appearances; and since, in it, insofar as it is noumenon, nothing happens, thus no alteration requiring a dynamical time-determination is demanded, and hence no connection with appearances as causes is encountered in its actions, this active being would

34 Broad, 199-201. 35 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 341. 36 Ibid., 340. 37 Guyer, 248-50.

to this extent be free of all the natural necessity present solely in the world of sense.38

In other words, because the human will is ‘intelligible’ (by which he means ‘not material’), it is not subject to causal determinism. Because human freedom operates on the noumenal level we cannot perceive its character or describe how it really operates, but only observe its effects phenomenally as the constituent parts of an unbroken causal series. Therefore, Kant concludes that material determinism is not a fact which excludes the possibility of human freedom, but rather the subjective human impression of its consequences.

Kant’s transcendental account of freedom has been both hugely influential and enduringly controversial. It is not my purpose to assess the philosophical coherence of this proposition. It is sufficient to point out that it restored significant philosophical credibility to an idea under assault. The great virtue of Kant’s transcendental critique is that it offers a potential avenue for reconciling the insights of natural empiricism (whatever they may be) with the apparent urgings of the soul. One can believe in the universality of natural explanations for natural phenomena without forsaking one’s belief in the ability of the human subject to influence its own destiny. It is not necessary, then, to suppose that God creates a vacuum within the natural order within which the human will can operate freely. Nor is it necessary to theologically censure the advances of natural science in order to defend the biblical testimony to human agency. This is the transcendental analysis which will be useful to us when we come to offer our own approach to the problem of Hell.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers an account of the human will which is radical it its ontological scope. But it is within Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, that he comes to offer an account of freedom which is profound in its moral depth.39 In this work, Kant develops his thesis of ‘radical evil’. He argues that, while we may have predispositions to certain actions, many of which are evil, we are neither inevitably good or evil. No human is so lost to evil that he cannot spontaneously turn to good, nor so confirmed in his virtue that he cannot become evil. Echoing Pelagius, he argues that ‘if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings.’40 The ability to follow either of these courses lies

38 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 536-37. 39 Guyer, 260. 40 Ibid., 262..

43 irreducibly within the scope of autonomous human agency, and follows solely from one’s commitment either to the maxims of the Moral Law or to the primacy of the self.41 Those who serve the self above the moral law will do evil, and others good. Self-love is the antithesis of duty.

From this Kant arrives at his concept of the ‘highest good’, or ‘summum bonum’, which he takes to be an ideal moral world in which human beings are perfectly good and perfectly happy.42 In the ‘summum bonum’ human beings would not be happy because they are good, or good because they are happy. The highest good is the coincidence of these independent properties attending maximally within the human subject. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that the ‘whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, is centred in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?’43 Kant answers this first question with his formulation of epistemological synthesis, the second with the categorical imperative, and the third with this notion of the highest good. It is Kant’s commitment to his answer to the third question that shapes his understanding of God and immortality.

God and Immortality

As ‘postulates of pure practical reason’, Kant does not believe the concepts of God and immortality to have independent verifiability, in strict epistemological terms. Rather, they are the necessary presupposition of the human capacity for moral improvement. Kant takes it to be self-evident that we are obligated by the moral law to live in a certain way. It is this judgement which guarantees the reality of our freedom (as we cannot be obligated to perform impossible actions). It is these two propositions (the existence of the moral law and our ability to conform ourselves to it) which, in Kant’s view, precedes and also requires the existence of God and immortality. In Dorrien’s description, ‘Kant showed that believing in God is a necessary demand of one’s moral self-consciousness, which belongs to practical reason, not to the sensibility of theoretical reason.’44 Simply put, Kant believes that the

41 Ibid., 261. 42 Ibid., 271. 43 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 677. 44 Dorrien, 9.

44 existence of the moral law implies the existence of God as its author and guarantor, while immortality accounts for our capacity to observe it.45

Kant states his argument for the immortality of the soul quite simply in the Critique of Practical Reason. He argues that the realization of the highest good within the intelligent subject is the ‘necessary object of a will determined by the moral law’.46 The realization of the highest good must be possible for us, for it is the final and perfect expression of the moral law. This realization of the highest good he terms ‘holiness’. Kant acknowledges that this perfect holiness, while implied by the moral law is unattainable to us in this life, but ‘since it is nevertheless required as practically necessary, it can only be found in an endless progress toward that complete conformity’.47 Rather, ‘for a rational but finite being only endless progress from lower to higher stages of moral perfection is possible.’48 In other words, Kant believes that it is necessary to infer a future life of endless duration in order to guarantee our ability to arrive at this state of holiness. Immortality consists of individual souls gradually ascending a scale of moral perfection.49

An objection to be raised here is that this description of immortality seems to leave scarce room for heaven itself. An endless moral progression implies that we shall never arrive at our destination. Kant anticipates this objection by arguing that God, as a timeless being, ‘sees in what is to us an endless series the whole of conformity with the moral law, and the holiness that his command inflexibly requires’.50 In other words, while our moral improvement seems to us to be an unending progression, God sees in it a sanctified completeness. Because God is timeless, he does not see the temporal sequence of our moral improvement, but rather glimpses eternity as a singular entity, within which we have perfectly conformed ourselves to the moral law.

The God of the Critiques serves the role of a philosophical device, and as such can appear to be a rather anonymous, abstract figure. This appearance arises from Kant’s conviction that, epistemologically speaking, we cannot prove God or define him by pure

45 Guyer, 266. 46 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 680. 47 Kant, in Practical Philosophy, 238. 48 Ibid., 239. 49 Broad, 267.

50 Kant, in Practical Philosophy, 239.

45 philosophical speculation. Kant thus describes God only in terms which can be justified from the demonstrable insights of his moral philosophy: ‘[God] must be omnipotent, so that all of nature and its relation to morality in the world are subject to it; omniscient, so that it cognizes the inmost dispositions and their moral worth; omnipresent, so that it is immediately ready for every need that is demanded by the highest good for the world; eternal, so that this agreement of nature and freedom is not lacking at any time, etc.’51 Having outlined a formulation of immortality which he argues is necessary to allow for the practical possibility of us attaining the moral perfection of the highest good, Kant now looks to the postulate of God to justify our hope that this might actually occur. He argues that practical reason implies God as a ‘necessary condition of the possibility of the summum bonum (an object of the will which is necessarily connected with the moral legislation of pure reason).’52 Kant proposes that God presides over this moral world of the summum bonum and it is from his character and providence that the highest exists as a possible state of being which the soul can attain and express. For Kant, conformity with the Moral Law is not a cause of happiness, but rather the precondition by which humans become worthy of happiness. It is God who translates this worthiness to actuality. Kant writes:

If one asks about God’s final end in creating the world, one must not name the happiness of the rational beings in it, but the highest good, which adds a condition that wish of such beings, namely the condition of being worthy of happiness…Hence those who put the end of creation in the glory of God (provided that this is not thought anthropomorphically, as inclination to be praised) perhaps hit upon the best expression. For, nothing glorifies God more than what is most estimable in the world, respect for his command, observance of the holy duty that his law lays upon us, when there is added to this by his magnificent plan of crowning such a beautiful order with corresponding happiness.53

Unlike the Stoics, Kant denies that happiness does or should arise from the conscious satisfaction of fulfilling one’s duty. Rather, he believes duty and happiness to be independent properties with no necessary relationship, but which God brings together in the immortal soul, thus actualising the Summum Bonum within the individual subject. Kant identifies this

51 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 682. 52 Ibid., 679. 53 Kant, in Practical Philosophy, 245.

46 outcome with the ‘kingdom of God, in which nature and morals come into a harmony, foreign to each of them of itself, through a holy author who makes the derived highest good possible’54 The summum bonum is the ultimate aim of God’s work in the world. He brings nature to perfection by making humans good because they have become perfectly conformed to the Moral Law, and happy because they are good. God unites goodness and happiness within us, where otherwise we would spend eternity either imperfectly happy or imperfectly good, or both.

Reflections

In affirming the innate moral neutrality of the human soul (without diminishing the prevalence of evil in human affairs) Kant makes a sharp diversion from Augustinian theology. Instead, Kant believes that a radical freedom expressed in our actions includes the absolute ability to conform ourselves either to the moral law or to the worship of the self. Indeed, Kant looks to the perfect humanity of Christ to persuade us that the moral ideal is realisable. Far from affirming the necessity of grace to perform good works, Kant insists that virtue cannot be imposed from without, but rather mustered from within. We can, and must, suppress the evil within and elevate the good. In this, Kant occupies some common ground with Pelagius. Certainly, his affirmation of the realisation of the moral law recalls Pelagius’ insistence that God would not command anything to human beings could not do. But unlike Pelagius, Kant recognises that this moral refinement cannot be completed in this life, but must rather be pursued in the next.

In this, Kant denies the soteriological finality of death characteristic of the Traditional view. As we shall see, the concept of moral progress after death is of enormous significance to arguments for universalism and the liberal doctrine of Hell. For Kant, death is not the moral and soteriological judgement point. Moral progress can take place after death, and indeed, must do so ad infinitum. The character of the soul is not settled with its last breath.

54 Ibid., 243.

Indeed, Kant’s interpretation of immortality seems to complicate the traditional duality of Heaven and Hell. The notion of moral progress, ‘from lower to higher degrees of moral perfection’ implies that, at least subjectively, immortal souls occupy individual points on an ascending scale of bliss and misery, and virtue and vice. This could be seen to invite an Origenist interpretation of Hell as the ‘refining fire’ in which souls are made fit for heaven. It also has something in common also with the eastern doctrine of Apokotastasis, in which immaterial souls are drawn gradually from the fallen agonies of the earth to blissful reconciliation with the divine, and the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. But whereas, in Platonism, the soul ascends naturally as a function of its divine character and in the doctrine of Purgatory the repentant soul is merely awaiting clemency, Kant believes that the soul can arise only by the progressive and persistent moral formation of free choice.

Kant’s belief that humans possess a universal awareness of the demands of the moral law also undermines the universalist argument that those in Hell can be damned on account of their ignorance. For Kant, no human being can be truly oblivious to moral imperatives. If they are alien from the good, it is only because they have chosen to be. However, this assertion is far from obvious. It is by no means uncontroversial that there is a universal, objective moral awareness, or that a redeeming faith can be expressed by those who have never heard the Gospel. Nevertheless, we shall see that this argument will inform the contested question of motivation. In order to show that human beings could be justly damned forever, liberal theologians must show that this damnation occurs not by ignorance but by choice. Kant’s idea of self-love as an alternative to the moral law suggests a motive which could exercise sufficient force to impel us to reject God forever, even if we possessed an intellectual understanding of the objective goodness of reconciliation with him.

The notion of moral progress beyond death invites numerous questions. For instance, how are we to conceive the phenomenological framework in which this progress might take place? Moral progress in this life does not occur in a vacuum but in the context of our reciprocal relationships with other human beings and their activity in the world. The impetus for new moral insight usually occurs by means of encounters with good and evil in the world, religious and spiritual experience, success and failure, and exposure to new ideas and perspectives. It is unclear how actions of varying moral value might be performed if the afterlife consists of immaterial souls floating in the cosmic void. Perhaps immortal moral progress will occur introspectively, once the fears and impediments of earthly life have faded.

Or perhaps we are to imagine a social sphere of eternity, something rather like the world presented to us in C.S Lewis’ novel, 'The Great Divorce', in which the afterlife consists of moral actors engaging in a manner broadly reflective of our behaviour in the world. But if this is so, then some reason must be supplied for us to think that moral perfection will be more attainable then than it is now. It could be, for example, the mere fact of immortality itself that provokes the necessary change of perspective. Certainly, one would expect any kind of post-mortem awareness to provoke a drastic reappraisal of previously held certainties, particularly for those who lacked faith in God in this life. But if immortality consists primarily in a temporal extension of our lives as they are now, rather than a qualitative transformation of nature, it becomes harder to see why the direction of moral change in the afterlife should necessarily be toward goodness, anymore than it is now.

A part of the answer to this question may lie in the notion of the ‘highest good’. Importantly, Kant understands the glory of God to be expressed most fully in the realisation of this summum bonum rather than in the eternal punishment of human sin. God accomplishes his intentions when happiness and moral virtue coincide in their maximal degree. The greatest good does not consist of a moral order of rewarded saints and punished sinners, but with the universal manifestation of the highest good within all human beings. Kant’s understanding of God as the guarantor of the highest good suggests that this is possible, and that God works to bring this about. In this sense, the eternal damnation of some in Hell would be then regarded not as the victory of God’s purposes but rather their frustration. If this is true, a defence of the doctrine of Hell would have to show that there was a compelling reason for God to permit this frustration. This is a central project of the liberal doctrine of Hell. The liberal view implies instead that the ‘highest good’ consists in humans maintaining their moral and soteriological autonomy. It argues that a God who wished to save all would do so, if not for the conflicting, and superior, value of human freedom.

Now that we have completed this brief survey of Kant’s thought, we are ready to consider the liberal and universalist perspectives in detail, employing Kant’s epistemology to diagnose the debate, and his transcendental idealism to suggest a solution to the problem.

THE LIBERAL DOCTRINE OF HELL: JERRY WALLS

In advancing from Immanuel Kant to a field of contemporary theology we have omitted a significant period of intellectual development. In the intervening period Protestant theology had evolved in countless directions, of which trinitarian, feminist, liberation and ecological or ‘green’ theology are notable current trends. Quite obviously, no theological question of contemporary relevance can be investigated without reference to these innovations, and as we explore the debate we shall be sensitive to their influence. However, the metaphysical issues of Christian philosophy remain substantially intact. The debate centres largely upon competing interpretations of the moral activity of the post-mortal soul. Broadly speaking, the thoroughly speculative nature of this question has shielded it from more change than one might expect from the passage of two centuries.

That is not to say, however, that the theological and philosophical landscape in this field has remained static. The philosophy of mind and freedom has undergone enormous change, which will be reflected in the terms of the debate.1 The seachange in theological culture has been reflected in the increasing popularity of liberal and universalist soteriological perspectives, among both academic theologians and lay Christians. Universalism is now relatively common in contemporary works of theology, and liberal interpretations of Hell equally so amongst those theologians who continue to engage with the subject at all. The consequence of this trend has been a significant increase in public interest in these questions, which has in turn prompted an escalating depth and clarity to the competing positions. Thus, while the issues at stake are ancient, the debate itself is modern.

This effect has been propelled by several factors. Firstly, it has been undergirded by interpretative shifts in biblical studies. Historically, liberal or allegorical exegesis and universalist theology have been common bedfellows.2 Origen and Schleiermacher are prominent examples of this intersection, which takes apparently plain biblical attestations to the reality of Hell to be either authorial errors, temporary processes (the ‘refining fire’) or theological metaphors. Others, such as Thomas Talbott, seek to develop universalist interpretations of biblical statements such as 1 Corinthians 15:28, which look forward to

1 Kane, 7-9. 2 Here ‘liberal’ refers to the broad theological movement, rather than to the Liberal doctrine of Hell.

God’s being ‘all in all’.3 With an increasingly developed case for biblical universalism, these theologians conclude that damnation texts must be either subordinate to the overriding theme of eschatological restoration, or argue that the question cannot be adequately resolved by biblical exegesis alone. Rather, it calls for the mediation of philosophical and theological reasoning. Kronen and Reitan sum up this conclusion:

We do not find the scriptural case for [the doctrine of Hell (DH)] to be conclusive, in part because the texts offered in support of DH are ambiguous and in part because the ‘hell texts’ are counterbalanced with ‘universalism texts’ whose plain sense supports [the doctrine of Universalism]. In fact, we make use of the doctrinal debate concerning Hell to expose the inadequacy of naïve inerrantist approaches to Scripture. Put simply, we cannot reliably settle doctrinal disputes by sifting through the Bible to find the answer in some passage or other. The Bible is not a book of doctrinal theology, and efforts to turn it into one are routinely stymied by the ambiguity, complexity and seeming contradictions in the text.4

For defenders of Hell, the challenge is to accommodate texts such as 1 Corinthians 15:28, which appear to endorse a theology of universal restoration, with eternal separation. Clearly, for these thinkers, ‘all in all’ will need to mean something other than the universal reconciliation of God with all human beings. Nonetheless, in defending at least some form of the doctrine of Hell liberal theologians are the ally of tradition, and can plausibly argue that, given the arguably even greater ambiguity of ‘universalist texts’ than ‘hell texts’, the burden of proof lies with those who reject the traditional doctrine. Overall, however, Liberalism and Universalism are united in their rejection of the traditional exegesis of Hell as a place of eternal punishment for sin.

Secondly, Universalists and Liberal Hell theologians share a common disquiet with the expression of divine punishment and wrath implied by the Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) model. We have explored some of these potential objections in our assessment of

3 Thomas Johnson, "A Wideness in God's Mercy: Universalism in the Bible," in Universal Salvation? : The Current Debate, ed. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge (Cambridge: W.B Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2004). 4 Reitan, 5-6.

Augustine, but broadly they believe that they have found a defeating contradiction in the following propositions:

The Problem of Hell

1. God is maximally good and just.

2. God is omnipotent.

3. God desires universal salvation.

4. Some will suffer eternally in Hell.

Universalism and Liberalism are competing solutions to this problem. For liberal theologians, the solution is to find some means of reconciling the last premise with the preceding ones. For Universalists, it is simply to dismiss the fourth premise entirely. Discussion of this alleged contradiction has historically taken its form in two distinct debates. The first debate has been contained within the Traditional view, between Arminians and Calvinists over the truth of the third premise, in which Calvinists argue that the problem is resolved by denying that God wills the salvation of all. However, the persuasiveness of the Arminian argument for universal atonement has propelled the rise of the second debate, which is the debate at question, conducted principally between liberals and universalists. Universalists and liberals both accept the Arminian thesis but argue that it is inadequate to resolve the moral complications of the doctrine. Instead, universalist theologians propose this alternative argument:

The Doctrine of Universalism

1: God is maximally good and just.

2: God is omnipotent.

3: God desires universal salvation.

