Wednesday, May 9, 2012

How Bad Theology Leads To Atheism

I was reading a story of a pastor who became an atheist. He talks about it starting with doubts about the doctrine of hell.
DeWitt's transition from true believer to total skeptic took 25 years. It began, he said, with the idea of hell. How could it be, as he had been taught and preached, that a loving God would damn most people to eternal fire? "This thing called hell, it began to rock my world," he said.
From there he read about universalism — the idea, scorned by most fundamentalist Christians, that salvation is universal, and all people will be restored in their relationship with God without any action on their own part. After universalism, he discovered the idea, supported by some neuroscientists, that God is actually our inner dialogue.
"I went from God loves everybody to God saves everybody to God is in everybody," he said.
So that is a bit scary. Lots of people have trouble with the idea of hell. Are they all going to become atheists? Hopefully not. We need to go back and ask what makes the idea of hell so hard to accept? One source of that problem is when we make heaven too easy to accept. Heaven can seem easy in many fundamentalist churches. You say the sinners prayer and you are saved. Isn't it great? The most amazing gift is available totally free. You just need to ask. But not everyone asks. So they go to hell. How is that fair? It is like God will give you $1 billion but only if you say Rumpelstiltskin. If you don't say it then too bad so sad. What kind of God does that?

The trouble is this view of salvation is wrong. It ignores what heaven is like and it ignores what we are like. The big thing about heaven is it is a community. We often think of it in individual terms. Sometimes we thing of union with God but often not even that. We can think of heave like going to Disneyland. If that is what it is like then there would be no good reason for God to refuse everyone entry.

But the joys of heaven depend completely of the fact that they are shared with God and with each other. We will know each other fully just as we are fully known. That is why it is so important that nobody with any sin at all be in heaven. A community of perfect love requires total self-sacrificing love from everyone involved. If one person breaks that than the whole thing breaks down. So we need to be sure nobody there is going to use us or ignore us or disrespect us. We are to live the way God meant us to live. To love and be loved without limit.

So if you see that we must be perfect in love to enter heaven you can start to see why not everyone will be there. But why does God not just make everyone perfect? Problem solved. But making someone perfect is a big thing. We are serious sinners. We don't just sin big but we sin in the most personal ways. For God to make such sweeping and intimate changes to a person's life requires their permission. We understand that forcing somebody to marry against their will is a violation of their dignity as human persons. Forcing somebody to be supernaturally transformed into the image and likeness of Jesus would be many times worse. God will not do it.

But what if God just makes an argument so convincing that everyone is going to say Yes? The trouble is that would still be forcing. Just in a different way. The nature of love requires it be a real choice. It even requires the choice not be simply self-serving. It must not be a choice we make because everyone else is doing it. Quite the opposite. The option of saying No must look easier. That is the only time we know we really love someone or something.

The other thing we need to know about heaven is how right it is. It is where we are meant to be. It is who we are meant to be with. It is how we are meant to be with them. Everything about it is right and not just right on a superficial level. It is right for you right down to the depths of your soul.

What follows from that is that missing out on heaven is very bad. If we are not forced even in the most sneaky way then many will be excluded. If it is so right then that exclusion will be very sad. We are meant to feel that sadness. We are meant to do something about it through evangelism. But evangelism involves the whole mystery of a person be transformed from a sinner into a saint. To reduce it to walking a aisle and saying a prayer turns the whole thing into nonsense. Once it stops making sense then we will be tempted by atheism.

9 comments:

  1. That's a nice description of the doctrine of heaven well done. It doesn't answer the problem of doctrine of hell. If hell were preached like the Mormon hell, or like the hell of C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce where it is just a bunch of people who are more or less OK and disinterested in God that would be compatible with this view. But hell is generally taught as infinite torment not simply separation.

    Further the doctrine of hell contradicts on the issue of self exclusion. Western Christianity (mostly) teaches there is no mercy for those in hell, repentance in hell is worthless and pointless. Which of course totally contradicts with the idea that the people in hell choose to be there, they may have chosen but they do not choose. Your version that once they certainty the choice is worthless is moral but I think inconsistent with the
    idea that the damned damn themselves.

