Sins of Attention?

In the third installment of my series entitled "The Problem of Damned Sinners" (which also included parts 1 and 2 and an addendum), I argued that within the broader context of Calvinist theology, belief in the eternal conscious torment of the damned commits one to the view that the damned remain eternally mired in sinfulness. My case was of the form "A, but if you don't accept A then B; but if you don't accept B, then C"--where A, B, and C are all arguments for the view that the damned remain eternally sinful in a way that constitutes an ongoing affront to the good and to God as the supreme good.

Randal Rauser challenged the strength of my "argument C"--the argument that was directed towards those who claimed that the eternal conscious torment of the damned is so overwhelming that it utterly consumes them and thereby prevents them from actually sinning. In response to this, I argued that in order for the damned to suffer conscious torment, they would need to attend to their torment; and in order for this torment to wholly consume them, the torment would have to occupy all of their attention. But insofar as (on traditional theological assumptions) we ought to attend first and foremost to the divine, such fixation on oneself would qualify as sinful. Thus, the conclusion that the damned sin eternally cannot be escaped by insisting that they are too focused on their own torment to commit any sins.

Randal found this argument implausible and appealed to the analogy of someone being slowly skinned alive to highlight the implausibility of it. Now there's a sense in which I agree that the argument is highly implausible. But what I think makes it so implausible is precisely this: If someone is being subjected to extreme torment, the torment is driven to the very center of their consciousness so fully that they really cannot attend to anything else. And it seems implausible to hold someone accountable--as guilty of a sin--for attending to what they cannot help but attend to.

But to say that this is implausible is, really, to say that Calvinist theology in its strictest forms is implausible--because this theology holds that sinners cannot help but sin while still maintaining that the sinfulness they are incapable of failing to commit remains blameworthy. For the supralapsarian Calvinist, "ought" does not imply "can." What is required for sinful behavior is that the behavior is out of conformity with an established standard, whether or not behavior in conformity with that standard is possible.

But, clearly, what we attend to and don't attend to is an important dimension of sinfulness and holiness in the Christian tradition. To be holy, Christians are exhorted to "think on" the right sorts of things. We are called to love God and neighbor--but it seems impossible to love when we do not attend.

So, within the Christian tradition there clearly will be standards to which our attention must conform. And for the supralapsarian Calvinist, the ability to actually conform is not necessary in order for failures of conformity to be sinfully blameworthy. And so, if attending to God and neighbor and not just to oneself is the established standard, then the person who attends only to herself is sinning...even if the person is attending only to herself because she cannot help it, because the suffering she is enduring so swamps her that nothing else breaks through.

In fact, however, I think that this kind of fixed attention on your own torment isn't sinful, precisely because I think that when torment overwhelms your psyche in this way, the subsequent fixity of attention is a result produced in you by forces beyond your power to resist, and hence not something you can be held accountable for. But this way of thinking presupposes the very "ought" implies "can" principle that, it seems to me, the strict Calvinist theology I was assessing has to deny.

I might rest on that point, but as usual I think there is a more philosophically interesting set of issues lurking at the margins here. Specifically, I think that the psychological state in which we cannot help but attend wholly to our own suffering is precisely what the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil had in mind when she spoke of "affliction" (which she distinguished from mere suffering). And for Weil, such affliction has a unique place in Christianity--a place given to it by the crucifixion.

I think that there are lessons to be learned from reflecting on Weil's ideas here and bringing them to bear on the conservative Christian notion that some persons suffer eternal torment. In a near-future post or two, then, I want to explicate some of Weil's core ideas in relation to attention and affliction.

Before doing that, however, there are some more really mind-boggling bills being brought before the Oklahoma legislature that I want to call attention to as a public service...maybe tomorrow.

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.

Damned Sinners, Part III: Why Think the Damned Would Sin Forever?

This is the third part in a series of posts. If you haven’t read the first two, they can be found here and here.

In these posts I am considering two responses to what I am calling “The Problem of Damned Sinners.” The problem is one faced by traditional vindicatory views of hell, which see damnation as a just punishment for sin. In brief, the problem is that damnation involves alienation from God, and alienation from God deprives persons of a necessary condition for overcoming sin (arguably the necessary condition), namely divine grace. So damnation punishes sin by making sure that sinners can never escape their sinfulness. How in the world is that supposed to erase the negative value of sin and make things right?

