The Grand Coherence, Chapter 17: The Meaning of Redemption
This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.
Pre-Christian worldviews, at their wisest, understand Creation and Fall, but not Redemption. Christianity promises Redemption, an escape from the tragedy and transience of the world. But are its promises credible? Can we even conceive an alternative to this tragic, transient world for us? What would we even wish for? If God promises us perfect happiness, what would that look like? Does that sound like an invitation to irresponsible fantasy? And yet Christians have always included hope among the "theological virtues."
What to wish for is a harder question than it seems. The pattern of Creation and Fall is so pervasive that it's hard to imagine a world free of a tendency towards chaos and mortality. We can scarcely conceive what the laws of physics would look like with the Second Law of Thermodynamics left out. Perhaps it's even harder to imagine what men and women would be like, and what we ourselves would be like, without a propensity to sin. But we need to try. If the pre-Christian worldview of Creation, Fall, and nothing else is unacceptable, and if we seek a hope of Redemption to make it all right, then to imagine what Redemption could look like is a first step towards seeking it. If we put our hopes for Redemption in Jesus and the Church, we need some notion of what Jesus and the Church would have to accomplish in order to fulfill those hopes.
"Redemption" and "salvation," "redeem" and "save," are religious words, but they also have non-religious natural language uses which can help us understand their religious meaning.
Suppose you've been working at your computer for a few hours, when you notice something amiss. Your computer has been infected by a virus. You click through all the documents that you have open, assess each one, and save some-- that word!-- while discarding others. Then you restart, run your antivirus software, and begin a new, virus-free session. The documents you save still exist. The documents you discard are consigned to oblivion, erased, deleted, lost forever.
What does it feel like to be deleted like that? It doesn't feel like anything, of course, for the data. Data isn't sentient. But what if a human being were consigned to oblivion like that, deleted, erased, lost forever? We'll come back to that.
Different question: why do you do it? Why do you save some documents and discard others? You do it to declutter, so that you can find files you want, and avoid stumbling into abandoned projects by opening the wrong files.
The idea of salvation, similarly, is that God's world has been infected by the virus of evil, so God is preparing to shut down the world, purging it of the virus of evil in the process, and then restart it, this time wholly good. He'll save whatever is worth saving, and let the rest be cast into oblivion, cut off, abandoned, forgotten, lost forever. As a computer has two kinds of memory, RAM and storage, so there are two kinds of life, for which CS Lewis uses the Greek words bios and zoe. They are not easily distinguishable while the computer is on, but as RAM vanishes when the power supply is cut off while storage remains, so bios is native to and dependent on this transient, material world and must perish with it, but zoe resides in eternity, and when this transient world passes away, whatever has been saved from bios into zoe will still be there. As St. Paul wrote, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable… [but] we will all be changed [and] the perishable must be clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come to pass: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.'" (1 Corinthians 15:50-54).
To vary the metaphor, suppose you have a sudden, desperate need for cash, so you take many of the most valuable, useful, beautiful items in your house, and take them to a pawnbroker. The pawnbroker accepts the items, gives you a loan, and tells you a deadline to "redeem" -- that word! -- the items. For now, the items are still yours, though you don't get to use them. If you pay back the loan before the deadline, you can get the items back. But if not, they cease to be yours and belong to the pawnbroker instead.
We are a little like items in Satan's pawn shop. We were created originally for God's delight, but for now, the debt of sin imprisons us, exiles us from God's company, and makes us useless. We may get redeemed, and become part of God's household again, useful and beautiful and valued. Or we may not get redeemed, and become instead the property of Satan forever.
By now, I will have provoked a burning question. Why is there Hell? If God is so loving and good and powerful, why doesn't He save everyone? There is no blame on the computer user for saving some files and letting others vanish when the power stops. There is no blame on the debtor who declines to redeem some of his pawned things. There is no blame in these cases because the things lost forever, abandoned to oblivion, were not sentient and could not suffer. But human beings matter in a way that pawned personal belongings and files in a computer do not. They have feelings. They can suffer. And scripture and Christian tradition sometimes represent damned souls as suffering terribly. Why?
Surely God ought to save everyone if He can, especially if the alternative is so horrible. And mustn't He be able to do so if He is omnipotent? Yet the funny thing is that in setting out to save human souls, God has taken on a task where His omnipotence doesn't help Him that much. Mere power can't make a free being love. That's part of the reason why He relinquished His omnipotence, and became a helpless baby, lying in a manger on that first Christmas night. That's part of the reason why He let His complete powerlessness be displayed as He hung, wretched and abandoned and in unimaginable pain, on the Cross. Some who could not love a mere all-powerful Creator are stirred to love by the helpless baby, or moved to a pity that leads to love by the innocent man, the one truly innocent man who ever lived, tormented and dying. But even in the face of that, some will not love. So no, it seems that God can't save all. He tried His very best. But we are free, and that means being free to reject His every offer.
