Non Serviam: The Mystery of the First Refusal
"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n"
(Satan, Milton's Paradise Lost)
Introduction
Before the serpent, before any human being drew breath, or
any garden was planted, something turned.
That's the question this essay sits with. Not why evil
exists in some abstract philosophical sense, but how the very first act of
rebellion was even possible. Lucifer, the tradition tells us, had no excuses.
No tempter whispering in his ear, no passion clouding his judgment, no
ignorance to hide behind. Pure spirit and intellect; created good and held in
grace, and yet, at some point in what we can only call the morning of creation:
non serviam. I will not serve.
The human fall has contextual factors. There's a serpent,
there's embodiment, there's the particular vulnerability of creatures who learn
gradually and can be deceived. When Adam and Eve make a wrong choice, we can
see contributing conditions. But Lucifer strips the problem to its bones. His
refusal is the hardest case. There’s no possible excuse, and so the mystery
stands alone.
If we can even partially begin to understand what made that
refusal possible, we will gain insight into the structure of freedom itself and
into what it costs a Creator to create beings capable of genuine refusal of love.
The Problem with a Perfect Beginning
To understand the Fall, human or angelic, we must first
understand what was being fallen from. And this is where classical theology
makes a claim that surprises many people who haven't encountered it.
Adam and Eve weren't simply innocent in the way a child is
innocent through inexperience, or not yet having been tested. They were
constituted in a condition of positive harmony. The technical term is “original
justice”. It names a specific state. One in which the body was subject to the
soul, passions were subject to reason, and the whole person was freely and
joyfully oriented toward God. There was no concupiscence; no disordered
appetite dragging the will toward evil.
If there were no internal disorder, no irrational impulse
inclining them toward sin, then how could temptation get traction?
The classical answer turns on a subtle but crucial
distinction. The absence of disorder is not the same as the impossibility of
choice. Adam and Eve were rightly ordered, but they were not what the theologians
call “confirmed in glory”. The saints and angels who dwell in the full presence
of God enjoy a direct, unshakeable union with Him that makes sin literally
inconceivable because the will, having seen what it was always made for, could
no more turn away than a thirsty person, having found water, could prefer dust.
That state had not yet been granted to Adam and Eve. They stood in via:
on the way. Their wills were rightly ordered, but not yet permanently secured.
The Church has always distinguished between holiness and
impeccability. Adam possessed the first. He did not possess the second, the
sheer inability to sin that belongs only to those confirmed in the eternal life
of God. The harmony within him eliminated disordered appetites that overwhelm
reason. It didn’t eliminate the possibility inherent in any finite will, the
capacity to prefer the self over God. To want the present moment over the
eternal good, and autonomy over trust.
God wants Adam and Eve to choose Him and love Him. He gifted
them free will, as a will that cannot choose wrongly cannot really choose at
all. And a being that cannot really choose cannot really love.
What the Serpent Actually Did
When the serpent arrives in Genesis 3, it's tempting to read
him as the explanation. An outside force that injected evil into an otherwise
incorruptible system. This is not how the tradition sees it. The serpent was
the occasion of the fall, not its sufficient condition.
The divine prohibition was already in place before the
serpent spoke. That command alone establishes the drama of freedom, presenting
the will with a real alternative: obedience or disobedience; trust or
self-assertion. The serpent didn't create this alternative. At most, he
sharpened it, deceptively reframing a divine boundary as an act of jealousy, reframing
obedience as servility and autonomy as liberation.
Notice what kind of temptation this is. "You will be
like God" is not an appeal to animal appetite. It's an appeal to reason; an
invitation to a false picture of flourishing. The serpent doesn't inflame a
passion; he proposes an interpretation. The sin that followed was not passion
overwhelming reason. It was human reason freely embracing a false picture of
reality.
This shows that the problem isn't located in embodiment or
desire. It’s located in freedom itself, in the fact that a will can be
presented with a false good and choose it. Even in a state of perfect harmony,
with no disordered desires and no prior corruption, that possibility remains.
The serpent found the crack. He didn’t create it. He knew it was there and
exploited it.
Which brings us back to Lucifer, because in his case, there
was no outside tempter or deceiver.
Lucifer: The Hardest Case
Lucifer is pure intellect. He has no embodiment, no
passions, no possibility of being deceived through ignorance. The angels, in
classical theology, know comprehensively, directly, and immediately. Not
discursively, picking their way through arguments step by step, but grasping
things whole. And their choices reflect this. Angelic choice is not the kind
that unfolds across time, revisable in the light of new experience or second
thoughts. It is a single, total commitment of intellect and will made once, in full
possession of the facts, and permanently.
Where a human being deliberates across a lifetime, an
angel's probation was by its nature immediate. A choice made in what the
tradition struggles to call an instant, because nothing in angelic knowing
requires duration. This is why the fallen angels' condition is irreversible.
Not because God is implacable, but because their act has no temporal dimension
in which repentance could arise. They didn't choose badly in a moment of
weakness that they might later reconsider. They chose, with full clarity,
without compulsion or confusion, once and for all.
This makes Lucifer's fall simultaneously the clearest and
most inexplicable event in the history of theology. Clearest, because there are
no mitigating factors. Inexplicable, because without mitigating factors, the
act seems to have no internal logic at all.
We normally explain a bad choice by pointing to something
that distorted the chooser's perception: disordered passion, ignorance,
manipulation, or false belief. Remove all of those, and you remove the references
we use to help make bad choices intelligible. Lucifer’s choice isn't a mistake.
He knew what he was doing. Nor is it weakness. There was no weakness to appeal
to. Self-interest doesn't explain it either. He was turning from the source of
his own being toward nothing.
The scholastic term for this is “deficient causality”. Evil
has no positive cause; it arises when the will fails to cleave to the good it
knows. It’s an absence that masquerades as an act.
Lucifer fell because he could. This may be the only honest
answer. It refuses to fill the gap with a pseudo-explanation that would obscure
what's genuinely strange. Scholastic theology confesses that the gap between
the possibility of refusal and its actuality has no further floor. No
sub-basement of motive to excavate. At some point, you reach the naked act of a
will choosing against its own deepest nature, and beneath it, nothing further.
This doesn't explain the fall. It names the location of the
mystery with greater precision, which is something, though not as much as we'd
like it to be.
What Pride Actually Means
Augustine identified the root of angelic sin as pride. Not
vanity or arrogance, something more precise. A metaphysical act. A will
preferring its own excellence to the gift of God. Evil has no efficient cause,
no positive engine driving it, only the will's failure, for no sufficient
reason, to remain oriented toward the higher good.