In my last post I looked at a response offered by a conservative Calvinist, Steve Hays, and I argued that the response fails to appreciate the force of the problem, and as such faces two difficulties: First, even if its chief premise is acceptable, it fails to undercut The Problem of Damned Sinners; second, its chief premise is not acceptable.

In this post I want to consider a question about the Problem of Damned Sinners posed by Randal Rauser in a comment on his blog. Now Randal seems to understand the problem, and I think he senses the force of it. But he raises an important question: Why suppose that damnation has to involve endless sinning? We might reframe this question as an argument against the Problem of Damned Sinners, as follows:

1. If we adopt a conception of damnation according to which the damned do not endlessly persist in sin, then we escape the Problem of Damned Sinners.

2. There is nothing that prevents us from adopting such a conception of damnation

3. Therefore, we can escape the Problem of Damned Sinners

Now Randal, an astute thinker, already anticipates some responses to such an argument: First, it appears that passages of Scripture naturally lend themselves to interpreting the state of damnation as essentially involving rebellion against God—such that if you view this state as eternal, you will be called upon by Scripture to view the rebellion as eternal, too. (And, of course, to rebel against God is to sin.)

Second, even if we escape the Problem of Damned Sinners by adopting a view of damnation in which the damned don’t sin forever, this solution may generate new problems relating to the justice of inflicting eternal damnation on creatures who at some point stop offending against God. You might end up with a kind of “out of the frying pan, into the fire” response.

I will pursue neither of these responses here. I do, however, think it is important to stress that there has been, over the centuries, a range of conceptions of hell (John and I, both in GFV and in our contribution to The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology, provide a kind of philosophical taxonomy of possible species of the doctrine of hell). And it is important to stress that problems that arise for some conceptions of hell may not arise for others.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Problem of Damned Sinners does not arise in relation to more liberal conceptions of hell, such as C.S. Lewis’s, according to which the gates of hell “are locked from the inside” by the autonomous choices of the damned. The interesting question, then, is how extensive the problem is. It would not be very extensive if the notion of ongoing sinfulness were logically and conceptually separable from other things that defenders of eternal damnation have been committed to.

Since my formulation of the problem specifically targeted the coherence of a Calvinist conception of damnation, I will concern myself primarily with that perspective. Unless my grasp of Calvinist theology is deficient, traditional Calvinists believed all three of the following:

(a) The damned are permanently alienated from God as a just punishment for sin
(b) The damned endure eternal conscious torment, again as a just punishment for sin
(c) The damned continue eternally in a state of sinful rebellion against God

If this is right, then I could, in principle, rest my case and simply note that here is a traditional view of damnation that faces the full force of the Problem of Damned Sinners simply by virtue of its affirmation of (c). But the philosophically interesting question is whether one could give up (c) while continuing to endorse (a) and (b). If one could, then defenders of a fairly traditional Calvinist view of damnation could escape the Problem of Damned sinners readily enough, without having to give up too much.

What I want to do here, then, is argue that this can't be done--that, at least within a broadly Calvinistic theology, embracing (a) and (b) requires also embracing (c). If you want to hold to a punitive view of damnation in which God casts sinners away from His presence and subjects them to eternal conscious torment, then eternal sinfulness will also have to be part of your view. And so, the Problem of Damned Sinners will be one you'll need to confront.

I am thus not going to argue here that the Problem of Damned Sinners is a problem for views of hell that give up on (b). For example, one might hold that the damned are eventually so overcome by the horror of their state that they retreat into perpetual unconsciousness to escape their suffering (something God permits). While we could imagine such a view of hell, I will concede for the sake of argument that it avoids the Problem of Damned Sinners as I have been posing that problem here.

But making this concession requires that I pause to draw a distinction between what I am doing here and what John and I do in our book. As I noted in the previous post, the version of the Problem of Damned Sinners that John and I develop in GFV is a bit different from the version I’ve been considering in these posts. In GFV, we argue that a perfectly good God would not will sin, but that by imposing eternal alienation as a punishment for sin, God would be willing sin by withholding from the damned what is necessary to avoid sinning.

