## 1. Three Primary Eschatological Views



Let *theism in general* be the belief that a supremely
powerful, supremely wise, and supremely good (loving, just, merciful)
personal being exists as the Creator of the universe. *Christian
theism* is, of course, more specific than that, and Christian
theists typically make the following two-fold assumption: first, that
the highest possible good for created persons (true blessedness, if
you will) requires that they enter into a proper relationship (or even
a kind of union) with their Creator, and second, that a complete
severance from the divine nature, without even an implicit experience
of God (see
 note 11)
 would be a terrifying evil. As C. S. Lewis once put it, union with
the divine "Nature is bliss and separation from it [an
objective] horror" (1955, 232). Although most Christians would
probably agree with this, some may want additional clarity on the
nature of the union and the separation in question here. But in any
case, whereas heaven is in general thought of as a realm in which
people experience the bliss of perfect fellowship and harmony with God
and with each other, hell is in general thought of as a realm in which
people experience the greatest possible estrangement from God, the
greatest possible sense of alienation, and perhaps also an intense
hatred of everyone including themselves.



The ideas of heaven and hell are also closely associated with the
religious idea of *salvation*, which in turn rests upon a
theological interpretation of the human condition. Even the
non-religious can perhaps agree that, for whatever reason, we humans
begin our earthly lives with many imperfections and with no
(conscious) awareness of God. We also emerge and begin making choices
in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception, and behind
our earliest choices lie a host of genetically determined inclinations
and environmental (including social and cultural) influences. As young
children, moreover, we initially pursue our own needs and interests as
we perceive (or misperceive) them. So the context in which we humans
emerge with a first person perspective and then begin developing into
minimally rational agents virtually guarantees, it seems, that we
would repeatedly misconstrue our own interests and pursue them in
misguided ways; it also includes many sources of misery, at least some
of which--the horror of war, horrifying examples of inhumanity to
children, people striving to benefit themselves at the expense of
others, etc.--are the product of misguided human choices. But
other sources include such non-moral evils as natural disasters,
sickness, and especially physical death itself.



Clearly, then, we all encounter in our natural environment many
threats to our immediate welfare and many obstacles, some of our own
making and some not, to enduring happiness. The Christian
interpretation of this human condition thus postulates an initial
estrangement from God, and the Christian religion then offers a
prescription for how we can be saved from such estrangement; it
teaches in particular that "God was in Christ, reconciling the
world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19a--KJV). But Christians
also disagree among themselves concerning the extent and ultimate
success of God's saving activity among human beings. Some
believe that God will positively reject unrepentant sinners after a
given deadline, typically thought of as the moment of physical death,
and actively punish them forever after; others believe that God would
never reject any of God's own loved ones even though some of
them may freely reject God forever, thereby placing themselves in a
kind of self-created hell; and still others believe that God's
redemptive love will triumph in the end and will successfully bring
reconciliation to all of those whom God has loved into existence in
the first place. So one way to organize our thinking here is against
the backdrop of the following inconsistent set of three
propositions:


1. All human sinners are *equal* objects of God's
redemptive love in the sense that God wills or aims to win over each
one of them over time and thereby to prepare each one of them for the
bliss of union with the divine nature.
2. God's redemptive love will triumph in the end and
successfully win over each and every object of that love, thereby
preparing each one of them for the bliss of union with the divine
nature.
3. Some human sinners will never be reconciled to God and will
therefore remain separated from the divine nature forever.



If this set of propositions is logically inconsistent, as it surely
is, then at least one proposition in the set is false. In no way does
it follow, of course, that *only* one proposition in the set is
false, and neither does it follow that at least two of them are true.
But if someone does accept any two of these propositions, as virtually
every mainline Christian theologian does, then such a person has no
choice but to reject the
 third.[1]
 It is typically rather easy, moreover, to determine which proposition
a given theologian ultimately rejects, and we can therefore classify
theologians according to which of these propositions they do reject.
So that leaves exactly three primary eschatological views. Because the
Augustinians, named after St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430),
believe both that God's redemptive (or electing) love will
triumph in the end (proposition (2)) and that some human sinners will
never be reconciled to God (proposition (3)), they finally reject the
idea that God's redemptive love extends to all human sinners
equally (proposition (1)); because the Arminians, named after Jacobus
Arminius (1560-1609) for his opposition to the Augustinian
understanding of limited election, believe both that God's
redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally (proposition (1))
and that some of these sinners will never be reconciled to God
(proposition (3)), they finally reject the idea that God's
redemptive love will triumph in the end (proposition (2)); and
finally, because the Christian universalists believe both that
God's redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally
(proposition (1)) and that this love will triumph in the end
(proposition (2)), they finally reject altogether the idea that some
human sinners will never be reconciled to God (proposition (3)). 



So here, then, are three quite different systems of theology.
According to Augustinian theology, God's redemptive love cannot
be thwarted forever, but the scope of that love is restricted to a
limited elect. According to Arminian theology, God's redemptive
love extends to all human sinners equally, but that love can be
thwarted by factors, such as certain human choices, over which God has
no direct causal control. And according to the theology of Christian
universalism, God's redemptive love extends to all human sinners
equally and God's will to save each one of them cannot be
thwarted forever. Accordingly, a question that may now arise is,
"Which system of theology best preserves the praiseworthy
character and the glory of God?"


### 1.1 Postulating a Final and Irreversible Division within the Human Race



Some may already have observed that the third proposition in our
inconsistent triad, namely


3. Some humans will never be reconciled to God and will therefore
remain separated from the divine nature forever,



is fairly unspecific concerning the fate of the wicked and the import
of separation from God. For if we think of such separation as a state
of being estranged or alienated from God, or if we think of it as
simply the absence of a loving union with God, then (3) is equally
consistent with many different conceptions of hell, some arguably
milder than others. It is equally consistent, for example, with the
idea that hell is a realm where the wicked receive retribution in the
form of everlasting torment, with the idea that they will simply be
annihilated in the end, with the idea that they create their own hell
by rejecting God, and with the idea that God will simply make them as
comfortable as possible in hell even as God graciously limits the harm
they can do to each other (see Stump 1986). This lack of specificity
is by design. For however one understands the fate of those who
supposedly remain separated from God *forever*, such a fate
will entail something like (3). Alternatively, anyone who rejects (3)
will likewise reject the idea of everlasting torment as well as any of
the supposedly milder conceptions of an everlasting separation from
God.



Now when the Fifth General Council of the Christian church condemned
the doctrine of universal reconciliation in 553 CE, it did not,
strictly speaking, commit the institutional church of that day to a
doctrine of everlasting conscious torment in hell. But it did commit
the church to a final and irreversible division within the human race
between those who will be saved, on the one hand, and those who will
be hopelessly lost forever, on the other. So anyone who accepted the
Council's decision on this point, as most major theologians over
the subsequent thousand years did, inevitably confronted an obvious
question. If there is to be such a final and irreversible division
within the human race, just what accounts for it? According to the
Augustinians, the explanation lies in the mystery of God's
freedom to extend the divine love and mercy to a limited elect and to
withhold it from the rest of humanity; but according to the Arminians,
the explanation lies in our human free choices. Thanks to God's
grace, *we* ultimately determine our own destiny in heaven or
hell. 



These two very different explanations for a final and irrevocable
division within the human race, where some end up in heaven and others
in hell, also reflect profound disagreements over the nature of divine
grace. Because the Augustinians hold that, in our present condition at
least, God owes us nothing, they also believe that the grace God
confers upon a limited elect is utterly gratuitous and supererogatory.
As John Calvin put it, "For as Jacob, deserving nothing by good
works, is taken into grace, Esau, as yet undefiled by any crime, is
hated" (Calvin 1960, Bk. III, Ch. XXIII, sec. 12). But the
Arminians reject such a doctrine as inherently unjust; it is simply
unjust, they insist, for God to do for some, namely the elect, what
God refuses to do for others, particularly since the elect have done
nothing to deserve their special treatment. The Arminians therefore
hold that God *offers* his grace to all human beings, though
many are those who freely reject it and eventually seal their fate in
hell forever. But for their part, the Augustinians counter that this
Arminian explanation in terms of human free will contradicts St.
Paul's clear teaching that salvation is wholly a matter of
grace: "For by grace you have been saved through faith,"
Paul declared, "and this [the faith] is not your own doing; it
is the gift of God--not the result of works, so that no one may
boast" (Eph. 2:8-9). The Augustinians also challenge the
Arminians with the following question: if the ultimate difference
between the saved and the lost lies in the superior free choices that
the saved have made during their earthly lives, then why
shouldn't they take credit for this difference or even boast
about it? Why shouldn't they say, "Well, at least
I'm not as bad as those miserable people in hell who were so
stupid as to have freely rejected the grace that God offers to
all."



A Christian universalist, of course, might insist that the
Augustinians and the Arminians are both right in their respective
criticisms of each other.


