Damned Sinners Addendum

My God's Final Victory co-author, John Kronen, has been pushing me a bit on my arguments in this "Damned Sinners" series. Specifically, he's been stressing that there's an idea embraced by supralapsarian Calvinists (not by infralapsarian ones) that I don't seem to take seriously enough in these posts. And he's suggested that it's this failure to take that idea seriously that might've led someone like Steve Hays to think that the Problem of Damned Sinners could be so quickly dispensed with.

I think John has a point. You see, on supralapsarian Calvinism the ultimate purpose of creation is to display God's majesty, which is found both in God's merciful love and in His justice. But this theology assumes that God cannot fully display both together (an assumption that I think wreaks havoc on some of the most important and profound understandings of the Atonement, by the way, but I won't get into that here). To fully display both and thus achieve the full purpose of creation, the creation must be such that there are appropriate beings on which to manifest the glory of His justice--"vessels of wrath"--and others on which to manifest His merciful love--"vessels of mercy."

It follows from this that the supralapsarian God couldn't fully achieve the purpose of creation without the existence of vessels of wrath to serve as proper objects of the divine displeasure. And so, the existence of sin and sinners is taken to be required in order for God to put His majesty on full display. In other words, the supralapsarian Calvinist believes that God wants there to be sinners--and actually designed His creation so that there would be--because in their absence He'd only be able to display half of what is so majestically wonderful about Him.

If this is right, then what I say about sin and divine retribution in this series of posts is incomplete. It's not simply the case that divine justice neutralizes the negative value of sin (althought that's part of it). And it's not simply the case that sin justly repudiated by God is "as good" as no sin at all. Rather, on this theology a world without sin would be worse than a world with sin--at least so long as in the latter, all the sinners end up writhing in eternal anguish for the sinfulness that God guaranteed they'd possess in order to be able to justly punish them for all eternity and thus display His justice.

Or, put another way, this theology takes it that the act of neutralizing the negative value of sin with a punitive response produces a meta-level good (the display of divine justice) that wouldn't have otherwise existed. On this theology, the problem of explaining why there is so much wickedness in a world created by a morally perfect God is answered as follows: God wants wicked people to be there, because only then can His justice be fully put on display through His smiting of them.

And so, on this view, God really is like the government that would rather have the murder rate spiral out of control, so long as every murderer is justly punished, than have a society without murder. On this theology, God positively wills sin as a means of displaying His justice, and as such does not want a world without sin. On this theology, the existence of that which is fundamentally opposed to God is better than its nonexistence, so long as it's properly punished. On this theology, sin simply isn't as thoroughly bad as other theologies (including my Lutheran one) take it to be.

But here's the thing: this theology strikes me as so morally awful that the thought that there are people out there who really embrace it at a fundamental level (not just playing pious lip service to it out of communal allegiance) makes me spiritually nauseous. I think that if I could get myself to really believe that deep down anyone wholeheartedly embraced this idea, I'd be pushed in the direction of a species of supralapsarian Calvinism in which God created supralapsarian Calvinists so as to have vessels of wrath on which he could heap his just outrage against people who harbor such awful convictions.


I'm kidding of course. I'd remain a universalist even if I could be convinced that anyone wholeheartedly embraced supralapsarian Calvinism. Really. My point is that since my aversion to this theology is so potent, part of me doesn't believe that there are people who honestly think it's right; and so I find myself developing my arguments as if there were no such people--and this means that some of what I say may end up begging the question in relation to anyone who really does embrace this theology deep down.

Reviewing my previous posts in this series, it seems clear to me that I did not ever take very seriously the following idea: Murder punished is better than no murder at all because the former not only fully erases the negative value of murder but in the process of doing so manifests the meta-level good of justice-having-been-done. And hence, God deliberately acts to ensure that there are murderers (and other kinds of sinners).

I never took this idea seriously, and hence never show how my arguments bear on it. But this idea is one that some Calvinists explicitly endorse. As such, my arguments don't seriously and explicitly engage with an idea that at least some Calvinists explicitly endorse.

Mia culpa. 

That said, I don't think my core argument is undermined by this oversight. Even if the existence of justly repudiated sin is taken to be better than no sin at all because it makes possible the meta-level good of manifesting God's justice, we still have to confront the intuitively implausible idea that an act which guarantees the propagation of sin succeeds in neutralizing sin's negative value. You can't get the meta-level good if the evil of sin isn't neutralized by the punitive response. And I just can't see how this punitive response is supposed to achieve such a result.

It seems pretty clear that (given Calvinist assumptions about grace being a necessary condition for overcoming sinfulness) being cast eternally from God's presence does guarantee that one persist eternally in a state of sin. The punishment for sin thus perpetuates sin, and this magnification of sinfulness in the universe is supposed to produce the meta-level good of manifesting God's just wrath against sin.

How?

One answer I anticipate runs something along the following lines: "It's a mystery we can't understand, but we know it's true because of divine revelation in Scripture." But even if you grant a high view of Scripture according to which Paul's use of the "vessels of mercy/vessels of wrath" language (Romans 9:22) was God-inspired, it's an enormous challenge to holistically interpret such passages in light of other ones--such as, for example, all of Romans 11, which is following up on the same issue that motivates Paul to ask his hypothetical "vessels of wrath" question (Paul asks "What if" God operates in the way that the supralapsarian Calvinist insists God in fact operates).

In Romans 11, the "hardening" of Israel against God, and the concomitant divine repudiation, is described as a stage in a process aimed at saving both "the full number of the Gentiles" and "all Israel" (vs. 25-26). This chapter ends with the striking claim that "For God has bound over all men to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all" (vs. 32). This starts to sound as if, on Paul's view of things, each of us is both a vessel of wrath and a vessel of mercy, albeit at different stages in our moral and spiritual evolution--and it sounds as if serving as a vessel of wrath is always in the service of the ultimate goal of mercy being shown to all.

But, of course, at other points it doesn't sound as if he's saying this at all. Limiting ourselves to Paul's epistle to the Romans, sometimes Paul sounds like an outright and blatant universalist (e.g. Romans 5:18-19 and elsewhere); at other times he sounds as if this is merely a fervent hope and prayer (Romans 10:1). And at one point he asks a hypothetical question that, if treated as if it were a veiled assertion rather than a question, would support supralapsarian Calvinism.

The attempt to read the whole, to understand the parts in light of the whole, and to extract from such a complicated text a coherent theology that does justice to the whole given the apparent tensions and conflicts--that task isn't easy. And it seems to me that part of what Christians who pursue such a task need is to recognizing when a particular interpretive effort has, for example, implications that clash with the voice of conscience, or produces internal problems that raise concerns about consistency.

In other words, even given a very high view of Scripture there is an important place for philosophy in the assessment and development of doctrinal views--an important place for the pursuit of such philosophical tasks as tracing out the counterintuitive implications of a view, or calling into question its internal coherence, or determining what other plausible beliefs have to be rejected if one is to hold to a certain view.

But all such efforts are, of course, fallible and shaped by human prejudices. Which is why it is so important to engage in such efforts in thoughtful conversation with others who might not share our particular prejudices (although they'll have their own), who might know things we don't (and vice versa), and who might notice where our reasoning goes astray even as we notice where theirs does.

Philosophy done best is philosophy done in community. One reason I appreciate my co-author, John--and other philosophical interlocutors in my life, and the various thoughtful contributors to this blog--is because they help to provide me with this community of discourse.