This problem would not disappear, even if we conceded that the damned eventually fell into a state of permanent unconsciousness. My argument here, then, is that there is a further problem confronted by those who want to say, not only that being cast away from God is a just punishment for sin, but that those who are justly cast away experience eternal conscious torment. By including the traditional idea of eternal conscious torment in their view of hell, they thereby commit themselves to the idea that the damned keep sinning forever—that the very offense which warrants the punitive response is endlessly propagated by the punitive response. And it is hard to see how the negative value of an offense can be erased by a response that propagates the offense.

One thing to note up front is that much of the Christian theological tradition (not just Calvinism) has been committed to (c), that is, to the idea that the damned are eternally mired in a state of extreme sin. John and I, in our book, look at why the tradition has done so. In briefest terms, if damnation involves being preserved in a state of permanent alienation from God, then damnation involves being preserved in existence while being forever cut off from the only thing that can (given Christian theological assumptions) result in a non-sinful reorientation of our values. At the very least then, we should conclude that the damned will never succeed in overcoming their fundamentally disordered values and the sinful dispositions which accompany them.

Some might challenge the strength of the case for this conclusion, and I invite those who do so to look at what John and I say in GFV. But that invitation aside, it would be hard for a Calvinist to challenge our view on this point, given their theological commitments. Calvinists hold that we are lost to sin without divine grace, and they hold that damnation means being cut off permanently from divine grace. My original argument was directed to a Calvinist theology, and it’s pretty clear that on such a theology the damned could never overcome a sinfully disordered value system.

Even so, a Calvinist might claim that, while the damned never cease to have sinful dispositions, they do stop sinning actively. When Randal says, “But the doctrine of hell doesn’t require that we view the final state of the lost as consisting of ongoing active rebellion,” we might view him as gesturing to a rebuttal along these lines: The damned, while surely doomed to a state of eternal sinfulness given Calvinist theology, needn’t be construed as actively sinning against God for all eternity. Could the problem posed for Calvinist theology be escaped if we see the damned as (eventually) pushed into a passive state in which they are unable to act on any of their intolerable dispositions?

Let me approach the question this way: It seems to me that essentially every theological tradition that embraces some variant of the doctrine of hell holds that the damned hate God. And hatred of God is, of course, a grievous sin in any remotely orthodox theological tradition. But when it comes to something like hatred, we might reasonably ask whether we can meaningfully distinguish between actively hating God and simply possessing a hateful disposition. At least some might wonder whether, when it comes to an "attitudinal sin" of this sort, such a distinction can be drawn. If you “harbor” hatred for God but don’t have the opportunity to “do” anything about it—not even shake your fist at God, or curse God in your thoughts, or gnash your teeth—is your hatred any less actual?

In other words, there's a difference between merely having the potential to hate God if certain conditions obtain, and actually hating God. And surely the damned actually hate God. And so, it might be argued, they are actively hating even when they can't act on their hating.

Again, we’re assuming a view of hell in which the damned endure eternal conscious torment. In other words, they’re conscious. And they hate God. And they are in torment because of the rejection of this God they hate. Even if they’re not doing anything about their hatred—even if they’re not making active choices in which hatred is the motive—wouldn’t the hating itself nevertheless be active under those conditions?

But let’s set that worry aside, and imagine that this distinction can be made. What would prevent the damned from actively hating God, given their disposition to do so? The only answer I can think of appeals to eternal conscious torment itself: The damned, we might imagine, are so caught up with their subjective suffering that all their attention is focused on it, leaving them no time to “act on” any of their sinful dispositions, even their dispositional hatred of God. There’s still a sense in which they hate God here, but they aren’t “actively” hating him because they’re too fixated on their suffering.

This picture strikes me as problematic on a number of fronts. First, it seem that the perpetuation of dispositional hatred of God, even if the person is prevented from activating it, is an orientation of the self so opposed to God that it would constitute an ongoing affront to God’s majesty whether it could be actively expressed or not. Why think that futile gnashing of one’s teeth against God is an affront, but it isn’t a comparable affront to harbor a hatred that would result in such futile gestures were one not screaming in agony?

But I won’t develop that argument here. Instead, consider the following. If we are supposing that the damned are in a conscious state of suffering, one in which they are so fixed on their suffering that they cannot attend to God enough even to actively hate him, it follows that their attention is fixed wholly on themselves and their own misery. Let’s call this the self-fixation of the damned.