### 1.2 Restricting the Scope of God's Love



We have seen so far that the Augustinians in effect reason as follows:
God's saving grace is irresistible in the end, and yet
everlasting torment in hell will nonetheless be the terrible fate for
some; therefore, God does not love all created persons equally and his
(electing) love is thus limited in its scope. Augustine's own
interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:4 provides a nice illustration. He
wrote: "the word concerning God, 'who will have all men to
be saved,' does not mean that there is no one whose salvation he
[God] doth not will ... but by 'all men' we are to
understand the whole of mankind, in every single group into which it
can be divided ... For from which of these groups doth not God
will that *some* men from every nation should be saved through
his only-begotten Son our Lord?" (*Enchiridion*,
103--italics added).



So it is not God's will, Augustine claimed, to save every
individual from every group and every nation; it is merely God's
will to save all kinds of people, that is, *some* individuals
from every group and every nation. Augustine's exegetical
arguments for such an interpretation, however fantastic they may
appear to non-Augustinians, need not concern us here. More important
for our purposes is his pattern of argument, as illustrated in the
following comment: "We could interpret it [1 Tim. 2:4] in any
other fashion, as long as we are not compelled to believe that the
Omnipotent hath willed something to be done which was not
done"--and as long as we are not compelled to believe, he
no doubt took for granted, that no one will be eternally damned. For
if propositions (2) and (3) are *both* true, then proposition
(1) is false and the scope of God's love is restricted to a
limited elect. It is as simple as that.



Nor should one suppose that this Augustinian understanding of limited
election is totally bereft of contemporary defenders. One such
contemporary defender, the Christian philosopher Paul Helm, has argued
that God's loving nature no more necessitates that God extend a
redemptive love equally to all humans than it necessitates that God
create them all with the same human characteristics. For why is it,
Helm asks, "that some are strong, some weak, some male, some
female, some healthy, some diseased, and so forth?" He then
makes the following claim: "if it is possible for there to be
differentiations in the created universe that are consistent with the
attributes of God then it is presumably possible for there to be
differentiations with regard to God's redemptive purposes which
are entirely consistent with the divine attributes" (Helm 1985,
53). How one evaluates such a claim will no doubt depend, at least in
part, upon how one answers such questions as these: Would God's
willing that one person have black hair and another brown hair be
compatible with loving both of them equally and with acting justly
toward both of them? Would God's willing that one person should
come to a glorious end and another to a horrific end be compatible
with loving both of them equally and with acting justly toward both of
them?



In response to similar questions, Jeff Jordan has challenged the whole
idea, which he acknowledges to be widely accepted among theistic
philosophers, that "God's love must be maximally extended
and equally intense" (Jordan 2012, 53). According to Jordan,
such maximally extended love would be a deficiency in any human who
manifested it; hence, it should not be numbered among God's
perfections or great-making properties. Neither is it possible, he
appears to argue, that God should love equally each and every created
person. For "if God has deep attachments [with some of them], it
follows that he does not love all [of them] equally. And being a
perfect being, God would have loves of the deepest kind" (Jordan
2012, 67). Jordan thus asks in a later article, "What if ... it
is not possible in-principle [even for God] to love every person
uniformly to the same degree?" And in support of his contention
that this is indeed impossible, Jordan argues, first, that people in
fact have incompatible interests, second, that two "interests
are incompatible just in case attempts to bring about one of them
require that the other be impeded," and third, that love of the
deepest kind "has as a necessary constituent identifying with
the interests of one's beloved" (Jordan 2015, 184). 



Two critical problems arise at this point. First, why suppose that the
deepest love for others (in the sense of willing the very best for
them) always requires identifying with their own interests? According
to Jordan, a person's interest is merely "a desire or goal
had by that person--something that a person cares about"
(Jordan 2012, 62, n. 26; see also Jordan 2020, 83). But in that sense
of "interest," God's deepest love for a person
surely requires that God actually oppose or impede some of that
person's interests. Why else would Christians believe, as the
author of Hebrews put it, that God often "disciplines those whom
he loves and chastises every child whom he accepts"? (Heb.
12:6). And second, why suppose that God cannot identify with
incompatible interests anyway? Indeed, why cannot a single individual
identify with incompatible interests (or conflicting desires) of his
or her own? Jordan himself offers the following explanation of what it
means to identify with an interest: "Identifying with an
interest we might understand as, roughly, caring about what
one's beloved cares about because one's beloved cares
about it" (Jordan 2015, 184). But why, then, cannot a loving
mother, for example, care deeply about the incompatible interests (or
immediate desires) of her two small children as they squabble over a
toy and care about these incompatible interests, however trivial they
might otherwise have seemed to her, precisely because her beloved
children care about them? The impossibility of her *satisfying*
such incompatible interests hardly entails the impossibility of her
identifying with them in the sense of caring deeply about
 them.[2]
 Accordingly, what a proponent of limited election needs at this point
is to specify a clear sense of "to identify with" such
that (a) it is impossible for God to identify with incompatible
interests and (b) an equally deep love for all created persons would
nonetheless require that God be able to identify with at least some of
their incompatible interests. 



In any case, the vast majority of Christian philosophers who have
addressed the topic of hell in recent decades *and* have
published at least some of their work in the standard philosophical
journals do accept proposition (1) and also reject, therefore, any
hint of Augustinian limited election. However ephemeral and changeable
such a consensus may be, the contemporary consensus does seem to be
that God's redemptive love extends to all humans equally (see,
for example, Buckareff and Plug 2005, Knight 1997, Kronen and Reitan
2011, Kvanvig 1993, Murray 1998, Seymour 2000b, Stump 1983, Swinburne
1983, and Walls 1998). For a more thorough examination and critique of
Jordan's specific arguments, see Parker 2013, and Talbott 2020;
and for Jordan's reply to some of this criticism, see Jordan
2015 and Jordan 2020, Ch. 5.


## 2. The Augustinian Understanding of Hell



Behind the Augustinian understanding of hell lies a commitment to a
retributive theory of punishment, according to which the primary
purpose of punishment is to satisfy the demands of justice or, as some
might say, to balance the scales of justice. And the Augustinian
commitment to such a theory is hardly surprising. For based upon his
interpretation of various New Testament texts, Augustine insisted that
hell is a literal lake of fire in which the damned will experience the
horror of everlasting torment; they will experience, that is, the
unbearable physical pain of literally being burned forever. The
primary purpose of such unending torment, according to Augustine, is
not correction, or deterrence, or even the protection of the innocent;
nor did he make any claim for it except that it is fully deserved and
therefore just. As for how such torment could be even physically
possible, Augustine insisted further that "by a miracle of their
most omnipotent Creator, they [living creatures who are damned] can
burn without being consumed, and suffer without dying" (*City
of God*, Bk. 21, Ch. 9). Such is the metaphysics of hell, as
Augustine understood it.



It would be unfair, however, to imply that all Augustinians, as
classified above, accept Augustine's own understanding of an
eternal torture chamber. For many Augustinians view the agony of hell
as essentially psychological and spiritual in nature, consisting of
the knowledge that every possibility for joy and happiness has been
lost forever. Hell, as they see it, is thus a condition in which
self-loathing, hatred of others, hopelessness, and infinite despair
consumes the soul like a metaphorical fire. Still, virtually all
Augustinians agree with Jonathan Edwards concerning this: whatever the
precise nature of the suffering, "In hell God manifests his
being and perfections only in hatred and wrath, and hatred without
love" (Edwards 1738, 390). In fact, according to Edwards, the
damned never were an object of God's electing love in the first
place: "The saints in glory will know concerning the damned in
hell, that God never loved them, but that he hates them, and [that
they] will be for ever hated of God" (Edwards 1834, sec. III).
So why are Christians required to love even those whom God has always
hated? Because, says Edwards, we have no way of knowing in this life
who is, and who is not, an object of God's eternal hatred.
"We ought now to love all, and even wicked men" because
"we know not but that God loves them" (sec. III). In the
next life, however, "the heavenly inhabitants will know that
[the damned] ... are the objects of God's eternal
hatred" (sec. II). Edwards and other Augustinians thus hold that
the damned differ from the saved in one respect only: even before the
damned were born, God had already freely chosen to exclude them from
the grace and the redemptive love that God lavishes upon on the
elect.



So why, one may wonder at this point, do the Augustinians believe that
anyone--whether it be Judas Iscariot, Saul of Tarsus, or Adolph
Hitler--actually deserves unending torment as a just recompense
for their sins? The typical Augustinian answer appeals to the
seriousness or the heinous character of even the most minor offense
against God. In *Cur Deus Homo* (or *Why God Became
Man*), a classic statement of the substitution theory of
atonement, St. Anselm illustrated such an appeal with the following
example. Suppose that God were to forbid you to look in a certain
direction, even though it seemed to you that by doing so you could
preserve the entire creation from destruction. If you were to disobey
God and to look in that forbidden direction, you would sin so gravely,
Anselm declared, that you could never do anything to pay for that sin
adequately. As a proponent of the retributive theory, Anselm first
insisted that "God demands satisfaction in proportion to the
extent of the sin." He then went on to insist that "you do
not make satisfaction [for any sin] unless you pay something greater
than is that for whose sake [namely God's] you ought not to have
sinned" (*Cur Deus Homo* I, Ch. 21). Anselm's
argument, then, appears to run as follows: Because God is infinitely
great, the slightest offense against God is also infinitely serious;
and if an offense is infinitely serious, then no suffering the sinner
might endure over a finite period of time could possibly pay for it.
So either the sinner does not pay for the sin at all, or the sinner
must pay for it by enduring everlasting suffering (or at least a
permanent loss of happiness).



