Heaven and Hell: the Looming of the Last Things at the End of the Trail

Top o’ the Stack.

Note to Vlastimil:

This is the newly-redacted full-length version of the text you quote over at Facebook. Look near the top of my current feed.  I toned down the part where you sensed anger on my part at pedophile priests. The Roman way around the problem of the spiritual efficacy of confessing your sins to a corrupt priest is via the doctrine of ex opere operato, which is a topic for a separate occasion, as is the dangerous folly of face-to-face confession, now mindlessly re-named, “Reconciliation.”

26 thoughts on “Heaven and Hell: the Looming of the Last Things at the End of the Trail”

  1. Bill,
    “I would say that no crime or series of crimes would merit such punishment. Thus it is offensive to my moral sense that a just God would punish everlastingly a human evildoer.”

    I agree. And what troubles me further is the RCC doctrine of everlasting punishment for ANY mortal sin, lumping together everything from, say, intentionally entertaining lustful thoughts or missing Mass to intentionally raping or killing someone. Even if we grant the claim that all are grave sins, committed with full knowledge, and with deliberate consent, it seems gravely disproportionate that the all require the same post-mortem penalty, a perpetual existence in Hell. We expect proportionality between offense and punishment in a rational legal system, and yet we told not to expect the same of God’s justice. Strange.

    Vito

    Reply

    1. That’s a good point, Vito. To revert to a point I made against Ed Farrell a while back, there is a difference that makes a moral difference between committing adultery with a woman in your heart and committing adultery with her in physical fact. Even if both sins are serious, the second is morally worse than the second.

      And can either be reasonably viewed as mortal in the trad RCC sense according to which one who dies in the state of mortal sin ends up in hell for all eternity?

      Yes, we are free, and not merely in the compatibilist ‘freedom of the turnspit’ sense. But the trad doctrine ascribe to us miserable humans a level of freedom and of insight into the consequences of actions that most of us do not possess.

      Reply

          1. Bill,

            This has grown absurdly long for the comments section and relates more to your earlier comments on biblical inerrancy than heaven and hell. Apologies for the tangent. Some of these thoughts became monsters when I tried to put them to words. I’ve tried as much as possible to restrict the comments to my own thoughts without reference to the endless existing commentaries on these matters. Also, we may be talking past each other to some extent because as a Protestant my doctrinal perspective is based on hermeneutics mostly restricted to the bible (sans apocrypha) and yours and Vito’s seem based on the much larger Magisterium of the Roman Catholic church which incorporates interpretation by Aquinas, Augustine, and others that has equal stature with biblical texts. So when I say “the bible says” and you say “the Church believes” the area of intersection of our respective domains is considerably smaller than the domains themselves.

            I believe the bible is the word of God and since God is without error so must his word be. But what does this mean? In what sense is the bible the word of God and in what sense is it inerrant?

            It’s the word of God in the sense that it’s a record of God directly speaking to man, acting on his behalf, and revealing the exact nature of his relationship to man. It’s a book for believers only, though of course anyone can read it. What is revealed about God in the bible is from God; it’s God’s word to man. This does not mean that the bible is equivalent to Christ as logos, but I think it’s still fair to call it the word of God. The scope of the bible is clearly confined to man’s fractured relationship with God; elements of cosmology are incidental and outside of Genesis are conveyed unsystematically in terms common to the times in which the original texts were written. The fractured relationship is the story it tells: how and why the fracture occurred; the unbridgeable nature of the fracture; the incorrigibility of human sin, the freedom that allows it, God’s utter rejection of sin, and God’s atoning grace in Christ. Beyond this we know very little of God that is not speculative; God has revealed little to nothing about the general nature of the created universe beyond what we are able to discover for ourselves. But within its proper scope, the believer in faith can regard the bible as inerrant because, assuming Christian belief, by what higher standard would you evaluate the work of God?

