Bertram of Minden, “Creation of the Animals,” from the Grabow altarpiece (1383)
If heaven is fullness of being and the upper limit of human existence, hell may be taken as loss of being and the lower limit. Loss of being need not mean annihilation, but includes every declination from a genuinely personal existence and every divergence from the fulfillment of authentic potentialities for being. Thus hell, like the other eschatological ideas, can stand for a present phenomenon and can in varying degrees be experienced here and now. To talk of hell as a “punishment” is just as unsatisfactory as to talk of heaven as a “reward.” Hell is not some external or arbitrary punishment that gets assigned for sin, but is simply the working out of sin itself, as it destroys the distinctively personal being of the sinner.
Whether in fact anyone ever comes to the point of utterly losing his personal being, or of falling away altogether from the potentialities of such being, may be doubted. If this should happen, then we would be committed to a doctrine of “conditional immortality,” as we have already mentioned. This utter limit of hell would be annihilation, or at least the annihilation of the possibility of personal being. Since salvation is itself personal, and must therefore be freely accepted, God cannot impose it upon anyone, so we must at least leave open the possibility that this kind of annihilation might be the final destiny for some. Yet since we have refused to draw a sharp line between the “righteous” and the “wicked,” and since we have suggested that even for the man made righteous, heaven is not finally attained, but each heaven opens up new possibilities of perfection, so on the other side we seem compelled to say that the sinner never gets to the point of complete loss and so never gets beyond the reconciling activity of God. Needless to say, we utterly reject the idea of a hell where God everlastingly punishes the wicked, without hope of deliverance. Even earthly penologists are more enlightened nowadays. Rather we must believe that God will never cease from his quest for universal reconciliation, and we can firmly hope for his victory in this quest, though recognizing this victory can only come when at last there is free cooperation of every responsible creature.
–John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, Revised Edition, SCM Press: 1977, pp. 366-7.
One of the striking things about this passage is that, although it was written over 30 years ago, Macquarrie barely considers the so-called traditional doctrine of hell to be worth discussing (“Needless to say, we utterly reject…”). Despite all the brouhaha around Rob Bell’s recent book, it’s worth remembering that universalism in some form or another has been a live option in Christian theology for some time. And many of the giants of 20th-century theology (Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, Rahner, Von Balthasar, etc.) seem to have rejected hell, at least if we understand hell as “eternal, conscious torment.” (Did any major theologian of this era defend the traditional view?) This shift was no doubt partly because they all rejected biblical literalism and partly because of a certain moral revulsion toward the traditional view, even though none could be called theological liberals in any straightforward sense. And I would say Macquarrie belongs firmly in this camp too. The fact that Macquarrie dismisses the idea of hell as eternal punishment so readily also suggests that this had become something like a consensus, at least in certain theological circles, by the latter half of the 20th century.
Over at the blog Year of Plenty, Craig Goodwin reviews Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It’s a generally positive review, but at the end Goodwin takes issue with some of Hobgood-Oster’s explanations for our troubled relationship with the animal world:
The references and historical background offered on these key doctrines of the Christian faith are too abbreviated and simplistic. For example I have an entire shelf of my library that is taken up by Karl Barth’s Dogmatics wherein Barth lays out thousands of pages of complex theological perspectives (the joke is that not even Barth read all of Barth.) To sum up Barth’s theology of the atonement in a few paragraphs and to suggest that this is a root cause of the problem is inadequate for the argument being put forth in the chapter.
Hobgood-Oster’s arguments in the concluding chapter regarding the influence of the Enlightenment on the disconnect are much more on target. The quote from Descartes regarding animals as unthinking “automata” is fascinating and informative.
I’d likely agree that Hobgood-Oster’s book, which is pitched toward a popular audience, probably doesn’t do full justice to the nuances of Barth’s doctrine of the atonement. (I don’t have the book in front of me, but I’m willing to agree this is the case.) On the other hand, it’s equally simplistic to blame our history of mistreating animals and neglecting their interests on the Enlightenment, which has in any event become much too convenient a whipping-boy in recent theology.
As Andrew Linzey and others have documented pretty exhaustively, the historical Christian tradition is pretty ambivalent about the status of animals. While there are lots of examples of saints showing compassion to animals and some examples of faith inspiring reform on animals’ behalf, official theology and church teaching have generally taken a much more negative view of non-human animals. Linzey has put a lot of effort into recovering the “animal-positive” aspects of the Christian tradition, but even he admits that this has been an uphill battle. The fact is that for most of its history Christianity has been overwhelmingly concerned with human beings and only tangentially, if at all, with non-humans. Fortunately, both the Christian and Enlightenment traditions have resources that can foster a greater concern for animals’ interests and the place in God’s creation.
…it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel to suppose that, though violence is prohibited in this age, it will be perfectly acceptable in the age to come. The German writer Friedrich Nietzsche called this resentissement, the desire for delayed revenge, the belief that we might have to suffer persecution now, but God will take revenge in the end. The true Christian perception is that the cross of Christ is God’s last word on violence. The divine love will never turn into divine hatred. It will go as far as possible to bring people to divine life, and it will always seek the welfare of every sentient being. And that is the last word.
