[Edited 11/2/2015 to add paragraph numbers for ease of discussion reference offsite.]
[1] On October 15, Joseph Dear posted an article at the conditionalist (annihilationist) weblog Rethinking Hell (facebook.com/groups/rethink … 294291253/)
[2] My thoughts on the article start out of the gate with the title. As a trinitarian theologian, I would argue that regardless of whether a trinitarian Christian is a conditionalist (God shall never save some sinners from their sins but shall finally annihilate them out of existence entirely); or a traditionalist (God shall never save some sinners from their sins, but they shall continue existing in some form of eternal conscious torment); or a universalist (God shall persist at saving all sinners from their sins until He gets that done, with or without punishment along the way including after death); we ought to “approach wrath, love, and other things” as trinitarian Christian theists first and foremost, and then from there to our soteriologies.
[3] Similarly, as a trinitarian theologian, I would argue that regardless of whether a trinitarian Christian believes God intends to save all sinners from sin but somehow doesn’t do so (Arminianistic soteriology broadly speaking, with Catholic predecessors East and West, whether ‘anni’ or ‘ECT’ either way); or believes God will surely save from sin whomever He intends to save but doesn’t even intend to save all sinners from sin (Calvinistic soteriology broadly speaking, with Western Catholic predecessors, whether ‘anni’ or ‘ECT’ either way); or believes God will persist at saving all sinners from sin until He gets it done (universalistic or to coin a term ‘katholistic’ soteriology, whether Protestant or Eastern or Western Catholic, or among the Oriental Orthodox trinitarians, or among the trinitarian Church of the East, with or without post-mortem punishment as God sees best); we ought to “approach wrath, love, and other things” as trinitarian Christian theists first and foremost, and then from there to our soteriologies.
[4] In other words, coherently trinitarian “conditionalists” ought to “approach” these topics just like coherently trinitarian “traditionalists” and coherently trinitarian “universalists”: as coherently trinitarian Christian theists. We really shouldn’t have to have disputes on such matters among ourselves.
[5] And yet somehow we do, among fellow trinitarians.
[6] Here I will mention that in my experience, the reason Arms and Calvs (whether ECT or anni either way, whether Protestant or Catholic either way) and Kaths (whether Protestant or Catholic either way) end up disputing with one another on such topics, is because trinitarian Christian theologians (among whom I am counting Joseph Dear, since I am reliably informed he is a trinitarian, and since he has written an article on theology and soteriology) have a habit of treating trinitarian theology per se as an incidental aside, at best, to topics like “love” and “wrath” and more specifically soteriology.
[7] The first reason I became a trinitarian Christian universalist, was because when I looked at any other option (whether Calv or Arm, whether ECT or anni, and coming from a position of Arm ECT by the way) I routinely found myself denying one or more points of orthodox trinitarian theism.
[8] Now, obviously that isn’t an experience most people have had for whatever reason, even among trinitarian Christian universalists, or there would be a lot more TCUs today! Although, I am doing what I can to bring out and foster the conceptual connections between trinitarian Christianity and Christian universalism in my work, so that these connections will be more common in the future (at least among TCUs). Naturally this project overlaps at many points with trinitarian apologetics, whether in metaphysics or in exegetics.
[9] But anyway, I mention this to explain that when I see an article titled this way, I would hope the answer amounts to something like, “We approach wrath, love, and other things, exactly the same way all other trinitarian Christians do, as trinitarian Christians instead of unitarian or modalist or non-Christian theists – except conditionalists are being more coherently trinitarian than traditionalists or universalists when we talk about wrath, love, and other things, and here’s why.”
[10] That’s what I would hope, but from increasingly long experience I don’t expect it.
[11] And, regretfully, my increasingly long experience continues to increase with Joseph’s article.
[12] The only point I can find at which his discussion would principally differ from that of a merely nominal deist (God creates Nature and maybe continues to sustain it but never does anything more with Nature, acting as only the Great Watchmaker instead), is on the idea that God actually acts in judgment – an important distinction to be sure, but Muslims, and non-Christian Jews, and unitarian or modalist Christians, could agree beyond the mere deist that God acts in judgment, without going any farther theologically than Joseph does in his article.
