Earlier this week I posted a link to a blog post by Anthony Sacramone condemning the idea of double predestination (i.e. that some people are born for heaven, others for hell).  As you might expect, his post set off a firestorm of angry comments in response.  Today Sacramone posted a response to some of the comments.  Once again, it’s well worth reading.

I really appreciate the way Sacramone repeats, “I don’t know the answer.”  It’s a vital acknowledgment.  In the New Church I think we have a tendency to say, “Now that we have the Writings, we don’t have to say that anymore – we DO know the answers.”  To some extent, that’s true – the Writings provide answers to some key questions.  But the New Church motto, taken from Swedenborg’s vision of “Nunc Licet” temple recorded in True Christian Religion n. 508, is “Now it is permitted to enter with understanding into the mysteries of faith.”  We’re permitted to enter in – we haven’t eliminated mystery altogether.  You can’t even see that other famous heavenly temple, the Temple of Wisdom, unless you “see from the light of heaven that what [you] know, understand, and are wise in, is so little in comparison with what [you] do not know and understand, and in which [you are] not wise, as to be like a drop to the ocean, consequently as almost nothing” (True Christian Religion n. 387).

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Anthony Sacramone of the Evangel blog at First Things has a great post that tears down the Calvinist doctrine of double-predestination (i.e. that God chose some people to be born for heaven and some for hell and there’s nothing anyone can do about – God grants faith to some people, and if you’re not one of the lucky few, you’re out of luck).  Here’s an excerpt that I particularly like:

If Calvinism, especially in its supralapsarian form—which argues that God foreordained the eternal fates of humans not yet created in a world not yet created, never mind fallen—is true, then most of us are lost, and not just because, in the words of Dirty Harry, we don’t feel particularly lucky, but because we are asked to love a monster. A deity who out Hitler’s Hitler in a blood-thirsty self-preening is too repellant to contemplate, never mind adore. Especially one whose obsession with his own glory reduces every person to nothing more than an adornment. If this is true, let’s please stop talking about the sanctity of human life. In this horrific scheme, there is nothing more expendable than a human being. “I need more glory—throw another baby on the barby!” (Whether non-elect infants go to hell has been a long-fought controversy within the Reformed world, admittedly, but there’s nothing it its confessions or theology that seriously argues against it.)

Pretty well sums up my thoughts on the idea of a God who would condemn most people to hell but save a few “for His own glory.”