Query:

I am a bivocational pastor at a Southern Baptist church, and am currently and enjoying your recent book Pandemic of Lunacy.  Your books on sexuality and happiness are also on my shelves, and Pandemic is making me look forward to reading them too.  I hope you won't mind a question in the area of philosophical theology:  Briefly, how would you defend the traditional Christian doctrine of hell?

Reply:

I’m so glad that you’ve been finding my books enjoyable and helpful!  Coincidentally, I was raised in a Baptist home myself.  My grandfather, who baptized me, was, I think, the first pastor of a Polish-speaking Baptist congregation in the United States.  He was a true man of God.  I pray about him every day.

Briefly, here is why I think the doctrine of hell makes sense.

1.  The loving God created us in His image, rational beings capable of loving Him in return, as well as all others, who are equally His reflections.

2.  But love is something freely chosen.  Just because we are capable of loving God, we are capable of rejecting Him.  We are also capable of using others instead of loving them for His sake -- which is another way of rejecting Him.

3.  At this point someone might object that a good God wouldn’t have made us free to turn our backs on Him or on other people.  But a world without freedom would be a world without love.  Our choices wouldn’t even be choices; we would merely act as we were programmed to act.  The possibility of love is worth even the possibility of suffering.  More precisely, it is worth even the certainty of suffering, which God turns to the good of those who love Him.

4.  Now the most characteristic feature of heaven, and its chief joy, is what we were made for:  Fully seeing and enjoying God Himself.  Just for this reason, heaven itself would be hell to anyone who rejects Him.  The glory of God would be torment.

5.  So when God consigns some people to hell, he is giving them what they want.  They wouldn’t have it any other way.  As C.S. Lewis put it in The Problem with Pain, “The door to hell is locked from the inside.”  (He also wrote a sort of novel or parable about choosing hell, titled The Great Divorce.)

6.  An objection is that nobody could want this, because nobody desires suffering.  This plaint is based on a misunderstanding.  It isn’t that those in hell desire suffering, but they desire God to be absent and themselves to be absent from God.  I don’t say they are thinking “I desire to be separated from Him” – they may go to great lengths to conceal their minds from themselves.  But this one great choice is revealed in all their other choices.

7.  Since we are made for nothing less than perfect communion with the God in whose image we are made, to be utterly and finally separated from Him simply is the greatest possible suffering.  It is the ultimate futility, the consummate emptiness.  It is final ruin.

I already know that you have follow-ups, but I think that’s enough for now!

Query:

I’m not sure where you get your questions, but I wanted to submit one for consideration.  Here’s my question:

I feel like it's unfair that one man sinned, and now all people are born under judgment. It seems like God is holding us accountable for something we had no control over.  I've heard the argument that if I were in the Garden of Eden, I would have sinned too (and so would everyone else).  Perhaps true, but that raises a different issue.

If I bought a product and it broke, I'd return it for another one.  If the next one broke the same way, and then the next one, I'd assume the problem is not a bad individual product, but a bad design.

Why didn't God make humans smarter/wiser/whatever so that they would choose not to sin?  Free will is a complicated topic, but if obeying God is a dramatically better choice, why didn't God make us capable of recognizing that?

Thanks for any insight you can provide.  I used to read your column on Boundless a long time ago, btw.

Reply:

Thanks for writing.  You say “Here’s my question,” but I think it’s actually two questions:

(1)  Why didn't God make humans wiser so that they would choose not to sin?  Why didn’t He make us capable of recognizing that obeying Him is a dramatically better choice?

(2)  How can it be fair that though only one man sinned, now all people are born under judgment?  Is God holding us accountable for something over which we had no control?

As to the first question:  God did make humans capable of recognizing that obeying him is a dramatically better choice.  The whole point of it being a choice, however, is that we are not compelled to do it.  You may be assuming that whenever we can see what is good, we will do it.  Plato thought so; he reasoned no one does evil except through ignorance.  But this is contrary to all of our experience, because we are quite capable of doing evil even with our eyes open.  Haven’t you ever done something stupid, knowing that it was stupid?  I have.

