Professed atheist and blogger John Lopilato – creator of “Counter Apologist” (YT) – has written an article over at “Real Atheology: A Philosophy of Religion Podcast” entitled “Good Omens: Reflecting Death, Heaven, and Hell” (2019).
This article has some general musings over the nature of “the good,” heaven, and some Christian claims contained therein. I don’t mean to comment so specifically on some arguments that are faulty throughout, although than to make note of a certain observation he made towards the end of his piece.
The Debate That Divides Us
John, in summation, is exercising some speculative considerations as to the conditions of the Christian belief of worshipping God in eternity. Although you should extend charitable courtesy of reading his article in full, here are some claims worth mentioning on this point:
- It might be worth objecting “[T]he idea of an eternity in heaven, especially if it turns out to be some kind of perpetual church service where we just praise god for eternity. The idea is “well you’ll want to do that once you get there!” The thing is, I’m not sure the idea of an infinite church service is all that appealing, even when I was a believer. . .”
- “I believe the Christian or theistic counter argument. . . is to say that ‘but praising god is praising goodness itself, and so you should want to be such that you always do the good thing, which would entail wanting to exalt the good!'”
And perhaps one last quote worth extending at length:
“By making goodness center on the nature of a god, we axiomatically would want to change such that we better reflected goodness. Any desire we’d have to preserve our autonomy in ways that go against that good would be rooted in a sinful/rebellious nature. . .
If goodness is really rooted in the nature of a god, then the counter argument works. If it does not, then our instincts to preserve our autonomy in our preferences is not misguided and the idea of heaven actually is as revolting as I now imagine it to be.”
I’m sure that these claims and then some could be thrown to the Christian apologist’s “piranha think-tank” and leave ample time for chewing and belching. But notice a while here, Christendom, the insight allowed (graced?) to John at the end of his article:
- (1) “Ultimately this kind of thing is what under girds so much of the theist-atheist disagreement. The problem of evil, or gratuitous evil follows from what one thinks about good and evil in general. . . [O]ur pre-commitments to seemingly unrelated views are going to inform our conclusions on this kind of side issue.
- (2) One thing I’m stuck with after all this reflection is just how seemingly impossible it is to be able to prove one side or the other; regardless of how strongly I feel about my convictions. What I’m left thinking is that if I’m going to continue the atheist advocacy hobby of mine, it’s going to necessitate a change in approach.” (emphasis mine)
I have to say that I’m impressed with the honesty. I am always interested to hear precisely where the divide lies between atheists and theists. I think the example we have before us is an honest look into such a divide, although the insight ultimately incomplete.
We organize our beliefs and the philosophical details of our worldviews to either allow comfortably for the existence of God(s) or we don’t. There’s of course much to elaborate on that point, but the pre-commitments that John speaks of here are necessarily embedded distinctions between atheists and theists that wont (perhaps typically) be budged on repeated, cyclic philosophical debate.
The debate, as far as arguments for and against the existence of God, may be of value to someone who is not familiar with the conversation of God’s existence. Hence, they can be persuasively opined towards one view over another by way of the evidence, arguments, “meaningful appeals” and so on.
This is one (important) way one can come into a pedagogical, communicable approach to establishing a relation – albeit general or personal – with God.
What’s important about this observation, and why I’m taking John so seriously at his point here is that the very nature of this division lies at deeper motivations for personal autonomy and right living/thinking about God.
This division over amongst rivals over God should not only interest us for its evidential value but also of its possible “attractiveness.” In other words, is the “Good” that I so desire in life really grounded in God? Could I accept that what is “ultimately good” for my life pertains to whether or not God exists?
Reflections on Hell and All That
First, Hell (Some Comments)
There are some comments from Protestant theologian Helmut Thielicke (1908-1986) that might be of some help here [1]. He sheds helpful light on the (somewhat) naive association of “death and hell” is a just about “punishment,” which Thielicke I think rightly show is a very narrow and shortsighted way to view a crucial Christian conception of mortality.
Psalm 90:1-4 shows us one textual example of the vast yet feeble separation between human life and divinity:
“Lord, you have been our dwelling place
in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.” (vv. 1-4, ESV)
These verses taken by themselves only show us the (partial) “gulf” that exists between the finitude of human life and the divine life, which is merely just an “economic-dynamic relation between time and eternity.” But notice now the introduction of verse 7: “For we are brought to an end by your anger.”