Aquinas refined this. The fallen angels didn't reject
happiness as such; they desired it on their own terms, without grace, without
receptivity, and without really acknowledging that what they were was always a
gift. Not ingratitude exactly; closer to a refusal of the very category of
gift. The insistence on self-sufficiency in a being that did not, in fact,
originate itself.
Logic suggests that pride of this kind need an occasion. An
abstract orientation toward self-sufficiency is not yet a choice. Something has
to be placed before the will that demands the posture of reception and is then positively
refused.
The Order Lucifer Refused
One longstanding proposal is that the angels were given some
revelation of the divine order of grace, enough to require either humble assent
or refusal. According to this, human beings, embodied, composite creatures who
eat, suffer, die, and are lower than angels in the natural order, would be
raised above them in the final order of grace. The creatures the angels were
appointed to serve would, in the end, outrank them.
In Franciscan theology, most notably in John Duns Scotus,
this takes a more explicitly Christological form. For Scotus, the Incarnation
was not God's response to sin but His original intention; the highest
expression of divine love, willed from before creation. The test presented to
the angels was therefore not merely whether they could accept a hierarchy in
which humanity was elevated, but something sharper. Could they assent to a
universe ordered around a God who would unite Himself to human nature in Christ?
Whether one follows Scotus in holding the Incarnation as
God's absolute intention, or Aquinas in holding it as the fitting divine
response to foreseen sin, the order placed before the angels involved the same
essential claim: that glory would be expressed through divine self-gift to
human nature, through condescension rather than distance. Non serviam is
the refusal of a God whose greatness looked like descent.
This account identifies the occasion of Lucifer's refusal. The
specific shape of the divine order he was shown and could not accept. It does
not claim to have finally explained the act itself. Why a will so constituted
refused, rather than assented, remains the abyss that deficient causality
points at. The Scotus framing tells us what was placed before him. It does not
tell us why he turned from it.
This is also why the question of whether the Incarnation was
God's original intention or His response to foreseen sin finally resists a
clean answer. Not because the tradition is confused, but because the question
imagines a divine deliberation that never happened. God does not deliberate in
stages; His knowledge is eternal and simple. He sees, in a single act, all that
would freely occur and all that He would freely do in response. His eternal
response to a fall He permitted but did not will, known from before creation,
answered from before creation, without that foreknown answer making the fall
itself any less a free act of creaturely refusal.
What this means is that the felix culpa (the
"happy fault" of the Easter Exsultet) is not saying that Adam's sin
was fortunate as a lucky accident. It is the recognition, from within time, of
what was always true in eternity: that the good drawn from the fall exceeds the
loss. Humanity redeemed is not simply restored. It is humanity elevated beyond
what it was, into sons and daughters of God by adoption, participants in the
divine nature, heirs of a glory that unfallen Adam in Eden did not possess. The
remedy doesn't merely close the wound. It transfigures the patient.
This is the order Lucifer was shown and refused: that the
highest creatures would not be the pure spirits but beings of flesh and blood,
elevated through gift into a glory surpassing their own. And more than that, God
Himself would take on that flesh. Non serviam is the refusal of a vision
of divine love that expresses itself through descent, through embodiment,
through the willingness to raise creatures of dust not by decree from above but
by entering into their condition from below.
He could not have known where that refusal would lead. The
Cross was not part of any angelic revelation. It belongs to a history that only
became necessary after the human fall, a history Lucifer's own rebellion helped
set in motion. But seen from the other side of that history, the irony cuts
deep. The thing he found intolerable, a God whose greatness expresses itself
through condescension, turns out to be the fullest revelation of what God
actually is. And the Cross is that same love going further down than he ever
imagined possible. All the way to Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. The cry of
desolation from a cross outside a city wall.
A God who doesn't just stoop. A God who kneels in the dirt
and stays there until it's finished. It's hard to know what to do with that,
honestly, but that seems to be the point.
Foreknowledge Without Complicity
God knew all of this would happen. Within any serious
theism, this is unavoidable. Divine omniscience is the eternal, simple,
non-temporal awareness of all that is and all that freely will be. Nothing in
created history surprises God. The rebellion of Lucifer, the fall of Adam. None
of it derails a previously well-laid plan.
This raises a question theology can't avoid. Why, then, did
He create them?
There is a cheap, tempting answer here for some. That God
needed the fall, that the drama of redemption required sin as its precondition,
that without the fall there is no Cross, no display of inexhaustible mercy. On
this account, the rebellion of angels and the sin of Eden were written into the
script in advance by a God who is the
playwright, grieving theatrically over a tragedy He authored.
Christian theology insists instead on the distinction
between what God wills and what God permits. God does not will the rebellion.
He permits it, within a providence that can draw greater good from evil without
requiring evil to do so. The greater good is not that evil occurred. It is that
love, confronting evil freely, proves inexhaustible.
This means God could have created a world in which no angel
fell and no human being sinned. A world without the Cross, because the Cross
presupposes a fall that was never inevitable. It was a free act of creaturely
will, met by a free act of divine love. To suggest otherwise, that God
foreordained some to fall as the necessary backdrop to election, is precisely
the move many strands of both Catholic and Reformed theology have resisted. A
decree of reprobation that precedes and causes the fall makes God the author of
the tragedy He appears to mourn.
Divine foreknowledge is not the same thing as causation.
God's eternal awareness of what would freely occur is not God determining what
must occur. That distinction matters. It's the difference between a God who
grieves genuinely and a God whose grief is performance; between a prodigal-son
parable in which the father's anguish is real and one in which he wrote the
departure into the story before his son was born.
The mystery is not dissolved. We have explained what God did
not do. The answer that remains is simpler to state than to absorb: He wills a
love that is tested and real, and the greater good drawn from permitted evil is
not that evil occurred, but that love, descending into it, was not consumed.
What the Silence of Scripture Teaches
Scripture says surprisingly little about the interior of
Lucifer's fall. The texts most commonly cited, passages from Isaiah and Ezekiel, read
typologically, don't penetrate the psychology of the rebellion. Revelation 12
gives us war in heaven, a dragon cast down, but no interior monologue. We're
given just the image: brightness fallen, a third of the stars swept from the
sky.
This restraint may be instructive. Scripture is not trying
to satisfy our curiosity about angelic psychology. It holds two truths in
tension without resolving them: evil originates in created freedom, not in God;
and God remains sovereign even over rebellion. The silence beyond that is its
own kind of speech. The mystery of iniquity is not something we are
really given to anatomise fully. We are shown the reality of rebellion, not its
interior logic, perhaps because its interior logic is, finally, the absence of
logic; an abyss dressed up as a reason.