It’s true that we can’t do evil for the sake of evil, but we are all too capable of pretending to ourselves that what is evil is actually good.  In fact, we even fabricate excuses for wrongdoing from the moral law itself.  For example, I might justify stealing from another fellow by telling myself that it’s unjust for him to have more than I have.  My pretense is that taking it is really an act of corrective justice.  The only way to make it impossible for us to make evil choices would be to deprive us of free will, so that they weren’t really choices at all.

Well, why not do that?  What’s the big deal about free will?

The big deal is that if we do what we do only because we are compelled to do it, then our actions lose most of their meaning and all of their moral value.  Consider:  If I freely perform some sacrificial good for my wife because I love her, then she is honored by my sacrifice and knows that she is cherished.  But if I do the same thing for her just because she paid the neighborhood magician to give me a love potion, then I haven’t really cherished her or done her honor, but merely acted under the spell.  Love isn’t love unless it isn’t freely chosen.  Since a world without freedom would be a world without love, it wouldn’t be a better world, but worse.

Your second question concerns what is called “original sin.”  I think this one is the harder of the two, and will take longer to answer.  Christians have been discussing it for centuries.

Here’s my take on it.  Stay with me, because the matter is complicated, but that’s just how it is.  It would be silly for physicists to complain, “The truth about quantum mechanics is too hard!”  In the same way, it would be silly for us to complain that the truth about God is too hard.  The truth about God is just exactly as hard as it has to be in order to fit how things really are with Him.

“Actual” sin and “original” sin are both sin, but not in precisely the same sense.  Rather they are analogous to each other.  What we call “actual” sin is easy to understand.  For example, suppose I commit the sin of envy against my neighbor.  Several things result.  One is that I weaken my mind’s control over my emotions.  Another is that I become disobedient to God.  A third is that I incur guilt for having done so, because I did it freely.  Not to mention the fact that in my envy, I may hurt him.

“Original” sin is the tough one.  Let me offer a comparison.  A high-performance fighter jet has an excellent design, but the freedom of the aircraft to turn this way or that way, as the pilot chooses, depends on a degree of instability.  This isn’t something wrong with the design, but something right with it.  As engineers say, “It isn’t a flaw, but a feature.”  After all, if the fighter jet were utterly stable, it would keep going the same way no matter what the pilot did.  Thus, it isn’t enough for the pilot to have a well-designed aircraft.  He also needs skill so that he can steer and respond to changing conditions -- and he needs to keep his eyes open, facing in direction of flight.

Now our nature is something like the design of the high-performance fighter jet.  We have all sorts of powerful engines and control surfaces -- abilities, desires, and emotions which can be turned this way or that.  For example, I might allow my anger to arouse me to defend my children from attack by someone who tried to hurt them, and that would be good.  But on the other hand I might let it push me into smashing the nose of someone who offered a justified criticism, and that would be bad.  So here too, there is a degree of instability, but here too, it isn’t something wrong with the design – in this case the design of human nature -- but something right with it.  It’s a precondition of our freedom.  Not only that, but just as the pilot, in order to fly the jet, needs to have skill and keep his eyes pointed in the direction of flight, so we, in order to “fly” our nature, need to have virtue and keep our eyes pointed in our direction of flight, which is toward God.

But here’s the catch.  The pilot doesn’t need help to keep his eyes open and facing in the right direction.  We do need help to keep our spiritual “eyes” open and facing in the right direction.  Hy?  Because God isn’t just something in the created world, something visible to the senses, like a landmark the pilot can look at – God is the Creator of the world, Himself uncreated, invisible to the senses.  Our natural power is not equal to looking toward the supernatural God; to keep facing Him, He must give us a certain special grace which lifts us above ourselves.

Our first parents were born with that gift, which is called “sanctifying” grace.  But just as the pilot might refuse to fly right and end up damaging his aircraft, so our first parents refused to “fly” right and ended up damaging their nature.  They lost what is called the “original integrity” of their nature.  I suppose we could say that they suffered “original damage,” but theologians use the term “original sin.”  Why sin?  Because in refusing to fly right, they did wrong.

But that’s about them, not us, right?  No, it’s about us too.  Just as our “actual” sin does several bad things to us, so “original” sin does several bad things to us -- not in precisely the same way, but in an analogous way.

