Syncretistic Catholicism

another minority report

Syncretistic Catholicism where any Anglican, Episcopal, Roman & Orthodox

consensus informs core beliefs & divergences are received as valid theological
opinions

Responses to Fr Rooney’s Church Life Journal

Series on Indicative Universalism
See these articles: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/authors/james-
dominic-rooney/

The Incoherencies of Hard Universalism

By James Dominic Rooney
October 18, 2022

FrJDR writes: Let us be clear about our terms. Universalists think that all will be
saved. Universalists are not saying that everyone will end up in heaven just by
good luck; people who believe in the possibility of hell can believe that.
Universalists instead want to argue that it is not possible for anyone to end up
in hell for eternity. Many defenders of universalism assert God would not be
good if he allowed even the possibility of hell. More technically, then,
universalists hold that it is a necessary truth that all are saved. This sets
universalists apart from theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar or Jacques
Maritain who thought we might legitimately hope and pray that all people end
up saved. These theologians are not universalists—although they are
sometimes called “soft universalists”—because they held it was possible for
people to end up in hell, and their views would not be implicated in what I am
going to argue against, which is sometimes called “hard universalism.”

If it is a necessary truth that all will be saved, something makes it so. The only
way it would be impossible for anyone to go to hell is,

That God could not do otherwise than cause human beings to love him or
That human beings could not do otherwise than love God.

There is no third option.

Both of these options, however, entail heresy. This is why universalism has been
seen as heretical by mainstream Christianity for millennia, for good reason.

John’s response:
If it is a necessary truth that, eternally, none will be – not only not consciously
tormented, but – either deprived of their original beatitude or foreclosed upon
in their original teloi, then something makes it so.

God would not be good if he allowed even the possibility of eternal conscious
torment, eternal deprivation of original beatitude or eternal foreclosure of
original teloi, because without sufficient knowledge of God a finite creature
could not definitively reject God and with a sufficient knowledge of God a
finite rational creature would be gifted, along with impeccability, at least a
love of God for sake of self. Divine punishments that would permit the eternal
suffering of finite creatures are prima facie disproportionate. God would not
be good if he allowed even the possibility of such disproportionate
punishments.
1) the possibility of eternal conscious torment – This conception is being
softened even by many perditionists nowadays?
2) eternal deprivation of original beatitude – Maritain entertained the
possibility of a post-mortem universal restoration of original beatitude. Many
perditionists properly recognize a limited array of universally enjoyed
beatitudes.
3) eternal foreclosure of original teloi – Universal hylomorphism blocks this
inference. Sin does parasitize our theotic processes & vicious habits do
situate between our volitional potencies & acts. While such sinful habits can
hinder our reductions of those potencies, they can never utterly obliterate
them. While they can obscure our essential nature as imagoes Dei, they can
never wholly eclipse it.
4) without sufficient knowledge of God a finite creature could not definitively
reject God – Call it circular. Call it tautological. It doesn’t make it not true. It’s
still more taut, existentially & evidentially, than competing accounts, which are
absurdly implausible.
5) with a sufficient knowledge of God a finite rational creature would be
gifted, along with impeccability, at least a love of God for sake of self – This
is boilerplate post-mortem anthropology vis a vis Thomistic concepts like
predestination, impeccability & inancaritability.
6) punishments that would permit the eternal suffering of finite creatures are
disproportionate – Prima Facie.
7) the possibility of such disproportionate punishments – Per a cooperation
with evil and double effect-like calculus, when such a disproportionality is in
play, permission becomes tantamount to intent. This dynamic is related to
DBH’s game theoretic analysis and the moral modal collapse at the
eschatological horizon.

The above is not so much a rejection of the characterization that indicative

universalism entails believing that “it would be impossible for anyone to go to
hell.” It’s a rejection of popularized conceptions of hell that would make it
more than a transient purgatorial state for any given rational creature. So, I
reject perditionist definitions because, in my view, they don’t even refer.
As for these options:
That God could not do otherwise than cause human beings to love him or
That human beings could not do otherwise than love God.

