Theology Corner

You and me both, brother. Nothing can snap a recent convert out of his faith quicker than reading the bloodbath in the book of Joshua, for example.

There are five possible general responses to a Christian reading about the blood-thirstiness of the God in the Old Testament. The first is to reject the whole thing as a human invention, as the honest atheist must do. The second is to reject part of what the Bible says as human invention, and accept part as divinely inspired. The third is to excuse the shocking behavior of God by finding some reasonable justification. The fourth is to bow to the apparent injustice with piety, and say we do not understand God’s ways. The fifth is to say the Old Covenant with the Jews necessitated cruel laws and cruel enforcement, and that the New Covenant with Christ is more merciful.

There are problems with each of these approaches.

The fifth supposes a changing or evolving God or an evolving conception of God: the problem with an evolving God is that an evolving object is not perfect, cannot be used as a standard, and is whimsical. How can it be lawful for St. Paul to eat pork and unlawful for Moses?

(Please note this problem applies to any concept of an evolving standard, not just a Christian concept. The honest Marxist thrown back in time to the Dark Ages would be required to be a pro-Capitalist, because the ‘evolving standards’ of Marxism list Capitalism as a necessary historical stage to follow Feudalism. A standard that evolves is not a standard; a God that evolves is not a God.)

The fourth is unsatisfying to any thoughtful man, perhaps even an offense again reason: it is, in effect, asking men to trust rather than ponder.

The third would depend on a case by case examination of each enormity: but the problem is that it would be special pleading—why is it just for God to smite Sodom but unjust for the Romans to do the same thing to Carthage?

The third approach also raises Euthyphro’s paradox: Is righteousness loved by the gods because it is right? Or is it righteous because it is loved by the gods?

The second opens a Pandora’s Box of conflicting interpretations. In effect, accepting parts of the Bible as authentic and inspired and rejecting other parts as text corrupted by humans runs the serious risk of having each believer merely write his own version of the Bible in his imagination, tempting him to quote only those passages out of context that support his own particular opinions.

The first is satisfying to the intellect, but does not satisfy the spiritual hunger or supernatural insight, whatever it may be, that led the believer toward Christianity in the first place. One is left wondering how and why intelligent people like CS Lewis could lend this efforts to supporting a creature as monstrous as the slayer of all the first born children of Egypt, or the whole world of Noah (and Lewis was a intelligent—even his enemies must admit that a professor at Oxford and Cambridge was literate).

But if one rejects God utterly, what is one left with? The honest atheist is left staring into the grave that has been dug to receive him without hope: the blind idiot universe, dying of entropy, is certainly not any more just than the cruel God of the Old Testament. One can drink with Omar Kayyam, lolling with one’s head in the lap of a toothsome damsel, and toasting with strong wine the fate that comes to consume and destroy you; or one can commit suicide with Cato of Utica, living by stern and unflinching precepts while life lasts, and accepting inevitable death with the fortitude of a philosopher.

If the doctrine of Hell offends you, if the injustice of God offends you, it would be better for you to read Tom Paine’s AGE OF REASON and be a Deist, rather than to fall back into the cold, cheerless, hopeless world of the atheist.

I am not a theologian, and am not studied in the particular questions that vex Christian thinkers. I am a philosopher, and so can only speak in general terms about the basic questions. If God is unjust, our only honorable course is to defy Him and be destroyed; an act that would require the fortitude of Lucifer. Drawing back from that appalling possibility, let us assume as an axiom that God is just. If we take it as an axiom that God is just, it follows that any reports of acts of injustice are either not unjust or are not acts of God.

The first thing to recall is that human conceptions of justice change in some respects from time to time and nation to nation, but in other respect remain the same. The general consensus of justice that springs from the Christian world-view, which is not present in the Old Testament (at least, until Isaiah) is that justice is individual. Modern Christians hold it as wrong to punish the sons for the behavior of the fathers, or to punish the nation for the misbehavior of the rulers: the idea of collective or vicarious guilt runs counter to the basic precept of justice common to all men—one ought not to punish the innocent.