C: God achieves universal salvation.

Universalists contend that it is senseless to remove any logically coherent objective beyond the reach of omnipotent power. They argue that any state of affairs which is willed by an omnipotent being will eventually be realised.

While this logical sequence seems forceful, liberal theologians argue that the conclusion does not follow from its premises. God may be both omnipotent and good, but be

53 impeded in accomplishing universal salvation by the irreducible obstacle of human freedom. Thus, the thrust of the liberal doctrine of Hell is to show that human freedom is capable of providing such an eternal impediment . The crux of the debate ultimately comes down to whether this idea is plausible. However, before we explore this further, we must reflect further on why Liberals and Universalists both consider universal atonement5 to be an inadequate solution to the Problem of Hell.

The first objection to the Arminian solution is the problem of proportionality. Critics of Hell argue that there is no act performable by a finite human being to which the intentional punishment of eternal conscious torment is a proportionate response. Human justice ordinarily considers crimes to fall within a gradation of severity. Falsifying a legal statement is considered less serious than assault, and so on, and our criminal system recognises this by applying penalties of equivalent gravity. A judge which imposed the same punishment for every crime, from jaywalking to murder, would be regarded as unjust, either in applying penalties of insufficient or excessive force. Equally, they argue that a just God could not apply an equally maximal punishment to all forms of sin. To do so would transgress the principle of proportionality on two counts: that crimes of apparently variable severity are treated equally, and that finite human crimes, even the very worst, are treated as matters of infinite severity. Surely even a murderer must arrive at a future duration of conscious torment at which the penalty for their crime has been satisfied.

The second objection concerns the problem of culpability and universal guilt. Soteriological models which rely upon an informed, conscious affirmation of faith have absorbed increasing criticism throughout the twentieth century, though the problem of those who have ‘never heard’ has been a question of theological concern since Justin Martyr. If we accept that those who are exposed to the Gospel and those who are aren’t share an equal liability for sin, then salvation appears to proceed merely from an arbitrary historical accident. Presumably, under an Arminian model, there are many throughout the world and throughout history who might have repented and sought justification in Christ if only they had the opportunity to do so. And, indeed, perhaps the same is true for those who have exercised a profound relationship with God within other religious traditions, yet do not recognise the historical Christ as the object of their faith. To punish, for instance, an ancient

5 I define ‘universal atonement’ as the proposition that God desires the salvation of all human beings, and that, through the redeeming work of Christ upon the cross, works to bring this about.

South American for failing to worship the God of Israel and express faith in Jesus of Nazareth, seems problematic to say the least.

These are by no means original observations, and theologians have been occupied with them since the inception of Christianity. Justin Martyr proposed the platonic solution that, though some may have no relationship with the historical, personal Christ, they are ‘Christian’ to the extent that they identify with Christ as the ‘Logos’, understood as the divine animating presence of the Universe. Abraham and Plato were therefore Christian in the sense that their lives were grounded in this divine presence, though it had yet to be physically incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth: ‘those who lived according the Logos are therefore Christians, even though they were regarded as atheists; among Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus; and among non-Greeks, Abraham, Ananias, Azanas, and Misad, and Elijah, and many others.’6

In modern times, theologians such as Karl Rahner have developed inclusive soteriological models in which God is understood to be at work within all religious traditions. Though Christ remains the sole means by which God saves human beings, the work of Christ can be expressed through God-human relationships which are not consciously Christian.7 Rahner argues that ‘the saving event of the unique cross and the empty tomb in Jerusalem’ is ‘chronologically simultaneous.’ Though Jesus Christ appeared at a certain temporal time, the consequences of his redemptive work is timeless and active for ‘all men, cultures and spaces in history.’ Therefore, ‘Christianity does not simply confront the member of an extra- Christian religion as a mere non-Christian but as someone who can and must be regarded in this or that respect as an anonymous Christian…touched by grace and truth.’8 John Hick goes further than this, suggesting a ‘Copernican revolution in our understanding of the religions.’ For Hick, no religious traditions fully contain the truth of God, but rather constitute different ‘lens’ by which we perceive the divine.9

Orthodox theologians who are not prepared to concede the exceptionalism of Christian faith also continue to wrestle with this dilemma; William Lane Craig has proposed the novel defence that God has so pre-ordained the world that those who would freely accept

6 Justin Martyr, "Apologia 1.Xlvi.1-3," in Saint Justin: Apologies, ed. A. Wartelle (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 160. 7 A Aghamkar, "Christian Apologetics in the Non-Western World," in The New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, ed. W. C. Campbell-Jack, McGrath, Gavin J. (USA: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 47. 8 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 5 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 115-34. 9 John Hick, The Second Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1983), 82-87.

55 the Gospel have been born into places and times which would expose them to it, and vice versa. In other words, those had been and will be born into circumstances which render them necessarily ignorant of the saving grace of Christ would have rejected it even if they had not been so. Craig acknowledges that this solution might seem unappealing, not least on account of the vast implied disparity between those who would embrace the Gospel and those who would reject it, and characterises it merely as a defence rather than a theodicy. That is, it is taken to be a hypothesis which could possibly be true, thereby evading the logical and moral problems of the doctrine, rather than a proposition which is demonstrably true.10

However, whatever the merits of these responses to the problem of ignorance, one of the animating convictions of liberal and universalist theorists is that they are inadequate. They are persuaded that there can be no satisfying solution to this problem which retains mortal death as the final, irreversible point of judgment. The insistence that salvation can follow only from conscious, intentional commitment to the justifying grace of Christ in this life underestimates the severity of social, psychological and spiritual barriers to faith, even amongst those who have access to the Gospel. One effect of the fall of Christendom has been that Christians now customarily share their lives with family, friends, and colleagues who, according to the doctrine of justification by faith, are bound for Hell. We are confronted with the distressing expectation that those with whom we share loving relationships, apparently good and moral people yet unpersuaded by the reality of God and his expression in Christ, are doomed to suffer forever at the hands of a God we worship. This personal reality is not, of itself, a compelling logical reason to abandon the doctrine, but it has corresponded with the formulation and prosecution of arguments against the Traditional view.

Universalist and liberal theologians are generally agreed that demonstrations of the trinitarian God’s existence and character are sufficiently subtle, and conflicting social, psychological, philosophical and religious influences sufficiently formidable that lack of faith is not equivalent to intentional disobedience. Instead, the project of moral and spiritual growth within the individual is potentially infinite. These people are, at least possibly, the prodigal sons which God waits patiently to welcome home. They are the lost sheep which the good shepherd will not forsake. They deny that the door of God’s patience and mercy is closed with the conclusion of mortal life. It might be that God could be decisively rejected, but such a rejection is not necessarily implied by a faithless death.

10 William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1987), 150-51.

This soteriological deadline is charged as arbitrary and unjustified, particularly if we adopt a libertarian model of freedom, in which a person who dies today without faith, might spontaneously have embraced it tomorrow. It seems that there could be many who would, had their lives been prolonged, have ultimately come to willing, saving relationships with God. Therefore, while they may die in a state of alienation, their rejection is not necessarily final in a soteriological sense. They need not have actively rejected God, they may simply have failed to accept him. Given this, if we affirm both God’s universal desire to save and the ceaselessly fluid state of human character, it is counterintuitive that God should ever ‘give up’.

The common conclusion among universalist and liberal theologians is that the realm of moral and spiritual development must be propelled to the life beyond death. They are convinced that, not only does God lack impelling causes to uphold the point of death as the expiry date of salvation, but that, unless humans are allowed to express moral and spiritual autonomy beyond death, they can never enjoy an equal opportunity to accept God’s loving invitation. However, it is at this point of agreement that the united front formed by liberal and universalist theologians ends and the debate about human freedom arises. For, once we repudiate the point of death as the day of judgement, the problem of ignorance and guilt resurfaces in the immortal sphere. The question then becomes whether it is possible, or even intelligible, for a human being to express an eternally decisive rejection of God. It is agreed that for such a rejection to be morally admissible it must be both sufficiently informed and consistent. Thus, the contemporary debate between these perspectives continues to be fought in large part on the problem of ignorance, though not of temporally unaware humans in history, but of morally expressive immortal persons. This problem of eternal ignorance consists of a number of constituent questions, including: Can God disclose himself with greater force and clarity in an afterlife without compromising the freedom of the subject? To what extent could God intervene to obtain the free affirmation of the subject without compromising their free autonomy? Is it conceivable for any person to possess a sufficient, well-informed and rational motive to reject God, and is it acceptable or necessary for God to sustain this separation forever?

The liberal model of hell is, in its broadest sense, the belief that hell is occupied by those who choose to do so. In the words of C.S Lewis, ‘the doors of Hell are locked on the

57 inside’.11 However, the decision to inhabit hell is of a radically different kind than that of whether to have soup or salad for lunch. It is not necessarily a decision in which the subject discerns between two clearly defined and apparent alternatives and possesses the means and understanding necessary to decide between them. It is not even analogous to a more abstract, complex form of decision-making such as who to vote for or who to marry, which involve an imponderable intersection of environmental influences and variables. Rather, the alternatives of this decision are not fully understood even by the Christian, much less by the non-believer, and the consequences of it are clouded in obscurity beyond the boundary of mortal life. It is a decision in which the grace of God is active and the Spirit is understood to be at work. It is a decision of eternal significance which reflects the purpose and meaning at the heart of creation.

The liberal model proceeds from the dual conviction that the Traditional view is morally impermissible, but that the doctrine of Hell itself is biblically and theologically indispensable. It implies a disaffection with the evangelical formula that salvation relies upon a conscious declaration of faith, or baptismal re-birth within this life, which is seen to reduce the conditions for salvation merely to an intellectual arrangement of concepts and feelings which, while by no means meaningless or insignificant, neglects the problems addressed above.

Nonetheless, it is the foundational premise of the liberal model that a free and conscious affirmation of the human will is a necessary condition of salvation. Liberal theologians deny the Augustinian contention that the identity of the elect and the damned are predetermined, and that the fate of all humans is sealed, irrespective of their own individual wishes or actions. Rather, God has invested us with a will which he desires us to use. What God seeks is the intimate satisfaction of freely given love, without which we can never enjoy the blessed delight for which we were made. Salvation is not an object to be passively bestowed upon us, but an elected manner of being. It cannot be imposed, any more than the determined miser can be compelled to merriment. Understood in this way, it becomes insensible to speak of involuntary salvation. It is simply a contradiction in terms.

The reverse consequence of this, it is argued, is that the possibility of true and decisive acceptance of God’s salvific grace implies the possibility of its sincere rejection. If we are truly free to say 'yes', then we must be equally at liberty to say 'no'. In bestowing us

11 Ibid., 115.

58 with libertarian freedom, God has taken a risk. In opening the possibility of the reciprocation of his love by free creatures, he has created the possibility of its free rejection by them. It is possible that God’s love might be decisively rejected, even by someone who possessed sufficient knowledge, understanding and grace to make such a choice phenomenologically decisive and morally acceptable. Our freedom is sufficiently radical that we might make an authentic choice to reject God’s love, even if it seemed contrary to our own welfare, or even if we seemed to lack compelling motivation to do so.

However, because God’s chief impelling motive is inducing us to accept his salvific invitation, he never abandons us. There remains always the possibility that we might turn from the idol of self-love. For this reason, the invitation never expires and the door is never closed. God will not permit even death to snatch us from this potential transformation. He sustains us in existence, as we are, waiting patiently and unceasingly, until his gentle persuasion wins us over. And it is this that we call Hell.

Some forms of Universalism, however, accept that sequence of reasoning up to this point. The definition of universalism is not that there is no Hell, but that Hell is not, for anyone, eternal. Hell might perform a rehabilitative role, as a cradle of those who have yet to reciprocate God’s love, but who will inevitably do so eventually. Or it might perform a refining or purifying function, shedding from us sin and imperfection until we are made fit for Heaven.12 Such interpretations are often employed by Universalists to reconcile the biblical affirmation of Hell with that of God’s final eschatological victory. Therefore, the existence of Hell is not the distinguishing line which separates liberal theologians from their universalist critics. Rather, it is the liberal contention that Hell might for some, be eternal. To say that God takes a risk in creating free creatures is to affirm that he has implanted within them the psychological, intellectual and spiritual resources to reject him forever. Liberal theologians are not universalists because they believe that, for some, God’s graceful persuasion will never be enough, and that their stubborn self-worship will never be overcome. For God to compel, or reconstitute them to accept his invitation would be to distort and refashion them in such a radical way that we could never legitimately say that they were ever saved at all, but that an entirely new creature had been created, and the former destroyed beyond recognition.

12An idea particularly associated with Origen: Gyorgy Heidl, "Origenism," in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Fergusson McFarland Ian A., A. S., Kilby, Karen., Torrance, Iain R. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

The Liberal doctrine of Hell can therefore be summarised as follows:

The Liberal Doctrine of Hell

1. God has created us to be free, morally expressive creatures.

2. God’s infinite, universal love for us is expressed partly in the desire that we are saved and dwell forever with him.

3. Salvation proceeds from a free response to God’s grace.

4. God’s perseverance for this free response is unlimited, sustaining us beyond death eternally in Hell as he continues to work his grace and persuasion upon us.

5. Because our free will is ontologically radical, there remains always the possibility of repentance, through moral and spiritual transformation.

6. However, this ontological radicalism means that this free response is never assured. We retain the capacity to resist and reject God eternally.

7. Therefore, universal salvation, though possible, cannot be guaranteed. It is conceivable that some will exercise their freedom to remain alienated from God forever.

8. Given that this is possible, the biblical doctrine of damnation should be retained.

To the extent that the ordinary Christian has encountered any explicit formulation of the liberal doctrine of Hell, they are likely to have found it in the relevant chapter of 'The Problem of Pain'13, by C.S Lewis. Lewis adapted the ideas presented there five years later in narrative form in his novel 'The Great Divorce', and there are elements present within the

13 C.S Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London; Glasgow: Collins, 1957).

60 eschatological entry in his ‘Narnia’ series, 'The Last Battle'.14 Lewis’ employment of the liberal model of Hell exemplifies its attraction to those who are unwilling to part with the doctrine and, particularly in Lewis’ case, wish to present it sympathetically to a non-Christian audience without wielding it as an instrument of fear.

Lewis expresses a common sentiment of liberal theologians when he remarks that he sees nothing in the doctrine to admire; ‘I am not going to try to prove the remark intolerable. Let us make no mistake; it is not tolerable.’15 He regards the existence of Hell not as the sceptre of God’s majesty, the predestined outworking of his sovereignty, but rather the revolting and necessary outcome of human freedom. In asserting the existence of Hell, Lewis affirms the limits of mercy. Having painted the portrait of a supremely evil, unrepentant sinner, ‘a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world, unshakeably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life’, Lewis insists that to unilaterally forgive such a man would be to condone his behaviour; Forgiveness is not a unilateral act, ‘but must be accepted as well as offered for it to be complete’.16

Instead, Lewis argues that Hell cradles within it those who have elected to pursue the Kantian alternative to righteousness: self-love. He argues that, while we might regard Hell as abhorrent, this is not subjectively apparent to its occupants. They are blind to God, preoccupied with staring lustily into eternity’s looking glass. Within themselves they have found the fullest satisfaction of meaning and purpose, and the ultimate object of worship. Lewis writes, ‘We are therefore at liberty…to think of this bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is. The characteristic of lost souls is their “rejection of everything that is not merely themselves.”’17

The impetus of damnation is therefore not imposed judgementally from above, but asserted recklessly from below. Perdition is not the fulfilment of God’s sovereignty, but rather its subversion and (permitted) frustration. Lewis acknowledges that the loss of ‘a single soul’ represents the defeat of God’s purposes, but that it is a defeat which does not threaten the doctrine of God’s omnipotence.18 It is a defeat which God permits to befall him.

14 C.S Lewis, The Last Battle (England: Penguin Books, 1964).

15 Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 108. 16 Ibid., 110. 17 Ibid., 111. 18 Ibid., 115.

His eternal rejection is a risk which he allows when he creates free creatures. It is not that God is unable to save all, but that the cost of doing so would be too great. It would be the same cost of eliminating evil in the world. It would be to exchange free, morally expressive beings for soulless ‘automatons’. A creature which cannot reject God’s love, in Lewis’ view, is one which also cannot accept that love and find its being in its joy and consummation. Such a loss would be to sap creation of its purpose.

Lewis has no principled commitment to death as the soteriological judgment point, asserting that divine goodness demands that we are given every opportunity to turn from self- love. However, he denies the Kantian premise that the transformative path to righteousness is never closed. For Lewis, at some point the internal commitment to self-worship obtains a state of irreducible finality, and ‘it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when.’19

As a persuasive exposition of Hell, Lewis’ description contains common elements of the liberal model: the location of soteriological agency within the free will of creatures, the rejection of excessive and subjective punishment, the classification of damnation as self-love, and the extension of human freedom and moral expression beyond the point of death. However, whatever its apologetic merits, Lewis’ treatment of the liberal model is (self- confessedly) underdeveloped. Lewis flirts with elements of retributivism and conditionalism20, and his account does not possess the philosophical depth to satisfactorily resolve questions such as the sufficient motive for eternal rejection and the moral limits of God’s intervention. For an exposition of the liberal model of Hell which potentially overcomes these limitations we must turn to more philosophically sophisticated (and contemporary) treatments of it, such as that of Jerry Walls.

Jerry Walls

The account of Hell Jerry Walls presents in 'Hell: The Logic of Damnation'21 is comprehensive and radical. The work, constituting one part of a trilogy on Hell, Heaven and

19 Ibid., 112. 20 Conditionalism is the view that human beings who are not saved simply cease to exist when they die. 21 Walls.

Purgatory is motivated by the author’s conviction that these doctrines, understood as literal spiritual realities are indispensable to the Christian faith. Walls understands Christianity to be ‘primarily a scheme of salvation. Its main thrust is how we can be saved from our sins and receive eternal life.’22 He believes that any theology which honours the centrality of this theme must give a serious account of both its fulfilment and its frustration. For Walls, the alternative is to ‘significantly alter the character of what it means to believe the Christian faith.’23 While there are occasional biblical references, Walls’ defence is almost exclusively a philosophical-theological one. He takes the biblical attestations of Hell to be sufficiently plain as to rest the burden of proof with the Universalist. Instead, he is concerned to refute the philosophical case for Universalism, which he considers to be more persuasive than the biblical case.