In the end, centuries of theological reflection don’t give
us a solution so much as a handful of hard-won distinctions. A rightly ordered
will is not an incapable one. The serpent didn’t create the drama of freedom,
though it sharpened it. Divine foreknowledge is not divine causation. And the
“greater good” God draws from permitted evil isn’t that evil happened, but that
love, confronting it freely, proves inexhaustible.
These distinctions mark the edges of the mystery with
honesty. They don’t remove it. At the centre, after all the careful
distinctions have been made, something remains: a creature, created in
goodness, held in grace, with nothing distorting its knowledge of the good
proper to it, turning away. Not by accident. Not in confusion. Freely, clearly,
and once. Then forever.
The Answer That Is Not an Argument
The Cross is not theology's answer to the problem of evil in
the sense of a logical solution. It does not explain why a good God permitted
rebellion. It does not close the gap in Lucifer's choice.
But it is an answer of a different kind. Not a solution so
much as a response. God did not answer non serviam with power, or
argument, or a demonstration of superiority. He responded by descending. By
taking on the very flesh that Lucifer found beneath the dignity of God. By
living among creatures of dust, eating with them, weeping with them, and
finally dying among them, publicly, shamefully.
The pride that says I will not serve a God who stoops
meets, in the end, a God who keeps on stooping. Past the Incarnation into
Gethsemane, past Gethsemane onto the Cross, past the Cross into the grave.
Meeting refusal not with overwhelming force, but with a love that will not stop
descending.
This is not weakness or defeat. It’s the one thing pride
structurally cannot comprehend because pride reads all descent as loss, all
service as servility. A love that chooses to serve, that gives without being
emptied, this is unintelligible from within the logic of non serviam.
At its best, theology knows the difference between a
question that is answered and a question that is understood.
The mystery of the first refusal isn't something we can finally
answer. At best, we learn how to understand where answers run out. What we have
is not a solution but honest markers around the place where explanation stops: that
freedom is real; and created freedom is genuinely risky; God permits what He
does not will; and love that cannot be refused is not love.
At the centre is one truth, simply stated: God wills to be
loved freely. That entails risk, not because God miscalculates, but because
freedom without the genuine possibility of refusal is not freedom, and love
without the genuine possibility of refusal is not love. The history that
follows: rebellion, fall, Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, is the drama of
what that divine vulnerability looks like when taken all the way to its limit.
Theology's final word is not explanation but confession. It confesses a Love that entered it, descended into the very heart of non serviam, and was not consumed by it.
References
Augustine of Hippo
The City of God (De
Civitate Dei), Books XI–XIV; on the angelic fall, pride, and deficient
causality. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm
On Free Will (De Libero Arbitrio); on the nature of evil as privation and the will's capacity for self-directed refusal.
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1510.htm
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologiae, Prima
Pars, Questions 62–64; on angelic nature, merit, and the sin of the demons.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1062.htm
Summa Theologiae, Prima
Pars, Questions 48–49; on evil as privation and deficient causality.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1048.htm
John Duns Scotus
Ordinatio III, dist. 7; on the absolute primacy of Christ and the Incarnation as God's original intention rather than a remedy for sin. https://www.aristotelophile.com/Books/Translations/Scotus%20Ordinatio%20III%20dd.1-17.pdf
Catechism of the Catholic
Church
Paragraphs 391–395; on the fall of
the angels, freedom, and irreversibility of angelic choice.
https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P18.HTM
Paragraphs 309–314; on God's permission of evil and
providence. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1C.HTM
Hello, it's your resident thorn-in-the-side for all things eschatological.
ReplyDeleteThe saints and angels who dwell in the full presence of God enjoy a direct, unshakeable union with Him that makes sin literally inconceivable because the will, having seen what it was always made for, could no more turn away than a thirsty person, having found water, could prefer dust.
In the previous articles, when I suggested that a state like this would pertain to any soul encountering God with true clarity, you said you were 'wary of a model in which refusal becomes metaphysically unintelligible once clarity is present'. If no soul (or only a trivial number) can obtain perfection in this life, is the post-mortem purification of the soul to the degree where it cannot turn away not also jettisoning free will?
At some point, you reach the naked act of a will choosing against its own deepest nature, and beneath it, nothing further.
I don't think this is possible. A creature's naked will must be identical to its nature.
Angelic choice is not the kind that unfolds across time, revisable in the light of new experience or second thoughts. It is a single, total commitment of intellect and will made once, in full possession of the facts, and permanently.
their act has no temporal dimension
Granted that a lot of Scriptural language is allegorical here, but surely a 'fall' requires some kind of procession of events. If the angels' fall was identical with their creation, then there doesn't seem to be a sense in which they have fallen. As the very least, Scripture seems to indicate that there was a time before Satan fell, an occasion on which he fell, and an end when he will be destroyed.
I'm also unclear on why the decision to rebel is irreversible, unless angelic beings are created tabula rasa (which would make the idea of a 'fall' incoherent). Temporality doesn't seem to be a barrier here: angelic beings, including Lucifer, are able to manifest in our time. The idea of angels being perfectly informed creatures of pure will rejecting a God of perfect love seems contradictory to me.
Always appreciate the thorn — it keeps things honest.
DeleteI think we're circling two main disagreements: what "perfect freedom" looks like, and whether every choice has to be fully explainable.
On freedom and seeing God clearly
The tension you're pointing to is real. If seeing God clearly means you can't turn away, doesn't that kill freedom?
The distinction I'm trying to make is this: freedom isn't just the ability to choose between options, it's also the ability to fully rest in what you were made for. So when the will finally sees God face to face, it doesn't lose freedom, it reaches its fulfilment. At that point, turning away becomes not externally blocked but internally incoherent, because the will has arrived at the very thing it was always constituted for.
However, I don't think that level of clarity is simply what happens whenever a soul encounters God. If it were, then the first refusal, angelic or human, becomes impossible to describe. Something about the mode of encounter matters, not just its object.
On the "naked will equals nature" point
I agree the will isn't separate from our nature. But I don't think every act of will can be neatly explained as a rational expression of that nature. The classical view I'm drawing on says that good actions make sense because they align with what we're made for, but bad actions don't have that same structure. They're a failure to act in line with the good, not a fully positive alternative with its own logic.
So when I say you eventually reach a "naked act," I don't mean something random. I mean an act that doesn't have a deeper, satisfying why behind it. That's uncomfortable, but I think it's the honest stopping point.