[13] Having read over his article carefully, my concern in summary is this: that Joseph rejects the idea that God as God necessarily acts in love and justice, toward fulfilling love and justice, in relation to every rational creature; in favor of the idea that God may or may not act to fulfill love, and even that God may or may not act to fulfill justice, toward any rational creature.
[14] My objection to this position is not that it is “conditionalist” compared to “traditionalist” or “universalist” – in fact it does not principally differ from many “traditionalist” ideas, and certainly I have met universalists who would agree that God only does love and/or justice, not essentially is love and justice at the level of God’s own eternal self-existence.
[15] But the position of God merely doing instead of essentially being love and justice, is a theological position incoherent with trinitarian theism.
[16] God is either self-existently and ever-actively self-begetting, self-begotten, and self-giving, in a mutually supporting and self-sacrificial interpersonal unity, at and as the ground of all reality (i.e. trinitarian theism is true, or at least binitarian theism), or else God is not (i.e. some theism less than binitarian theism is true).
[17] If the former idea is true, that makes a huge difference in how “we” can and cannot “approach” “love, wrath, and other things”. And if the latter idea is true, that also makes a huge difference in how “we” can and cannot “approach” “love, wrath, and other things”.
[18] God may or may not do wrath toward any creature on either kind of theology, or may start and then stop doing wrath, not being essentially wrath in God’s own self-existence; but God must act to fulfill love and justice toward creatures if trinitarian theism is true, and the justice God acts to fulfill toward creatures must be principally the same kind of justice the Persons of God fulfill toward one another eternally at the level of God’s own self-existence, the only difference being the appropriate mode of action God may take toward creatures in fulfilling God’s love in justice toward the creature. For example, God may act in wrath to fulfill love and justice toward a creature, specifically toward a rebel creature, but the Persons of God would not ever act in wrath toward each other, even to fulfill justice toward each other. But the wrath of the trinitarian God must still fulfill love and justice toward the object of the wrath, the justice of fair-togetherness (or {dikaiosunê}) being achieved between persons. There is no justice other than God’s justice, and that justice is eternally expressed in the action of the Trinity toward and with One Another, at and as the ground of all reality.
[19] As a trinitarian theologian, I have to stress that this is not optional; and at the very least, it is a dispute on the proper implications of trinitarian theism.
[20] JD, by contrast, writes that, “This is perhaps one area where Christians are often taught to quibble and try to make the ideas of love and mercy fit in because we are trained to think that God just has to be merciful and loving in absolutely everything he does.” Mercy is another word for {charis}, from which we also get the English word “grace”, and specifically as a trinitarian theologian I answer yes, God must be gracious in everything God does – including when God must act in wrath toward a creature. God’s mode of grace may depend on the creature’s state at any moment of its existence, but not whether God acts in grace toward any creature.
[21] I shouldn’t have to be disputing this with a fellow trinitarian Christian; this is a primary theological difference between trinitarian theism and literally any other proposable kind of theism (except possibly binitarian theism).
[22] Instead I routinely get to read things from nominally fellow trinitarians, like JD’s article, where God merely does love and/or justice, and so may choose never to do love and/or justice toward a creature, or perhaps may start and stop doing love and/or justice toward a creature. And it is fairly normal in reading such things for my concerns to be dismissed as mere “quibbles”, or even (per JD’s 3rd footnote) nothing more than the challenge of an unbeliever.
[23] As JD writes in the article introduction, “Questions about the nature of Godly justice and wrath, how love plays into it, what is deserved, and more, have great practical significance when it comes to arguments for and against conditionalism.” I agree.
[24] JD contines, “Certain arguments against conditionalism may rely on the assumption that conditionalism is based on certain beliefs about God’s love, wrath, and mercy. And yet such an assumption is unwarranted, as different conditionalists can have different views on God’s love, wrath, and mercy.” – But it is not an assumption, that any non-universalism necessarily involves God either choosing not to bring all doers of injustice to only do justice ever after, or failing to bring about that result. Whether annihilation or ECT follows is irrelevant to that point; and certainly JD agrees with a particular combination of those proposals. Yet the choice or failure of God resulting in creatures finally doing injustice, is either way based on certain implicit or explicit beliefs about the relation of love and justice to God’s self-existent reality, compared to other implicit or explicit beliefs which if true would involve God successfully bringing all doers of injustice to do justice instead.