As a free will theist, Walls draws upon what he describes as a ‘ground-level intuition’ of the inviolability of libertarian free will as a moral value. He takes it to be a fundamental constituent of the human soul, inextricable from any intelligible account of the human as a moral agent, able to engage in an authentic, worshipful and loving relationship with God.24 Walls is an Arminian, believing that the scope of God’s saving intentions are universal, but that salvation relies upon a free individual response to grace. Walls aims to show that an account of Hell can be given which is consistent with the goodness of God and the eternal autonomy of human freedom. As such, the defence of Hell presented by Walls operates on two fronts, firstly in reaction to Calvinist predestination, which he regards as incompatible with a plausible account of divine goodness, and secondly against dogmatic Universalism25, which he believes underestimates the soteriological efficacy of the human will.26 His argument is thematic, defending the compatibility of Hell with the divine attributes of knowledge, power and goodness, and then separately with human freedom and misery.

22 Ibid., 6. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 136. 25 ‘Dogmatic Universalism’ is the view that all human beings will certainly be saved, as opposed to ‘Open’ or ‘Hopeful’ Universalism, in which universal salvation is posited as a possible, or likely outcome. 26 Ibid., 37.

Hell

For Walls, Hell is a literal spiritual reality, occupied by the disembodied souls of those who have died. He takes the damnation of souls to Hell to be regrettable, contrary to the wishes of God and right thinking people. While Walls acknowledges that those in Hell experience objective evils, such as the separation from God and the profound corruption of sin, these are not imposed by God as punishments and may not even take the form of subjective torments. Indeed, those in Hell may enjoy a perverse pleasure derived from pride, fatalism, vanity or the defiance of God; ‘[Hell] holds no genuine happiness, but those who prefer it to heaven may savour a deformed sense of satisfaction which faintly resembles real happiness.’27 Walls denies that those in Hell suffer physical pain.

The purpose of Hell is neither punitive nor rehabilitative. Indeed, Walls explicitly denies the proposition that of Hell is designed to compel spiritual reformation, likening this to a medieval weight which presses down upon an interrogated person until they confess or die.28 He does not hold the punishment of sin in Hell to be mandated by the predominance of God’s glory. Human rejection is not understood primarily as an offense to God, but instead as a lamentable loss which he does everything he can to prevent. God’s providence is not enriched by condemning some to Hell, but rather by redeeming all those he can and granting the favour of autonomy to those he cannot.

Walls believes that salvation can take place only in the context of a free, willing acceptance of God’s grace. However, because libertarian theory traditionally asserts that an action is only free if it is possible to do otherwise, the possibility of true acceptance in Heaven is verified necessarily by the possibility of true rejection in Hell. If humans lack the absolute freedom to damn themselves, then salvation is not truly free at all. However, while the possibility of damnation is absolute, it is not irrevocable. The damned are contained in Hell only insofar as their rejection is maintained. Their perdition could end at any moment if

27 Ibid., 128. 28 Ibid., 132.

64 they were to give themselves to grace and true repentance, enabling a salvific relationship with God.

Walls implies that, for the quality of the human will to be maintained in recognisable and coherent form after death, the afterlife must in some sense resemble the life we know now. Responding to a claim that perception of God after death must be so powerful as to overcome resistance, Walls writes that he sees no reason why God must be more apparent in Hell than he is now, and that he may continue to engage with us by means of human agents; ‘Surely God could reveal himself only to such an extent as would enable a free response…The situation after death may be similar to this life in the sense that persons may learn about God from their fellow humans and respond in faith to what they learn.’29 This implies a high degree of familiarity about our experience of the afterlife, which recalls the kinds of interactions which Lewis suggests in 'The Great Divorce'. Familiarity of this kind seems necessary to sustain the conditions in which human beings could form moral judgements and make determinative decisions.

Optimal Grace

At the heart of Walls’ defence of Hell is a theory he calls ‘optimal grace’. He uses this term to describe ‘the optimal amount of good which God can exercise on [a person’s] will without destroying his freedom.’30 In order for us to plausibly claim that God desires the salvation of all and does everything in his power to achieve it, Walls believes that it is necessary to postulate that God provides an equal opportunity for all to respond to his offer of salvation. We must have the same opportunity to make a decisive choice to either reject or accept him. This alone would be an uncontroversial conclusion, however, Walls also argues that, because of inequalities of awareness and understanding, duration and condition of living, hardship and suffering, an equal and maximal opportunity for repentance cannot be guaranteed in this life. Rather, the provision of optimal grace may take place at or beyond the point of death. God sustains the existence of human beings forever so that this repentance may one day take place.

29 Ibid., 100. 30 Ibid., 88.

Walls regards the soteriological finality of death as an insuperable obstacle to any form of damnation which could be imposed by a good and loving God. Rather, Walls argues that the rejection of God could only be considered an acceptable justification of perdition if such a decision were truly authentic and final. That is, it must be a decisive choice, derived not merely from circumstance but rather from a settled, consistent and informed volition. Unless such a decisive choice is made, neither Heaven nor Hell are feasible outcomes for the human soul. Both depend upon an active and morally significant desire. The eternal destiny of a human being cannot justifiably be settled by the intellectual, spiritual and moral character of that person at the moment of death. To illustrate the difficulties with such a position, Walls asks us imagine two separate cases:

First, let us take the case of two persons who are born and raised in two very different situations. One is born into a home in which he is deprived of both physical and emotional needs. He is never loved and receives virtually no religious instruction. Throughout his life he is faced by a wide array of temptations and eventually becomes a criminal and dies a violent death. The other, by contrast, is born into a loving family which provides for all his needs, including his emotional and spiritual needs. He is faithfully taught Christian precepts and becomes himself a devout believer. Suppose God knows the first would have also become a devout believer if he had been raised in the second person’s circumstances. Next, consider the case of two young women, both of whom have been taught the Christian faith, but have rejected it. Both are involved in an automobile accident in which one is killed while the other lives. Let us say the second is eventually converted and becomes a saintly person, whereas the first is damned. Suppose God knows the first would also have become a saintly person if she had lived to a normal age before dying.31

In both of these cases, Walls claims that, while both the first man and the first woman had made a choice, it was not a decisive choice. It did not represent the fullest expression of their moral character and spiritual potential. To take even more alarming examples, consider the damnation of Paul or Augustine if they had died before their conversions. Walls invites us to conclude that such an outcome would be deeply unsatisfactory. The problem grows even more grave if we presume an account of divine foreknowledge in which God knows this

31 Ibid., 86.

66 alternative future, and damns them anyway. Even if we assumed that God did not have this knowledge, damnation would almost always take place in the face of the possibility that some future moral transformation may have occurred. We can have confidence that any damnation is truly self-imposed and authentic, Walls argues, only if we grant optimal grace and eternal opportunity.

In Walls’ view, the goodness of God does not demand that anyone is actually saved but merely that they have every opportunity to be saved. There is no proportion of saved to damned which is necessary to say that God is good, or that his act of creation was worthy. It is sufficient to say that any who are ultimately damned are ‘transworld damned’,32 that is, there is no possible circumstance in which they would freely respond to God’s grace. Rather, God’s goodness consists in providing us with the autonomy to exercise true freedom, either in accepting or rejecting him. He rejects the Augustinian gratuity of grace, arguing that the chief characteristic of grace is not that it is gratuitous but that it is undeserved. The provision of grace equally to all does not detract from the goodness or freedom of God.33

Human Freedom

If the first pillar of Walls’ defence of Hell is his account of optimal grace, the second is a strong statement of human libertarian freedom and its capacity to intelligibly and authentically reject God forever. His theory of optimal grace suggests that damnation is possible, while his account of human freedom suggests that damnation is plausible. After all, the antithesis of Universalism is not that Hell is possible, or even that it exists and performs some function in the process of salvation, but that it will be populated forever; that there are some whose minds will never be changed, who will never see God.

Walls' reply to this problem is that God’s desire that we choose him freely and willingly is greater than his desire that all be saved. Our salvation is meaningless if it is not a free response to grace; an expression of love which permeates our spiritual and moral character and fixes within us a desire to worship God in the community of heaven. Indeed,

32 Craig, 151. 33 Ibid., 104.

Walls doubts that any model of salvation which does not proceed from such a faithful and free affirmation is even intelligible. Humans do not ascend to heaven by necessity of nature or irresistible election. Rather they may defy God, and they retain the absolute capacity to resist God knowingly and eternally.

In order to be decisive, Walls argues that a choice to reject God must also be consistent. Walls defines a ‘consistent decision’ as one which is fully representative of the person’s moral character and expressed at every level of desire. Walls puts the idea in terms of Frankfurt’s theory of higher-order volition, in which the will is thought to operate on several hierarchical levels. According to this theory we possess ‘first-order desires’ which are our immediate wishes and inclinations, and ‘second-order’ desires which reflect my feelings about my first-order desires.34 For instance, I may have an immediate desire to buy a book. However, this may conflict with a second-order desire at which I know I cannot afford to buy the book, and therefore wish that I did not desire to buy the book.35 To resolve this conflict, I must either change my first-order desire by persuading myself that I do not want to buy the book, or by changing my second-order desire by persuading myself that I can afford the book by making savings elsewhere, and thereby come to both desire to buy the book and also want to desire that I buy the book. This is what Walls means by a ‘consistent’ choice, one in which ‘a person who had chosen evil decisively who consistently wanted evil at every level of desire.’36 Walls refers to an example used by Eleanor Stump of Joseph Goebbels, who when confronted by a sudden pity for Poland, commands himself ‘be hard, my heart, be hard.’ Stump suggests that this is an example of how a wavering first-order desire for evil might be indefinitely fortified by a second-order desire for evil.37 Thus, a decisive choice to damn oneself must constitute both a rejection of God and a higher-order desire that one wish to reject God.

However, Walls acknowledges the criticism that such a choice, though intelligible, may seem incomprehensible. It might be argued that there can be no sufficient motive to impel such a decision, or to sustain it eternally in the face of the persistent persuasions of God. This seems particularly true if one grants Walls’ own theory of optimal grace, in which

34 Ibid., 121.

35 This is similar to Walls’ own example, but I have adapted it to one which is more relevant to me. 36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 122.

68 we are equipped with sufficient understanding, opportunity and grace to accept salvation. In order to describe how someone who fully understood the promises offered to them by God could choose to reject them Walls draws heavily upon the treatise, 'Sickness Unto Death'38, in which Kierkegaard describes how evil can be intentionally and knowingly chosen.39 He invokes Kierkegaard’s existentialist analysis that we are confronted by the God-given responsibility ‘to be a self’, which is ‘to become decisively conscious that one is an eternal spirit. It is to become aware of God’s existence and to allow one’s entire life to be shaped by that reality. It is consciously to live in relation to God so that one becomes the sort of self, or person, that God desires.’40 Kierkegaard is struck and compelled by the enormity of this vocation. The failure to do this is ‘despair’, which he believes to be common to all people. We are all afflicted by despair, and it is only by becoming aware of it that we can bring ourselves into conformity with the ‘self’ which God requires of us. This awareness of despair ‘grounds us in God’ and compels within us the desire to be what God wishes us to be. Indeed, it is only by embracing this existential despair that it can ever be eradicated. Those who lack the awareness of their own despair can never overcome it, for they are blind to their true purpose.41

Instead, Kierkegaard believes that those who fail to become this true self are drawn into a continuity of sin, which itself becomes a character-forming tendency. They become trapped in a self-confirming depravity in which sin and the desire to sin becomes inherently woven into their character, giving shape to their identity and personality. The pervasiveness of this sinful character becomes so embedded in the sinner that he interprets any challenge to this degraded nature as a threat to himself; he must guard himself against thoughts and temptations of goodness for fear that they will undo the consistency of his being. Thus, rather than inheriting this depravity necessarily, he has constructed it within himself; it is the expression of his will and the cumulative outcome of his decisions.

In this Walls sees a potential model for understanding how someone might close themselves off from God forever; ‘Here…is the factor which makes the choice of evil decisive. It is when the choice for evil has become fully consistent that it is decisive. At this

38 Soren Kierkegaard, The sickness unto death : a Christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

39 Ibid., 117. 40 Ibid., 119. 41 Ibid.

69 point, evil is present through and through a personality, and there is no place left for good even to get a foothold. It never “bottoms out” so to speak, and thus there is little, if any, prospect for a return to good.’42 This, then, is Walls’ portrait of the eternally unrepentant sinner. They have rejected God consistently and finally, closed themselves off to grace by an accumulation of evil which has warped and depraved their character, and embedded within them a habitual hostility to goodness. They have placed themselves in the thrall of their own self-worship and intentionally corrupted their own will and spirit. They have made themselves ‘thoroughly immune to the grace of God.’43 The concept of repentance is obscene to them and even impossible, for to embrace goodness would be to destroy their own identity. Walls believes that such a depravity could account for how someone could freely, consistently and decisively reject God forever.

Like, Lewis, Walls suggests a number of possible motives for such a rejection. The unrepentant might be hostile to the very concept of grace, demanding what is owed to them, and rejecting the levelling equality that grace implies. They might draw an infernal satisfaction from the very act of rebellion, which feeds a perverse sense of smugness derived from defying an omnipotent God. They may be committed to a form of self-pitying fatalism, in which they insist that they cannot be forgiven, which gives shape to their self-identity. Walls writes that this is ‘a subtly inverted act of pride…it is evil assuming a posture of moral superiority and righteousness.’44 Walls believes that ‘hell may afford its inhabitants a kind of gratification which motivates the choice to go there. In each case there is an echo of Satan’s claim that hell is better than heaven. That belief is what finally justifies and makes intelligible the choice of hell.’45

This is of course a subjective impression. No satisfaction derived in Hell can equal the bliss experienced by those in Heaven, nor can it possess any true moral value. The pleasures of Hell are illusory and ultimately hollow, enjoyed despite the knowledge that true joy and fulfilment is derived only from a right relationship with God. However, Walls denies that it is possible for God to relieve them of this illusion. Firstly, Walls argues that true autonomy requires that we are free to deceive ourselves. He likens this to an addict who chooses to be

42 Ibid., 120. 43 Ibid., 124. 44 Ibid., 128. 45 Ibid.

70 addicted. Even were a doctor to apply a chemical therapy which restores the patient’s ability to choose, they would simply return to their addiction. For, while the will of the patient has been deformed, they are nevertheless acting as they would wish to.46 Secondly, Walls argues that becoming aware of God as the true source of happiness and fulfilment is not merely a matter of intellectual conception. God cannot place that knowledge within us like decorating a cake. Rather, Walls argues that that knowledge can be grasped only through spiritual and moral development, and free engagement with God’s grace; ‘as one responds to God’s grace…he gains a deeper and deeper understanding of God’s relation to happiness…it is a matter of moral development and character. And it is because of this character that the saints in heaven spontaneously love God and want to do his will. Those who have responded to God in this fashion and achieved this character can be said to have perfected their moral freedom.’47 Thus, while the damned may have an intellectual familiarity with the fact that God is the true source of happiness and sin the source of misery, this truth will lack sufficient force to alter their behaviour unless they choose to open themselves to it through grace. In this way, they resist God’s attempt to sow within them true understanding or genuine spiritual transformation. Thus, while the rejection of the damned rests upon deception, it is an intentional self-deception, and remains within the scope of free human autonomy.

Divine Attributes

Aiming to maintain an orthodox doctrine of God, Walls devotes much of his defence to show that the attributes of God are consistent with eternal damnation. In this sense the problem of Hell mirrors the problem of evil (or is even a subset of it), in that, given that salvation is a desirable and good outcome, God’s inability or refusal to save all seems to imply a failure either of power, love or knowledge. Either he refrains from saving all when he knows that it would be right and good to so, in which case he is not perfectly good, or he wishes to save all, yet is unable to do so, in which case it seems that he is not omnipotent, or thirdly, desires the salvation of all but lacks the sufficient knowledge to carry it out, in which case he is not omniscient.

46 Ibid., 134. 47 Ibid., 130-31.

This is a simple and classical formulation of a logical problem which contains a host of inter-related sub-problems. Divine foreknowledge, in this case, seems to create problems for divine goodness. Why should God create humans he knows will reject him forever and be eternally lost to evil and sin? If he possesses foreknowledge of those who will eventually embrace him and those who will forever turn away from him, why not create only the former? Why not fill the world only with them? We might better imagine God as an omniscient quality manager on a factory floor, removing items from the conveyor belt which he perceives will ultimately be harmful. This might sound a pitiless image of God, but it seems hardly more edifying to think that he brings some into the world in the sure knowledge that they will inevitably suffer in alienation and degradation forever. Or, if we were to employ an open model of divine foreknowledge, in which the scope of divine omniscience does not include certain knowledge of the outcome of free human decisions, is it acceptable for God to have created any humans at all, in the awareness that it was possible that most or even all of his creations might reject him and be damned forever? Furthermore, can any plausible model of divine omnipotence and sovereignty bear the prospect that, in addition to simply performing isolated acts of evil within creation, human beings might be able to decisively defy the will of God forever, obstructing God’s purposes of salvation which lie at the heart of creation and his relationship to humanity? It seems counter-intuitive to imagine that a human will could ever overcome and frustrate an eternal one.

Many of these objections are at least partly addressed by Walls’ account of human freedom and optimal grace; God does not lack the ontological power to accomplish universal salvation, but that desire is subordinated to an overriding aim to engage with humans in the context of freely given, reciprocated love. God might be able to accomplish the universal salvation of some kind of creatures, but not of humans. God has embedded the vocation of the human will at the heart of creation, and to infringe upon it would be to do violence to the integrity and nature of creation as it is made. God could fill the heavenly realm with puppet- like creatures but this would be to fundamentally undermine the purpose of creation. It would be a meaningless act.

