Thomas Talbott makes some very compelling arguments throughout The Inescapable Love Of God that our happiness (as well as God’s) is tied to the happiness of others and that eternal bliss is an impossibility with the knowledge that our loved ones are going to suffer forever.
I was watching Brain Games last night and followed that up with a chapter of TILOG and I think the two things go together. In the first Brain Games episode (available on Netflix), they explored the fairly new discovery of “mirror neurons”. There are neurons in the brain which fire not only when we experience pain or happiness ourselves, but also when we see someone else experience pain or happiness. In a very real sense, their pain is our pain, their joy is our joy. For more on this 1990s discovery, see brainfacts.org/brain-basics/ … r-neurons/
So not only is Talbott’s argument well-founded in scripture (if you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me), and philosophically (you cannot love me without loving the people I love as well), but now we see that God has, in fact, made a hard-wire connection of our bodies to each other in a way we did not previously understand. This command to love even our enemies is not merely a moral platitude Jesus made up, it is a physical connection we cannot escape even if we wanted to, if we want to be happy ourselves. Somewhere down the line, we are all connected by love. We will continue to experience some degree of pain as long as those we love continue to experience pain. Our joy will not be complete until their joy is complete.
And that is also true of God. He has made us in His image. “Every pain we experience is therefore a pain that God experiences, and every torment we endure is a torment that God endures as well.” - Talbott, from “Completing The Sufferings Of Christ”.
Contrast this knowledge with the dark musings of Jonathan Edwards. Notice that he uses the term “sight” in the following passage, which is exactly the point of the mirror neuron discovery. When we see someone experience something, we experience it ourselves as they experience it, not in an opposite way, as Edwards argues. “Fourth, the sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever. It will not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace of God in their happiness, but it will really make their happiness the greater, as it will make them more sensible of their own happiness. It will give them a more lively relish of it: it will make them prize it more. When they see others, who were of the same nature and born under the same circumstances, plunged in such misery, and they so distinguished, O it will make them sensible how happy they are. A sense of the opposite misery, in all cases, greatly increases the relish of any joy or pleasure.”