I would argue that, on an essentially conservative theology of sin, attention lies at the heart of sin. Those who hate God do so because they are not attending to God as such (were they to see God as He is in Himself, there would be no room for anything but love). They are instead focused on themselves and “seeing” God only through the filter of that self-absorption. They have made their (confused) self-seeking desires the object of their fixed attention, and when they think of God at all, it is in terms of the imagined effects of God on the satisfaction of these desires.

Because, of course, they see enough to recognize that God challenges the single-minded pursuit of their subjective desires. What they don’t see is that, were they to attend fully to God, those subjective desires would be displaced by desires that would truly satisfy them (in a way that the attainment of their existing desires simply can’t). They don’t see that God’s opposition to their subjective desires is an opposition to what harms them. Because they are so fixed on their own self-seeking impulses rather than on God, they are fundamentally confused about both their own good and about God. This is the heart of sin—it’s root, if you will: Sin as an act of misdirected attention, attention that focuses more on the self than on the Ultimate Good.

And the self-fixation of the damned, whereby their attention is so focused on their own suffering that they can pay attention to nothing else, seems to be nothing but an intensification of the misdirected attention that is the root of sin. And attending is something we do. To attend is active. And so the damned would, it seems, be actively sinning.

Of course, we are assuming that their suffering is so overwhelming that it’s impossible for the damned to focus on anything else. God has brought this about, imposed upon them suffering that (given their psychologies) totally consumes them. But if that’s right, mightn’t someone argue that, since they haven’t chosen to attend as they do, their attention isn’t active?

Let me make two points here. There is a difference between potentially attending to something and actively attending. Surely the damned here are actively attending to their suffering. In that sense, it is clear that their attention is active whether they chose it or not. Second, the idea that their attention can’t be something they do because they couldn’t have done otherwise rests implicitly on the assumption that an action isn’t an action unless it is free in the libertarian sense.

And this is something that conservative Calvinists have to deny. Following the biblical claim that sinners “are in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves,” Calvinists (and not just Calvinists) insist that, in the absence of divine grace, our sinfulness is entirely determined. Hence, Calvinists have to believe that our sinful actions remain actions even though they are determined. More broadly, I would suggest even those who believe in some kind of libertarian freedom aren’t committed to the view that only libertarian free acts are acts. Even if there are cases in which, in doing something, one could have done otherwise, it doesn’t follow that when one couldn’t have done otherwise one is no longer doing anything.

In any event, Calvinists have to believe in actions that, even though determined, are still actions. And so no Calvinist could coherently insist that, because it wasn’t freely chosen in a libertarian sense, the self-fixation of the damned isn’t actively sinful.

In sum, then, the point is this: Human consciousness attends to things. As such, so long as the damned are conscious, they are active at the level of what they attend to.

Hence, if damnation is characterized by eternal conscious torment, the damned (being conscious) would of necessity be committing sins of attention—unless, of course, they attended wholly and purely to God, in which case their attention wouldn’t be sinful. But in that case, they wouldn’t be damned, either.

It seems to follow that the only way to avoid the conclusion, within a broadly Calvinist theology, that the damned actively sin for all eternity, would be to deny that they are eternally conscious, and so to deny that they suffer eternal conscious torment.

Damned Sinners, Part II: Can the Negative Value of Sin be Erased by Eternal Damnation?

This post picks up where the previous post left off. You may want to look at Damned Sinners, Part I, before turning to this follow-up.

In this post, I want to consider Steve Hays’ response to what I’m calling The Problem of Damned Sinners. The problem, in brief, is this: Some theologies (e.g. traditional  Calvinist ones) hold that God damns some sinners as a just punishment for sin, thereby repudiating sin clearly and forcefully. But by damning some persons as a punishment for sin, God is responding to the “affront” of sin by guaranteeing that this affront continue for eternity. But how is that supposed to repudiate sin? How can you repudiate something by guaranteeing that it never stop?

In a nutshell, Steve responds to this problem by denying that, on Calvinist theology, there is any meaningful sense in which sin as such is “intolerable” to God. What is intolerable is sin unrepudiated, sin for which just punishment has not been meted out. In other words, he takes it that the main challenge I’m raising in the Problem of Damned Sinners is this: By tolerating the never-ending sinfulness of the damned, the Calvinist God “tolerates the intolerable.” He then responds by saying that never-ending sinfulness as such isn’t intolerable, so long as it is fittingly punished.

