“Many persons . . . pronounce Antinominaism to be nothing more than Calvinism run to seed”
John Evans, A Sketch of the Denominations of the Christian World (1808)*
The political scientist C. Northcote Parkinson once said that the road from aristocracy to democracy begins with sympathy for younger brothers. To endure as a exclusive elect, an aristocracy must enforce rigid primogeniture, priority in birth-order being the indispensable requirement for election. But fraternal affection and a healthy fear of assassination caused high-born big brothers to cut their little brothers some slack, and the trek to democracy was begun.
Robert Frost tells us that there is something that does not love a wall, and there is likewise something that does not like a cutoff. I say this as a professor who has just passed through the furnace of final grades, and whose ears are therefore ringing with the lamentations of students who wound up one point below the cutoff for an A, or a B, or a C, or a D. Pointing to the students who wound up one point above the cutoff, these malcontents reproach me with the words, “there but for a miserable two points go I!”
These are not trivial arguments. Another American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, places these mornful words in the mouth of every man who did not “make the grade.”
“Meanwhile, the sport of seeming chance,
The plastic shapes of circumstance,
What might have been we fondly guess
If earlier born, or tempted less.”**
Every athlete knows the extraordinary sting of losing a close contest, and I suppose this is why softies began to hand out silver and bronze medals. And once they started handing out silver and bronze medals, they were on the road to ribbons for all.
God’s mercy is of course what my students euphemistically call “extra credit.” Every professor’s semester ends with pleas for “extra credit,” a phrase that in a student’s mouth means that I will raise their score and they will pretend to do extra work. I have often thought that offering me an outright bribe would be more honorable. In any case, the plea for God’s mercy is always a plea that he bend the rules just for me.
I cannot begin to count the times I have explained to an extra-credit-seeking student that I cannot justly raise their score for pretended extra work unless I raise everyone’s score for pretended extra work, and that the result of this charade would be to simply raise the cutoff.
Although, if I am being honest, that would not be the result because it makes me feel good—not just pleasurably but morally good—to simply inflate students’ grades.
It also forfends unpleasantness, and this takes me back to Parkenson’s statement that the political rights of an aristocracy will in time be universalized in a democracy. First the elder brother bestows or finnagles some lesser rank of nobility on his younger brother. Soon after the eldest son of this younger brother bestows or finnagles some some lesser rank of nobility on his younger brother. Before long there is no appreciable difference between the lower orders of the aristocracy and the upper orders of the bourgeoisee. And so on, and so forth, until you extend the franchise to hobos and madmen and women.
Roman Catholics feel good and forefend unpleasantness with the doctrine of Purgatory, which is a sort of spiritual summer school where backwards Catholics (except, perhaps, Adolf Hitler) can earn “extra credit” and graduate in August. There are still cutoffs in this system, at least theoretically, but they are veiled cutoffs, and cutoffs that are veiled soon disappear.
As my epigraph states, Calvinists have their own method of soft-hearted spiritual grade inflation, and this is to progressively lower the cutoff for election until everyone (except, perhaps, Adolf Hitler) gets a passing grade. Thus the old quip that antinomian universalism is “Calvinism run to seed.”
Neither camp has cause to crow. The Catholics end up confident all black sheep straighten up and get their act together in summer school. The Calvinists just universalize the privileges of election.
“Some of their teachers expressly maintained, that as the elect cannot fall from grace, nor forfeit the divine favor, the wicked actions they commit are not really sinful, nor are they to be considered as violations of the divine law; consequently they have no occasion either to confess their sins, or the break them off by repentance.”***
And so by whichever road they take, Christians sooner or later arrive at a doctrine that unites the best parts of atheism and Christianity. This is how the Christian philosopher John Finas described this hybrid of worldly hedonism and Christian hope.
“eat, drink, and be merry—do just what we feel like—for tomorrow we live forever.”†
*) John Evans, A Sketch of the Denominations of the Christian World, Eleventh Edition (London: Crosby and Co, 1808), p. 81.
**) John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Chapel of the Hermits” (1856).
***) Evans, Sketch, pp. 80-81.
†) John Finas, “On the Practical Meaning of Secularism,” Notre Dame Law Review (March 1998): pp. 491-516, quote p. 500.
