Under Craig’s scheme (see above post) if the unbeliever questioned the sincerity of our concern for him we might respond:
“I have faith that once in heaven I will either be either unaware of the damned or so enamored with Christ I will not think of the damned.”
The unbeliever should respond: "But you know about the damned now. You also know that I have no intentions of believing your gospel. Yet you appear so calm and at peace. "
The believer may reply: " But I am concerned … that’s why I am talking to you right now."
Unbeliever: “Yes, you do appear a little concerned for me, but nowhere near what I would expect. It seems as if Christ will not only eliminate your concern for the lost once you are in heaven… but He is beginning to have that effect on you now. If I become a Christian will I also be so heavenly minded it will numb my concern for those I love who continue in their unbelief? I can’t see any other way this Christianity thing could work. I cannot see any other way a Christian could bear up under the present knowledge of the damned unless he is somehow anesthetized by his expectation of being oblivious to them in the future … kinda like how you are right now. I don’t know that I want to be like you.”
For me, the nail in the coffin for ECT was when Talbott hammered home the point that if God loves us fully, He would love those we love (which should be everyone, including our enemies).
I just had an interesting conversation with a traditionalist who made the following point:
My immediate thought is that this scenario contradicts Jonathan Edward’s thesis that part of our experience of heaven and reason for joy will be a contemplation of the damned who will be visible to us from heaven.(See biblebb.com/files/edwards/contemplated.htm .)
But what if Jonathan Edwards proposition is wrong? If we will not be able to actually view the damned, even though we may care, does my friend’s proposition have any merit? i.e. Is it possible we will never have any occasion to contemplate the fate of the damned (even though we would care about them if given a chance to think about them)? Is this type of heaven reasonable or is this absurd?
(NOTE: Of course my friend’s proposition does nothing to alleviate our current concern for the damned while we are still here on earth. But that’s another issue.)
In regards to God, my friend asserts the following:
Is there any to merit to suggesting this situation as a possibility? Is this a reasonable view of heaven or absurd?
I wouldn’t say it’s absurd, but I don’t think it has much merit either. I’m very skeptical of any explanation of the full experience of heaven (as God intended it) that requires those in heaven be partly ignorant of or kept in the dark about the truth regarding their suffering loved ones. In other words, our fullest joy ought to be predicated on the fullest truth. Edwards realizes this. But your friend it seems wants to expell all thought of hell from conscious thought by supposing that our happiness in heaven will be so overwhelming that conscious consideration of the fate of the wicked will pass from all contemplation. The party will just be so perpetually good that we’ll forget about the wicked. They’ll fade from memory. That’s what he’s essentially saying. And that’s my problem with it. What’s it say about the integrity of the glorified human experience of God that it can’t be all God indends unless a great portion of the truth about the universe is kept from our view? Your friend is essentially saying that the truth (about hell) would undermine our experience of God, and I find THAT as disturbing as anything in this debate. At least Edwards knew that what hell MEANS has got to be integrated into the conscious experience of the redeemed. Our happeness cannot require our ignorance of the truth.
Again, absurd is a strong term. I know a lot of brilliant and respectable Christian thinkers embrace the notion of divine timelessness, and I don’t think they’re absurd, BUT I have real problems with the way some people use ‘timelessness’ as a catch-all to solve pretty much any theological problem that comes along. It becomes a kind of dumping grounds for all the problems they can’t solve. I don’t think most people who are eager to find ‘divine timelessness’ or God’s being ‘outside of time’ an answer really ponder how radical timelessness is. Even your friend here talks about God’s timeless experience of all emotions as if it were an ongoing temporal experience. The words used (“experiences,” “emotions,” “joy,” “exists”) all describe temporal experience. Apart from the temporal flow inherent to ‘experience’, what could these terms even mean? What would an absolutely atemporal or timeless experience joy even MEAN? Is God a cosmic stuffed shirt? Is he simultaneously locked timelessly in a cosmic orgasm AND in the deepest agonies of crucifixion? Within the one field of God’s experience I am both lost and found, forgiven and unforgiven, repentant and unrepentant, and God believes BOTH about me because his experience OF me isn’t temporally ordered. It all is equally real and present to God. To God there’s only ONE atemporal me and contradictory things are believed about me by God.