But what about those who never commit any offense against God at all,
such as those who die in infancy or those who, because of severe brain
damage or some other factor, never develop into minimally rational
agents? These too, according to Augustine, deserve to be condemned
along with the human race as a whole. "For ... the whole
human race," he insisted, "was condemned in its apostate
head by a divine judgment so just that even if not a single member of
the race [including, therefore, those who die in infancy] were ever
saved from it, no one could rail against God's justice"
(*Enchiridion*,
 99).[3]
 Registering his agreement with Augustine, Calvin likewise wrote:
"Hence, as Augustine says, whether a man is a guilty unbeliever
or an innocent believer, he begets not innocent but *guilty*
children, for he begets them from a corrupted nature" (Calvin
1536, Bk. II, Ch. I, sec. 7 --italics added). Augustine and
Calvin both believed, then, that God justly condemns some who die in
infancy; indeed, if their innocence required that God unite with them,
then the ground of their salvation would lie in themselves rather
than, as Augustine saw it, in God's own free decision to save
them from their inherited
 guilt.[4]
 With respect to the unborn twins Jacob and Esau, Augustine thus
wrote: "both the twins were 'by nature children of
wrath,' not because of any works of their own, but because they
were both bound in the fetters of damnation originally forged by
Adam" (*Enchiridion*, 98).



As these remarks illustrate, the Augustinian understanding of original
sin implies that we are all born guilty of a heinous sin against God,
and this inherited guilt relieves God of any responsibility for our
spiritual welfare. In Augustine's own words, "Now it is
clear that the one sin originally inherited, *even if it were the
only one involved*, makes men liable to condemnation"
(*Enchiridion*, 50--italics added). Augustine thus
concluded that God can freely decide whom to save and whom to damn
without committing any injustice at all. "Now, who but a
fool," he declared, "would think God unfair either when he
imposes penal judgment on the deserving or when he shows mercy to the
undeserving" (Enchiridion, 98). For the Augustinians, then, the
bottom line is that, even as our Creator, God owes us nothing in our
present condition because, thanks to original sin, we come into this
earthly life already deserving nothing but everlasting punishment in
hell as a just recompense for original sin.



Although this Augustinian rationale for the justice of hell has had a
profound influence on the Western theological tradition, particularly
in the past, critics of Augustinian theology, both ancient and
contemporary, have raised a number of powerful objections to it.


### 2.1 Retributivist Objections



One set of objections arises from within the retributive theory
itself, and here are three such objections that critics have raised.
First, why *should* the greatness of the one against whom an
offense occurs determine *the degree of one's personal
guilt* anyway? According to most proponents of the retributive
theory, the personal guilt of those who act wrongly must depend, at
least in part, upon certain facts about *them*. A schizophrenic
young man who tragically kills his loving mother, believing her to be
a sinister space alien who has devoured his real mother, may need
treatment, they would say, but a just punishment seems out of the
question. Similarly, the personal guilt of those who disobey God or
violate the divine commands must likewise depend upon the answer to
such questions as these: Have they *knowingly* violated a
divine command?--and if so, to what extent are they responsible
for their own rebellious impulses? To what extent do they possess not
only an implicit knowledge of God and the divine commands, but a clear
vision of the nature of God? To what extent do they see clearly the
choice of roads, the consequences of their actions, or the true nature
of evil? Even many Augustinians admit the relevance of such questions
when they insist that Adam's sin was especially heinous because
he supposedly had special advantages, such as great happiness and the
beatific vision, that his descendants do not enjoy. If Adam's
sin was especially heinous because he had special advantages, then the
sins of those who lack his special advantages must be less heinous;
and if that is true, if some sins against God are less heinous than
others, then the greatness of God cannot be the only, or even the
decisive, factor in determining the degree of one's personal
guilt or the seriousness of a given sin (see Adams 1975, 442 and
Kvanvig 1993, 40-50).



Second, virtually all retributivists, with the notable exception of
the Augustinian theologians, reject as absurd the whole idea of
inherited guilt. So why, one may ask, do so many Augustinians, despite
their commitment to a retributive theory of punishment, insist that
God could justly condemn even infants on account of their supposedly
inherited guilt? Part of the explanation, according to Philip Quinn,
may lie "in a homuncular view of human nature itself"
(Quinn 1988, 99) or in what some philosophers might label as a simple
category mistake. A good illustration of the homuncular view, as Quinn
calls it, might be the following chapter heading in Anselm's
*Cur Deus Homo*: "What it was that man, when he sinned,
removed from God and cannot repay" (I, Ch. 23). The implication
of such language, which we also find in Augustine, Calvin, and a host
of others, is that humankind or human nature or the human race as a
whole is itself a person (or homunculus) who can act and sin against
God. Perhaps that explains how Augustine could write: "Man
... produced depraved and condemned children. For we were all in
that one man, since we were all that one man who fell into sin"
(*City of God*, Bk. XIII, Ch. 14). And perhaps it also explains
how Calvin could write: "even infants themselves, while they
carry their condemnation with them from the mother's womb, are
guilty not of another's fault but of their own" fault
(Calvin 1536, Bk. II, Ch. I, sec. 8). The reasoning here appears to
run as follows: Humankind is guilty of a grievous offense against God;
infants are instances of humankind; therefore, infants are likewise
guilty of a grievous offense against God. But most retributivists
would reject this way of speaking as simply incoherent. Whether one
agrees with it or not, one can at least understand the claim that
Adam's sin had disastrous consequences for all his progeny in
that they inherited many defects, deficiencies, and degenerate
dispositions. One can also understand Calvin's claim that, as a
result of original sin, "our own insight ... is utterly
blind and stupid in divine matters" and that "man's
keenness of mind is mere blindness as far as the knowledge of God is
concerned" (Calvin 1536, Bk. II, Ch. II, sec. 19). One can even
understand the claim that we are morally responsible for doing
something about our inherited defects, provided that we have the power
and the opportunity to do so. But the claim that we are born
*guilty* is another matter, as is the claim that we are all
deserving of everlasting punishment on account of having inherited
certain defects or deficiencies. Most retributivists would regard such
inherited defects as excusing conditions that *decrease*,
rather than *increase*, the degree of one's personal
guilt. So even though the Augustinians accept the idea of divine
retribution, they appear at the same time to reject important parts of
the retributive theory of punishment.



Third, if, as Anselm insisted, even the slightest offense against God
is infinitely serious and thus deserves a permanent loss of happiness
as a just recompense, then the idea, so essential to the retributive
theory, that we can grade offenses and fit lesser punishments to
lesser crimes appears to be in danger of collapsing. Many Christians
do, it is true, speculate that gradations of punishment exist in hell;
some sinners, they suggest, may experience greater pain than others,
and some places in hell may be hotter than others. Augustine even
tried to ameliorate his views concerning the fate of unbaptized
infants by suggesting that "such infants as quit the body
without being baptized will be involved in the mildest condemnation of
all" (*On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism
of Infants*, Bk. I, Ch. 21
 [available online]).
 But many retributivists would nonetheless respond as follows. If all
of those in hell, including the condemned infants, are dead in the
theological sense of being separated from God forever, and if this
implies a permanent loss of both the beatific vision and every other
conceivable source of worthwhile happiness, then they have all
received a punishment so severe that the further grading of offenses
seems pointless. We would hardly regard a king who executes every
law-breaker, the jaywalker no less than the murderer, as just; nor
would we feel much better if, in an effort to fit the punishment to
the crime, the king should reserve the more "humane" forms
of execution for the jaywalker. Once you make a permanent and
irreversible loss of happiness the supposedly just penalty for the
most minor offense, the only option left for more serious offenses is
to pile on additional suffering. But at some point piling on
additional suffering for more serious offenses seems utterly demonic,
or at least so many retributivists would insist; and it does nothing
to ameliorate a permanent loss of happiness for a minor offense or, as
in the case of non-elect babies who die in infancy, for no real
offense at all.



All of which brings one to what Marilyn McCord Adams and many others
see as the most crucial question of all. How could *any* sin
that a finite being commits in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and
illusion deserve an infinite penalty as a just recompense? (See Adams
1993, 313).