The Orthosphere 
Well, here’s one man who thought that God “inflates grades”:
“Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am…..” (1 Cor. 15:7-10)
St. Paul not only didn’t make the one-point cutoff for the higher grade, he failed the course entirely, attacked other students and tried to burn down the school. Whereupon he was promoted to Head Boy and Senior Prefect.
The issue here, I think, is confusing the values and standards of the City of God / Kingdom of God with those makeshift arrangements we make in order to get by here in the sublunary realm. What makes the rules seem capricious is toggling back and forth between the two. There’s nothing arbitrary about either one, but yes, they are different. Fairness is an excellent goal to pursue, and when necessary to enforce, but it’s a worldly value, not a principle that governs or limits divine mercy and grace.
St. Paul repented. His case is like that of the student who flunks the midterm and has what some professors still call a “Road to Damascus Experience.” No one here doubts that a sinner can turn his life around and get right with God.
The “different standards” strikes me as helping yourself to the conclusion of an unmade argument. What can’t be proven in this way? Perhaps Heaven is made of green cheese and its rivers run with lemonade. Perhaps 2+2=7 in the City of God. In any case, “different standards” are still “standards,” and mortals facing Judgement Day reasonably wish to know what they are. If you tell me I will be judged by standards I cannot comprehend, I’ll just get on with my life and hope for the best. It is like playing darts in a blindfold!
Saul had not repented, not at all, when God nonetheless poured out immense grace upon him by smiting him on the Road to Damascus with a personal revelation of the Risen Christ — a great boon that most of us are not granted. That was not an act of justice or an application of standards of fairness. He was on a persecution tour, aiming to destroy the early church, and justice would more likely have meant striking him dead. Saul/Paul is a prime example, as he seemed to know, of God’s willingness to deliver unmerited mercy.
“If you tell me I will be judged by standards I cannot comprehend, I’ll just get on with my life and hope for the best. It is like playing darts in a blindfold!”
I think you can comprehend the standards fine, except that they may be more forgiving than you would like. Which might well benefit you yourself, in fact, or any of us. But it seems like what actually bothers you isn’t how you’ll be judged, but the possibility that other people who aren’t trying so hard — the laggard students — might catch some breaks they don’t really deserve. You are making the same complaint as the Dutiful Son and the vineyard workers hired early in the day. Well yes, some people will and do get undeserved breaks. The Gospels flatly say so.
On the “Hell and Eternal Punishment II” thread you posted a comment to me that started with “What is the purpose of earthly existence on this hypothesis?” Since WordPress seems to have eaten my reply there, but it’s relevant here too, I’ll just recap it:
1. We don’t know in full what heavenly “bliss” is like, and I agree that boredom would not be bliss, but it certainly cannot include anxiety or sorrow. If it’s childish to suppose that heavenly existence is free of anxiety and sorrow, then every conception of heaven I’ve ever seen described in any faith tradition has been childish. None has ever suggested that heaven is a place of bad experiences.
2. While we’re living it, life still has all the local, existential meanings it’s always had. People of all faiths and none experience those meanings — in their friendships, family relationships, satisfying and purposeful activities of all kinds. What would seem to “suck meaning” out of this life is hinging it on some event or condition that occurs only after death.
3. Even if earthly life is a “test or time of decision,” the nearly universal teaching of Christianity is that you can fail this test chronically, repeatedly and in quite serious ways throughout life, and yet still be saved at the end through sincere repentance and conversion. The key “decision” need not be made early or often. So if it’s a test, it’s a remarkably forgiving one — like an SAT where you can get every question along the way wrong, yet still finish among the highest scorers as long as you get the last few questions right, because that somehow nullifies all the earlier wrong answers. Again, I know of no church that teaches otherwise — with the partial exception of the doctrine of Purgatory, which is kind of like a provision for extended remedial instruction before the passing mark is issued (or, in your analogy, it’s the ultimate extra-credit assignment).
Any man can have a “Road to Damascus Experience,” albeit few have an RTDE as dramatic or momentous as the one that made Saul into Paul. This is not the question we are asking. And I don’t think it is germane to the question because no one here doubts that God is gracious to living men. For Saul’s story to be germane, this is how the story would go.