Walls supposes that, in creating a world populated by creatures, he knows that some will ultimately reject him. But he denies that the prospect of human rejection ultimately conflicts with divine power; ‘If this were so, God could not both create W [a world of free creatures] and save all persons in it. It would be absurd to say God might try to do both, or

72 that he would be a failure if he could not.’48 God does not fail to accomplish his purposes because some will ultimately damn themselves, for, according to most models of divine foreknowledge, in creating the world he knows that this will occur, so he cannot truly will it. Rather, God’s intentions are fulfilled merely in creating every opportunity for us to know him and come to him in free and loving relationship. In a sense, the damned remain within this overriding purpose of God for they have made a true and decisive expression of freedom. This is itself an act of moral and ontological significance, for which God sustains them in existence. While God might be disappointed or even grieve for those who are lost, he is not defeated by them, no more than the existence of evils in the world shows that he is not omnipotent.49 Rather, they are permitted to occur for the sake of superior aims.

Walls and Universalism

In asserting the logic of Hell, Walls mounts both a formal defence and a theodicy. That is, his argument seeks to show not only that Hell is logically possible (that its premises are not logically contradictory) but that we have good reasons to think that it actually exists. However, Walls’ argument does not exclude the possibility that universalism might be true. Hell is not essential to Christianity. Universal salvation would not obviously degrade doctrines of God’s power, goodness or sovereignty. Unlike Calvin, Walls does not take the eternal punishment of sinners to be necessary for the expression of God’s glory and his hostility to sin. Whilst an adequate defence of Hell requires some critique of universalism, Walls does not believe that there is any logical contradiction inherent to some form of ‘hopeful’ Universalism (the belief that, while we may hope that all will be eventually reconciled with God, we cannot be certain of it, as opposed to ‘dogmatic Universalism’ which takes universal salvation to be logically or practically necessary). Indeed, by the very nature of the model of libertarian freedom which Walls is committed to, he must allow the possibility that eventually every person might respond to grace, leaving Hell ultimately vacant. However, Walls believes that the biblical case for damnation should be accepted, unless there is a compelling philosophical-theological reason to abandon it. The case that Walls makes is not that Universalism is incoherent, but that the doctrine of Hell is reasonable.

48 Ibid., 78. 49 Ibid.

In mounting this defence of Hell, Walls strays far from the theology of the Traditional view. He proposes a model of human freedom and immortality that neither Augustine nor Arminius would recognise. Walls’ model of Hell recalls Kant’s intuition that freedom of the will is irreducible. It is a preliminary postulate to possible knowledge about God and his relationship to human beings. We can make no predictions of human destiny in which freedom is not a determinative factor.

UNIVERSALISM: JURGEN MOLTMANN

Jurgen Moltmann does not believe in Hell. That is, he denies a ‘double outcome’ model of judgement, in which humanity is ultimately subdivided into two groups; those bound for eternal damnation and those elected, by ordination or by choice, to eternal bliss. Despite this, Moltmann is not a theologian of marginal influence. He has been a totemic Christian thinker of the 20th century, whose work has contributed to the renovation of Eschatological and Trinitarian theology, and the formation of Liberation theology and Social Gospel responses to the existential horrors of the Second World War, which Moltmann personally endured.1 Indeed, as a theologian Moltmann stands as a challenge to the claim that the doctrine of damnation is inextricable from the edifice of Christian orthodoxy. He denies the claim that the doctrine of Hell represents something so fundamental about the nature of God and his purposes in the world that its removal would render the face of Christianity unrecognisable.

Yet, the doctrine of Hell, in both traditional and liberal forms, is not merely absent from Moltmann’s theology. Rather, it is explicitly repudiated as a profound error of interpretation, fundamentally at odds with the essence of the faith. For Moltmann, judgement is not the last act of God in the world. Instead, it is merely a paving stone on the road which leads invariably to the universal reconciliation of all creation. In his theology, judgement is ‘penultimate’.2 Despite its reputation, judgement is not, in fact, ‘final’. Or rather, the final judgement is incurred not by people, but by evil and injustice itself. This judgement is a contingent preparation for the eschatological transformation of Heaven and Earth, and the gathering of all creation into the community of God.3

1 Richard Bauckham, The Theology of Jurgen Moltmann (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 1-3. 2 Moltmann, The Coming of God, 236. 3 Ibid.

Moltmann’s two most famous works, 'The Theology of Hope'4 and 'The Crucified God'5, express the predominant themes in his theology which intersect to expel the possibility of human damnation and reinterpret the relationship between humanity and the divine.6 For Moltmann, the momentum of history is driven to the new creation, which grows out of, and is identified by the work of Jesus Christ on the cross, in which God suffers, dies and rises: ‘The true Christian foundation for the hope of universal salvation is the theology of the cross, and the realistic consequence of the theology of the cross can only be the restoration of all things.’7 Moltmann expresses a recognisably Reformed soteriology, which elevates the sovereignty of God, and affirms the doctrine of irresistible election. Whilst freedom is important to Moltmann, he does not accept its soteriological significance. Freedom is the means by which humans participate in the life of faith, but the coming to pass of God’s intentions do not depend upon the affirmation of the human will. Free autonomy offers no refuge to the unrepentant from the purposes of God. Indeed, the libertarian will as we see it expressed in this life is not a defining or eternal component of human identity. The final restoration shall not leave the human will undisturbed, but institute a ‘higher’ will. It will perfect human freedom, so that the human will is brought to joyful conformity with the will of God.8

Jurgen Moltmann’s rejection of the traditional doctrine of Hell, and his re-evaluation of the relationship between human freedom and God make his theology a useful and illuminating contrast to the liberal model of Hell proposed by Walls, and to the broader edifice of liberal philosophy represented by Kant. In order to engage these perspectives in productive dialogue, we must further explore the implications of Moltmann’s theology.

4 Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the ground and the implications of a Christian eschatology (London, SCM Press, 2002).

5 Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The cross of Christ as the foundation and criticism of Christian theology (London, SCM Press, 2001).

6 Richard Bauckham, "Eschatology in the Coming of God," in God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jurgen Moltmann, ed. Richard Bauckham (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 2-9. 7 Moltmann, The Coming of God, 251. 8 Moltmann, "The Logic of Hell," in God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jurgen Moltmann.

Creative Judgment

Moltmann takes judgement to be an important biblical and theological theme. His universalism does not rest upon an excision of judgment from the Christian narrative. Instead, judgement is a precondition of the fulfilment of God’s redeeming purposes. New creation can come about only because judgement has taken place. To abjure judgement is to tolerate the persistence of evil and injustice; judgement is God’s counterpoint to ungodliness in the world. Moltmann writes, ‘The preponderance of God’s grace over his anger, which is experienced in faith, means that Judgement and the reconciliation of the universe are not antitheses. The reconciliation of the universe comes about through the Judgment in which God reveals the righteousness that creates justice and puts things to rights, in order that he may gather all and everything into the realm of his glory.’9 Judgment is the labour which brings forth the new creation, a ‘joyful liberation’ which casts off things past and brings the earth to its final consummation with God.

This is what Moltmann takes to be the true biblical vision of judgment; the eschaton which embraces and reconciles humanity and creation in its wholeness.10 Against this true biblical interpretation of judgment he casts ‘double outcome’ judgment, the traditional Christian doctrine that judgment is incurred by individuals. Christian art and literature is rich with this imagery: Christ resplendent upon the throne of judgment, an interminable queue of souls arrayed before him to receive their verdict.11 C.S Lewis imagines such an event in the eschatological conclusion to his novel ‘The Last Battle’:

The creatures came rushing on, their eyes brighter and brighter as they drew nearer and nearer to the standing Stars. But as they came right up to Aslan one or other of two things happened to each of them. They all looked straight in his face; I don't think they had any choice about that. And when some looked, the expression of their faces changed terribly—it was fear and hatred: except that, on the faces of Talking Beasts, the fear and hatred lasted only for a fraction of a second. You could see that they suddenly ceased to be Talking Beasts. They were just ordinary animals. And all the creatures who looked at Aslan in that way swerved to their right, his left,

9 Moltmann, The Coming of God, 243-44. 10 Geiko Muller-Fahrenholz, The Kingdom and the Power: The Theology of Jurgen Moltmann (London: SCM Press, 2000), 204-06. 11Ibid., 235.

and disappeared into his huge black shadow, which (as you have heard) streamed away to the left of the doorway. The children never saw them again. I don't know what became of them. But the others looked in the face of Aslan and loved him, though some of them were very frightened at the same time. And all these came in at the Door, in on Aslan's right.12

This is an Arminian rendering of the judgment of nations in the Gospel of Matthew, in which Christ separates the ‘sheep’ to his right and the ‘goats’ to his left. To those on his right, he says: ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world’, and to those on his left, he says, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’…Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.’’13 This is one of the passages in scripture which suggest that, whether by choice or by election, by faith or by works, individual humans are bound either for Heaven or for Hell. This judgment is final and irreversible, and eternally divides humanity into the saved and the lost. It is the final act which concludes the theatre of this world, and brings to completion the redeeming work done by Christ upon the cross, in which some will participate, and others will not. By punishing the ‘goats’ and rewarding the ‘sheep’, so does God punish evil and reward good, overcome the oppressors and satisfy the victims.

Moltmann takes this to be a false and damaging interpretation of judgment. It is not authentically Christian at all, but rather the inheritance of Egyptian paganism and Roman imperial justice. Moltmann locates the medieval imagery of Christ upon the throne ‘with a double edged sword in his mouth’ in the mythology of the Egyptian Osiris, passing sentence according the weighing of subject souls. Divine judgment has thus been anthropomorphised, appropriated as a human instrument of moral sobriety and social stability. Moltmann describes the pre-Constantinian theology of judgment as ‘a hope cherished by the victims of world history, a hope that the divine justice would triumph over their oppressors and murderers.’14 Following the conversion of the Empire, judgment became a ‘divine criminal tribunal’, ‘oriented solely toward the perpetrators’.15 Divine judgment came to resemble human judgement; not a transfiguring cosmic consummation but an ongoing regulation of

12 C.S Lewis, The Last Battle (London: The Bodley Head, 1956), 171. 13 Matt. 25: 31-46, New Revised Standard Version. 14 Moltmann, The Coming of God, 235. 15 Ibid.

78 society, a stern imperative for good Christian living. The terror of judgment was useful to medieval religion ‘in order that tempted men and women should seek comfort and salvation in the means of grace provided by the church’, and to the Reformers ‘in order to awaken justifying faith through the Gospel.’16 Rather than transform, this judgment maintains and instructs. The future expectation of judgment was the instrument for moral and spiritual rectitude in this life. Judgment was the final court of appeal for the punishment of unrepentant oppressors and the redemption of unredeemed victims: an antidote for imperfect and prejudiced human judgment.

Final punishment for the evil-doers and redemption for the suffering is a seductive and comforting idea. Human evil and suffering can be so striking that it compels an instinctive urge for this form of judgment. Indeed, a common criticism of universalist theology is that it leaves human evil and horror unpunished. For Moltmann, however, good and evil are not manifested in binary communities of humans. There is no clear divide between ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’. Rather sin and merit coexist within every person. Victimhood and criminality are fluid identities which we alternately inhabit. We are complex moral entities. To confer punishment and reward upon individuals is to leave the balance of good and evil fundamentally undisturbed. To judge individuals according to their dominant moral character is to cast sinners to Hell whilst residual good remains within them, and to save others who are complicit. Rather, judgment is rightfully incurred by sin and evil itself. Judgment is ‘creative justice’ which does not preserve the judged as they are and consign them either to Heaven or Hell, but rather transforms, transcending these categories.

The moral impetus for this creative justice is, as with all of Moltmann’s theology, located in the life and suffering of Christ. Moltmann holds that upon the cross Christ experiences for us the full force of the ‘total hell of God-forsakenness’ and the ‘total damnation of sin’; ‘the realistic consequence of the theology of the cross can only be the restoration of all things.’17 In suffering and descending to ‘hell’, Christ bridges the divide between God and humanity, trespassing upon the place of damned separation, so that even in Hell Christ is present. Hell cannot be locked from the inside or the outside, for Christ has broken the seal, and in doing so, has guaranteed the final reconciliation of all people with God;

16 Ibid. 17 Moltmann, The Coming of God, 251.

Christ’s descent into hell therefore means: even in the experience of hell you are there…you have suffered the experience of hell for us, so as to be beside us in our experiences of Hell…Christ’s descent into hell means, finally: hell and death have been gathered up and ended in God.18

In his descent to Hell, Christ completes his work as the Good Shepherd, gathering in his flock. Eternal separation is no longer possible, for Christ has transgressed upon the place of solitude: ‘Because Christ was brought out of hell, the gates of hell are open, and its walls broken down. Through his sufferings Christ has destroyed hell.’19 Whilst this redemption does not occur through the affirmative ‘yes’ of human individuals, it is not Bonhoeffer’s ‘cheap grace’, but rather is ‘costliest grace’, born of the death of God through Christ who ‘draws us through our hells’.20

So it is that through the work of Christ, God annihilates the sin and redeems the sinner. God blows a creative breath throughout creation, damning sin, evil and injustice and establishing the new kingdom. No one is to be damned, for in no one does sin remain: ‘In that Judgment all sins, every wickedness and every act of violence, the whole injustice of this murderous and suffering world, will be condemned and annihilated, because God’s verdict effects what it pronounces. In the divine Judgment all sinners, the wicked and the violent, the murderers and the children of Satan, the Devil and the fallen angels will be liberated and saved from their deadly perdition through transformation into their true, created being, because God remains true to himself, and does not give up what he has created and affirmed, or allow it to be lost.’21

In this way, Moltmann decisively rejects the retribution characteristic of the Traditional view. It is not that he is unconcerned with God’s triumph over evil, but that he believes that the damnation of some human beings to Hell does nothing to accomplish this. It is a misplaced intuition, driven by our natural response to evil in the world. Rather, God’s justice is transcendent and transformative. It is a deeper, eschatological judgment which restores the victim and erases the oppressor within each of us. In fact, to banish human beings to Hell unchanged would be the true victory for evil. In this sense, evil contained is not evil

18 Ibid., 252. 19 Ibid., 253-54.

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 254-55.

80 defeated. Instead, when God becomes ‘all in all’, evil cannot exist anywhere, not even in Hell.

Hell

Moltmann draws heavily upon the theological imagery of Christ’s descent into ‘hell’ to interpret Calvary as the heraldry of God’s coming Kingdom. However, even here he does not take hell to be a literal spiritual location. Rather, it is expressed as the existential angst of alienation and ‘God forsakenness’. In this, Moltmann quotes approvingly of Martin Luther to deny that Hell is a ‘special place’, but rather an ‘existential experience, the experience of God’s anger and curse on sin and godless being. Christ suffered this hell on the cross in order to reconcile this world, damned as it is, with God.’22

Moltmann draws on Luther’s interpretation of Christ’s descent into Hell as occurring before his crucifixion, in Gethsemane. There, in his unanswered prayer for deliverance, followed by his abandoned cry upon the cross, ‘Why have you forsaken me’, Christ endures a state beyond grace, and endures it for us. Hell, therefore, is a separation we experience in this life, rather than in the next. In entering ‘hell’, Christ overcomes this isolation: ‘Christ’s descent into hell says that even in their hell Christ is their companion and brother.’23 Quoting Hans Urs von Bathasar, Moltmann argues that ‘the sinner who desires to be “damned” away from God, finds God again in his solitariness, but God in the absolute powerlessness of love, who in the Not-Time unpredictably puts himself on the side of the one who damns himself.’24 Thus, Hell is not a prison cell, but a form of suffering in which God participates and overcomes.

Moltmann denies that the possibility of universal salvation is excluded by the Bible. Instead, he acknowledges that ‘Universal salvation and a double outcome of judgment are…both well attested biblically. So the decision for the one or the other cannot be made on the ground of ‘scripture’’.25 By which he means that this dispute cannot be resolved by the

22 Ibid., 252. 23 Ibid., 253. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 241.

81 plain reading of the biblical text. Where both universal restoration and the double outcome of judgment are biblically attested, one must be ultimately subordinate to the other; one must by ultimate, the other penultimate. Moltmann observes biblical attestations to universal reconciliation in texts such as Ephesians 1.10, ‘to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth’, Colossians 1.20, and the ‘hymn’ of Philippians proclaiming the bowing of every knee and the confession of every tongue. He looks to Paul’s ‘Adam-Christ typology’ in which Paul associates the universality of Adam’s ‘condemnation’ with the universality of Christ’s righteousness which ‘leads to acquittal and life for all men’ in Romans 5.18 and 1 Corinthians 15.22.26 Acknowledging also double outcome judgment texts, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, Moltmann proposes to resolve the apparent contradiction from two sides.

Moltmann firstly questions the eternality of damnation. He proposes that the Greek word ‘aionios’ means ‘time without fixed end, a long time, but not time that is ‘eternal’ in the absolute, timeless sense of Greek metaphysics.’ He points out that there is a plural form of this word, ‘aiones’, which suggests a finite quality, for true eternality cannot be properly plural. Instead the torments are ‘aeonic, long-lasting or End-time states’.27 It does not possess the ‘absolute’ quality of proper eternality of God. Mark 9.49 refers to the fire of hell as purifying, or ‘corrective’, while ‘Paul and John speak of ‘being lost’ only in the present tense, never in the future.’28 Thus, the contradiction between universal reconciliation and judgment is resolved, for the latter is not ‘final’, but precedes the former: ‘The ultimate, the last thing is: ‘Behold I make all things new’’.29 Judgment is a constituent of God’s ultimate plan for the universal reconciliation of humanity.

God and Human Freedom

The second way in which Moltmann proposes to overcome the impasse between judgment and universal salvation is to rebalance the relationship between the purposes of God and the free will of humans. In doing so he expresses the Calvinist doctrine of

26 Ibid., 240-41. 27 Ibid., 242. 28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., 242.

82 irresistible election, though arriving at conclusions which depart decisively from Calvinist orthodoxy. He develops his doctrine of universal salvation in two stages. The first is to unshackle the doctrine of limited atonement from the doctrine of irresistible election, and the second is to reject the Arminian ‘mutuality’ of God’s grace and human choice. The outcome of this is a kind of Calvinist universalism, which affirms the salvific sovereignty of God whilst abolishing the gratuitous distinction between the elect and the non-elect.

