In a recent post, I suggested (in effect) that the only consistent

response to Calvin's doctrine of limited election is futility and

despair. For according to the Calvinistic doctrine, God has predestined

some of my own loved ones to eternal perdition. In response, Zachary

Haston <haston@leland.stanford.edu> wrote:

>You have committed a serious error here. One can rest assured that they

>[i.e., all of my loved ones] will be raised, but there is NO WAY you can

>tell that another individual will not.

Hmmm. I find myself wondering what my supposed error is here, Zack.

In fact, I'm not altogether sure what you are saying. If all of my

loved ones will be raised, then of course I will never have sufficient

evidence that some of them will not be raised. But so what? How is that

relevant to Calvin's doctrine of limited election?--and how is it

relevant to my criticism of Calvin's doctrine? You go on to say:

>True, I know that some will never be brought to repentance, but I have no

>detailed knowledge of God's plan, no copy of the Lamb's Book of Life, and no

>peephole into the future, and therefore consider everyone potential brothers

>in Christ.

Here, I think, two comments are in order. First, the claim I have made

concerns not the extent of your knowledge, but an implication of

Calvin's theology. According to Calvin, God restricts his mercy to a

chosen few and therefore passes over and rejects some people; these, the

reprobate, are predestined to eternal perdition. So if all of this is

true; and if, following Christ's command, I must eventually learn to love

all of my neighbors even as I love myself, it is bound to turn out that

some of my own loved ones will be numbered among those whom God passes

over and rejects. I can know, therefore, that some of those whom

I now love, or at least some of those whom I must eventually learn to love,

will be lost forever.

Second, it is of no help here to point out that, from Calvin's

perspective, I cannot now know which of my loved ones will eventually be

lost forever. Suppose that a mother knows that one of her six children

has died in a tragic fire. Would you try to console her with the thought

that, for the time being anyway, she remains ignorant of which one it

is? Of course not. So why should any of us find consolation in the

idea that, though some of our loved ones have been predestined to

eternal perdition, we do not yet know which ones they are? How can we

feel anything but futility, I again ask, knowing that God has predestined

some of our dearest loved ones to eternal perdition?--And how can we

genuinely love a God who fails to love (and fails to extend his mercy to)

some of the very ones he has commanded us to love?

-Tom

A word about context: Zachary Haston <haston@leland.stanford.edu> and I
have been discussing the Augustinian doctrine of limited election:
whether such a doctrine can justifiably provide a sense of security, or
whether it must ultimately lead to a sense of futility and despair. I
have argued that the Augustinian cannot reasonably escape futility and
despair; and in support of that contention, I offered an example of a
woman who knows that at least one of her six children has died in a
tragic fire. In a case such as this, I suggested, ignorance of which of
her children might have died would in no way forestall a sense of
futility and despair. By way of a reply, Zack wrote:

>Just to be clear I'll say it one more time. There is no way that a mother
>would know that one, two, any, or none of her children would die. That's way
>too small a scale. In fact there's nothing to keep me (aside from not being
>delusional) from believing that I can move to Los Angelas, launch a mighty
>crusade, and see every person in the city brought to Christ.

I think you have misconstrued the analogy I gave, Zack, no doubt because
I failed to make it sufficiently clear. In my analogy, the woman's
six children represented the world as a whole. So if the woman should
continue to hope that none of her children had died, this would be
analogous to a hope for universal salvation; and alternatively, if she
should believe that at least one of them had died, this would be
analogous to a belief in limited election. Now the doctrine we are
discussing is that of limited election--which implies, in your own words,
that "some people live their whole lives and die on a path straight for
Hell." So if, following Christ's command, I should someday manage to
love all of my neighbors even as I love myself, it would inevitably
turn out that some of them are among those whom God has passed over and
rejected; it would inevitably turn out, in other words, that God has
predestined some of my own loved ones to eternal perdition. And that was
the whole point of the analogy.

Nor do I think you really disagree with me on this, Zack. For as you say
yourself, "I know not who they are [whom God has passed over and
rejected], only that there are" some. So now I must ask again: How can
I genuinely love a God who refuses to love (or to extend his mercy to)
some of my own loved ones? Am I supposed to be grateful to God for
having rejected them? Am I supposed to praise him for it? If I am
grateful to God and do praise him for having rejected them, then in what
sense do I really love them?--and if I am not grateful to God or do not
praise him for having rejected them, then in what sense do I really love
God?

-Tom

In his latest contribution to our discussion of limited election, Zachary
Haston <haston@leland.stanford.edu> made the following important point:

>election does not necessarily mean that every person alive
>today isn't saved (although there are tares in the field, you could argue
>that a particular section doesn't have any in it - but you'd have to come up
>with a purpose for God in this). To make your stretch hold, you would have
>to have loved everyone who has ever lived to know for sure that you were
>loving someone who will spend eternity in Hell.