But here, Steve is both misconstruing the main force of the Problem of Damned Sinners and, in responding to the misconstrued argument, relying on a premise I find highly implausible.

Before making these points, I should stress something that my co-author, John Kronen, wants emphasized. The argument I presented first on Randal’s blog and then in the previous post—which I’ve dubbed “The Problem of Damned Sinners”—is adapted from an argument in God’s Final Victory and brought to bear on certain Calvinist claims. But it is not identical to that argument. In our book, the argument John and I develop is not premised on God’s finding sin intolerable, but on the premise that God would never will sin. We argue that by permanently casting the damned away from the only thing that can save them from their own sinfulness, God does end up willing sin. In the book, we consider and respond to a host of objections to this argument--both to the claim that God would never will sin and to the claim that God would be doing exactly that were He to impose eternal alienation as a punishment.

In other words, as formulated in our book, the argument doesn’t even rely on the premise that Steve attacks. As such, Steve's rebuttal is irrelevant to the argument formulated in our book. That said, it may at least seem as if it is relevant to my formulation of the argument. In either formulation, however, the main focus of the argument is on whether imposing eternal damnation as a response to sin makes sense—whether this is a coherent “response” to sin, given what sin is to God (namely, something fundamentally opposed to God’s nature).

Even formulated in the terms I've used here and on Randal’s post, the argument isn’t reducible to the claim that, on Calvinist and similar theologies, God tolerates the intolerable. Rather, the focus is on the coherence of damnation as a response to sin. In terms of the tolerable and the intolerable, we might say that what the argument challenges is the idea that eternal damnation can make sin tolerable. In short, it doesn't quite capture my argument to say that sin is intolerable even if repudiated with just punishment. Rather, the argument is that you can’t properly repudiate sin with a response that guarantees its continuation.

Think of it this way. Even if Steve holds that punished sin is tolerable in a way that unpunished sin is not, to make sense of this position he has to hold that sin as such has a negative value that needs to be “erased” (if you will) through appropriate punishment. Thus, sin as such is bad, and what just punishment does is somehow “balance the scales” that have been set off kilter by sin. Steve himself uses this language of scale-balancing, which makes sense only on the assumption that sin in its own right throws things off balance.

In short, Steve and other Calvinists would be disingenuous if they claimed that, on Calvinist theology, sin weren’t deeply offensive in itself. Its profound negative value is what generates the demand for justice, the need to make things right.

Put another way, in order to hold that eternal damnation makes things right, you first have to hold that sin “makes things wrong.”

In short, Steve has to hold that sin has significant negative value. In fact, if sin is going to warrant endless punishment, that negative value would have to be very grave indeed. In fact, traditional Calvinists follow Anselm in explicitly embracing the view that sin is *infinitely* grave insofar as it affronts God’s infinite majesty. Sin—moral wickedness—is that in the created order which is most contrary to God, the gravest “turning away” of the creation from its creator.

One concise way to put all of this is as follows: sin is intolerable.

Now part of what Steve wants to say is that this way of putting things is misleading, since what might be intolerable all by itself needn’t be intolerable when combined with something else. Sin may be intolerable without a scale-balancing retributive response; but with such a response, justice has been done and the situation as a whole isn’t intolerable.

Even if Steve is right about this, I don’t think it solves the fundamental issue at stake in the Problem of Damned Sinners. But before making that point, I want to explain why I think Steve isn't right about this. Take the case of murder. We find murder to be such an “intolerable” crime that, as a society, we respond to it with the strongest punishments we consider intrinsically permissible (life imprisonment or capital punishment). Is it adequate to say that murder unpunished is intolerable, but murder justly punished is just fine since the scales of justice have been balanced?

Think of it this way: Suppose the murder rate in a country of 1 billion people is enormous: say one million murders every year. Does this become a tolerable situation if every murderer is caught and subjected to proportional punishment, but the murders continue unabated at the same rate? Is that state of affairs “just as good” as a society in which no murders happen? When confronted with a horrific offense, is it enough for the offense to be justly punished or does the horrific nature of the offense also entail that it should stop happening?

