One of the most common objections to the idea of hell is that it’s incompatible with the idea that God is both all-powerful and all-loving. But is that the case? To answer this, we need to reconsider what we mean about God, heaven and hell, and goodness.
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And I want to talk today about one of the hardest topics in Christianity and one of the most controversial, and I think rightly so actually, which is the idea of hell. And it’s often put this way, “How is the idea of hell consistent with the Christian belief in an all powerful and all loving God? That if God wants us to be saved and has omnipotence, has all the power in the world, and then some, how can we possibly believe that anyone isn’t saved?” And I think that for certain forms of Christianity, this is a really decisive objection meaning I think there are some forms of Christianity because they de-emphasize free will where it’s hard to see how you would answer this objection. And I’ll give you an example.
In both the United Kingdom and in the area now called Netherlands, and in the new world in the U.S., what became the U.S., there were colonies of Puritans. And the Puritans in each of these places ended up becoming universal Unitarians meaning they went from this extremely strict, extremely rigid, very conservative kind of religion to this very, for lack of a better term, liberal religion that everyone is saved, they’re universalists. And I had the opportunity once in a Q and A to ask Cardinal George, the now late Cardinal George why this was. I thought it was very strange that it seemed like this total 180 and it didn’t just happen in one place, it happened seemingly all over the place.
And he suggested, “Well, this is Calvinism with mercy.” And he was giving a brief answer. I think there was something really punchy about that. I think there’s something accurate about that, that if Calvinists are right, that all of this is simply whoever God wants to be saved is saved. That’s idea behind monergism as it’s called, that only God’s will factors into this. Well, why wouldn’t God will everyone to be saved? How is His glory manifested in a greater way if people are sent to hell through really no fault of their own or through something they have no control over. They couldn’t go to heaven they have to go to hell? And so you can see while someone who buys into the idea of Calvinism is going to be quickly, seemingly logically would be drawn towards a belief in universal salvation.
So I say all that as a preamble. I know this is very long and so I apologize for that. But a preamble to say, I think this is a really good, really strong objection. How can we harmonize the idea of eternal damnation with the idea of an all loving God? But I think understanding it in a different light, there is an explanation for this. And I think even more than that, we might say that properly understanding God, properly understanding the human condition and properly understanding heaven and properly understanding hell, we’ll see that these two ideas are not only compatible, but the idea of a loving God almost, and this is an important almost, almost requires the existence of hell given the world as it is. But let’s get into that.
The first thing we want to correct is the idea of God. When we talk about God as all powerful and all loving, omnipotent, what do we mean by that? I think the danger is that we think of God simply as a really nice guy. That we think of God as someone who, He’s very strong, He’s very nice, but we’re still thinking in terms of something very creaturely. And the analogy I’d give here is that when we talk about infinity mathematically, I don’t think I’m alone when I say it’s hard for me to distinguish in my head between a very large number, a trillion or a quadrillion and infinity. But there’s actually an infinite gap between the largest number you can think of and infinity. That there’s a real sense in which infinity is not a number, it’s the negation of a number. It’s something beyond number. It’s innumerable, it’s un-namable vastness, unlimited vastness.
And any kind of number is a limitation saying this many, no more, no less. That’s a hard concept to grasp mathematically. Like leaving aside the theology, just getting how different infinity is from big number is hard. And I struggle with it. I think most people struggle with it just imaginatively. Well, likewise, when we’re talking about God, when we’re talking about the goodness of God, the power of God, even God’s existence, we don’t mean any of those words in the same way that we mean them for another creature. So if I talk about my uncle is very good, he’s a good man, I don’t mean that even close to what I mean when I say God is good.
That if you want to get technical about it, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “God alone is good. Essentially everything else is called good according to its perfection.” In other words, God is infinite uncreated being, infinite, uncreated goodness. And if that sounds confusing, good, it should, but He’s infinite and uncreated, and that everything that is good and everything that exists in some way shares in some divine quality, in some attribute. And if it didn’t, we couldn’t talk about a thing existing, we couldn’t talk about a thing being good. That when we say something is good, we mean it’s vaguely God-Like. That’s a very loose, vaguely God-like. If you say you have a good meal, you mean that it’s achieved some kind of perfection. Well, the ultimate perfection is done only in God.