Moltmann applies a doctrine of universal reconciliation in its fullest sense, including not merely all of humanity, but all the cosmos, heaven and earth. Such a holistic model of restoration can acknowledge no individual distinctions of election, nor apportion salvation on the basis of faith. In Moltmann’s view, the ‘great turning point from disaster to salvation took place on Golgotha’.30 In the work of Christ the reconciliation is already completed and does not require the consent of human beings. Faith does not enable salvation, but arises from it; ‘Faith means experiencing and receiving this turning point personally, but faith itself is not the turning point. It is not my faith that creates salvation for me; salvation creates for me faith.’31 Faith is the effect, not the cause. It is the means by which we interact with our justification, rather than the activating grounds for it. Rather, it is in the work of Christ who endures the universal ‘damnation of sin’ that the grounds for the reconciliation of all creation are established. And it is in Christ’s death, descent into Hell and resurrection that reconciliation is not merely offered, but accomplished. The atonement, justification and reconciliation, are universal, irresistible and final.

To think otherwise, in Moltmann’s view, is to literally idolise the human ego and its subjective will. To imagine that an individual human could defy the reconciling purposes of God and abstain from the final restoration, he argues, constitutes a deification of humanity; to put the will of God and the will of humanity on the same level. This is what he describes as the error of ‘mutuality’: the theology of ‘offer and acceptance.’ The human will and the divine will interact in relationship, but it is not a relationship of equals. Humanity does not possess a power of veto of the will of God: ‘The doctrine of universal salvation is the expression of boundless confidence in God: what God wants to do he can do, and will do…The doctrine of the double outcome of Judgment is the expression of a tremendous self- confidence on the part of human beings’.32 In other words, the liberal model of Hell actually

30 Ibid., 245. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 244.

83 implies a kind of humanistic Manicheanism, in which the divine will and the human will are locked in a mutual struggle, neither able to fully overcome the other. Moltmann denies that the eternal destiny of human beings lies in their own hands. To think this is to cordon off a sphere of existence in which the human will is able to act beyond the encompassing sovereignty of God. It is to demote God to a soteriological door-to-door salesman, extending the offer of reconciliation to humans, who retain the final say.33

Moltmann believes that this theology ‘fits the modern age, in which human beings believe that they are the measure of all things, and the centre of the world, and that therefore everything depends on their decision.’34 It is the philosophical offspring of the Renaissance humanism, and then Enlightenment rationalism which elevates human freedom and autonomy to sacred status; ‘To see God and a human being on the same level means humanising God and deifying the human being.’35 Moltmann sees in this a doctrine of salvation by works. That is, if salvation depends on faith, then it is ultimately the human being who saves or damns themselves, and God is reduced to an obsolete executor of the human will. ‘Christ becomes a person’s Saviour only when that person has ‘accepted’ him in faith. So it is the acceptance in faith which makes Christ the Saviour of that man or that woman.’36 No, for Moltmann freedom is the condition in which human beings live and interact with God and the world, but they can never be extricated from the universal, cosmic and final restoration.

Eschatology

The invigorating theme which has run through this discussion of judgment and freedom is eschatological. Moltmann has taken a leading role in refurbishing this sphere of Christian thought, placing it at the centre of his theological project. While Moltmann denies the soteriological efficacy of the human will, his chief objection to a liberal model of Hell is eschatological. Eschatology, according to Moltmann does not take place in the narrow

33 Ibid., 246. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 245. 36 Ibid., 244.

84 confines of the human soul. For Moltmann, ‘men and women are not aspirants for angelic status, whose home is in heaven and who feel that on this earth they are in exile…Their eschatological future is a human and earthly future – ‘the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’37 The Eschaton is not a subjective individual process, nor an event which recognises individual distinction. Rather, it is a holistic, cosmic hope which is predicated upon a radically different conception of time which revolves upon the novum (newness). The coming of the Kingdom is neither the millennial establishment of the Kingdom upon this earth, nor the existential awareness of the present Kingdom in the human heart. Rather, it is a transformational ‘coming’ which will restore all things in the New Creation. God’s purposes will be finally realised in the New Heaven and the New Earth, from which nothing and no one will be lost.38

Responding to what he takes to be the theological neglect of eschatology since the 19th Century, Moltmann argues that modern trends in eschatology fail to give voice to the true breadth of the biblical eschatological vision. These trends contract this biblical vision in one of two ways, either in the ‘transposition of eschatology into time’, or in the ‘transposition of eschatology into eternity.’39 The failing of the former is to confine eschatology within history and the failing of the latter is to expel eschatology beyond history. Each are captives to a linear understanding of eschatological time, and therefore narrow and compress the Christian hope.

Among those trends which ‘transpose eschatology into time’, Moltmann firstly identifies ‘Prophetic Theology’, which reads into the bible a ‘divine prophecy of the future history of the world’.40 Prophetic Theology upholds the bible as an inerrant road map to the End Times, unfolding in the series temporum (stages of time) described principally in Revelation, the beginnings of which can ‘already be detected in the present.’ Prophetic theologians anticipate these phases of ‘salvific history’ unfolding on a linear, historical timeline.41

37 Moltmann, The Coming of God, 259. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 6-21.

40 Ibid., 7. 41 Ibid.

Second is the ‘consistent eschatology’ of Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer encountered in Jesus a figure that was profoundly alien to modern mind. Rather than an ethical teacher, Jesus was ‘the apocalyptic proclaimer of the End-time catastrophe.’42 The ‘culture- Christianity’ of Schweitzer’s time bore little resemblance to this eschatological prophet. However, the apocalyptic anticipation of the early Church foundered on a series of disappointments, in which the imminent arrival of the Kingdom failed to appear, contrary to the apparent expectations of Jesus and his disciples. Schweitzer saw the eschatological hope of Jesus broken by the unceasing wheel of history, and redirects the eschatological purpose of Jesus into a social striving for the ‘final moral perfection of the world’.43 Moral progress in the world became the eschatological expression of Schweitzer’s Christianity. Moltmann sees this as a retreat, a ‘shrinking back’ from the eschatological strangeness of Jesus to the ‘culture-Christianity’ which placed its hope in scientific progress and human goodness. Rather, ‘anyone who ‘imperiously forces’ eschatology into history has already abandoned it…[This] culture-Christianity was cut adrift from the early Christianity that had now been rediscovered, and from Jesus himself; and with this, Protestant culture-Christianity become inwardly eroded and untenable, only to founder altogether in the terrors of the First World War.’44

Finally, Moltmann considers the ‘salvation-history theology’ of Oscar Cullman which seeks to mediate between the ‘‘not yet’ of consistent eschatology and the ‘now already’ of the existentialist interpretation.’ This view understands time after Christ as ‘fulfilled but not completed’.45 This common eschatological interpretation sees the Incarnation as delineating distinct periods of eschatological time. Upon the cross the eschatological work takes place, and we are now living through the period in which that eschatological work is brought to consummation. Cullman compares this to the decisive battle in a war; though the seeds of victory have been irreversibly sown, the war may drag for years more before the enemy finally capitulates. Christ inaugurated the time of the Holy Spirit, ‘the time of the church, between Christ’s ascension and his Parousia…a transitional time between the fulfilment in Christ of the Old Testament time of promise, and the manifestation of the salvation that has

42 Ibid., 8. 43 Ibid., 9. 44 Ibid., 10. 45 Ibid., 11.

86 taken place in him.’46 This thesis responds to Schweitzer’s ‘disappointments’ by holding that ‘salvation-history’ determines time, rather than time abolishing eschatological hope. For Moltmann, however, this view is vulnerable to three objections. Firstly, the plausibility of this theory is tested by the lengthening time between the Incarnation and the Parousia. Secondly, this linear model of time, in which ‘The Last Judgment’ is the final page on the calendar, is not a biblical concept, and finally that Cullman’s theory constitutes a form of ‘historical deism’, in which God establishes an eschatological ‘blueprint’ and ‘has no further need to intervene’, which does violence to God’s living, creative freedom.47

Moltmann contends that each of these theories contain an ‘error of perspective’: they seek to compress eschatology into history: ‘Their error was to transpose eschatology into time, instead of seeing in eschatology a transformation of time itself. But true eschatology is not about future history; it is about the future of history.’48 However, Moltmann also rejects those theologians which have committed the inverse error; to expel eschatology beyond history and outside time, into eternity. Moltmann identifies Barth, Althaus and Bultmann as the principal exponents of this interpretation. These theologians see eschatology expressed in the existential awareness of eternity. The Kingdom ‘breaks in’ upon Christian consciousness, and is to be found in the here and now. This is Christ’s meaning when he said ‘the Kingdom is at hand’. It was not an imminent epoch, but the ever-present potentiality of eschatological feeling.49

For these theologians the ‘breaking in of eternity plunges all human history into its final crisis. It is not history that puts an end to eschatology; it is eschatology that puts an end to history.’50 The eschaton is present with us now as we are confronted existentially by eternity. The ‘end of history’ takes place not as the ‘final page’ on the temporal calendar but as an existential experience in which the linear future loses its eschatological significance. For Barth, the eschaton is encountered at the ‘frontier of time that is eternity’.51 This ‘eternal moment’ is a transcendence that is accessible at every moment of our lives; ‘it becomes present in the moment which lies ‘between the times’, because it is ‘an atom of eternity’, not

46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 12-13. 48 Ibid., 10. 49 Ibid., 13-22. 50 Ibid., 14. 51 Ibid.

87 a moment in time.’52 Thus Christ’s Parousia is realised in this eternal moment. The ‘second coming’ is present in the Christian consciousness awakened to eternity. There is, therefore, no eschatological disappointment, no delay. The eschaton is upon us, and the Kingdom is at hand.

Similarly, Althaus holds that ‘the fruit of history is not to be found in history’s final temporal condition, but is ascertained from what is beyond history.’53 The eschaton is realised in the present moment, just as The Fall is ever-present within us. Althaus’ ‘axiological eschatology is ‘supra-temporal’; ‘every time is immediate to judgment, immediate to the completion. In this sense every time is the last time. All time, not just the last time, will be perpetually ended and gathered up by eternity.’54 Similarly, for Bultmann, human beings are confronted by eschatology, and face the radical awareness that they ‘stand before God hence that God stands before them’; ‘Always in your present lies the meaning in history, and you cannot see it as a spectator, but only in your responsible decisions. In every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awaken it.’55

Moltmann takes this existential eschatological awareness to be a true and valid Christian pursuit. Indeed, he describes it as little more than Christian mysticism draped in eschatological language.56 But for Moltmann, ‘the eschatology of the ‘eternal moment’’ of Bultmann and Barth is inadequate as a final account of God’s eschatological purposes. It compresses eschatology to the insights of the individual consciousness, which, while important, leaves the broader dynamic of the world, creation and human society undisturbed. It is not the final putting to rights promised in the Bible. Responding to Barth’s metaphor of waves breaking upon the shore, Moltmann sees in this a naturalistic eschatology of transience. The waves are not a cosmic tsunami, sweeping away the order of the world, but a gentle lapping on the shore, feeding the soul but changing nothing beyond the self. We are then ‘dealing with the same thing, in the tides, with their ebb and flow.’57 It lacks the transformative character of God’s ‘all in all’. Reacting again to the modernist individualism he takes to be at the heart of this view, he argues that God’s eschatological scope transcends

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 16. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 20. 56 Ibid., 21. 57 Ibid., 19.

88 the individual. Rather, human beings are inextricable from their context; they are shaped in part by the social and historical forces which act upon them. Rather, ‘Christian eschatology teaches hope not only for the soul…but also for the body; not only for the individual but also for the community; not only for the church but also for Israel; not only for human beings but also for the cosmos.’58 There is no healing of the individual so long as the human context goes unchanged.

This hope for cosmic transformation and reconciliation is the core expression of Moltmann’s eschatology. It does not look to break into time but to transform it. It does not see individuals as isolated islands of existential enlightenment but as participants in a broader project of restoration. It does not herald the coming of Christian kingdom upon the earth, but a new earth. For Moltmann, ‘novum’ (the new thing) characterises the eschatological event. It is in the coming of God that the eschaton takes its form. This ‘coming’ means the renewed constitution of all things; the transformation of heaven and earth into something both recognisable and radically new. God is not the eternal abstract, but on the move. Time itself is oriented toward this coming: ‘God now already sets present and past in the light of his eschatological arrival, and arrival which means the establishment of his eternal Kingdom, and his indwelling in the creation renewed for that indwelling.’59 Through Christ, God acquires the characteristic of Messiah, whose coming anticipates a new reign of righteousness.

Moltmann argues that the biblical category of novum (expressed firstly by the prophets) has a number of characteristics. Firstly, the coming of the new is announced in the midst of the judgment of the old; the new is precipitated by the broken character of the existing order.60 Secondly, the new is forecast by means of analogies to the old, but exceeds them. Biblical prophesies are expressed in images of the new Exodus, the new Jerusalem, the new covenant. But the new ‘covenant’ is not merely a restaging of the old covenant. Rather, they ‘always hold within themselves more than was ever contained in the old, for the old is past, and for remembrance now only has the significance of being the advance radiance of what is new, or its prototype.’61 Thus, eschatological newness is not like a second flood event, in which the present is wiped away, but rather an event in which the old is

58 Ibid., 21. 59 Ibid., 23. 60 Ibid., 27. 61 Ibid., 28.

89 consummated, brought to a new clarity, richness and depth, while retaining its recognisable features. But the novum is not merely the natural passing away from old to new. It is a surprising intervention, a dramatic change of course. It does not proceed from a predictable chain of causation, but ‘evokes unbounded astonishment, and transforms the people whom it touches’. But still there is a continuity from old to new, as the novum ‘does not annihilate the old but gathers it up and creates it anew. It is not that another creation takes the place of this one’.62 He compares this to the resurrection of Christ: the risen Christ is the same person as the crucified Christ, but he is transfigured and restored. This is the transfiguration which awaits all creation. Unlike eschatology transposed into eternity, in which the ‘eternal moment’ is merely the ‘interruption’ of the present, appearing and receding, but leaving the present order unchanged, Moltmann’s eschaton is the final, ultimate, transforming coming of God, which makes things new, restores all things, and leaves nothing unchanged, even time itself which passes away into eternal time.

Moltmann and Kant

One way to interpret Moltmann, and many of his contemporaries, is to understand them in reaction to the liberal theology of the 19th Century, shaped by thinkers such as Kant and Schleiermacher. These theologians revolted against what Moltmann calls the ‘culture- Christianity’ of the Enlightenment which they believed had strayed too far from biblical theism and its Judaic roots. Rather than preserving the radical strangeness of Jesus, Enlightenment theology tamed God to reason, distrusted the miraculous and sought to delouse Christianity from what it saw as pre-modern superstition. The Enlightenment prized individualism and scientific progress, emphasised the freedom of the will and subjected the doctrines of the Church to the interpretation of rational philosophy. Previously central doctrines such as the Trinity were sidelined, and others radically reinterpreted according to the predispositions of the intellectual class of enlightened Europe. It professed optimism for the moral improvement of humanity through scientific innovation and rational thought.

There is little in this tradition to which Moltmann does not stand in conscious objection. His traumatic experiences in the Second World War destroyed his confidence in

62 Ibid.

90 the benevolence of science and the inevitability of moral progress. God is certainly no philosophical device, a postulate of reason and source of the moral law. Rather, he is the living and active God of the bible, whose identity is profoundly Trinitarian, expressed and understood in the life and suffering of Christ, through whom God himself suffers and shares our griefs. For Moltmann the individual and his freedom is not the supreme value, and eternity not merely the vessel in which she pursues her progressive moral enlightenment. Human beings do not float in the eternal void, climbing the staircase of virtue, but are swept up in the eschatological coming of God which restores and reconciles them and all creation, whether they should will it or not.

Moltmann restores the eschatological vision of the new, the shedding of which cast the modern culture-Christianity adrift from the Jewish Jesus and the apocalyptic hopes of the early Church. Moltmann’s universalism is not expressed in the moral enlightenment of the individual soul but in the creative agency of God’s coming. His formulation of eschatology by the category of ‘novum’ is not interested in placing human autonomy at the centre of the ‘final things.’ The novum bears a resemblance to the present, but exceeds it. It ushers in a new radiant clarity, enlarging and transforming what is past. It transcends the phenomenology of human choice and the human paradigms that sustain it. Eternal life is not an infinite protraction of the present order in which human behaviour is merely transplanted from earth to heaven, but the instigation of a new order. Moltmann thoroughly rejects the humanism of Kant’s philosophy, and the liberal doctrine of Hell that springs from it.

The only echo of Kant that one hears in the eschatology of Moltmann is the notion of the ‘highest good’. While Kant postulated immortality as the future realm of moral expression he did not take human freedom to be an absolute value for its own sake. Freedom for Kant has a purpose. Freedom has merit only when it is attached to the moral law. The freedom of Kant’s immortality is not the liberty simply to be as you are forever, as it is for the liberal doctrine of Hell. The reality of freedom is revealed by the moral law, and it is to the moral law that freedom is properly oriented. The ‘highest good’ is God’s final purpose. Kant understands the postulate of God to guarantee the possibility that human beings may approach and finally embody this highest good, in which God makes us more than we are. In the highest good God gathers together joy and goodness, uniting them in a blessed harmony that human beings could not otherwise attain. This is a kind of holy transfiguration that transcends the changeability of libertarian freedom as an irreducible characteristic of human beings. Moltmann shares this impression that freedom is not itself the meaningful purpose of

91 creation. Rather, freedom is a means by which we draw upon the sanctification that awaits us in the coming Kingdom of God. There is no place in this holy future for human autonomy that lies forever dormant in the unredeemed soul.