[25] Moreover, while it is demonstrably true that “different conditionalists can [and do] have different views on God’s love, wrath, and mercy,” views which are somewhat though not entirely expressed along divisions between Arm and Calv soteriologies (as Joseph acknowledges along the way), the whole point of JD’s article is to examine two broad ways (with some variations) in which “conditionalists approach love, wrath, and other things” including “mercy” and “justice” (as in his introduction and the body of his work). Consequently, any criticisms about such approaches of love, wrath, and other things, as mentioned by JD, will presumably not be considered merely unwarranted assumptions about how “conditionalists” approach such things, unless JD is also making unwarranted assumptions about how conditionalists approach such things. At the very least, JD is trying to represent how conditionalists like JD approach such things in two somewhat different ways; and I do not think it is difficult to find the core approach JD thinks the two categories share: the category who believe annihilation is merciful and not just (although JD personally thinks if annihilation is merciful it would also still be just); and the category who believe annihilation is just and not merciful.
[26] I agree with JD that criticisms aimed at one of the two kinds of approach broadly discussed by JD, do not necessarily affect conditionalists who take the ‘other’ approach. But (by tautology) such limited criticisms do still apply to whichever one of the broad approaches they apply to! – and JD treats the two approaches as broadly inclusive of all sub-varieties of approach. (“Ultimately, they all are variants of two main ideas, two views that seek to answer one main question.”) Any criticism which applies to both approaches cannot be accused of being a merely unwarranted assumption, then, of how “conditionalists” (of JD’s sort anyway) “approach” such “things”. (Although if there are other categories of how conditionalists approach such things apart from JD’s attempt at two comprehensive categories, a criticism aimed at both those two broad approaches might not apply to other un-discussed approaches. Or maybe such a criticism would still apply, who knows? – the comparison remains to be made.)
[27] JD puts this “one main question” a little backward, but only because he is expressing the question as a post-hoc description from the perspective of people who have already decided annihilationism is true, and from that perspective the form is proper enough: “Does God annihilate the unrepentant because it is the punishment that they deserve, or is it an act of kindness on his part toward them?”
[28] The question annihilationists are answering by being annihilationists would be rather the other way around: Does God do to the unrepentant as they deserve; and if so or not then what is the result of what God does do to the unrepentant? Any annihilationist thinks the result of what God does do to the unrepentant is annihilation; the main variation is whether the conditionalist thinks God thereby gives them what they deserve, or not what they deserve but better (since as JD notes, no one is intentionally going to claim God gives them less than what they deserve.)
[29] My first observation to this approach, as a trinitarian theologian, is that one option involves God not doing justice to a creature, and even that there is something not justice which is better than justice. Good and evil on this view are not just or unjust, but beyond justice.
[30] Whatever else this position is, it is not a position that God is intrinsically justice; and it is not even a position that justice is necessarily and positively involved in God being essentially love, so instead justice somehow has nothing to do with the fulfillment of fair-togetherness between persons as in the eternal self-existent action of the Trinity at and as the ground of all existence. I would argue such a position, divorcing justice from the essential reality of the Trinity, ultimately involves a non-trinitarian theology. But at any rate, I will be the one insisting that God definitely fulfills all justice toward all rational creatures.
[31] Moreover, I don’t think I would have to dig far in the scriptures to find examples of God castigating people who, knowing what is just, simply refuse to do justice, as being morally damnable doers of injustice. Those scriptures would include several examples appealed to by conditionalists (and traditionalists) as apparently evidence for annihilation or eternal conscious torment! The kind of neutrality being tacitly proposed by such a position, where (so to speak) a moral agent can do +1 justice, or 0 non-justice, yet not be doing -1 injustice by doing 0 non-justice, is condemned by God in some of the strongest scriptural passages. Such neutrality of intention only applies to non-rational creatures (which simply react and counter-react like biological machines), or to rational creatures who are not cognizant of the relation of the questioned action to justice at all one way or another; in which case it isn’t possible for them to do +1 justice or -1 injustice by intention either way, even though Justice Himself may have preferential intentions in favor of +1.
