So the idea of irreparable harm—that is, of harm that not even omnipotence could ever repair—is critical at this point.
It is most relevant, perhaps, in cases where someone imagines sinners freely choosing annihilation Kvanvig , or imagines them freely making a decisive and irreversible choice of evil Walls , or imagines them freely locking the gates of hell from the inside C. But proponents of the so-called escapism understanding of hell can plausibly counter that hell is not necessarily an instance of such irreparable harm, and Raymond VanArragon in particular raises the possibility that God might permit some loved ones to continue forever rejecting God in a non-decisive way that would not, at any given time, harm them irreparably see VanArragon , 37ff; see also Kvanvig , He thus explicitly states that rejecting God in his broad sense requires neither an awareness of God nor a conscious decision, however confused it may be, to embrace a life apart from God.
Accordingly, persistent sinning without end would never result, given such an account, in anything like the traditional hell, whether the latter be understood as a lake of fire, the outer darkness, or any other condition that would reveal the full horror of separation from God given the traditional Christian understanding of such separation.
Neither would such a sinner ever achieve a state of full clarity. But a theist who accepts proposition 1 , as the Arminians do, and also accepts proposition 2 , as the Augustinians do, can then reason deductively that almighty God will indeed triumph in the end and successfully win over each and every human sinner. From the perspective of an interpretation of the Christian Bible, moreover, Christian universalists need only accept the exegetical arguments of the Arminian theologians in support of 1 and the exegetical arguments of the Augustinian theologians in support of 2 ; that alone would enable them to build an exegetical case for a universalist interpretation of the Bible as a whole.
One argument in support of proposition 1 contends that love especially in the form of willing the very best for another is inclusive in this sense: even where it is logically possible for a loving relationship to come to an end, two persons are bound together in love only when their purposes and interests, even the conditions of their happiness, are so logically intertwined as to be inseparable.
If a mother should love her child even as she loves herself, for example, then any evil that befalls the child is likewise an evil that befalls the mother and any good that befalls the child is likewise a good that befalls the mother; hence, it is simply not possible, according to this argument, for God to will the best for the mother without also willing the best for the child as well.
That argument seems especially forceful in the context of Augustinian theology, which implies that, for all any set of potential parents know, any child they might produce could be one of the reprobate whom God has hated from the beginning and has destined from the beginning for eternal torment in hell.
In any event, Arminians and universalists both regard an acceptance of proposition 1 as essential to a proper understanding of divine grace. Could God truly extend grace to an elect mother, they might ask, by making the baby she loves with all her heart the object of a divine hatred and do this, as the Augustinians say was done in the case of Esau, even before the child was born or had done anything good or bad?
They therefore reject the doctrine of limited election on the ground that it undermines the concept of grace altogether. Or, to put the question in a slightly different way, which position, if either, requires that God interfere with human freedom or human autonomy in morally inappropriate ways? As the following section should illustrate, the answer to this question may be far more complicated than some might at first imagine. But in fact, no universalist—not even a theological determinist—holds that God sometimes coerces people into heaven against their will.
For although many Christian universalists believe that God provided Saul of Tarsus with certain revelatory experiences that changed his mind in the end and therefore changed his will as well, this is a far cry from claiming that he was coerced against his will. The basic idea here is that a sinner could have, if necessary, infinitely many opportunities over an unending stretch of time to repent and to submit to God freely.
So consider this. Although it is logically possible, given the normal philosophical view of the matter, that a fair coin would never land heads up, not even once in a trillion tosses, such an eventuality is so incredibly improbable and so close to an impossibility that no one need fear it actually happening. Or, if you prefer, drop the probability to. Over an indefinitely long period of time, S would still have an indefinitely large number of opportunities to repent; and so, according to Reitan, the assumption that sinners retain their libertarian freedom together with the Christian doctrine of the preservation of the saints yields the following result.
We can be just as confident that God will eventually win over all sinners and do so without causally determining their choices , as we can be that a fair coin will land heads up at least once in a trillion tosses. But either the hardened character of those in hell removes forever the psychological possibility of their choosing to repent, or it does not.