At some points I just shake my head and tell people, “Listen, you gotta do whatcha gotta do. This is nonsense to me and it explains ZERO, but hey, if it really works for you, God bless ya man,” and let the discussion end. I’ve had to say this so many times after long debates about the advantages/disadvantages of such views, because if I’m talking with somebody who really finds this kind of explanation helpful, then I don’t have enough in common with him/her to maintain a fruitful conversation about God. We’re just on different wavelengths.
For what it’s worth, if the undivided God simultaneously experiences the fullness of all human history, then so far as God is concerned whatever has ever been true IS true to God, and whatever has ever been false IS false to God. Whatever has ever occurred IS OCCURING to God and whatever has ever FAILED TO OCCUR yet obtains in God’s experience. The contradictions this leads to (for God’s knowledge of the world and his own experience of it) make it an impossible view to my mind. I mean, if the job of theology is to speak meaningfully about God, then this doesn’t even count. But to some, the more impossibly sounding our claims about God are and the more absurd they appear to our minds, the more likely they are to be true.
It’s one thing to say God is capable of handling a diverse emotional life analogous to our own ability to manage competing emotions, it’s another thing to upload the whole history of creation to a timeless, unchanging God. A couple can continue to experience the fullness of their own love for each other here and yet have reason to grieve some loss over there. We can rejoice with a child who wins informs us that she’s won an award and at the same time be grieving because we just read our bank statement and learned that we have a lot less money than we thought. We ARE able to manage competing emotions WITHIN a single field of experience, and we do so temporally. I’m much more inclined to think of God analogously. But I don’t have to suppose he’s timeless to do so.
My problems with ECT are not that God is so emotionally unhealthy that he’d eventually have a breakdown at his continued grief over the suffering of those in hell. God’s resources are infinite. He can emotionally “handle” whatever. My problems are that ECT leaves us with a theologically intolerable dualism of good/evil, which just IS the victory that Satan seeks.
It also occurred to me that if my friend’s understanding of how God experiences things is true, even if all eventually do go to heaven, we are still stuck with a God who will suffer endless agony as he contemplates the woes of human history and the agony of the cross. God could save everyone from hell and still suffer misery because our past would not change.
How is this “good news” to our ears while we breath on this planet and are aware of God’s unhappy everlasting state? How is this good news for us during this life while we are aware of the fate of the damned? Its not. The only good news is that one day in heaven we will not have the opportunity to think about it. This is an eerie conception of our future.
This raises another point: Under my friend’s scheme, while we live on this earth part of reason for worship and gratitude is the knowledge that Christ will forever bear the burden of mourning the lost while keeping us from thinking about it. Yet in heaven, we are not only shielded from mourning the lost but we are also kept from thinking about the burden God continually bears.
This action on His part presumably must be considered one of the greatest things he has ever done for us. Yet, once in heaven, we have no chance to acknowledge this … no chance to love Him for it … no chance to sympathize with Him concerning this. He bears it alone and we are deprived an opportunity to glorify Him for this. Having another reason to glorify Him would certainly enhance our appreciation of God and potentially make our love for Him sweeter. But if He showed us this reason, our bliss would be undermined, for we would always have reason to mourn God’s ongoing misery.
God is caught in a Catch-22, in order to give us the fullness of heaven he must hide part of heaven from our view …and … in order to give us the fullness of Himself he must hide part of Himself from our view.
This hardly seems consistent with 1 Corinthians 13:12 :
Thanks for adding your comment! I totally agree and actually had a few attempts to put that in my comment but just couldn’t get the wording right.