The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Human freedom requires the possibility of self-damnation

Evangelical Universalism Arguments against Evangelical Universalism
#1

I have been blogging on the Orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloe. He is an opponent of universal salvation. I thought the group might be interested in analyzing what for him is the decisive objection—universalism makes human personhood impossible. Here is my latest blog article:

Holy Scripture shows that life on earth is the arena in which the human person decides his fate for eternity, for after death he cannot change his fate" (The Fulfillment of Creation, VI:30)—this is a foundational premise from which flows much of Dumitru Staniloae’s reflections on salvation and damnation. He grounds this conviction on the explicit teaching of Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers but also on a philosophical understanding of libertarian freedom he believes to be implied, if not explicitly authorized, by the Orthodox tradition.

Only in the body is the human person a truly active being. It is in the body that “he works toward his perfection by spiritualizing the body, that is, by the fact that he makes the body a medium for the senses and for good works” (VI:30). In the body he is given the opportunity to praise and serve God, to love his neighbor, to give alms to the poor, to preach the gospel. In the body he is given the opportunity to cultivate a virtuous character, repent of his sins, alter his behavior, fight against his disordered desires, and freely join himself to the living God in the sacramental and ascetical life of the Church. Precisely because man is made a unity of body and soul, his life in the world is decisive for his ultimate salvation.

We are not saved or damned as discarnate spirits but as embodied beings who share a world with other embodied beings. As the Apostle declares, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body” (2 Cor 5:10).

That our earthly existence possesses an absolute significance for our eschatological destiny may seem to us, who fear the divine judgment both for ourselves and those we love, as an arbitrary, even capricious, decree of the Creator. Why such a short time? Why no second chances? The stakes, after all, are so high. At least the reincarnation of Hinduism gives the individual multiple opportunities to get things right. But Staniloae argues that if our earthly life lacked absolute significance, then we would be trapped in an endless cycle of ascents and descents. Life would lose all meaning, and genuine happiness would be impossible:

I have quoted Staniloae at length here because the above represents his decisive objection to both reincarnation and universal salvation. In his judgment both render life relative and thus meaningless; both render God irrelevant. Authentic freedom requires the dimension of absoluteness; otherwise, it becomes vacuous and ceases to be freedom. Another important, and lengthy, passage:

Imagine playing a game in which violations of the rules have no consequences and in which no one wins or loses. It just goes on and one … in monotonous endlessness. What is the point? Why play well? Why obey the rules? Why try to win? Why play at all?

Perhaps we might say that the possibility of eternal damnation is the necessary cost of forging authentic persons. Without the possibility of failure, the achievement of personhood is an impossibility.

Why else the presence of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden? Why the command not to eat of its fruit, “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen 2:17)? “Freedom, as a sign of spiritual power, is more than just a gift,” states Staniloae; “it is also a result of effort” (The World: Creation and Deification, II:166). If Adam were to become a true partner with God in an eternal communion of love, he needed to be confronted with the tree and commandment and given the opportunity to resist the temptation it presented. He needed to exercise his freedom through trusting obedience and begin the journey into the personhood of theosis.

What is freedom good for? For nothing less than becoming saints who enjoy the living God forever.

#2

I’d not heard of this particular theologian; thanks to you for shedding some light on his thought.
It does seem to me that, beginning with the idea of ‘free will’ as the focus of what it means to be a human, is really open to question, however. I’ve been thinking this for some time, and here is a small section of an essay someone here linked to, just to give a taste of the way my thinking would proceed:(from: clarion-journal.com/files/fr … alism-.pdf)

For the church fathers—and arguably Christ and Paul—a higher faculty than will
reigns in both God and his children. The Greek word for this was nous. The Greek
nous on the God-side is similar to the idea of logos—the ordering principle of the
universe, the divine mind, but not as it so often mistranslated, mere ‘reason.’ This is
to read the Greeks through the rationalist lenses of the Enlightenment, as if Plato et
al were pre-incarnate Cartesians (i.e. disciples of Rene Descartes).

Rather, the Apostle John and St Paul, along with their disciples, especially in the
Alexandrian school, regarded love as the very essence of God’s nature. I.e., “God is
love”—in and by and through this love, the logos/nous created, ordered and
permeates the universe. Then, of course, this same divine logos/nous became flesh
to reveal God as love and love as God’s primary disposition to the world.