Beyond that, the most critical issue at this point concerns the relationship between free choice, on the one hand, and character formation, on the other.
Our moral experience does seem to provide evidence that a pattern of bad choices can sometimes produce bad habits and a bad moral character, but it also seems to provide evidence that a pattern of bad choices can sometimes bring one closer to a dramatic conversion of some kind. So why not suppose that a pattern of bad choices might be even more useful to God than a pattern of good choices would be in teaching the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn and in thus rendering a dramatic conversion increasingly more probable over the long run?
Are not the destructive consequences that alcoholism can have in the lives of some people the very thing that sometimes motivates them to seek help and even to give up alcohol altogether? Suppose that a man is standing atop the Empire State Building with the intent of committing suicide by jumping off and plunging to his death below. So one is not free to accomplish some action or to achieve some end, unless God permits one to experience the chosen end, however confusedly one may have chosen it; and neither is one free to separate oneself from God, or from the ultimate source of human happiness as Christians understand it, unless God permits one to experience the very life one has chosen and the full measure of misery that it entails.
Given the almost universal Christian assumption that a complete separation from the divine nature in the outer darkness, for example would be an objective horror, it seems to follow that even God would face a dilemma with respect to human freedom. For either God could permit sinners to follow a path that ultimately leads, according to Christian theology, to an objective horror and permit them to continue following it for as long as they freely choose to do so, or God could at some point prevent them from continuing along their freely chosen path.
If God should permit sinners to continue along their freely chosen path—the one that unbeknownst to them will inevitably lead them to an objective horror—then their own experience, provided they are rational enough to qualify as free moral agents, would eventually shatter their illusions and remove their libertarian freedom to continue along that path.
Alternatively, if God should prevent sinners from achieving their freely chosen goal of separating themselves from the divine nature, then they would have no real freedom to do so.
In neither case, therefore, would sinners be able to retain forever their libertarian freedom to continue separating themselves from the divine nature and from the ultimate source of human happiness. If this argument should be sound, it also seems to follow that, no matter how tenaciously some sinners might pursue a life apart from God and resist the divine purpose for their lives, God would have, as a sort of last resort, a sure-fire way to shatter the illusions that make their rebellion possible in the first place.
To do so, God need only honor their own free choices and permit them to experience the very life they have confusedly chosen for themselves. Many Christian universalists are thus fond of quoting St. If, as a last resort, God should allow a sinner to live for a while without even an implicit experience of the divine nature, [ 11 ] the resulting horror, they believe, will at last shatter any illusion that some good is achievable apart from God; and such a discovery will finally elicit a cry for help of a kind that, however faint it may be, is just what God needs in order to begin and eventually to complete the process of reconciliation.
Because the Arminians and the universalists agree that God could never love an elect mother even as, at the same time, God rejects her beloved baby, they both agree that the first alternative is utterly impossible.
But because the issues surrounding the idea of free will are so complex and remain the source of so much philosophical controversy, perhaps they can also agree that a free—will theodicy of hell is the best philosophical account currently available for a doctrine of everlasting separation from God. Rarely, if ever, are Christian theologians very specific about what heaven will supposedly be like, and there are no doubt good reasons for this.
For most of them would deny that the primary sources of the Christian faith, such as the Bible, provide much information on this particular matter.
But three issues have typically arisen in the relevant philosophical literature: first, because so many of the recent Christian philosophers have focused upon free will theodicies of hell, it is hardly surprising that the issue of freedom in heaven should likewise have arisen; a second issue is whether the misery of loved ones in hell would undermine the blessedness of those in heaven; and a third issue is whether immortality of any kind would ultimately lead to tedium, boredom, and an insipid life.
Like the arguments over universalism and human freedom, as briefly summarized in section 4. It also illustrates how easily a purely verbal dispute, which is an apparent dispute that arises from different uses of the same term, can sometimes disguise itself as a genuine disagreement over some matter of substance.