–Keith Ward, Re-thinking Christianity, pp. 41-42
Interestingly, Ward doesn’t think this rules out the idea of hell, at least in a qualified sense. He says that God cannot force people to embrace the path of love against their will. “[I]t is possible for rational creatures to exclude themselves from love, and therefore from the divine life” (p. 42). As a result, people might find themselves, after death, in a hell of their own making where they experience the consequences of the choices they have made. Nevertheless, he believes that the divine love remains insistent in trying to draw people into repentance, and that such repentance is possible even in hell. “A God of unlimited love would go to any lengths to persuade them to return to the path of eternal life, and to help them on that path” (p. 42).
This sounds similar to the view of hell sketched by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce–people are in hell because they won’t choose to let go of their sins, their hatreds, the resentments. But they could. Purgatory and hell are not two separate realms (as in Dante); the difference is whether one chooses to leave. Lewis also imaginatively depicts God’s grace trying to draw people back. In his telling this takes the form of redeemed humans–usually people that the damned knew in the earthly life–entreating them to come “higher up and further in.”
Where I’m not sure Ward and Lewis would agree is whether there is, at some point, a moment of decision after which one’s eternal destiny is fixed. Both deny that such a moment occurs before death–in both Lewis and Ward post-mortem repentance is a possibility. But Lewis seems more inclined to think that there is a moment when one decides decisively for or against God. (His book is called The Great Divorce, after all.) Ward, on the other hand, seems more optimistic that the divine love will never give up on the unrepentant and that universal salvation is something to be hoped for.
A short addendum on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time: One thing that always makes me happy is when a good book leads me to really want to read other books by citing them. In this case, Hill’s book made me want to track down copies of John A.T. Robinson’s (yes, that John A.T. Robinson) In the End, God and E.P. Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism.
During my vacation I finished Craig Hill’s In God’s Time and wanted to offer some concluding thoughts on it. (See previous posts here and here.)
Hill, wisely in my view, declines to meet the popular “end times” view of conservative dispensationalism on its own turf by countering one proof-text with another. He recognizes that different views of eschatology arise from fundamentally different approaches to the Bible. He names these the “deductive” and “inductive” approaches.
A deductive approach takes it as axiomatic that the Bible is the perfect, inerrant word of God and therefore it provides an internally consistent and true map of the end times. Thus books that may at first blush seem inconsistent (e.g., the gospels, Paul’s letters, and Revelation) are “harmonized,” often in what seem to outsiders as outlandishly complicated or implausible ways. Nothing is allowed to count as counter-evidence to the Bible’s perfect, factual accuracy and consistency.
By contrast, an inductive approach takes the Bible to be a collection of witnesses to God’s self-revelation, but ones that offer complementary–and not always consistent–perspectives on that revelation. The inductive approach begins with the particularity of the varied biblical witnesses and tries to arrive at some general truths. For this view, Jesus Christ always stands “behind” scripture as the ultimate norm, albeit one that we only have access to through the biblical witnesses.
Hill also offers to ways of thinking about how the Bible functions in the life of the believing community. We can think of the Bible as something we must conform to, or we can think of it as something that models the life of faith for us, providing “archetypes of Christian thinking and living” (p. 27).
Recognizing this fundamental division, and taking his stand with an inductive, modeling approach to the Bible, Hill is free to look at the eschatological and apocalyptic texts in the Bible (as well as extra-canonical sources) in all their bewildering diversity. For instance, he points out that the extra-canonical Jewish text I Enoch shares many specific themes with Revelation, and may even have influenced it. In fact, one significant outcome of Hill’s survey is to show how close Jewish and early Christian thinking about the end was. The common assumption that Jesus presented a way of being the Messiah that broke starkly with Jewish messianic expectations overlooks the rich diversity of 1st-century Jewish apocalyptic thought.
Hill also offers close readings of Daniel and Revelation itself, as well as a survey of Paul’s thought on eschatology, and a succinct, but convincing, rebuttal to historical Jesus scholars (e.g., the Jesus Seminar) who seek to “de-eschatologize” Jesus.
The upshot is that these visions of God’s ultimate victory are both rooted in a specific historical context (a hostile Roman Empire in the case of Revelation) and also convey profound theological truths that have application beyond that context. Hill thus seeks to avoid the extremes of viewing the text as only of historical interest or as something that is speaking exclusively about some future time (usually the interpreter’s own).
This plurality of images can play itself in a variety of ways within Christian thought; Hill notes particularly the tension between future and realized eschatologies in the New Testament, and the theologies, forms of church, and social ethics that tend to go with them. He sees this division working itself out within Paul’s thinking–which oscillates between a theology of the cross that sees Christian life as one of patient suffering while holding to a future expectation of fulfillment and a theology of glory (my term, not Hill’s) that is more optimistic about the possibilities for transformed human life here and now.