Some people don't want to be saved. At one level, salvation as they imagine it from bits of Christian imagery doesn't appeal. They don't want to spend eternity playing harps in the clouds. That's flippant, and of course Christians have long known that the imagery which scripture and tradition use to describe Heaven is symbolic of a state of bliss that we can't imagine properly, though I think life does give us many glimpses of it. Yet there is a serious point here, too. For it's not just the imagery but the reality of salvation that some people don't want.
Some people don't want to love all the time. Some people don't want to be with God. Maybe in a sense none of us want, none of us, that is, desire purely and steadfastly, to love all the time, and to be with God. But Christians, at least, have resolved to become, with God's help, at any cost, the kind of people who do want to love all the time and be with God. What about those who don't? What about those who won't repent? Couldn't God do something better for them than send them to Hell?
Let's think about that one. What would make you, as you are now, in your sins, happy? What could God do for you to make you happy, if you won't repent?
Let's start with a naive suggestion. Suppose God gave you unlimited money. You could buy anything you want. Palaces. Yachts. European vacations. The finest cuisine, prepared by the world's best chefs. Live music. Wine. Would that make you happy?
At first, maybe. Up to a point. In a way. For a while. But wealth has its limitations. You'll still die eventually. Lots of things can't be bought. If you want to be handsome or beautiful, you could try plastic surgery, but it will probably never match natural good looks. Money can't buy you friendship, for friendship must by nature be disinterested. Worse, money tends to attract false friends. You'll probably always suspect, and probably with good reason, that people who seem to like you are just looking for an angle to get a little of your money. You'll see others around you getting some moral satisfaction from humdrum workdays that put food on the family table, and you'll find that's denied to you, because your vast wealth makes ordinary wages meaningless. You have to worry about kidnappers and confidence tricksters, from whom poverty keeps other people safe. And you'll be envied and talked about behind your back. If you're prone to addictions, wealth makes them easier to fall into. The price of alcoholic beverages is no obstacle. Nor is the need to show up to work sober in the morning.
Could you fall in love? Of course. And your money might make the object of your affection more likely to want to marry you. But how would you know if they really loved you? The nice thing about being poor is that anyone who wants to marry you must want to marry you for yourself. You're all you have to offer. But the rich can never be sure. Will your spouse find a way to get enough of your money to live out their lives in luxury, and then leave you? Worse, the fortune hunters that you'll attract as romantic partners may crowd out the ones who would have loved you for yourself. You might never meet your true love because you're besieged by gold diggers.
Similar problems will afflict all your endeavors. You probably won't achieve excellence in the arts, because flatterers will crowd out the honest critics who could have improved you. Your pursuit of wisdom will be impeded by your lack of so many ordinary experiences that make up the texture of life for ordinary people, like hard work and thrift and charity that involves real self-sacrifice. All things considered, isn't it doubtful whether unlimited money would make you happier at all? Surely it's obvious, in any case, that it wouldn't suffice to make anyone perfectly happy.
If poverty can be a blessing in disguise, so may all sorts of other things that we habitually regret or complain about. Bad weather spoils your outdoor plans and makes you discover a good book. An illness makes you bedridden for a week, and thereby reveals how many friends are willing to come visit and bring you meals. Your car breaks down, and you get good exercise walking to the grocery store. A devastating earthquake hits a city, and provides countless opportunities for heroism and charity. Life is full of this sort of thing. An oyster doesn't make a pearl unless a grain of sand, or some other irritant, gets stuck in its shell. The oyster deposits around the irritating object a substance that protects the oyster's flesh, thereby forming a pearl. That's a metaphor for how trouble can work upon our souls to create virtue and beauty. It's why Christians urge people to glorify God for all things, and to be grateful even in times of the greatest trouble, having faith that things are ordered for our good, even when we can't see how.
If money isn't enough, could God make you happy by giving you unlimited power? That's much worse. We should be grateful for our weakness, for it protects us from many sins. Even billionaires are blessed with some of that fortunate weakness, for the free societies that we live in today limit the power of the rich in all sorts of wholesome ways. They can't force people to pretend to like them. They can't go out and buy a harem of slave concubines. If they're angry with someone, they can't issue a decree to have them killed. But the tyrant, the despot, and the absolutist king are far less protected by weakness from wrongdoing. If they're angry, murder is easy and safe. Since everyone around them knows that an offending word could get them killed, good people will avoid them, while those who do mill about them will have mercenary motives and tell them lies. Any preference they signal will be pandered to, including a preference for friendship. But real friendship is disinterested. The tyrant will seek friends and get only flatterers. He can't risk trusting anyone, because anyone he trusts might betray him, and might be right to betray him. If he loses power, he's likely to be killed from revenge or to prevent his return to it, or perhaps on dispassionate grounds of justice. Tyranny is as much a trap for the tyrant as it is a nightmare for the subjects.