Intuitively, it seems we should go with the latter. Doesn’t it? Given that murders occur, we might agree that proportionately punished murder is better than murder going unpunished. But far better that no murders occur at all. And what would we think about a government that thinks the wrongness of murder is communicated most clearly in just punishment—and so, in order to demonstrate how bad murder is, enacts policies that magnify the murder rate so as to have more murders to justly punish? Do you really repudiate murder if you make sure more murders happen so as to have more murders to repudiate? Or is repudiation what you do in response to something that you think shouldn’t happen at all?

Put simply, if some behavior is so bad as to call for serious punishment, that’s a reason to want the behavior to be reduced or eliminated. As such, it seems you've got a distorted theory of retributive justice if you think there’s nothing wrong with the murder rate spiraling out of control so long as every murder is justly punished. In fact, I'd be so bold as to insist that any retributive theory that calls for the punitive repudiation of an act would also have to regard the act's non-occurrence as preferable to its occurrence. And if so, there’s something amiss in Steve’s claim that, for God, there’s nothing intolerable with sin as such, but only with unrepudiated sin.

But despite the deep intuitive difficulties with Steve's claim, let’s grant it for the sake of argument. Let’s suppose that appropriate punishment can somehow fully erase the negative value of sin, such that the sin taken together with the appropriate punishment does not have a negative value. Even if sin taken in isolation is intolerable, justly punished sin isn’t an intolerable situation at all. This is the point on which Steve Hays rests his rebuttal.

But how is appropriate punishment supposed to achieve this “erasing” of sin’s infinite badness? John and I actually develop a theory of this in our book—a theory of “vindicatory justice” that follows the lead of the Lutheran Scholastics. But explaining that theory here would take us too far afield. For now, it’s enough to note that what is needed in order to erase something of enormous negative value is something of comparable positive value. But even that’s not enough. If I owe a hundred thousand dollars in credit card bills, and my neighbor Joe has a hundred thousand dollars in his bank account, the existence of his money doesn’t erase my debt. In order for my debt to be erased, Joe's money actually needs to be applied to my account. To get to zero, the positive sum has to be “added” to the comparable negative sum. Only then can the negative value be “erased.” Only then is the intolerable situation turned into a tolerable one.

(In fact, as John and I argue, it is Christ’s Atonement that is thought to do this vindicating work in theological traditions following Anselm—and one section of the book is devoted to making the case that if you take that view seriously, you can no longer argue that the demands of justice require eternal damnation…but that's a different argument which I won’t pursue here.)

The point I was making in my comment on Randal’s blog was simply this: It doesn’t make much sense to suppose that you can erase the negative value sin by acting so as to guarantee that it never stops happening. How do you erase the enormous negative value of sin by propagating it? It seems that you would then be magnifying the negative values that need to be erased, as opposed to erasing them.

In short, suppose we grant Steve Hays’ claim that the continued existence of sin is a tolerable situation to God so long as sin’s negative value is erased by God’s justly punishing it through eternal damnation. Even if we grant this, we still have to ask whether eternal damnation really could erase the (infinite) negative value of sin.

Steve Hays supposes that eternal damnation can do this. In our book, we consider more than one reason to be highly skeptical of such a supposition. The focus in these posts is on one of them.

Here’s the thing about eternal damnation: Its central feature is eternal exclusion from the beatific vision. Whatever other positive evils might be thought to accompany damnation, the heart of hell is that the damned are decisively cast out of God’s presence and cut off from God’s grace. But Calvinists (along with other Christians) hold that the only cure for sin is divine grace. Without grace, ongoing sinfulness is inevitable. On this theology, eternally withholding divine grace amounts to eternally withholding the necessary condition for not sinning…and as such guaranteeing that sin continue unabated. The essential feature of the state of damnation—exclusion from the grace of God—can thus be characterized as the act of making sure that a person’s sinful state never be overcome.

And so the conservative Calvinist view can be summed up as follows: Some sinners have the negative value of their sin neutralized by being deprived of what is necessary to stop sinning. God punishes sinners by doing the one thing that guarantees their sin never ends. And somehow, THIS is supposed to neutralize the negative value of sin, making an otherwise intolerable situation tolerable?

Let’s put this in terms of a metaphor (however imperfect all such metaphors inevitably are): For the Calvinist, if sin is the disease, then divine grace is the only cure. Without grace, the “disease” of sin will continue unabated. And this disease is taken to be so bad that it must be repudiated—by forever withholding the cure and making sure that the disease continue unabated.

Huh?

