Explaining Away the Love of God: Part I
In a recently published book, Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism, Jerry Walls argues, persuasively in my opinion, that "Calvinists are so dazzled by the power of God that they invariably end up denying or distorting the love of God."[1] For how else are we to understand the doctrine of limited election, except as an explicit denial of God's universal love for all of humankind? To be fair, Calvinists also view this doctrine as an inevitable consequence of clear biblical teaching, and it is not my purpose here to expose the faulty exegesis, as I view it, upon which this conviction of theirs rests. I want instead to examine the philosophical reasoning that some have offered for restricting the scope of God's deepest love and then to expose some of its philosophical confusions.
Having poured over Calvin's Institutes line by line during my seminary days, it seems to me that Calvin himself accepted the idea that God never had any love at all for the non-elect. But even if I am wrong about that, other Calvinist theologians and philosophers have explicitly stated as much. Walls provides an excellent example at the beginning of his book, where he quotes the following statement from Calvinist icon, Arthur W. Pink: "When we say that God is sovereign in the exercise of His love, we mean that He loves whom he chooses. God does not love everybody . . ."[2]. But of course Walls could also have quoted Jonathan Edwards, who wrote: "The saints in glory will know concerning the damned in hell, that God never loved them [my italics], but that he hates them, and [that they] will be for ever hated of God"[3] Edwards likewise described the non-elect as "objects of God's eternal hatred,"[4] and, in a similar vein, the Dutch theologian, Hermann Hoeksema, insisted that the "sovereign hatred of God's good pleasure"[5] is what determines the unalterable destiny of the non-elect.
Not all proponents of limited election, it is true, are equally explicit about God's hatred of the non-elect; some even insist that God loves all of humankind in some generic way, though not in the deeper redemptive way that he loves the elect. Sometimes this concession consists of little more than the silly observation that, according to Matthew 5:45, God allows the sun to shine and the rain to fall on both the righteous and the unrighteous---as if that would qualify as a genuine expression of love even when followed by divine rejection and an eternity of torment. More recently, however, Jeff Jordan has challenged the whole idea, which he acknowledges to be widely accepted among theistic philosophers, that "God's love must be maximally extended and equally intense."[6] According to Jordan, such maximally extended love would be a deficiency in any human who manifested it; hence, it should not be numbered among God's perfections or great-making properties. Neither is it possible, he appears to argue, that God should love equally all of the persons whom he has in fact created. For "if God has deep attachments [with some of them], it follows that he does not love all [of them] equally. And being a perfect being, God would have loves of the deepest kind."[7]
But why deny even the possibility of God eventually having equally deep attachments with every human being? By way of an answer in a later article, Jordan asks: "What if ... it is not possible in-principle [even for God] to love every person uniformly to the same degree?" What if, in other words, God's deep attachment with respect to, say, Jeff Jordan, as one of his specially favored, should require that others---the non-elect, perhaps---should be less favored (not to mention utterly despised)? The assumption here is that one person's best interest over the long run might be logically incompatible with that of others. So just how does Jordan understand the idea of someone's best interest in the present context. I must confess that some of his examples strike me as breathtakingly naive. We can all agree, I presume, that neither everlasting torment in hell nor everlasting separation from the divine nature would be in anyone's best interest, whereas union with that nature would be in everyone's best interest. Beyond that, however, we often have no way of knowing whether various temporal events are, or are not, in a given person's best interest over the long run. We cannot know, for example, what might in fact prompt someone to repent and to submit to God in the end. And yet, with respect to a scholarship pageant in which only one participant can win, Jordan confidently asserts that "Jones's best interest [over the long run?] in winning the pageant is not compatible with the best interests of the other contestants as it is in each of their best interests to win the pageant also."[8] He thus continues to confuse here, as he also did in his original article, a person's perceived best interest with a genuine or a real best interest. Often a perceived best interest is the very thing that God opposes precisely in order to promote someone's real best interest.
Even more breathtakingly naive, in my opinion, is the following assertion: "A child has among her best interests that she be the primary object of her parents' loving attentions. So, each of two siblings would have this among their respective best interests, and yet a loving parent could not identify with that best interest in both cases."[9] But even if two immature siblings should each strongly desire to be "the primary object" of their "parents' loving attentions" and should thus both perceive this to be in their respective best interest, it hardly follows that their perception in this regard accurately reflects a genuine best interest. And one can only hope, furthermore, that, as they mature into adults, these immature siblings will eventually feel fortunate that neither of them ever became the primary object of their parents' loving attention to the exclusion of the other. As for the six siblings in my own immediate family, I cannot even imagine one of us now believing that our family life as a whole would have been better had our parents made one of us the primary object of their loving attention to the exclusion of the others.