Having been visited by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, Saul refuses to repent and in fact redoubles his persecution of Christians, partly for money, partly for spite, and partly to satisfy a sadistic sexual perversion. He continues his vile, bloodstained career until his death. There is some apprehension in the mind of Saul’s wraith as he approaches God’s judgment seat, but God just winks and says, “don’t worry Saul, it’s all good, here’s your harp.”
That a living man can be forgiven is clearly essential to the gospel—indeed it is the good news—but with death comes judgement. To draw another analogy from academia, a student has the whole semester to earn points and perhaps change his ways, but the day comes when the professor says, “the class is over, there are no more points to earn, and this is your final grade.”
You are shifting the question on standards because you formerly said that “worldly values” are different than the values of “the City of God.” And by “worldly values” you did not mean what we ordinarily mean by “worldly values,” but rather Christian values as understood by Christians in this world. This may be so, but the God of such a system would be as sadistic as a professor who said, “final exam values are different than semester values.” In any case, you are shifting the question from different standards back to lower standards, and implying, rather meanly, that anyone who disagrees with you is just mean and a prig.
Speaking for myself, I am a very inferior type of Christian and will not make the grade if standards for admission to Heaven are high. I would not personally grudge anyone catching a break. I will not relish the aroma of roasting flesh that rises from Hell (assuming I am not myself much closer to the source of that aroma). Universalists need to stop using this ad hominem argument.
I understand and accept the vineyard parable, but you are pushing it farther than it actually goes. Many deathbed conversions are dubious, but repentance can happen at any time in a man’s life. A man can get right with God at the age of 20, or 40, or 60, or 80. That is not the question. But you are suggesting that God pays wages to men who never spent a minute in the vineyard. That when payday comes, deadbeats can wander in off the street and get a pay packet too. That pushes the parable farther than it actually goes.
I agree with your analogy of the student who passes the SAT by getting the last few questions right, but would add that this student must hand in the exam with the chastened understanding that he got all the earlier questions wrong. That is repentance and no one questions that those who repent are forgiven. The questions are, are there opportunities for repentance after death? and, are there opportunities for salvation without repentance?
“Roman Catholics feel good and forefend unpleasantness with the doctrine of Purgatory, which is a sort of spiritual summer school where backwards Catholics (except, perhaps, Adolf Hitler) can earn “extra credit” and graduate in August.”
It is not exactly like that. The final Catholic exam is pass/no pass. Purgatory is only the preparation for the real world for the students that have passed before graduation ceremony. If you don’t pass, you don’t get a second chance.
Of course, brilliant students (only saints, A++++++) are allowed to do away with Purgatory. But this is only one in one million.
OT: Is imnobody00 banned? My comments don’t get published. Your website, your rules, but I would like to know. I have been a commenter from the very first time of the Orthosphere. Belonging to other culture, I understand that I can be a bit annoying for America people. But, if you have decided to ban me, I only wanted to know that this is the cause and not any technological problem. Thank you very much for this information.
My experience among everyday Catholics is that they think every deceased person they knew is a saint who went straight to Heaven. I’ve heard priests say this at funerals, although perhaps only as a courtesy to the family. But even the strictly orthodox view of Purgatory does not nullify my argument. The doctrine of Purgatory allows Catholics to set the cutoff for “passing” lower than they might feel comfortable setting it without the doctrine of Purgatory.
I don’t believe we have ever banned any commenter, although we have toyed with the idea once or twice. I am quite sure no one banned imnobody00. His/your comments were always welcome.
“My experience among everyday Catholics is that they think every deceased person they knew is a saint who went straight to Heaven. I’ve heard priests say this at funerals, although perhaps only as a courtesy to the family.”
You are right, of course. There are two problems.
First, most Catholics are completely ignorant of their faith. This is the product of 50 years of priests not teaching it. In my 54 years of existence, most of them with weekly Mass, I have never heard something about Hell, Purgatory or Heaven in the sermon . Not. One. Time. Grace? Atonement? Everything is about “be a good chap and help others, especially the poor” (although Catholic masses pray every time for dead people, so they implicitly acknowledge the existence of Purgatory). So most Catholics are really ignorant about everything in their faith and get carried away by modern culture.