[32] Whatever excuse a creature may have, though, about doing 0 justice instead of +1 justice, God is not a moral idiot or morally ignorant; or rather such a position requires this tacitly, and so the problem is far more of a theological dispute than a soteriological one: the proposer that God can choose not to do justice without doing injustice, is not even talking about the God Whose way is righteousness (the same word in Greek also translated justice through Latin instead of an English coined term).
[33] Anyone having read JD’s article may quickly recall that I am not pulling this example of God doing amoral 0 instead of moral +1 or immoral -1 out of thin air! JD himself takes this position later, on a similar topic. But regardless of which mode of morality is being proposed for God to do 0 instead of +1 or -1, I cannot accept the proposal, precisely on grounds of trinitarian orthodoxy. More on that when I get to it.
[34] At any rate, JD categorizes the two approaches along two lines: those who are annihilated thereby get what they deserve, no more and no less; or those who are annihilated get better than they deserve by being annihilated.
[35] Either way, the underlying idea is that sinners only deserve either annihilation or eternal torment, and either some sinners get what they deserve (annihilation) or all sinners get better than what they deserve, with annihilation being on par with salvation from sin as far as being better than what sinners deserve. Which itself leads to the question of whether salvation from sin is more better (better-er?) than annihilation than what sinners deserve, or equally as good as annihilation in being better than what sinners deserve.
[36] I will pause a moment here to note that if JD ever once talks in his article about sinners being saved from their sins into being loving and just, he talks about it so little that I have not been able to find it on a quick re-scan of the article. He demonstrably talks most (if not always?) about sinners being saved from punishment, not from their sins. This focus on only being saved by God from God’s punishment not only involves God saving people ultimately from God (which is ludicrous in trinitarian theology, and still problematic at best in non-trinitarian theologies), but leads to bizarre concepts like annihilation being better than what sinners deserve yet either not as better as salvation from God’s punishment altogether (in which case the ground for God giving one result better than justice instead of a better result even better than justice, obviously isn’t a just ground, and is being left up in the air undiscussed) or else annihilation is as good as being saved from God’s punishment altogether; perhaps the latter, since either way being saved from one’s sins isn’t a factor. Certainly proponents of annihilation commonly paint annihilation as being saved from God’s punishment, whether they regard the annihilation as just or not just!
[37] I thought JD might discuss, in regard to category #2, that it is not even possible for annihilated people to benefit from being annihilated, and so there can be no mercy to them in annihilating them – there would only be mercy to them (in the mere sense of saving people from punishment, which as a trinitarian is not how I would define fundamental grace) if they continued to exist in a reduced inconvenient suffering. Consequently, the mercy in annihilation can only be to fellow creatures – a point JD does briefly nod at in passing.
[38] Oddly, JD doesn’t actually present a mercy-annihilation theory as being more than what such sinners deserve, but as less, and even describes “love and grace” to the sinners thereby as being less than what they deserve! This is despite claiming a few paragraph later that “inherent in the idea of mercy is to give better than [the persons] deserve”. So if mercy isn’t annihilation it’s better than what persons deserve, and if mercy is annihilation it’s less than what persons deserve?
[39] A few paragraphs later he seems to be arguing in agreement with the idea that if sinners deserve annihilation, then eternal conscious torment would be worse (less? more?) than what sinners deserve. Eternal conscious torment and merciful annihilation are less than what people deserve??