On angels and time
When I say angelic choice isn't "in time," I don't mean nothing happens or that the fall is identical to their creation, and you're right that the essay slightly overreaches there. There's still a real sequence: creation, gift, presentation of a choice, acceptance or refusal. What I mean is that their choice isn't a slow, step-by-step process like ours. They don't deliberate, reconsider, or revise in the light of new experience. Scripture describes it in temporal terms because that's the only language available to us, but the underlying reality is a kind of total, immediate commitment that our sequential experience doesn't map onto.
On irreversibility
The irreversibility isn't about angels being temporally "stuck." It's that their choice is made with a completeness that leaves no room for second thoughts. We change our minds because we learn, or because we didn't fully see what we were doing. The claim is that angelic choice doesn't have that gap. There's no new perspective that could open repentance, not because God withholds it, but because the act itself was made without the incompleteness that makes revision possible for us.
Where I think we finally differ and why universalism matters here
I suspect this disagreement runs deeper than the angel's question. If your universalism means that no refusal, human or angelic, is ever truly final, then the irreversibility I'm arguing for will look not just philosophically questionable but theologically motivated in the wrong direction. I don't want to open that whole discussion here, but I think it's worth naming. The tradition I'm drawing on holds that some orientations of the will do become permanent, and not only by divine decree. That's a genuine disagreement between us, and probably the one underneath the others.
My position allows for something harder than yours: that even without confusion or ignorance, a will can refuse, and that refusal may not have a deeper explanation underneath it, and may not be reversible. That's the part that feels unsatisfying, but it's where the tradition deliberately stops rather than smoothing it over.
Roses are known for their thorns! 🌹
DeleteI agree that we understand freedom differently. I don't think that every choice has to be explainable, but I do think it needs to be intelligible. I don't think that, e.g., the mechanism of the Resurrection can be explained, but it is comprehensible notwithstanding. A final rejection of God by one created in God's likeness is not just inexplicable to me, it's illogical - like a mirror that refuses to reflect what is placed in front of it, or a square that refuses to have four sides.
it's also the ability to fully rest in what you were made for. So when the will finally sees God face to face, it doesn't lose freedom, it reaches its fulfilment. At that point, turning away becomes not externally blocked but internally incoherent, because the will has arrived at the very thing it was always constituted for.
Yes, this is exactly my point. We just differ in to whom this applies.
However, I don't think that level of clarity is simply what happens whenever a soul encounters God. If it were, then the first refusal, angelic or human, becomes impossible to describe. Something about the mode of encounter matters, not just its object.
I think that we need to treat angelic and human refusal separately because they are different types of being. I would say that, if the account of the Fall in Genesis describes the first human refusal, then it only does so on a strictly literalist reading that I'm not certain is the intention of the text. I'm also not sure that Adam/Eve 'refuses' in the same way that Lucifer does - they are lured into disobedience like a child which, spiritually, they are (and which is why we could never have remained in Eden). I think the Fall narrative is fundamentally ontological and describes the journey of each soul - not just one historical event - but, on any interpretation, Adam and Eve's encounter with God is not the same as the soul's encounter after life. They did not have perfect clarity (and can you even choose good before you've eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?)
But I don't think every act of will can be neatly explained as a rational expression of that nature.
I'm slightly cautious of the use of the word rational here because, unlike the last few centuries of western philosophy, I don't believe that humans are fundamentally rational creatures. I think we're narrative creatures and rationalising creatures, but not rational ones.
That aside, the unenlightened will and nature are not aligned. If our nature is like a radio signal, and our will like a radio operator, then what the operator hears and acts on is determined to a greater or lesser degree by how much interference there is. If the signal is badly distorted, then the operator will believe that he or she is hearing any number of crazy things.
Christ is the model here - his will and nature were perfectly aligned. Nothing he did was not a pure expression of his nature (although many of the things he did weren't 'rational'!)
So when I say you eventually reach a "naked act," I don't mean something random. I mean an act that doesn't have a deeper, satisfying why behind it.
If a naked act is an enlightened act - that is, free from delusion or outside influence - where does it come from if not from nature? Would that imply that Christ would actually have been capable of accepting Satan's offer? I would argue that, when the will and the nature are perfectly aligned (as was Christ's), then the creature's existence is exhaustively described and there is nowhere left for contrary notions to lurk.
What I mean is that their choice isn't a slow, step-by-step process like ours.
You've never seen me decide between chocolate and broccoli...
It's that their choice is made with a completeness that leaves no room for second thoughts.
DeleteMy difficulty here is that this explains how an angel might go from tabula rasa to good or evil, but if the angels 'fell', then they were created as 'good' but became 'evil'. 'Fall' implies that there was, at some point, a change of mind or the availability of new information that resulted in Lucifer deciding to serve himself. Unless those angels were never truly 'good' to start with, then we seem to be applying different requirements to different states - one is changeable, one is not.
If angelic beings are simply some type of divine machine, like a heavenly roomba, that accepts a certain programming and then cannot change, I think that the tabula rasa model suffices, but I'm not sure Scripture treats them that instrumentally.
The tradition I'm drawing on holds that some orientations of the will do become permanent, and not only by divine decree.
Everything, ultimately, is by divine decree. If God has decided to 'honour' our orientation at death, then it becomes permanent only by his fiat.
While acknowledging the place of tradition, it must still make sense, lest it become simply an argumentum ad antiquitatem. An ancient error is still an error.
Roses duly received 🌹
DeleteI think this is where we finally hit the real dividing line, and you’ve put it very clearly: for you, a final rejection of God isn’t just mysterious, it’s illogical, something like a square refusing to have four sides. A fully enlightened will cannot reject God, because that would be illogical, not just mysterious.
I can’t follow you there because it seems to treat the will as a kind of natural mechanism rather than a genuinely free power.
A mirror has to reflect. A square has to have four sides. But a will, even when fully illuminated, doesn’t have to choose in that way. If it did, then what we’re calling “freedom” collapses into something closer to necessity, as the will would track the good automatically.
That’s why I’m hesitant to say that a fully enlightened will cannot refuse. At that point, refusal may become deeply irrational, even self-destructive, but I don’t think it becomes literally impossible or incoherent in the way a contradiction is.
On your question about Christ, I wouldn’t say this implies that Christ might have sinned in practice. The tradition usually handles that by distinguishing between natural capacity and personal actuality. Christ’s human will is real, but it is never actualised in separation from the divine will. So the “space” where refusal would occur is not there.
