Christ Jesus Came To Save Sinners

This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.  (1 Timothy 1:15)

How are we to look at sinners?  St Paul identifies himself as the chief of them (an identity we claim for ourselves before receiving Communion).  Jesus says He came to seek and save sinners, which is the Gospel which St Paul proclaims (and how we became part of the Church – Christ seeking us out as sinners and inviting us in).  We are to see sinners as Christ sees them – because this is how He also sees us.  We are to love them as Christ loves us (John 13:34), for while we were still sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).  We are to treat them as we have been treated by Christ.  We are to treat them with the same spirit as Christ treats us.  This applies to all of us, but very particularly to those involved in any kind of ministry within the Church.

Fr Alexis Trader writes about how a father confessor, or for that matter, a godparent, should treat their godson or goddaughter who has sinned.

“The virtues of love, faith, and humility should be manifest in the way the spiritual father approaches his spiritual child.  Without unfeigned love for the spiritually sick and a desire for their restoration to health, the spiritual father can hardly be considered a spiritual physician at all.  Without unshakable faith in God, he might be tempted to pronounce those who have been severely wounded in the Christian life to be dead, because he is blind to the fact that God can raise up both confessors and martyrs from those reckoned to be lost.

And without humility, he is in danger of resembling a physician who administers medicines to the sick and does not look after the poison of his own infection.”  (ANCIENT CHRISTIAN WISDOM AND AARON BECK’S COGNITIVE THERAPY, p 154)

Indebted at Christmas

Fourth Century hymnographer St Ephrem poetically contrasts the birth of the Messiah King, Jesus, with the activities of the Emperor Caesar Augustus.  Augustus as king orders a census to be made of all citizens so that he can determine what taxes they owe him.  The earthly king is interested in making sure his citizens pay their taxes, or in other words are indebted to him.  Christ the King comes to cancel debts – the debt created by our sins against our Creator.  Sin in this sense is our failing to give God what is due to Him (our thanks, tithes, praise, worship, our hearts), and thus creating a debt.  Christ not only pays that debt but as St Ephrem notes Christ in His own teachings takes on Himself the debt of all the poor to whom we give charity.  What we give to the poor is what He as Lord owes us and He promises to repay us in the Kingdom.  Thus, true Christmas giving is when we give to the needy who cannot repay us (what credit is it to us to give to those who will repay you equally? see Luke 6:32-34).  When we give in charity not only do we give those in need the joy and grace of Christ, but the Lord accepts the charitable gift as a debt He owes back to us.  Indebtedness at Christmas should not be about our credit cards but about what we joyfully give to those in need which makes Christ indebted to us for caring for the least of His sisters and brothers.  Christmas giving, that which is not repaid in mutual gifts or food, should cause us to look for that great last day in which Christ will bless us with all we have given to those in need.

On this feast of the Nativity the openings in the curtains are joyous,

and the Holy One rejoices in the holy Temple,

and a voice thunders in the mouth of babes,

and the Messiah rejoices in His feast as Commander of the host.

On the birth of the Son, the king was enrolling the people in the census,

so that they would be indebted to him.

To us the King came out to cancel our debts,

and He wrote in His name another debt,

so that He would be indebted to us.

(quoted by Gary Anderson in Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament: Theology in the Service of Biblical Exegesis, Kindle Loc 4307-4315)

The Son of God Became the Son of David

St. Irenaeus (d. 202AD) wrote a great deal about salvation and from him we can understand just how theologically minded they were in the early Church.  We also see how early in Christian history he writes for when Irenaeus says “the fathers,” he still means the Jewish Patriarchs of the Old Testament, not the church fathers.  Irenaeus himself is destined to become one of the church fathers quoted frequently by future generations of Orthodox theologians. But in the nascent church when they spoke of the scriptures they might still mean what we today call the Old Testament.

Writing about Jesus, he says:

Thus then He gloriously achieved our redemption, and fulfilled the promise of the fathers, and abolished the old disobedience. The Son of God became Son of David and Son of Abraham; perfecting and summing up this in Himself, that He might make us to possess life. The Word of God was made flesh by the dispensation of the Virgin, to abolish death and make man live. For we were imprisoned by sin, being born in sinfulness and living under death.   But God the Father was very merciful: He sent His creative Word, who in coming to deliver us came to the very place and spot in which we had lost life, and brake the bonds of our fetters.

And His light appeared and made the darkness of the prison disappear, and hallowed our birth and destroyed death, loosing those same fetters in which we were enchained. And He manifested the resurrection, Himself becoming the first-begotten of the dead, and in Himself raising up man that was fallen, lifting him up far above the heaven to the right hand of the glory of the Father: even as God promised.  (The Proof of The Apostolic Preaching, Kindle Loc 616-24)

For St Irenaeus there are two births of Christ.  First He, the timeless and pre-eternal Word of God, is born of the Virgin as Son of David, a human yet God, in the flesh.  Second Jesus becomes the first born of the dead in His resurrection. Christ does this in order to give us a new birth as well.  We too are born in the flesh but also because of the flesh we are mortal and die.  In being united to Christ in baptism we are born again.  Christ thus both redeems our first birth in the flesh and gives us the new birth to eternal life.  Just as Christ has two births and sanctifies them both, so He as our Creator has given us two births, the first into this world and the second into eternal life in the world to come.

Blog Series: That All Shall Be Saved

I have gathered all the posts from my blog series reflecting on David Bentley Hart’s book, THAT ALL SHALL BE SAVED, into one PDF for those who prefer to read it as a document rather than have to navigate through several posts.   You can find that document at  That All Shall Be Saved (PDF)

You can find links to PDFs for any of the blog series I have posted since 2008 at  Fr. Ted’s PDFs.