[40] This kind of flip-floppy attitude (which I think JD also rejects, at least somewhat) on whether mercy is greater or less than what is justly deserved, i.e. greater or less than justice, and even on whether various punishments are more or less than what is deserved, is just the kind of incoherency that can be expected when justice is divorced from being the fulfillment of love between persons, and so also divorced from being the one and only ground of all reality in the active interpersonal self-existence of God the Trinity. Perhaps JD was only giving examples of the wild incoherencies with which “conditionalists” “approach” the topics of love, wrath, mercy, and justice, and personally goes with mercy being more than just or less than just (not both, and not agnostic on the topic) – it seems obvious he goes with annihilation as being exactly just justice anyway, but maybe he thinks eternal conscious torment would be more than just or less than just, or maybe he thinks it would be just as just as annihilation but God chooses annihilation instead. Whatever. Maybe when describing mercy in annihilation as less than they deserve (“They would have been tormented forever, but God put them out of their misery. Under this view, it can be said that God shows love and even grace to the unsaved, since they get less than they deserve.”), JD doesn’t mean he himself thinks such mercy would be less than what they deserve (rather that it would be more than they deserve), but is only trying to report that those who hold an idea of annihilation as mercy think such annihilation is less than what the annihilated deserve. I myself am doubtful I would characterize all mercy-annihilation proponents as thinking mercy is less than what the ones shown mercy deserve, but I am having to make some guesses about what exactly JD is trying to claim here.
[41] Even so, I must contradict the drastic variations in “how conditionalists approach” mercy and punishment in relation to justice, to a coherently trinitarian approach to justice, mercy, love, and punishment.
[42] If trinitarian theism is true, the implications for true and ultimate love and justice are that God always acts toward bringing creatures to act in fulfilling love in justice toward God and toward their fellow creature, just as even if God had never created any creation at all God would still be always acting in love and justice between the Persons of the Trinity. Their standard of behavior is foundational in every theological sense I can coherently express.
[43] That means grace (which is mercy when acting toward the unjust) is fully just, and justice is fully gracious. God disciplines in love, whether He is training servants already loyal or chastising rebel creatures who ought to be His servants. All righteous punishment is remedial, and truly re-tributional – not the anti-retribution which has no goal of bringing the rebel back into proper tribute to God’s ultimate authority.
[44] God acts in whatever ways He sees will most speedily result in the true fulfillment of love in justice for and by all creatures, even if in temporal terms that may take eons of the eons, even if God may temporarily lock rebels into the results of their rebel choices in order to get other things accomplished first – but those other things will still have the goal of bringing all to honor God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in doing love and justice. Consequently if the Father gives all judgment to the Son, that will be in order that all may be honoring the Son and the Father equally; and if the Son judges, that will be to bring all those who are not honoring the Father to honor the Father through submitting to the Son as the Son submits to the Father.
[45] This is all entirely coherent with trinitarian Christian theism, and follows coherently (indeed uniquely) from trinitarian Christian theism. There is no need to juggle around whether mercy is less or more just than justice, whether this or that punishment is less or more just or equally just as justice, or less or more just than mercy. There is one justice of God: the gracious fulfillment of love between persons. Wrath and punitive discipline are means to that goal of consummation, to that {telos}; they are expressions, where applicable, and as far as God sees fit, of the essential reality of love fulfilled toward persons.
[46] The salient question for the trinitarian Christian theist then, is whether a final result of unjust creatures never coming to be just, satisfies Justice Himself as a just result of His creative action. Does annihilation or does eternal conscious torment thus fulfill trinitarian justice by the result of some unjust persons never coming to do justice instead of injustice?
[47] Alternately, does a failure by Justice Himself to bring all unjust creatures to do justice fulfill trinitarian justice? Or does a choice by Justice Himself (originally or eventually) that some creatures shall never come to do justice, even though Justice could succeed at bringing them to truly and fully do so if Justice chose to do so, fulfill trinitarian justice?
[48] Either way, the question is whether a final accomplishment of non-fair-togetherness between persons, is coherent with the intention and capabilities of the fulfillment of fair-togetherness by which all reality exists, including creatures who temporarily do not fulfill fair-togetheness between persons.
[49] To me, the answer is sufficiently obvious, once I started thinking about the topic from the perspective of trinitarian love and justice. But (and I must emphasize this) even a non-trinitarian might possibly agree that GOD DOES NOT HONOR GOD BY GIVING TO GOD CREATURES THAT FINALLY DISHONOR GOD! God only ultimately honors God by giving to God creatures that finally honor God.
[50] Whether God keeps in existence creatures that finally dishonor God which God gives to God; or whether God rejects God’s gift to God of creatures that finally dishonor God, by annihilating those creatures out of existence so that only creatures which honor God remain; either way, God would be giving to God ultimate and final dishonor and blasphemy of God.