So there is something God-like even about a good meal, but it’s so far removed that is kind of a joke to even make that comparison. But this is what it means. This is why Jesus famously says, “Who is good, but God alone. No one is good, but God alone.” This idea that there is a goodness proper to God that is not proper to even the greatest saint. A goodness proper to God that isn’t true of the greatest angel. A goodness proper to God that isn’t true of the greatest non-sinning, powerful, glorious creature you can imagine still infinitely away from the goodness of God. That chasm between creature and creation is enormous.
And so if we get this right, a lot of things actually fall in place. And one of the things that falls in place is people are often a little squeamish about Catholic devotion to Mary. It’s like, “Oh, aren’t you putting her at the same level of God?” And it’s like, “No, there’s still an infinite gap between the highest creature and the creator, an infinite gap. And, again, just the very largest number you can think of, you’d be ridiculous to say, “Aren’t you getting a little too close to infinity?” No, infinitely far away. But there’s this failure of imagination. So when we talk about God, we need to understand we mean infinite, perfect uncreated goodness, that’s who He is. It’s not just how He is, it’s who He is. That’s getting God right.
Second, we need to get the human person and we need to do this in a couple of ways. Aquinas, again, he describes what he defines as the first principle of practical reason. And the first principle of practical reason is that good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. And you might think, “Well, that’s pretty basic.” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s the first rule. Do good, avoid evil.” And there’s two senses in which we can talk about this rule. One is a prescription that you ought to do good, you ought to avoid evil. But the other, and in some ways the more striking, more fascinating is that he intends this as a kind of description that the human person at the level of the will is always pursuing good and trying to avoid evil.
Now, you might say, “That doesn’t match up with my experience of humanity.” But I think if you look deeper, it does. I’d say in this way we got to introduce two related concepts. The first is that there are things called apparent goods. An apparent good is exactly what it sounds like. It’s something that looks good, but isn’t. And so don’t think about other people, think about yourself for a second. There are times where something looked good to you and it wasn’t. It didn’t turn out to have the goodness you thought it would have. Now, sometimes this is a really high-minded kind of mistake. You try to do the right thing, and it turns out your moral judgment was just mistaken. That’s one kind of apparent good.
Another kind is you just think, “Well, I think pursuing bodily pleasure will make me really happy.” And it doesn’t. And you think, “Oh, okay, that didn’t work out the way I thought it would.” That’s an apparent good something. But in those cases notice, you’re still trying to do something good. Now, good doesn’t mean morally good. Good means just good in the broader sense. It’s a perfection in some way. It’s satisfying in some way, and if it wasn’t satisfying in some way, you wouldn’t do it. But in addition to apparent goods, there are also higher and lower goods. I mentioned even a good meal shares in some quantity of goodness, a good person, obviously more so. And so we can talk about different levels of goodness.
And so if you are playing golf and you’re playing the best game of your life, there’s a real good there. But if you see some kid drowning on the water and you keep playing because you don’t want to lose your streak, you’ve pretty decisively done something horrible. And you’ve done something horrible not because pursuing the golf game is bad of itself, you’ve done something horrible because you’ve chosen a lower good, a golf game over a higher good, human life. In that case, you’re not willing evil as such on someone else. You’re just selfishly choosing a lower good over a higher good. And so when we talk about sin, when we talk about just human bad actions, we mean someone is doing one of these two things. Either they’re chasing something as good that isn’t really good, or they’re choosing a lower good over a higher good.