Salvation

David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved inspired me to reflect a bit on salvation and how Christ’s coming into the world is good news indeed for all humankind.   His book brought to the forefront of my thinking the many reasons I joyfully embrace Christianity as my faith and experience of God.   This is the 5^th and final post in this blog series which is looking at ideas from his book which have been an anchor to my faith.  The previous post is: Is Free Will the Curse?

The Gospel is and is meant to be good news for all of us who inhabit planet earth and struggle in life, who have to cope with evil and the effect of sin on our existence here.   And while the good news promises us salvation, it does not promise us life on earth will be easy, without suffering or temptation or death.  We are to be of good cheer because Christ has overcome all of these aspects of the world, and so they are proven to be limited, circumscribed, in their power.

In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against God that dwell on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the “good tidings” of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God, who by the sending of his Son into the world, and even into the kingdom of death, had liberated his creatures from slavery to a false and merciless master, and had opened a way into the Kingdom of Heaven, in which all of creation would be glorified by the direct presence of God.

It was an announcement that came wrapped in all the religious and prophetic and eschatological imagery of its time and place, and armored in the whole metaphorical panoply of late antique religion, but with far less of the background and far fewer of the details filled in than later Christians would have found tolerable. It was, above all, a joyous proclamation, and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their Father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures; rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love. Hope in heaven and fear of hell were ever present, but also sublimely inchoate, and susceptible of elaboration in any number of conceptual shapes. Nothing as yet was fixed except the certainty that Jesus was now Lord over all things, and would ultimately yield all things up to the Father so that God might be all in all.  (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2790-2803)

When the Lord Jesus came eating and drinking with sinners was He not enacting the very thing He proclaimed in His parables – that those invited to the wedding banquet did not wish to attend and so the banquet had been opened to all – undesirable people were invited, even compelled to come in and join the banquet even though they were undesireable?   Did not the Jesus’ own lifestyle and actions, especially His table fellowship, announce that the Kingdom of Heaven had come, that God had reconciled the world to Himself?   Yet, we see already in the New Testament a rejection of this reconciliation between God and God’s creation.  Pharisees, among others, rejected Christ’s message and condemn Him for His table fellowship with sinners.  A concern for judgment of sinners and unbelievers comes to the forefront of thinking as Christians see people not only rejecting the Gospel but also persecuting believers.   Being forgiven by God, reconciled to God, united to divinity was not enough good news for believers – they thirsted for triumph over enemies and retribution for sinners.  Rather than sorrowing that everyone did not embrace salvation, believers began persecuting those who didn’t believe.  The values of the Kingdom of Heaven were replaced by the values of worldly kingdoms.

However, the Church never lost sight of its message.  The Gospel shone through the centuries to those who would hear it.   St. Leo the Great (d. 461AD) writing in the 5^th Century about the Nativity of Christ still captures the joyous message of salvation for everyone:

“Our Saviour, dearly beloved, is born today; rejoice!  For it is not fitting that we give any place to sadness when Life is born, the Life which, consuming the fear of death, has filled us with joy because of the eternity He promises.  No one is excluded from this gladness.  One reason for joy is common to all, since Our Lord, the destroyer of sin and death, as he found no one free from sin, came to deliver us all.  The saint is to exult, for he is nearing his palm.  The sinner is to rejoice, for he is invited to forgiveness.  The pagan is to take courage, for he is called to life… 

And so, dearly beloved, we are to give thanks to God the Father, through His Son, in the Holy Spirit, to Him who, in the abundant mercy with which He has loved us, has had pity on us, and ‘when we were dead in our sins, has brought us to life together with Christ’, so that we may be in Him a new creature, a new work.  Let us, then, take off the old man with his works, and become partakers in the generation of Christ, renouncing the works of the flesh.  O Christian, realize your dignity: you are associated with the divine nature, do not turn back to your past base condition by a degenerate way of life. Remember that you have been rescued from the power of darkness, you have been transported into the light and the kingdom of God. By the sacrament of Baptism, you have been made the temple of the Holy Spirit.  Do not make such a guest take flight by perverse actions nor submit yourself again to the devil’s slavery, for you have been redeemed by the blood of Christ, for He will judge you in truth, He who has redeemed you in mercy, He who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.”  (THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT & THE FATHERS by Louis Bouyer, p 530)

St. Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022AD) writing five centuries after St Leo says:

“… He Himself, Who is able to do all things and is beneficent, undertook to accomplish this work through Himself.  For the man whom He had made by His own invisible hands according to His image and likeness He willed to raise up again, not be means of another but by Himself, so that indeed he might the more greatly honor and glorify our race by His being likened to us in every respect and become our equal by taking on our human condition.  O what unspeakable love for mankind!  The goodness of it!  That not only did He not punish us transgressors and sinners, but that He Himself accepted becoming such as we had become by reason of the Fall: corruptible man born of corruptible man, mortal born of a mortal, sin of him who had sinned, He Who is incorruptible and immortal and sinless.  He appeared in the world only in His deified flesh, and not in His naked divinity.  Why?  Because He did not, as He says Himself in His Gospels, wish to judge the world but to save it.”   ( ON THE MYSTICAL LIFE  Vol 1,  pp 144-145)

Christ did not become incarnate in order to condemn humans, but, rather, to save them.  God became human so that we humans might become god.   If He wanted to condemn sinners, He didn’t need to die on the cross.  That death is God’s love and will for humanity – God uniting Himself to humanity, not spurning humanity because it is fallen and sinful.  Why senselessly be tortured for humanity if your goal is punishment for sinners in the first place?  The life, death and resurrection of Christ are God’s continued effort to bring about God’s own plan: to unite heaven and earth, to reconcile humanity to God so that we humans might share in the divine love and life.