Corresponding to the divine nous, church fathers like Gregory of Nyssa taught that
the image of God in every human being—the thumbprint of his God’s nous—
establishes the human nous (sometimes translated mind, heart or spirit). This nous is the spiritual organ that turns towards and receives the overtures of divine love.
That is, God created each of us with a human nousthat naturally corresponds,
responds and interacts with God’s nous. In other words, God has given us hearts that
respond by nature to His Heart for us. He has planted within every one of his
children a capacity for love that is perfectly designed to respond to God’s love when
we encounter it. This is the default mode of the true humanity: not a neutral
freedom of will to respond to or reject God, but a responsive propensity—a
willingness of heart—to love the Lover when we see that Love for who and what he
is.

The biblical metaphors for the nous are either the heart that loves or the eye that
sees—these are one and the same. Seeing is not only believing: for Paul (as for Plato
before him) seeing is finally loving. For Paul, conversion is turning to see and thus, to
love. Repentance isn’t just re-thinking, but re-seeing and therefore, re-loving. When
the nous is freed (unchained) to turn and behold, it does not choose—does not will—
to believe or to love. It just does what it was always created to do: it sees, it believes.

Any thoughts on that? It seems like a fruitful direction for those like myself who think the ‘free will debate’ has not and will not be resolved this side of Glory. :slight_smile:

#3

Without having read Fr. Kimel’s reply yet (since there’s value in seeing if replies independently overlap):

1.) I am not convinced that a body is so utterly necessary to do good; God has no need of a body to be good. I can see however that bodies of some sort are necessary for operative distinctions between creatures in a shared environment. This is more a function of them existing as not-God creations at all, but consequently persons do bodily relate to other persons for good or for evil within that shared neutral environment.

2.) The Fathers (Origen chief among them) tended, partly along that line of thought, to argue that NO CREATURE OF ANY KIND ANYWHERE exists bodiless. Only God is pure spirit; all other rational beings, as creatures, have bodies of some kind, even if not the kind we currently have. (Origen was accused later of teaching the bodiless pre-existence of spirits, but he demonstrably did not and would rather have rejected the idea. Strongly. What he did teach was that angels exist with a different body than ours, and existed as such before our existence; and that Adam and Eve existed with different bodies before the kind that were given to them, and subsequently to us as their descendents, after the fall.)

3.) Along those lines I’m willing to agree with a lot of what Staniloe writes about the importance of the body for the moral behavior of creatures. But does he simply reject the bodily resurrection of the evil as well as the good? – is that his orthodox theology held by no orthodox thinker whatever? Because the bodily resurrection of the evil would at least theoretically allow the same principles he appeals to for sake of moral progress.

4.) Perhaps sensing that the bodily resurrection of the evil would not in fact close off the options of salvation the way he wants, he goes straight to a timeless finality at resurrection instead, locking in conditions and locking out further choices immediately. Surely he is not following unanimous testimony of the Fathers on that! But more importantly, to exist bodily even with moral perfection in a shared reality and to engage in any actions at all within that reality, still would involve time. And love is an action, not a mere static state of existence. Time is not eternity, but time the child of eternity can go on forever; just as the human spirit is not God but can by God’s gracious action continue without ceasing, still dependent upon God the truly eternal.

I admit by taking such a position I’m going against the majority (unanimity?) of Fathers, including Origen but also those who followed him, who expected a final timeless reality of no further growth or change eventually when the eons come to an end. But then, I don’t hold that such a condition best expresses personal relationship interactions – not for creatures. Moreover I don’t regard a static finality as a necessary requirement to prevent the notion of constant fall and redemption. Where sin exceeds, grace hyper-exceeds, for not as the sin is the grace – I fully believe persons can come to forever freely choose the good, as God intends for them, and freely forever choose not to do evil. That’s what God does in His own ever-active self-existent reality, at and as the ground of all existence, and that’s what we can be led and empowered by God to grow (watered and lightened by God, so to speak), in joining with God’s own eonian life. There is no conflict here with the most robust notions of free will, so long as creaturely free will isn’t confused with the uniquely self-existent free will of God.