This is indeed an important point, Zack, and I probably haven't done
justice to it in my previous posts. As I now see more clearly than I
previously did, you think it quite possible that everyone now alive might
be numbered among the elect; hence, I cannot know for sure that any of my
current loved ones will "spend eternity in hell." It is not that you
failed to make this point clear before, or even that I missed it
altogether. But I don't think that, until now, it registered with me as
forcefully as it should have.

Don't you think, however, that you are placing way too much weight upon
our current state of ignorance? Suppose that a child of yours should
turn out to be one of the non-elect. There is, of course, no way at the
present time that you could know for sure whether this is true, but such
a tragic occurrence is, I take it, a genuine possibility on your view.
And even if none of your own children should be included among the
non-elect, presumably each of the non-elect, or at least each of the
non-elect humans, will start out as someone's child. So let us
suppose, for a moment, that you should be one of the unfortunate
parents whose child is not elect. If so, would you not--in the next
life, if not in this one--eventually discover the devastating truth of
the matter? Would you not eventually discover that, from the beginning,
God had always despised and had always rejected your own child? And when
the time of painful discovery finally arrives, of what value then would
your past ignorance be?

Right now, I believe that my two children are healthy and happy. But I
could be wrong about that. It remains possible that right now (even as I
write these words) one of them is being brutally tortured and murdered.
It is possible, in other words, that my belief about my children (and the
happiness it entails) is nothing more than blissful ignorance. And
similarly for any child of mine, or of yours, whom God might already have
despised and already have rejected even before it was born: Our hopes
for the future of such children would rest upon nothing more than a
blissful ignorance of God's true intentions towards them. Is that really
what you want to say?

You go on to write:

>The only ones who end up in Hell are the ones who
>basically actively seek it all their lives. Do I praise God for sending the
>sons of Satan to Hell? You bet.

But don't you see, Zack, that these "sons [and daughters] of Satan," as
you call them, are also our own sons and daughters, our own loved ones?
On your view, remember, the sons and daughters of Satan start out no
differently than do the sons and daughters of God; and on your view, God
could have perfected them just as easily as he does the elect. So the
explanation of why they, unlike the elect, "actively seek" hell "all
their lives" lies in God's refusal to be merciful to them. And that, it
seems to me, brings us right back to the question with which we began
this discussion: If you love someone even as you love yourself, how
could you, at the same time, be genuinely grateful to God, or offer
heartfelt praise to him, for having predestined the object of your love
to eternal perdition? Doesn't the whole thing strike you as a logical
impossibility?

I am reminded, at this point, of St. Paul's remark in Romans 9:3: "For
I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the
sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race." Although some commentators
find this remark worrisome--because, they fear, it would be sincere only
if it also expressed an irrational wish--I see nothing worrisome here at
all. For consider another remark that Paul makes, this time after his
dear friend Epaphroditus had fallen ill: "Indeed he was ill, near to
death, But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also,
lest I should have sorrow on sorrow" (Philippians 2:27). As this text
illustrates, Paul understood clearly that his own interests, even the
conditions of his own happiness, were inseparably linked with the welfare
of his loved ones; indeed, not even God's mercy could reach Paul without
reaching Paul's loved ones as well. So, from that perspective, Paul's
own damnation--being accursed and cut off from Christ--would be no
greater evil than the damnation of those whose welfare was so important
to him.

-Tom


5/12/96, soc.religion.christian: Reply to Zachary Haston

Zachary Haston <haston@leland.stanford.edu> and I have been going back
and forth a bit on the issue of limited election, and in his latest response,
Zach asked:

>How did I ever get dragged into this?

If this is an expression of frustration, Zack, I certainly find it
understandable. These net discussions can easily acquire an inordinate
immediacy, which no doubt explains, in part, some of the sophomoric ways
in which they sometimes play themselves out. For my own part, I am still
trying to figure out how to carry on a fruitful discussion in this
setting and, in particular, how to bring the discussion of a given issue
to a satisfactory close. But one thing already seems clear to me:
In an ongoing discussion group such as this one, none of us can hope to
indulge our natural desire to end a discussion even as we get in the last
word. For the discussion we enter will inevitably continue after we
have dropped out of it.

So I guess this is my way of saying that no one but yourself dragged
you into this discussion, Zack; you did so by articulating a point of
view in a public forum.