[51] I repeat, even a non-trinitarian theist (Christian or non-Christian either way) might be able to see that. But a trinitarian Christian theist of all people has the least excuse not to see that God does not honor God by giving to God creatures that finally dishonor God.
[52] And yet trinitarian Christianity has historically fragmented (and continues fragmenting) practically over disputes on how and why exactly God at last dishonors God by giving to God at least some creatures who finally dishonor and blaspheme God.
[53] And maybe somehow JD dimly recognizes this, too; because in trying to explain how various things (love or wrath or whatever) might be less or more than justice – a position no trinitarian Christian, as a trinitarian Christian, could ever coherently argue concerning the actions and judgments of God – he inadvertently creates an argument for universal salvation.
[54] Which I would find more personally amusing, if it didn’t also involve an argument that we really ought to believe God to be more than perfectly just, so doing something better than justice instead. As though salvation from injustice is not just, and as though such salvation is not just by being more than just instead of less than just (as other conditionalists apparently believe on JD’s report).
[55] JD introduces this argument by claiming first that annihilation is not a good fate but a just fate and therefore perfectly good – which is flatly contradictive, but he gets around that by claiming it is not good for the recipient by not being love for the recipient, so that God acts in a way that is ultimately not good toward a person yet somehow thereby does what is perfectly good – which means JD shuffles one contradictory idea about the good for the same contradictory idea about the good but stated a little differently as though this somehow makes sense. (He also adds that if annihilation is just then it is also perfectly righteous, which is simply a tautology, since the Greek term behind those English translations is the same, {dikaiosunê}, fair-togetherness between persons. How God accomplishes fair-togetherness between persons by annihilating those persons out of existence, is a contradiction JD does not address, but probably because he does not understand the underlying term.)
[56] “Inherent in the idea of love is to want what is good for the person,” JD says, and I agree with that, if by ‘want’ we mean ‘intentionally will’, not merely have an emotional preference. I would have supposed a Christian theologian would agree with that, but JD will illustrate a notion of justice soon that suggests mere emotion makes the difference (and moreso, a difference superior to cold, unfeeling, impersonal justice).
[57] Since even JD has to agree that God is doing that which is utterly not good to the person by annihilating the person, therefore not being gracious to the person either (therefore not being merciful either), he must divorce doing justice to X from doing what is good to X, which is nothing other than denying that justice is intrinsically good and that goodness is intrinsically just.
[58] We’ll see that worked out in a more stunning way soon, but the immediate method JD chooses is to go on to claim that “inherent in the idea of mercy is to give them better than [persons] deserve,” good being thus declared (by exclusive connection to mercy, since JD regards a non-merciful action to not be good toward the object of the action) to be better than justice even though justice is supposed to be perfectly good as JD himself quickly flip-flops back around to admit when that seems expedient.
[59] I will counterclaim, as a trinitarian Christian theologian (instead of whatever morally vacuous robot theism JD keeps lapsing into) that God Who is essentially Goodness and Justice at the level of God’s own active eternal self-existence, does only what is good and just, and never what is not good and just. I agree that annihilation is not good toward the annihilated person, therefore as a trinitarian theist I deny that God annihilates anyone even currently impenitent sinners – which no one can deny is how God usually chooses toward impenitent sinners, or we would all be instantly annihilated the moment we sinned against goodness and justice! I could also quote two or three scriptures to that effect if necessary, but since JD’s article is mostly a metaphysical attempt I’ll stay on that track.
[60] JD gets past this problem by a theological sleight-of-mind wherein justice is not necessarily always good and sometimes utterly not good but also perfectly good. He does not go so far as to say that justice is evil (i.e. not good) of course; he’ll have a mathematical argument about that, one which could only apply to an ultimately amoral and non-rational entity, which he’ll also apply to God as an illustration of how (he thinks) God acts, but we’ll get to that soon.
[61] Remembering briefly that trinitarian Christian theologians are (or should be) trained to think that “God just has to be merciful * and loving in absolutely everything he does”, and being honestly “straight with ourselves” that annihilation is not a gracious punishment; this is where JD complains that the qualms of trinitarian theologians on this topic are mere quibbles: “Christians are often taught to quibble and try to make the ideas of love and mercy fit in because we are trained to think that God just has to be merciful and loving in absolutely everything he does.” A quibble which in its related footnote he equates with the complaints of mere unbelievers.