But notice even with those two areas of sin, nobody just chooses evil for its own sake. Now, when I say this people tend to say, “Well, I know some. Think about the Nazis. Think about…” It’s like, “No, no, even horrible criminals have motives to their crime. No one just says, ‘I’m going to be a bad guy. I’m going to do bad things for no reason.'” Even a sadistic person, someone who enjoys hurting other people is drawing some kind of pleasure from that action. And they’re doing it not for the evil, but for the pleasure they receive from it. Maybe that’s a subtle distinction, but it’s possible to do something because you enjoy doing something. And in a non-evil category, that’s fine. If you want to go jogging because you like to jog and you’re not worried about your health, you’re not worried about it, you just enjoy the experience of jogging, that’s fine.
Bodily pleasures are good. That’s enough of a reason to do most things. But when you do something morally evil for that, the positive, the dopamine or whatever, the rush of pleasure that you experience, that’s the morally problematic part. It’s not wrong to want a rush of adrenaline or dopamine or fill in the blank. It is wrong to try to get that rush by hurting somebody else. Now I think that is abundantly clear. But notice that even in those really extreme cases that the person isn’t doing it just for the sake of evil. If they didn’t get a jolt, if they didn’t get a rush out of doing it, if it was an unpleasant kind of evil to inflict and they just sign it really tedious, they wouldn’t do it. So they’re motivated there by pursuit of their own pleasure, very selfishly at the expense of others, but nevertheless, even in those cases, they’re pursuing a good.
Now, I want to make sure it’s really clear here. I’m not saying that that makes sin okay. I’m not saying anything like that. I’m saying even with sin, every crime has a motive. And that we need to understand based on this, that every human being is hardwired to always be pursuing the good. And it may not be moral goodness you’re pursuing, it may not be a higher good you’re pursuing, but you’re always pursuing the good. So if we understand this about the human person and we understand that God is infinitely good, then we can understand heaven. How so? Because we’re made with this hunger not just for a little good, we’re made with this hunger for infinite good, and God is infinite, eternal good.
And so when we think about heaven, so often just as we misunderstand God as a nice guy who’s really powerful and He’s infinitely more than that, and just as we understand ourselves as being able to choose good or evil simply for their own sake, and both of those are wrong, well, so too we get heaven wrong. We get heaven wrong by imagining a cloud with some harps and the rest. But in fact, heaven is much more than that, infinitely more than that. Saint Paul says that, “Eye has not seen, an ear has not heard what God has ready for those who love Him.” So there’s this sense in which there’s something unspeakably, unimaginably good about heaven, and quite understandably, just as we can’t understand God, so too we can’t understand heaven.
Nevertheless, let’s try to unpack it a little bit. The Catechism paragraph 10:24 talks about heaven this way, that, “This perfect life with the most Holy Trinity, this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed is called heaven. Heaven is the ultimate end,” that means goal, “And fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme definitive happiness.” In other words, someone can think about playing a harp on some clouds and say, “I don’t know if that’s for me. That sounds kind of boring.” And any of the images you have of heaven can fall short and understandably so. Think about it, not you’ve never experienced infinite happiness in your life. You’ve never experienced eternal happiness. All of your experiences of happiness have fallen short of the real thing,
And they don’t last as long as you want them to. They’re not as rich, they’re not as deep as you want them to. Whatever experience, whatever encounters you’ve had that have brought you true happiness, the thousandth time you engage, whether it’s, “This is my favorite park or this is my favorite spot to vacation to, or this is my favorite meal, or this is my favorite interaction with this person,” there comes a point where you just say, “It didn’t give me the same pleasure it gave me last time.” Might have still enjoyed it a lot, but you noticed those diminishing returns. And just be mindful of that. So you’re not experienced with infinite happiness, you’re not experienced with eternal happiness. And so as a result, you can’t imagine heaven, you’ve no experience to go off of.
You know you want infinite happiness. Everything you’ve experienced has fallen short, but you don’t know what it would even look like or feel like to actually have that itch scratched perfectly forever. That’s what Paul means when he says that, “Eye has not seen, an ear has not heard.” That the itch will get scratched and you can’t imagine what that’ll be like. That’s okay, right? Obviously you can’t imagine it. But nevertheless, it’s something to just bear in mind that when we talk about heaven, we’re talking about that perfect happiness and that perfect happiness is inseparable from communion with God because communion with God means communion with infinite eternal happiness. That’s who God is. And so we are made for union with God. This also means we can’t be happy without God.