As for your latest response on the doctrine of limited election, I
thought that you raised a good many intriguing issues--about original
sin, about fatalism, and even about hell itself--but in truth I saw
nothing that seemed to me particularly relevant to my argument against
limited election. I also have a general complaint--not aimed
specifically at you--about the quotation practices that we see in all of
these newsgroups. Here I have in mind the common practice of taking
someone's original paragraph, breaking it up into a series of small
fragments, perhaps even individual sentences, and then commenting on each
fragment in turn as if it were an isolated unit whose meaning has no
relationship to the context in which it is embedded. The result of such
a practice is almost always, it seems to me, that the point of an
argument gets lost, the discussion becomes more and more diffuse as it
proceeds, and little progress is made in marking out areas of agreement
and disagreement.

Accordingly, instead of merely echoing your own words back at you, I
thought it might be useful to formulate two propositions and then to
invite you, or anyone else who accepts the doctrine of limited election,
to tell me which, if either, of these proposition you want to reject.
Here are the two propositions:

(1) It is logically impossible that God should both love my
daughter and predestine her to eternal perdition;

(2) It is logically impossible that I should both love my
daughter even as I love myself and love a God whom I know
does not love her (but instead despises her).

From these two propositions, we can draw the following inference: If at
any time in the future I should discover that, from the beginning, God
has despised my daughter and has predestined her to eternal perdition,
then (as a matter of logic) I will no longer be in a position to obey the
two great commandments. Either I will not truly love my daughter even as
I love myself; or, if I do continue to love her, I will not love God with
all my heart and all my mind. For if I do continue to love my daughter,
how could I be grateful to God and spontaneously praise him for having
predestined the object of my love to eternal perdition?--and if I become
so calloused towards my daughter as to be grateful to God for having
predestined her to eternal perdition, in what sense then do I truly love
her? The whole thing seems to be a logical impossibility.
So now, Zack, I invite you, or anyone else who accepts the doctrine of
limited election, to tell me which, if either, of the above propositions
you reject, and why. Let's see whether we can figure out where our most
fundamental disagreement lies.

-Tom


5/19/96, soc.religion.christian: Reply to Zachary Haston

Okay, Zack, back to the substance of our discussion. I thought that
your last contribution was an exceptionally clear and honest statement
of your view, and I thank you for it. As you will no doubt recall
(having quoted these very words yourself), I previously had written:
"Let's see whether we can figure out where our most fundamental
disagreement lies." Thanks in large measure to the clarity of your
latest response, we are now, I believe, in a position to do just that.

So here, then, is an attempted summary of your view, as I now understand
it. You hold that God loves (and thus seeks to promote the best
interest of) some created persons, perhaps even a large number, but
not all. For though God loves Jacob, he does not, on your view, love
Esau; to the contrary, he literally hates Esau, along with a good many
others, and has hated all of the non-elect from the beginning of time.
Accordingly, it is at least possible, on your view, that one of your own
loved ones--a child of yours, for example--should be one of the
non-elect: an object of God's "eternal hatred," as the Dutch theologian,
Hermann Hoeksema, would have put it. Of course it is also possible that
you should be one of the non-elect. But if in fact God loves you
whilst hating your child (even as, on your view, he loved Isaac whilst
hating Isaac's child), he will then help you to cope with this tragedy
in the following way: He will so transform your attitudes that you will
no longer love your own child or yearn for the child's redemption; he
will so transform you, indeed, that you will even take pleasure in, and
praise God for, your child's suffering in hell.

Is this a fair description of your view? Because it sounds so harsh and
seems so hard to swallow, I do want to make sure, before proceeding any
further, that you are prepared to accept it.

My own view is, of course, very different from yours. I believe that,
because the very essence of God is love, it is a necessary truth about
the person who is God that he loves every created person, including
Esau, with a perfect form of love. As I see it, then, it is logically
impossible that God should fail to love someone; it is even impossible
that he should love one person, say Esau or Pharaoh, less than he does
another, say Jacob or Moses. Nothing, I would argue, short of a perfect
love for every person is consistent with either (a) the Johannine
declaration that God is love or (b) St. Paul's teaching in Romans 9-11
that God is merciful to all, including the "vessels of wrath made for
destruction."

My purpose here, however, is not to defend my view, but merely to
express it over against yours. It looks as if our most basic
disagreement finally boils down to this question: Does God love all
created persons with a perfect form of love? I say, "Yes," and you say,
"No." Is that how you would assess our most basic disagreement as well?

Now one final point before getting your reaction to my summary of your
view. You asked:

>But just for clarification, is it your position that God sends
>people to Hell whom He loves?

In fairness to you, it is now time for me to put a few more of my own
cards on the table. If you are asking whether, on my view, there is
such a thing as eschatological punishment, otherwise known as hell, and
whether God actually subjects people to such punishment, then the answer
to both questions is, "Yes." But the purpose of punishment is
correction, I would argue, and hell therefore exists for the ultimate
purpose of redeeming those in it. Hell may be the most severe
expression of God's perfecting love, but it remains an expression of
love (and even of mercy) nonetheless.