These are too facile. They fail to distinguish between divine necessity and
fittingness, between human erotic & agapic loves and other considerations
that will be in play, below.
######

FrJDR writes: In any event, it seems to make perfectly good sense

(“meaningful”) to say God could have done otherwise than create the universe,
or that God did not need to become incarnate.

John’s response: Creation & grace are utterly gratuitous.

######

FrJDR writes: What is necessary is that God could have done otherwise, which
is precisely what Hart rules out when he draws the heretical conclusion that
“creation inevitably follows from who [God] is.”

John’s response: I only ever gathered from Hart that he was talking in terms
of fittingness not necessity.
######

FrJDR writes: Because denying God’s freedom is serious, universalists typically

focus instead on undermining human freedom. David Bentley Hart in his That
All Shall Be Saved is, again, a good example. His two strategies for defending
that everyone necessarily will be saved are, first, that the notion of mortal sin is
somehow logically contradictory, so that making a choice to turn away from
God eternally would be choosing completely arbitrarily, without reason, and
contrary to all reason. Second, he argues that God’s love and benevolence
would be incompatible with hell, because no possible reason can be given on
which God neither intends the suffering of the damned for its own sake nor as a
mere instrumental means for some other good.

John’s response: The above pretty much reduces to my own conclusions,

above, first regarding the incoherency of putative definitive rejections of God
and also regarding a moral modal collapse where permission becomes
tantamount to intent when disproportionate evils are in play:
######

FrJDR writes: If culpable negligence is real, then it seems to me there is no

ground to argue the concept of mortal sin entails a contradiction. You do not
need to have God’s own knowledge to know “well enough” that something is
wrong.

John’s response: While we can and do know “well enough” that many things
are wrong, our knowledge of what’s really good rather than only apparently
good grows and, along with it, our degree of culpability.

Universalists needn’t deny this. Rather, we argue we don’t have a sufficient

degree of knowledge to be absolutely culpable.
######

FrJDR writes: Logically speaking, I would argue that you only need three truths
to get you to the possibility of hell: People can want things that do not
correspond to what they ought to want (and do not necessarily or naturally want
to love God) Learning new facts about the world, God, or yourself need not
change what you want. God does not need to change what you want. By your
free choices then You can choose to love things that orient you away from God
and your true source of happiness in him. Then, even given an infinite time,
there is no necessity that you learn anything new about yourself or the cause of
your suffering that would make it impossible for you to do anything else except
love God. This is to affirm that humans are free. A person does not need to act
on any one set of reasons they have available to them, but can always
reconsider the reasons for which they act. Nothing outside of them
necessitates their choices (i.e., which reasons they act upon).

John’s response: Regarding “Learning new facts about the world, God, or
yourself need not change what you want.” – Astute Thomists are aware that
eschatological realities like predestination, impeccability & inancaritability
present perditionists with a universalism problem on precisely this point.
There are no character or disposition-based beatific contingencies. For those
who reject a concrete (not abstract) natura pura, there are no indwelling-
based beatific contingencies, either. A truly efficacious grace is infallibly
followed by the act to which it tends, e.g. contrition. Even before one’s will
consents to it, that grace, infallibly sure of success, will infallibly procure one’s
consent, produce that act – of contrition. While it infallibly procures one’s
consent, it doesn’t necessitate consent, instead leaving one free to dissent.
The will will infallibly say “yes” to it, but it is free to say “no.”
######

FrJDR writes: And, similarly, God is under no obligation to break you out of this
state, so you could persist in it forever.