With respect to the issue of freedom in heaven, here are a couple of additional examples to consider: a the honest banker whose deeply-rooted moral and religious convictions make it psychologically impossible for him to accept a bribe in a given situation, and b the mother whose great love for her newborn baby makes it psychologically impossible for her knowingly to harm her beloved child physically.
The question of whether there is freedom in heaven seems relevantly similar to the question of whether our honest banker freely refuses the bribe and whether our loving mother freely refuses to do anything she knows would harm her baby physically.
Consider now three different non-compatibilist accounts of what it means to act freely and the implications that each of these accounts has for the possibility of freedom in heaven. According to the first account, briefly introduced in section 3. So if no one in heaven, as Christians typically understand it, will ever have the slightest inclination to disobey God—if, that is, it would be as psychologically impossible for the saints in heaven to disobey God as it would be for our loving mother to torture her beloved baby to death, then there can be no freedom of that kind in heaven.
Or, to put it another way: if the saints in heaven do have this kind of freedom even as Lucifer, according to one traditional interpretation of his supposed fall from perfection, was able to commit the primal sin in heaven, then they also retain the power to sin in heaven see Matheson , In a similar vein, James F. Sennett defends the free will of the saints in heaven by in effect arguing that they have freely chosen their own moral character.
So given our epistemic limitations and the unanticipated consequences of our free choices, is it any wonder that many Christian theologians view a good character as a gift from God rather than as something for which we can credit ourselves? But unlike the autonomy view, as she calls it, such freedom does not require the ability to refrain from doing the right thing for the right reasons.
Wolf thus commits herself to the following asymmetry: whereas committing a wrong or immoral act freely requires an ability to do otherwise and therefore to refrain from acting wrongly, doing the right thing for the right reasons freely does not require an ability to act otherwise.
Such a view takes full advantage of the idea, expressed in section 3. Such a view also seems to accord perfectly with St. When a reporter asked the mother of Ted Bundy, a serial murderer of young women, whether she could still support a son who had become a monster, her answer provided a poignant illustration of the problem.
I love him. I have to support him. But still, one wonders how this suffering woman—a committed Christian, by the way—could ever achieve supreme happiness knowing that the son she continued to love was destined to be lost forever without any future hope of redemption.
Such considerations have led some, including the 19 th Century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, to argue that the misery of those in hell would undermine altogether the blessedness of the redeemed in heaven see Schleiermacher , —; Kronen and Reitan , 80—89; and Talbott b, — But others have argued that God could always shield forever the redeemed in heaven from painful memories of the lost in hell.
Another concerns how God, as an infinitely loving being, might expunge the infinitely more painful memories from his own mind. But the main issue to be resolved here is whether blissful ignorance qualifies as a worthwhile form of happiness at all.
As a matter of historical fact, in any case, some of the most influential theologians in the Western tradition, including some who are widely admired as heroes of faith, have not only made an eternal torture chamber an important part of their teaching about hell; they seem also to have gloried in the idea that the torments of those writhing in hell forever will increase the joy of those in heaven.
II [ available online ]. Remarkably, Edwards was also a theological determinist who held that God determined from the beginning to bring a huge number of people to a horrific end and did so for the precise purpose of increasing the joy of the elect in heaven. If justice were to require that one suffer eternally for sins that God himself causally determined, then such suffering would have to be a source of satisfaction, if not outright bliss, on the part of any fair-minded person witnessing it.
Schleiermacher and many others therefore find it hard to understand how those who receive special favor in this regard could be so deliriously happy in the knowledge that some of their own loved ones do not receive a similar special favor.
A third issue concerning heaven that sometimes arises is whether everlasting bliss is even a possible state of affairs. Such a statement is reminiscent of a quotation often attributed to Charles H. Duell, who became commissioner of the U. According to legend, Duell declared that everything that can be invented has already been invented; and even though this wonderful story is probably apocryphal, it nonetheless illustrates in a humorous way the possible consequences of an impoverished imagination.
It would hardly take even 30 years, depending upon the circumstances, for a given life to become dull and insipid. But the idea that a healthy person could exhaust all the possibilities for adventure and meaningful experience in a mere years will strike many as simply preposterous. A mere years is virtually nothing, it is true, when compared to a life without end.