            “Typos” of exhausted, seeing-double scribes, periods in which original texts were unavailable yet biblical texts were rendered anyway from second sources, mistranslations of words: did these result in textual errors? Yes. Do they make the bible errant? No. No one can say with any authority exactly how God’s word was transmitted through human authors via the agency of the Holy Spirit. Exploiting this, counter arguments throw doubt on divine authorship and thus attempt to undermine faith. Such approaches center on the modern fallacy that “if it can be demonstrated to seem unlikely or improbable then it can’t be true.” From here we get: “well, God didn’t actually write the bible, people did.” But this is a sleigh of hand that conflates the source with the reporter with intent to befuddle. It seems clear enough that God did not simply dictate the text of the bible to the human authors; their own voices speak and there are differences in their accounts, particularly in what they emphasize. This is especially obvious in the New Testament. Compared to most ancient myths the bible has a distinctly unscripted feel to it. It’s messy and there are loose ends that are not resolvable within the context of the bible itself. There’s also a certain amount of uncertainty in the transmission of its texts, though according to Metzger (The Text of the New Testament, 3rd edition, Oxford, 1992) transmission errors, though numerous, have been astonishingly trivial, and correctable, especially considering the conditions of transmission and immense time involved. Translations introduce potentially more significant variations of meaning and that’s why all serious exegesis of the bible is from the original texts.

            And then there’s the business of the selection of canonical biblical texts from a much larger number of existent texts. But those that conform to the gospel rise out of the mass quite distinctly. Gnostic texts certainly don’t conform. Where it’s a little more fuzzy is with the so-called apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts, which don’t necessarily contradict the gospel but often contain elements whose origin is more clearly Greek philosophical or Jewish mythological tradition, which in some cases contain elements that go beyond the gospel in problematic ways: prayers for the dead, the doctrine of purgatory, even the doctrines of heaven and hell that the church has traditionally taught. This fuzziness has caused debate in the church about their inclusion. No pseudepigraphal texts are included in any canon, but the apocrypha are included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox bibles while excluded from Protestant bibles. Probably more than anything, the Protestant exclusion represents a divide within the church about hermeneutics, but it also involves doctrine. Nevertheless, in site of such differences, the gospel message of salvation through Christ alone remains unadulterated.

            Another common strike against inerrancy is the bible’s accounts of miracles and events that seemingly contradict modern science and modern views of history. These are variations of the “so unlikely that they can’t be true” argument, but going deeper are also clashes of secular vs Christian dogma. Examples are the questionable literalness of the six days of creation, Noah’s flood, Lot’s wife, the parting of the Red Sea, and Christ’s divinity not to mention his miracles. How can any of these things be true when modern science says that, for all practical purposes, they’re impossible? Therefore, so the argument goes, since they can’t be true then the bible is in error.

            An honest believer will hold that these problematic things ARE true while admitting that the exact nature of their truth may be obscure. The Genesis account of creation is one of a few biblical passages that defies a literal reading while not providing a clear approach to how it should be read. The general assumption is that it’s mythology but “myth” is nowadays commonly associated with make-believe in a pejorative sense. Ernst Cassirer is undoubtedly closer to the truth in his contention that myth as a human symbolic form can best be seen an organ of reality. Like other symbolic forms such as language and science it’s created by people rather than received from nature but it nonetheless provides a real perceptive framework from which real actions in the world commence. The claim of Genesis is something more of course–a symbology with its ultimate roots in God. Exactly what it means and how it might be reconciled with modern cosmology remains conjectural. Interpretations involving esoteric meanings range from the huge Jewish Zohar to Swedenborg’s equally huge Arcana Caelestia.

            Passages involving miraculous events are less ambiguous and are usually presented as straightforward accounts of real events. These are low hanging fruit for debunkers. Some of these passages (such as Lot’s wife and Noah’s flood especially) can be interpreted simply as parables that have a didactic purpose, in this case to demonstrate God’s implacable response to sin, unmediated by grace–while ignoring or bypassing the miraculous event itself, or simply regarding it a fanciful embellishment. But the believer, at least, should never be shamed by scornful secular accusations of hick superstition, and assume in kind that God can’t or won’t act in such a way as to upset or defy our current models of the physical universe. To do so would also deny the divinity of Christ and the very concept of salvation. It would also assume that our current physical science is the last word even while the history of science demonstrates that there is never a last word.