Unfortunately, in life, it is not even theoretically possible to punish the guilty without punishing the innocent. The Nazis had young children: if you shoot a Nazi to save a Jew, you make a German child, who has done no wrong at all, into an orphan. If you don’t shoot the Nazi, then the Jew dies a horrible death. If you throw a man in jail for the most just of reasons, you leave his family to earn a living without him.

Christians believe in the paradox of vicarious punishment. We believe Christ stood in our place and took the penalty our sins earned, and paid in blood for our wrongs. In a universe where vicarious mercy is possible, vicarious justice must also logically be possible: each sin consents to and participates in the original sin of Adam.

A man who as an iron-hard notion of justice must reject with disgust the idea of vicarious crimes of Adam and vicarious salvation by Christ: but, on the other hand, no mother with the heart of a mother can help but wish that she could do herself what Christ did, and stand in the place of her suffering child, and take his pain in his stead and spare him. Logically, if the wish that nature plants in the heart of every mother with a suffering child could be satisfied, then the paradox of vicarious punishment must be accepted. If you believe men are as corrupt and wicked as Christian pessimism paints us, or if you have read any history books and have seen the corruption and wickedness of men, you must abandon and iron-hard notion of justice, lest you and your loved ones be condemned by it. Even the most beautiful things of this Earth, the greatest nations, the most just of men, participate in, or benefit from, wicked crimes: David was an adulterer, Solomon an idolater, Socrates a sodomite, Lancelot a traitor, Cato a suicide. Washington a slave-owner and so was Trajan. These are noble men, lawgivers, kings, philosophers, and they include the best and greatest our race has produced.

My child is an innocent as spring rain; but if my fathers committed any act of crime, let us say, to rob Indians of their land, or to drive slaves to work it, the wealth my sons will inherit is tainted with blood. Where is iron-hard justice now? Must the innocent be dispossessed?

Young men of high hearts and high ideals love iron-hard justice, for young men of high ideals love all things clean and pure. Old men love mercy, for it rare and precious, and they see their own sins, and the sins of their loved ones, and they quail to think what iron-hard justice would owe them.

The horrid paradox, then, is that the wrathful God of the Old Testament shows us the face of divine justice: and it smites the whole people, not each individual separately, because we are not as isolated and separate as we think we are. Love binds together families and nations, or ought to; patriotism binds kings and peoples, or ought to. No king is king without the consent of the governed; they pay his taxes and carry out his orders; if we live in a universe where the blessings of good government can be shared with the people, then we live in a universe where the cursed earned by the iniquity of bad government likewise fall upon the people. Speaking as a man who has received untold and unspeakable blessing from the Founding Fathers of an especially well-governed nation, the best institutions of government in history, I cannot in justice excuse myself from any general punishment that befalls this nation for our sins, which, unfortunately, are many and very egregious.

But I see I have wandered far from your questions. Let me in all fairness try to answer them more particularly. You mention several specifics that shock the conscience:

“Yahweh’s attempted murder of Moses”

 Circumcision is symbolic of the acceptance of God’s law, and is for the Jews what baptism is for Christians, a sign of the covenant. God was coming to kill Moses precisely because we are talking about real life, not some fairy-tale. In real life, all men, sons of Adam, are mortal. God is coming to kill all of us. It is not until and unless we accept His covenant, and keep His laws, that there is even the possibility of an escape for us. The point of the passage here is to show that even the noblest and best of men, a prophet like Moses, cannot of his own merit escape death without God’s covenant.

I am not a theologian, but my answer here is that I would not read that passage literally.  It was a story meant to impress the arrogant that they are not immune from God’s law any more than Moses was.