Let's try something more difficult. Would eternal life and eternal youth make you happy? Wouldn't the world be a better place if the curse of death could be revoked? Why did God make death?
If you alone were immortal and eternally young, it would, of course, be sad to watch everyone you knew, friends and lovers and children, grow old and die, while you remained, as in the book Tuck Everlasting. Would the problem of accumulating bereavement for a lonely immortal be solved if immortality could be spread around more generously? Yes, probably, to a great extent, but that would bring on a different problem.
How good are you getting along with people? Have you ever lost a friend by giving offense, or taking offense? Short of definitely losing a friend at a particular moment, are there people who you were closer to at one time than you are now? I mean closer in thought and feeling of course, but perhaps physically too. Doubtless, there are people you once lived with, or near, whom you now live apart from, or far away from. This physical dispersal is often accidental or involuntary, and can be consistent with a warm-hearted emotional intimacy. Some may regret leaving their hometown for a job or a college education or a spouse. Some may regret that the cost of getting married is leaving their parents' house. And yet our easy assumption that privacy is a good thing suggests that all these physical separations are usually not, on balance, regretted. Think again about people you were once closer to than you are now. Perhaps you feel the pain of regret that the former intimacy has diminished. But would you want to live with them? How would that work out? If you wouldn't, maybe it's more than just accident and circumstance that drove you apart.
CS Lewis, in The Great Divorce, hauntingly represented Hell as a great, drab city that was constantly growing because of the combination of people's quarrelsomeness with a kind of mediocre material abundance. You could make a house just by thinking one, so people kept moving away whenever they had a spat with the neighbors, as they constantly did. It's eerily evocative of the world we live in, except that we're forced to remain a bit closer than that by scarcity and our economic dependence on each other, and the diffusion process is limited by death.
Perhaps I've made you think that you should be better at getting along with people, and try harder to keep in touch with your friends. But there are some people you definitely don't want to keep in touch with, and couldn't get along with. They're bad, bad for you at any rate, maybe bad absolutely. You couldn't feel happy in their presence. Maybe you wouldn't say you want them dead. You're probably right that you shouldn't say that. That's part of what Jesus's teaching to "judge not that you be not judged" means. But isn't it a relief, after all, that Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper are dead? And yet if everyone were immortal, then Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper would be immortal, too. And if not everyone should be immortal, where is the line drawn, and who decides? I shudder even to think of a democratic tribunal of natural immortals deciding who ought to be stripped of their immortality for the comfort and convenience of everyone else.
Let's posit then, as an alternative to that horrible tribunal, that God must judge the Earth, securing the happiness of some good or good-ish subset of mankind by freeing them from the noxious company of the rest. Might we still ask God to provide something better for the rejects than Hell? But what would that be? "Better than Hell" might seem like a very low bar, but on the other hand, scriptural references to Hell are vague or symbolic, so it's not exactly clear. Hell seems to be a place of great misery and torment, so anything at all pleasant or happy that might be provided for souls unworthy to dwell with their fellows would seem to be an improvement and a mercy. But again, what could that be?
It's an ominous fact of life that people usually become harder to please as they get older. That oversimplifies, to be sure. Adults generally get bored less quickly, and they're able to enjoy many entertainments that are over children's heads. But children can delight in all sorts of trivial things whose value is baffling to adults. A piece of wood or a scrap of paper becomes a toy. Ten games are spun out in a single afternoon from a doll or two and other odds and ends, a blanket, a stick, a piece of furniture. Childhood is a wonderland. As we grow older, we learn how to enjoy new things, but we also forget how to enjoy or even to notice many things. Often, our overall capacity for wonder dims with age, in a way that we can't seem to help. If that happens to us in 70 years, what would we be like in eternity? I'm afraid the wicked, kept alive until eternity, would be very hard to entertain. How could they be kept from making themselves gradually more miserable through boredom?