            Finally there are moral objections to God that go “I could never believe in a God that [fill in the blank].” This assumes you simply don’t believe in God as depicted in the bible or that you fully understand God’s purpose and can evaluate it from a higher moral standard–though this also strongly implies that by “God” you really mean human authors who’ve concocted a myth called God).

            Enough for now, but more on heaven and hell shortly.

    1. V,
      Here is what I wrote originally, and then redacted: “Going to a church and participating in external rites and rituals won’t do you much if any good, nor will confessing your sins to a pedophile priest.” That had to be modified lest it give readers the impression that I think all priests are pedophiles, which I don’t believe, and which is not true.

      As for hate, I believe I have said myself that “hate has its uses.” And is not God himself a hater? Does he not hate sin and in particular that personification of hate, Satan? There is the much bandied-about facile phrase, “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.” But in the case of Satan, sin and sinner are one. And while in no human specimen are they one, in some they are nearly one.

      And didn’t JC physically assault the money-changers in the temple? He did not try to reason with them, or quote scripture, or appeal to their consciences. He drove them out with physical violence. Assault and battery against poor schmucks just trying to make a living and do right by their families.

      As for contempt, is any human being deserving of utter (total) contempt? One year on my birthday Dale Tuggy gave me a copy of a book by Dallas Willard in which he maintains that no one should be treated with utter contempt because each bears the imago dei. And so I ask myself: am I morally in the clear when I refer to our political enemies, as I often do, as SCUM, etc. ? It is a serious moral question, and I sense that you don’t appreciate the seriousness of it.

      Reply

          1. v,
            But if I say what I just said about hate, then what should I say about love? If I love a woman, do I love her herself? Or do I love her only in respect of her instantiation of lovable attributes? There is a problem here that Pascal saw, and I have written about. Link later!

        2. V,
          True, you did not say exactly that. So I suppose you would make a distinction between feeling utter contempt for a person and feeling contempt for a person but only in respect of his instantiation of property P. You could do the same with hate. “I don’t hate her per se; I hate her insofar as she instantiates certain hateful attributes.”

          Reply

          1. Yes, Bill.

            I wrote about love, too, stealing from von Hildebrand (the-Catholic-good-boy-disciple of Scheler and Husserl; what love is, how it is a way to high happiness, how it relates to God and Aristotle, how philosophy helps.

            https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-DJkyH5e-N-O29lpgPcCNMedCq6hzJpn/view?usp=sharing

            I should write about hate as well. Much of it might be mutatis mutandis.

            In the article, I say: “One has felt love for another person when one affectively and pervasively appraises her perceived, idiosyncratic, and intrinsic value, and wishes her well-being for her own sake, as well as to be significantly united with her.”

            So, one has felt hate for another person when one affectively and pervasively devalues her perceived (though maybe not necessarily idiosyncratic or intrinsic) worth, and wishes her ill-being for her own sake, as well as to be significantly severed from her.

  3. Good morning, Bill.

    You said, “…the way I live, devoting most of my time to prayer, meditation-contemplation…”

    This is not the first time you’ve mentioned “meditation.” Over the years, you’ve talked about spending early hours “on the mat,” etc. You don’t talk about it a lot, but you do now and then.

    When you say “meditation,” what do you mean? Is there a specific practice or set of practices you have in mind? I am genuinely curious. I am a 69-year-old Catholic, well-ensconced in Holy Mother Church with absolutely no desire to “swim the Ganges,” as one might say. Still, I have read a bit on Vedanta recently and it’s interesting. That’s part of what prompts my question, I suppose.

    Thanks and I hope all is well with you.

    Tom

    Reply

    1. Good morning, Tom. No time now for a proper reply. But I have written a lot about this, and will provide some linkage later.

