This morning I wasn\u2019t able to respond to all of the comments.\u00a0 Hopefully now I can.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Someone suggested that a person who refuses God\u2019s love, preferring hell, would not be free but insane.\u00a0 In that case, he suggested, a God of love would save the person without his or her consent.\u00a0 My response is that even an insane person has free will.\u00a0 As a society we do not force insane people into institutions to be \u201ccured.\u201d\u00a0 (See C. S. Lewis\u2019 defense of that in an essay in God in the Dock.\u00a0 He was very sensitive to the whole issue of governments deciding who is and who is not insane and to forceful treatment of those deemed insane.)\u00a0 If a person who refuses God\u2019s love is insane, it\u2019s an odd kind of insanity that we\u00a0may\u00a0simply be \u00a0attributing to him or her because we don\u2019t understand their choices.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think God is obligated by his love to force his grace on anyone against their will.\u00a0 Also, we need to keep in mind the difference between free will and true freedom.\u00a0 I\u2019ve discussed that important distinction here before.\u00a0 The only person who is truly free is one who is all that God intends for him or her to be.\u00a0 But free will is the gift God gives us with which to move toward or away from that real freedom.\u00a0 Real freedom is ours to lose; misusing free will is how we lose it.\u00a0 God graciously extends to all the possibility of realizing true freedom IF we meet a certain condition\u2013acknowledge our dependence on him and his grace and cease our own efforts to achieve it apart from God.\u00a0 The only alternative would be for God to force true freedom on us which seems oxymoronic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The only way I see to avoid universalism (which I cannot accept because of my belief in free will and God\u2019s respect of our personhood and desire for our free, uncoerced acceptance of his grace) and Calvinism\u2019s view of hell as God\u2019s horrible decree (which makes God a monster) is to view hell as our choice\u2013not God\u2019s.\u00a0 Hell is real, but only because we insist on making it real.\u00a0 As C. S. Lewis said, in the end there are only two kinds of people\u2013those who say to God \u201cNot my will but thine be done\u201d and those to whom God says \u201cNot my will but thine be done.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I wasn\u2019t able to respond to all of the comments.\u00a0 Hopefully now I can.\u00a0 Someone suggested that a person who refuses God\u2019s love, preferring hell, would not be free but insane.\u00a0 In that case, he suggested, a God of love would save the person without his or her consent.\u00a0 My response is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n