Writing 900 years after St Symeon, Archimandrite Sophrony  building upon the words of St Silouan the Athonite discusses the struggle with evil humanity has faced through the centuries:

“The history of the Orthodox Church, past and present, right up to our own day reveals frequent instances of a leaning towards the idea of physical combat against evil, though fortunately confined to individual prelates or ecclesiastical groups.  The Orthodox Church herself has not only declined to bless or to impose these measures but has always followed in the steps of the crucified Christ, Who took upon Himself the burden of the sins of the world.  The Staretz was profoundly and very precisely aware that only good can defeat evil – that using force simply means substituting one sort of violence for another.  We discussed this many a time.  He would remark, ‘The Gospel makes it plain that when the Samaritans did not wish to receive Christ, the disciples James and John wanted to bring down fire from heaven, to consume them, but the Lord rebuked them and said, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of . . . I am come not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them”.’  And we, too, must have this one thought – that all should be saved.”     (ST. SILOUAN THE ATHONITE, p 226)

David Bentley Hart is in good company as he argues the purpose of God’s incarnation in Christ, His death and resurrection all were done for the salvation of the world not for condemning sinners to hell.   As previously noted, a message of universal salvation does not change the struggle which believers face in the world, does not deny that evil is real, does not take away the suffering undergone in this world by innocent people.  It does bring the Gospel to the forefront of the Christian message and says “God is love” is not an idea that can be negotiated or altered.  Rather it becomes the key to interpreting all of Scripture.  God’s purpose in creating the cosmos is to bring all things into communion with God.  This is God’s plan, unaltered by human sinfulness, which is being realized from creation to salvation in Christ to the kingdom of God.  God is both Creator and Savior because God’s will is that we should be united to God.   As Hart says:

… between God’s antecedent and consequent decrees: between, that is, his original will for a creation unmarred by sin (“Plan A,” so to speak) and his will for creation in light of the fall of humanity (“Plan B”). And it has usually been assumed that, whereas the former would have encompassed all of creation in a single good end, the latter merely provides for the rescue of only a tragically or arbitrarily select portion of the race. But why? Perhaps the only difference, really, between these antecedent and consequent divine decrees (assuming that such a distinction is worth making at all) is the manner by which God accomplishes the one thing he intends for creation from everlasting. Theologians and catechists may have concluded that God would ideally have willed only one purpose but must in practical terms now will two; but logic gives us no reason to think so.  Neither does scripture (at least, not when correctly read). After all, “our savior God,” as 1 Timothy 2:4 says, “intends all human beings to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth.”  (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location

Is Free Will the Curse?

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor”, the inquisitor blames Christ for the mess humans are in because God chose to give free will to humans and humans are not capable of making right decisions and thus because of God are doomed to hell.   The inquisitor accuses Christ of failing to take over human free will and by allowing us to choose love – or not—leaves humans with no real hope of attaining heaven because we seem incapable of using free will for the good.  Free will for the Inquisitor is a curse that God imposed on humans and so God is to blame for human sinfulness.  David Bentley Hart in That All Shall Be Saved sees the issue very differently.  This is the 4^th post in a blog series reflecting on Hart’s book.  The previous post is An Eternal Hell?

For Hart, “Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is”   (That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2386-2386).   What is also true is that all humans grow up in the world of the fall, and therefore never are fully free, but rather are tainted by all the effects that sin has on the world.  For God to hold us fully accountable for our choices would require that each of us really starts life in a fully potential position where we are not yet influenced by the world.  Since none of us can have that perfect potential, we are at a disadvantage from the moment we are conceived.   Hart believes God takes that into account when God judges us.   God does not hold against us what we cannot control or what we inherited, and recognizes that none of us is perfectly free.  God’s patience with us and mercy toward us is thus perfectly just.  God’s mercy is based both in God’s perfect love and God’s perfect justice.

It is our imperfect condition which makes it impossible for us to fully and freely reject God.  Our understanding of God and our experience of God is already colored and distorted by our experience of the fallen world.  So we never reject God as God is, but always our image of God, which is distorted by our experience of the sinful world.  St Paul appeals to ignorance and unbelief in 1 Timothy 1:13 to explain why he rejected Christ – his understanding was incomplete and God did not hold this against him.  The same is true when Christ dying on the cross forgives his murderers because they didn’t know what they were doing.  St Paul in 1 Cor 2:8 says the rulers killed the King of Glory exactly because they didn’t understand who He was. He really is providing a defense for them that they are not guilty of deicide (though some Orthodox hymns say otherwise ignoring Christ’s forgiveness of them in the Gospel).

You can reject a glass of wine absolutely; you can even reject evil in its (insubstantial) totality without any remainder of intentionality. Neither of these things possesses more than a finite allure in itself. But you cannot reject God except defectively, by having failed to recognize him as the primordial object of all your deepest longings, the very source of their activity. We cannot choose between him and some other end in an absolute sense; we can choose only between better or worse approaches to his transcendence.  (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2562-2565)

Hart feels this in itself makes an eternal hell as punishment for unbelievers as an injustice.  He believes if we really knew God, we would not reject God.  What we reject is our false ideas about God.   We can only attain a perfect understanding of God when we are able to set aside the effects of the fall on ourselves.   St. Peter Damaskos says:

“We are punished for our lack of repentance, and not because we had to struggle against temptation; otherwise most of us could not receive forgiveness until we had attained total dispassion. But as St John Klimakos again observes, ‘It is not possible for all to achieve dispassion, yet all can be saved and reconciled with God’”  (THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Loc. 30139-43).  [St. John Climacus  (d. 649AD) wrote: “That all should attain to complete detachment is impossible.  But it is not impossible that all should be saved and reconciled to God ” (The Roots of Christian Mysticism, p 304). 

