The Same-God Question: Four Views

Last updated on: October 21, 2019 at 6:48 pm By Scot McKnight

Many I bump into don’t care about this issue because for them all other Gods than the Christian God are non-gods, idolatries. Others, however, probe this question with far more interest, asking at times about overlaps and dissimilarities. I’m grateful to Zondervan’s industrious editors for yet one more volume in the Counterpoints series with this new volume:

Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews Worship the Same God?

The editors are Ronnie P. Campbell and Christopher Gnanakan.

The contributors are Wm Andrew Schwartz and John B Cobb, Jr (religious pluralism view), Francis Beckwith (same God view), Gerald McDermott (Jews and Christians do, the shared revelation view), Jerry Walls (different conceptions view).

Ministry reflections are by Joseph Cumming and David Shenk, who focus on Christian Muslim relations.

Each delves into the following questions:

Jews, Christians, and Muslims all hold to monotheism, but is monotheism enough to claim that adherents of each religion worship “the same” God?

Does the doctrine of the Trinity matter in this debate? If so, to what extent?

Much of the current debate hinges on what one means by “the same.” What do we mean by “the same,” and how do we make sense of the differences underlying each religions understanding of God?

What is included in worship? Is worship necessary for salvation? Furthermore, what place does the worship (or reverence) of Jesus Christ have for understanding the sameness of the God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and to what extent does this matter?

Does affirming sameness lead to inclusivism or pluralism with respect to salvation, or does denying sameness imply exclusivism?

I’m with Jerry Walls, and I will provide a summary by the editors of his view:

Dissenting from the previous three views, Jerry Walls takes the fourth and final position, that none worship the same God. Certainly, Christians, Jews, and Muslims share common beliefs about God, but Walls questions whether such shared beliefs are enough to maintain that the same God is in view. Drawing from recent studies in the philosophy of language, particularly the notion of “reference shifts,” he first argues that it is doubtful whether Muslims and Christians can even claim to refer to the same thing when they speak of God. But even if a reference shift has not occurred, it is still not clear that the conditions necessary for worship obtain. Walls then provides another argument grounded in New Testament revelation, which, if successful, would show that Christians, Jews, and Muslims have radically different conceptions of God. He distinguishes between the order of being and the order of knowing. According to the order of being, God has eternally been a triunity of persons. Yet with respect to the order of knowing, this is something that was not revealed until the incarnate Son rose from the dead—something Christians recognize as progressive revelation and is established by the New Testament. Jews and Muslims both reject these distinctive elements of God’s revelation to us, namely, the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus and the triunity of God. The thrust of Walls’s argument suggests that for those Muslims and Jews who have been properly informed of the incarnation and resurrection of the Son of God, and yet who reject this revelation given to us by God through the New Testament, are not worshiping the same God as properly informed Christians, since those who reject are denying something that is true about God.

Yes, that’s the central issue that divides

Last updated on: August 20, 2016 at 3:14 pm By Scot McKnight

From Roger Olson:

Review of New Book about Calvinism and Arminianism: Jerry Walls’s Does God Love Everyone: The Heart of What Is Wrong with Calvinism

Yesterday I was asked by bright, eager, young Christian student of theology to identify “the one major difference between Calvinism and Arminianism.” Without hesitation I identified it the way evangelical Arminian philosopher Jerry Walls does in this book (published this year by Cascade Books, in imprint of Wipf and Stock): the character of God. On page 80 Walls writes that “The deepest issue that divides Arminians and Calvinists is not the sovereignty of God, predestination, or the authority of the Bible. The deepest difference pertains to how we understand the character of God. Is God good in the sense that he deeply and sincerely loves all persons?”…

In Does God Love Everyone? however, Walls does an excellent job of driving home the Achilles Heel of five point Calvinism which is that a believer in it cannot say to any group of people or any individual “God loves you, Christ died for you, and you can be saved.” Of course, John Piper and some other five point Calvinists argue that they cansay that to any group of people or to any individual. However, the “explanation” of that basic evangelistic statement, if made by a five point Calvinist, is so tortuous as to be laughable. As one five point Calvinist explained the first part of it “God loves all people in some ways but only some people in all ways.” And Piper argues that Christ’s death on the cross benefits even the reprobate—those God has predestined to hell—with “temporal blessings.” As I have said many times that amounts to giving them a little bit of heaven to go to hell in.

