Do You Believe in… “optimal grace”?

The best book I’ve read on hell is by Jerry Walls, and it is called: Hell: The Logic Of Damnation. Not only is the book readable, and not only is the book alert to the scholarship on this heavy topic, but it lands on fundamentally important ideas that make us think, and re-think, what we believe.

The fundamental issue animating this book is the morality of hell, or put differently and in a question, Can a morally and absolutely good God punish the wicked eternally in a place we call hell? How is such an action morally coherent if God is good? Some people don’t find such questions viable or important, but I do and so this book mattered (and matters) to me.

I can’t possibly summarize this book adequately but I will say that is worth your effort. Instead of a full summary, I want to make sketch a few of his conclusions and then focus on but one of those.

Questions for today: Do you believe in this idea of “optimal grace”? Do you think God’s goodness entails optimal grace?

First, Walls believes in libertarian free will, which means humans, when confronted with a decision, are also capable of choosing other than they did. Second, Walls contends the Calvinist approach to God’s goodness and eternal punishment/hell is rationally inconsistent and incoherent, since it wavers between determinism/compatibilism (God determines everything, or determinism and choice are compatible) and libertarian free will. I would add that the Calvinist notion that God determines everything then followed by asserting God is not responsible for evil makes no sense to me. Asserting something doesn’t make it viable or coherent. So I agree with Walls. Third, Walls takes traditional views on both human misery, though he does a much better job than most at showing that humans enter into their own designed miseries, and that hell is some kind of place.

What I want to focus on today, though, is another of his ideas: the idea of optimal grace.

Let us wipe from the table the Calvinist notion of double predestination for the sake of this conversation (and I would say it implicates God in evil), and focus on human freedom, a libertarian sense of free will, and discuss what it would mean for God to confront each person with saving truth in such a way that God sustains both goodness and makes entirely just in judging someone to eternal damnation.

As a Wesleyan, Walls appeals to John Wesley’s belief that God does whatever he can to provide saving opportunities for all humans who have ever lived, are living and ever will live. But God will preserve human freedom in doing this. (Walls is here countering Molinism, which ultimately leads one to see that God both knows what humans will do and still chooses to create a world in which some will choose hell.) Walls thinks God gives humans equal opportunities. (Again, Calvinists don’t believe this, but neither do they — except only with one another — declare their belief in double predestination clearly in public settings.)

Walls believes God will give each person an optimal measure of grace so that each fully comprehends the grace of God and can rationally decide in a way that is fully conscious, and in this way God is both good and just in judgment. That is, God gives a maximal measure of grace without suspending human freedom. This permits each human being to make a decisive response.

Walls, without being certain, would also argue that this can occur at death or even post mortem.

His argument now stated: “So God’s perfect goodness does seem to entail that he fully desires the salvation of all persons and will therefore give all an optimal measure of grace” (93). God, also, can create humans knowing that some persons will never respond to this grace.