Second, as you say, it is very hard to see a grieving family and tell them “your loved one is suffering in Purgatory”. My mom died last Christmas’ Eve and, although I pray for her to exit Purgatory, it is not a comforting image. So everything is about “s/he is in a better place, s/he is with God now”. What can you say? These moments are awful and you don’t want to make them worse. Of all the lies that we say, God will have mercy about these ones (but we have to confess).
“But even the strictly orthodox view of Purgatory does not nullify my argument. The doctrine of Purgatory allows Catholics to set the cutoff for “passing” lower than they might feel comfortable setting it without the doctrine of Purgatory.”
This is true but, IMHO, not in the way that you say it. If Heaven were Maths, only Euler and Fermat would be able to pass the exam without Purgatory. It is true that Purgatory allows people to set the cutoff for “passing” lower, but, because the cutoff note is so d**mn high. When only one in one million can go straight to Heaven (say, saints), Purgatory makes Heaven achievable for the rest of us. This does not means easy, because it is not easy at all, but achievable.
On the contrary, Protestant beliefs don’t have Purgatory but they have a “cutoff” for going to Heaven similar to the Catholics with Purgatory. You don’t need to be a saint to go to Heaven in Protestantism.
In a more personal tone, I don’t find the doctrine of Purgatory comforting. It is the doctrine I hate the most between those of the Catholic faith. After the pain and diseases of old age, you die and you start suffering. A lot. Nobody knows for what amount of time. The equivalent of centuries? Millennia? I don’t know about you but my life has been full of suffering and very little happiness and I don’t want more of the same.
OT: Thank you for confirming I have not been banned. I have lots of comments lost. I read regularly the Orthosphere so I am prone to comment. But I am not an American so I apologize if don’t always use the right tone.
I think your reports from way down south are particularly valuable because you are outside the American bubble, but also, as you learned to your sorrow, also inside it. What you tell us about the Church in Central America is also valuable because, if present trends continue, the children of your fellow partitioners are going to be the fellow partitioners of our children. We are often assured that migration from Latin America will save the Catholic Church in America, both with respect to numbers and doctrine, but you suggest the great transformation may not work out as advertised.
No one has returned from Purgatory to tell us what it is like, so all of our knowledge is inferential and speculative. Perhaps there is a less forbidding way to think about it. Imagine that you have been fat and unhealthy all your life and you are finally sent to a sanatarium with guaranteed results. The process will not be easy or painless, but you are will finally be able to climb stairs without huffing and puffing. It is not just pointless suffering, but suffering with a purpose and with guaranteed results.
Adolf keeps on giving and giving.
This is a fantastic post.
Of course, as a professor who has to assign grades tonight, I was biased to like it even before you pivoted from our mundane dealings with students to its spiritual equivalent, which took it up to a whole other level. The sentence “I have often thought that offering me an outright bribe would be more honorable” made me stop and think for a while about whether you’re right about that. I don’t quite agree, but the bribe would seem more honest.
Your thoughts about Purgatory and Calvinism really set me thinking too. It’s tempting to think that we have a loving God who will figure out how to coax most of us to somehow eventually merit salvation. But my intuition tells me that that’s not going to involve lowering the passing score. That final John Evans quote is droll but forboding.
Glad it struck a chord. Anyone who has been on the giving side of the grading ordeal will immediately understand. I don’t want to leave the impression that I am in favor of bribes. It is only, as you say, that an open bribe would expose the true nature of the transaction.
The Story of Dives and Lazarus, as told in the Universalist Bible :
“Hey, Dives ol’ buddy, welcome to Heaven. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. God is so nice, he just forgives everybody everything. Rap sheet a mile long? Totally unrepentant? No biggie. Doesn’t matter. He just wants everybody to be happy, no matter what. C’mon and join the party. Laz here will get you a drink. What’ll you have? Just water? Odd choice — especially for you, eh Dives ol’ buddy? But hey, you can have anything you want. Drinks are on the house.
“Oh, you know that great gulf that I said existed between you and Lazarus? I was only kidding! Everybody is equal up here, you know? Doesn’t matter that you spent your life living it up — you get to keep on living it up while you’re here! We wouldn’t want to cramp anyone’s style. I mean, who cares if you lived righteously or unrighteously? Not the big guy, that’s for sure. He couldn’t care less. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Divy my boy — God’s a hedonist too! He wants to screw everybody; it says so in the Song of Songs.