“Thou Shalt Not Murder; Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live”

Sorry, I am a lawyer. I do not see any contradiction in outlawing murder and proscribing a death penalty for poisoners. We are not talking about friendly new-age Wicca here. If you object to this, you have to object to all laws whatsoever: the act of law-making assumes that the sovereign may punish scofflaws.

“Yahweh’s tizzy over a census being taken while David was king.. Or is there something evil about taking a census i’m not aware of? does going around the neighborhood asking people their age, sex, occupation and counting heads call forth the legions of Hell? Does it start to crack the ice encasing Satan? What? What’s so horrible about a census?”

The passage in question reads:

“ And David said to Joab and to the rulers of the people, Go, number Israel from Beersheba even to Dan; and bring the number of them to me, that I may know it. And Joab answered, The LORD make his people an hundred times so many more as they be: but, my lord the king, are they not all my lord’s servants? why then doth my lord require this thing? why will he be a cause of trespass to Israel?” (1Ch 21:2-3)

Yahweh repeatedly granted victory in battle to the weaker side, if the weaker side put their trust in Him and not in their own numbers. Joshua at Jericho, Gideon being told to reduce the size of his army, Jehosephat in the wilderness of Tekoa, David against Goliath, all overcame their enemies not through strength of arms, but through straight of faith, which is stronger than arms. David’s numbering his armed men (which might seem a perfectly prudent think for any king with a commissary to plan to do) in this case, according to the Chronicler, was an act of arrogance: an unwillingness to rely entirely on God.

It was not a census such as our Constitution calls for, nor was the composition of his army a modern army. It was not “… does going around the neighborhood asking people their age, sex, occupation and counting heads …” It was, instead, gathering an enumeration of soldiers such as ancient kings in the middle east were wont to do before committing to invasion, or to boast on public monuments about their strength.

“How do you consider Hell to be Just?”

Unfortunately, I do.

Hell is exactly what human beings deserve because hell is what we create for ourselves in the absence of a redeeming goodness. The good things life on Earth, those things that are a source of abiding joy, are things like marriage, a sacrament, and childbirth, a miracle. Those things are from God. Let us suppose that God, in His terrible justice, granted to each of us exactly what we asked: those who reject God asked to be left alone. In His terrible justice, He leaves us alone. What would the place where there is no God be like? Look at Soviet Russia. Look at a Nazi concentration camp. Then remove from those places those spiritual things that make life bearable, those things creatures without souls do not understand: remove pity, compassion, marriage, friendship, family; remove honor and remove honesty. Humans, left to ourselves without God, would make of this world a concentration camp with even a Schindler.

I pray that all the Church Fathers are merely wrong, and that there is no Hell. I pray that the mercy of Christ can extend even to those who steadfastly reject and hate His mercy. It is merely that, logically, I do not see how this is possible. If there is a Hell, the decision whether to accept Christ’s mercy is a real decision with real consequences. If there is a God, and if there is such a thing as free will, what can God do to those who reject Him aside from depart from them?

Hell is not a place, because spirits are mental entities that do not occupy time and space. No more than you can point to a thought, or a concept, can you point to a spirit, or say it has size, shape, mass. Hell is the vacuum of goodness, of life, of godliness, into which the disbeliever plunges himself. Hell is the despair of eternity for those who reject eternity. When you depart from eternity, where else is there to go?

We don’t think of God as merely a person. He is goodness itself. He is light. If you reject goodness, you are left without the good. If you reject light, you are in darkness. Would that it could be some other way.

There are denominations, I should mention, that depart from tradition, and announce that there is no Hell. It would be more prudent for you to join one of those denominations, just in case Pascal’s God does exist, than to be caught up in ponderings of divine justice, and reject the grail of life eternal.

“How is it showing that God is Just?”

I suppose it depends on your definition of justice. The possibilities of life after death are only three: (1) that our spirits are mortal, we die at death and we dissolve into oblivion like the beasts; (2) that our spirits are eternal, and we are trapped in an eternal return, a cycle of reincarnation without end, life without end, suffering without end; (3) that our spirits are eternal, and suffering ends but life does not end.