On the “naked act” point, I think we’re using “nature” slightly differently. I’m not denying that acts come from the will as part of a creature’s nature. The claim is narrower: that a disordered act doesn’t have a further positive explanation that makes it fully intelligible as an expression of that nature.
In other words, it comes from the will, but not in a way that can be completely rationally unpacked without turning it into a kind of alternative good. That’s the limit I’m marking.
On angels and the “fall”: I agree that “fall” implies a before and after, and I’d want to keep that. The point about immediacy isn’t that nothing changes, but that the change isn’t the result of a gradual process of reconsideration. It’s a decisive act rather than a development. So they are created good, presented with a real good, and then either adhere or refuse, but that act isn’t something they arrive at through partial knowledge, the way we do.
Where I think we really diverge is your last point:
“Everything, ultimately, is by divine decree.”
I think that line actually leans quite strongly in a Reformed direction. And it raises a question for me: if even a final refusal is included in that decree, doesn’t that bring us back to the very issue you were concerned to avoid - God’s responsibility for it? That’s the move I’ve been trying to resist by keeping a distinction between what God wills and what He permits.
If that’s doing the work you want it to do, then any final state, including refusal, risks becoming something God is ultimately responsible for in a much stronger sense. The Church resist that, which is why I’m trying to preserve a space where the creature’s act is genuinely its own, even when it becomes fixed.
So, the choice is between two tensions. Either refusal remains possible even at the point where it becomes deeply irrational (my direction). Or full clarity rules out refusal altogether (your direction). Both preserve something important, but they resolve the risk in different places.
I can’t make your position look illogical, but I also don’t think mine collapses into incoherence. It just accepts that, at the point of refusal, intelligibility thins out rather than closes.
But a will, even when fully illuminated, doesn’t have to choose in that way. If it did, then what we’re calling “freedom” collapses into something closer to necessity, as the will would track the good automatically.
DeleteI think that there's a significant difference between it being impossible to choose X and it being inconceivable that one would choose X. If a red and a blue cup are put in front of me, and I'm fully informed that the red cup contains water and that the blue cup contains sulphuric acid, it's not impossible that I would drink the blue one, but it's inconceivable that I would. If I were to pick the blue one, then you would rightly conclude that I was either not in my right mind, or failed to fully understand what I was doing.
That aside, would this not also apply to those 'confirmed in glory', whose 'direct, unshakeable union with Him that makes sin literally inconceivable'? Would you say that their freedom collapses into necessity, and are they worse off for it?
Christ’s human will is real, but it is never actualised in separation from the divine will. So the “space” where refusal would occur is not there.
Precisely. So where is the space in fully enlightened souls? St. Paul is adamant that we become 'like Christ', which entails the full alignment of our human will with God's.
The claim is narrower: that a disordered act doesn’t have a further positive explanation that makes it fully intelligible as an expression of that nature.
We are perhaps talking about different things re. the 'naked act'. As I see it, disordered acts are so-called because they're disordered. As the desert fathers point out, each of our problematic passions are a perversion of a godly impulse: the 'seven sins and seven virtues' are mirror images of each other. So (if we accept that we are, by nature, created in the image of God and not 'totally depraved'), a disordered act is always nature plus something else, and can never be a 'naked act'. A naked act, however base, can only ever come from the creature's nature. In other words, I would deny that a genuinely ex natura act can ever be disordered.
I think that line actually leans quite strongly in a Reformed direction.
I disagree. That everything falls within God's decree is a sine qua non of ex nihilo creation, without which God is not God. The distinction between what God actively wills and permits is itself irrelevant unless everything is by divine decree: it's meaningless to speak of allowing something that one doesn't have the power to prevent. This is, however, different from saying that God puppet-masters everything.
...doesn’t that bring us back to the very issue you were concerned to avoid - God’s responsibility for it?
No - my argument is that it's the relational view of eternal damnation (where we 'do it to ourselves' and 'the doors of hell are locked on the inside') that seeks to 'let God off the hook' by assigning that responsibility to us - precisely because, deep down, we find the idea of an all-loving God allowing people to suffer eternally unpalatable. In this respect, I think that Reformed models of eternal punishment are actually more honest - God can do whatever he likes, you broke the rules, you get the punishment - although one has to bite the bullet and accept that God's justice is greater than his goodness on that model. I don't think it's possible to square omnibenevolence with an eternity in which the door is forever closed.
If that’s doing the work you want it to do, then any final state, including refusal, risks becoming something God is ultimately responsible for in a much stronger sense.
DeleteI'd want to distinguish between being 'responsible' as meaning a) being the cause of, and b) being the author of. If Y's adult grandchild throws a stone through a window, for example, Y is causally responsible for the act insomuch as Y instigated a chain of events that brought that possibility into existence. But Y is not morally responsible for the broken window in the same way as the child is, because the child is the author of the act.
In the first sense, God is responsible for everything, because God - if he is God and not a demiurge - is the non-contingent cause of everything. I think we can assert that God is causally responsible for the final state of all things without denying the creature's free will or falling into Calvinistic ideas of predestination.
But neither does it require us to hold that Hell cannot be temporary and therapeutic. If I ignore the lifeguard's advice not to jump into a freezing cold swimming pool and want to stay there, stubbornly shivering for as long as I can stand it, the fact that I can/will eventuality get out again is deleterious neither to my free will nor the authority of the lifeguard.
I think we risk elevating a very narrow definition of freedom - that it always requires a choice to do otherwise - too far. St. Paul says that true freedom is slavery. Pope Francis (if we is can cite him!) said 'Freedom makes free to the extent to which it transforms a person’s life and directs it toward the good'. Freedom is not about availability of choices, it's about teleological fulfilment.
Both preserve something important, but they resolve the risk in different places.
Indeed, but I think the implications are significant!
This is helping clarify where we really differ.
DeleteWhat you seem to be doing is this:
Redefining freedom as teleological fulfilment;
Insisting that full illumination makes sin inconceivable;
Denying that a truly “natural” act could ever be disordered;
Holding that God is causally responsible for everything, but not morally culpable; and
Using all of that to support a non-final, therapeutic view of hell.
It seems to me that your account makes a fully lucid fall impossible. But if that’s true, then either the angelic fall wasn’t fully lucid, or it wasn’t really a fall in the traditional sense. Yet the Christian tradition holds both: that the angels were created good, and that their refusal wasn’t just a mistake or confusion.