Might not an unending life even increase the possibilities for such a desirable mix? A favorite symphony not heard for a hundred years or so might be experienced as utterly fresh and exciting. And even if we set aside anything that might raise a controversy about personal identity, the mere discovery of an unexpected means of traversing our extravagant universe, with its billions of galaxies and billions of star systems within each of them, might open up—for adventurous spirits anyway—incredible possibilities for new and exciting experiences.
Nor should we ignore the further possibility of experiencing infinitely many other realms and universes that are not spatially contiguous with our own. In caring for her baby, for example, a mother typically performs many mundane tasks that might seem utterly tedious were it not for the joy of interacting with her baby and of watching it grow and flourish. Similarly, St. Paul found even the tedium of prison to be tolerable, so he claimed, because he saw it as part of a larger story that he believed to be both true and glorious.
So why allow, many religious people would ask, an impoverished imagination to exclude the very possibility of an over-arching story arc perpetually giving fresh meaning to our individual lives? And if that be true, then the task of rendering someone fit for eternal joy may be far more complicated, even for an omnipotent being, than one might have imagined.
As many religions including Christianity teach, we must first learn to love properly before we can experience enduring happiness, and this requires that we also be purged of all selfish tendencies, all lust for power over others, every temptation to benefit ourselves at the expense of others, and anything else that might separate one person from another.
Right here, of course, is where Williams would question whether a suitably transformed person would be the same individual as the unperfected person that existed previously.
But none of our moral imperfections, a religious person might retort, can coherently be numbered among our essential properties—as if we could never progress morally and never learn to become more loving persons. So here, perhaps, is the sum of the matter from a religious perspective: the more self-absorbed we become, the more tedious and dreary our lives inevitably become over time. But the more outwardly focused we become in loving relationships, the more joyful and meaningful our lives also become over time.
For the same considerations that lead some to wonder whether immortality would eventually become dreadfully boring may also lead some of the religious to consider favorably the following hypothesis. Although the problem of evil is the subject of another entry see the entry on The Problem of Evil , the relevant point for the topic of heaven is just this: one need not think of heaven or the coming age, as the Gospel writers sometimes refer to it as a static ethereal realm in which there is nothing to do.
One might instead suppose that God will never stop creating additional persons to love and additional realms for us to experience and that we will always have important roles to play, as Paul hinted in Ephesians , in this ongoing process of creation and revelation. Three Primary Eschatological Views 1. The Augustinian Understanding of Hell 2. Free—will Theodicies of Hell 3. The Universalist Rejection of Everlasting Separation 4. Heaven: Three Critical Issues 5. Three Primary Eschatological Views Let theism in general be the belief that a supremely powerful, supremely wise, and supremely good loving, just, merciful personal being exists as the Creator of the universe.
Some human sinners will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from the divine nature forever. The Augustinian Understanding of Hell Behind the Augustinian understanding of hell lies a commitment to a retributive theory of punishment, according to which the primary purpose of punishment is to satisfy the demands of justice or, as some might say, to balance the scales of justice. In the relevant literature over the past several decades, advocates of a free-will theodicy of hell have offered at least three quite different answers to this question: Perhaps the most commonly expressed answer concerns the possibility of an irrevocable decision to reject God forever.
Jerry Walls thus describes the damned as those who have made a decisive choice of evil see Walls , Ch. Another proposed answer rejects altogether the traditional idea that those in hell are lost without any further hope of restoration.
It also includes a perfect knowledge uf what a person would have done freely in circumstances that will never even obtain.
So with respect to the decision whether or not to create a given person and to place that person in a given set of circumstances, God can base this decision in part on a knowledge of what the person would do freely if created and placed in these precise circumstances—or if, for that matter, the person were placed in any other possible set of circumstances as well.
From this Molinist perspective, William Lane Craig has defended the possibility that some free persons are utterly irredeemable in this sense: short of overriding their libertarian freedom, nothing God might do for them—whether it be to impart a special revelation.