      As for Vedanta and ‘swimming the Ganges,’ I have been thinking about that as well in connection with John Tettemer, an obscure ex-monk, who did essentially that. I’ll be posting on that before too long.

      Reply

      1. A better formulation on hate (than that above).

        One has felt hate for another person when one affectively and pervasively disparages her perceived (though maybe not necessarily idiosyncratic or intrinsic) disvalue, and wishes her ill-being for her own sake, as well as to be significantly severed from her.

        Reply

  5. Bill,

    Here’s a little more on hell.

    You’re certainly right about this: “In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.” But as to proportionate and disproportionate punishments, these distinctions are necessary and proper in human justice but when applied to sin they’re misleading. In Christianity, sin is understood to be a general predisposition that opposes God (original, inherited sin) and any and all thoughts and actions that proceed out of this predisposition by individuals. When it comes to salvation, proportionality isn’t part of the equation. Without divine mediation, sin is an absolute barrier to God, and this includes everyone, even people who from a human perspective do good deeds.

    Many moderns have objected to the idea of hell. You probably remember Berdyaev’s take on hell (from “The Destiny of Man”):

    “It is easy enough to deny hell if one denies freedom and personality. There is no hell if personality is not eternal and if man is not free, but can be forced to be good and to enter paradise. The idea of hell is ontologically connected to freedom and personality, not with justice and retribution. Paradoxical as it sounds, hell is the moral postulate of man’s spiritual freedom. Hell is necessary not to ensure the triumph of justice and retribution to the wicked, but to save man from being forced to be good and compulsorily installed in heaven. In a certain sense man has a moral right to hell–the right freely to prefer hell to heaven. This sums up the moral dialectic of hell.”

    and:

    “Hell belongs entirely to the subjective and not to the objective sphere; it exists in the subject and not the object, in man and not in God. There is no hell as an objective realm of being; such a conception is utterly godless and is Manichean rather than Christian.”

    I think there’s a great deal of truth to this, but speculation as to whether hell is objective or subjective (and how this might solve the logical dilemma of a good God creating a place of eternal punishment) might seem moot to any individual confined to a Godless place for what might as well be an eternity.

    The bible itself is a little ambiguous about the exact nature of heaven and hell, but it is not ambiguous about their existence. The various biblical terms for hell in the original languages (sheol, gehenna, Hades, Tartarus) have cultural meanings relating to the idea of an underworld for the dead. But these do not generally relate to the place where souls are consigned after the judgment, which is the “hell” we’re discussing here. This is mostly referred to obliquely as “the lake of fire” or “the outer darkness where there’s wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Whatever these terms really mean, and whether the reality they refer to is objective or subjective, I think we CAN say that they refer to an existence separated from the grace of God without possibility of redemption. For us, in the age of Christ, redemption is only possible while you live, via the atoning grace of Christ. Accepting that grace is choosing an eternal life under God’s grace; rejecting it is to choose some kind of an existence entirely without it.

    As a believing Christian, I believe that God originally created a world that is good and though it’s now unmistakably corrupt and continually flirts with the hellish, there is also great beauty, good will, and hopes that are realized, which are all a reflection of God. I can’t imagine what the world might look like entirely devoid of God. Frankly, I don’t even want to imagine it, and for me that’s the salient fact about hell and I don’t need to speculate about it any further.

    Reply

    1. Ed,

      With regard to (1), I, like Bill, “am not trying to defend trad RCC positions on all questions.” I also agree with Bill on (2), that is, “the divine message reaches us indirectly via human authors with all their limitations, and not directly from God.”

      However, I must also point out that it is wrong to assert that the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic church [sic]…grants “interpretation by Aquinas, Augustine, and others…equal stature with biblical texts.”