    Simply put, there is no way that a finite being can commit sins commensurate with infinite punishment. So either:

    a) God is not just
    b) The punishment is finite, annihilationism is true
    c) There is salvation after death
    d) There is no punishment just lack of reward

    I don't see any way out of those options.

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  2. That's a nice description of the doctrine of heaven well done. It doesn't answer the problem of doctrine of hell. If hell were preached like the Mormon hell, or like the hell of C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce where it is just a bunch of people who are more or less OK and disinterested in God that would be compatible with this view. But hell is generally taught as infinite torment not simply separation.

    First of all, protestants have created some of this problem by eliminating purgatory. So anything in scripture or tradition that refers to torment in the after life they must assume is in hell. The torments of purgatory are more understandable. They are temporary and redemptive. They get you into heaven.

    Secondly, separation and torment often end up being the same thing. We were made for God. When we choose to live separate from God we always end up in pain. We don't have in ourselves the reason for our existence. Yet we cannot find peace without knowing that reason. So the torment does not have to be God initiating new tortures for those in hell. Just the situation of separation is enough.

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  3. Further the doctrine of hell contradicts on the issue of self exclusion. Western Christianity (mostly) teaches there is no mercy for those in hell, repentance in hell is worthless and pointless. Which of course totally contradicts with the idea that the people in hell choose to be there, they may have chosen but they do not choose. Your version that once they certainty the choice is worthless is moral but I think inconsistent with the idea that the damned damn themselves.

    I don't think so. Can we ever come to God without God drawing us? A person stuck in sin cannot suddenly decide he wants to be in heaven. The sins darken his mind and he cannot even imagine heaven. All he can see is what his pride, anger, greed, and lust let him see. So he will continue to choose hell.

    Just like a drug addict does not choose to get off drugs unless something intervenes. Someone loves him or he is graced with a moment of sober reflection where he is able to decide he wants to quite. An addict without that grace would never quit. All sin is addictive like that. Hell is just the place where people are left in their own sin and not made to feel guilty about it. But the guilt is the grace. It is our ticket out of sin. People wish it didn't exist and eventually they will get their wish. But they will no longer be able to choose good. They will still have the hunger to be good. They will just lack the ability because that comes from God.

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  4. Simply put, there is no way that a finite being can commit sins commensurate with infinite punishment.

    That is just not true. When Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK what determined the seriousness of the crime? Was it the criminal's dignity or the victim's dignity? A small time criminal could commit a big time crime. It is the same with us. We are finite but God's love is infinite. So when we sin against God's love we have committed a sin commensurate with infinite punishment.

    You are right that this is poorly understood and that is yet another reason why the doctrine of hell seems wrong. People don't see themselves as deserving an eternity in hell. They don't think their sin is that bad. That flows from not seeing God as that good. People feel more guilty when they offend their mother than when they offend God. I would not insult mothers (certainly not this close to Mother's day!) but offending God should make that seem like a small matter.

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  5. First of all, protestants have created some of this problem by eliminating purgatory. So anything in scripture or tradition that refers to torment in the after life they must assume is in hell. The torments of purgatory are more understandable. They are temporary and redemptive. They get you into heaven.

    Agreed, the Catholic version is vastly more moral than the Protestant version. The Catholic version involves works and redemption, the Protestant version amounts to either: having won a game of bingo or having managed to get the magic incantation sufficiently close to the desired one.

    Can we ever come to God without God drawing us? A person stuck in sin cannot suddenly decide he wants to be in heaven.

    I would hope so. If you presuppose something like full election then you end up with salvation being nothing more than winning at bingo like Calvin. I think the church has widely rejected this view arguing that man is able to reach towards God while God is able to reach back.

    Just like a drug addict does not choose to get off drugs unless something intervenes. Someone loves him or he is graced with a moment of sober reflection where he is able to decide he wants to [quit].

    I don't see any reason someone in hell couldn't have a moment of "sober reflection" if he is still meaningfully human.

    We are finite but God's love is infinite. So when we sin against God's love we have committed a sin commensurate with infinite punishment.