A TRANSCENDENTAL SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF HELL

It should be clear that the liberal doctrine of Hell and the doctrine of Universalism are robust perspectives, each fortified by serious philosophical, biblical and theological justification. Each lean upon a distinct theological emphasis and prioritise certain values. Each is girded by history and enjoys the allegiance of respectable thinkers and faithful Christians. Both are heterodox, pushing the boundaries of traditional theology. Each are convinced that Augustine’s Hell is untenable and seek a renewed understanding of judgment from Christianity’s deep commitments to justice, freedom and reconciliation. It is evident that they each possess persuasive force. There is something deeply plausible in the notion that human freedom is both indispensable and prone to the worship of the self. Equally compelling is the instinctive confidence that loving omnipotence must have its way in the end.

We have explored the exposition of Jerry Walls and Jurgen Moltmann, distinguishable among the most substantial and persuasive exponents of their respective positions. To explore the avenues of this debate is to range the skirmishes of a battle whose frontiers have moved little in the last two centuries, and in some ways, little in the last two millennia. These skirmishes have often been micro-battles, as each side probes the arguments of the other for logical vulnerabilities. Assessed against the fundamental principles of Christian theism, each side can plausibly defend its coherency to core Christian concepts of the power, goodness and knowledge of God, the nature of human freedom and the purpose and character of life beyond death.

Our observation is that, like so many philosophical and theological questions, the dispute between the liberal model of Hell and Universalism is deadlocked. The speculative nature of the problem is such that, short of the discovery of a decisive logical contradiction, each side can retain its credibility and expository force. Indeed, each side can present a case which appears to be simultaneously compelling, even decisive, and yet mutually incompatible. In this respect, the debate resembles the form of Kant’s ‘antinomies of pure reason’. To use Kantian terminology, the propositions that ‘not all people will be saved’ and

93 that ‘all people will be saved’ are synthetic a priori judgments, abstracted from sensible experience. There is nothing, arguably, which we perceive or experience in the world which will demonstrate to us with epistemological confidence which of these propositions are true. Subordinate to this central antinomy is a series of constituent antinomies which are often considered in isolation. These subordinate antinomies include contradictory statements such as:

(i)Universal salvation is an inevitable consequence of God’s omnipotence

(ii)There are impelling causes which prevent God from accomplishing universal salvation

and,

(i)There is no possible motive for a human being to choose eternal separation from God

(ii)there is a possible motive for a human being to choose eternal separation from God.

Of course, to say that a philosophical paradox is an antinomy is not to say that one or other horn of the dilemma could not be found more persuasive than the other, but merely that the dilemma cannot be conclusively resolved by means of rational deduction. The opposing propositions of the antinomy are both possible, and there is no certain means of determining which is correct. However finely these arguments and counter-arguments are honed and rehearsed, it seems impossible that either could win a total victory over the other. They are each upheld by prominent Christian values. While the persuasive momentum appears in some respects to favour the universalist perspective (though, this may be a phenomenon confined largely to the West), the history of other theological controversies suggests that consensus will never truly coalesce around either alternative. As Kant might suggest, this impasse is guaranteed by the obscure epistemological status of the dilemma.

In this chapter I will explore the resources of a theological adaptation of Kant’s transcendental analysis to resolve this antinomy. Just as Kant argued that causal determinism and free libertarian will are compatible, as they are active on different levels of reality and perception, I will argue that universalism and eternal separation can both be true, thereby satisfying the theological imperatives of the free autonomy of human beings and the inescapable goodness of God. In proceeding to this, I shall mirror Kant’s approach in setting out the antinomy and subordinate antinomies of the problem formally to show their equal plausibility, and then outline an analogical model for suggesting that Kant’s transcendental

94 critique can be applied to reconciliation and separation, expressing them as distinct but compatible realities.

The Antinomy of Hell

Thesis: Salvation is not and will not be universal.

Proof: Christian scripture and tradition attests to the duality of salvation and damnation. A plain reading of the teachings of Jesus suggests that salvation requires an act of mutual affirmation between God and the individual human being. God makes this affirmation through the work of Jesus Christ, by which we are redeemed and justified. The consummation of this justification requires the repentance and free acceptance of grace by the human will. The quality of salvation is relational, restoring human beings to right and loving relationship with God and with each other, and cannot be compelled or commanded. God has constituted human beings as free creatures, and a salvific relationship with them is only intelligible through this medium. Therefore, however much God might wish to accomplish the salvation of all, and work ceaselessly toward this end, the reality of human nature is that it possesses a limitless capacity for self-deception, moral corruption and worship of the self. It is conceivable that, by some form of distorted but authentic stubbornness, desire for autonomy, self-justification, preference for evil, or unholy pleasure some will eternally spurn the invitation of God’s grace.

While it cannot be proven that some will be damned forever, the plausibility of freely-chosen damnation is a sufficiently robust defence of the doctrine of Hell that it cannot be abandoned.

Anti-Thesis: Salvation is or will be universal.

Proof: Christian scripture and tradition affirms that God is infinitely loving and powerful. As a perfectly loving being, God desires the salvation and reconciliation of all creation. As

95 universal salvation is both desirable and possible, God will accomplish it, unless it conflicts with a more desirable aim.

Salvation is properly understood as transformative and supra-personal. God will ultimately destroy the evil within us, perfecting the will and restoring it to right relationship with him. Even if human freedom as we know it were to be eternally exercised, it could not deny God forever. A human being who properly understands the nature of God has no possible motive to deny him. To do so would be evidence either of insanity or brokenness, which would invite healing rather than damnation.

As there is no contradictory outcome more desirable to God than universal salvation, it can be affirmed with confidence that God will accomplish the salvation of all human beings.

The Subordinate Antinomies of Hell

1. Omnipotence

Thesis: Universal Salvation is implied by divine omnipotence

Proof: Omnipotence is generally regarded as the capacity to actualise any state of affairs which is not logically contradictory. It is clear that universal salvation is logically possible. Christian tradition and scripture affirms that one can be saved, and that many can be saved. If it is possible to save one, there seems to be no logical obstacle to saving all. ‘All human beings will be saved’ is a proposition which has a concrete, realisable correspondent in reality. Universal salvation, therefore, falls within the range of possibilities available to omnipotence. If God wills the salvation of all people, therefore, and is able to bring this about, then, all things being equal, all people will be saved.

Now, there are many things which occur which are contrary to God’s will, despite his omnipotence. That evil occurs in the world is presumably contrary to God’s intentions, and therefore, is usually understood not to have been caused by God, but merely permitted by him. Christian theology has traditionally made sense of this by suggesting that there must be a superior motive which causes God to permit evil. Theologians have suggested that this motive might include God’s wish to incite the moral and spiritual growth that occurs amidst

96 hardship. The existence of evil may be the necessary precondition for human beings to express free will, an illuminating counter-point to God’s goodness and glory, or even driven by some unknown motive.

There is, however, no superior motive sufficient to prevent God from realising his desire for universal salvation. Each of the theodicies proposed to explain the occurrence of worldly ills are superior to God’s motive to eradicate evil because they result in some higher good, or constitute some means of drawing human beings into closer intimacy with God. By definition, however, none of these apply to the evil of eternal separation. Eternal separation is an act of final evil, from which no possible good can follow. For God to irretrievably lose any of his beloved children would therefore belong to a higher category of evil. It would be a decisive failure, an irreducible frustration of his omnipotent will. God would have been actively defeated by evil, which would be not eradicated, but merely contained to Hell, eternally multiplying as the damned sin and suffer forever.

As there is, therefore, no sufficient superior motive for God to permit eternal separation it is clear that the doctrine of Universalism is implied by divine omnipotence.

Anti-Thesis: Divine omnipotence is compatible with eternal separation

That some should be eternally separated from God is not inconsistent with the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. The conclusion that ‘God will save all’ does not follow necessarily from the premise that ‘God will save some’.

The expression that ‘God will save’ is itself misleading. Salvation is not an act which is unilaterally performed by God, like a farmer pulling crops from the soil. Rather, salvation is the restoration of right relationship between God and his creation. Salvation depends upon God, for it is by God’s grace that the opportunity is created for this relationship to be restored. However, once the invitation is given, salvation is not complete until the invitation is accepted. The salvation of a hostile will is therefore a meaningless proposition. To bring an unwilling soul into heaven would either not properly be called salvation, or that which was ‘saved’ could not properly be called human. To save the hostile will would be to erase it, rendering the exercise redundant.

Therefore, while there may be no positive motive of superior good for God to permit eternal separation, universal salvation could remain both impossible for him to actualise, and consistent with his omnipotence. God does all that it is possible for him to do, which is to meet human beings half way.

2. Divine Goodness

Thesis: Universal Salvation is implied by divine goodness

It is a fundamental claim of Christian faith that God is infinitely good and loving. God is compared most commonly to a father, who regards human beings with the protectiveness characteristic of a faithful parent. God wishes for us only joy and goodness, which he knows can be truly found only in him. God forbids idols, for he knows that the satisfaction derived from worldly values is a pale imitation of the beatific happiness of intimacy with him. Our reconciliation with God in heaven is the sweetest consummation of joy that we could ever know, and is therefore the natural aim of a divine being who wishes good for us.

Just as God derives pleasure from our happiness, so does he abhor our suffering. He would never permit us to suffer unless by doing so he avoided some greater evil. Eternal separation from God is the greatest evil which could befall us. God will therefore not banish human beings from his presence nor permit them to be apart from him, for that destiny is preferable to no other possible destiny. Nor would he create human beings which he knew would ultimately reject him, for to do so would create them solely for destruction and suffering. While may he not be able to compel humans to accept his grace, he can surely exercise discretion about how and what he creates.

Anti-Thesis: Divine Goodness is compatible with eternal separation

God cannot unilaterally bring about universal salvation, therefore it cannot be a moral imperative that he do so. He expresses maximal benevolence merely by gracefully supplying

98 human beings with endlessly renewing opportunities to accept his invitation. Past incarnations of the doctrine of Hell have incurred criticism for denying many an equal opportunity to access the Gospel and respond to grace, whether by historical or geographical disadvantage, briefness of life, or disparities of understanding, knowledge and exposure to positive influence. However, God’s grace is not exercised in a narrow window, but reaches beyond death to pursue those who have rejected him. If God was unable to do so in this life, he provides a fullness of grace and understanding to human beings in the next. He is restless in his pursuit of the lost; he will never stop persuading and inviting them to accept his invitation.

Eternal separation is therefore not contrary to God’s goodness. It can result only from a settled, authentic human decision made in full awareness of its implications and consequences. Whatever suffering that follows from this decision is therefore not imposed by God but invited solely by the damned.

As to the morality of creating those who will reject him, it may be that the counterfactuals of human freedom obscure God’s knowledge of who will ultimately accept or reject him. Or, it may be that the existence of those who reject him is a necessary evil permitted for the superior aim of creating many who accept him. Perhaps God knows that if he creates one billion people, only three will reject him and the rest accept him. We lack the data to make any worthwhile moral calculation of this, but ultimately it is morally sufficient that God creates human beings with the capacity to participate in salvation, and makes every attempt to persuade and enable them to do so.

3. Human Freedom

Thesis: It is possible for the human will to reject God forever

Any course is open to a will that is truly free. True freedom can choose to suffer, to despise the holy and love evil. True freedom can choose to be deceived and hide itself from the truth. If human beings truly have the freedom to accept God’s grace, they must equally be able to reject it forever. If the agency of human beings is limited only to a temporary denial of God,

99 then its freedom is an illusion. To say that God has created the conditions under which human beings can love him freely is also to affirm that he has created the possibility of rejection.

Humans possess an infinite capacity to blind themselves to goodness. The moral identity of human beings is not neutral, prone equally either to goodness or evil. Rather, it is formed gradually by chosen values and patterns of behaviour which, over time, have the potential to create a consistency of moral character. Just as repeated acts of charity, mercy and kindness conditions the moral sensibility to a consistent preference for good, so does pride and cruelty cultivate an evil nature.

We observe in human nature that this preference for evil may be expressed even in full and certain knowledge of the destructive consequences which will arise from it. For instance, as the Red Army closed on Berlin, Adolf Hitler adamantly refused to surrender, despite the convinced knowledge that his cause was lost and persistence would invite only more death and destruction upon Germany. This kind of behaviour, which reflects an intentional, settled, authentic embrace of evil, is characteristic of those in Hell. Whether motivated by stubborn pride, narcissism, a misplaced sense of autonomy, wilful ignorance, or any other self- justifying form of sin, the damned express a sincere rejection of God. There is no reason to think that this rejection should necessarily waver over time. Indeed, it is likely to become ever more resilient as the moral nature of the damned continues to solidify.

Nor should we supposed that it is more difficult to deny God in the next life than it is in this one. While God bestows upon us every grace that he can, he must to some extent withhold himself from us so that our freedom can be exercised without constraint. Similarly, while the consequences of separation from God must involve some manner of self-imposed suffering, he must ensure that our freedom is not suppressed by anguish. God does not want the consequences of our decision to press upon us like a medieval weight, forcing us to accept reconciliation with him solely to escape the oppressive duress of separation from him. God makes Hell tolerable in order that the possibility of eternal separation might be truly open to us.

It is therefore plausible that the human will can freely and knowledgeably reject God, and that some will do so forever.

100

Anti-Thesis: It is not possible for the human will to reject God forever.

Proof: Even if it is granted that salvation is exclusively relational, it remains inconceivable that a human being could reject God forever. The human soul has been created with a natural tendency to God. Given infinite time, and the ceaseless appeal of the God’s love, all will eventually accept his grace and participate in the saving relationship that is offered to them.

There is no imaginable motive which could sustain an eternal human rejection of God. Certainly, human nature has a profound vulnerability to the allure of sin. There are those whose lives seem dedicated to the worship of the self, the torment of others, and hostility to the holy and the good. No one, however, is invulnerable to moral conversion. No illusion can persist forever, and evil is ultimately self-defeating. The more we seek fulfilment and satisfaction apart from God, the more those sources of pleasure will be exposed as hollow and meaningless.

We observe in human nature that moral conversion often follows, even unwillingly, from the depths of despair and suffering. Evil is able to be sustained indefinitely in this life only because evil-doers derive pleasure and satisfaction from the exploitation of complacent goods that God has embedded in the world, such as fellowship with others, sexual pleasure, wealth and power. In the next life, however, the damned will be confronted by the sheer horror and meaninglessness that follows from total separation from God. It is not that they will be forced to submit to God, but that that they will lack any possible motive to reject him.

Indeed, an enduring preference for evil in these circumstances would be indicative of a will which was not free at all. Such an irrational, insane rejection of God would be a sign that the will was so thoroughly corrupted that it was so no longer functioning freely, and the proper response of loving goodness would be to heal such a person, and restore their will to its natural state, so that it is once again able to operate properly.

Nor does free autonomy require God to shield us from true knowledge of him, or from the consequences of our decisions, even if they should force us inevitably to accept him. Imagine that a doctor has a drug-addicted son. The doctor wishes his son to be rehabilitated, but only by his own choice. Therefore, in order to ensure that his son has the ability to reform himself freely rather than by duress, he replaces the money that his son spends on his addiction, he hires actors to befriend his son so that his harmful behaviour does not socially isolate him,

101 and supplies his son with medication to dull the psychological and physical harm that his addiction would otherwise cause him. Imagine that, if the doctor had not acted in this way, the son would have suffered sufficient degradation, squalor, pain and despair which would have driven him to break his addiction and seek rehabilitation. In this case we would say that the doctor is helping to perpetuate his son’s addiction by suppressing influences which would motivate him to change his life. That the son is driven by pain to change his life does not mean that he is unfree, but is merely the outcome of his free will interacting rationally with his circumstances. In the same way, God does no injury to our autonomy by allowing us to suffer the full force of the consequences of our separation from him. Given enough time, these consequences will inevitably prompt a free moral conversion.

4. Eschatology

Thesis: Universal Salvation is implied by the eschatological expectations of Christianity

Proof: A significant, even predominant, element of the teaching of Jesus was eschatological prophecy. Paul clearly recognised spiritual resurrection in heaven as an intermediary condition, presaging the eventual eschaton, at which Christ would inaugurate the New Heaven and New Earth. The eschatological theme of Christianity is restoration, after which God will become ‘all in all’, and complete his judgment of evil. The Book of Revelation foretells the coming of New Jerusalem, the confession of every tongue and the bowing of every knee. This eschatological expectation is clearly at odds with a platonic model of immortality which sees individual souls engaged in eternal moral contemplation.

God is not merely the executor of the human freedom, passively confirming individual souls either in bliss or perdition according to their will.

God’s judgement is creative and transformative. It is not inter-personal but intra-personal. The coming of God will set things to rights, defeat evil, and restore all created being to proper relationship. The ‘libertarian’ freedom of the world will give way to a new, holy freedom, as our will becomes joyfully conformed to the will of God. It is impossible that alienation from God could be sustained in the face of the beatific vision. We will not retain

102 our nature just as it is, but be transfigured, becoming like God as his work is perfected within us. So Paul writes: ‘all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’1 The coming of God is a cosmic redemption, universal and final, from which no individual could absent themselves.

Anti-Thesis: Eternal separation is compatible with the eschatological expectations of Christianity

Proof: Christian tradition has never recognised any tension between eschatological hope and eternal damnation. Indeed, these are related concepts. The Gospel of Matthew associates the return of Christ with the final salvation of the faithful and the judgment of the damned. The lake of fire is foretold in the Book of Revelation alongside the confession of every tongue. The expectation that God will become ‘all in all’ is not an anthropocentric hope of the universal subjective acknowledgement of God by human beings. Rather, it is the coming of God’s reign, in which he overcomes the broken human order and restores all things to his good purposes.

God as ‘all in all’ is properly understood as the perfect establishment of God’s divine kingdom and the just ordering of all things according to his righteousness. Human freedom is not erased by the coming of God’s kingdom, but subjected before it. The total reconciliation of the willing and the complete separation of the unrepentant is itself a manifestation of the justice of God. The coming reign of God means the end of all suffering that human beings do not wish upon themselves. The only alternative is to erase the existence of the unrepentant entirely, which, as they bear the created image of God and forever retain the possibility of moral conversion, would be contrary to divine goodness.