On the “inconceivable vs impossible” distinction
I see what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure it holds. If a will is fully illuminated, and choosing against the good would only ever indicate confusion or defect, then in practice that choice isn’t just inconceivable, it’s ruled out by the very conditions you’ve set. If it were chosen, we’d immediately say the agent wasn’t actually in that state of full clarity. So the category is self-sealing.
On Christ and the saints
I agree that Christ’s will is perfectly aligned with the divine will, but that’s exactly what makes me hesitate. His inability to sin doesn’t seem like mere “inconceivability,” but something stronger—an intrinsic indefectibility. If that’s compatible with freedom in His case, then I’m not sure necessity (in that qualified sense) is as threatening to freedom as it first appears.
On the “naked act”
This is where we most clearly diverge. You’re treating disordered acts as “nature plus distortion,” such that a purely natural act couldn’t go wrong. The tradition I’m working with frames it differently. Evil isn’t something added, but a failure within the act itself, a privation rather than a positive content. So the will doesn’t need an external interference to miss the good; the failure can arise from within the act of willing, even if it never becomes fully intelligible in a satisfying way.
On divine decree
I take your point about causation vs authorship, and I agree that God is the non-contingent ground of all that exists. But that doesn’t fully resolve the concern you raised earlier. If God knowingly brings about a world in which certain final states occur, and could prevent them, then the question of how that relates to His goodness still presses, just at the level of permission rather than direct willing. I don’t think either of our positions entirely removes that tension; we locate it differently.
I think you’re right that this ultimately comes down to what we think freedom is: whether it includes the possibility of a final failure that doesn’t fully “make sense,” or whether full clarity necessarily carries the will into alignment with the good.
It seems to me that your account makes a fully lucid fall impossible. But if that’s true, then either the angelic fall wasn’t fully lucid, or it wasn’t really a fall in the traditional sense. Yet the Christian tradition holds both: that the angels were created good, and that their refusal wasn’t just a mistake or confusion.
DeleteI wouldn't want to push any arguments about the angelic fall too far, because I'm not sure what we can usefully say about non-corporeal spiritual beings of pure will, who exist outside of time and also don't, into whose state of existence we have no insight, and who are only ever described in deeply symbolic language full of poetry and metaphor. I would only tenuously, at best, draw analogies between their fall and ours.
However, if we are confident enough to assert that such beings were created as good servants of God but irrevocably changed their minds, it is incumbent upon us to explain why those minds cannot be changed back. I'm not convinced by the argument that one state (good) is reversible, while the other (bad) isn't. I think we overreach in the certainty with which we assert what we assert, rather than leaving the whole thing as a mystery.
That said, I don't think that a fall *needs* to be fully lucid, unless it's being used to justify punishment (viz. the lake of fire passages in Revelation, and I'm extremely cautious of using literal readings from the Apocalypse for anything). Was the fall in Eden really lucid if Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil? That seems like a significant knowledge gap and - returning to our main theme - was their choice really a free one, given that particular lacuna?
If a will is fully illuminated, and choosing against the good would only ever indicate confusion or defect, then in practice that choice isn’t just inconceivable, it’s ruled out by the very conditions you’ve set.
My difficulty is that your argument results in the same words meaning different things depending on to whom they are applied. For the ordinary soul, the deprivation of an ability to refuse (or for such an option to be inconceivable) is a (deleterious) deprivation of freedom. Yet, for the saints confirmed in glory, it isn't. And Christ becomes a sui generis separate case altogether (which, in this respect, he is only in degree, not category - he represents what we will be, perfected; he isn't a different order of willed being). If freedom to refuse is a non-negotiable of love, then it must be so in all cases.
My resolution is simpler. Choice and freedom belong to the binary world. Illumination transcends this (note that the Fall is symbolised by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, after which Adam and Eve enter the binary world). I might even go so far as to say that they are delusions: my freedom, my choice - these are creations of the ego that seeks to enthrone itself at the centre of the universe.
We glimpse this when, e.g., we fall in love. My question for you would be - is falling in love a coercive act? Is loving one's children a lesser act because it isn't 'free'? I would say no, because these things are transcendental. Talk of choice and freedom is a category error to the enlightened soul. I don't think, for example, that the Theotokos being preserved from sin somehow made her less free than anyone else. This is the only way that 1 John 3:9 makes sense.
The tradition I’m working with frames it differently. Evil isn’t something added, but a failure within the act itself, a privation rather than a positive content.
The difference is that your framing is 'disordered act = nature minus something', which I would also accept. A radio wave, a gene, a piece of code - these all become defective irrespective of whether something is added or subtracted. But we get to the same place: a disordered act does not equal nature alone, and is therefore not a naked act (because, as you said with Christ, when will and nature are aligned there is no room for anything else - and nothing is missing).
(These comment boxes are too small!)
DeleteIf God knowingly brings about a world in which certain final states occur, and could prevent them, then the question of how that relates to His goodness still presses, just at the level of permission rather than direct willing.
I think that this tension only exists for those who want to preserve an eternal hell. If hell is the non-punitive torment experienced by an impure creature standing in the presence of pure love, and it lasts only as long as it takes that creature to choose to walk through the gates that are never shut, then I see no conflict with God's goodness. It's also entirely what the parable of Prodigal Son models.
(We have to work with what we’re given ….)
DeleteYour asymmetry point is a fair one, but Thomas Aquinas actually answers it rather than leaving it open. The good state isn't reversible either; both become permanent after what the tradition calls a probationary “moment.” The good angels, directing their first total act toward God, were confirmed in that orientation. The fallen angels sealed their state by the completeness of their refusal. The logic of permanence is the same in both cases. So it's not that good is revisable and bad isn't. It's that both become fixed, for reasons that follow from what each choice was. You might want to challenge the probationary structure itself, but that's a different objection from asymmetry.
On freedom and the confirmed state, you're right that I'm using freedom differently across cases, but I'd suggest that freedom doesn't mean the same thing at every stage of a creature's existence. The freedom of someone still finding their way is not identical to the freedom of someone who has arrived. At its limit, freedom fulfils itself rather than abolishes itself. That may sound like special pleading, but it's at least an attempt to describe a difference the tradition insists is real.
The falling-in-love analogy is genuinely attractive, but it cuts both ways. Love, properly understood, isn't a feeling that bypasses the will. It's the will rightly ordered toward the good of another. On that account, the confirmed state isn't the suppression of freedom but its fullest expression. If illumination really does transcend choice and refusal entirely, then the angelic fall stops being explicable in those terms as well, which may be where you want to land. I'm just not sure the mystical frame and the personal-agent frame sit together as neatly as that resolution suggests.