Go to the link to read the rest.

Weekly Meanderings, 16 January 2016

Last updated on: January 15, 2016 at 1:02 pm By Scot McKnight

OK, one has to admit Marie Kondo’s magic of tidying up might be more than a little difficult for parents with kids around the house — but she’s good news for grandparents!

If you read Marie Kondo’s first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and you are reading this parenting blog, you probably have as little appetite for Kondo’s second act as I do. In fact, I bet you’ve been through the same Five Stages of Life-Changing Magic that I have:

Hey, I could use some life-changing magic!

I think I can do this!

Oh wait.

Oh crap.

Forget it.

Kondo claims that among her millions of clients and devotees, not one has backtracked. But Kondo had her first baby in July, and I’d be willing to bet even she has slipped once or twice since then. Perhaps the urgency of folding all her T-shirts to stand up like tacos (though loose enough they can still breathe!) has begun to seem a little unrealistic when she never has a hand free. Maybe after wolfing down (does Marie Kondo “wolf”?) a three-minute meal standing up while holding a fussy baby who can’t even hold her own head up, Kondo has recognized the wisdom of leaving the dish soap by the sink where it is useful, instead of storing it in the cupboard where it is tidy….

This is why Kondo’s life-changing magic makes no sense to parents.

It’s all premised on the idea that once you tidy, you’ll never have to tidy again. No matter how perfectly folded my socks are — no matter how minimal my bookshelf is — I’m going to be stepping in play-dough pies and Lego towns after every playdate. And nowhere does Kondo provide any tips on how to initiate my 4-year-old into the cult of de-cluttering when she’s too busy unfolding every blanket in the house to make a bed on the floor for every one of her dolls.

The church has no competition, and it needs to cease competing with Hollywood:

I’ve spent decades tweaking the service order, adjusting audio levels, setting up chairs, approving graphic designs and all the other work it takes to conduct a church service.

Does anyone really think the reason our next door neighbors aren’t going to church is poor stage lighting and a less-than-perfect closing song?

Or are they looking for something else entirely?

It’s not that those elements don’t matter. If they’re done poorly, they can distract from the message. But spending too much time and effort on them can distract from the message, too.

Let’s face the truth. It doesn’t matter how big our churches are, how much money we have, or how many A-List Hollywood producers become believers. If we compete head-to-head with Hollywood on entertainment quality, Hollywood wins, the church loses.

Not only can’t we compete with the latest Hollywood blockbuster at the local theater, we can’t compete with the phone in our pocket. The highest quality entertainment in the world is literally at our fingertips, 24/7.

My neighbor isn’t going to be blown away by the spectacle of our church’s Easter pageant.

The Church Has No Competition

So the bad news is, the church can’t compete with Hollywood. Or Disneyland. Or Broadway. Or Friday night high school football, for that matter. We can’t even compete with own smart phones and iPads.

But the good news is, we don’t need to compete with any of those things. Because the church has no competition.

The church needs to do what only the church can do.

Jesus told us to show the world we’re his disciples. Not by putting on a better Sunday morning show, or by making higher quality movies. And certainly not by sticking with the old, stale Sunday morning show, either.

Jesus said people would know we’re his followers because we love one another.

HT: JS

“Same” God and Jerry Walls:

So where does this leave us? With respect to the original controversial claim, there is no unequivocal sense in which it is true that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. To avoid this equivocation, it is crucial not to confuse the first two questions with the latter two.

The first two questions pertain to objective public truth about what Christianity andIslam teach about God, and the inescapable fact that both the beliefs and the worship practices of these religions are mutually incompatible; therefore, both of them cannot be true. The third question pertains not to straightforward facts about Islam and Christianity, but to individual Muslims (as well as adherents of other religions) and their relationship to God. Here we are poorly positioned to judge. We may hope and even have reason to believe that many of them are worshiping God faithfully according to the light they have, as Wesley would put it. The fourth question pertains to a central, non-negotiable claim of Christianity. While we can be clear about that claim and what it entails, only judgment day will definitively show who has knowingly and persistently rejected Christ.

In the meantime, let us muster as much clarity as we can while engaging these issues, even as we pray for charity on all sides, starting with ourselves. However, we should not confuse grace and love for all persons with Christian fellowship, nor should we assume or state that those who do not profess Christ as Lord are our brothers and sisters in a common faith. That fails to advance genuine respect and understanding just as it does when we presume to know the hearts of others or their eternal destiny.