So here’s the kicker, and this is where we’re finally going to get addressing hell more directly. If you have an infinite hunger for God, and God is the infinite good that satisfies your infinite hunger, you will never be happy with anything or anyone other than God. I don’t mean you can’t have some happiness. I mean you will never be satisfied, that eventually everything else will fall short and you’ll feel it fall short. And I think addicts tend to be the best in this area of just knowing this about themselves. If you’ve never really tried to satisfy yourself with something other than God, you might still be under the delusion that, “Well, maybe if I had a little more I’d be totally happy. Maybe if I got just amped it up just a little bit.”
And this is the nature of addiction that you do a little and okay, it makes you a certain level of happiness, then that declining happiness sets in I was talking about, there’s diminishing returns, and so you have to have a little more to get the same high you got before. You acclimate to it, and then you acclimate to that newer level. And so you go up and up and up and up and up and up. And so pretty soon you become a glutton or a drunker or a sex-aholic or you’re power hungry or you’re a workaholic or whatever the case may be, but you’re not actually happy with what you have. Not in a lasting, not in an enduring, not in an actually satisfied sort of way.
You might be happy with the prospect that you will be happy someday, but you’re not actually content with what you already have. That’s the nature of what it is to try to satisfy that infinite chasm with something other than God. And so then you’re left with a few options. One, remain unhappy. Two, constantly distract yourself to not notice your unhappiness. Or three, find something or someone that actually satisfies that happiness, and to that I would say it’s God alone. As you pursue the first one, the ancients had a concept for this. In the east it was called a hungry ghost. There’s both eastern and western kind of examples of this, of someone who is constantly eating, but the more they eat, the hungrier they become. So these are called Petas or Pretas in Tibetan kind of mythology.
And so fourth century BC, there’s a Tibetan text that talks about them as suffering hunger and thirst in another world, these Pretas, Petas, the disembodied spirits, for a long time lament since they’re in torment. Because they have done deeds of grievous consequence, they receive suffering as their bitter fruits. For momentary or wealth and prosperity, fleeting is the life here on earth, knowing transients from the transient with the wise man prepare an island of refuge. That they’re just starving with suffering, hunger and thirst because they tried to just constantly consume passing things. That was their kind of image of this. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there’s a guy who is cursed by the gods with a very similar thing, but the more he eats, the hungrier he becomes, and he eventually devours everyone and everything around him and then ends up killing himself by eating himself.
And it’s a spiritual image, that’s an image of something that we can become. And I think Mate picked up on this, I believe it’s his name, Gabor Mate with the Hungry Ghost. It’s an image of addiction. These were ghosts with an enormous stomach in a small mouth. They couldn’t actually satisfy their hunger. And so again, it’s another one of these Eastern images. So that concept is what we end up with. When we’re trying to fill the infinite chasm that we have, this infinite stomach for goodness with finite things where we just get hungrier and hungrier. We just have this suffering hunger, this suffering thirst, that kind of idea. I think it’s an important idea to kind of grapple with.
That is the logical consequence of trying to satisfy yourself with anything other than God if you’re made for God. That then is how we should understand hell. That what you experience in those moments when you start living as a hungry ghost is sort of prefigurement of what hell is. It’s like this, God is infinite goodness. He’s made us with a desire for infinite goodness. He cannot create a second infinite goodness, it’s logically impossible. He can’t create a second contrary infinite that’s not Himself. God can’t create another God equal to Him because the other God would be a creature. He creates some second God that’s a created God. Well, by definition isn’t God, and by definition isn’t infinite. It has a beginning, it has an origin.
And so it’s just logically impossible for the infinite uncreated God to create infinite goodness. Now, God can create good things, but remember that infinite chasm between even the highest number imaginable and infinity. That no matter how good the creature is that God creates, He cannot create anything equal to Himself because the thing He creates is by definition not equal to Him. I hope that’s clear. Again, I understand when people are confused by this because infinity is a hard concept to grasp. But to say that God is infinite without boundaries, goodness, you can’t have two of those. You can’t have two contrary infinites, it’s logically impossible.