Think about it.  Does what our first parents did still hurt us inwardly?  Yes.  The damage they did to themselves affected all future generations.  Our nature was designed so that our minds would control our emotions and desires.  That ability hasn’t been lost to us later human beings, but it has been weakened.  Sometimes it seems as though we had become combustible – as though our emotions and desires had become kindling wood for sin – because at the least little spark, we burst into flames.  “That isn’t fair!” we say.  Well, in a sense, no, just as it isn’t fair that a child is born in a state of addiction because his mother used addictive drugs while he was in the womb.  But would you want a world in which nothing had consequences, nothing had meaning?  A world in which children turned out the same no matter how their parents raised them?  In that case, why bother with parents at all?  God bothers with parents because He chose to make a world in which finite rational creatures are given the astounding privilege of imitating His Fatherhood and participating in the wisdom by which He governs the universe.  By the fact of raising my children, for good or ill I am also helping raise my children’s children’s children, so the privilege is not taken away, but intensified!  But with this privilege comes responsibility, for failure to live up to it causes real hurt to others.  The flip side of the power to do good is the power to do harm.  (You might read this blog post too.)  So it is with what our first parents did.

Do we have personal responsibility for what they did?  In a sense no, but in a sense, yes.  Certainly I am not responsible for the sin of my first parents in the same sense that I would be if I myself had eaten of the forbidden fruit.  Nevertheless, I share in the shame of they did.  “That isn’t fair either!”  Sure it is.  They were the representatives of the whole human family, me included.  Suppose your mother and father and aunts and uncles had committed terrible atrocities before you were born.  As a member of the family, wouldn’t you be ashamed of their deeds?  Of course you would.  “But I didn’t do those things, they did!”  But no one really thinks like that.  We all realize that a family has a certain joint responsibility for its members.  And this too is passed on through the generations.  We’re individuals – but we’re not just individuals.  We’re connected.

So is God beating us up for what was done in the Garden as though we ourselves had done it?  Certainly not.  Nevertheless, what was done in the Garden has consequences.  Because of it, things are much harder now.  Yes, there is still in each of us a longing for God.  Yes, we are still made in His image.  But we are no longer born with our eyes already turned in His direction; in fact, we’re born spiritually cross-eyed.  And our fearfully and wonderfully made nature is now in a bad condition.

Yet the loving God had compassion upon us, and took the worst of our shame and suffering upon Himself, so that we, beyond all deserving, could be restored to Him.  That is the meaning of the Cross.

I hope you keep asking good questions.  By the way, you mention my old Office Hours and Ask Theophilus columns from the old Boundless webzine.  A lot of them are still posted here on my Theophilus Unbound page!

NEW STUFF

“Made in the Image of Nothing”:  My review of Carl Trueman’s excellent new book, The Desecration of Man.

The text of a short interview with me, with a link to the audio, about Pandemic of Lunacy, on World magazine’s podcast, “The World and Everything In It.”  The interview begins at 23:20.

One of Dostoevsky’s characters famously claims that if there is no God, then everything is permitted.  Dostoevsky himself believed in God, but millions of atheists have taken comfort from his character’s line.  They reason that since God isn’t there to judge me, I can do what I want.

The statement is a queer one.  In at least three ways it is false, and in only one sense sort of true.  Even that sort-of-a-sense depends on an impossibility.

The speaker supposes that things are permitted and forbidden only because God has arbitrarily decreed them so.  Thus, he imagines that if there is no God, everything is just the same as if He exists -- except that there are no divine commands or prohibitions.  This being the case, everything is permitted.

The first flaw in this reasoning – and so the first sense in which the statement is false -- is that God’s decrees are not arbitrary.  They correspond to the natures of things that He has brought about.  We can’t create ourselves, any more than we can create another sky; He has done it already.  By nature, a lion eats lambs and is exempt from culpability.  By nature, human beings are responsible for their actions, and innocent human beings are inviolable.  By nature, children need and have a right to their parents’ care, and parents have the right and duty to care for them the best they can.  All this would be true – and we could tell that it is -- even if no one had told us.