John’s response: Again, more astute Thomists … … …

######

FrJDR writes: Further, if Hart’s argument were right that we could not rationally
choose anything opposed to God, who is in fact the Good himself, this would
mean everyone possesses supernatural love of God necessarily, since that love
just consists in having God as our chosen end. Obviously, if we could not stop
loving God, there would be no need for Christ’s Passion, the sacraments of
baptism or penance, and so forth, because everyone would necessarily be in a
state of grace. For many reasons, then, this first strategy of arguing that mortal
sin is incoherent relies on plausible-sounding claims which, when examined,
turn out to be unsound.
John’s response: Here, I find it helpful to frame this reality in terms of degrees
akin to Ignatian Humility and Bernardian Love, including such distinctions as
between an erotic love of God for sake of self coupled with imperfect
contrition and an agapic love of God for sake of God coupled with perfect
contrition. A Thomistic Autonomy Defense of Evil (not hell) would cohere well
with our theotic ends of divine intimacy, such as an agapic love of God for
sake of God as coupled with perfect contrition & continuing in eternal
epectasy. The graces flowing from the divine economy would remain ever
efficacious in overcoming sin & death and fostering our co-self-determined
growth in divine likeness. Why must one’s conceptions of freedom, autonomy
and the efficacy of grace be necessarily tied to a violent dichotomy between
hating God, on one hand, and divine nuptial bliss, on the other? What’s
incoherent about creation, incarnations and grace being peacefully &
harmoniously ordered, rather, toward our journeys from abundance to
superabundance, from divine images to likenesses, from friends to lovers,
from enlightened self-interest to agapic self-emptying?
######

FrJDR writes: Traditionally, orthodox Christians have argued that God merely
permits moral evil, such as hell, rather than intends it either as a good in itself or
as an instrumental means for achieving something good. God allows moral evil
—as John Damascene does in Book II and III of his Exposition of the Orthodox
Faith—because God wants free creatures, as only free creatures can be in
relationship with him. The reality of creatures who are really free entails the
possibility of moral evil.

John’s response: While I ultimately rely on my trust relationship with God as

enhanced by the special revelation of Abba in Jesus, apart from either logical
defenses or evidential theodicies, both the free will & autonomy defenses
ordered toward divine intimacy are eminently reasonable to me.
######
FrJDR writes, after an inapposite disquisition on DBH’s arguments: Creatures
would not be free if they were necessitated to act in some specific way. God’s
omnipotence does not extend to doing things that are nonsensical, and a
necessitated free person is a contradiction in terms.

John’s response: There’s nothing in DBH’s stance, however, that’s inconsistent

with a non-necessitating, efficacious grace infallibly followed by an act of
contrition and sure of purgative success.
######

FrJDR writes: Hell is a product of our free choices, not God denying us
something we need or pushing us down that path. There is then nothing about
God’s plan for creating free people, even when God knows that we will reject his
love, that means he is causing or desiring that we reject him. While
metaphysically accurate, such responses can be unconvincing. God looks cruel
if he creates human beings just to be damned. Hart’s claims that God must be
“all-in-all,” victorious over evil, and comprehensibly the supreme Good is merely
to say God must have a suitable justification for permitting hell. What is missing
in response to Hart’s second strategy is a convincing justificatory reason God
might have for permitting hell that is compatible with his goodness. We know in
general that God only allows evil because he can produce out of it some greater
good. Even for Hart, natural and moral evil would need to be allowed by God,
and God does not desire to inflict suffering upon anyone even if he permits it for
some good reason. But, if this is true, then there is no principled logical reason
that God cannot have a good reason to allow even that moral evil that leads to
damnation. I cannot see how we can know that God would not have such a
good reason—God’s reasons and omnipotence are far beyond our
comprehension. If we merely stick to logic, there is nothing contradictory here:
we should broadly conclude God permits the possibility of damnation only
because God loves us and wills our good. Whatever those reasons are in
particular, God does “not desire the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn
from his way and that he live” (Ezek 33:11).

John’s response: The problem with “If we merely stick to logic, there is
nothing contradictory here,” is that the theological skepticism of the
perditionist regarding the problem of hell and that of the theodicist regarding
the problem of evil are invoking radically disproportional evils in their
respective mysterian appeals, the latter evil being, although otherwise
horrendous & incomprehensible, finite and transitory, the former infinite and
everlasting. The divine permission of transient evils, generally considered,
already challenges everyone’s belief in some measure, although our unbelief
can be greatly mitigated by the weight of eternal glories promised. If a divine
permission of everlasting evils for finite creatures remains unconvincing,
perhaps it’s mere logical possibility is not even worthy of belief since it even
more egregiously, i.e. to an absolute extent, violates our parental instincts,
aesthetic sensibilities, moral intuitions and common sense. Why plead strict
logical possibility when a Franciscan knowledge can supplement what would
otherwise be a sterile analytical rationalism?
######

