Trying to comprehend what we may not fully be able to comprehend

These were comments I posted on Facebook in a conversation following my response to the “And What If I’m Wrong” posting.

Before I cut and paste my comments let me say that approaching the question of the relfected-self, or our addiction to self is one avenue into understanding what is a reality that is only partly accessible to our ability to know. As with many things that we believe exist out there, our capacity to fully capture them by our understanding is limited and so all of these frames of references are attempts to appropriate something in a way that we can understand.

The Problem: Is Eternal Punishment a just reward for temporal rebellion?

Everlasting, not Eternal

The question of the everlastingness of hell. Eternity is actually the wrong word because eternity has no beginning, and in a Christian worldview only God, joy, goodness, blessedness, etc. are eternal. Eternal can also be used as a term of quality more than temporality. In our English translations “life of the ages” in the gospel of John keeps getting translated “eternal life”. In that rendering it’s more a description of a quality of life rather than temporality. I’d rather render it “life of the age to come” because that is the frame that most of the NT renders with respect to consummation. A new regime, the end of the age of decay.

If People Are Everlasting, What is a Creator to do with them?

If you imagine (contra materialism) that human beings are actually on some level everlasting, you entertain the difficult proposition of what to do with them without violating their rights that the creator gave them and clearly intended them to have. Because they are his gifts, and his goods he intended to give, they are also his to preserve. If one of the rights he created us to have was to possess the possibility to oppose the creator, some accommodation must be created for those who wish to live in a perpetual state of rebellion.

Annihilation is an option grabbed by some religious traditions but at one level it forces the creator to cross Himself on his desire.

If he created us to be everlasting, and if he created us with the potentiality to rebel, it seems reasonable to assume that the creator also made accommodation for rebels and holdouts who don’t wish his presence, his attention, or his love.

Our Problem of Evaluating God’s Justice

The justice of God is also an interesting topic. What I want to point out in all of this is that when we evaluate God’s justice, we already have a problem. If we are to imagine that the creator of the world is all just, all powerful, all good, all knowing, etc. then the evaluative powers of such a being would obviously far outstrip our own capacity to evaluate. Philosophically speaking, evaluating God or judging God makes zero sense because by definition such a being has a far greater capacity for moral evaluation and righting wrongs than we can possibly imagine.

How this changes the discussion is that it refines the question to what I think you and others are asking. Does the Bible faithfully reveal such a god if one exists? That then, however, places us with different questions, ones we’re not unfamiliar with given our access to information of human society and history. If we gain an adequate appreciation for the degree to which our judgments are conditioned and even sometimes controlled by our cultural context and historical setting can we as human beings even hope to see justice and fairness and be able to render judgments trans-culturally. Ideally our experience of cosmopolitan pluralism should make us more humble, not more judgmental.

There are many competing systems that attempt to come to terms with what is justice and what we owe each other. How do you choose? That’s the process we’re in now, isn’t it? Part of what this guy (I should find his name) wants to say is that “I should be given credit for at least being honest given the limitations of one’s epistemological bubble.” and I can understand that. A just god certainly gets that too. You can find that idea in Acts 17, 19, the book of Jonah, etc. However, there is an real world out there that also expects correlation with reality. To say to your heart surgeon “I followed diet book X because it said it would help my heart” but diet book X was wrong, you may get points for earnestness, but you still may have a bad heart.

The Reduction of Common American Evangelicalism

Part of the reason I refocused the video away from the assumption that the dominant concern of Christianity is designation of after life accommodation is because that assumption usually yields in our cultural situation towards a narrative of performance evaluation. It isn’t too hard to read the Bible to see that this particular concern while valid is likely not the major concern of the Biblical narrative. Do you find any concern for post-life accommodations in the OT? How much is there really in the New? It is a subject that gets addressed within its cultural framework but nothing to the degree that American evangelicalism has focused upon.

A Better Central Narrative of the Bible

A better central narrative of the Bible is whether the creation (including humanity) will for ever be bound by decay and loss. Whether the creation was made for frustration or made for joy? The Bible says we were made for joy and it tells us how joy is found and this joy involves all of the natural order.

What are the options?

1. People are just highly evolved carbon mammals doing stuff in a universe with a self-life, in which case none of this talk (nor anything else) really matters beyond pleasant or meaningful experience in the moment.
2. People are everlasting AND God respects their wishes, in which case God reserves a space for those who don’t wish to be near what he calls glory as it is enjoyed the Lord and his friends see Hell and Parties 
3. God violates the rights of his creatures and poofs them away so as not to have them endure everlastingness without Him (annihilationism)

For more on this read the story of Lazarus and the rich man. Notice how the rich man, despite his time in hades, has not changed a bit. Also notice how Abraham has mercy for the rich man, but the rich man simply can’t understand.