Craig himself calls this dreadful property of being irredeemable transworld damnation Craig himself has put it this way: It is possible that the terrible price of filling heaven is also filling hell and that in any other possible world which was feasible for God the balance between saved and lost was worse. It is possible that had God actualized a world in which there are less persons in hell, there would also have been less persons in heaven.
It is possible that in order to achieve this much blessedness, God was forced to accept this much loss , Heaven: Three Critical Issues Rarely, if ever, are Christian theologians very specific about what heaven will supposedly be like, and there are no doubt good reasons for this.
Stump ed. Almeida, M. Hopkins and H. Though most of us are in no hurry to get to our final destination, we all have questions about it. After in-depth study of the Scriptures, here are some of the most frequently asked questions. Have you ever bought an economy ticket for a flight, but because of overbooking, been upgraded to first class?
Did you regret the upgrade? Did you spend your time wondering, What am I missing by not being in the back of the plane? The upgrade from Earth to heaven will be vastly superior to that from economy to first class. If we would miss something from our old lives, it would be available to us in heaven. Because we will experience all God intends for us. He fashions us to want precisely what He will give us so what He gives us will be exactly what we want. Death is a relocation of the same person from one place to another.
The place changes, but the person remains the same. The same person who becomes absent from his or her body becomes present with the Lord 2 Corinthians We won't be angels but we'll be with them. Once I was asked if we will ever be tempted to turn our backs on Christ. The answer is no. What would tempt us? Innocence is the absence of something sin , while righteousness is the presence of something God's holiness. God will never withdraw His holiness from us; therefore, in heaven we cannot sin.
We'll never forget the ugliness of sin, however. Having known death and life, we who experience life will never want to go back to death.
We'll never be deceived into thinking God is withholding something good from us or that sin is in our best interests. We'll always know sin's costs. Every time we see the scarred hands of Jesus , we'll remember.
We'll see sin as God does. It will be stripped of its illusions and will be utterly unappealing. The idea of working in heaven is foreign to many people. Yet Scripture clearly teaches it. When God created Adam, he "took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" Genesis Work was part of the original Eden.
It was part of a perfect human life. God Himself is a worker. He didn't create the world and then retire. Jesus found great satisfaction in His work. We'll also have work to do, satisfying and enriching work that we can't wait to get back to, work that'll never be drudgery. God is the primary worker, and as His image-bearers, we're made to work. We create, accomplish, set goals and fulfill them—to God's glory.
In Scripture, God is said to enjoy, love, laugh, take delight and rejoice, as well as be angry, happy, jealous and glad. To be like God means to have and express emotions. Hence, we should expect that in heaven emotions will exist for God's glory and our good. We know that people in heaven have lots of feelings—all good ones. We're told of banquets, feasts and singing.
People will laugh there Luke Will we cry in heaven? The Bible says, "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes ; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying or pain" Revelation These are the tears of suffering over sin and death, the tears of oppressed people, the cries of the poor, the widow, the orphaned, the unborn and the persecuted.
We might, though, shed tears of joy. The words for heaven or heavens in both Hebrew shamayim and Greek ouranos can also be translated as sky. It is not something that exists eternally but rather part of creation. The first line of the Bible states that heaven is created along with the creation of the earth Genesis 1.
Heaven is a place of peace, love, community, and worship, where God is surrounded by a heavenly court and other heavenly beings. Biblical authors imagined the earth as a flat place with Sheol below the realm of the dead and a dome over the earth that separates it from the heavens or sky above. Of course, we know the earth is not flat, and this three-tiered universe makes no sense to a modern mind.
Even so, the concept of heaven wherever it is located continues in Christian theology as the place where God dwells and a theological claim that this world is not all that there is. References to paradise in the Bible are likely due to the influence of Persian culture and particularly Persian Royal gardens paridaida.
Persian walled gardens were known for their beautiful layout, diversity of plant life, walled enclosures, and being a place where the royal family might safely walk.
They were effectively a paradise on earth. The garden of Eden in Genesis 2 is strikingly similar to a Persian Royal garden or paradise. God dwells there, or at least visits, and talks with Adam and Eve like a King might in a royal garden.
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