And so if this one infinite God has created us with a hunger for truth, goodness, and beauty, well then by definition only He will be able to satisfy that because only He is the infinite amount of truth, goodness, and beauty. Now, other things might please us along the way. You can have a lovely wife and family. You can have a great job, you can have a beautiful home. You can live in a wonderful place where you’re experiencing some real participation in truth, goodness, and beauty. I don’t mean to deny that, but You won’t have infinite truth, goodness, and beauty. And so something will always be missing. That’s no knock on your wife and your kids and your job and your home and the place you live. It’s just recognizing that even a bunch of big numbers together never get you to infinity. They never even get you close.
And so you continue to hunger, you continue to be a hungry ghost. And that’s a little bit of what the experience of hell is going to be like. The Catechism 10:33 puts it this way. “We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love Him, but we cannot love God if we send gravely against Him, against our neighbor or against ourselves. He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother as a murderer and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from Him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are His brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him forever.” And this is the kicker by our own free choice.
This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called hell. So just, in other words, as our concept of heaven needs to be centered around communion with God, that the reason heaven is heaven is not there’s cool stuff. The reason heaven is heaven is not there’s streets paved with gold or you’re going to see your family or any of those things. Those things are great. None of those are what makes heaven heaven. What makes heaven heaven is this participation in communion with God, that the infinite hunger you have will be satisfied, that this itch you have will finally be scratched and in a lasting, permanent kind of way. The flip side to that is that to never have that it scratched you kind of go crazy, and that’s what hell is.
To never have your infinite hunger met. That self-exclusion from God, that God is the key to the lock and you say, “I don’t want that key.” And then you say, “Well, my lock remains locked. It can’t be open.” And it’s like, “Well, only the key could open it and you’ve said no to that key.” So this is why I think having a good theology of free will is important, not because it makes people save themselves or anything like that, because it makes sense of how two things can be true. One, God wants you to be saved, and two, you might still go to hell. Well, how could that be? Because He wants you to actually want to be in communion with Him. This isn’t because He’s needy. It’s not because He is desperate. It’s not because He’s jealous. It’s because He wants your good good. He wants you to freely be in communion with him.
In the same way that a man who proposes to a woman wants her to freely say yes. He doesn’t want her to be compelled or forced to say yes. And a compelled or forced yes doesn’t even make for a valid marriage. You need to be able to actually consent. And so this is an important part. And so if you refuse to give that consent, if you say, “No, God, I don’t want what you’re offering.” There it is. That’s the thing we often talk about hell in terms of just those who don’t know Jesus or those who’ve never heard of Him. That’s not really the right understanding. Hell is about those who’ve rejected Jesus. And so that’s why we’re told that chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God.
That there are all of these different ways and images we use, fire and the rest, to try to describe this thing just like I’ve used images of a hungry ghost or a character from Ovid’s Metamorphoses or ancient Tibetan text to try to get to this spiritual thing. It’s a little hard to describe, but I think most of us have experienced it. And it’s this unsatisfied longing, but imagine an internally unsatisfied longing and there it is. And so that’s why it’s important. The Catechism 10:33 talks about it as the state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed that you say, “I don’t want God. I don’t want life with the blessed. I don’t want life with the saints.” Now, you might say that in words, you might say that in deeds, but in some way you’re saying, “Nope, this is not for me.”
Hopefully then it’s clear how the idea of God being all good and all loving is consistent with hell not because God makes a torture chamber for people who don’t want to be His friends, no. That God makes us with this eternal hunger for goodness. And if we say no to that, we’re not going to find some separate storehouse of eternal goodness. There is no such thing. There can be no such thing. And so we’ll always be in the state of dissatisfaction. We’ll always be in a state of continuing to hunger because we were made for more than what we’ve allowed ourselves to receive. Now, I said in the beginning that this means that hell is almost necessary for the idea of a loving God. That if we’re to believe both that God is all good and all powerful and all loving and He alone is those things.