On the Prodigal Son, I think the parable is more ambiguous. It doesn't end with the feast. It ends with the elder brother outside, the father pleading, and the outcome unresolved. He isn't ignorant or confused. He knows exactly what is being offered. He simply cannot bring himself to enter. The door is open; the refusal is his.
Something similar appears in the story of Dives. He sees clearly enough to understand his condition, but that clarity doesn't become repentance. He asks for relief, then for a warning to be sent to others, but he never asks to be reconciled. He remains recognisably himself. That's precisely the point: awareness doesn't automatically become conversion. A will can be fully informed and still settled.
On hell itself, I want to be clear where I stand. I lean towards hopeful universalism. I think universal restoration is a legitimate hope. What I'm not convinced of is certainty. Because I think the will can become settled in itself. Not by God locking the door, but by its own deepest orientation. The elder brother and Dives both show this: not souls barred from the feast, but souls who, even seeing it, do not enter.
The gates are never shut, but the parables leave open the possibility that some may choose to remain outside.
The good state isn't reversible either; both become permanent after what the tradition calls a probationary “moment.”
DeleteI think the probationary moment only works if the angels are created tabula rasa. It seems to me that we can't preserve all three of 'created good', 'beings of irrevocably pure will', and 'rebellion'. It feels like the desire to define a mystery necessitates creating a lot of unnecessary mechanics. I also don't see what we lose by allowing angelic repentance (unless they really are simply spiritual computers running set programs).
At its limit, freedom fulfils itself rather than abolishes itself.
Yes, which is what I've been saying all along!
Love, properly understood, isn't a feeling that bypasses the will. It's the will rightly ordered toward the good of another.
I think we're describing different things. I'm speaking about, to borrow your phrase, the 'naked act' that precedes any movement of the will. In a relationship, willing the good of the other is a choice (which is why marriage is regarded as a form of martyrdom in the Orthodox Church). Likewise, parents (should) make sacrifices for their children. But the moment of falling in love with someone, or the parental instinct being triggered by the presentation of one's newborn is not (usually) a choice and, in that sense, does bypass the will. Love isn't a willed decision made after careful deliberation (although it may have saved college-aged me a lot of problems if it was!)
Something similar appears in the story of Dives.
I don't think that the story of Dives is about the afterlife. It's about Christ. The parable concludes a long discourse with the Pharisees about the religious establishment's failure to recognise Christ for who he is. The point of the parables isn't the respective states of Dives and Lazarus, but the final words that Christ places in Abraham's mouth: ‘If they [the living] do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.’
The Prodigal Son, on the other hand, very much points out that admittance to the feast is a matter of one's own choice. Although it doesn't speak to the eternal fate of the brother who remains outside, it also doesn't preclude him from ever entering.
The gates are never shut, but the parables leave open the possibility that some may choose to remain outside.
I absolutely agree - but the doctrine of an eternal hell removes this choice and insists that there comes a point when the gates do shut.
You back again?
DeleteOn the probationary moment, I don't think it requires angels to be tabula rasa. "Created good" in the tradition doesn't mean pre-loaded with a fixed final orientation. It means rightly ordered, but not yet confirmed. That distinction is important. Without it, you're right that the fall becomes hard to make sense of. With it, the triad you're worried about - created good, real freedom, real rebellion - can be held together without contradiction, even if not fully explained. Whether the mechanics multiply beyond what the mystery warrants is a fair challenge. It’s not a doctrine; just a theological exploration.
On repentance, I agree we don't lose anything emotionally by allowing it, but we do lose something conceptually. If every act of refusal remains indefinitely revisable, then the will never truly settles. It's always, in principle, provisional. The tradition's instinct is that freedom includes not just the power to choose, but the power to become what one has chosen. That's what irreversibility is safeguarding. Otherwise, personality never quite crystallises. It just remains fluid.
On freedom fulfilling itself, you noted this is what you've been saying all along, and you're right. We're using the same logic to reach different conclusions. The divergence is real. I'm using it to account for why the confirmed state is stable. You're using it to suggest that ultimate orientation toward the good is where every will inevitably arrives. Both moves use the same structure. The question is whether that arrival is guaranteed or only possible. That's where we disagree.
On love, we've been working with different senses of the word. What you're calling the naked act (falling in love, the immediate attraction, the parental instinct triggered by a newborn) I'd agree, isn't chosen in any deliberate sense. But is this love in its fullest form? Or, is it love's beginning? Love properly speaking is what the will does with that movement. Otherwise, we'd have to say love is something that happens to us rather than something we're responsible for, which sits uneasily with everything else we say about moral life. Though I'll concede the initial moment has something pre-deliberate about it, it's ordered even if not deliberated.
On Dives, I'll concede that the parable is primarily Christological. You're right, and using it as straightforward evidence for post-death fixity was reading against its grain. But parables tend to operate on more than one level, and even within your reading, something remains: clarity doesn’t automatically produce conversion. Dives understands his situation fully and remains recognisably himself. That point survives the exegetical correction.
On the Prodigal Son, I think we agree more than it appears. The parable leaves the ending open. The openness cuts both ways. It permits eventual entry, but it also permits the possibility that the refusal persists. The text doesn't resolve it.
DeleteOn whether an eternal hell closes the gates, I'd frame it differently. The doctrine on hell isn't saying the gates are locked from the outside. It allows for a point at which the will is no longer the kind of thing that moves between inside and outside. Not because God withdraws the invitation, but because the creature has become what it has chosen in a way that’s no longer provisional. From your position, that may be wrong, but if it is, it's not because the doctrine of an eternal hell is arbitrarily shutting the door. It's because it thinks freedom has a depth that includes the possibility of finality.
That's the real difference between us: whether freedom ultimately culminates in an irreversible yes or no, or whether it always remains open-ended. I think that fork sits within a broader agreement. We're both working from the same instinct about divine love, the never-shut gates, and a God whose disposition toward what He has made is inexhaustible. The distance between hopeful universalism and that of those Eastern Orthodox who propose universalism is, in the end, about certainty and mechanism, not about the character of God. On that, we agree.
(You sound like my dad!)
DeleteIt’s not a doctrine; just a theological exploration.
I agree that it holds together with those caveats, but I'm wonder if this isn't simply working backwards from a conclusion and creating a complicated mechanism by which to arrive there. What does it mean for beings of pure will to be created good but not confirmed good? This distinction is logical for human souls, who need to be purified, but for angelic beings?
If every act of refusal remains indefinitely revisable, then the will never truly settles. It's always, in principle, provisional.