Or to invoke an earlier metaphor, it sounds as if one is saying something like the following: If unpunished murder is intolerable, then of course we must erase its negative value with just punishment. So let’s punish murderers in such a way so as to guarantee that they continue to commit murder after murder eternally. Then the negative value of murder will be erased! Adding countless murders to the first one will eliminate the badness of the first one, bringing about a condition which is no longer bad!

What?

Or to invoke yet another metaphor: Suppose someone owes a debt. How do you get rid of it? Suppose someone answered, “Make sure the debtor keeps wracking up more debt forever! THAT is sure to make the debt go away!”

Umm…

Even if we don’t object to Steve’s claim that the negative value of sin, properly neutralized by divine punishment, ceases to be intolerable, the central concern at issue in the Problem of Damned Sinners remains. In some way, depriving sinners of the necessary condition for ceasing sin is supposed to do this work of neutralizing the negative value of their sins (even as it guarantees that the negative values requiring neutralization grow without bound).

Now maybe there is some way for the Calvinist to make sense of this. But it is a problem—a pretty big one. And I think the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the Calvinist to resolve it. Otherwise, those of different theological persuasions have a right to be deeply skeptical. Simply asserting that, mysteriously, God depriving sinners of what they need in order to avoid sin somehow neutralizes sin’s negative value—well, that doesn’t cut it.

Damned Sinners, Part I: An Argument Adapted from GOD'S FINAL VICTORY, and Two Responses

A month ago I commented on a post on Randal Rauser’s blog entitled “Does God hate those he does not save?” The post was a brief, critical engagement with traditional Calvinist theology. Here is what I wrote in my comment:

Here is, for me, the big problem: God’s preordaining some sinners for reprobation is supposed to reflect God’s justice, which tempers His mercy and love (or the other way around?). The idea is that sin is such an intolerable affront to God’s holiness and majesty that divine justice demands that it be repudiated. And so God casts some sinners away forever as a display of His just wrath against sin, even as he elects others for salvation to display His mercy and benevolence.

The problem is this: In casting sinners away from His presence, He casts them away from the only thing that (according to the very theology underlying this theory) can overcome sin. Thus, God guarantees that this intolerable affront to His majesty continues eternally in the souls of the damned. In short, the view essentially amounts to this: sin is so terrible that God decisively acts to guarantee that this intolerable thing continue in all its intolerability forever and ever. “What you’re doing is so inconceivably unacceptable that I am going to make absolutely sure that there is no way for you to ever stop doing it!”

And making sure that this intolerable affront to His holiness never stops is supposed to be God’s justifying reason for not electing all, and so for truncating the scope of his benevolence? Is that a coherent understanding of divine justice?

I think a variant of this problem obtains not only for Calvinists, but for any adherents to that understanding of hell according to which the God-justifying purpose for damnation is to justly punish sin. It is not a problem for those understandings of hell that are more like C.S. Lewis’s, in which damnation is a regrettable outcome of divine respect for the free choices of rational creatures.

But if I go on, I’ll end up summarizing John’s and my entire book in a blog comment, and then no one will buy it even when it comes out in the affordable paperback version…

In brief, the problem I was posing was this: According to traditional Calvinist theology, damnation is supposed to be a just punishment for sin that somehow repudiates and so sets right the affront of sin. But whatever else damnation involves, it is essentially characterized by being cut of from God and His grace. Calvinist theology teaches that divine grace is utterly necessary to overcome our disposition to sin. And so, by damning some sinners, God guarantees that they keep being sinners for all eternity.

So: Sin is so terrible that it demands an extreme response to repudiate it. And the extreme response that supposedly repudiates sin is nothing other than an act ensuring that sin persist unabated for eternity. But can you really erase the stain of sin by an act that guarantees that sin never end? Isn’t that kind of like trying to remove an ink stain on your coat by putting your coat under a hose that eternally pours ink all over it?

Let me call this, for ease of reference, “The Problem of Damned Sinners.” It’s adapted from an argument that appears in the first part of Chapter 6 of John's and my recent book, God’s Final Victory. This particular line of argument originated with my co-author, John Kronen, as he was studying with care the writings of the Protestant Scholastics. Of course, as with all parts of the book, the final formulation and development of the argument was a collaborative effort…and as my adaptation of the argument to specifically target a conservative Calvinist position indicates, I’m a fan of it. I not only think the argument makes a significant point, but I think the problem it raises for traditional Calvinist theology (and similar theologies) may be one of the most serious that defendes of such theology need to overcome.