More advice for Wheaton:

This debate got me thinking afresh about doctrinal statements. I taught for four years at a classical, Christian school. In their statement of faith mention was made that the Holy Spirit is integral to salvation. As the school expanded new teachers signed the statement of faith, but had no idea what the decidedly Calvinist drafters meant by it. The drafters of the statement believed the Holy Spirit could not be resisted, a particular doctrinal implication they thought was crystal clear from what they had written. To say the least, others disagreed! Which brings me back to Wheaton College.

Perhaps it would be wise to unpack a few significant implications which are understood by the drafters to inhere in church and school doctrinal statements. It would not have to be terribly long. Further clarification in adding a few “What we mean by this is…” seems like it would prevent some of the controversies we now see being played out at Wheaton College.

Since it seems likely that Wheaton’s current challenges will not be unique among Christian institutions, others may also need to consider adding a few lines of clarification to their doctrinal statements.

Bring back those paper books!

PORTLAND, Ore. – When it comes to reading, there’s recent proof that people still turn to paper pages.

According to Nielsen Book-Scan, Americans bought 10,000 more books in 2015 than they did the previous year. E-book sales, on the other hand, remained flat from 2014 to 2015.

Local mother Vanessa was one of those book shoppers. She takes her daughter, Alsea to Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village to stock up on reading material.

Store manager Will Peters said frequent book buyers like Vanessa and Alsea helped boost his sales for the year.

“A lot of people scribble in the margins. I turn down the pages. If you don’t like it, some people even throw it across the room which you probably couldn’t do with a device,” said Peters.

Harper Lee’s new novel helped fuel the spike. Go Set A Watchman reached No. 6 on Amazon’s 2015 bestsellers list. Adult coloring books took the 4 and 7 spots, and Peters said they’re big at Annie Bloom’s, too.

“The thing that I’ve consistently heard back is that people want to get away from screens on their own time and that’s one way to do it,” he said.

A former Redbirds front office director got caught:

A former St. Louis Cardinals director for baseball development, Chris Correa, pleaded guilty to five counts of unauthorized access to protected information on the Houston Astros, including scouting and injury reports, trade discussions and draft rankings.

According to the Department of Justice, Correa, 35, admitted that from March 2013 through at least March 2014, when he was in charge of scouting for the Cardinals, he illicitly accessed the Astros’ online database, called Ground Control, as well as email accounts of people in the Astros organization to obtain proprietary data.

Each count carries a maximum possible sentence of five years in federal prison and a possible $250,000 fine.

Does God’s Mercy Endure Forever, or Does it End?

Last updated on: August 1, 2017 at 5:57 pm By Scot McKnight

Rob Bell asked the question if God’s mercy would endure forever so that people would have opportunities to turn to God in the afterlife (postmortem opportunity = PO) or if that mercy would end at death. Bell’s answer was a deft move in rhetoric: love wins, he said. Dante’s famous Divine Comedy disagrees for in it we read this famous line in the entrance into inferno: “Abandon every hope, who enter here.”

Jerry Walls, in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory asks if God’s mercy endures forever, which means even into the netherworld beyond death. Will there be opportunities beyond the grave for all who have said No in this life and, perhaps more acutely, especially for those who have less than a clear opportunity to know God’s grace in Christ?

If, as Walls has already argued, heaven is a perfect relationship with God, and God is a Trinity, and the Son is the center of that relational possibility, then it is not arbitrary to say those who enter heaven are those in relation with God and for whom that relationship will be perfected. So this is not reducible to affirming the right propositions but instead is about relationality.

Purgatory, we must insist yet again, is not about a second chance. Even if one believes in purgatory, which I don’t, purgatory is only for believers (from the feeble to the firm) and it is the place where believers are perfected. So it is not about a second chance. But PO is about a genuine “second chance.”

Walls approaches this question through Dorothy Sayers who said purgatory is not a second chance “for the obstinately unrepentant.” Ah, there’s some crack there: what about those, Walls asks, who are not “obstinately unrepentant”? Of course, one might appeal to middle knowledge here — the theory that God knows who would have repented had they been given a full life of opportunities — and end the discussion. But many don’t buy into middle knowledge. What then? Is there a second chance? Does God’s mercy extend to a person forever and ever? Or not?