The noble Buddhist conception allows for Possibility (3) extended over many myriads of lifetimes, until one finally achieves the bliss of Nirvana; the Christian conception allows for only one life, albeit the Catholics allow for a Purgatory to carry out unfulfilled penances or oaths.

(One reason why I am a Christian and not a Buddhist is that their nirvana sounds suspiciously like the oblivion of possibility (1), something that extinguishes the soul and the self. However, I have not looked in Buddhism as closely as I ought: I would be delighted to discover that Christ made some provision for their salvation as well. I am frankly unconcerned with the possibility that I lived many past lives: this one I must live as if it is my last, as if it were important, as if my determination to live as an obedient Christian were crucial, and not merely a drop in an ocean of endless lives and endless suffering.)

But not to meander from my point: I can see why some might object that a Final Judgment following possibility (3) is unjust. But I cannot see why the other two options are more just: indeed, they both posit either eternal nonbeing or eternal woe, no matter whether one is good or bad.

The Hindu allow that one may rise in the ranks of sufferers, so that one can be sad with the sorrows of a king, rather than sad with the sorrows of a peasant, but in the grand scheme of things, compared to perfection in bliss, Buddha was right to condemn the whole system of Karma as an endless wheel of pain.

Basically, Hell is just because no other possibility is logically possible granted a perfectly just creator and a perfectly unjust mankind.

“why does any mortal human being deserve eternal punishment?”

Do we deserve eternal bliss? That is the only other option.

“Saying that the soul is eternal doesn’t help because any soul has been tied to a mortal body, and that mortal body is only capable of temporal crimes, not eternal ones. We all die, and similarly all of the crimes that we’ve committed while living die with the passing of time. They fade out of memory. Who remembers anything about the crimes of the average ancient Roman or Greek? Some people might have an inkling if they’ve immersed themselves in the classics as you have; but even that is fragmentary at best. Who, ultimately, is there left to be offended except God?”

To the contrary. Saying the soul is eternal answers your question. A finite term of penalty, no matter how long, is one an infinite and eternal soul can hold in scorn. No matter how long, it is as nothing to him in the long run. One second of pain is as nothing to a creature who lives seventy years. A million seconds are likewise as nothing to a creature who lives seventy millions of years. Multiply that my any magnitude you like. If the punishment time is finite, proud Satan can serve his time in prison standing on his head, and emerge from the fire as unrepentant and scornful as ever, and then receive the same infinite bliss that the martyrs earned with all their heroic stoicism.  Where is the justice in that?

You are not mortal. I am not mortal. None of us are mortal. Those Greeks and those Romans, and their victims, are still around. They are simply not on Earth. We are immortal. If we do not forgive the crimes done to us, the wounds done to us, our hate will endure for ever. That is Hell. If we forgive, that is Heaven. There is, in the long run, no third option.

“How is it just to punish a person, any person, an infinite amount of time when they have only a finite existence during which they can earn this punishment?”

I don’t understand the question. We are not talking about a penance, where a person serves a certain amount of time in order that, at a later time, he might show improvement. We are talking about the condition that eternal souls will occupy for eternity.

Let us say Hitler only committed genocide on a finite number of Jews. His offense against them, if he were going to do penance for it, might be a large number of years, perhaps in proportion to some number of his victims and their widows and orphans, and the suffering he caused. This is what in law we call a tort: an offense against a private person. But Hitler also offended the sovereign by breaking the King’s peace. There is not just a lawsuit involved, but also a criminal offense. The law against murder is not a human invention: it is a matter of categorical logic. A categorical imperative, one might say. It is an eternal law. For how long should a man who breaks an eternal law, and who does not repent, but rejoices in his deed, be punished? The punishment should exist at least as long as the sin exists in the soul: indeed, divine judgment might be nothing more than the externalization of the internal pain of the sin itself. If you do not reject it, if you continue to love your sins more than you love your life, God, in His terrifying mercy, grants you your wish, and marries the unjust to their sins as He marries the saints to their salvation.