Everyone could attain salvation, but what we cannot attain is that perfect state in which we could completely, freely choose to accept or reject God.  We are  born into the world of the fall, so our thinking is distorted by sin from the moment we are born.  God is just and so does not hold that against us but rather recognizes we are never free of the effects of the fall, of sin and evil.

There is another issue which Hart raises and that is our ideas about God treat God as one among many things in the universe rather than as the source of all things.

…certain modern Anglophone Christian philosophers, formed in the analytic tradition, to abandon the metaphysics of classical theism that Christian intellectual tradition has unanimously presumed from its early centuries, in favor of a frankly mythological picture of God: God conceived, that is, not as Being itself—the source and end of all reality, in which all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28)—but merely as one more being alongside all the beings who are, grander and older and more powerful than all the rest, but still merely a thing or a discrete entity. (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2506-2510)

Because God is being itself, we can never fully separate ourselves from God or completely reject God.  A belief that we have such power to reject God is based in a false idea of God to begin with.   It is not as if we can leave God’s presence or enter into God’s presence.  All we can do is make ourselves more or less aware of our relationship to the Creator.   We all live and move and have our being in God (Acts 17:28) – this is the very world in which we live, the atmosphere we breathe.   This is why even the old division between Jew and Gentile, between those who keep Torah and those who don’t fails to grasp what the human dilemma is.

Paul’s Adam as first human, who introduced universal sin and death, supports his contention that Jew and gentile are on the same footing and in need of the same Savior.  …  The resurrection of Christ showed that the real problem was Adam and the universal problem of the reigning power of sin and its nefarious partner, death. These were at work long before the law (Rom. 5:12–14), and so Christ’s resurrection—death’s reversal—was clearly a solution to a much deeper problem than the law. To say that the law is neither the real problem nor the solution is in effect saying that Israel’s story is not God’s sole focus. The main drama began with the first Adam and ended with the last Adam. That is why being a Jew or gentile is no longer the primary distinction among humans, but rather being or not being “in Christ” is. The heart of Jewish identity is therefore marginalized, and the God of Israel and his salvation are denationalized. Jews and gentiles share the same plight, and Jesus came to solve it. And all of this stems from Paul’s rereading of his Scripture in light of the central and prior conviction that God raised Jesus from the dead.   (Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam, What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins, Kindle Loc. 3055-56, 3066-73)

All humans suffer from the same plight of growing up in a fallen world which distorts our experience or lack of experience of God.   Christ comes to heal that which is lacking in all of us.  Christ comes to unite all of us to God so that we will lacking nothing in our lives and God will become all in all (Ephesians 1:23).  Hart asks rhetorically,

Could there then be a final state of things in which God is all in all while yet there existed rational creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejection of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming and fulfilling end of the rational will’s most essential nature?   (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2673-2675)

Hart does not think that is possible for it represents a contradiction in terms.  If the end of all things is God in all then how could there be an eternal hell in which God is absent?  How could anyone be someplace where God is not if God is all in all?    This can only happen if in fact God’s goal for creation is never fulfilled – and that for the omnipotent God is not possible.

The existence of an eternal hell of torment for sinners, raises a question:  Is hell good or evil?  On the one hand, if hell is evil and accursed, then we should avoid it.  If it is evil, God could not have created it for God is not the source of evil.  So, if it is evil, it has no real existence but exists only in some parasitical form coming into existence only as the good creation was corrupted, and therefore itself is temporary, not eternal.  If God didn’t create it, then it has no eternal value.  If it is accursed, it will be done away with when Christ comes in His kingdom.    On the other hand, if hell is good because it is created by God, then to be sent there by God is to do God’s will.   One will not be punished for doing God’s will.   It will have some benefit and good value to it.  It will bring about God’s will, and God will fill it with Himself as well and make it a place where God is encountered and we are united to God.

The notion of an eternal hell calls into question a basic idea in theology which Orthodoxy has treated as absolute and non-negotiable: God is love.  Everything God does is love.  Everything Christ did as the incarnate God, a human person, is for our salvation.  Everything including judgment!  These two aspects of dogmatic theology question whether God would from all eternity have planned an eternal hell or whether, rather, God’s eternal plan always is the same: love.  God’s plan is God’s action toward creation, not God’s reaction to creation.  Death, Hades, hell, all come into being only as part of creation (and the fallen world) – they are not eternal but serve a purpose of purging everyone from sin.  They too will accomplish their purpose.  God’s plan from the beginning has never changed – to unite all that God created to divinity, to share God’s love and life with all God creates.   As God heals creation and makes all things new and becomes all in all, those things which are not part of God’s eternal plan will disappear.   God’s plan will be realized.

Next: Salvation

An Eternal Hell?

This is the 3^rd post in this blog series building upon David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved.  The previous post is That All Shall Be Saved.

Central to Hart’s thinking is that the idea of an eternal hell where sinners will be tortured forever without hope of redemption is inconsistent with the very nature of God and with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Hart does not argue against an idea that sinners will face judgment, but he holds to the notion that justice itself demands that punishment serve some redeeming purpose and that God’s love does not take away hope eternally.  Hart notes if heaven is really the place that individuals get to by their own efforts, then the logic of heaven turns out to be the ethos of hell.