      On this, the RCC holds that Sacred Scripture is the inspired word of God, divinely revealed to those who authored it and unchanging in its content: “The inspired books teach the truth. Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.” *

      However, the Church also holds that, while public divine ended with the death of the last apostle, “the Christian faith is not a ‘religion of the book.’ Christianity is the religion of the ‘Word’ of God, ‘not a written and mute word, but incarnate and living.’ If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, ‘open (our) minds to understand the Scriptures.’”* Thus, we have Tradition, which “transmits in its entirety the Word of God which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit. It transmits it to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, they may faithfully preserve, expound and spread it abroad by their preaching.”**

      The Magisterium, extraordinary and ordinary, is the servant, guardian, and interpreter of Tradition; its role is to define and clarify the Deposit of Faith (Scripture plus Tradition) and not to contradict or supersede it, including those rate moments when pontiffs speak ex cathedra.

      The writing of theologians and philosophers, including Doctors of the Church, such as Augustine and Aquinas, are highly regarded as profound interpreters of the faith, but they are not considered infallible or unreformable (example, Aquinas on the Immaculate Conception) and are not part of the Magisterium. They rank much lower in the Church’s hierarchy of the truths.

      Vito

      Reply

        1. Vito,

          Thanks for the quotations from the Catechism.

          >>106 God inspired the human authors of the sacred books. “To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.”71<< What is being said here is that the human authors of the sacred books are not taking divine dictation. They make "full use of their own faculties and powers" and are "true authors." And yet elsewhere we read in the Catechism that the sacred books are divinely inspired in whole and in part. There is a tension here that I tried to formulate earlier in terms of a signal-to-noise ratio. The divine signal, emanating from an impeccable transmitter is received by limited receivers that added human noise to the divine signal. The human authors were limited in their faculties and powers, and the languages they wrote and thought in were limited. And so it is no surprise to me that there is a lot of stuff in the Bible that could have nothing to do with any divine message. Inerrant in every particular? Seriously? So when St Paul says that women must cover their heads in church, he is reporting the will of God?

          Reply

          1. Bill,

            “And so it is no surprise to me that there is a lot of stuff in the Bible that could have nothing to do with any divine message.”

            Nor to me.

            The notion that contingent beings with limited cognitive powers, writing in specific moments of time, with all the limitations that this implies, and within the constraints imposed by language* and genre, set down in every instance, with every word, the precise message of God is very strange.

            *As Eliot understood, since words themselves exist within and rely on time, that is, in a continual passing, they are an imperfect means to express the absolute truths of the divine mind.

            “Words strain,
            Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
            Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
            Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
            Will not stay still.” (Burnt Norton)

      2. Vito,

        Thanks for the correction on the Magisterium. I always try to perform my “due diligence” before popping off online but here I needed to dig farther before attempting grand generalizations. That said, I do have some questions for you and Bill I hope to get back to soon.

        Regards,

        Ed

        Reply

  6. Ed,

    Thanks for your two long comments. Here are some responses to the first comment.

    1. I should say that I am not trying to defend trad RCC positions on all questions. You say that as a Protestant you base yourself on the Bible sans apocrypha whereas Vito and I base ourselves on what the RCC teaches. I can’t speak for Vito but I find it hard to accept that the interpretations of Augustine and Aquinas have equal stature with the Biblical texts if that means that those interpretations have the status of divine revelations.

    2. I take it you a Trinitarian and not a Unitarian. Yes? You distinguish the Bible as the word of God and the Word (Logos, 2nd person of the Trinity). So do I. I agree with you that God is inerrant. That’s true by definition. Does it follow that the word of God is inerrant? In one sense, yes. If God is inerrant, then what he says is inerrant. My friend Brian the Calvinist says that the Bible is inerrant “in every particular.” Would you agree with that?

    Either way, you can’t ignore the fact that the words we read in all the various texts and translations were written in human languages by human beings. So God is not speaking directly to us in the Bible texts; he is speaking to us indirectly via these human authors. Note that I am not denying that the Christian Bible (The OT + the NT) is a form of divine revelation. So I grant all of the following: God exists; God created man; God freely reveals himself to man; one of the ways God reveals himself to man is the words of the Bible. So, while I grant you that what God says is inerrant (because God is inerrant), it does not follow that everything we read in the Bible is inerrant, even if we restrict ourselves to ‘information’ about our “fractured” condition as you put it. Why not? Because the divine message reaches us indirectly via human authors with all their limitations, and not directly from God.