If it's difficult to entertain some people in company, how much more so in solitude! Some people can enjoy solitude. But it's a little unusual for someone to be contented alone for very long. We need one another's company. And again, the problem with the Adolf Hitlers and Jack the Rippers of the world, and probably, I'm sorry to say, with very, very many people who are less obviously and spectacularly guilty, is that they'll more or less annoy, bother, trouble, disgust and/or torment anyone they're with. They'll subtract from, rather than contribute to, the happiness of anyone whose company they keep. For the duration of this life, we Christians are commanded to endure it. If we can, we should probably try to silence even the wish to escape the company of many whom it is our duty to try to serve somehow. But if God wants to make as many people as possible perfectly happy in the end, then one of the prerequisites for that– and I know this sounds ugly but this is not the time to sacrifice honesty to diplomacy and soft words– is to get some other people out of the way. And so, in order to avoid burdening good people forever with the irksome society of the bad, God must condemn some people either to solitude, or else, perhaps worse, to the company of other people like themselves. The challenge God would face in trying to give some people a better fate than Hell is made that much more difficult, because He must deprive them of good company.
Might God at least give them a beautiful place to live? But what does beauty consist in? Usually beauty as we know it involves other things, with their own peculiar goodness, their own independent and fascinating existence, their own flourishing and vulnerability, things capable of being benefited or harmed. Birds are beautiful. Flowers are beautiful. What might wicked souls, condemned to exile from the human race, full of frustrated ambition or avarice or resentment or lust, do to the poor birds and flowers? Can that be risked? Perhaps they could be deprived of power. They could live in a beautiful world as ghostly spectators, able to look but not touch. Would that do any good? And even if it would, should even that be allowed? Should good creatures have to live in the company even of invisible, impotent wicked ghosts?
In some sense, at least. I don't think scripture is clear about whether damned souls maintain a conscious existence of some sort, or whether they are somehow annihilated. Is it even possible to annihilate a human soul? People's bodies can be killed, but can their thoughts be stopped? How would we know? But perhaps they can be. I don't feel equal to trying to discern which option, utter loneliness or permanent annihilation, would be kinder to them, more fitting for a loving God. I don't think scripture encourages us to dwell much on the subject or try to figure it all out. Scripture wants us to fear Hell, not to understand it, so it deals in harrowing rumors and images and symbols that are indelibly memorable. I once read that if the sinners in Hell really were tormented by material flames, they would be glad of the distraction from the greater torment of remorse. I have no idea whether that's true. I hope I never find out, and you don't either.
Many Christians want to deny the existence of Hell, for the best of reasons. They have pity on the damned. They don't think a loving God would do that. Yet the principal source of the idea of Hell is Jesus's own words. For example, He says, "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot" (Matthew 5:13). As salt brings out the flavor in all foods, it is the vocation of human beings to bring out the goodness in the manifold things of nature, planting gardens, taming beasts, and so on. The peculiar human power to do this is connected with reason and virtue. But through sin, people can become denatured, destitute of the peculiar flavor of humanity which brings out and enhances all the other flavors of nature. And there's nothing to be done about it. People can unravel, surrendering to addictions and grievances, until all that could give life meaning is out of their reach.
I'm afraid that Hell is rather easy to argue for. The road to Hell cuts with the grain of this world of ours, in which everything quickly or slowly decays and collapses, drifting towards destruction. By contrast, if we try to see how a human soul might be saved, might be preserved forever in a state of happiness, reason immediately seems to bar the way with insurmountable obstacles.
A simple way to put the problem is this. In eternal bliss, would we be free, or not? We can't imagine even existence, let alone happiness, without freedom. But if we're free, we can make mistakes, mess things up, destroy things, torment ourselves. If we're free to speak, we're free to offend, and to blaspheme. If we're free to make, we're free to damage. We know ourselves. Give us a perfect world, and we'd only wreck it.
Now this argument is strong. Yet there is an alternative argument which I think is at least plausible to hope for, even if no reasoning of ours could make us anything like justifiably certain that it is true. We know from experience that it is possible to form good habits. And those good habits can become very reliable features of our conduct. The principle applies in many areas of life, from flushing the toilet to saying thank you, but maybe the best example is driving a car. Stay on the right side of the road. Stop at the stop sign. Stay between the lines. Don't exceed the speed limit. And many more. To a new driver, it's all pretty hard to remember, and can be rather terrifying because any mistake can bring disastrous consequences very fast. But good drivers are very reliable about doing these things, so much so that they can quite cease to take their own possible errors into account. They can cheerfully plan thousand-mile trips, knowing perfectly well they'll stay between the lines and stop at stop signs the whole way. As the saying goes, "practice makes perfect." There's another saying that "no one's perfect," and I think common sense would resolve the contradiction by saying that "practice makes perfect " is a slight exaggeration, and even the best drivers err occasionally. But more driving should make them keep getting better, and if you extrapolate to eternity, maybe an immortal human race would get to the point where it could rack up a trillion trillion trillion trillion drive miles without a single fender bender, in a perfect vehicular paradise. We can't be sure, but it's at least plausible.
