The Theodicy of Hell

Vicq Ruiz asks a fascinating and very hard question:

I … have noted that one element in which Christianity appears to be unique is the doctrine of eternal punishment for unbelief, and for unbelief alone among man’s sins. And it is that doctrine which stands between me and Christianity like a thousand mile high granite wall. For if it is true, not only are both my (loving, and unbelieving) parents in eternal torment even as I write these words, but I am also to acquiesce – no, to delight! – in the “justice” which placed them there.

Of all doctrines, the one I am least eager and least qualified to defend is the doctrine of eternal damnation, and precisely for the reasons Mr Ruiz adumbrates: nothing seems, at first, to be more absurd, unjust, and sadistic than a benevolent and loving God who would throw the into a furnace the weeping innocent child, His own child, who is guilty of nothing but a reasonable, even inevitable, skepticism.

Add to this the cruelty of asking the believer to rejoice in this divine justice, and you have perhaps the most powerful argument against theodicy imaginable.

It is as bad as if, during a highrise fire or a mine collapse, the fireman who raised the ladder or dug a tunnel to find the dying victims, upon opening the way to escape from the flames or from the darkness, suddenly and arbitrarily demanded to know which of the dying believed in fire department was coming. After finding some illiterate widow or small child or born pessimist who did not believe, the fireman yanks the ladder back, leaving the doubters to burn; or he bricks over the escape tunnel, leaving them to asphyxiate. Certainly we would question the justice, and the sanity, of a fireman who acted by such a standard. It sounds like a horror story worthy of Poe rather than the act of a divine spirit motivated by supernatural and infinite love.

Nonetheless, the evangelist commands that I be ready always (with meekness and fear) to give an answer to every man that asks a reason of the hope that is in me.

The short answer, my dearest Mr Ruiz, is that you are blaming the doctor for the disease.

You are pointing at the sole cure to hell, the escape hatch from hell, and calling it injustice that not all men avail themselves of it.

This answer is perhaps too short, and may unfortunately seem flippant. Allow me to expand on it.

The thing that stands between you and paradise like a brick wall is an emotion, a sentiment, a feeling. You imagine your loving and beloved parents thrown into the cruel and burning torments of a pit worse than a gulag or deathcamp by an arbitrary tyrant. What I ask, for the sake of your immortal soul, is that you put sentimentality aside and think carefully and clearly and rationally. Think as if your life depends on it, for it surely does.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.