### 2.2 Challenging the Retributive Theory Itself



Another set of objections to the Augustinian understanding of hell
arises from the perspective of those who reject a retributive theory
of punishment. According to Anselm and the Augustinians generally, no
punishment that a sinner might endure over a finite period of time can
justly compensate for the slightest offense against God. Anselm thus
speculated that if no suffering of *finite* duration will fully
satisfy the demands of justice, perhaps suffering of *infinite*
duration will do the trick. But the truth, according to many critics,
is that no suffering and no punishment *of any duration* could
*in and of itself* compensate for someone's wrongdoing.
In the right circumstances punishment might be a means to something
that satisfies the demands of justice, but it has no power to do so in
and of itself. The Victorian visionary George MacDonald thus put it
this way: "Punishment, or deserved suffering, is no equipoise to
sin. It is no use laying it on the other scale. It will not move it a
hair's breadth. Suffering weighs nothing at all against
sin" (MacDonald 1889, 510). Why not? Because punishment, whether
it consists of additional suffering or a painless annihilation, does
nothing in and of itself, MacDonald insisted, to cancel out a sin, to
compensate or to make up for it, to repair the harm that it brings
into our lives, or to heal the estrangement that makes it possible in
the first
 place.[5]
 Neither does it justify God's decision to permit the wrongdoing
in the first place.



So what, theoretically, *would* make things right or fully
satisfy justice in the event that someone should commit murder or
otherwise act wrongly? Whereas the Augustinians insist that justice
requires punishment, other religious writers insist that justice
requires something very different, namely *reconciliation* and
*restoration* (see, for example, Marshall, 2001). Only God,
however, has the power to achieve true restoration in the case of
murder, because divine omnipotence can resurrect the victims of murder
just as easily as it can the victims of old age. According to George
MacDonald, whose religious vision was almost the polar opposite of the
Augustinian vision, *perfect* justice therefore requires,
first, that sinners repent of their sin and turn away from everything
that would separate them from God and from others; it requires,
second, that God forgive repentant sinners and that they forgive each
other; and it requires, third, that God overcome, perhaps with their
own cooperation, any harm that sinners do either to others or to
themselves. Augustinians typically object to the idea that divine
justice, no less than divine love, requires that God forgive sinners
and undertake the divine toil of restoring a just order. But MacDonald
insisted that, even as human parents have an obligation to care for
their children, so God has a freely accepted responsibility, as our
Creator, to meet our moral and spiritual needs. God therefore
*owes* us forgiveness for the same reason that human parents
*owe* it to their children to forgive them in the event that
they misbehave. Of course, precisely because they do forgive their
children, loving parents may sometimes punish their children and even
hold the feet of a child to the proverbial fire when this seems
necessary for the child's own welfare. And if the time should
come when loving parents are required to respect the misguided choices
of a rebellious teenager or an adult child, they will always stand
ready to restore fellowship with a prodigal son or daughter in the
event of a ruptured relationship.



We thus encounter two radically different religious visions of divine
justice, both of which deserve a full and careful examination.
According to the Augustinian vision, those condemned to hell are
recipients of divine justice but are not recipients of divine mercy;
hence justice and mercy are, according to this vision, radically
different (perhaps even inconsistent) attributes of
 God.[6]
 But according to an alternative religious vision, as exemplified in
the work of George MacDonald 1889 and J.A.T. Robinson 1968,
God's justice and mercy are the very same attribute in this
sense: divine justice is altogether merciful even as divine mercy is
altogether just. 


## 3. Free-will Theodicies of Hell



Unlike the Augustinians, Arminian theologians emphasize the role that
free will plays in determining one's eternal destiny in heaven
or hell; they also accept the so-called libertarian understanding of
free will, according to which freedom and determinism are incompatible
(see the entry on
 free will)).
 Because not even an omnipotent being can causally determine a
genuinely free choice, the reality of free will, they say, introduces
into the universe an element that, from God's perspective, is
utterly random in that it lies outside of God's direct causal
control. Accordingly, if some person should freely act
wrongly--or worse yet, freely reject God's grace--in a
given set of circumstances, then it was not within God's power
to induce this person to have freely acted otherwise, at least not in
the exact same circumstances in which the person was left free to act
wrongly. So in that sense, our human free choices, particularly the
bad ones, are genuine obstacles that God must work around in order to
bring a set of loving purposes to fruition. And this may suggest the
further possibility that, with respect to some free persons, God
cannot *both* preserve their their libertarian freedom in the
matter *and* prevent them from freely continuing to reject God
forever. As C. S. Lewis, an early 20th Century proponent of such a
theodicy, once put it, "In creating beings with free will,
omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of ...
defeat. ... I willingly believe that the damned are, in one
sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are
locked on the inside" (Lewis 1944, 115). 



The basic idea here is that hell, along with the self imposed misery
it entails, is essentially a *freely embraced condition* rather
than a *forcibly imposed
 punishment*;[7]
 and because freedom and determinism are incompatible, the creation of
free moral agents carries an inherent risk of ultimate tragedy.
Whether essential to our personhood or not, free will is a precious
gift, an expression of God's love for us; and because the very
love that seeks our salvation also respects our freedom, God will not
prevent us from separating ourselves from him, even forever, if that
is what we freely choose to do. So even though the perfectly loving
God would never reject anyone, sinners can reject God and thus freely
separate themselves from the divine nature; they not only have the
power as free agents to reject God for a season, during the time when
they are mired in ambiguity and subject to illusion, but they are also
able to cling forever to the illusions that make such rejection
possible in the first place. 



But why suppose it even possible that a free creature should freely
reject *forever* the redemptive will of a perfectly loving and
infinitely resourceful God? In the relevant literature over the past
several decades, advocates of a free-will theodicy of hell have
offered at least three quite different answers to this question: 


1. Perhaps the most commonly expressed answer concerns the
possibility of an irrevocable decision to reject God forever. Jerry
Walls thus describes the damned as those who have made a decisive
choice of evil (see Walls 1992, Ch. 5), Richard Swinburne suggests
that "once our will is fixed for bad, we shall never [again]
desire or seek what we have missed" because we have made an
"irrevocable choice of character" (Swinburne 1989, 199),
and R. Zachary Manis interprets Kierkegaard, whose view he defends, as
suggesting that the "damned are so filled with hatred ...
so motivated by malice and spite ... that they will to remain in
their state of torment, all for the sake of demonstrating that they
are in the right, and that God is in the wrong" (Manis 2016,
290).
2. Another proposed answer rejects altogether the traditional idea
that those in hell are lost without any further hope of restoration.
Buckareff and Plug (2005) have thus argued from the very nature of the
divine perfections (including perfect love) that God will always have
"an open-door policy towards those in hell--making it
[always] possible for those in hell to escape" (39); and
similarly, Raymond VanArragon has argued that those in hell continue
to reject God freely only if they retain the power to act otherwise
and hence also the power to repent and be saved (see VanArragon 2010).
Because the damned never lose forever their libertarian freedom in
relation to God's offer of salvation, in other words, and never
lose forever the psychological possibility of genuine repentance,
there is no irreversible finality in the so-called final
 judgment.[8]
 Still, the possibility remains, according to this view, that some
will never avail themselves of the opportunity to escape from hell.
3. A third proposed answer rests upon a Molinist perspective,
according to which God's omniscience includes what philosophers
now call middle knowledge, which in turn includes far more than a
simple foreknowledge of a person's future free actions. It also
includes a perfect knowledge uf what a person *would have done
freely* in circumstances that will never even obtain. So with
respect to the decision whether or not to create a given person and to
place that person in a given set of circumstances, God can base this
decision in part on a knowledge of what the person would do freely if
created and placed in these precise circumstances--or if, for
that matter, the person were placed in any other possible set of
circumstances as well. From this Molinist perspective, William Lane
Craig has defended the possibility that some free persons are utterly
irredeemable in this sense: short of overriding their libertarian
freedom, nothing God might do for them--whether it be to impart a
special revelation. to administer an appropriate punishment, or to
help them in some other way--will ever win them over or persuade
them to repent as a means of becoming reconciled to God (Craig 1989).
Craig himself calls this dreadful property of being irredeemable
*transworld damnation* (184).



In part because it rests upon the idea of middle knowledge, which is
itself controversial, Craig's idea of *transworld
damnation* may be the most controversial idea that any proponent
of a free will theodicy of hell has put forward. It also raises the
question of why a morally perfect God would create someone (or
instantiate the individual essence of someone) whom God already knew
in advance would be irredeemable. By way of an answer, Craig insists
on the possibility that some persons would submit to God freely only
in a world in which others should damn themselves forever; it is even
possible, he insists, that God must permit a large number of people to
damn themselves in order to fill heaven with a larger number of
redeemed. Craig himself has put it this way:



> 
> It is possible that the terrible price of filling heaven is also
> filling hell and that in any other possible world which was feasible
> for God the balance between saved and lost was worse. It is possible
> that had God actualized a world in which there are less persons in
> hell, there would also have been less persons in heaven. It is
> possible that in order to achieve this much blessedness, God was
> forced to accept this much loss (1989, 183).
> 



As this passage illustrates, Craig accepts at least the possibility
that, because of free will, history includes an element of
*irreducible* tragedy; he even accepts the possibility that if
fewer people were damned to hell, then fewer people would have been
saved as well. So perhaps God knows from the outset that a complete
triumph over evil is unfeasible no matter what divine actions might be
taken; as a result, God merely tries to minimize the defeat, to cut
the losses, and in the process to fill heaven with more saints than
otherwise would have been feasible. (For a critique of this reply, see
Talbott 1992; for Craig's rejoinder, see Craig 1993; and for a
critique of Craig's rejoinder, see Seymour 2000a.) 