[62] Joseph’s position amounts to denying that God is essentially love and justice, only doing (and only occasionally doing) love and justice instead. Opposing that involves no trivial theological quibble; and while unbelievers might not know technically why they ought to complain about it, a trinitarian theist ought to know why; and as a trinitarian theologian, I am going to keep insisting on such quibbles, such as “God’s nature as a God of great mercy and love” meaning mercy and love are more than something God can choose to do or not to do or to stop doing or even to start doing, but rather that God’s nature is what God essentially is and therefore what God necessarily always does toward any person.
[63] So I agree that God’s nature is not irrelevant to the discussion of hell, including to the discussion of annihilation, but I effectively agree with JD that annihilation can only be true if God’s nature is only what God occasionally happens to do and not what God essentially is. But that isn’t trinitarian theism, or even a coherent lesser theology. If we aren’t talking about what God essentially is and therefore what God necessarily does by “God’s nature”, then we might as well drop the phrase altogether.
[64] If the reader is curious how a God Who is intrinsically and essentially Justice (if trinitarian theism is true) can give any person something other than the justice they deserve, JD has an answer: justice is essentially only something that even a “cold robot judge” could give. And since even JD doesn’t think God is a robot judge or “a cold, cosmic force like karma”, then JD has to present God as being essentially something other and better than justice – although God can also do justice like the cold robot judge or the cold, cosmic force like karma, if God chooses to. But if God was essentially justice (as in trinitarian theism), then God would necessarily have to do justice, and then no one who (like God on this theory) sometimes refuses to do what he sees and knows is justice would have any hope of being spared from God doing justice to them by God not doing justice to them instead.
[65] JD is driven to make such comparisons and claims about the nature of justice, because he can tell easily enough that annihilationism would be false and maybe even that universal salvation would be true if justice is the fulfillment of love toward persons, and if God is essentially love and justice. So to land in favor of annihilation and (perhaps incidentally) against universal salvation, JD must take positions implicitly antithetical to trinitarian Christian theism – but even then, he ends up arguing (quite by accident) that we ought to expect universal salvation and not annihilation anyway!
[66] For even JD, as noted, is aware that God is more than the mere cold karma robot that JD thinks justice would merely involve, and JD even seems to think God may possibly be more and better than a merely not-horrible person! – a shocking claim indeed (compared to natural religious and philosophical expectations, especially from the first competitors to Christianity) that JD nearby has some trouble accepting.
[67] So JD introduces a mathematical analogy. The non-rational amoral karma robot would do 0, and that would be justice on JD’s account of what conditionalists (supposedly) believe about justice. “Zero is the baseline. Now imagine that what is worse than what is deserved, which would be genuinely evil, is -1.” I will observe again here that some of God’s strongest judgments in the scriptures (involving what conditionalists believe to be a punishment of annihilation of sinners) are leveled against people who think that by doing only 0 instead of doing what they know to be good, they are at least not doing evil. But passing that aside, this is nothing other than positioning justice to be morally neutral, not genuine good, and not genuine evil. It sort of resembles good and evil, but only by accident; it has a vacuum of real ethical meaning. You don’t have to be a particularly good person to do the moral nothing of justice, you only have to be a not horrible person, or even completely non-personal – on JD’s idea of (what “conditionalists” supposedly believe about) justice.
[68] But even JD knows and acknowledges perfectly well, until it becomes inconvenient to the idea of annihilation, that “God, being loving and merciful, is a +1 in his totality,” where “Love and mercy (especially mercy), doing what is good for the other person even when they don’t deserve it, would be +1.” And again, JD affirms that God is not merely a not-horrible person, “God is like the good Samaritan, a good person who helps strangers simply out of the goodness of his heart.”
