The decline of hell

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Faith

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The idea that we can believe what we like is deeply rooted in our society as part of our fundamental freedom. I doubt many of us wish to return to the time when uttering a word of sedition against the monarch or the Established Church could land you in chokey. In that sense the answer to the question of whether it matters what we believe is that it does not. On the other hand, it clearly does matter – were it not so, politicians and advertisers would not spend fortunes trying to win our support. Belief has consequences.

One of the things we used to hear from the pulpit was that one of the consequences of sin was hell-fire. If I were ever tempted to write about the last fifty years, I’d call it ‘the decline of hell’. I recall being told many years ago by a priest in the Church of England that he thought the whole idea of such preaching was a bad thing. It was, he argued, better to stress God’s love than to dwell on hell. I agreed with him about God’s love, but didn’t about hell.

The emphasis on God’s love has often led, as it did with Origen, toward a form of universalism – that is the belief that all shall be saved. The discussion we had earlier this week about predestination was, in part, a debate about whether a merciful and loving God can make folk who are bound for hell. It was, in part, the old Calvinistic idea of predestination which made some reluctant to preach about hell-fire, but if we reject the notion that it is God who condemns us to hell in favour of the idea that it is we who do so by rejecting Him and His love, then it becomes incumbent upon us to mention hell occasionally.

There is a consequence to rejecting God and His love. Christ Himself tells us about hell and that those who reject Him will be consigned there. Of course, if we want to advance the argument (not often heard in mainstream Christian circles now) that only members of our own communion will go Heaven, then we are bound to expect a back-lash from the rest of Christianity. But what if we take the view that those who confess Christ are in with a chance? If we were to do that, we’d open a space to talk about what happens to those who reject Him.

Note that this is not about those who do not know or who have not had a chance of knowing Him. In the beginning and the end everything is, as Jess implied this morning, Grace. But I do wonder whether we have not gone far too far in the direction of stressing God’s love and not done enough to warn of the consequences? That is not to argue we should believe because we are frightened of hell, but it is to say that if we believe it exists, we are under an obligation to say something about it.

What sort of Predestination?

12 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Faith, Salvation

≈ 15 Comments

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Christianity, controversy, Grace, Predestination

From the beginning Christians have recognised there is an issue with Grace. We can in no way be said to deserve Grace, neither can we somehow wrench it from God by being very good and meriting it as a reward for our behaviour; but do we believe in God because we can do no other, or because we decide, of our own free-will to make that commitment? If it is the latter, then is there not a sense in which, by making that act of faith, we are in fact taking the kingdom of Heaven by storm? This was the problem highlighted in the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius in the early fifth century.

Do we read the passages about Predestination to mean that whilst Jesus died for all men, and all have a chance to embrace Him, some will not; or do we read them as meaning that Jesus died only for those predestined from before all ages? Do we believe in a God who offers all men salvation, and those who reject His offer cast themselves from His presence and into hell; they have chosen to reject the salvation provided for all; they have chosen, of their own free will, to reject Him and to do what is evil in His sight. Or do we believe in a God who condemns to hell those he could so easily have saved, but whom, by His arbitrary will He chose for that fate. They can see and hear the message of Christ, but they cannot truly accept it? The last seems to me a hellish doctrine and in feeling so, I react rather as Pelagius did when reading Augustine claiming:

“All my hope is nowhere but in thy exceeding great mercy. Give what thou commandest and command what thou wilt. Thou enjoinest continence on us and ‘when I knew,’ says someone, ‘that no man can be continent unless God give it, this also was a part of wisdom to know whose gift she is’ (Wisd. 8:21). By continence indeed we are bound up and brought back into the One, whence we were dissipated into the many. For he loves thee too little who loves anything with thee, which he does not love because of thee. O love that burns and art never extinguished, O charity, my God, set me aflame. Thou commandest continence: give what thou commandest and command what thou wilt.

Pelagius read this as a denial of man’s free will. Pelagius did not think that man inherited the sin of Adam, or that his will was so decayed that he could make no good choices; man could, with God’s help, stay free of sin. These teachings were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. In his fight against Pelagius, Augustine, who had himself championed man’s free-will, moved into positions from which others have constructed a God who makes men for condemnation.

St Paul wrote about a God:^‘Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.’ St John was equally clear:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

There is therefore a mystery here – what form of Predestination is compatible with a God who died so that all sinners might seek redemption through Him?

Predestination: pursued by a bear

11 Saturday May 2013

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Faith

≈ 26 Comments

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Christianity, controversy, Predestination

Never let it be said that I’m unwilling to deal with some big topics. We’ve spent a bit of time on Purgatory, and now we’re going to have a go at Predestination; and perhaps as a compensation for those Catholics irritated by my views on Purgatory, my views on predestination will annoy the blazes out of many Calvinists; if, as our chum qvc keeps claiming, I am a heretic, I can claim to be the heretic’s heretic on this one.

The great verses used by Calvinists to justify their claim that before we were made God foredestined some of us for Him and some for the fiery pit are Romans 8:29-30:

²⁹For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

³⁰Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified

and Ephesians 1:3-6 which include:

⁴According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:

⁵Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,

There you go, pretty clear, unless you know you are one of the elect, you aren’t. Well, whoopy-do, you may as well go away and sin as much as you like, because that proves you aren’t among the elect, as you are going to be frying in the afterlife, you may as well have a hell of a time before you get to hell in the afterlife ain’t nuthing you can do boy.

Now I have to say that if I don’t care a bundle for purgatory, I can at least see its point and how, read as the Catholics here have explained (hat tip to Chalcedon and Servus Fidelis), it fits with a merciful God. Predestination on the Calvinist model here is an abomination. We are asked to believe in a God who deliberately makes people who will not be saved. Makes a total nonsense of free will and the lives of most of us.

You can, of course, soften it up and say that if you believe in Christ then you’re among the elect, but we then get into the ‘no true Scotsman fallacy’. So, if you think you are among the elect and go round killing folk, you’re not, even if you think you are.

And what is God’s motive? ‘He chooses some and ignores others not because of what the person has done, or what is foreknown that he would do, but simply because of God’s sovereign choice’. So, if I am not among the elect, I am fodder for hell, just because – hey, God felt like it that day. This is parallel with the argument I am having with qvc who seem to think the Jews of old were right when they had God killing little children with the aid of two bears just because they mocked that bald old coot Elisha. There are times I can understand why some atheists think Christianity beyond contempt. A God who really did these things would be a capricious tyrant, and frankly, would be behaving in a manner which in a human would be contemptible.

So, what does all this stuff mean if not what the old Calvinists claim?