    3. You appreciate that there is a serious question about which texts are to be judged canonical. You are certain that Gnostic text do not make the cut. How do you know that? What are your criteria of canonicity and where do they come from? Does the Bible itself supply these criteria?

    4. Can you give an example of someone who argues that if a proposition is unlikely, then it cannot be true? Surely that is a non sequitur.

    Reply

    2. Bill,

      A few more comments that hopefully address your comments.

      Yes, I’m a trinitarian.

      Is the bible “inerrant in every particular?” I’d have to understand exactly what you friend Brian means by that before I could answer.

      I said the bible was a record of God speaking directly to man. That means speaking directly to Adam, to Noah, to Moses and all the prophets. Then, in the person of Jesus Christ, to the people who encountered him in Judea before his crucifixion and again to the apostles after his resurrection. That’s God speaking directly to man; it’s not meant to imply that he dictated to the authors of biblical texts. I actually described at some length why it’s clear that the biblical texts were NOT dictated by God.

      As to canonicity and the criteria for it. That’s not a simple matter, but of course the bible itself doesn’t provide the criteria. The church, as a community of believers at least if not the institution it has become, preceded the bible and determined among themselves (in a divisive atmosphere of competing doctrines) the canon of scripture based on a) their understanding of Christ’s teaching, guided by the Holy Spirit and informed by the witnesses (if you are sympathetic to the church) or b) the craven self interest of shyster faith-mongers making every attempt to destroy their competition (if you are unsympathetic to the church). How do I know Gnostics texts don’t make the cut? “Know” propositionally or in the “gnosis” sense? Propositionally I only know that they DIDN’T make the cut for reasons still hotly debated. In the gnosis sense it’s a lot more complicated as you well know. So this is just a gross generalization that will have to do for now, as hole-ridden as it may be. The gospel is a monotheistic doctrine that preaches universal salvation for all who have faith in Christ. Salvation is based entirely on Christ’s atoning sacrifice, without which there is no salvation. I will describe Gnosticism as “escaping-the-dualistic-prison-into-the-monad for adepts,” in which “salvation” requires the adept to strive for hidden knowledge to engineer escape from a material prison into the higher realms of divine emanation. Salvation here is restricted to the few who are able to acquire this special knowledge. Is there truly a Gnostic “doctrine” in the same sense that there’s Christian doctrine? Probably not. Nevertheless, the difference in mythical approach (if you will) that I’ve broadly outlined here is why Gnostic texts don’t make the cut. I can’t give you example texts right now; it’s been years since I’ve looked at Layton’s translations of the Gnostic texts but I think what I’ve said is fair as far as it goes.

      That said, Gnosticism and Christianity are not entirely opposed as black and white. For instance, the gospels refer to angelic and demonic realms, principalities, and powers that are not defined in the bible but are defined in great detail in Jewish, extra-biblical Christian, and hermetic texts that have a strong flavor of Gnostic/Neoplatonic spiritual hierarchies if not origin. And mysticism, both Christian and Jewish, seems to align itself with Gnostic strivings though I haven’t really investigated this very thoroughly yet.

      Examples of “someone who argues that if a proposition is unlikely, then it cannot be true?” No. But as non-sequitur as it may be I’ve heard this argument for years from people who debunk the bible as preposterous. It goes like this:

      “Why is the bible preposterous?”

      Disbelieving stares that I could ask such a stupid question, followed by: “Good god, man—virgin birth? Manna from heaven? Loaves and fishes? Not to mention the very idea of God?”

      “Are you saying these things are impossible?”

      “Maybe not impossible but for crying out loud who could believe such fantastic nonsense.”

      That’s what I’m talking about.

      Reply

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