…if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.  (David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2078-2080)

Certainly, some described hell as that place where no one can see the face of anyone else, where each person suffers because they are so isolated and alienated from all other people because it is the place in which there is no love for others.  Hart argues that ideas of an eternal hell come from Hellenic philosophy more than from Judaism:

In reality, the idea of eternal perdition for the wickedest of souls, in a place of unending suffering, appears to have been a Greek notion—mythological, religious, and philosophical—before it ever took (shallow) root in Jewish thought; it is certainly also an idea of only the most dubious “scriptural” authenticity.   (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location  2219-2221)

Some of the great thinkers of the early church struggled with the righteousness of an eternal hell:

It was precisely the absence of the banality of an eternal hell in Origen’s thought that allowed him to believe that all of life and all of creation have a meaning, one immeasurably richer and more ravishing than some tawdry final division between the winners and losers of the game of history: the fullness of reality that will be achieved when all being is perfectly united to God, and God is all in all.  (David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2230-2233)

Hart posits St Augustine and the Western theologians who followed him as being the root cause for the acceptance of an eternal hell in Christian thought as it fit their theology and logic.

If the story really does end as Augustine and countless others over the centuries have claimed it must, with most—or, at any rate, very many … or, really, any—beings consigned to eternal torment, and if this story then also entails that God freely and needlessly created the world knowing that this would be the result, then Christianity has no “evangel”—no “good news”—to impart. There is only the hideous truth of a monstrous deity presiding over an evil world whose very existence is an act of cruelty, meaninglessly embellished with the additional narrative detail—almost parodic in its triviality—of the arbitrary salvation of a few select souls who are not even in any special sense deserving of the privilege (else grace were not grace, and absolute power were not absolute power). This is in fact the ghastliest possible “dysangel,” the direst tidings ever visited on a world already too much burdened by unmerited suffering.  (David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 2307-2314)

Many Christians hold to and even seem to relish that God created humans knowing they would burn in hell eternally or even created some for no other reason than that they would burn eternally in hell.  Hart finds this hard to accept that people would hold to these views especially if they really read the New Testament or knew anything about God.  Yet, some seem to find comfort in an order which requires some or many to spend an eternity in hell after a brief sojourn on a rather unhappy earth.  Even when Eve and Adam sinned against God opening the entire human race to the effects of the Fall, the consequence which God allows is simply death.  Genesis 2 and 3 make no mention of hell at all, let alone an eternal hell of torture for sinners.  One would think if anyone deserves being sent to hell, it would be Adam and Eve for their sin dooms the entire human race and all of the cosmos to death.  The effect of their sin has far more consequences than say those of Hitler since their sin effects all humankind.   Yet, in the Orthodox Tradition, Adam and Eve, who never properly repent in Scripture, are shown as being resurrected from the dead in Orthodox icons of the harrowing of hell.  Their resurrection from the dead is proclaimed every Pascha in the Orthodox Church as our salvation.  There is no eternal hell for them, so why do we so readily believe there is an eternal hell for those born into the world of the fall who never have all of the advantages that Adam and Eve had? [see also my blog series which begins with Hell No?]

The man who wrote under the pseudonym of St. Dionysius the Areopagite offers us the following story to help us understand Christ’s attitude toward death and hell, and what we as His disciples should think about hell and Christ’s saving us from it:

 “One day I was in Crete.  The holy man Carpus welcomed me to his home. … he told me that one day he was exasperated by the infidelity of a man … (which)… had turned away from faith in God one of the members of his church… Carpus in his goodness should have been duty bound to pray for both of them. … Instead, Carpus for the first time in his life felt grieved and indignant.  It was in this state of mind that he went to bed and fell asleep.  In the middle of the night, at the hour when he was in the habit of waking of his own accord to sing the praises of God, he arose, still prey to unspiritual irritation, saying to himself that is was not right to let someone live . . . and he begged God to hurl his inexorable thunderbolt to put an end at a single stroke to the life of two unbelievers.  At that moment, he said, the house where he was suddenly seemed to rock this way and that, then to split in two from the roof down the middle.  A vivid flame appeared which came down on him; the sky was rent; Jesus revealed himself in the midst of a multitude of angels…    

Carpus lifted his eyes and stood astonished at what he saw.  Looking down, he told me, he watched the ground itself opening to make a black yawning abyss, and in front of him on the edge of the abyss the two men he had cursed, trembling and gradually losing their foothold.  From the bottom of the abyss he saw snakes crawling up and wrapping themselves round the men’s feet trying their utmost to drag them down.  The men seemed to be on the point of succumbing, partly despite themselves, partly quite willingly, since there were being assaulted and at the same time seduced by the Evil One.  Carpus was overjoyed, he told me, as he contemplated the spectacle beneath him.  Forgetting the vision above (Jesus), he was growing impatient and indignant that the unbelievers had not yet succumbed.  Several times he joined his efforts to those of the snakes…  

In the end he lifted his eyes and saw again in the sky the same vision as shortly before.  But this time Jesus, moving with compassion, came down to the unbelievers and stretched out a hand to help them… then he said to Carpus, ‘Your hand is already raised.  It is I whom you should strike, for here I am to suffer again for the salvation of humanity…moreover you should consider whether you yourself should not stay in the abyss with the snakes, rather than live with God… ”

Olivier Clement comments on the story:

“Carpus’s vision convinces him that to wish to damn anyone is to attack Christ himself, to annul his Passion and so to compel him to undergo it again; similarly it is to throw oneself, by one’s own actions, in the abyss.”      (The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Oliver Clement, pp 300-301)

We see in this that some saints really did reject an idea of an eternal hell.  So a story in the desert fathers offers the same idea:

 “One day a soldier asked an elder whether God grants pardon to sinners. The elder answered, ‘Tell me, my good friend, if your cloak is torn do you throw it away?’ The soldier replied, ‘No. I mend it and continue to use it.’ The elder concluded, ‘If you take good care of your cloak, will not God be merciful to his own image?’ (Sayings of the Desert Fathers)

God in his love punishes, not to take revenge, far from it. He seeks the restoration of his own image and does not prolong his anger. (Issac of Nineveh)”  (Quoted in The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Oliver Clement, pg. 299)

It is the same lesson that the Prophet Jonah, the Prophet of the resurrection of Christ, had to learn about his enemies, the Ninevites:

And the LORD said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”  (Jonah 4:10-11)

Olivier Clement comments:

“The early Church with its gaze fixed wholly on the Parousia had no conception either of the present existence of souls definitely damned, nor of an already consummated beatitude for the saints (or even for Christ, according to Origen), nor again of a ‘purgatory’ in the strictest sense of the word, meaning penal ‘satisfaction’ of a juridical nature, such as developed in the mediaeval West.  What we find rather in the Fathers is the idea of a progressive purification and healing.”  (The Roots of Christian Mysticism, p 298)

Even God’s ‘punishment’ is for the healing of humanity, not for its eternal torture.

Next:  Is Free Will the Curse?

That All Shall Be Saved

David Bentley Hart in his book, That All Shall Be Saved, makes the case that the idea of universal salvation is strongly supported in the New Testament and in the Tradition of the Church.   This is the 2^nd post in this series which began with the post And All Mankind.   What Hart really targets as misguided is a notion of an eternal hell where sinners are perpetually tortured for their sins.   This idea he argues is unworthy of the God of love and even illogical if one believes firmly in justice.  Punishment for wrong doing is one thing, but the idea that someone is eternally tortured for a finite sin goes beyond reason.  Additionally, true justice would have punishment as serving some redeemable value.  What good is punishment that never corrects or improves or helps a person?   How is that type of punishment consistent with the God who so loves the world?

Say to them, As I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:11; see also Ezekiel 18:31-32)

St. Romanos the Melodist offers us Christian insight into Ezekiel‘s prophetic words:

“Now I shall make all known to you and I shall prophesy to you, All-Holy, unblemished.

For fall and resurrection,

your Son is set, the life and the redemption and the resurrection of all.

The Lord has not appeared so that some may fall while others rise,

for the All-Compassionate does not rejoice at the fall of mortals.

Nor has he now come to make those who stand fall,

but rather he is here hastening to raise those who have fallen,

ransoming from death what he himself fashioned,

the only lover of mankind.

(On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, p. 31)

And from the desert fathers we find a very motherly and earthy understanding of the Ezekiel prophecy:

A brother asked Abba Macarius, “My father, I have fallen into a transgression.” Abba Macarius said to him, “It is written, my son, ‘I do not desire the death of a sinner as much as his repentance and his life’ [see 1 Tim 2:4 and 2 Pet 3:9].

Repent, therefore, my son; you will see him who is gentle, our Lord Jesus Christ, his face full of joy towards you, like a nursing mother whose face is full of joy for her child when he raises his hands and his face up to her. Even if he is full of all kinds of uncleanness, she does not turn away from that bad smell and excrement but takes pity on him and lifts him up and presses him to her breast, her face full of joy, and everything about him is sweet to her. If, then, this created person has pity for her child, how much greater is the love of the creator, our Lord Jesus Christ, for us!   (St. Macarius The Spirit Bearer: Coptic Texts Relating To Saint Macarius, Kindle Location 269-279)

The unconditional love of a mother for her child is a most exquisite image of God’s love for us.  God is not repulsed by the filth of our sins but desires to embrace us with God’s eternal love if only we will allow ourselves to be so embraced.

It is true, of course, that for Paul the cross of Christ revealed the law’s wrath upon sin, in that it was an eminently legal murder; but it certainly revealed nothing about the will of God toward his creatures enslaved to death, and was in no sense a ransom paid to the Father to avert his wrath against us. For the earliest Christians, the story of salvation was entirely one of rescue, all the way through: the epic of God descending into the depths of human estrangement to release his creatures from bondage to death, penetrating even into the heart of hades to set the captives free and recall his prodigal children and restore a broken creation.  The sacrifice of Christ was not a “ransom” paid to the Father, but rather the “manumission fee” (λύτρον, lytron) given to purchase the release of slaves held in bondage in death’s household.  (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 342-349)

The Good News is that God wills to save His human creatures from bondage to sin and death, not to consign them to an eternity of hell.  Salvation is liberation from sin and death.  Salvation brings an end to the place of the dead, the place where humans are separated from God’s Kingdom.

Basil of Caesarea (c. 329–379) once observed that, in his time, a large majority of his fellow Christians (at least, in the Greek-speaking Eastern Christian world that he knew) believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all in the end would attain salvation.   (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 45-47)

This same idea is common in the early church.