The second flaw in this reasoning – and so the second sense in which the statement is false -- is that we don’t believe in God, and then, from this belief, derive a conscience.  Rather we are endowed by Him with conscience from the beginning, and this conscience testifies to us of God.  It presents itself to us as His voice.  If I stop believing in God, I don’t cease to have a conscience, any more than I can unmake my own nature.  What happens instead is because I no longer believe in God, I can no longer explain my conscience.  I have to make it out to be something other than a conscience.  For example, I might take it to be merely an instinct, or a residue of how I was brought up, or even me talking to myself.  Actually it couldn’t be any of those things.  The first hypothesis can’t explain how I can ever think it right to resist my instincts; there cannot be an instinct to resist instinct.  The second one can’t explain why I may think it right to go against some element of my upbringing; if I am how I was taught, that’s the end of it.  And the third one can’t explain how what I say to myself somehow becomes a law which I can’t change to suit myself.

The third flaw in this reasoning – and so the third sense in which the statement is false -- is that the universe requires an ultimate explanation, a First Cause.  An infinite regress of explanations is no explanation at all; a chain of causes with no beginning is no cause at all.  Since the universe does not have to exist, if there were no cause, there would be no universe, and so there could be no moral evaluation of acts whatsoever.  It would not be that all human acts would be permitted rather than forbidden, but that there would be neither acts nor actors, therefore no permitting or forbidding at all.  There would be nothing.  In fact, there would be less than nothing, because the something of which nothing is the absence could not be conceived, and there would be no one to conceive it.

Now in a fourth way, the statement might be called true, but this way would require us to believe something impossible – that the universe could exist without God having brought it into being and endowed it with order.  Such an existence would make no sense of any kind, neither logical, nor causal, nor moral.  Nothing could be forbidden, simply because there could be no ultimate explanation for anything.  This is the supposition of existentionalists, who say existence is absurd.

Then again, the fact that nothing could be forbidden wouldn’t really mean that everything would be permitted.  In a world in which everything were meaningless, both permitting and forbidding would be meaningless, and the statement “everything is permitted” would make no more sense than “everything is required,” or for that matter “everything is Kltpzyxm.”  We would not even declare existence absurd, because the idea of absurdity makes sense only against the frustrated expectation of meaning.  To be appalled that we have no meaning, we have to know what meaning is, and in such an impossible world, we couldn’t know what it is.  Meaning itself would be meaningless.

So the idea that if there is no God, then everything is permitted, leads to absurdities

But now turn this around:  If the universe does make sense, then as we saw above, there must be a First Sense -- a First Cause, a First Origin of whatever sense it does make – and this is what we call God.  In this case, we have no more reason to reject the moral order we see in things than to reject their logical order, their causal order, the order of ends to means, or the order of our minds.

Thus, among other things, created beings have natures.  Some things make our natures flourish, and others are inimical to them.  Therefore there are a good and evil.  Moreover some things can be rightly directed to our highest good in Him, and other things cannot.  Therefore there are an intrinsic good and evil.  Therefore not everything is permitted.

Query:

I’ve been reading about the American founding, but the failure to explain what a “republic” is or what “republicanism” is supposed to be is frustrating.  Take the late Gordon Wood.  He is helpful in other ways, but he writes long chapters on how republican the English were, how the colonists were more so, and how England itself was a highly republican sort of monarchy – and what does this mean?

I make sense of it by distinguishing between the form of government and the societal mores. A country may nominally be a monarchy, but the society is monarchical to the extent its sense of the nation (of its constitution?) is mediated through the monarch. It is "republican" to the extent that sense is independent of the monarch.

In a true monarchy, the king has more power to interpret the constitution, literally and symbolically. His embodiment of the nation counts for more.  It makes sense that as common people became more educated, they would have less need of monarchical forms.

This enables me to make sense of claims about American republicanism.  Do you think I am on the right track?

Reply:

I do think you’re on the right track.  The failure of various writers to explain what they mean by the terms “republic” and “republicanism” has long frustrated me too -- also the terms “democracy” and “democratic,” but that’s a different story.