In any case, how one assesses each of the three answers above will
depend upon how one understands the idea of moral freedom and the role
it plays, if any, in someone landing in either heaven or hell. The
first two answers also represent a fundamental disagreement concerning
the existence of free will in hell and perhaps even the nature of free
will itself. According to the first answer, the inhabitants of hell
are those who have freely acquired a consistently evil will and an
irreversibly bad moral character. So for the rest of eternity, these
inhabitants of hell do not even continue rejecting God *freely*
in any sense that requires the psychological possibility of choosing
otherwise. But is such an irreversibly bad moral character even
coherent or metaphysically possible? Not according to the second
answer, which implies that a morally perfect God would never cease
providing those in hell with opportunities for repentance and
providing these opportunities in contexts where such repentance
remains a genuine psychological possibility. All of which points once
again to the need for a clearer understanding of the nature and
purpose of moral freedom. (See section 5.1 below for some additional
issues that arise in connection with freedom in heaven and hell.) 


### 3.1 Moral Freedom and Rationality



Given the New Testament imagery associated with Gehenna, the Lake of
Fire, and the outer darkness--where there is "weeping and
gnashing of teeth"--the question is *not* how
someone in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception could
freely choose separation from the divine nature over union with it;
the question is instead how someone could *both* experience
such separation (or the unbearable misery of hell, for example)
*and* freely choose to remain in such a state forever. This is
not a problem for the Augustinians because, according to them, the
damned have no further choice in the matter once their everlasting
punishment commences. But it is a problem for those free-will theists
who believe that the damned freely embrace an eternal destiny apart
from God, and the latter view requires, at the very least, a plausible
account of the relevant freedom. 



Now, as already indicated, those who embrace a free-will theodicy of
hell typically appeal, in the words of Jonathan Kvanvig, to "a
libertarian account of human freedom in order to provide a complete
response to" the problem of hell (Kvanvig 2011, 54). But of
course such a "complete response" would also require a
relatively complete account of libertarian freedom. According to
Kvanvig, "some formulation of the Principle of Alternative
Possibilities (PAP) correctly describes this notion of [libertarian]
freedom"; and, as he also points out, this "principle
claims that in order to act freely one must be able to do
otherwise" (48). But at most PAP merely sets forth a necessary
condition of someone acting freely in the libertarian sense, and it
includes no requirement that a free choice be even minimally rational.
So consider again the example, introduced in section 2.1 above, of a
schizophrenic young man who kills his loving mother, believing her to
be a sinister space alien who has devoured his real mother; and this
time suppose further that he does so in a context in which PAP obtains
and he categorically could have chosen otherwise (perhaps because he
worries about possible retaliation from other sinister space aliens).
Why suppose that such an irrational choice and action, even if not
causally determined, would qualify as an instance of acting freely?
Either our seriously deluded beliefs, particularly those with
destructive consequences in our own lives, are in principle
correctable by some degree of powerful evidence against them, or the
choices that rest upon them are simply too irrational to qualify as
free moral choices.



If that is true, then not just any causally undetermined choice, or
just any agent caused choice, or just any randomly generated selection
between alternatives will qualify as a free choice for which the
choosing agent is morally responsible. Moral freedom also requires a
minimal degree of rationality on the part of the choosing agent,
including an ability to learn from experience, an ability to discern
normal reasons for acting, and a capacity for moral improvement. With
good reason, therefore, do we exclude lower animals, small children,
the severely brain damaged, and perhaps even paranoid schizophrenics
from the class of free moral agents. For, however causally
undetermined some of their behaviors might be, they all lack some part
of the rationality required to qualify as free moral
 agents.[9]




Now consider again the view of C. S. Lewis and many other Christians
concerning the bliss that union with the divine nature entails, so
they believe. and the objective horror that separation from it
entails, and suppose that the outer darkness--that is, a soul
suspended alone in nothingness, without even a physical order to
experience and without any human relationships at all--should be
the logical limit (short of annihilation) of possible separation from
the divine nature. These ideas seem to lead naturally to a dilemma
argument for the conclusion that a freely chosen eternal destiny apart
from God is metaphysically impossible. For either a person S is fully
informed about who God is and what both union with the divine nature
and separation from it would entail, or S is not so informed. If S
*is* fully informed and should choose a life apart from God
anyway, then S's choice would be utterly and almost
inconceivably irrational; such a choice would fall well below the
threshold required for moral freedom. And if S is not fully informed,
then God can of course continue to work with S, subjecting S to new
experiences, shattering S's illusions, and correcting S's
misjudgments in perfectly natural ways that do not interfere with
S's freedom. Beyond that, for as long as S remains less than
fully informed, S is simply in no position to reject the true God; S
may reject a caricature of God, perhaps even a caricature of S's
own devising, but S is in no position to reject the true God.
Therefore, in either case, whether S is fully informed or less than
fully informed, it is simply not possible that S should reject the
true God *freely*. 



By way of a reply to this argument and in defense of his own
free-will approach to hell--which, by the way, in no way
excludes the possibility that *some* inhabitants of hell may
eventually escape from it--Jerry Walls concedes that "the
choice of evil is impossible for anyone who has a fully formed
awareness that God is the source of happiness and sin the cause of
misery" (Walls 1992, 133). But Walls also contends that, even if
those in hell have rejected a caricature of God rather than the true
God, it remains possible that some of them will finally make a
*decisive choice of evil* and will thus remain in hell forever.
He then makes a three-fold claim: first, that the damned have in some
sense deluded themselves, second, that they have the power to cling to
their delusions forever, and third, that God cannot forcibly remove
their *self-imposed* deceptions without interfering with their
freedom in relation to God (Walls 1992, Ch. 5).



For more detailed discussions of these and related issues, see
Swinburne 1989 (Ch. 12), Craig 1989 and 1993, Talbott 2007, Walls 1992
(Ch. 5), 2004a, and 2004b, Kronen and Reitan 2011 (142-146), and
Manis 2016 and 2019. See also sections 4.2 and 5.1 below.


### 3.2 Moral Freedom and Irreparable Harm



Consider now the two conditions under which we humans typically feel
justified in interfering with the freedom of others (see Talbott
1990a, 38). We feel justified, on the one hand, in preventing one
person from doing irreparable harm--or more accurately, harm that
no *human being* can repair--to another; a loving father
may thus report his own son to the police in an effort to prevent the
son from committing murder. We also feel justified, on the other hand,
in preventing our loved ones from doing irreparable harm to
themselves; a loving father may thus physically overpower his daughter
in an effort to prevent her from committing suicide.



Now one might, it is true, draw a number of faulty inferences from
such examples as these, in part because we humans tend to think of
irreparable harm within the context of a very limited timeframe, a
person's life on earth. Harm that no human being can repair may
nonetheless be harm that God can repair. It does not follow,
therefore, that a loving and omnipotent God, whose goal is the
reconciliation of the world, would prevent every suicide and every
murder; it follows only that such a God would prevent every harm that
not even omnipotence could repair at some future time, and neither
suicide nor murder is necessarily an instance of that *kind* of
harm. So even though a loving God might sometimes permit murder, such
a God would never permit one person to annihilate the soul of another
or to destroy the very possibility of future happiness in another; and
even though a loving God might sometimes permit suicide, such a God
would never permit genuine loved ones to destroy the very possibility
of future happiness in themselves either. The latter conclusion
concerning suicide is no doubt the more controversial, and Jonathan
Kvanvig in particular has challenged it (see Kvanvig 1993,
83-88). But whatever the resolution of this particular debate,
perhaps both parties can agree that God, as Creator, would deal with a
much larger picture and a much longer timeframe than that with which
we humans are immediately concerned.



So the idea of *irreparable* harm--that is, of harm that
not even omnipotence could ever repair--is critical at this
point. It is most relevant, perhaps, in cases where someone imagines
sinners freely choosing annihilation (Kvanvig), or imagines them
freely making a decisive and irreversible choice of evil (Walls), or
imagines them freely locking the gates of hell from the inside (C. S.
Lewis). But proponents of the so-called escapism understanding of hell
can plausibly counter that hell is not necessarily an instance of such
irreparable harm, and Raymond VanArragon in particular raises the
possibility that God might permit some loved ones to continue forever
rejecting God in a non-decisive way that would not, at any given time,
harm them irreparably (see VanArragon 2010, 37ff; see also Kvanvig
2011, 52). Here it is perhaps worth noting how broadly VanArragon
defines the term "rejecting God" (see 2010,
30-31)--so broadly, in fact, that any sin for which one is
morally responsible would count as an instance of someone rejecting
God. He thus explicitly states that rejecting God in his broad sense
requires neither an awareness of God nor a conscious decision, however
confused it may be, to embrace a life apart from God. Accordingly,
persistent sinning without end would never result, given such an
account, in anything like the traditional hell, whether the latter be
understood as a lake of fire, the outer darkness, or any other
condition that would reveal the full horror of separation from God
(given the traditional Christian understanding of such separation).
Neither would such a sinner ever achieve a state of full clarity. For
given VanArragon's understanding of libertarian freedom,
continuing to sin forever would require a perpetual context of
ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception. 