They don’t deny the gratuity of grace either as it gifts us a superabundance

beyond abundance, a divine intimacy beyond friendship, just not a morally
unintelligible dichotomy between hating God and divine nuptial bliss.
######

FrJDR writes: To disprove the view that it is impossible for anyone to go to hell,
we only need to show that what God achieves by permitting hell could be worth
the mere possibility.
John’s response:
Moral.
Modal.
Collapse.
Permission tantamount to intention.
######

FrJDR writes: All these claims, however, are strictly metaphysical nonsense.
John’s response: Well, the caricatures are indeed nonsense.
######
FrJDR writes: God’s own reasons are not naturally accessible to us; we cannot
deduce what God will do and what goods he could bring about that might be
sufficient to defeat the badness obviously involved in hell.

John’s response: Again, the skeptical theisms used by perditionists and

theodicists in their defenses of hell and evil involve wildly disproportionate
mysterian appeals.
######

FrJDR writes: At the core of the story is the fact that the damned can leave hell
for heaven at any time. Christ’s victory was to open the doors of paradise to the
damned. If anyone remains, it is only because (as Lewis said in The Problem of
Pain) “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

John’s response: If all perditionists subscribe to this vision of Christ’s victory,

then that “hell” might more closely resemble a purgative state, possibly
transitory? If they also subscribe to a universal hylomorphism, there could be
no locked doors, inside or out.
######

FrJDR writes: I will end by adding one story alongside Lewis’s.

John’s response: Why must one’s conceptions of freedom, autonomy and the
efficacy of grace be necessarily tied to a violent dichotomy between hating
God, on one hand, and divine nuptial bliss, on the other? What’s incoherent
about creation, incarnations and grace being peacefully & harmoniously
ordered, rather, toward our journeys from abundance to superabundance,
from divine images to likenesses, from friends to lovers, from enlightened
self-interest to agapic self-emptying?
######
FrJDR writes: Universalism is Calvinism about salvation, only with a pretty face.
But these beliefs that we are free in our choice to love God, and that God is free
in his choices to love and redeem us, are central to Christianity’s story of
salvation. Universalism has been definitively condemned as heretical for good
reason: eliminating freedom from the picture leaves us with an unrecognizable
vision of God and ourselves.

John’s response: Universalism, rather, is a robust Thomism, which has come

to grips with its universalism problem to accept the implications of
predestination, impeccability & inancaritability when properly coupled with
zero beatific contingencies. What separates Báñezians, Molinists and certain
Open Theists from Calvinism is – not just single vs double predestination, but
– the fact that grace is non-necessitating.
######

Hell and the Coherence of Christian Hope

By James Dominic Rooney
November 29, 2022

FrJDR writes: All of this sounds nevertheless shallow and pitiful to those who
cannot imagine any such reason.
John’s response: So far, so good.
######

FrJDR writes: No one . . . so long as he lives this mortal life, ought in regard to
the sacred mystery of divine predestination, so far presume as to state with
absolute certainty that he is among the number of the predestined …

John’s response: Because perdition does not refer in my universalism but

predestination does, I should be clear that to me it refers to sainthood,
degrees of holiness, beatitude and such. In that sense, no one should
presume anything.
######
FrJDR writes: Rejoicing in the Cross makes little sense if there were nothing to
be liberated from. If it were not possible for us to end up in eternal death, if
Christ did not harrow hell, Easter is a sham victory, “our preaching is empty and
your faith is also empty” (1 Cor 15:14).

John’s response: Without hell, there’s nothing from which to be liberated?

Without hell, there would have been no incarnation? Contra Maximus and
Scotus? Without hell, there would be no need for grace? Without hell, there’d
be no need to trust God?
######

FrJDR writes: Problems of evil—such as the problem as to whether an all-good

God can permit hell—argue that a certain instance of evil is incompatible with
God’s goodness and conclude: “therefore, God does not exist” (or is not loving,
etc.). But these arguments are logically unsound and invalid for the reason that
an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God can have some good, justifying reason
for allowing any given instance of evil. I might not know what it is, but, if some
such reason is possible, there is simply no logical contradiction between God’s
existence and any given evil, including the possibility that God permits us to
reject his love forever.