This verse now introduces a qualified category, that of guilt and wrath. Hence, Thielicke says, this is not so much a “quantitative break” amongst two entities but rather a “qualitative break” between two persons. That is to say, what is expressed is not a “different ranking but a judgement.” Hence, Thielicke finishes: “Death does not manifest distance; rather, it manifests judgement.”
Insofar as we are no longer operating on the plane of mere Natural Theology, the “differences” between us and “Supreme Being” – i.e., the attributes that contribute to the infinite-finite ‘schism’ – are no longer “ontological” but now robustly “moral,” because now our abstract speculations are no longer the rough construction of a philosophical blue print.
Instead, they are now apart of an altogether radically “new” kind of relation: not merely a quantitative break amongst other entities similar in Being (capital B), but now a “qualitative break” amongst persons – a loss of fellowship.
Hence, “death” is the deprivation that marks our “qualitative break” that once existed between God and us. Therefore, the “wrath of God” that lies over us is no “mere fate, no mere shore of eternity, but God’s reaction to the action that we have responsibly engaged in as persons” [2].
Some Comments on “Proper Christian Thinking”
As Fulton Sheen rightly pointed out many years ago, hell is not related to an evil life in the same way that a spanking is related an act of obedience. Rather, hell is related to evil as “blindness is related to the plucking out of an eye” [3]. Heaven, further, is not related to a good life as a medal is related to a school examination. Rather, heaven is related to a “good life as knowledge to study. By the mere fact that we’ve applied ourselves intellectually, we become learned” [4].
While there are some doctrinal clarifications that could be made about heaven, I wanted organize a conversation that centers around something different. Insofar as you are attempting to be within the “Christian sphere” of thinking about things (heaven and so on), there are some important insights that need to take place within your own life and not just merely an addition of facts to aid your worldview [construction].
One of these insights regards the Christian understanding of the nature of man. As Sheen says it simply, there are two laws of gravitation that exist within man: (i) one that is “pulling him to the earth, where he has his time of trial” and (ii) the other “towards God, where he has his happiness.”
It is true that faith ought not to be merely understood as some newly exercised organ of knowledge in the Christian life. Rather, as Augustine once rightly argued, faith functions as a kind of “vision of God” rather than a successfully obtained “proof” about Him.
This vision, informed by the right contemplation of eternal things and the right use of temporal things, comprises for the individual believer a unified experience of relationship with God and personal expression or freedom.
I get this idea directly from Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275), who notes in his De Rationibus Fidei (ch. I): “Our hope is directed to two things: (1) what we look forward to after death, and (2) the help of God which carries us through this life to future happiness merited by works done by free will” [5].
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) provided a rough framework for a religious-psychology of the human person (or “Self”) prior to the establishment of psychology as an academic discipline. He writes:
Time is, then, infinite succession; the life that is in time and is only of time has no present. In order to define the sensuous life, it is usually said that it is in the moment and only in the moment. By the moment, then, is understood that abstraction from the eternal that, if it is to be the present, is a parody of it. The present is the eternal, or rather, the eternal is the present, and the present is full. [6]
Kierkegaard is essentially saying that the human person, being a composite reality of the eternal and temporal, fails to come into self-hood when the “sensuous” life or the “aesthetic” life hinders one from thinking “above” or outside of time.
However, the aesthetic life (of pleasure, of carnal enjoyment, etc) is typically defined as “living in the moment.” The kind of philosophy of life that says “all we have now is the present,” or such musings that “the past (memory) is suffering, the future (planning) is anxiety and the present (now) is peace.”
Kierkegaard is arguing that if the “eternal” is sought within this realm of the “moment” (i.e., in time) then it really is a kind of farce or parody of the actual realization. The “moment,” whereby a human individual sees himself as a white light amidst the infinite Divine Light itself, is where the temporal meets the eternal. It cannot be substituted with this false illusion of the eternal being sought “in time,” so to speak.
In other places, the rise of modern evangelism would not have us forget of the shortcomings of modern man’s attempt to pick himself up by his own “psychological bootstraps” apart from God.