Hill concludes that the Bible “provides us with numerous models of hopeful expectation,” which should caution us “against holding too-certain ideas about what lies ahead” (p. 197).
At its core, eschatology is about the character of God. If God can be trusted, then the future can be trusted with God. (p. 197)
While we should sit loose to the details of what God’s ultimate victory will look like, our vocation is clear: it’s “insofar as possible, to bring the eschatological future into the present” (p. 197). This is the polar opposite of the attitude (in)famously displayed by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior James Watt, who said that there was no point in protecting the environment or conserving nature since Jesus was coming back soon anyway. On the contrary, says Hill: it’s precisely the eschatological message and mission of Jesus that provide the urgency to the call to discipleship. Because God is “making all things new,” we are called to live into that new future.
(See my previous post on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time.)
Hill goes on to identify some of the obstacles to a retrieval of eschatology for non-fundamentalist Christians. While he recognizes that significant work has been done in recent theology to put eschatology back at the center of the faith (he cites Moltmann and Pannenberg among others), he also notes the ongoing scholarly efforts to drive a wedge between the historical Jesus and the eschatological outlook of the New Testament. Hill also observes, “I have heard hundreds of Sunday-morning sermons in ‘mainline’ churches; I cannot recall one that dealt squarely with the subject of the future” (p. 7).
Nevertheless, the problem isn’t just academic fashion, embarrassment, or the fact that preachers have other favorite topics. There are real differences between us and the first few generations of Christians that make it difficult for us to inhabit New Testament eschatology in any straightforward way. These differences fall broadly under the umbrella of reconciling faith with science.
Early Christian hopes were expressed in ways that assumed that the earth was the center of a relatively small universe, that it had existed for at most a few thousand years, and that prior to “the fall” humanity and creation existed in a state of sinless harmony. Within this framework, it was relatively straightforward to imagine what “a new heaven and a new earth” meant. But many of us at least no longer share these views, and it’s unclear how or whether a belief in the triumph of God’s purposes can be re-expressed in ways more consistent with a contemporary world-view. Hill also cites the fact that many early Christians, including Paul, and possibly even Jesus himself believed–mistakenly as it turns out–that the world would end in their lifetime. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to jettison the whole idea?
The problem with that move is that eschatology is “basic” to Christian faith. To get rid of it would undermine the entire structure. He points out that Christianity without eschatology wouldn’t really be Christianity at all, since Jesus, if he was not raised, would not be the Christ, but at best an inspiring ethical teacher and social reformer. Moreover, Jesus’ ethic itself was eschatologically grounded and not obviously valid as a free-floating ethical system: “because the coming reign of God has a certain character and value, says Jesus, one would be sensible to respond to it in certain specific ways” (p. 8).
Instead of abandoning eschatology, we need to reevaluate it, starting with coming to grips with the history, purpose, and context of eschatological thought in the Bible. That’s the task Hill turns to next.
No, this isn’t a riff on Rob Bell’s latest book. The expression is Craig Hill’s two-word summary of what eschatology is all about in his book In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (published in 2002). Hill is a professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, and his book is an attempt to counter the lurid fantasies of popular Left Behind-style apocalyptic thinking with a more biblically informed view.
Regarding the meaning of eschatology, Hill writes:
When all is said and done…the essential point of eschatology is quite simple. In two words: God wins. God’s purposes ultimately will succeed; God’s character finally will be vindicated. At heart, all eschatologies are responses if not quite answers to the problem of evil. Are injustice, suffering, and death the final realities in our world? Is human history, both individual and corporate, purposeful? Is all this talk about the goodness, love, and justice of God just pie in the sky? Eschatologies differ in how they conceptualize God’s triumph, but they are essentially alike in asserting God’s victory as the supreme reality against which all seemingly contrary realities are to be judged. (p. 4)
Echoing Karl Barth, Hill insists that Christianity is “irreducibly eschatological.” He is thus taking issue not only with the eschatological views of Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, and their ilk, but also with liberal Christians who downplay, or deny altogether, the eschatological significance of Jesus and his mission. (I suspect he has in mind here Jesus Seminar types.) We might also add theologians who qualify God’s power to such a degree that God’s victory is no longer assured.
Hill maintains that the heart of Christianity is eschatological because it is based on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
In his resurrection, the early Christians saw the vindication of Jesus, who despite crucifixion was shown to be God’s Messiah. Even more, they saw in his resurrection the vindication of God. All of this talk of future hope, of God’s final justice and triumph, really is true. They knew it would happen to them because they had already seen it happen to Jesus. (p. 5)
As we’ve recently seen, it’s easy for Christians of a more moderate or liberal bent join their secular friends in mocking Rapture believers and the like. But what’s not easy, as Hill shows, is to separate Christianity from eschatology altogether, even though there are many ways of conceptualizing it. Mainline Christians tend to be uncomfortable discussing things like the end of the world and life after death. these things are inseparable from what we believe God is like and whether God will “win” in the sense that the divine purposes will ultimately triumph over sin, suffering, and death.
A Thinking Reed 