Some say you get one life and it’s all over: it’s just, it maximizes instead of trivializing this life’s opportunity, and that (Aquinas now) the soul without the body cannot change.

But he appeals to Dante’s image of Trajan and the unconquerable love of God that goes on and on and responds to those who in turn love and love God.

The issue, then, is this: Who is God? How do we conceive of God? Which, by the way, ultimately was at the core of Rob Bell’s proposals in Love Wins.

I believe that if we affirm that God is love then we must also believe in what is called “accessibilism”, that is, that God makes his love accessible to every human being however God does that. Walls puts this on the table through Terrance Tiessen, a friend of this blog. Whether Calvinists (Tiessen is) or Arminian, which opens this accessibilism up a bit, Walls thinks this is “minimal grace.”

Walls believes in optimal grace. God loves all and does all God can, without overriding free will, to save all. He thinks reality proves that not all experience or know or can know optimal grace in this life so that optimal grace can extend into PO. Walls knows this is not found in the Bible but contends it is consistent with the view of God in the Bible. God could provide optimal grace and Walls thinks God’s nature means God would provide optimal grace. He sees this, however, as an extension of purgatory theology. His purgatory is bigger than Dante’s!

He sketches PT Forsyth, Donald Bloesch (yes, he had a kind of second chance theology), and CS Lewis (possibly?). This does not necessitate universalism according to Walls.

Once again, why is 1 Peter 3 ignored so often in this discussion?

Is Heaven Vital for Morality or Not?

Last updated on: August 1, 2017 at 5:56 pm By Scot McKnight

You may well recall the famous scene in Les Miserables in which Jean Valjean comes clean in public to take the place of another who was in fact on trial instead of himself (Valjean). The scene poses the moral theory called altruism, that is, that one does what is good for others in a disinterested manner. It might be said that altruism is considered by many to be the highest form of moral action; heroic, in fact, when one poses that giving one’s life for others is the ultimate act when especially not connected to hope for reward after death. (Some think this kind of altruism is hardwired into us biologically — even if the hardwiring is a fiction that benefits human survival.)

Do you see altruism, a kind of naturalistic altruism or social altruism, as the major ethical posture of secularized Western cultures?

Others today contend no one does anything solely for the sake of others but instead all moral action springs from self-interest and may then be seen as selfishness. Thus, the debate is between altruism and egoism, between morality and self-interest, between other-ness and selfishness.

And one more theory needs to be put into the mix.

Jerry Walls, in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory contends that the doctrines of heaven and hell are vital to an account of ultimate reality and that this makes best sense of moral obligation and what he calls “deeply persuasive moral motivation.”

When faced with a moral action — here he discusses Sidgwick’s famous Dualism of Practical Reason — ought we to choose what benefits ourselves or what benefits others (family, friends, community, nation)? But one wonders then if there is a God, choosing what benefits others also always benefits the individual. Moral duty may seem morally intuitive but will it be rewarded? Or does it fall flat into a social contribution by death? American culture is described in such a way that one can genuinely wonder if self-interest is not the ruling ground of action instead of morality or altruism.

Walls does not think we need to sever altruism from self-interest. He thinks the naturalistic basis for altruism is lacking. He proposes a heaven and hell basis for ethical behavior, and he also shows that such a view solves the dilemma of egoism vs. altruism.

Christian ethics are based in the Trinity and that we are made in God’s image and thus fit for relations with God in God’s way of relating. Doing good for the sake of others acts the way the Trinity acts: thus, altruism is Trinity-like. Sacrifice is how the Trinity acts in a fallen world. Thus, it is a foretaste of heaven; to act in egoism is foretaste, then, of hell. (Precisely what we will see in the second post on this blog today.)

Now the conclusion: belief in heaven, in effect, dissolves the dilemma between egoism and altruism. Acting for others is what makes a person most happy. This is not self-ishness but self-interest. Altruism with no hope of reward is not a heaven-based form of altruism. Resurrection, he shows, is the ground of Christian action.

Ultimate motivation comes from being loved by the ultimate lover and returning that love.

Is “No Tears in Heaven” Desirable?