## 4. The Universalist Rejection of Everlasting Separation



A theist of any religion who accepts the traditional idea of
everlasting punishment, or even the idea of an everlasting separation
from God, must either reject the idea that that all human sinners are
equal objects of God's redemptive love (see proposition (1) in
section 1 above) or reject the idea that God's redemptive love
will triumph in the end and bring reconciliation to each and every
object of such divine love (see proposition (2)). But a theist who
accepts proposition (1), as the Arminians do, and also accepts
proposition (2), as the Augustinians do, can then reason deductively
that almighty God will indeed triumph in the end and successfully win
over each and every human sinner. From the perspective of an
interpretation of the Christian Bible, moreover, Christian
universalists need only accept the exegetical arguments of the
Arminian theologians in support of (1) and the exegetical arguments of
the Augustinian theologians in support of (2); that alone would enable
them to build an exegetical case for a universalist interpretation of
the Bible as a whole.


### 4.1 Divine Grace and the Inclusive Nature of Love



One argument in support of proposition (1) contends that love
(especially in the form of willing the very best for another) is
inclusive in this sense: even where it is logically possible for a
loving relationship to come to an end, two persons are bound together
in love only when their purposes and interests, even the conditions of
their happiness, are so logically intertwined as to be inseparable. If
a mother should love her child even as she loves herself, for example,
then any evil that befalls the child is likewise an evil that befalls
the mother and any good that befalls the child is likewise a good that
befalls the mother; hence, it is simply not possible, according to
this argument, for God to will the best for the mother without also
willing the best for the child as well.



For similar reasons, Kenneth Einar Himma has argued that some
widespread moral intuitions, "together with Christian
exclusivism and the traditional doctrine of hell, entail that it is
morally wrong for anyone to have children" (Himma 2011, 198).
That argument seems especially forceful in the context of Augustinian
theology, which implies that, for all any set of potential parents
know, any child they might produce could be one of the reprobate whom
God has hated from the beginning and has destined from the beginning
for eternal torment in hell. The title of Himma's article,
"Birth as a Grave Misfortune," would seem to describe such
cases perfectly. (See Bawulski 2013 for a reply to Himma and Himma
2016 for Himma's rejoinder.)



In any event, Arminians and universalists both regard an acceptance of
proposition (1) as essential to a proper understanding of divine
grace. Could God truly extend grace to an elect mother, they might
ask, by making the baby she loves with all her heart the object of a
divine hatred and do this, as the Augustinians say was done in the
case of Esau, even before the child was born or had done anything good
or bad? As the Arminians and the universalists both view the matter,
the Augustinians have embraced a logical impossibility: the idea that
God could extend a genuine love and compassion to one person even as
God withholds it from some of that person's own loved ones. They
therefore reject the doctrine of limited election on the ground that
it undermines the concept of grace altogether. Where they disagree, of
course, is over the issue of whether the objects of God's love
can resist his grace forever. Whereas Arminians hold that, given the
reality of free will, we humans can, if we so choose, resist
God's grace forever, universalists tend to believe that, even
though we can resist God's grace for a while, perhaps even for a
substantial period of time (while mired in ignorance and ambiguity),
we cannot resist it forever. So the issue between these two camps, the
Arminians and the universalists, finally comes down to the question of
which position has the resources for a better account of human freedom
and of God's respect for it (see, for example, the exchange
between Walls 2004 and Talbott 2004). Or, to put the question in a
slightly different way, which position, if either, requires that God
*interfere* with human freedom (or human autonomy) in morally
inappropriate ways? As the following section should illustrate, the
answer to this question may be far more complicated than some might at
first imagine.


### 4.2 Universalism and Human Freedom



A widely held assumption among free-will theists is that no
guarantee of universal reconciliation is even possible apart from
God's willingness to interfere with human freedom in those cases
where someone persists in rejecting God and his grace. Indeed,
Jonathan Kvanvig goes so far as to describe universalism as a
"view, according to which God finally decides that if one has
not freely chosen Heaven, there will come a time when one will be
brought to Heaven against one's will. One will experience, in
this sense, coercive redemption at some point" (Kvanvig 2011,
14). But in fact, no universalist--not even a theological
determinist--holds that God sometimes coerces people into heaven
*against their will*. For although many Christian universalists
believe that God provided Saul of Tarsus with certain revelatory
experiences that *changed* his mind in the end and therefore
changed his will as well, this is a far cry from claiming that he was
coerced against his will. Kvanvig's own understanding of
libertarian freedom, moreover, already establishes the *logical
possibility* that God can bring about a universal reconciliation
without in any way interfering with human freedom. 



But in addition to defending the bare logical possibility of such a
universal reconciliation on libertarian grounds, Eric Reitan has set
forth an intriguing argument, which he calls "the Argument from
Infinite Opportunity," for the conclusion that God can
effectively guarantee the salvation of all sinners without ever
interfering with anyone's libertarian freedom (see Kronen and
Reitan 2011, Ch. 8). The basic idea here is that a sinner could have,
if necessary, infinitely many opportunities over an unending stretch
of time to repent and to submit to God freely. So consider this.
Although it is logically possible, given the normal philosophical view
of the matter, that a fair coin would never land heads up, not even
once in a trillion tosses, such an eventuality is so incredibly
improbable and so close to an impossibility that no one need fear it
actually happening. Similarly, in working with some sinner S
(shattering S's illusions and correcting S's ignorance),
God could presumably bring S to a point, just short of actually
determining S's choice, where S would see the choice between
horror and bliss with such clarity that the probability of S repenting
and submitting to God would be extremely high. Or, if you prefer, drop
the probability to .5. Over an indefinitely long period of time, S
would still have an indefinitely large number of opportunities to
repent; and so, according to Reitan, the assumption that sinners
retain their libertarian freedom together with the Christian doctrine
of the preservation of the saints yields the following result. We can
be just as confident that God will eventually win over all sinners
(and do so without causally determining their choices), as we can be
that a fair coin will land heads up at least once in a trillion
tosses.



A possible reply to Reitan's argument, as just briefly
summarized, is that our free choices can sometimes create a hardened
character, which in turn places constraints on future free choices.
But either the hardened character of those in hell removes forever the
psychological possibility of their choosing to repent, or it does not.
If it does remove that psychological possibility, then they do not
continue rejecting God freely in the sense that the Principle of
Alternative Possibilities (PAP) requires; and if it does not remove
that psychological possibility, then Reitan's argument remains
pertinent. Beyond that, the most critical issue at this point concerns
the relationship between free choice, on the one hand, and character
formation, on the other. Our moral experience does seem to provide
evidence that a pattern of bad choices can sometimes produce bad
habits and a bad moral character, but it also seems to provide
evidence that a pattern of bad choices can sometimes bring one closer
to a dramatic conversion of some kind. So why not suppose that a
pattern of bad choices might be even more useful to God than a pattern
of good choices would be in teaching the hard lessons we sometimes
need to learn and in thus rendering a dramatic conversion increasingly
more probable over the long run? Are not the destructive consequences
that alcoholism can have in the lives of some people the very thing
that sometimes motivates them to seek help and even to give up alcohol
 altogether?[10]
 For more on the issue of free will and character formation, see
Swinburne 1989 (Ch. 12), Sennett 1999, Murray 1999, the rejoinder to
Murray in Kronen and Reitan 2011 (170-177), the discussion of
character formation in Talbott 2010 (9-13), and section 5.1
below.


### 4.3 The Limits of God's Power to Preserve Human Freedom



Suppose that a man is standing atop the Empire State Building with the
intent of committing suicide by jumping off and plunging to his death
below. One obvious way in which God could interfere with the
man's freedom in this matter would be simply to cause him to
change his mind; that would effectively prevent the suicide from
occurring. But there is another, less obvious, way in which God could
interfere with the man's freedom to commit suicide; God could
permit him to leap from the building and then cause him to float
gently to the ground like a feather; that too would effectively
prevent the suicide from occurring. So one is not free to accomplish
some action or to achieve some end, unless God permits one to
experience the chosen end, however confusedly one may have chosen it;
and neither is one free to separate oneself from God, or from the
ultimate source of human happiness as Christians understand it, unless
God permits one to experience the very life one has chosen and the
full measure of misery that it entails.



