Hell, justice, and freedom

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Volumn 43, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 69-86

  Seymour, Charles ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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EID: 54749148655     PISSN: 00207047     EISSN: 15728684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1003075721992     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Thomas Talbott, 'Providence, freedom, and human destiny', Religious Studies 26 (1990): 239-241.
2. Marilyn McCord Adams, 'The problem of hell: A problem of evil for Christians', A reasoned faith, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 313-314.
3. William Lane Craig, '"No other name": A middle knowledge perspective on the exclusivity of salvation through Christ', Faith and Philosophy 6 (1989): 172-188. Unlike Talbott and Adams, Craig defends the doctrine of hell.
4. Augustine, The City of God, Book 21, ch. 17, trans. John Healey, ed. R. V. G. Tasker (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 339.
5. As Thomas Flint pointed out to me, not all everlasting punishments are infinite. To see this, consider the following example. Let punishment be measured by the 'pain-hour' unit, obtained by multiplying the intensity of pain by the number of hours that intensity of pain is suffered. If a mild itch produces one unit of pain, then to feel that itch for an hour would be a punishment of one pain-hour. If the damned experienced one thousand pain-hours of punishment the first hour, five hundred the next, two hundred fifty the third hour, and so on everlastingly, then the total amount of punishment approaches the finite amount of two thousand pain-hours. The punishment is finite, yet it lasts forever. So not all everlasting punishments are infinite. In response, it may first be questioned whether there is not a smallest conceivable pain of intensity N. If there is then such geometrically decreasing series of pains are impossible. Secondly, I define hell below as 'an everlasting period of existence, each of whose moments is on the whole bad'. But there is some minimum degree of suffering necessary to make any moment on the whole bad. Let that minimum degree of pain be N. In the scenario envisaged above, the damned experience 1000 pain-hours, then 500, then 250, then 125, then 62.5, then 31.25, etc. At some point in time the degree of suffering will fall below N, and from that point forward life will not be on the whole bad for the damned. They will no longer exist in hell, which contradicts the everlasting nature of damnation.
6. Of course the premise could be true in an Ockhamite sense; perhaps God's choosing an action makes it just, rather than God's choices being restricted to what is necessarily just. In this case, however, premise (2) would not be known to be true with respect to God. If God chooses to punish finite sins with infinite punishment, doing so is for Him just. Therefore an Ockhamite interpretation of (8) defuses the argument (8) is supposed to support.
7. Jerry Walls, Hell: The logic of damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 12-14.
8. Jonathan Kvanvig, The problem of hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 20, 71, 102.
9. For those interested in the rationale underlying this definition, I offer an explanation. First, everlasting unhappiness must be thought to be both logically and epistemically possible, for a convinced naturalist, to whom it is most implausible to attribute belief in hell, could believe that there is nothing logically inconsistent in the idea. Even a theist might allow the logical possibility of hell while denying its actuality; he might base this denial on a private mystical experience, or a certain reading of religious texts, or simply groundless optimism. Such a theist would no more believe in the doctrine of hell than the convinced naturalist. Hell must be an epistemic possibility; that is, it must be a live option for belief; it cannot be strongly disbelieved. Second, I say the unhappiness envisaged must be everlasting rather than eternal. In much philosophical theology the word 'eternal' is used to describe an existence outside of time, and 'everlasting' describes an infinitely extended existence in time. As Peter Geach points out, it does not make much sense to say that we, who now exist in time, will after death come to be timeless. What is timelessly true is, of course, unchanging. If our existence in heaven and hell is time-less, then it is an unchanging truth that we exist in heaven or hell. But this cannot be an unchanging truth, since we have not yet arrived at our afterlife destination. It is not now true that we exist in heaven or hell, but it will be true sometime after our death. See Peter Geach, Providence and evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 130-132. Clearly, then, our life after death will be, strictly speaking, everlasting rather than eternal. Finally, I claim that hell is an everlasting existence each of whose moments is on the whole bad, for an everlasting existence which was on the whole bad could have moments or even long stretches of bliss, but such a life would not be strictly speaking hellish.
10. Augustine, The City of God, op. cit., pp. 333-334.
11. Augustine, The City of God, op. cit., p. 334.
12. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 99, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1946), p. 3008.
13. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 99, a. 2, p. 3010.
14. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, Basic Writings, trans. S. N. Deane (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1966), p. 241.
15. See Marilyn Adams, 'Hell and the God of justice', Religious Studies 11 (1975): 442;
16. George Cadwalader Foley, Anselm's theory of the atonement (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1909), pp. 109-115;
17. William J. Wolf, 'Atonement: Christian concepts', The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 495-499.
18. Jonathan Edwards, 'The justice of God in damning sinners', The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1865), p. 669.
19. Edwards, p. 669.
20. David Hume, Dialogues concerning natural religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 67.
21. C. S. Lewis, The problem of pain (New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 41-42.
22. C. S. Lewis, 'Answers to questions on Christianity', God in the dock: Essays on theology and ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 58.
23. In The problem of pain, the same book in which he said that our only happiness is in God (see note 19 above), Lewis imagines a person who commits the greatest injustices and yet lives 'eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant - a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world' (Pain, p. 109).
24. Georges Panneton, Heaven or hell, trans. Ann M. C. Forster (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965), p. 271.
25. Panneton, p. 271.
26. Panneton, p. 271.
27. D. P. Walker, The decline of hell: Seventeenth century discussions of eternal torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 24-25.
28. William King, An essay on the origin of evil (New York: Garland, 1978), pp. 308-310.
29. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essay on the goodness of God, the freedom of man, and the origin of evil (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), pp. 290-293. King says that the damned 'indulge themselves in their obstinate Election [i.e., free choice], and tho' every way surrounded and possessed with Woes, yet will they not alter what they have once embraced. . . . As Men that are desperately in Love, ambitious, envious, choose to bear Torments, loss of Estate, and hazard of Life, rather than lay aside these foolish and bewitching Affections.
30. We may easily conceive then how the Wicked in Hell may be in very great Misery upon the increase of their Obstinacy and Folly, and yet unwilling to be freed from them' (Theodicy, pp. 309-310).
31. King's suggestion was given in reply to the objection that God would sooner destroy the wicked than punish them forever. Leibniz offers the freedom view as a tentative response to the argument from justice: 'Ernst Sonner . . . had composed a little discourse entitled: Demonstration against the eternity of punishment. It was founded on this somewhat trite principle, that there is no proportion between an infinite punishment and a finite guilt . . . I replied that there was one thing to be considered which had escaped the late Herr Sonner: namely that it was enough to say that the duration of the guilt caused the duration of the penalty. Since the damned remained wicked they could not be withdrawn from their misery; and thus one need not, in order to justify the continuation of their sufferings, assume that sin has become of infinite weight through the infinite nature of the object offended, who is God. This thesis I had not explored enough to pass judgement thereon' (Theodicy, p. 290).
32. He then cites theologians of various churches who held a similar view: Johann Gerhard (Lutheran), Zacharias Ursinus (Calvinist), and Father Drexler (Roman Catholic) (Theodicy, p. 291).
33. Nothing in the above entails that the damned freely remain wicked, but later Leibniz clarifies his position: 'There is always in the man who sins, even when he is damned, a freedom which renders him culpable, and a power, albeit remote, of recovering himself, even though it should never pass into action' (Theodicy, p. 292).
34. Adams, 'Hell and the God of justice', p. 433.
35. Matthew 25:31-46.
36. Hebrews 12:14.
37. Leviticus 19:18,33-34.
38. In the Koran, Sura 107, it is written 'Have you thought of him that denies the Last Judgment? It is he who turns away from the orphan and does not urge others to feed the poor. Woe to those who pray but are heedless in their prayer; who make a show of piety and give no alms to the destitute'. The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 28.
39. Such was the chief complaint Augustine voiced against Origen 'This, and other of [Origen's] opinions, chiefly that concerning that rotation and alternation of misery and bliss which he held that all mankind should run in, gave the Church cause to pronounce him anathema: seeing he had lost even this seeming pity of his, by assigning a true misery, after a while, and a false bliss, unto the saints in heaven, where they (if these views were true) could never be sure of remaining'. Augustine, City of God, Book 21, Ch. 17, p. 339.
40. Richard Swinburne, 'A theodicy of heaven and hell', The existence and nature of God, ed. Alfred J. Freddoso (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 49.
41. I would like to express my gratitude to Philip Quinn and Thomas Flint for reading earlier drafts of this essay.