Last updated on: April 20, 2015 at 6:44 am By Scot McKnight

Here’s how he sums up the problem:

Let’s face it, the Christian notion that heaven will wipe away all tears is a staggering thought. If heaven is real, no doubt there are many rapists, murderers, and terrorists who will be there along with their victims. Is this idealistic nonsense? Is it a moral absurdity? Or is it a profoundly moral hope?

So Jerry Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, 144. Walls opens by discussion the famous Ivan scene/discussion/rhetoric in Brothers Karamazov. He then tells the story of a rapist-murder-convert-in-prison.

What to say? What does heaven mean? What does justice mean? What does repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation mean for life’s deepest, dark, abyss-shaped tragedies?

Walls asks Who has the moral high ground here?

The atheist who claims belief in a good God in a world of unspeakable evil is illogical? But some contend from unspeakable evil that there must be a God who will make things right. So the Rebbe said to Elie Wiesel after Wiesel said he could not believe in God after the Holocaust; the Rebbe asked How can you not believe in God after the Holocaust? (My point about Wiesel.) Hope for rectifying the wrongs is reasonable and a higher moral ground.

The apostle Paul earned the right to speak about suffering and eschatological hope for justice (just read 2 Corinthians 11:24-27).

The supreme good of life is to know God and to see God’s face. If that is the supreme good that brings life meaning and joy, then knowing God is the supreme end of life. Such a theory of the supreme good can counter unspeakable evil. This is the argument of Marilyn McCord Adams:

If a face-to-face vision of God is an incommensurate good for human beings, that will surely guarantee, for any cooperative person who has it, that the balance of goods over evils will be overwhelmingly favorable. Indeed, strictly speaking, there will be no balance to be struck. And no one who received such benefits would have any claim against God’s justice or complaint against his love. God will have bestowed on those who see him “up close” as great a good as such a finite container can take (147).

And, she argues, God can remake, reshape, and reconfigure out lives — maintaining personal identity — in such a way that joy will overcome unspeakable evil.

But is forgiveness of perpetrators morally good or is it irrational and complicit in injustice? Forgiveness, grace, unconditionality — each combined with repentance, reconciliation, and transformation are the building blocks needed to construct a Christian view of heaven as a place where all will be made right.

What about tears over those who do not embrace God, for those who are in hell? He does not think the Calvinist view of hell being the dark backdrop for the grace of heaven is adequate. He appeals to CS Lewis: Shall the misery of the loveless blackmail the joy of the beloved?

In other words, here’s Walls’ approach:

It is the difference between believing that even the best things of life are destined to come to a tragic end and believing that even the worst things can come to a comic  end (161).

A Big One about the Afterlife

Last updated on: April 16, 2015 at 5:53 am By Scot McKnight

Any one who has counseled the grieving — as a parent, as a sibling, as a child, as a pastor, as a friend, as a neighbor — anyone, in other words, who has done so has been asked this question: Will I recognize my loved ones? Will they recognize me? Will we know one another?

There are some who have what is often called a theo-centric theory of heaven/the afterlife and they tend to focus on our union with God and our worship of God and God as the Be-All of heaven. There are others who have a socio-centric theory of heaven/the afterlife and they tend to focus on both a union with God as well as knowledge of one another.

(And there are some who say, “We can’t know, it’s all speculation, and let’s focus on the present.” This posture will not fit the biblical evidence that focuses on a future kingdom of God. Radical agnosticism about heaven or the future kingdom fails to have the confidence and courage of the biblical authors and tends to diminish the significance of the bodily resurrection of Jesus.)

Jerry Walls, in his book Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, examines this question in part through the issue of whether we will be souls or bodies in heaven. He contends that we will not only know one another but we will know one another even better than we do now.

Walls’ book is a primer, but a mighty good primer, for classes and churches. He has pastoral angles and the book raises all the big issues — and the book is clearly and winsomely written. A must have for pastors and for libraries. (And those who want more can follow up with his three more academic volumes on these topics, each of which is a winner in my view.)

Walls opens with the famous Road to Emmaus scene with Jesus where we see both bodily continuity and discontinuity, and part of that continuity is resumption of relationships (Luke 24). If Jesus’ raised body is paradigmatic then personal identity is also resumed fully.

Of course, this raises a huge question: How do people maintain identity in continuity between their death and resurrection? How much of us survives? What survives?