Of course, we don't care about driving, but about the whole of human conduct. And it's much harder to be a perfect human being than a perfect driver. We want people who do only good, and who want only good, in all aspects of their lives. Only such people could inhabit paradise without spoiling it for themselves and others. And while experience does give us some warrant for believing that it's possible for a human being to attain perfect driving, experience doesn't support, but on the contrary thoroughly and emphatically contradicts, the idea that it's possible for a human being to attain moral perfection in general. That's why we must put our hope in the grace of God, and why death is still part of the cure for sin. But if we can attain some virtue, it stands to reason that we can attain all virtue, if we keep trying, and if God gives us the right opportunities. In the perfect vehicular paradise that I described above, driving would be a lot easier than it is now, since many of the worst hazards in driving result from the poor decisions of other drivers. Likewise, in a paradise inhabited by those who had passed many tests of virtue, virtue would be easier, since the temptations people face are often the result of other people's sins.
We must keep away, though, from the idea that we can earn paradise as a right, or fit ourselves for paradise through our own efforts alone. What is meant by the phrase "the grace of God," and how it is compatible with free will, are hard questions, and I'm not sure I can say anything about them to an audience that I hope will include not only experienced Christians but also many seekers. Suffice it to say that God can work in us somehow, with our consent, without violating the prerogatives of free will or destroying the continuity that makes us ourselves, so that we "die to sin" (Romans 6:2) as St. Paul wrote, losing our sinful propensities, and can be resurrected and admitted to the presence of God once and for all, and live in bliss forever.
Two problems haunt me as I try to imagine the state of the saved soul: the past, and individual recognition.
If the saved souls will have become perfect, they will not always have been perfect. What are we to do with their pasts? If they are remembered, their past sins would mar Paradise. But if the sinful past is forgotten, how is it even we who will be saved? That is, why should we regard those future saved souls, even if some of them inhabit our own resurrected bodies, as us, if they know nothing about us as we are today? Memory is indispensable to personal identity. We forget much, but we must remember enough to give continuity to the stories of our lives. Otherwise we don't know who we are, and no other blessings could quite make up for that loss. How can Paradise let the past, with all its sorrows and sins, still be present somehow, remembered and honored, in the midst of eternal bliss?
And also, relatedly, what will distinguish us in Paradise from everyone else? What will be worth noticing about us? I mentioned CS Lewis's vision in which damned souls can enter Heaven as ghosts, and we understand why that's no good. But even if Paradise isn't a world where you can look but not touch, even if we can walk on the grass there, and pluck the fruits, I think we need more than that. We want to be recognized. We want to be welcomed as ourselves, valued for ourselves. We want to be desired, needed, not superfluous, not mere digits in an undistinguished crowd. But it's difficult enough to be free of sin so that we're fitted for Paradise. How can we hope to deserve to be honored there?
Start with this. There are a lot of different ways to tell a story. The storyteller has a thousand choices about which details to select and how to characterize people and events. Doubtless, there is much in your life that is vaguely dull or shameful, and that you would not like to be told. But might a brilliant storyteller think of a way to narrate the story of your life so that it would be more or less complete, recognizable and true, and at the same time not so much flattering, though maybe even that every now and then, but interesting and satisfying? Might the Divine storyteller pull off that trick? Maybe you've had the experience of getting hired into a new job, hearing your colleagues get introduced, and feeling that you're lucky to be there and you're looking forward to working with them. For some, I think Judgment Day will be a little like that, though of course much better. We will hear our own stories told for the first time, concluding with the words, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!" And then, we'll carry that story with us unto ages of ages, like a name, and we will not feel ashamed amidst the splendors of paradise. As the poet William Blake wrote: "Eternity is in love with the creations of time."
I hope that the readers will forgive the following undignified comparison for God. I think that God will forgive it. He does not stand on His own dignity. In the Bible, He compares Himself to a cuckolded husband and a thief in the night.
So think of yourself as a customer who just walked into a restaurant. In chapters 15 and 16, we met the waiter. It is Jesus and the Church. In this chapter, we decided what we want to order. It is to be perfected by grace, with the difficult consent of our own wills through humility to the process of being perfected, and then to have our stories told once and for all in such a way that we will not be ashamed in the company of the saints and angels, and to live forever in bliss among them, and to see the face of God.
So the next question is: can the Waiter deliver our order?
Keep your eyes on the prize, for the road ahead will get harrowing.