“Yes, I know you’re a little anxious about your good-for-nothing brothers (they’re just like you, eh?). Not to worry. The Law and the Prophets? Hey, who cares about that shit anyway? The only thing that matters is God’s great big fat unconditional passionate love for all His creatures. I will send Laz to tell your degenerate brothers to come on up and join the party too. I’m okay, you’re okay, they’re okay — hell, everybody is okay. We’re all about being inclusive up here, you know?”
But you are suggesting that God pays wages to men who never spent a minute in the vineyard. That when payday comes, deadbeats can wander in off the street and get a pay packet too. That pushes the parable farther than it actually goes.
Right, the parable doesn’t say that, I agree. The vineyard workers all got paid for working. In that regard, the landowner did distinguish between them and someone wandering in off the street. What he didn’t do was distinguish among the workers according to the hours they worked. What impresses me about both that parable and the Prodigal Son is that in both cases, individuals who are not otherwise worse off — the early day workers got paid what was agreed, and the dutiful son was not somehow disadvantaged (in fact, he was urged to join the feast) — nonetheless complained about unfairness, to no avail. The early-day workers “began to grumble against the landowner,” who says no, he’s not being unfair, and he has the right to be more generous to others than they’d like if he so chooses. The older brother “became angry and refused to go in,” so the father has to plead with him. (There’s a further “diss” there, I think, which would have been obvious in the ancient Near East, in that the angry brother is given no special status as the firstborn — another ancient social distinction violated.)
I take both stories to reinforce the overall message of the Gospel, which is one of astounding divine generosity and grace. None of us really merits salvation, let alone a sacrifice from God (!!) to bring it about. That is upside-down: in the ancient world, human beings were expected to sacrifice TO gods. But the conclusion of the Vineyard parable is “the last will be first, and the first will be last” — already very radical — and in John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” that we could be saved. That is literally the most radical act of generosity in all of history and for all future time. We get multiple stories and verses amplifying it because evidently God was well aware that human beings, focused as they are on their status relative to each other, would be inclined to “grumble” and would need it repeatedly explained.
…..the God of such a system would be as sadistic as a professor who said, “final exam values are different than semester values.”
In that analogy, my position would be, “At the point of and even after the final exam, I am going to do the best I can by everyone.” So — these are my actual policies — students who fail outright can do a “re-sit” (that’s actually a system rule), and others get a preview of what grade the exam score earns them and can do an additional assignment to try to raise it, if it’s important enough to them to put in that effort. These measures do nothing to benefit the “A” students, who don’t need them, yet nobody’s ever complained. If someone did, my answer would be that of the Father / vineyard owner: What I do for others is not harming you in any way, and is certainly not an act of “sadism” toward you or anyone else.
But anyway, this whole line of argument is separate from the point I originally made about heaven, which is that we have it on the authority of ALL Christian faith traditions (AFAIK) that three things are true about it: the people there are still distinct from each other, not some kind of undifferentiated cosmic anthill or Borg; what distinguishes them is that, although transformed, they retain identities continuous in some way with their earthly selves; and, they do not suffer, which means they’re not subject to sorrow, grief, anxiety, pain, or any reasons to feel those things. The notion of a hell of eternal torment forces us to abandon at least one of those three conditions. (Kristor’s answer is effectively to abandon the second and maybe the third.) Perhaps a milder hell or a Purgatory+Hell would not, which means my position is not “universalism” strictly speaking.
I think you are still arguing against a position no one has taken. No one disputes that the greatest sinner can be saved by some sort of contrition and repentance in this life, even to the point of a sincere “deathbed conversion.” The Rigorists in this debate simply say that the offer of salvation ends at death, indeed that the expiration of this offer is an event of far greater moment than the expiration of biological life. We Rigorists are not by any means grumbling like the first-hired workers in the garden, or at least I am not. If I were on a ship that sank at sea, I would be glad to be among the first plucked from the water, and I would feel sorry of those who had to tread water for hours and hours. The Rigorist position is that there is something a man is required to do while he is alive, that he cannot satisfy this requirement post mortem, and that we have no reason to hope that this requirement will be waived. We fully accept the parable of the late-hired workers in the vineyard, but deny that this can be leveraged into an argument for post-mortem conversion. Your student evaluation policies are very generous, but I’m sure that your offer for re-sits and additional work has an expiration date. A student cannot return twenty years from now and say, “Hey, Doc. . . .”