Jonathan Edwards, I should perhaps point out, went even farther than Jordan does and suggests that the everlasting torment of those in hell contributes greatly to the blessedness of the redeemed in heaven. He thus wrote: "When the saints in glory . . . shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they [the saints] in the mean time are in the most blissful state and shall surely be in it to all eternity; how will they rejoice!"[10] Although many Christians (Wesleyans, Catholics, and other Protestant Arminians) are apt to find such a view nothing less than appalling, it is not without its contemporary defenders. Michael J. Hart thus defends a similar view in a recently published essay, where he writes: "by God's displaying eternal punishment the elect would become more grateful of their place in heaven. . . . The picture is this: I was just like so-and-so, yet I am exalted and they are debased, and the fact that they were just like me makes me happier than I would otherwise be at my exaltation. . . . [Accordingly, by] reprobating a greater number to hell, the elect in heaven are permitted a great gratitude not otherwise available to them: a gratitude at being part of the few that are saved."[11] So to those who agree with Edwards and Hart in this matter, it might seem as if the greatest good for the elect logically requires a world in which others experience an eternity of torment---in which case not even God would, as Jeff Jordan puts it, "love every person [in this world] uniformly to the same degree."
But at this point we are surely entitled to wonder how the above-described attitudes of the redeemed in heaven supposedly differ from human selfishness of a kind utterly incompatible with genuine love. For suppose that in heaven you should discover that from the beginning God had already decided to reprobate a beloved child of yours and to destine that child to a horrific end in hell. How could you possibly be grateful to God for refusing to spare your child from a fate worse than death? Edwards in effect conceded that such gratitude would be incompatible with love. But he also implied that God will simply cause the elect to become less loving in the end; he will cause them, that is, to despise some of their former loved ones and thereby bring their attitudes into conformity with his own "eternal hatred" for the non-elect. And lest some should think this an unfair caricature, Edwards in fact made this a critical part of his preaching, as the following quotation illustrates: "How will you bear to see your parents," he asked, "who in this life had so dear an affection for you, now without any love to you . . . How will you bear to see and hear them praising the Judge, for his justice exercised in pronouncing this sentence, and hearing it with holy joy in their countenances, and shouting forth the praises and hallelujahs of God and Christ on that account?"[12]
Is it any wonder that George MacDonald could write: "From all copies of Jonathan Edwards's portrait of God, however faded by time, however softened by the use of less glaring pigments, I turn with loathing. Not such a God is he concerning whom was the message John heard from Jesus, that he is light, and in him is no darkness at all."[13] So far as I know, this is the only place in his entire corpus of writings that MacDonald mentioned the name of an actual person in connection with a negative comment, and even here it was a demonic portrait of God, not the person painting it, that he criticized. The profound difference between MacDonald's understanding of God's nature and Edwards' understanding of it brings me to the paradox of exclusivism, as I have elsewhere called it: how love---willing the best for another---ties the interests of people together and thus exposes a logical absurdity in the Calvinist idea of limited election. Accordingly, in Part II of this essay, I plan to review this paradox briefly, apply it to Jordan's restrictivist understanding of divine love, and examine further Jordan's rejoinder to my published critique of his original essay.
[1] Jerry Walls, Does God Love Everyone? (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016), p. 51.
[2] Quoted on p. 3 of Does God Love Everyone?
[3] "The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous: Or, the Torments of the Wicked in Hell, No Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven," sec. III, in E. Hickman (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Edwards in Two Volumes, Vol. II [available online in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library].
[4] Ibid., sec. II.
[5] Quoted in G. C. Berkouwer, Divine Election (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1960), p. 224.
[6] See Jeff Jordan, "The Topography of Divine Love," Faith and Philosophy 29 (2012), p. 53. For my own critique of this article, see Thomas Talbott, "The Topography of Divine Love: A Response to Jeff Jordan," Faith and Philosophy 30 (2013), pp. 302-316. And for Jordan's rejoinder, see "The Topography of Divine Love: A Reply to Thomas Talbott," Faith and Philosophy 32 (2015), pp. 182-187.
[7] Ibid., p. 67.
[8] "Reply to Thomas Talbott," p.185.
[9] Ibid., pp. 184-185. Jordan's use of the term "identify with" raises additional difficulties that I explain in my entry on heaven and hell in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See Section 1.2 at the following URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heaven-hell/#ResScoGodLov
[10] Jonathan Edwards, "The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous: Or, the Torments of the Wicked in Hell, No Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven," available online at the following URL: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/works2.vi.ix.html.
[11] Michael J. Hart, "Calvinism and the Problem of Hell," in David Alexander and Daniel Johnson (eds.), Calvinism and the Problem of Evil (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2016), pp. 258-259.
[12] "End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous," Sec. IV.
[13] George MacDonald, "Justice," Unspoken Sermons (Whitehorn, California: Johannesen, 2004), p. 540.