-Tom


5/22/96, soc.religion.christian: Reply to Zachary Haston

Zack,

Thanks for your latest contribution, and thanks also for informing me of
your travel plans. I'm going to divide my response into two separate
posts. The first will retain the same subject line as before, "Re: Limited
election and futility," but the second will have the new subject line,
"Merciful to all." I'll of course send you copies of both, so you can make
a public reply if you wish. Hope you have a good trip.

In my previous post, I wrote:

>>So here, then, is an attempted summary of your view, as I now understand
>>it. You hold that God loves (and thus seeks to promote the best
>>interest of) some created persons, perhaps even a large number, but
>>not all. For though God loves Jacob, he does not, on your view, love
>>Esau; to the contrary, he literally hates Esau, along with a good many
>>others, and has hated all of the non-elect from the beginning of time.
>>Accordingly, it is at least possible, on your view, that one of your own
>>loved ones--a child of yours, for example--should be one of the
>>non-elect: an object of God's "eternal hatred," as the Dutch theologian,
>>Hermann Hoeksema, would have put it. Of course it is also possible that
>>you should be one of the non-elect. But if in fact God loves you
>>whilst hating your child (even as, on your view, he loved Isaac whilst
>>hating Isaac's child), he will then help you to cope with this tragedy in
>>the following way: He will so transform your attitudes that you will no
>>longer love your own child or yearn for the child's redemption; he will
>>so transform you, indeed, that you will even take pleasure in, and praise
>>God for, your child's suffering in hell.

To be honest, I thought this a very accurate summary of your view, as it
has emerged in our various exchanges. But it is, you said, "seriously
flawed." You give two reasons:

>First I'd like to remind you that we're talking about a hypothetical point
>in the future with me in heaven and my child in hell, so the redemption of
>the child is not possible. We're starting with the basis of there being
>no good in her.
>
>Secondly, let us not forget that while they did just as was planned (cf.
>Acts 4:27-28), and their fall was riches for the world (cf. Romans 11:12),
>Jesus wept over Jerusalem (cf. Mt 23:37). So I would definitely take out
>the phrase "take pleasure in." "Regret" is more along the lines.

The first reason, however, strikes me as irrelevant both to the accuracy
of my description and to the soundness of my argument against limited
election. If I truly love my daughter and she should become, at some
future time, as irredeemable and as wretched as you suppose, that would
only increase the sense of loss and the yearning for what might have
been. A corrupted loved one is, after all, much harder to take than a
corrupted stranger. When the mother of Ted Bundy declared, so
agonizingly and yet so appropriately, her continuing love for her son who
had become a monster, she illustrated the point nicely. And the question
is: How could God's love possibly reach this poor suffering woman unless
it should also find a way to reach (and to transform) her son?

Your second reason, though more relevant to the accuracy of my description,
quite frankly baffles me. If I do not "take pleasure in" the acts of God,
but instead "regret" them and even weep over them even as Jesus wept over
Jerusalem, then in what sense can I be grateful to God, and spontaneously
praise him, for them? How do I manage to be grateful for the very action
of God's that I regret? Your previous answer to such questions was to do
away with the regret--to suggest, for example, that the command to love our
neighbor (not to mention our enemy) "isn't valid for heaven." You even
suggested that it would be a sin to continue to love the lost. But that
answer also carries a price: For if God so transforms Isaac that he no
longer loves Esau, then what motive would remain for regret? And why
shouldn't Isaac take the same pleasure in Esau's damnation, or even Esau's
torment, that he takes in every other action of God's?

May I suggest, as gently as possible, that part of the problem here may be
a reluctance on your part to accept the full implication of your own words?
I say this, in large measure, because of the following remark:

>To start with, we should be in agreement over what "loves" is here. In a
>certain sense, God loves *all*, but that's not what I'm talking about
>here. What I'm talking about is the special relationship He has with His
>children.

Here you seem to be backing away from a proposition to which I thought you
had already agreed; namely,

(1) It is logically impossible that God should both love my
daughter and predestine her to eternal perdition.

For now you seem to suggest that God could indeed predestine my daughter
to eternal perdition and, at the same time, continue to love her in some
recognizable sense of "love." But if that is your view, then you owe us,
I think, at least some explanation of what kind of love this might be.
I explain what I mean by "love" in my summary of your view: God loves
another only if he wills the good for the other and seeks to promote the
other's best interest. If God does not love Esau in that sense, then in
what sense does God love him? And why call it "love" at all?

-Tom