There may be an “expiration” date, and it may be the moment of death. I see the neat logic of that but take no position on it myself. I know of a couple of careful thinkers on these matters who don’t agree with it; David Bentley Hart, for instance, whose universalist book (which I haven’t read yet) apparently argues that the original understanding of hell saw it as aimed at eventual reconciliation, but then that view got distorted into something much harsher in early and medieval Christianity:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/condemned-to-salvation-considering-universalism-with-david-bentley-hart/
Another deeply thoughtful universalist is the blogger Turmarion, who has written extensively on this subject (and many others):
https://turmarion.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/universalism-what-the-hell-index/
I’ve conversed with Turmarion in a couple of different online forums, and he seems amazingly well read and well informed about the history of religions and theologies of many kinds (not only Christian). He believes, perhaps like Hart, that seeing the human lifetime — infinitesimally short compared to all of eternity — as final and decisive for one’s fate over that infinitely longer stretch is strangely narrow and arbitrary.
As a footnote, I should correct myself on one point: a couple of lines in that review of Hart, including one from Hart himself, do suggest that some conservative Christian “rigorists” (The 700 Club is mentioned) take sadistic delight in the thought of others’ suffering. And I’m sure we’re all tempted to take some delight in it ourselves. So maybe the idea that a lot of conservatism is basically sadism is more common than I thought. I would have to do a closer reading of liberal rhetoric; what I can readily recall having seen is the criticism that conservatives take an overly narrow, constrained and tribalistic view of who deserves their sympathies — that is, that their moral imaginations are stunted — and that they tend to be rigid hierarchicalists who are mainly concerned that the privileges of the “right” people are defended, whether those privileges were really earned or not and whatever the cost to others. Those criticisms, I would grant, are undeniably quite common.
I wish you had some thoughts on what I said about the settled fact that the married are unmarried in heaven. I know my grandmother spent thirty years of widowhood looking forward to reunion with my grandfather, and not as a platonic friend. Was she disappointed (imperfect bliss)? Does amnesia accompany death? Or are our earthly loves remembered in a whole new light?
Apparently so, e.g., the depraved killer receiving Unction on his death bed versus your perfectly decent Hindu neighbor who spends a lifetime in service to his family and the faith of his fathers.
I did comment on the point about marriage on the other thread, but I don’t see the comment there now. I will try it posting it again.
I think the concern is often that grades will be deflated.
Imagine a school where a failing grade in a class transforms into a 0.
There’s a hypothesis from the Thomistic philosophy that after death human beings cannot change their minds and so the soul is either catapaulted hellward or heavenward. But the thing about this idea is that it isn’t the same as a choice on its own terms, it’s other choices collapsing down into a definitive choice.
The idea that the soul loses some of the powers it had while joined to the body is reasonable and was also believed by the Hebrews and Greeks (and presumably other ancient people) based on their description of the shades of the dead.
But exactly what powers does it lose? The scholastic philosophers also believed in visions in which the dead appeared to the living and were able to have an appearance and a personality and memory. Yet, according to their philosophy the souls of the dead have the power of reasoning about universals and will and that’s it. It’s like an engine with no car attached to it.
Some might say that God restores the powers lost after death to the soul. That’s one possibility but it’s not the only one.
The Aristotelian philosophy has an epistemological principle that all knowledge begins in the senses and then metaphysical principles are abstracted from that. In addition, they would say that whatever exists exists concretely.
The Thomistic philosophy of the soul without a body is largely a human being with the body subtracted. It’s an abstraction from what we experience. However, from the other principles, the souls of the dead exist concretely. Yet, we do not experience them through the senses so we don’t know what other capabilities they might have.
Other philosophies would have other reasons for believing that souls make a real choice after death rather than a metaphysical collapse. However, based on the Thomistic philosophy’s own principles, it is also consistent with that philosophy.