I wanted to add some additional comments, following along the same track as Randy’ in his post, and expanding a bit. I found Tim Keller’s 5th Chapter, “Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?” to be very good. Keller, in concluding the chapter, writes, “I must conclude that the source of the idea that God is Love is the Bible itself”, to which I respond, “Right on, Tim!”. He continues, “And the Bible tells us that the God of love is also a God of judgment who will put all things in the world to rights in the end.” He then remarks that in the end, God loves and judges. My only comment is that in my estimation, there is no reason to leave these two side by side. In closing the chapter this way, Keller appears to be content to leave love and judgment, justice and mercy, on parallel tracks. But they are in no way opposed to each other or in tension with each other. God’s love is judgmental and God’s judgment is loving. St. John reminds us in his first letter , “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Here, John is able to simply set forth the truth that God’s love and judgment are one and the same. If you love God, you know Him, and you’ve been born of Him. If you don’t know God’s love, you don’t know Him, and if you don’t know Him – or better put, don’t care to know Him, then the judgment’s already in place. C. S. Lewis’ observation in The Great Divorce is to the point here: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.” Here love and judgment are bound inseperably.
Keller actually himself sees this, when he observes very nicely on top of p. 77, “Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever”. Thomas Aquinas’ in his magisterial Summa Theologiae makes the same point in the way that only St. Thomas can do:
Supplement to the Third Part, Question 99 (“God’s Mercy and Justice Towards the Damned”), Article 2, Reply to Objection 1
“God, for His own part, has mercy on all. Since, however, His mercy is ruled by the order of His wisdom, the result is that it does not reach to certain people who render themselves unworthy of that mercy, as do the demons and the damned who are obstinate in wickedness. And yet we may say that even in them His mercy finds a place, in so far as they are punished less than they deserve condignly, but not that they are entirely delivered from punishment.”
In fact, Thomas writes that those in hell still receive God’s ongoing mercy in that they still exist. We understand that all “being” is derived from God’s being, and is an intrinsic good and mercy:
Supplement to the Third Part, Question 99, Article 1, Reply to Objection 6:
“Although a man deserves to lose his being from the fact that he has sinned against God the author of his being, yet, in view of the inordinateness of the act itself, loss of being is not due to him, since being is presupposed to merit and demerit, nor is being lost or corrupted by the inordinateness of sin: and consequently privation of being cannot be the punishment due to any sin.” (italics mine)
Hell may have at least that one good point, but the rest of it is bad… real bad. We don’t want to merely exist, and that then in painful eternal separation from our God. Rather, we’ve taken up the heavenly offer to know the Maker of our being, to receive the Object of our heart’s desire, and finally to gaze upon the face of our God in all of His splendid glory, righteousness and blessedness forever and ever.
Obviously, we can’t keep this wondrous offer to ourselves, but must share it! Matters of eternal weight are at stake. We’d better get busy!
Glenn+
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