For the earliest and greatest of the church fathers in general, the story of salvation was really quite uncomplicated: We were born in bondage, in the house of a cruel master to whom we had been sold as slaves before we could choose for ourselves; we were born, moreover, not guilty or damnable in God’s eyes, but nonetheless corrupted and enchained by mortality, and so destined to sin through a congenital debility of will; we were ill, impaired, lost, dying; we were in hell already. But then Christ came to set us free, to buy us out of slavery, to heal us, to restore us to our true estate. In pursuit of those he loved, he invaded even the very depths of that hell we have made for ourselves and one another—in the cosmos, in history, in our own hearts—so as to drag us to himself (to use the actual language of John 12:32).  (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 358-364)

Hart is echoing the thoughts found in Patristic writings:

 “God is not One who requites evil, but he sets evil aright.   …  The majority of humankind will enter the kingdom of heaven without the experience of gehenna.”   (St. Isaac the Syrian, THE SPIRITUAL WORLD OF ISAAC THE SYRIAN, p 269)

“… there is no sin so great that it can conquer the munificence of the Master.” (St. John Chrysostom, BAPTISMAL INSTRUCTIONS, p 32)

“Do not say that God is just…David may call him just and fair, but God’s own Son has revealed to us that he is before all things good and kind.  He is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked (Luke 6:34).  How can you call God just when you read the parable of the labourers in the vineyard and their wages?  ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong…I choose to give to this last as I give to you…do you begrudge my generosity?’ (Matthew 20:13).  Likewise how can you call God just when you read the parable of the prodigal son who squanders his father’s wealth in riotous living, and the moment he displays some nostalgia his father runs to him, throws his arms around his neck and gives him complete power over all his riches? 

It is not someone else who has told us this about God, so that we might have doubts.  It is his own Son himself.   He bore this witness to God.  Where is God’s justice?  Here, in the fact that we were sinners and Christ died for us…  O the wonder of the grace of our Creator!  O the unfathomable goodness with which he has invested the existence of us sinners in order to create it afresh! … Anyone who has offended and blasphemed him he raises us again … Sin is to fail to understand the grace of the resurrection.  Where is the hell that could afflict us?  Where is the damnation that could make us afraid to the extent of overwhelming the joy of God’s love?  What is hell, face to face with the grace of the resurrection when he will rescue us from damnation, enable this corruptible body to put on incorruption and raise up fallen humanity from hell to glory? … Who will appreciate the wonder of our Creator’s grace as it deserves? … In place of what sinners justly deserve, he gives them resurrection.  In place of the bodies that have profaned his law, he clothes them anew in glory … See, Lord, I can no longer keep silent before the ocean of thy grace.  I no longer have any idea how to express the gratitude that I owe thee … Glory be to thee in both the worlds that thou hast created for our growth and delight, guiding us by the path of thy majestic works to the knowledge of thy glory!”   (St. Isaac of Ninevah  quoted in Olivier Clément’s  The Roots of Christian Mysticism, pgs 306-307)

Next:  An Eternal Hell?

And All Mankind

I recently read David Bentley Hart’s new book, That All Shall Be Saved.  Hart made a great and intellectual defense of so many things that I have believed and hoped were true.    I spent most of the last 40 years of my life calling people to pray, “Lord, have mercy.”  I have felt if God were not merciful, our liturgies in the Orthodox Church make no sense whatsoever.  Why call people to pray for God’s mercy if God has already decided not to be merciful but to condemn everyone to hell?  Is the Church a fraud and deceiving people to beg mercy from a ruthless, blood-thirsty and unforgiving tyrant who has already issued an irrevocable condemnation of sinners?   I have not believed that.  The Church seeks God’s mercy and forgiveness because She knows God to be forgiving, steadfast in love and abundant in mercy.   Christ’s coming into the world and dying for us wretchedly on the cross is the greatest sign of God’s loving-kindness.  And I don’t think God’s Word will return empty to Him as the Prophet Isaiah says:  “so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it”  (Isaiah 55:11).   Christ’s death on the cross will bring resurrection to all and so accomplish God’s will for us.

I am no doubt among those misguided souls whom St Augustine criticized at the beginning of the 5^th Century “as misericordes, ‘the merciful-hearted’  (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 38-40).   Yet, it seems to me it is exactly what our Lord Jesus called us to be.  And my reading through the history of Orthodoxy says I’m in good company as well.   For example I think St Silouan the Athonite is certainly a misericordes. I have written several blog series related to this topic and you can find two of those threads beginning with the posts Images of Salvation  or with Hell No?

You can read those blog series to see what things I’ve read that have shaped my thinking on these issues of salvation and damnation.  In this blog series I will be quoting some things I’ve mentioned before, but also am adding new material, and I will be weaving Hart’s comments into the posts.

Hart who dismisses biblical proof-texting as a method of argumentation nevertheless offers an abundance of New Testament texts in support of his position:  Matthew 18:14; Luke 16:16;  John 3:17, 4:42, 12:32, 47, 17:2; Romans 5:18-19, 11:32; 1 Corinthians 15:22; 2 Corinthians 5:14,19; Ephesians 1:9-10; Colossians 1:27-28; Philippians 2:9-11; 1 Timothy 2:3-6, 4:10; Titus 2:11; Hebrews 2:9; 2 Peter 3:9;  1 John 2:2, 4:14.   He claims there are many more such texts and far more than support the position of those he disdainfully calls the “infernalists”– those who proclaim an eternal hell for sinners.  Hart’s overall appeal is not to proof texts, but to taking the whole of Scriptures into account and analyzing the ideas with reason and logic.  He offers an overview of the topic which includes the entirety of Scripture and Tradition and not just a few quotes wrested from the whole.  He has done the hard work of synthesizing the Tradition into a coherent framework.   For him it is not the number of quotes one can come up with but how they reveal God to us.  Taking St Paul as an example, Hart notes:

“If Paul means us to understand that there will also be yet another class—that of the eternally derelict—he does not say so.  … If he really believed that the alternative to life in Christ is eternal torment, it seems fairly careless of him to have omitted any mention of the fact. In every instance in which he names the stakes of our relation to Christ, he describes salvation as rescue from death, not from perpetual torture.”  (Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Kindle Location 1474-1476)

Paul indeed mentions the wrath and judgment of God, but does not according to Hart mention an eternal hell.  St John Chrysostom commenting on Romans 3:29 and being critical of a Jewish exclusivism says:

It is as if Paul said, “Why do you think it strange that all humans could be saved?” Could God be partial? They outrage the glory of God by insolence toward the Gentiles, refusing to allow God to be the Lord of all. If God is the Lord of all, then God cares for all. If God cares for all, then God saves all alike through faith. This is the reason Paul says, Is God the God of Jews only? Is God not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also.  For God is not partial but is shared by every person, unlike the gods in the myths of the  Greeks.  (St. John Chrysostom, Romans: Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators, Kindle Loc. 1804-8)

Hart applies the same logic to Christian thinking as Chrysostom does to Jewish thought.  The same criticism can be leveled against Orthodox who hold to an exclusivist or exceptionalist perspective.   We can think about how we pray at the Divine Liturgy each time we celebrate it  (from the OCA translation):

You were pleased to ascend the cross in the flesh and deliver Your creatures from bondage to the enemy. (entrance prayer)

O God, our God, Who sent the heavenly Bread, the food of the whole world, our Lord and God, Jesus Christ,   (proskomedia)

have mercy on us and save us for He is good and loves mankind.

For the peace of the whole world, 

Your love for mankind is inexpressible

through Your inexpressible and boundless love for mankind, You became man, yet without change or alteration

Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven

We also offer You this reasonable worship: for the whole world

And all mankind.

and upon us all send forth Your mercies.

That our God, Who loves mankind

While certainly some of the prayers of the Liturgy are specifically for believers, for those who repent, for Orthodox Christians, the Liturgy has plenty of prayers for all of humankind and for the entire world.   The Liturgy is not exclusively exclusivist.  We pray constantly for the Lord to have mercy, for God to act according to God’s own nature, which is love, loving kindness, goodness and mercy.  We are to be like God in offering mercy to all.  And so we pray for everyone and work to be a light to the world, not a lamp hidden under an onion dome.

“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.   Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”  (Luke 6:35-38)

“But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.  …  You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  (Matthew 5:44-48)

Orthodox perfection means to love as God loves us.   And God’s love is for the entire cosmos as well as for all humankind.

Next:  That All Shall Be Saved

A Jonah Moment

 

The Holy Prophet Jonah is perhaps best remembered for trying to flee from the Lord, so that he wouldn’t have to do the Lord’s will since he found it disagreeable that the Ninevites, enemies of Israel,  might be given opportunity by God to repent and be saved.   As we read in the Book of Jonah:

Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare, and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.
But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.  ...  (Jonah 1:1-4)

Try as he might to flee from the presence of the Lord, Jonah discovered God is everywhere, one is never away from the presence of the Lord.  And though we have free will to choose in life anything other than God’s will, God is able to outlast us in any game of hide and seek or in any staring contest we might want to engage with God.  It is pretty hard to beat an eternal being in time, though we often are willing to try to play the game.   What is amazing about God in the Jonah story is that God saves Jonah from the belly of the whale while Jonah is trying to flee from God (the belly is certainly a symbol of Sheol – the place of the dead, and the whole story is a resurrection story and a prefiguring of Christ’s resurrection, at least as Christ and His followers read Jonah) .  Jonah is not saved because he is trying to do God’s will, but is saved despite his effort to thwart God’s will.  Think about that – Jonah is saved despite clearly rejecting holiness.  Jonah has worked his way to his Sheol, just like Adam did – by disobeying God.  Yet, Jonah is saved from the consequences of his own behavior.  No eternal punishment for the disobedient in this prophecy.

In the writings of the desert fathers, Abba Issac has his own Jonah moment, though in the end he agrees to God’s will a lot more easily than Jonah ever did.  Even saints do not always want to do the will of God, and some do it only grudgingly.  Humans are headstrong and strong willed to their deaths.  So we read in the desert fathers:

Once they came to make Abba Isaac a priest. When he heard, he fled into Egypt, went into a field, and hid amidst the crop. The fathers went after him and, when they got to the same field, sat down to rest a little there, for it was night. They set the ass free to pasture, but the ass went and stood by the elder. When they sought the ass at dawn, they found Abba Isaac too. They were amazed and wanted to bind him but he would not let the. “I am not running away any more,” he said, “for it is the will of God and no matter where I run away to, I will come to it.”   (Isaac of the Cells, Give Me a Word: Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p. 147)

No matter where we might run to get away from God, we will find God present there.  That is the mercy of an omnipresent God!

Jonah’s complaint with God is that God is too forgiving and merciful, and Jonah makes it clear that he disapproves of God’s nature:   But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the LORD and said, “I pray you, LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”    (Jonah 4:1-2)   While it is true of God that:  “He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger for ever” (Psalms 103:9), that was not true of Jonah who was unforgiving of the Ninevites and hoped they all would be destroyed and perhaps sent to hell for all eternity.  Fortunately for us, God is far more loving, forgiving and merciful than his saints!  We may never find reason to forgive someone or their offense in our lifetime.  On the other hand, since God is not bounded by time, God can afford to be eternally patient with us and forgive us in the world to come.

We  commemorate the Holy Prophet Jonah on September 22.