[69] Now, that idea definitely means, as JD agrees, that “To imagine God being a -1 would just be unconscionable. How could a loving God (a +1) ever be a -1?” and “How unimaginable would it be for God to then be the person who stabs the stranger on the street? If a merely not-horrible person wouldn’t do that, how much less could we expect the good Samaritan to do so?” And as a trinitarian Christian theist, I agree. (I don’t agree with JD’s position on mercy involving doing something more than someone deserves, especially God’s mercy, but again I’m working from a theology where God is essentially love and justice at the level of God’s own self-existent reality at and as the ground of all existence. Whereas, to be blunt, JD is not.)
[70] But if God is +1 in God’s totality, then by exactly the same principle it ought to be equally unimaginable for God to do only 0 toward someone, to act only as the merely not-horrible person, to act only as the cold non-rational amoral robot karma judge which JD thinks is the proper example of justice instead of the interpersonal relationship of the Trinity at and as the ground of all reality.
[71] JD there is simply slipping into the pop-theology idea of justice, where rationality and justice are inhuman and even non-rational and amoral; the usual popular corollary is that what makes a person truly a person and truly good, are our emotional feelings which mere robots don’t have and which those Vulcans over there try to eliminate, and which the good robot Data over there wants to experience so he can be a real boy and not a mere puppet, and which the good Vulcan learns he has to put up with and respect in order to be a truly good person.
[72] In reality, mere reactions are the key behavior of non-rational animals and even non-rational robot behaviors, and mere emotional reactions are the key irrational behavior of rational agents like humans.
[73] But leaving that aside, the point is that JD’s account of God not only excludes God doing -1, but also excludes (by God being totally +1) God doing 0.
[74] And JD is aware of that! But annihilationism must be the truth, so JD whiffles away, as hard as he can, the obvious implications of his own chosen illustration of what we ought to expect from God, and how “God’s love and mercy do play directly into the discussion”: “If God is a +1, it already seems out of the ordinary for him to do zero”. No, if God is totally +1 it should seem unconscionable and unimaginable for Him to do zero instead of +1.
[75] But JD thinks “this is ultimately what [t]he Bible shows us in this case”, namely that God is totally +1 and so would never do -1, but being totally +1 somehow sometimes (in out-of-the-ordinary circumstances) does only 0 not +1 – does what a merely not horrible person would do, does what a mere robot or impersonal karma would do – not what God-who-is-totally-+1 would do.
[76] At the very least, this ought to be a sign that JD has made at least one grave error (maybe more) somewhere in his approach to love, wrath, and other things like mercy, justice, and punishment, whether that be in his scriptural exegesis or his metaphysics or both. Either JD will have to give up the idea that God is +1 in God’s totality (which would also be tantamount to denying trinitarian theism to be true); or JD will have to give up the idea that justice is so morally divorced from love and grace as to be morally zero instead of +1 (which adjustment would thus be consonant with trinitarian theism being true instead of some lesser theism).
[77] But JD has an idea that annihilation can’t be true unless true justice, God’s justice, is a moral zero no different from robotic karma (and unless God at least sometimes does what is just). So far as that goes, JD must either drop annihilation; or drop trinitarian theism; or at the very least, JD should be looking at how to better square annihilationism with trinitarian Christian theism.
[78] Being a trinitarian theist, obviously I recommend sticking with trinitarian theism. For various reasons, some of which I have summarized above, I don’t think any non-universalism, including any variety of annihilationism, will ever be coherent with trinitarian theism; much less ever coherently follow from trinitarian theism; much less ever follow exclusively from trinitarian theism. But I could never fault someone for at least trying to synchronize a soteriology with trinitarian theism. And at bottom, that’s my complaint about this article: the exposition is absolutely not in synch with trinitarian Christian theism.
[79] Possibly by accident, because Facebook likes to randomly make associations, when Chris posted the link to this article on FB, it came with a photo of a wedding ring engraved with “God is love” resting on fragments of a text of the First Epistle from John (from where that phrase is taken). Joseph Dear’s article on how “conditionalists” “approach” “wrath, love, and other things”, involves God merely doing love sometimes, and sometimes not doing love at all, instead of essentially being love; merely doing (mere!) justice sometimes, and sometimes not doing justice at all, instead of essentially being justice.
[80] I protest about that, not because I’m a Christian universalist, but because I’m a trinitarian Christian theologian.*