And second, that He’s made us for communion with Him, but He gives us a free will to say yes or no to its overtures. Then it seems to follow pretty logically that the people who say no end up in a state that we could only describe as hell. That you won’t be an eternal bliss if only communion with God can give that to you and you’ve said no to communion with God. Nevertheless, it’s only and almost for this reason because grace is a mysterious thing and God can do all sorts of things in the human heart. And so we don’t desire for anyone to experience self-exclusion from the life of God. We don’t desire that in this life or in the eternal life. It’s just not what we want for anyone.
And so I’m not rejoicing in the concept of hell or the idea of hell, and hopefully everyone we know will say yes to God even if we don’t see that yes, even if we don’t understand how that could be a yes, that God’s grace and it’s the mysterious ways that He works will work the kind of wonders that He is capable of working. So we have that hope, we have that desire for everyone, but we don’t want to just say, “Well, because God is good, therefore.” Because God does, even with His grace, He respects free will. You can say no to grace. People do say no to grace. They do choose lower goods over higher goods. They do choose apparent goods over true goods.
The last thought here, Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium suggests that this is why evangelism is so important. This is not turn and burn or turn or… Excuse me. Turn or burn. For some reason, that’s a hard phrase to say today. Turn or burn the idea that you need to repent or else you’re going to roast forever. That is not a fear-based evangelization. It’s rather born, and as he says, he’s says like this, “Enthusiasm for evangelization is based on this conviction. We have a treasure of life and love which cannot deceive and a message which cannot mislead or disappoint. It penetrates to the depths of our hearts, sustaining and ennobling us. It is a truth which is never out of date because it reaches that part of us which nothing else can reach.”
And here’s my favorite line. “Our infinite sadness can only be cured by infinite love. The truth is people even now on earth experience a foretaste of heaven or a foretaste of hell. And so it’s not about trying to terrify people into, “You’re going to go to hell.” There are times and places, and maybe that’s an appropriate thing. And the same way that a doctor might have to say, “If you keep living like this, you’re going to get cancer or you’re going to die at a young age.” The occasionally the fear can serve an appropriate point, but we’re not trying to live in a fear-based kind of religion. It’s rather saying, “Look, you’ve probably already butted up against this. You’ve experienced this infinite sadness in your soul because you’re wanting something more than you’ve experienced.”
And so Christianity is good news, and the good news is that there is an infinite love that can cure this infinite sadness. And this is a conviction that won’t deceive, it won’t disappoint. This is a promise, it’s a guarantee. It’ll come true. So I didn’t want to just end this episode by saying, “God exists and so does hell.” I want to end this by saying, “We should want for ourselves and for those around us to A, be aware of this infinite sadness, this hunger that’s never quite met with any or theory reality, but B, be aware that there is a solution, that there is a cure that is promised to us by one who we know keeps His promises.”
And that should motivate us to share the good news with those we love, and that those we care about also experience this infinite sadness, this infinite hunger, and that we know what the solution to that is. In the same way that if people around you were sick with an easily preventable kind of disease or an easily cured disease, and you knew the cure, you’d be a monster if you didn’t share it with them. If you said, “Oh, I don’t want to tell them about aspirin. I don’t want to tell them about fill in the blank.” Well, you should definitely want to do that. If you love your neighbor at all you should want them not to suffer needlessly. And that’s how we evangelize, not just because they’ll suffer needlessly in the afterlife, but because they suffer needlessly now.
That God wants more in this life for you and your neighbor, then you’ll have in a life without God. I hope that makes sense. All that’s to say, I think there’s a way of harmonizing the idea of God’s power and love and goodness with the fact that we might freely choose something other than Him both here and hereafter, and that when we do make those choices, it hurts. Not because God’s trying to hurt or torment us, but because that’s the natural consequence of trying to fill an infinite chasm with something other than the infinite God. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I hope you enjoyed that. God bless.
Speaker 1:
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