“If God is so angered and opposed to any particular damned soul, why couldn’t he just dissolve them into nothing? He brought the souls into existence out of nothing; why not also send them back to nothing if they are irredeemable, rather than tormenting them eternally?”

The unjust would rejoice at that, I must say. It is the suicide-bomber’s dream: to kill, and to put oneself instantly beyond all retribution! Anyone with the courage of a samurai, anyone willing to accept death as the price, could carry out whatever crimes of hate his maddened soul could prompt him to, and escape divine judgment.

But to answer you question: me, I do not think God can abolish souls into nonbeing any more than He can dissolve eternal justice into nothingness. God is what He is: He is being itself, He is existence, the necessary being. Everything else fades, is corrupted, is consumed by entropy: God is eternal.

We are His children, hence we cannot be anything but eternal as well. He could not make us His children and make us capable of dissolution into oblivion, because then He has not given us all the blessings we can receive. If He merely created mortal children that can die into nothingness, He has kept back some part of His love, and kept to Himself some of the storehouse of honors and treasures with which it is His pleasure to anoint us.

Allow me to speculate, but I must say again, that what I am expressing is my own opinion, my own musings, not received doctrine. I speak only for myself:

The reason why we sons of Adam live under such a dire penalty as the threat of hellfire is that we are great and splendid beings, creatures more noble than the entire sidereal universe. Look at the night sky: see the endless galaxies! They are rubbish: they will age and die and we will outlive them. Even the most wretched beggar in a ditch is worth more than all the gemmed wonders of earth and sky; we are more than the superclusters beyond Hercules, and more grand. We are the princes of eternity, you and I. With this awe-inspiring glory  comes awful responsibility. Logically, there is no third possibility: immortal bliss is not possible without immortal unbliss. God Himself cannot do what cannot logically be done: He cannot both make us immortal, and, in the same time and the same sense, make us able to dissolve into our elements.

“Does actually putting numbers to eternity give you pause, and realizing that the numbers never fully express just how much torment each damned soul will suffer?”

The numbers do not beguile as much as you might think, because there is no comparison possible between infinity and any finite value howsoever high.

Let me see if I can make this clear: the saints will enjoy eternal and infinite bliss. Hence, anyone excluded from that suffers an infinite amount of depravation, even if he were reincarnated forever into very comfortable circumstances. The only way to make the contrast tolerable, even for an instant, is to erect a material world and a material life where the bliss and blessings of heaven are hidden from our direct sight. One wonders why God is so obscure, so hard to understand, so hard to see: but I am a man who saw Him, if only in a vision. Words cannot express the transcendent ecstasy: this present life is already Hell, compared to that. Compared to infinite light, any finite light is indistinguishable from darkness.

Do you understand? It is God’s generosity, His blessedness, His love that makes this grim doctrine of damnation seem so real to me: if He is to reward the faithful with infinite, endless bliss, life everlasting, then whatever is reserved for the faithless is infinitely less than that.

“Does any human crime merit that?”

Mine do, I’m afraid.

Try to imagine what a glorious thing a human soul is, how bright, how perfect, how angelic. To mar such fair perfection is unforgivable.

The crime is not that I steal or rob or lie. The crime is that God gave me a soul and I corrupt and ruin it, I make it ugly. I do it every day, practically every hour. A soul is an immortal thing, an eternal thing. I am making an eternal thing corrupt and vile: that is an infinite crime.

Perhaps you cannot see the beauty in your own soul. Look into the face of a benevolent baby, and you can catch a glimpse of what innocence is, what heaven is.

It is not the divine justice of sending men to Hell I have trouble explaining. It is the divine mercy of uplifting men to Heaven I cannot explain. I can only wonder, and worship, speechlessly.