Given the almost universal Christian assumption that a complete
separation from the divine nature (in the outer darkness, for example)
would be an objective horror, it seems to follow that even God would
face a dilemma with respect to human freedom. For either God could
permit sinners to follow a path that ultimately leads, according to
Christian theology, to an objective horror and permit them to continue
following it for as long as they freely choose to do so, or God could
at some point prevent them from continuing along their freely chosen
path. If God should permit sinners to continue along their freely
chosen path--the one that unbeknownst to them will inevitably
lead them to an objective horror--then their own experience,
provided they are rational enough to qualify as free moral agents,
would eventually shatter their illusions and remove their
*libertarian* freedom to continue along that path.
Alternatively, if God should prevent sinners from achieving their
freely chosen goal of separating themselves from the divine nature,
then they would have no real freedom to do so. In neither case,
therefore, would sinners be able to retain forever their libertarian
freedom to continue separating themselves from the divine nature and
from the ultimate source of human happiness. 



If this argument should be sound, it also seems to follow that, no
matter how tenaciously some sinners might pursue a life apart from God
and resist the divine purpose for their lives, God would have, as a
sort of last resort, a sure-fire way to shatter the illusions that
make their rebellion possible in the first place. To do so, God need
only honor their own free choices and permit them to experience the
very life they have confusedly chosen for themselves. Why interfere
with someone's freedom, after all, at the very point where
honoring that freedom would in fact teach a hard lesson and therefore
do the most good? Would that not be utterly incompatible with
God's moral character, as most Christians understand it? 



However one might answer such a question, the Christian
universalist's understanding of the nature and scope of
God's irresistible grace is very different from the Augustinian
understanding of it. For Christian universalists not only reject the
Augustinian idea that God's irresistible grace extends to a
limited elect only; they also hold that God's judgment of sin is
essentially a matter of permitting sinners to experience the very
condition of separation they have confusedly chosen for themselves.
Many Christian universalists are thus fond of quoting St. Paul's
remark that "God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that
he may have mercy on them all" (Rom. 11:32--NIV), and they
interpret this as a declaration that divine judgment, however harsh it
may seem, is itself an expression of divine mercy and is therefore
part of what makes God's grace irresistible in the end. If, as a
last resort, God should allow a sinner to live for a while without
even an implicit experience of the divine
 nature,[11]
 the resulting horror, they believe, will at last shatter any illusion
that some good is achievable apart from God; and such a discovery will
finally elicit a cry for help of a kind that, however faint it may be,
is just what God needs in order to begin and eventually to complete
the process of reconciliation. 



In sum, opponents of universalism must either restrict God's
redemptive love to a limited elect or admit that God's love will
suffer an ultimate defeat in this sense: God's own desire for
the human race as a whole, as expressed in a place like 1 Timothy 2:4,
will never be satisfied. Because the Arminians and the universalists
agree that God could never love an elect mother even as, at the same
time, God rejects her beloved baby, they both agree that the first
alternative is utterly impossible. But because the issues surrounding
the idea of free will are so complex and remain the source of so much
philosophical controversy, perhaps they can also agree that a
free-will theodicy of hell is the best philosophical account
currently available for a doctrine of everlasting separation from God.



## 5. Heaven: Three Critical Issues



Rarely, if ever, are Christian theologians very specific about what
heaven will supposedly be like, and there are no doubt good reasons
for this. For most of them would deny that the primary sources of the
Christian faith, such as the Bible, provide much information on this
particular matter. But three issues have typically arisen in the
relevant philosophical literature: first, because so many of the
recent Christian philosophers have focused upon free will theodicies
of hell, it is hardly surprising that the issue of freedom in heaven
should likewise have arisen; a second issue is whether the misery of
loved ones in hell would undermine the blessedness of those in heaven;
and a third issue is whether immortality of any kind would ultimately
lead to tedium, boredom, and an insipid life.


### 5.1 Freedom in Heaven



Like the arguments over universalism and human freedom, as briefly
summarized in section 4.2 above, the issue of freedom in heaven once
again illustrates the need for a reasonably clear and complete account
of free will. It also illustrates how easily a purely verbal dispute,
which is an apparent dispute that arises from different uses of the
same term, can sometimes disguise itself as a genuine disagreement
over some matter of substance. With respect to the issue of freedom in
heaven, here are a couple of additional examples to consider: (a) the
honest banker whose deeply-rooted moral and religious convictions make
it psychologically impossible for him to accept a bribe in a given
situation, and (b) the mother whose great love for her newborn baby
makes it psychologically impossible for her knowingly to harm her
beloved child physically. The question of whether there is freedom in
heaven seems relevantly similar to the question of whether our honest
banker *freely* refuses the bribe and whether our loving mother
*freely* refuses to do anything she knows would harm her baby
physically. 



Consider now three different non-compatibilist accounts of what it
means to act *freely* and the implications that each of these
accounts has for the possibility of freedom in heaven. According to
the first account, briefly introduced in section 3.1 above, freedom
always requires that PAP obtain; that is, one is free with respect to
some action A in a given set of circumstances only if it is within
one's power to do A in that set of circumstances and also within
one's power to refrain from doing A. So if no one in heaven, as
Christians typically understand it, will ever have the slightest
inclination to disobey God--if, that is, it would be as
psychologically impossible for the saints in heaven to disobey God as
it would be for our loving mother to torture her beloved baby to
death, then there can be no freedom *of that kind* in heaven.
This is not a matter for dispute; it is instead merely a matter of
being clear about a specified use of the term "freedom."
Either the saints in heaven retain a robust power to disobey God and
to sin, or they do not have the kind of freedom that PAP specifies.
Or, to put it another way: if the saints in heaven do have this kind
of freedom even as Lucifer, according to one traditional
interpretation of his supposed fall from perfection, was able to
commit the primal sin in heaven, then they also retain the power to
sin in heaven (see Matheson 2018, 66). 



A second account carries no implication that having the relevant
freedom in the present always requires an ability to do otherwise
*in the present*, though it does require an ability to do
otherwise at various times in one's life history. For according
to Robert Kane, "Agents with free will . . . must be such that
they could have done otherwise on some occasions of their life
histories with respect to some character- or motive-forming acts by
which they make themselves into the kinds of persons they are"
(Kane 1998, 72). In a similar vein, James F. Sennett defends the free
will of the saints in heaven by in effect arguing that they have
freely chosen their own moral character. "A character that is
libertarian freely chosen," he therefore suggests, "is the
only kind of character that can determine compatibilist free
choices" (Sennett 1999, 74; and for a similar view, albeit
tweaked a bit, see Pawl and Timpe 2008). The basic idea here seems to
be that one's own motives and character can determine a free
action in the present only when one is fully responsible for the
motives and character traits that determine this action. 



A possible difficulty here is to provide a coherent account, not to
mention an empirically verifiable account, of how certain undetermined
choices buried in a life history might render one responsible for
one's present motives and character traits. This is a problem in
part because, as Manuel Vargas points out, "even freely chosen
features of our lives and ourselves can, because of our epistemic
limitations, yield unanticipated consequences" (Vargas 2005,
282)--as, for instance, when someone sincerely cultivates moral
integrity and inadvertently produces some of the worst character
traits: moral rigidity, self-righteousness, and a lack of compassion.
Similarly, someone's worst choices and the lessons learned from
them may be the very thing that has the most profound effect on the
development of a good character. So given our epistemic limitations
and the unanticipated consequences of our free choices, is it any
wonder that many Christian theologians view a good character as a gift
from God rather than as something for which we can credit ourselves?




A third account of freedom, sometimes neglected by those who emphasize
the importance of human freedom, is Susan Wolf's Reason View,
according to which "the freedom necessary for responsibility
consists in the ability (or freedom) to do the right thing for the
right reasons" (Wolf 1990, 94). But unlike the autonomy view, as
she calls it, such freedom does not require the ability to refrain
from doing the right thing for the right reasons. Wolf thus commits
herself to the following asymmetry: whereas committing a wrong (or
immoral) act *freely* requires an ability to do otherwise and
therefore to refrain from acting wrongly, doing the right thing for
the right reasons *freely* does not require an ability to act
otherwise. Such a view takes full advantage of the idea, expressed in
section 3.1 above, that the relevant freedom requires a minimal degree
of rationality, and it might be modified slightly as follows. If a
relevant threshold of rationality requires only an ability to make
reasonable judgments, rather than infallible ones, concerning the best
course of action, then perhaps we can say that freedom consists in the
ability to follow one's own reasonable judgment concerning the
best course of action in a given situation (see Talbott 2009, 388).
Whether one accepts such a modification or not, something like
Wolf's Reason View seems to accord perfectly with the religious
view that those in heaven are the freest of all created persons, even
as those in hell remain in bondage to sin (a bondage similar to an
alcoholic's bondage to alcohol). Such a view also seems to
accord perfectly with St. Paul's view that salvation is a means
by which the will is released from its bondage to sin. 