Writers speak of republics in widely different senses.  I used to offer my students a one-size-fits-all definition, that republican government is government without a king, structured in such a way that "the last word" always rests, directly or indirectly, with the whole body of eligible citizens.  They -- not a body of nobles, though one might exist -- are where "the buck stops."

By a “king” I mean someone who actually exercises a share in rule.  Contemporary England has sometimes been called a “crowned republic” because the king no longer counts for much politically, although he does socially.  We seem to be something like an informal monarchy because of the way we treat our presidents.

By “eligible citizens” I meant "citizens eligible to participate in the stage of politics in question.”  In ancient republics like Rome, I told them, the body of eligible citizens was given the last word by requiring that every law be submitted for their personal approval at an Assembly of the People.  (In practice, of course, the aristocratic Senate manipulated the popular assemblies and most of the time did pretty much as it pleased, although the tribunes were a real check.)  Our method has been much less direct.  For that reason, Madison and Hamilton used the term “republic” simply for a regime dependent on representation rather than direct popular rule, although I think this is misleading.

I like your distinction between republicanism in the form of government and republicanism in the mores of the society.  However, although knowledge of public affairs is important, I wouldn’t necessarily say that how educated the citizens are is the key factor.  If they are highly educated, but don’t believe in a common good or don’t have civic virtue, they won’t be able to participate in government in a republican way.

Of course then we have to ask what we mean by civic virtue and the common good.  Influenced by Montesquieu, some of the Founders thought civic virtue lay mostly in devotion to the law and willingness to set aside personal interest for the common good.  Montesquieu would have had us think of Sparta, in which a woman who was told by a runner that her sons had fallen in battle gave the answer, “Don’t bother me about that.  Did we win?”

I am all for civic virtue and the common good, but I think the Spartan view of them was perverse.

Happy semiquincentennial!

NEW STUFF:

Sean McDowell’s interview with me (Dr. McDowell is a professor at Biola University):  “Why This Nihilist Professor Couldn’t Escape God.”  You can view it either here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w52USVw6t4 or here:  https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/why-this-nihilist-professor-couldnt-escape-god-j-budziszewski-testimony.

Query:

You’ve written and taught about moral prohibitions which have no exceptions.  Thomas Aquinas gives as an example the prohibition of lying.  Aristotle would never deny that someone has the right to lie to his enemies, but as you explain, Aquinas holds that lying is always immoral.

But while lying is not something noble or befitting the conduct of a gentleman, isn’t it a necessity?  Necessity sometimes triumphs over the noble.

I do not mean to imply that the thought of this sublime genius, Aquinas, is naïvely inflexible.  The natural law would even require a legislator to take the deficiencies of his subjects into account when legislating.  But it is certainly the case that his natural law teaching would not allow a city to take certain necessary actions to preserve its existence if it involved something prohibited by the natural law.

Reply:

Your question is certainly topical.  The Rasmussen polling organization, RMG Research, found that among economically elite voters who talk about politics every day, 69% say they would rather cheat than lose a close election.

Would it help to make a distinction?  For it seems to me that your objection mixes together three different issues:

1.  Are there any exceptionless prohibitions?

2.  Is the prohibition of lying, properly understood, one of them?

3.  What is the proper understanding of a lie?  Is the classical definition right, so that a lie is saying what one knows to be false with the intention of deceiving?  Or is a lie only speaking in such a way to someone who has a right to the truth?  Or does anything which conceals the truth count as a lie, so that, for example, silences, disguises, ambushes, and polite equivocations are kinds of lie?

To put it my point another way:  I wonder whether your objection to the idea of exceptionless prohibitions may really be an objection to certain exceptionless prohibitions, especially lying – or, perhaps, to certain exceptionless prohibitions understood in a certain way.

One way to settle which kind of objection you are making is to ask yourself whether there is any prohibition at all which you would view as exceptionless.  Consider the question and see what you think.

How about "Never rape your mother," or "Never torture a baby to death"?  Would you ever do those things so that good would result?  If not, then you are really on Thomas Aquinas’s side.  It may be an exaggeration to say that your disagreement is only about the details – but at least you agree that there are some exceptionless prohibitions.  We must not do what is intrinsically evil even so that good will result.