Notably, though I don’t think many of his disciples followed him on this, Origen seems to think that every rational creature has fallen at least a little, even the loyal angels. I don’t think any creature had to fall, and that some rational creatures can have remained unfallen. Adam and Eve, whatever their actual reality was, could have chosen (literally or metaphorically or both) to not eat the fruit in rebellion against God; they would have received the good knowledge of good and evil anyway, just not by rebellion! I’m not denying an original sin effect passed on to us by our descendants, which we are saddled with and cannot escape but by death and resurrection (even if that is transformation at a rapture for some Christians eventually) – we humans cannot escape that, maybe some other rational animals as well. But humanity did not have to fall. Grow, yes; fall, no.

5.) Synching up thus with that other quoted portion from Staniloe: Adam and Even make spectacularly poor examples for a defense of hopeless condemnation and final perdition via important human choices. I’m hilariously amazed whenever non-universalists appeal to them. Yes, God respected their choices, and let a lot of tragic things (nearly all tragic things numerously speaking) fall out from those choices. But God certainly did not translate that respect for His God-granted freedom of their wills, into hopelessly final unrighteousness! Jesus Christ! (Jesus Christ? Remember Him? Seriously, one of the first prophecies out of the gate to meet and overcome their sins, saving them from sin?)

Also, that bronze serpenty guy is prophesied at the same time to eat dust, and God showed through Isaiah what it will mean for the bronze serpent to eat dust someday: co-existing in humble service on God’s holy mountain, reconciled to God and to humanity (though no longer in his previously granted authority). But even if that rather obscure detail is ignored or discounted or unnoticed (and I certainly don’t blame people for not noticing it), just how blazingly obvious does it have to be that the original sin of Adam and Eve is not finally hopeless condemnation into permanent unrighteousness? (Or the final unrighteousness of annihilation for that matter?)

It really seems like another (typically Arminianesque, though the Catholic precedent of that of course) attempt at arguing that surely there must be final evil so that evil can finally win even if the win is a pyhrric loss so to speak. How is it a game if evil cannot finally win? Oh, wait, evil isn’t supposed to finally win, so let’s call the final victory of evil losing instead?

What the non-universalist appealers to free choice are really demanding is the right to not play the game against a God Who will surely win, or a right to not accept the fact of a win by God, or a right to wipe the board from the table with a resentful backhand – and not have God persist in doing something about that, not have God lead the person to value the justice of God (as Paul says in the Greek of 2 Thess 1:9). The non-universalists appealing to game metaphors want to shut down the game so that God won’t win after all, not really. But if we must insist on treating righteousness and unrighteousness as a game (fine, for sake of analogical illustration), righteousness wins when all unrighteous pieces are taken for the side of righteousness and the unrighteous king surrenders in checkmate and stops rebelling and repents back into righteousness. Final un-righteousness IS NOT A FINAL VICTORY FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS!

This type of nonsensical metaphysic ought to be a sign that something has gone seriously wrong with the scriptural exegetic somewhere. A particular result of an exegetic does not excuse consequent metaphysical nonsense. Doesn’t matter how many times a nonsense answer is generated, that means go back and do the math again until the mistake is found. Don’t just give up and accept the nonsense answer: we could never make any claims of superior truth against non-Christian religions or philosophies that way.

#4

Thank you, Dave and Jason, for interacting with Staniloae. I am continuing to blog on him, but I hope to conclude the series with some of my own critical thoughts–and so I especially welcome the stimulating thoughts of others.

#5

Human freedom doesn’t have to extend to a place called “Hell” or a final separation from God, plain and simple. There are thousands of things which we don’t have the freedom to do. If a person grants this, why insist everlasting torment is a viable option that our freedom extends to? I can’t burn my physical body more than a few moments without the nerve endings dying, but I can (without really understanding what I’m getting into) cause my consciousness to experience unfathomable burning for all eternity?

Universalism - all it need maintain - is that the road by which we come to God and the content of our “heaven” is in large part effected by our freedom; not that the actually getting there is. We cannot choose whether or not the sun will come up tomorrow, though we can choose if we curse it or bless it. Our freedom, which is granted for the growth of our individuality, is not something which can exist or act by itself or unilaterally determine anything. It is only in a universe of rules set up by an all perfect God that our freedom can have any effects. None of them, therefore, can be ultimately irrevocably bad. So even if we maintain that our freedom allows us to resist God for a time, that need not mean we’ve been given freedom to do so forever. After all, God has no problem “overriding” our freedom when we sin and pricking our consciences to show us the error of our ways (surely no Arminian would say he “chose” to feel convicted of his sins?). Eventually, for those who need it, a trump card will be played and all will irresistibly see what it was God was trying to get them to see on their own.

