Catholic and Enjoying It!
…of everlasting damnation and is roundly rebuked by comboxers who don’t like to think about such matters.
The possibility of hell is part of the stakes we are necessarily playing for when we speak of a gospel that offers, but does not impose, the chance to enter freely into “participation in the divine nature”. If we will not have that, then we necessarily choose the only alternative: dissolution and destruction since nothing in the created order lasts forever. Hell is, if you will, the state of having once been a human being. We see people, even in this life (sometimes ourselves in awful face-in-the-mirror moments), who appear to be well on the way to a post-human existence. Jesus offers us the chance to participate in his divinized human life. If we take it, with however feeble a grasp, he helps us toward his glorified humanity. If we obstinately refuse, we get what we want: ourselves cut off from the only source of life, love, and hope: aka, hell. We don’t know if anyone has ever made that definitive irrevocably choice, and we pray for the salvation of all. But not to warn of it would be utterly irresponsible.
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