This would make sense to me if salvation were a one-and-done deal, but it's not. St. Peter's life swings wildly between being praised for his supernatural insightfulness, being called a Satan, denying Christ and then being martyred for him. On this argument, surely the doors should have slammed shut eternally once the cock crew, to honour his choice and allow him to become who he's chosen to be. Endless vacillations and choice on earth, but none thereafter, doesn't seem to tally with allowing people to become what they truly choose to be. And it also implies that the best life to lead is being run over shortly after you've chosen for Christ!
Otherwise, we'd have to say love is something that happens to us rather than something we're responsible for, which sits uneasily with everything else we say about moral life.
Only if we're equivocal about what love means. The physiological states of falling in love and attraction are things that happen to us and things that we're not responsible for. How we react to them (and if we even should react to them) is a different question. But even then, wouldn't we say that some of the highest acts of love are those done instinctively - that is, not by reasoned choice - like a parent who, without a thought, throws themselves in front of a moving car to push their child out of the way? My point is that freedom is not the greatest good.
Dives understands his situation fully and remains recognisably himself. That point survives the exegetical correction.
Perhaps the character in the parable does. But I think it's eisegesis to read a doctrine into that. And by the parable's own narrative, Dives hasn't met Christ - Augustine and other Fathers viewed Lazarus' place in 'Abraham's bosom' as a temporary abode for the righteous awaiting Christ's resurrection and the harrowing of Sheol/hell - so has he really attained full clarity? His ignorance in his conversation with Abraham suggests maybe not.
That's the real difference between us: whether freedom ultimately culminates in an irreversible yes or no, or whether it always remains open-ended.
I would phrase it slightly differently. My position, from within the hesychastic eastern tradition but also present in the mystical traditions of the west - e.g., The Cloud of Unknowing - is that union with God moves you to a place that transcends the question (a condition required for those you described as confirmed in glory). There is no irreversible yes or no because there is only God but, just like the aforementioned parent who acts from instinct to save their child, this is freedom's fulfilment, not its absence.
Truly free will includes the freedom to choose to renounce your free will. This is what I have done in response to the love of God displayed in Christ. I gladly choose to be made, in the coming day, incapable of sinning.
DeleteAngels live in the immediate presence of the Holy, leaving them no scope for exercising faith. Along with this, they seem not to have the option of surrendering their free will.
Gadjo finds the "mystery of free will" much easier to swallow than any mystery which impugnes God's character e.g. by claiming that He authors sin while simultaneously calling Him just and loving.
ReplyDelete"God knew all of this would happen. Within any serious theism, this is unavoidable. Divine omniscience is the eternal, simple, non-temporal awareness of all that is and all that freely will be. Nothing in created history surprises God." Gadjo agrees, but he has also recently become interested in the whole "open theism" thang
... nah, he can't buy it ... surely as God created Creation he will be in some sense be outside it and seeing everything ... unless he purposely (and temporarily) blinds Himself, which seems like a bad idea.
"Divine foreknowledge is not the same thing as causation. God's eternal awareness of what would freely occur is not God determining what must occur." Right. Awareness of the "modal fallacy" should clear this up, but it seems to be a very persistent way of thinking.
I think we’re in agreement, and you’re right that the “modal fallacy” is doing a lot of work in the background, though people don’t always name it clearly.
DeleteThe mistake, as I understand it, goes like this:
From “God knows that X will happen” people slide into “X must happen.”
But that only follows if you confuse two different things:
Necessity of the consequence: If God knows X, then X will happen (that part is true).
Necessity of the thing itself: X must happen (this is the illegitimate step).
In other words, God’s knowledge must be correct, but it doesn’t follow that the thing known is itself necessary rather than free. A simple way to put it is that God knowing I will choose something doesn’t mean I have to choose it. It just means that if I freely choose it, God eternally knows that I do. So the “modal fallacy” is basically collapsing certainty into necessity.
That’s why I draw the distinction between foreknowledge and causation. God’s knowing doesn’t push the will in one direction or another. It simply doesn’t get things wrong.
On your aside about open theism: I agree. It solves the problem by shrinking divine knowledge rather than clarifying the nature of freedom. Classical theism keeps both claims. Full divine knowledge and real creaturely freedom, and accepts that the tension has to be handled carefully rather than removed.
And that takes us back to the main point. If we avoid that modal slip, then God’s knowing the fall doesn’t make Him its author. The act remains genuinely the creature’s, even though it is eternally known.
We are going to have to stop agreeing or either I will become a member of the Roman Catholic Church or Jack will become a member of the Romanian Baptist Church! Gadjo will now have to read Lain's coments to see if he can find something contentious...
DeleteI'll be disappointed if I'm not being contentious!
DeleteTo all Western-type Christian people, Christ is Risen!!
ReplyDeleteA very blessed Easter to all those celebrating on Palm Sunday!
ReplyDeleteSo, have you stocked up on half-priced Easter Eggs?
DeleteOh, you think you know me?
DeleteYes. Of course 😂
雲水,
DeleteEaster blessings!
How au fait are you with the words and wisdom of David Bentley Hart? I read his book Atheist Delusions with glee (and didn't get too far with The Experience of God), but have recently seen that he has some interesting ideas about soteriology - isn't his universalism considered too heterodox for Eastern Ottnodoxy?
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!
DeleteI've read quite a lot of DBH. I find him quite thought provoking, if sometimes a bit brusque in dismissing opposing viewpoints. From memory, I enjoyed The Experience of God. I found that looking at how other traditions understand God helped deepen my understanding within my own tradition: sometimes I think we fall into easy and familiar ruts when talking about God, and looking outside of our own linguistic and theological traditions can help shake us out of that.
Hart explores universalism in That All Shall Be Saved, which I'd heartily recommend. I found it convincing. It's scholarly without being too dryly academic. His universalism (which doesn't deny judgement and hell, but instead sees hell as temporary and redemptive) is a minority viewpoint within the OC, but still acceptable. Hart goes beyond the 'hopeful universalism' of figures like Bp. Barron by insisting that there is no Gospel unless all are eventually saved, and positions like Barron's are cop outs...
I would recommend reading him directly if you're interested in what he has to say. The internet commentary around him tends to be as nuanced, informed and balanced as you'd expect. (That is, not at all).
Thanks for your comments. Right, I think that his position is known as eventual universalism. Yes, he seems a little dismissive of other points of view, but then he's someone who has made his own translation of Scripture, so he probably feels quits confident 🙂. I will look out for video clips discussing That All Shall Be Saved.
Delete