#6

^^ Quite so!

And I didn’t even get into my usual problem, though it still applies here, that the argument comes down to ‘God respects human free will so much as to ensure human free will is permanently eliminated! – and worse than that, permanently eliminated in favor of unrighteousness!’

I do think a significant part of the problem is that people have a hard time believing that anyone, even God, could ever under any circumstances freely choose to do good forever – thus to lock in goodness safely there must be a lock-out of voluntarism (at least) leaving only the ‘capability’ notion of freedom. And when one has that, why not go ahead and lock-out voluntarism to prevent repentance and reconciliation and a return to righteousness, too?

#7

Well to be able to be free to make a choices and function fully, we have to fully true self and cleared of all delusions and deceptions, even those caused by our mind or that we put on ourselves. Our true self and identity only find itself in Christ, in the Word, we only fully find our self and identity and are able become and grow into our full nature by participation with Him who is the meaning and purpose of all things. And until that happens, when we neither know ourselves nor our true self or humanity, but while it is not unconnected at all with whom we are now, we won’t know our full identity until the self is resurrected, transformed and transfigured in the Messiah. The self is at our very core and heart, and is a psychosomatic unity of our person, but our experience of the true self is deeply clouded by the effects of death that infects our existence, only be being in union with and participation in the Logos of God, do we find our true self and being. So this leads to a question of how can anyone make a fully free orientation of their life and nature if they are both no fully operating in their true self and that self is clouded and warped by the power of death and it delusions it leads to the mind, such a person is to varying extents not fully free and so cannot have the full understanding and function of self and the full clarity of truth without delusions to make a fully free actions and decisions.

This is something we practice universally in our societies, when someone is suffering from severe mental illness or other illness and effects that effect our mental faculties we understand such people are not in ‘their right mind’ or self, and do not accept they decisions as either rational, valid or freely made beyond restricted and limited areas (and sometimes not even then) but rather are suffering under delusions and not thinking or operating clearly but are not able to function or comprehend many things clearly but rather have a warped understanding of reality. As such we seek to treat and heal people so they are able to return and recover themselves and understand and think clearly again and perceive reality as it is, so that they are free to be themselves again. But it seems to be, just as with other sickness and sins, this is a more extreme manifestation of what is true of all humanity at various levels, and beyond some levels were are not yet our full selves or able to think clearly, and it is only when we meet some people who are truly sanctified that we get glimpses of what a fully free human looks like (and of course in the Lord Jesus Himself). So I’m not sure we can talk about anyone being able to choose freely until they are free and themselves completely, and of course that would to me involve treatment and revelation that would take away all forms of delusion and deception that the power of death currently allows, where someone could both truly understand God, themselves and reality and in such a place I think it would be functionally impossible for someone to choice to function deluded, anymore then someone suffering from severe schizophrenia living in a deluded perception of reality that recovers would return to that. The very bringing them to freedom in which they can choice would make it a functional impossibility, they could pretend but not actually be in that way or life, and where truth is part of the nature of being and living well that just wouldn’t be part of life. Just as it was functionally impossible for Paul to deny the truth of the Lord Jesus or himself so eventually for all, the very thing that makes people free means there can be no chains.

#8

That’s one reason the Orthodox put so much stress on the ascetical disciplines and the purification of the passions–to achieve authentic freedom in the Spirit.

#9

Not that I would wish to derail the thread, but I have been coming across a number of these related concepts, and if you had the time would welcome your input if you had anything extra to add, or advice to give to my search into the Orthodox tradition on this thread, I have had much helpful advice and insight on it, but would welcome more from someone who is an Orthodox priest :

But with that I won’t derail the thread anymore :slight_smile:

#10

Hi, NightReven.

I’m probably not the best to ask priest to ask about the ascetical life. Fr Stephen Freeman over at Glory to God would be a good person to ask about freedom, asceticism, and personhood.

But I will recommend an entertaining introduction: The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos Markides. It’s sort’ve like a travelogue, with an extended conversation between the author of an Athonite monk.