Here we enter a big one: Soul or Body? Dualism or monism (physicalism, materialism)? (Recent studies by Kevin Corcoran at Calvin and Joel Green at Fuller; I have heard their arguments and turned them over and over, but I still favor the dualist option because of passages like 2 Cor 5:1-10 and “Today you will be with me in paradise.”) Is death separation of soul and body (dualism)? Physicalist sees a more radical form of death — and probably, too, not consciously alive in God’s presence until the resurrection. Do souls recognize one another before resurrection?

For the physicalist, do we get a special post-death pre-resurrection temporary body? Do have a “gap” in our existence?

And identity is very tricky, too. Our identity is a storied, morally-decided reality and it is also a loving and being loved, relational reality. How much discontinuity can we handle and maintain identity? Walls, no surprise here, thinks purgatory maintains greater continuity.

Purgatory: One (Solitary?) Evangelical’s Affirmation

Last updated on: April 13, 2015 at 6:01 am By Scot McKnight

Jerry Walls is one of the few evangelicals by confession who also affirms purgatory. I don’t agree with Walls here, but after a full book on the topic, Walls reduces his argument to a single chapter in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. (Purgatory in the theory of Catholicism is only for Christians; it is not about a second chance; it is entirely for Christians and concerns their sanctification and/or satisfaction.)

How do you respond to this: The only difference between an affirmation and a denial of purgatory is that the former thinks the Christian not only needs entire sanctification but will be conscious and participatory in the process while for the traditional Protestant (denier of affirmation) entire sanctification occurs instantaneously (at death, at resurrection) and is entirely an act of God (and God’s grace).

Some Protestants are not bothered; others are deeply offended. E.g., John Calvin:

Therefore, we must cry out with the shout not only of our voices but of our throats and lungs that purgatory is a deadly fiction of Satan, which nullifies the cross of Christ, inflicts unbearable contempt upon God’s mercy, and overturns and destroys our faith. For what means this purgatory of theirs but that satisfaction for sins is paid by the souls of the dead after their death? (91-92)

Walls rightly refers here to the “long shadows of Tetzel” — purgatory was at the heart of the Reformation. Is purgatory contrary to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone? Here is Walls’ defense:

1. Heaven is a place of total perfection and that means humans must be perfected to enter into heaven.

2. The vast majority of people are far from perfection at death. Even the most devout of Christians is far from perfect.

3. Those who enter must be (1) imperfect, (2) instantly perfected by God, or (3) be sanctified through a conscious, willing freedom and cooperation of the person after death. #1 is rare; #2 is most of the Protestants and #3 is Catholic, Orthodox and a small number of Protestants.

Thus, every theology must have some kind of purgatory theory: either instantaneous or through a process.

To be sure, some in the Catholic tradition have not emphasized purgatory as sanctification but as satisfaction of justice. That is, contrition, confession and penance are part of the Catholic tradition’s theory of satisfaction, extended into purgatory. The satisfaction theory deconstructs the doctrine of salvation by grace alone.

But Walls thinks one can reject the satisfaction theory of purgatory and still affirm the sanctification theory of purgatory. This is the theory that seems to have been affirmed as well by C.S. Lewis, and he shows how Lewis’ own evangelicalism consistently came to expression in his belief in purgatory.

Christ as perfect penitent (Lewis); the importance of repentance and faith and grace; virtue ethics and character formation. We are called by God to become little Christs — in other words, character transformation. (Again, he’s expounding Lewis.) Christ is doing this but we have freedom to cooperate or not. So Walls thinks purgatory is consistent with Lewis’ mere Christianity. Here is Lewis:

Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you for these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into joy”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt, you know”—”Even so, sir.” (110)

So the issue for Walls and Lewis is character, not forgiveness.

The issue then is freedom, our freedom, and our part in the process: Are we passive recipients of the zap of sanctification or do we, in our freedom, respond to God’s transforming grace?

The Reformed locate faith and grace in justification but have traditionally believed that sanctification requires response. In this life, for sure. Why not, Walls ask, in the next life?

God’s Love and Hell

Last updated on: August 1, 2017 at 5:56 pm By Scot McKnight

Here’s how he begins the chapter, with a question:

How can hell exist if God is truly love and will bring his world to the perfect comic end we explored in the first chapter?

The answer?

Well, what I want to argue is that hell can exist precisely because God is love. Because God is love, the comic ending is assured, but because he is love, hell is also possible.