### 5.2 Concerning the Misery of Loved Ones in Hell



Assuming that love ties people's interests together in the way
described in section 4.1 above, one might then wonder how God could
preserve the happiness of those in heaven who know that some of their
own loved ones are suffering forever in hell. For the question
inevitably arises, "How could anyone remain happy knowing that a
genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable
*forever*". When a reporter asked the mother of Ted
Bundy, a serial murderer of young women, whether she could still
support a son who had become a monster, her answer provided a poignant
illustration of the problem. "Of course I support him,"
she declared, as her eyes filled with tears and her body literally
began shaking. "He is my son. I love him. I have to support
him." She obviously did not support his monstrous crimes, and
neither did she even object to the severity of his punishment. But
still, one wonders how this suffering woman--a committed
Christian, by the way--could ever achieve supreme happiness
knowing that the son she continued to love was destined to be lost
forever without any future hope of redemption.



Such considerations have led some, including the 19th
Century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, to argue that the misery
of those in hell would undermine altogether the blessedness of the
redeemed in heaven (see Schleiermacher 1830, 721-722; Kronen and
Reitan 2011, 80-89; and Talbott 1990b, 237-241). But
others have argued that God could always shield forever the redeemed
in heaven from painful memories of the lost in hell. William Lane
Craig thus raises the possibility that God could simply
"obliterate" from the minds of the redeemed "any
knowledge of lost persons so that they experience no pangs of remorse
for them" (Craig, 1991, 306). Given the widespread theological
view, which Craig seems to accept, that billions of people will
eventually be lost forever, one issue here concerns how much of some
people's minds, particularly those whose entire family is lost
forever, God would have to wipe out in order to accomplish such a
strategy. Another concerns how God, as an infinitely loving being,
might expunge the infinitely more painful memories from his own mind.
But the main issue to be resolved here is whether *blissful
ignorance* qualifies as a worthwhile form of happiness at all.



As a matter of historical fact, in any case, some of the most
influential theologians in the Western tradition, including some who
are widely admired as heroes of faith, have not only made an eternal
torture chamber an important part of their teaching about hell; they
seem also to have gloried in the idea that the torments of those
writhing in hell forever will increase the joy of those in heaven.
Jonathan Edwards thus wrote: "When the saints in glory ...
shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were
naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall
see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their
burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that
they [the saints] in the mean time are in the most blissful state and
shall surely be in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!"
(Edwards 1834, sec. II
 [available online]).
 Remarkably, Edwards was also a theological determinist who held that
God determined from the beginning to bring a huge number of people to
a horrific end and did so for the precise purpose of increasing the
joy of the elect in heaven. He even insisted, *contra* Craig,
that the inhabitants of heaven and hell will be acutely aware of each
other's condition; so even as the torments of former loved ones
in hell will contribute to the joy of those in heaven, so the joy of
former loved ones in heaven will contribute to the psychological
torment of those in hell. He thus made the following kind of warning
an important part of his preaching: "How will you bear to see
your parents, who in this life had so dear an affection for you, now
without any love to you ... How will you bear to see and hear
them praising the Judge, for his justice exercised in pronouncing this
sentence, and hearing it with holy joy in their countenances, and
shouting forth the praises and hallelujahs of God and Christ on that
account?" (sec. IV).



As horrifying as such descriptions are apt to appear to someone such
as Ted Bundy's mother, perhaps all parties can agree on one
thing at least. *If* justice were to require that one suffer
eternally for sins that God himself causally determined, then such
suffering would have to be a source of satisfaction, if not outright
bliss, on the part of any fair-minded person witnessing it. But since,
as they say, one person's modus ponens is another's modus
 tollens,[12]
 a critic of Edwards will simply reply in the following way. No
fair-minded person would find satisfaction in someone's
experiencing eternal torment as punishment for even the worst of sins,
particularly in the case of sins that God himself has causally
determined; therefore, such torment is not what justice requires.
According to Edwards's own theology, moreover, he was no less
deserving of eternal torment himself than are those who suffer in
hell. Schleiermacher and many others therefore find it hard to
understand how those who receive special favor in this regard could be
so deliriously happy in the knowledge that some of their own loved
ones do not receive a similar special
 favor.[13]



### 5.3 Concerning the Supposed Tedium of Immortality



A third issue concerning heaven that sometimes arises is whether
everlasting bliss is even a possible state of affairs. Bernard
Williams has thus suggested "that immortality would be, where
conceivable at all, intolerable" (in Fischer 1993, 73).
Commenting on a play by Karel Capek about a women who at age 42
receives immortality and by age 342 no longer wants to live, Williams
wrote: "Her trouble was, it seems, boredom: a boredom connected
with the fact that everything that could happen and make sense to one
human being of 42 had already happened to her" by age 342
(82).



Such a statement is reminiscent of a quotation often attributed to
Charles H. Duell, who became commissioner of the U.S. patent office in
1898. According to legend, Duell declared that everything that can be
invented has already been invented; and even though this wonderful
story is probably apocryphal, it nonetheless illustrates in a humorous
way the possible consequences of an impoverished imagination. It would
hardly take even 30 years, depending upon the circumstances, for a
given life to become dull and insipid. But the idea that a healthy
person could exhaust all the *possibilities* for adventure and
meaningful experience in a mere 300 years will strike many as simply
preposterous. A mere 300 years is virtually nothing, it is true, when
compared to a life without end. So the real issue is whether it is
logically possible that an unending life (in which one retains
one's identity as the same person) should be filled with
unending joy and ever increasing opportunities for novel and
meaningful experiences.



Addressing this very issue, John Martin Fischer writes:
"Remember [the possibility] that certain ... of one's
family and friends also have the relevant sort of immortality. It
seems to me that under such circumstances one could live an attractive
life characterized by a desirable *mix* of fulfilling
activities" (Fischer 1993, 10--his italics). Might not an
unending life even *increase* the possibilities for such a
desirable mix? A favorite symphony not heard for a hundred years or so
might be experienced as utterly fresh and exciting. And even if we set
aside anything that might raise a controversy about personal identity,
the mere discovery of an unexpected means of traversing our
extravagant universe, with its billions of galaxies and billions of
star systems within each of them, might open up--for adventurous
spirits anyway--incredible possibilities for new and exciting
experiences. Nor should we ignore the further possibility of
experiencing infinitely many other realms and universes that are not
spatially contiguous with our own. Pursuing Fischer's idea of a
desirable mix even further, a longer life could also increase the
chances for the experience of boredom itself to fit into a larger
context of meaningful experience. In caring for her baby, for example,
a mother typically performs many mundane tasks that might seem utterly
tedious were it not for the joy of interacting with her baby and of
watching it grow and flourish. Similarly, St. Paul found even the
tedium of prison to be tolerable, so he claimed, because he saw it as
part of a larger story that he believed to be both true and glorious.
So why allow, many religious people would ask, an impoverished
imagination to exclude the very possibility of an over-arching story
arc perpetually giving fresh meaning to our individual lives?



Still, all of that having been said, Williams's view concerning
the inevitably tedious nature of an unending life is not that far
removed from the religious view that in our present unperfected
condition we are not yet fit for eternity and not yet capable of
experiencing the most worthwhile forms of happiness; indeed, given our
present condition, some would claim, we might even turn heaven itself
into a hellish experience. And if that be true, then the task of
rendering someone fit for eternal joy may be far more complicated,
even for an omnipotent being, than one might have imagined. As many
religions including Christianity teach, we must first learn to love
properly before we can experience enduring happiness, and this
requires that we also be purged of all selfish tendencies, all lust
for power over others, every temptation to benefit ourselves at the
expense of others, and anything else that might separate one person
from another. Right here, of course, is where Williams would question
whether a suitably transformed person would be the same individual as
the unperfected person that existed previously. But none of our moral
imperfections, a religious person might retort, can coherently be
numbered among our essential properties--as if we could never
progress morally and never learn to become more loving persons. So
here, perhaps, is the sum of the matter from a religious perspective:
the more self-absorbed we become, the more tedious and dreary our
lives inevitably become over time. But the more outwardly focused we
become in loving relationships, the more joyful and meaningful our
lives also become over time.



In any case, the controversies associated with Williams's
understanding of immortality are also relevant to the problem of evil.
For the same considerations that lead some to wonder whether
immortality would eventually become dreadfully boring may also lead
some of the religious to consider favorably the following hypothesis.
For all we know, an environment such as the one we live in--an
environment in which one encounters real threats and dangers of a
temporary kind, where one person's temporary welfare may depend
upon the choices of others and upon natural forces over which one has
limited or no control, where a quest for truth and genuine discoveries
about the glories of God's creation are possible, and where
moral failure would likely provide ample opportunities for repentance,
forgiveness, and atonement--for all we know, such an environment
is an important part of the process whereby God renders us fit for
eternal joy. Although the problem of evil is the subject of another
entry (see the entry on
 The Problem of Evil),
 the relevant point for the topic of heaven is just this: one need not
think of heaven (or the coming age, as the Gospel writers sometimes
refer to it) as a static ethereal realm in which there is nothing to
do. One might instead suppose that God will never stop creating
additional persons to love and additional realms for us to experience
and that we will always have important roles to play, as Paul hinted
in Ephesians 2:7, in this ongoing process of creation and
revelation.