    I don't buy the victim's dignity argument. This essentially obliterates all distinction between sins, and makes morality binary. Which eliminates a good deal of the rationality of criminal justice and Catholic doctrine. In our other thread you want sins to be stacked a true moral difference between spitting on the sidewalk and genocide.

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  6. I would hope so. If you presuppose something like full election then you end up with salvation being nothing more than winning at bingo like Calvin. I think the church has widely rejected this view arguing that man is able to reach towards God while God is able to reach back.

    The idea of God drawing us is in John 6:44 so all Christians believe it in some way. You only get into Calvin territory when you completely crush free will. Free will co-operating with God's grace is the Catholic position. God predestines and yet you choose. It is a mystery.

    I don't see any reason someone in hell couldn't have a moment of "sober reflection" if he is still meaningfully human.

    Sobriety requires stepping away from sin for a time. Sin cripples the mind. It is precisely because we are human that we cannot break out of it. Hell means God will no longer be constantly calling you to Himself. That is what is happening when we have those periods of sober reflection.

    I don't buy the victim's dignity argument. This essentially obliterates all distinction between sins, and makes morality binary. Which eliminates a good deal of the rationality of criminal justice and Catholic doctrine. In our other thread you want sins to be stacked a true moral difference between spitting on the sidewalk and genocide.

    Infinite does not mean binary. One infinite sin can be worse than another. In mathematics we see levels of infinity. The real numbers are a bigger infinity than the integers. That is there is no one-to-one and onto relationship that can be defined between them. So we can talk about the relative gravity of different sins while still holding that all sins are infinitely offensive. That is any one sin makes us deserving of an eternity in hell.

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  7. God predestines and yet you choose. It is a mystery.

    Those "its a mystery" are the points where I step off Christian theology. "It is a mystery" IMHO is an excuse for a self contradictory set of beliefs. So I don't buy it. The trinity is the classic example of this. I did a
    post on the hypostatic union
    a while back. Which I think points out the moment you actually try and figure out what a God man is, you run into how much gooblygook one nature that is fully God and fully Man is.

    For me it is simple either God chooses or I choose. If God chooses sins are of no moral consequence because I'm not the agent of action. If I choose, even if the choice is only via. infused grace then it is possible to repent in hell with infused grace. Failure to infuse grace creates the culpability for the failure to repent since it is no longer a choice.

    The rest of the replies are dependent on the idea that there exists moral culpability for effectively unchosen acts. I don't see how one can be morally responsible for anything you are unable to change.

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  8. These are not self-contradictory. They are paradoxical. They are infinitely complex. But they don't violate the laws of logic. The doctrine of the trinity does not say 1+1+1=1. It says God is one God in 3 persons. That is a complexity but not a contradiction. the same with God's predestination and our free choice. Rats in a maze have free choice yet often their behavior is predictable. Human behavior is more difficult to predict by God could, in principle, do it. It is not obviously impossible that He could respect human choices and still direct human history. There are actually a few different resolutions of this that are withing Catholic orthodoxy. So part of the complexity is we don't know which of God's logically available option He has chosen. That is far different from saying there are no logical options left.

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  9. The doctrine of the trinity does not say 1+1+1=1. It says God is one God in 3 persons. That is a complexity but not a contradiction.

    I disagree. Let me just give the main statements of the trinity.

    1) There is only one God.
    2) The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all fully God (i.e. not parts)
    3) The Father is not the Son is not the Holy Spirit

    Yes I think that is a contradiction. The Son cannot be fully God, with the Father being fully God with there only being one God and them being unequal. It violates the very principle of identity that

    x = x for all x. You couldn't get more like the 1+1+1=1.

    the same with God's predestination and our free choice Rats in a maze have free choice yet often their behavior is predictable

    That's an entirely different thing. One believe (and when I was a Christian I did believe) that God existed outside of time and everything that will ever happen (from our perspective) has already happened from God's. God having perfect knowledge of the future does not in any way diminish my experience of choice. The me from today knows with perfect understanding what the me from yesterday choose to do, yet that me from yesterday had free will in those choices. Perfect knowledge doesn't impact free will.

    That's entirely different than on an individual basis that at the time the choice is made there is not free will to make the choice. Election is like stacking the deck yesterday, not like remembering how the game went.

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