So Jerry Walls in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: A Protestant View of the Cosmic Drama.

For some this creates tension: love and hell. For Walls because of love, therefore the possibility of hell.

If God is good and if God wants all to be saved, then all will be saved — or God is not good. (A common way of framing the problem for belief in hell.) The common response is free will: if all are saved, then there is no free will. Therefore, unless God compels all, and there is no free will, then hell must be a possibility.

Walls: “If freedom can account for evil in this world, the same freedom may explain why hell exists in the next” (70). He also adheres to CS Lewis’s famous line that hell is locked from the inside — by the choice of those there.

Love is demand; love is a choice; love emerges from freedom. The establishment of freedom therefore establishes free choice about love. If God is love, God is freedom; if God is freedom, free choice is part of the world God has made.

That is, some may choose not to love God, not to love Jesus, not to be with God forever.

Marilyn Adams counters that this makes humans too much like God. The size gap is diminished.

Tom Talbott says we would never — knowing all that needs to be known — choose hell. There is not intelligible reason to choose hell, if the person understands the implications of the choice.

What say you? Is hell rational?

Let’s Just Say You Don’t Believe in Heaven: What’s it like?

Last updated on: April 6, 2015 at 6:36 am By Scot McKnight

The tendency today among Christians is not so much to deny heaven as a genuine hope and reality but to minimize it as a factor in the faith or, what is worse, to diminish it by saying we ought to focus on the present life (because, after all, heaven is just speculation).

In Jerry Walls very fine new book, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, he sketches the belief systems of those who have surrendered hope in heaven.

So today I want to look what happens when we don’t believe in heaven. What’s it really like?

He begins with Bertrand Russell’s famous Alpha determines Omega idea, and I quote from Walls:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labor of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built (48-49).

Mindless, undetermined origins lead to termination, not a destination. We must accept this cold reality and continue, Russell thinks, to pursue our noblest ideals. Yet, later in life all he could muster was “Outside human desires, there is no moral standard” (52).

Next, consider Richard Taylor, philosopher of the meaning of life.

… who takes the famous myth of Sisyphus as his starting point. Sisyphus, recall, was the mythical character condemned by the gods to push a large stone up a hill, which then rolled back down to the bottom, only to be pushed up again, and again, forever.

The main difference between us and Sisyphus is that whereas he continues to push the stone up the hill forever, we pass the task on to our children. They then pick up where we left off and continue in our steps. Civilizations are built and destroyed, but new ones are built on the rubble of earlier ones. We just keep picking up the stones and building afresh, and the beat goes on. We are all Sisyphus, and we are all rolling stones (54).

All we have in our veins is a will to live, and the drive for meaning is vain. Meaning is the satisfaction we find in our life, that’s it. Walls takes him on by contending that visions like Revelation bring far more meaning and hope than his naked reality of meaningless satisfaction brings.

Next, Thomas Nagel, another philosopher, who exhorts us to embrace the irony of our life.

‘Reference to our small size and short life span and to the fact that all of mankind will eventually vanish without a trace are metaphors for the backward step which permits us to regard ourselves from without and to find the particular form of our lives curious and slightly surprising (57).

In short, then, one of the inevitable “side effects” of intellectual and emotional sophistication is a sense of the absurdity of our lives. But since our intellectual and emotional sophistication is the very thing that makes us human and gives our lives richness and depth, we should not be unduly bothered by the sense of absurdity that comes with it. Rather, we should embrace the irony and live with it (58).

Finally, Keith Parsons, who offers one of the oldest of all despairs of life:

Why not draw the reverse conclusion and say that, since we know life is fleeting, we should strive to experience all the meaning we can in that short compass? The message we should draw from our mortality is this: You have a limited number of days, hours, and minutes. Therefore, you should strive to fill each of those days, hours, and minutes with meaning. You should strive to fill them with learning and gaining wisdom—with compassion for the less fortunate, with love for friends and family, with doing a job well, with fighting against evil and obscurantism, and yes, with enjoying sex, TV, pizza, and ballgames (59).

Carl Sagan, who did not believe in the afterlife or heaven, said this as he approached death

“I would love to believe that when I die, I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.” A page later, Sagan went on to add, “If there were life after death, I might, no matter when I die, satisfy most of these deep curiosities and longings. But if death is nothing more than an endless sleep, this is a forlorn hope” (64).