In other words, the anxieties of (modern) man display his disjunction between the eternal and the temporal. There’s an “ontological dependency” that foregoes all ages, all generations, East to West, among men: it’s his endowed nature to be unified – or now, “reconciled” – with the eternal.
However, while this “general” dependency is argued for by Christians, there are still “historical plights” as to how men craft numerous ways to philosophize, rationalize, socialize, secularize, psychologize and even anthropomorphize their separation from God.
It takes considerable attention, research and care to precisely articulate the context of these historical plights as they come and go up and against the succession of Christendom.
The conversation about heaven and of modern man’s relation to God ought to necessarily pursue the proper doctrinal clarifications. Find out exactly what conception of heaven it is you are (or trying) to criticize and speak on the “terms” of the doctrinal or credal expressions contained therein.
Of course, there is a precaution on behalf of Christians to withhold comment or exposition of matters regarding the “sublimity of Faith,” which Aquinas says contains truth that “exceeds not only human minds but also those of angels; we believe in them only because they are revealed by God” [6]. These usually pertain to matters of the Trinity, the double-nature of Jesus Christ, and etc.
This point is really worth clarifying, in the sense, that it’s not that atheists are “intellectually blind” to the truth of Christianity and hence we should “tip toe” around our words.
This is just as annoying to argue as is the Presuppositionalist critique against some forms of Evidentialists that they are “hiding behind” worldly philosophies in order to “implicitly” defend/present the Gospel – hence they too are (supposedly) “tip toeing” around indirect, irrelevant-to-the-Gospel speculations.
Rather, I think at best we can say that the blindness of unbelief (generally) is grounded in an intentional act of the will. That is, no significant “shift” takes place in the ontological status of God or the individual in such instances of unbelief, but rather that the autonomous individual is exercising (or reaping) the moral and spiritual repercussions of his self-interest(s) to which God has allowed (cf. Romans 1).
These repercussions hold despite whether or not one is sincerely compassionate, if one is genuinely doubting, or if one has never even heard of the concept of “God.” False beliefs, if they are false, are not just wrong (e.g., possibly harmful!) for you to hold, but for everyone around you as well.
Heaven Briefly
Benedict XII in his (1336) De visione Dei beatifica (“On the Beatific Vision”) wrote that “the souls of all saints. . . have been, are and will be in heaven, in the heavenly kingdom and celestial paradise with Christ, and are joined with the company of angels, already before they take up their bodies once more and before the general judgement” [7].
In short, when the thief asked if would be remembered once Christ entered his kingdom, He is said to have replied: “And he said to him, ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise'” (Luke 23:43 ESV).
We come “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12 ESV) with God after death in the “intuitive vision” of the divine essence. Whereas we once (or now) see God “through a looking glass darkly” (ibid. NIV), we will come to a “full” knowledge of God as He is in Himself (though of course, not an “exhaustive” knowledge of God).
The reconciliation that’s possible amidst that qualitative break doesn’t rid of death (this will come much later in the history of the world), but takes away the “sting” or “power” of death.
Hebrews 2:14, “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil. . . ” (ESV).
One thing worth mentioning in passing about the devil. I don’t think Christians ought to get too hung up on the “ontological description” of Satan in the NT, almost analogous to the NT’s [restrained] ontological description of Christ.
In other words, if one theologian has it right [8], to know Christ is to know his benefits, likewise, “to know the devil is to know his ill effects.” I don’t think we can say much about the “devil” beyond this.
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Notes:
- Helmut Thielicke, Living with Death (Eerdmans: 1983). Considering pp. 123-125.
- Ibid., 125.
- Fulton Sheen, Go to Heaven (Dell Publishing: 1960), p. 9.
- Ibid.
- Thomas Aquinas, ibid. Emphasis mine.
- Thomas Aquinas, ibid.
- Quoted from Alister McGrath, The Christian Theology Reader (Blackwell: 2001), p. 623.
- Phillip Melanchthon, Loci.
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Mentionables:
- The featured image to this article is Francesco Botticini’s The Assumption of the Virgin (1475).
- The featured image to this article was taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assumption_of_the_Virgin_(Botticini)
The Instant 