5. Heavenly joy

Thesis: Universal Salvation is implied by the bliss of heaven

1 2 Corinthians 3:18

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Thesis: The Christian doctrine of heaven affirms the perfect joy of the saved. Every human longing ultimately stems from the soul’s desire for God. The consumption of earthly pleasures are merely misplaced attempts to sate this preeminent yearning. In the beatific vision the reconciled experience immaculate happiness, as they rest in the perfect satisfaction of this desire. Their bliss is eternally interrupted, as they praise and worship God forever.

However, the happiness of the saved could not be perfect if they knew that their loved ones suffered in Hell.

Therefore, if the bliss of heaven is to be perfect, all must be saved.

Anti-Thesis: Eternal Separation is compatible with the bliss of heaven

The bliss of heaven is not properly understood as a mere uninterrupted sensation of pleasure. After all, numerous theologians have suggested that God experiences sadness and even suffering, though he abides in heaven. Rather, the bliss of heaven should be understood as the joy of intimate communion with God, and the perfect conformity of our will and understanding with his. In this sense, the bliss of the saved is perfect, even if they should feel grief and regret for the lost, as God does. Nevertheless, they recognise that this is the perfect outcome of God’s goodness, by which he gives us the freedom to decide our fate.

6. Probability

Thesis: Universal Salvation is implied by probability

Thesis: Any outcome willed by an omnipotent being must be so likely as to be considered effectively certain. Even if eternal separation is not positively inconceivable, this does not mean that it is true. While there may be a formal logical compatibility between omnipotence and eternal damnation, this does not imply a probabilistic equivalence between the doctrine of Hell and the doctrine of Universalism. Indeed, given that there is literally infinite time for

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God to persuade the reluctant, the more time passes the closer the probability that they will relent approaches 12. Given that it is possible for souls to pass from hell to heaven, but impossible to pass in the reverse direction, all people will eventually reside in heaven. To pit the force of the human will against the force of the divine will is virtually to assume that the will of God will succeed. Eternal damnation implies a form of soteriological Manicheanism, in which the will of God and the will of human beings are locked in eternal equilibrium.

Therefore, in the absence of certain, demonstrable proof that hell exists, probability demands that we assume that the doctrine of Universalism is true.

Anti-Thesis: Universal Salvation is not implied by probability

The determinations of the will are not random, and therefore the laws of probability do not apply. To say that the damned are more likely to repent as time passes is to imagine them as an eternally flipping coin, which must eventually land on heads. Rather, the human will is governed by motives and character, not by chance. If someone has a sufficient motive to reject God once, there is no necessary reason to think that they will change their mind millennia later. Though they forever retain the ontological capacity for moral conversion, they lack the will to do so. The love of the self can become so embedded in the human soul that it becomes utterly decisive and consistent, wilfully impregnable to persuasion, however much time might pass.

7. The glory of God

Thesis: Universal Salvation is implied by the glory of God.

Proof: Christian theology affirms that God is the greatest possible being. As the greatest possible being, God possesses an innate glory, arising from his infinite power, goodness and ontological distinctiveness. He is completely sovereign, and all being is contingent upon his

2 In probability theory the probability of a certain outcome is expressed as a decimal value on a scale between 0 and 1, in which 0 is impossible and 1 is certain.

105 sustaining will. All things exist because he upholds them, and would vanish at his word. God’s power exceeds any other existent power or force by infinite degree. His majesty is proclaimed by special revelation and the goodness of creation.

As the greatest possible being, sin is an affront to his glory. Sin is the perversion of God’s good creation, a distortion of the proper relationship between God and human beings that was intended from the beginning. It diverts human activity from its proper goal of worship and praise of God, the only true source of satisfaction and joy. While God permits evil for the sake of superior goods, Christians believe that sin and evil are temporary. They will not outlast God’s purposes, but be subjected before them. The bible expresses the expectation that evil will eventually be defeated by God, and that his glory will be ascendant, clearly proclaimed and acknowledged by all. For human beings to defy him forever would be an insult to him, an infringement of his majesty, and contrary to his very nature.

The doctrines of Christianity teach that the glory of God will one day be supreme, universally acknowledged and unobscured by human sin. As a form of sin, this future is incompatible with eternal separation.

Therefore, universal salvation is implied by God’s glory.

Anti-Thesis: Eternal separation is compatible with the glory of God.

Like the universalist argument from eschatology, the argument from glory implies an interpretation of God’s majesty that has never been held by the Church. The glory of God is not dependent upon human acknowledgement, and cannot be denied by human rejection. God’s glory is not contingent upon the magnitude of human worship, but rather human worship is the proper response to his perfect majesty. In ‘giving glory to God’ we do not add to his already maximal glory, but rather reflect his glory in our actions.

Instead, the eternal separation of those who reject God should be understood as the outworking of God’s sovereign will, which itself displays his glory. It is to God’s glory that he has constituted us with a free will and invited us to love him by it. In order to guarantee that we may love him freely, he has also guaranteed that we may reject him freely. That some actually do so is the outcome of his good and just will. That the damned invite upon

106 themselves an existential suffering and alienation is a sufficient remonstration for their failure to acknowledge him. That those who remain separate from God suffer from an eternally unsatisfied desire for the peace that comes only from him is itself a reflection of his glory.

Therefore, there is no contradiction between the glory of God and eternal separation.

8. The impossibility of separation

Thesis: Universal Salvation is implied by the impossibility of separation from God.

Proof: Whether or not human beings choose to separate themselves from God forever is of no consequence. To reject God is to will the impossible. The traditional doctrine of Hell did not posit that the damned were in any sense autonomous from God. Rather, they were entirely conscious of and subject to him, compelled to acknowledge him by conscious punishment. However, in order to rescue Hell from the moral problems of the traditional view, liberal theologians have erected their defence of the doctrine upon an unintelligible concept.

Our relationship to God is not analogous to the relationship of two human beings in the world, but to fish in the ocean. We can no more reject God than the fish can reject the sea. Our existence is not a passive fact, but an active work of God. We are not like a deist’s watch that can be wound up and left alone. Rather, we have our being in God and are actively sustained by his will. We might as well choose to be separate from the earth beneath us or from the air in our lungs.

God cannot promise us the freedom of separation, for such a separation would be an illusion. He cannot leave us alone, he can merely deceive us into believing that we are alone. But there is no moral value in a separation that is not true separation, and the delusion of autonomy is not autonomy. Therefore, the impossibility of true separation from God undermines the stated purpose of Hell as God’s response to human freedom. Human freedom cannot possibly be expressed in separation from God.

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Anti-Thesis: There is an interpretation of eternal separation to justify the existence of Hell

The eternal separation of Hell is a subjective one. Of course, those in Hell remain ontologically dependent on God for the continued fact of their existence and the conditions in which they live. In that sense, rejection of God would be impossible to realise.

The separation which they may choose, however, is to be excused from heaven. God does not force them to acknowledge him in conscious praise or behold the beatific vision. In Hell they are free to be the object of their worship. In this sense, they remain separate from God in the same sense that they were separate from God on earth.

Imagine that an intelligent animal desired to be completely independent from its owner and live freely in the wild. Its owner, granting the animal’s wishes, constructed for it a great natural park, populated it with game and water and left the animal to roam freely. The animal lived out its life as it wished, and never saw its owner again. In this case, while the animal continued to depend upon its owner for the environment in which it lived, we would say that its desire for autonomy was satisfied.

This is the separation that God grants to those in Hell.

Analysis of the Antinomies

In the preceding section I have sought to illustrate the difficulties of negotiating this kind of dispute. I have expounded the competing perspectives as fairly and forcefully as possible, summarising the best arguments available, and suggesting some of my own. I have arranged the issues thematically, presenting arguments and counter-arguments. In most cases I have stated the universalist argument first, followed by the liberal perspective. This order should not be taken to imply that the latter arguments were defeating refutations of the former. Rather, I intended only to reflect the dynamic of the debate, which usually sees Universalism as the prosecutor and liberal theologians in the defensive posture.

I have also intentionally adopted the terminology and style of Kant, who used the language of ‘Thesis’ and ‘Anti-Thesis’ in the Critique of Pure Reason. In that work, Kant

108 identified four resilient problems of metaphysical philosophy: the spatial limits of the universe, the composition of substance into divisible or indivisible parts, the existence of free will and determined causality, and the existence of a necessary being.3 He called these problems ‘antinomies of pure reason’, by which he meant that they were unresolvable by speculative reason. In that work, Kant plays devil’s advocate, mounting persuasive arguments to show that each of the alternatives were both necessary and incompatible. His purpose was not to show that the arguments were fallacious, but rather to expose the impotence of pure philosophical reasoning generally to demonstrate the truth of them. Kant believed that, left to itself, pure philosophical logic was capable of erecting two arguments that seemed both forceful, even necessarily true, and contradictory. It could show that the universe must be infinite, and that it must be finite. It could demonstrate the necessity of free will and the necessity of material determinism. Kant thought that any means of deduction that was capable of this was suspect, even worthless.

Kant’s diagnosis was that these philosophers were attempting to develop synthetic judgments without the mediation of sensory experience. He thought that deductions which are completely abstract from our observations of the world are untethered, liable to reach conclusions that are unreliable and unverifiable. It was not that these metaphysical propositions couldn’t be true, but rather that they couldn’t be established with epistemological confidence. Only when reason incorporates the testimony of the senses can its conclusions be relied upon.

Theology is particularly vulnerable to the problems of pure reason that Kant exposed. By the very nature of its subject, theology attempts to penetrate beyond the boundary of sensory experience, reaching out to the periphery of human reason itself. God is understood to be obscured by the finitude of human understanding and by his own will, as he withholds the fullness of his being from our view. This, of course, is not to say that there is nothing that we observe in the world which informs theological reasoning. Theology has been guided by all manner of evidence, including the historical facts of Jesus’ life, the testimony of the Church and its members, special revelation and miracle, and holy scripture. But the very diversity of theological opinion attests to the reality that these signposts can lead in radically different directions.

3 Caygill, 76-77.

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The question of what happens to us after we die is one of the most speculative theological enquiries. The obscurity of life after death is unrelieved by almost any facts in the world. Claims of spiritual revelation and ‘near-death experiences’ are contestable, as they cannot be verified or reproduced. The Bible, of course, remains an important guide for discernment in this area. But the Bible is no guarantee of consensus, even under the most forceful interpretations of its authority. Biblical exegesis is often employed to fortify both sides of theological controversies. Biblical cases have been mounted elsewhere to justify the traditional interpretation of Hell, the liberal interpretation, and universal salvation. Biblical evidence can make a theological argument more persuasive, but if it is capable of decisively resolving the problem of Hell, it has yet to do so.

The general principles of Christianity also seem a futile resource with which to solve the problem. The exposition of the antinomies above is intended to show that the basic intuitions of Christianity lead to different conclusions about what is true. The doctrine of omnipotence seems to give force to expectations that God will fulfil his desires, but also that he might create human beings that could reject him forever. The doctrine of divine goodness implies Heaven, and the freedom to choose Hell. Human freedom seems destined for God just as it seems irreducibly obstinate. Each perspective has carved out a coherent place within the narrative of Christianity. Both can claim the support of eminent modern thinkers, but neither will find much succour in tradition, as the overwhelming judgement of the historical church has cleaved to the Traditional view.

I therefore argue that the abstract nature of claims about post-mortal life places the problem of Hell in the same epistemological class as Kant’s antinomies. My exposition of the relevant arguments above is intended to demonstrate that strong arguments can be mounted for incompatible conclusions. The central claims of Christianity, such as the omnipotence and goodness of God, and his intentions for creation and human beings can be employed to show that universal salvation must be true, and that eternal separation must be possible. Each is undergirded by deep theological intuitions at the heart of Christian faith. It seems to be beyond the resources of philosophical reason to determine whether some may spend eternity in Hell. That is not to say that the doctrine of Universalism may not be more persuasive to some than the doctrine of Hell, or vice versa. Rather, it is to say that the debate cannot be conclusively resolved.

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The Transcendental Solution

The problem of free will in respect to material causation was one of the chief philosophical dilemmas of Kant’s age. How could the intuition of freedom be reconciled with the insights of the material sciences? Kant felt a deep philosophical commitment both to the reality of human freedom and to the capacity of science to provide material explanations for events in the world. As we have seen, Kant’s solution to this paradox is known as the transcendental analysis. Referring to it as his ‘Copernican revolution’, Kant’s contribution was to suggest that this was in fact a false dichotomy. Freedom and determinism were both true, as they functioned on different levels of reality and perception. Kant’s ontological category of ‘noumena’ referred to things as they truly were, but which could not be directly perceived by the human mind, whereas 'phenomena' referred to the appearances of things, as they could be perceived. The 'phenomenal' was the consequence of the ordering and interpreting of the 'noumenal' by the brain. Space and time belonged only to the phenomenal world because they were forms that were imposed subjectively by human beings, rather than inherent properties of things as they really were. The noumenal world could not be accessed directly, it could only be inferred. We cannot tell what freedom truly is, or quite how it functions, because it belongs to the noumenal world, which we cannot access. Nevertheless, our perception of the moral law dictates that we postulate the existence of free will, without which the moral law cannot properly be obeyed. Freedom and determinism were therefore both in some sense true and yet mutually opposed.

Now that we have concluded our assessment of the problem of Hell with a Kantian diagnosis, I argue that we apply a Kantian solution. I suggest that a theological adaptation of this transcendental analysis can be mounted to reconcile the conflicting intuitions of the universalist and liberal perspectives. Kant resolved the problem of freedom, not by showing that the arguments for one or the other were fallacious, but rather by showing that the assumptions that undergirded their incompatibility were false. The arguments for freedom and the arguments for determinism were so strong because their conclusions were actually true. It was not the arguments that were flawed but the perspective. This revolution of perspective, I think, suggests an analogous means of resolving the problem of Hell. Perhaps the arguments for eternal separation and for universal salvation are so compelling because they each point to some kind of truth. Progress might then be made, not by attempting to

111 defeat the arguments on one side or the other, which I consider to be impossible, but by deconstructing the preconceptions that maintain them in mutual contradiction. This may seem an unlikely suggestion; Universal salvation and eternal damnation might seem so obviously incongruous that to reconcile them is inconceivable. But they are no more obviously irreconcilable than Kant’s conceptions of freedom and material causation. And, of course, it is impossible that they should be true equally, and in quite the same way. I suggest that theological categories of ‘noumenal’ and ‘phenomenal’ can be applied to show how they can be reconciled, whilst also acknowledging their distinctive character.

The first theological application of this ontological distinction to the problem of Hell is to show that there could actually be such a problem. Though it has not been a subject of this thesis, one alternative to both the doctrine of Hell and the doctrine of Universalism is to redefine eternal life itself. It may be said that there is no Hell, not principally because it is morally inadmissible, but because the whole notion of life after death is unintelligible. It could be argued that the concepts of Heaven and Hell as realities of subjective awareness are the foreign imports of Greek Platonism. Rather, the Christian worldview is monist. The human spirit is not detachable from its body, and the only merit to the notion of the survival of the ego beyond death is theological metaphor. Some Christians prefer to interpret ‘eternal life’ not as the temporal prolonging of life after death, but rather as a quality of this life. Heaven is the present, transcendent awareness of God, and the Kingdom is brought forth when we act like Christ. Salvation is the existential seed of God in this life, rather than the beatific abode of the next one.4

Even those who maintain the traditional hope of some kind of post-mortal awareness may be cautious of any speculation of what Heaven or Hell might be like. To discuss the nature of decisions and motives in the next life might presuppose a recognisable familiarity to immortality that is unwarranted. Narratives like C.S Lewis’ The Great Divorce' suggest that the next life feels and looks much like this one. But perhaps to picture the afterlife as an elysian garden in which human beings recognise each other, communicate and make moral decisions is as naive as imagining God as an old man with a beard. Surely eternal life must be so qualitatively remote from this life that its character cannot even be speculated.

My first response to this is that to have faith in a God who creates, loves and becomes incarnate is already to affirm a form of life that is not intrinsically physical. Platonism is not

4 J. P. Moreland, "Immortality," in The New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, ed. W. C. Campbell-Jack, McGrath, Gavin J. (USA: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 348-51.

112 implied by the belief that God miraculously enables us to participate in this kind of life. A distinctively Christian doctrine of resurrection should rightly repudiate the Platonic view of the immortal soul as divine substance. Rather, resurrection is an active miracle of God, which is exemplified in the empty tomb of Easter Sunday. The Christian soul is not a divine substance which is relieved to shed the abhorrent shackles of the body. The physical body is an inseparable characteristic of human identity. God raises this body to life with him, and lays immortality upon it. God’s intentions are wider than the collection of detached souls. His redemptive purposes encompass all creation and bend toward restoration. Nonetheless, the tradition of the Church affirms the intermediate realisation of Heaven for the saved. It is not necessary to deny Heaven in order to affirm the eschaton. Whatever the character of these final things might be, and in what order they occur is obscure to us, but the substance of the Christian hope is that it is our destiny to behold God, and to share his blessed company with Christ and the saints forever. This sacred optimism is grounded in the life of Jesus and proclaimed by Paul.

If eternal life is therefore an active work of God, rather than an innate reality of the divine soul, then it is God who defines its nature. It seems reasonable to expect that the God who leads Israel from Egypt, dies on the cross, and guides the Church in the life of faith would not nullify this work of fellowship in the next life. This is a God who values human beings as they are, who is invested in the decisions that human beings make, how they care for each other and how well they know him. What we do on earth matters. It would be a wanton act to erase all this in the next life, like a cosmic etch-a-sketch. To sever all continuity between our present life and the life to come would surely be to say that this life was purposeless, and that the character and the relationships that were formed in it were without meaning. For what purpose did God become human if not to influence and shape the creatures who would one day see him? Heaven is not the escape of who we are but the transfiguring celebration of it. God perfects his work in us. He does not cast it away and start again with a fresh lump of clay.

Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal gives us a lead for conceptualising this continuity between the present life and the next. Kant’s transcendental idealism infers that the nature of things as they appear to us is not as they actually are. Rather, phenomena are merely impressions of the truth. It is how we subjectively process our sensuous experience. We are not passive receptors, but active interpreters, ordering and categorising the things that we perceive. On this basis, it is reasonable to expect that our

113 perception of the next life will also be interpreted and ordered according to these structures. From this perspective, it is meaningless to say that the next life must be qualitatively different to this life, for ‘this life’, as it appears to us, is not actually as things truly are. Rather, we can expect that the intelligibility that we impose on this life we will also apply to the next. Those same faculties by which we recognise ourselves as intelligent creatures, capable of meaningful thought, judgement, moral character and free determination will sustain those interpretative categories beyond death. It is reasonable to suppose that death will not erase our capacity for subjective judgment, moral expression and determinative choice because these faculties are not a property of the world but rather a property of ourselves. Resurrection, therefore, is not a severance from the conditions that enable us to make decisions, recognise ourselves and each other, and accept or reject God on account of motives derived from our moral character, because these are realities that are grounded not in the noumena of the world but in the phenomena of human beings.

This transcendental analysis which helps us to understand the phenomenology of choice after death can also be applied to help us to understand how salvation and damnation can be compatible paradigms. From such a perspective, the theological category of noumena is God. God is the fundamental reality, the essence of things in-of-themselves. Noumena is identical with the nature of God, and constitutes the divine groundwork of everything that exists. The theological category of phenomena is the condition of human beings in the world. It is the immediate substance of human existence, the interpretative framework by which they live their lives, and the surface of things as they perceive them. The perception of human beings is contained to the phenomenal category. These conceptual structures allow us to form discrete identities, develop moral character, and engage in social relationships with each other. While these categories are related, there is a gulf of perception between the phenomenal and the noumenal. We cannot perceive God as-he-is. God reaches into phenomena but does not erase it. We are alienated from God by the interpretative framework which we impose on the world.

However, the theological categories of noumena and phenomena are not passive classes, but active ones. Through the incarnation of Christ noumena breaks in to phenomena. Miracle is a flash of noumena within the phenomenal context; it consists not in the contravention of natural laws (which are no more than the inflexible impressions of human

114 consciousness) but is rather the act of noumena momentarily disrupting the interpretative consistency of phenomenal awareness. Similarly, in the spiritual disciplines of prayer and worship, phenomena strains to meet the noumenal. Religion arises when human beings detect that noumenal truth lies below phenomenal impression. Mysticism is the attempt to encounter noumena by piercing the phenomenal veil. Human desires are thereby oriented either to the noumenal or to the phenomenal. By making moral decisions human beings conform themselves more closely to one or the other. The perspective is not fixed, but is alterable according to the formation of moral character.

Heaven is therefore understood as the perfect reconciliation of phenomena with noumena. Christ overcomes the breach between the noumenal and the phenomenal, disturbing the material consistency of our understanding of the world by walking on water, exorcising demons and raising the dead. His wonders were not an aberration from reality, but rather the outcome of embodied truth breaking through illusion. Through the cross Christ bridges the gulf from the phenomenal to the noumenal, exposing death itself as a phenomenal category of interpretation. God enters the phenomenal world so that he can break it apart. In the beatific vision, the phenomenal becomes the noumenal. God becomes the interpretative framework for human beings. The saved see things as they truly are in-and-of-themselves. Alternatively, damnation is the subjective conformity of noumena to phenomena. For the damned, the phenomenal is the true reality. The noumenal is entirely obscured, shut out from the subjective consciousness. In Hell, human beings identify the fundamental source of being and truth within themselves. The damned mistake their interpretative representations of reality for reality itself. They resist the indwelling of noumena, maintaining the rigidity of their interpretative impressions. The phenomenal is the looking glass into which the damned flatter themselves forever. Hell is where humans reject God, where representation rejects truth.

But the phenomenal is not an alternative to the noumenal in the same way that damnation is traditionally understood to be an alternative to salvation. They do not have an equal ontological status. The noumenal remains the universal reality of things-as-they-are however much the phenomenal may be incapable of perceiving it. The damned person may become a creature of phenomena and imprison itself in a cage of representations, but the noumenal reality of God is absolute and total. The damned may choose representation over truth, but they do not destroy truth. The noumena of God’s salvation is universal. On the noumenal level the damned participate in salvation, even though they do not allow

115 themselves to recognise it. They are not separate from God but immersed in him. The phenomenal does not defeat the noumenal any more than blindness defeats the sun.

In Kant’s transcendental analysis human beings are free, even though the material process of causation seemed to provide a complete explanation for human behaviour. This is because phenomena is subordinate to noumena. Phenomena is the interpretation of reality, not an alternative reality. On this basis, therefore, just as the appearance of material determinism does not exclude freedom, the appearance of damnation need not exclude salvation. Because the determinist sees only causation does not mean that he is not free, and because the damned sees only themselves does not mean that they are not reconciled with God. Noumenally, the destiny of God’s relationship to creation is to be all-in-all. His omnipotence will win through and accomplish his purposes universally. His goodness is absolute, as he holds all creation in love to himself. His eschatological purposes will not have been denied, for evil will not have endured. All human beings will have been saved.

Now, is this really a solution, or merely a semantic sleight of hand? Surely salvation demands the subjective repentance and reunion of human beings with God. If the damned do not see God and fully adopt the right manner of relationship with him, in what sense have they been saved? In response to this question I would suggest firstly that objective goods can exist without subjective acknowledgement. That the coma patient is loved and cared for by their family and tended to by their doctor is no less good because it occurs without the awareness of the patient. God is no less sovereign because some do not praise him. The bodyguard who stops an assassin’s bullet has no less saved the life of his employer because the employer has not noticed the attempt.

But ultimately, what I have presented here is an analogical solution. If one does not give credence to Kant’s transcendental account of human freedom, one will not give credence to a transcendental account of salvation. I have employed Kant’s methodology to suggest a solution which would be sound if one accepts the assumptions and metaphysical premises that underlie that methodology. Before I conclude this section, therefore, it is important to consider whether Kant’s concepts can actually bear the weight that this solution lays upon them. In the Introduction, we saw that there was some controversy as to how Kant intended these concepts to be understood, and how we should interpret them. We saw that, while some understand Kant’s noumena to be a genuine category of reality, others have preferred to

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‘deflate’ the extravagance of this idea, understanding it as a normative regulation of the boundaries of human reason.

Let us consider a statement of this latter view. Henry Allison’s argues that Kant’s transcendental idealism is “critical’ because it is grounded in a reflection on the conditions and limits of discursive cognition, rather than one on the contents of consciousness or the nature of ultimate reality. In both respects it differs radically from what Kant terms idealisms of the “common sort,” which include those of Berkeley and Descartes.’5 In other words, Kant’s idealism concerns what we can really know, rather than what things are truly like. By introducing the concept of ‘noumena’, he is merely hoping to inhibit philosophers from making extravagant claims to knowledge. Allison distinguishes between two flawed traditions of interpreting Kant’s idealism: the ‘two world’ reading and the ‘one world’ reading. Allison describes the ‘two world’ reading as the view ‘which takes appearances and things in themselves to constitute two ontologically distinct realms of being.’6 Meanwhile, the ‘one world’ interpretation maintains that phenomena and noumena are not different realities, but merely different appearances of the same reality: ‘the intended contrast is between things as they appear and the same things as they are in themselves, rather than between two ontologically distinct sets of entities.’7

Allison considers each of these readings to be fatally flawed. Of the ‘one world’ reading, he notes two objections:

First, it suggests that transcendental idealism is to be understood as a form of subjectivism, according to which the mind is acquainted only with its own contents (representations). Second, and perhaps even worse, it requires the postulation of a distinct set of entities (things in themselves) to which, according to the theory, the human mind can have no cognitive access.8

In Allison’s judgement, the ‘two world theory fares no better than the first:

the main problem with this interpretation of transcendental idealism is that it seemingly commits Kant to the view that objects only appear to us to be spatiotemporal, whereas in reality they are not, or at least that we have no way of knowing whether or not they are. But since by “knowledge” is usually

5 Henry E. Allison, "Kant's Transcendental Idealism," in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 111. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 112.

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understood the cognition of things as they truly are rather than as they may seem to us under certain conditions, this apparently implies that human knowledge is not really knowledge at all.9

Put simply, both of these species of idealism suffer from the implication that noumena constitutes an entire sphere of the reality (or the sum total of reality) to which we have access or reliable knowledge. Aside from the ontological implausibility of this, Allison argues that such an assertion transgresses the limits to metaphysical philosophy that Kant has himself laboured to establish. Kant cannot at one turn rule out forms of knowledge which do not arise from synthetically-constituted perceptible data, and at the next posit the existence of a vast metaphysical landscape of which he cannot, by definition, have any knowledge or experience.

Instead, Allison argues that ‘transcendental idealism must … be seen as a metaepistemological position, committed to an alternative model of cognition, and not as a competing metaphysical theory.’10 The noumena-phenomena distinction is merely a way of thinking. By adopting an ‘epistemic humility’ about our ability to understand the nature of reality we can ward off the overreach of the old metaphysicians. To read more into Kant’s transcendental idealism is to go further than the philosopher intended, and undermine the coherency of his work.

If this interpretation is true, it would seem to present a serious obstacle to deploying Kant’s idealistic categories as I have in the solution to the problem of Hell outlined above. However, I will suggest two reasons why it is reasonable to do so. The first is that the view represented by Allison is only one interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Indeed, Christopher Insole suggests that it is declining in popularity as a plausible account of Kant’s intended meaning. Insole argues that, motivated by philosophical naturalism (which is inherently suspicious of worlds beyond the senses) and a desire to rescue Kant from a theory that they find untenable, deflationists have disregarded textual evidence that is unfavourable to them.11 Indeed, he shows that Kant explicitly repudiated deflationary reviews that appeared in his lifetime.12 Instead, Insole argues that Kant’s transcendental idealism has three aspects:

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 114. 11 Insole, The Intolerable God: Kant's Theological Journey, 103. 12 Ibid., 97-101.

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First of all, it limits our knowledge to the realm of experience, which is the realm of spatio-temporal appearances. Secondly, within those limitations, our knowledge is rendered entirely secure and stable. Thirdly, and of most significance to us, possibilities for thinking open up beyond the boundaries of our knowledge: If the spatio-temporal causally determined series that we experience are features of our reception and cognition of the world, rather than being in the world in itself, then it is possible at least that the way things are is fundamentally different from the way in which we experience them.13

Insole calls his interpretation ‘noumenal affection’: the view that Kant’s idealism really does refer to the existence of imperceptible entities (things in themselves) which affect us. He writes,

When [noumenal objects] “appear to us” we call these appearances “phenomena” or “that which appears.” These noumenal objects bring about our experience, which is always mediated through our forms of intuition, space and time. Although we understand that our experience is always on this side of this mediation, coning downstream of how we receive the world, we also understand this it is dependent upon the world as it is in itself, even though we cannot know anything substantial about this world, except that it does indeed ground our experience. So as well as being committed to a notion of “noumenal affection”, we also understand that we suffer from principled ignorance about noumenal reality. (The Intolerable God, 97)

This is a ‘one-world’ reading of Kant’s idealism. It considers the phenomenal object and the noumenal object to be the same thing. They are only distinguished by human interpretation. A creature that did not apply patterns of time and space to its perception would only observe one thing.

For Insole, therefore, it is not that Allison is wrong, but that his explanation is incomplete. Kant undoubtedly intended his idealism to engender caution about metaphysical claims. But to reduce its significance solely to this function is to overlook passages which clearly allude to the third aspect. There is no incompatibility between a noumenal idealist reading and a deflationary reading. But Insole argues that, while a ‘noumenal affection view is able to incorporate deflationary passages, a deflationary view finds it much harder to incorporate passages which appear to imply noumenal affection. ‘The option, therefore,’

13 Insole, Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem, 103.

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Insole concludes, ‘is not between one set of Kant passages and the other, but between accommodating all the passages or only some of them. I submit that we should prefer an interpretation that can accommodate as many passages from texts intended by the author as a unity…Application of this principle favours the noumenal affection interpretation.’ (Intolerable God 103-4)

This has been an extremely brief survey of two interpretations of Kant’s idealism. A full exposition of these issues would require its own Thesis, and has been well explored elsewhere. It is sufficient to show that the interpretation of noumena and phenomena that I have employed in the transcendental solution to the problem of Hell is a plausible one, adopted by experts in the field. Beyond the textual debate, a noumenal affection reading seems particularly compelling in the light of Kant’s transcendental account of freedom. The entire premise of this account is that human actions are not ruled by the material determinism apparent at the phenomenal level. But if the language of phenomena and noumena is merely didactic, and there is no practical difference between them, then this whole idea collapses.

Secondly, while noumenal affection seems to me to be the most plausible interpretation of Kant’s idealism, the transcendental solution to the problem of Hell does not depend upon this. Such a solution does not require proof that Kant believed in noumenal affection. Indeed, it could be sustained even if the deflationary interpretation was somehow shown to be the correct one. It is quite legitimate for philosophical language to inspire new ideas, whilst departing from the meaning of the person who coined them. A form of idealism built upon concepts of ‘noumena’ and ‘phenomena’ might be quite plausible in its own right, even if it did not align with Kant’s use of them. The meaning of philosophical concepts evolve over time, as they collide with other ideas and absorb new information. While energy expended to determine the meaning of philosophers is fruitful, an argument which is influenced by Kant need not be fully endorsed by him.

A final point to note is that, while this solution to the problem of Hell is built upon an analogy to Kant’s transcendental idealism, it is not a perfect analogy, and differs from it in important ways. Kant takes human freedom to be a postulate which is a universally perceptible impression of human consciousness. It is a necessary presupposition of human reason and moral expression. For this reason, the reality of human freedom cannot be denied, however complete the explanation of natural events material determinism appears (or appeared to Kant) to provide. The intuitions that underlie the liberal doctrine of Hell and

120 universalism are not in the same class. Their conflicting claims to the inescapability of God’s love and the soteriological stubbornness of human beings are claims that may be only persuasive to Christians, and indeed, not to all of them. Nonetheless, as I have hoped to show, the theology that animates each of these perspectives are sufficiently plausible and resilient (in different ways) within the Christian tradition that they cannot be easily denied. Neither can be completely excised from biblical interpretation. They seem both irreducible and incompatible. In these characteristics they share a similarity with Kant’s antinomy of freedom on this basis that I have suggested an analogical solution.

Kant believed that human beings were free and that that freedom was morally meaningful, even though human activity seemed to be ruled by causation. The same principle can be applied to show that human beings can have a meaningful destiny in God even though they are subjectively separate from him. Whether or not this possibility is judged to be plausible, it nevertheless points the debate in a potentially profitable direction. The arguments both for eternal separation and eternal salvation are forceful. It is worth considering whether the solution may lie in revisiting the assumptions that hold them apart.

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CONCLUSION

Hell is among the most resilient of theological problems. Discomfort with its reputation as an instrument of fear and control has evolved to outright scepticism of its existence. It is a doctrine under siege, held in contempt by critics outside Christianity and by critical elements within it. The challenge of reconciling the judgement of Hell with the goodness of God has occupied many theologians and disturbed many believers. Soteriological perspectives now occupy a place in a broad doctrinal spectrum, with Augustine’s gratuitous grace at one end and Moltmann’s cosmic universalism at the other. One option is simply to deny that the traditional model is problematic. Another is to reinterpret the doctrine in new ways. A third is to abandon it completely.

The liberal doctrine of Hell is an attempt to revitalise the doctrine by recasting its nature and purpose. The liberal model interprets Hell as God’s response to human freedom. It holds that God has constituted human beings as free creatures and desires a relationship with them through this medium. It aims to give credence to the possibility of separation found in the Bible, whilst overcoming the moral difficulties that beset it. It presupposes innovative interpretations of human freedom, moral autonomy and post-mortal life. It tears down the soteriological finality of death and affirms the eternal capacity of human beings for free decisions and moral conversion.

Universalism claims that the doctrine of damnation is a historical error. Salvation is the universal and inescapable destiny of creation. Universalism places its confidence in the omnipotence of God to achieve its aims. God’s purposes cannot be denied by the finite will of human beings, any more than they can absent themselves from its cosmic scope. Even if God could permit his eternal rejection human beings could never make such a decision. Ultimately we must all succumb to God’s persuasion.

Walls and Moltmann represent modern statements of ancient perspectives. The arguments on both side are formidable and persuasive. Indeed, they are so forceful that I doubt that their differences can be resolved by argumentation. I have applied Kant’s epistemological categories to argue that the Hell debate is a redundant exercise. The abstract nature of eternal life forbids us from assessing the claims that are made about it. It may be that either the liberal doctrine of Hell or Universalism is true, but it is beyond us know that they are. Rather, I have outlined a theological adaptation of Kant’s transcendental idealism to

122 suggest how reconciliation and separation could be compatible realities. Theological concepts of noumena and phenomena can be understood as co-existent planes of understanding. On this basis, which presupposes the credibility of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, we might be phenomenally damned even as we are noumenally saved.

Beyond the possibility of a formal solution to the problem of Hell, the transcendental analysis suggests a shift of perspective. It locates the intransigence of the problem not in the arguments themselves, but in the assumptions that hold Hell and salvation in mutual conflict. Further research in this area may be profitable. There may be other critical philosophical perspectives which suggest some means of overcoming the apparently binary divide between salvation and damnation. The apparent presence of both in the teaching of Jesus suggests that they may both be irreducible properties of human experience.

There is also potential work to be done in exploring the application of a transcendental analysis to other theological questions. The similarities between Kant’s antinomies and some of the mysteries of Christian theology are striking. Both are shaped by fundamental intuitions that seem mutually incongruous. Other theological antinomies might include the relationship between the sovereignty of God and the agency of human beings, and the interaction between material causation and the miraculous. Perhaps a means of approaching these theological antinomies is to understand them as active on different levels of reality. It is hoped that this thesis serves as a starting point for these deliberations.

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