Shortly after posting my comment on Randal’s blog, Randal suggested a line of challenge in a follow-up question, and a reader of Randal’s blog, Steve Hays, posted a response at Triablogue under the heading “Sloppy philosophers.”

At the time, I ignored both responses. Let me stress that this isn’t because further comment might compromise the marketability of God’s Final Victory. The closing sentence of my comment might have left that impression—and, in fact, both Randal and Steve, in their responses, seemed to take that remark seriously. Randal says, “Feel free not to respond to my comment if it will compromise further the marketability of your book,” while Steve derisively says, “I’d like to thank Reitan for sparing us the need to read his book. Given the quality of his summarized argument, it would be poor stewardship of time and money to invest in the book.”

In fact, the closing remark was a bit of a self-deprecating joke. I seem to find myself incapable of being especially concise in blog posts…or even in blog comments (the current post is no exception—in fact, it’s getting so long that I’m breaking it up into a series of three posts!). My natural inclination, it seems, is to write articles and books.

Part of the reason for this inclination is that, even given my propensity for long-windedness in blog-writing, blog-appropriate summaries of arguments cannot be as clear and precise as what can be laid out in a book, cannot be as complete in anticipating and responding to objections, and cannot be coordinated with all the other relevant arguments that should be addressed in a comprehensive book-length treatment of a subject as substantial, say, as the doctrine of hell. The advantage of blogging is that, however inadequately, it can get the ideas and arguments out to more readers.

In any event, the argument in question is featured in one part of one chapter of God's Final Victory. There’s really no way I could do justice to all the work John and I put into that book in a blog comment, and I really doubt that what I say in the blogosphere will negatively impact sales. (The price of the book does that well enough all on its own.) In short, I have absolutely no objections to addressing questions and criticisms relating to my books in blog-format—although, again, anything I say here will be more comprehensively treated in the book.

So, why did I ignored Randal’s thoughtful response and Steve’s…response? Well, the day after they were posted, my mother came to visit for the holidays…and promptly fell, breaking both arms (three fractures total, two of them pretty serious).

And so, with real life intruding on my blogging life, I had more important things to attend to. It happens more often than you'd think!

But now, at last, I find my attention turned back towards this topic. And so, without further ado, here are the concerns raised about The Problem of Damned Sinners. The first, thoughtfully and respectfully posed by Randal, runs as follows:

Your comment assumes that those who go to hell continue to sin there. Of course that is one common view which is suggested by the reference to “gnashing of teeth” (e.g. in Acts 7 the Pharisees gnash their teeth in rage at Stephen). But the doctrine of hell doesn’t require that we view the final state of the lost as consisting of ongoing active rebellion.

While there is some advantage in claiming that the reprobated get to a point where they no longer sin (perhaps they are inert, maximally remorseful but not repentant creatures), this view raises more sharply the morality of hell as eternal conscious torment.

The heart of Steve’s response (with intrusive numbering, ad hominem attacks, and self-congratulatory chest-thumping deleted so as to focus in on what may actually have philosophical merit) runs as follows:

As for Reitan’s argument (such as it is), he tries to contrive an artificial dilemma by casting the issue in terms of tolerance. As he frames it, the Calvinist God tolerates the intolerable. Hence, Reformed theism is self-contradictory.

But he’s burning a straw man. In Calvinism, “sin” is not “intolerable” to God. “Sinners” are not intolerable to God.

What’s “intolerable” (if you wish to put it that way, which may not be the best way to put it) isn’t sin, but injustice. Isn’t sin, but allowing sin to go unpunished. What’s “unacceptable” isn’t the existence of sinners, but justice denied. Sooner or later, the scales of justice must be righted.

It not a question of “overcoming” sin, but exposing sin for what it is, then meting out a suitable punishment. That, in turn, reveals the moral character of evil–for the punishment fits the crime.

I want to consider Steve’s criticism first, since what I have to say may set some groundwork for more efficiently addressing Randal’s (to my mind more interesting and challenging) question. But because this post is already as long as it is, a consideration of Steve’s response will have to wait. So, look forward to “Damned Sinners, Part II,” coming soon to a blog near you (probably Monday, since I rarely blog on weekends).