John’s response: redux

Theological skepticism of the perditionist regarding the problem of hell and
that of the theodicist regarding the problem of evil are invoking radically
disproportional evils in their respective mysterian appeals, the latter evil
being, although otherwise horrendous & incomprehensible, finite and
transitory, the former infinite and everlasting.
######

FrJDR writes: From my perspective, we can always be more confident, as

Christians, that God is good than of any evidence in favor of any instance of evil
we see or experience being pointless or meaningless. So, if evil occurs, we can
be confident that God has good reasons for permitting it. This point is not very
strange or controversial, I think, as it formalizes the “hopeful” reasoning by
which Christians respond to evils in their life.

John’s response: Perditionism, rather, formalizes the “hopelessness” of hell

precisely because it is infinite and everlasting. It also makes a mysterian
appeal that, rather than surpassing our fondest parental hopes, aesthetic
sensibilities & moral intuitions with an unimaginable weight of eternal glories
building on those connatural inclinations, overturns them by enshrining what’s
parentally alien, aesthetically repugnant & morally unintelligible, absolutely
foreign to what’s been implanted in our hearts.
######

FrJDR writes: When we have hope, we already expect that God’s goodness will
shatter even the limits of our imagination, and that, even when things appear to
be hopeless, they never are.

John’s response: I responded at the end of the first article: “If all perditionists
subscribe to this vision of Christ’s victory, then that “hell” might more closely
resemble a purgative state, possibly transitory? If they also subscribe to a
universal hylomorphism, there could be no locked doors, inside or out.”
I’ll similarly observe, if all perditionists truly believe that, for the putatively
damned, things are never hopeless, then their “hell” might more closely
resemble a purgative state after all, possibly transitory?
######

Hard Universalism, Grace, and Creaturely Freedom

By James Dominic Rooney
January 17, 2023

FrJDR writes: For theologians like Hart, these implications are central to their
views of creation, redemption, universal salvation, and grace.[1] Claims that God
cannot but create and raise us to grace imply an essential relationship between
God and creation. If God could do nothing other than create or redeem us, given
what he is, we would be essentially related to him, which is the basis from
which Hart concludes that all must be saved.

John’s response: This entire article caricatures both Hart & Wood.

The Christologies and cosmologies of JDW & DBH can be roughly mapped to
Joe Bracken’s creatio ex Deo.
For all of them, the hypostatic union is fitting (not necessary), creation’s
gratuitous, the analogy of being holds & the potencies of human nature are
relative perfections. Ergo, human persons enjoy their primary beatitude,
finitely, as adoptees.

Confusion often ensues from mistaking essential & personal logics. JDW’s
personal logic, informed by Maximian & Neo-Chalcedonian elements, differs
somewhat from DBH’s personal logic, informed by Bulgakov’s Sophiology
(which only requires tweaking by Bracken, for example).

While those logics go beyond the analogia, they don’t go without it.

I commend the work of Brandon Gallaher, who uses Bracken to correct

Bulgakov’s infelicities. Bracken, himself, engages Hegel, German idealists &
Peirce, but he tames their insights with certain neoclassical commitments.

The personal logics of Bracken, JDW & DBH roughly converge on the same
Totus Christus conception of mutually constituted I – Thous. These logics
aren’t drastically different from the personalist account of Norris Clarke or
from Don Gelpi’s metaphysic of intersubjectivity.

Fr. Bracken and the late Frs. Clarke & Gelpi are all FrJDR’s co-religionists.
Jesuits are just smarter than Domnicans, I’ve found.

The universalisms of JDW & DBH don’t follow, explicitly or by implication,

directly or indirectly, from rejections of either the analogy of being or the
gratuity of creation. They follow, rather, from applying the Anselmian principle
to the Trinitarian missio ad extra:
Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit: ‘twas possible & “fitting,” ergo accomplished. They
also follow from moral intuitions grown from the special revelation of Who
Abba is & How Abba acts as manifest in Jesus.

FrJDR shares his noseeum inference: And I see no good reason that there is
nothing God could achieve that would not be able to defeat that badness of
hell’s mere possibility.

John’s response:

The Coherencies of Indicative Universalism – the universalist weseeum

inference

######

Please also see:

Why Beatific Contingency is an Oxymoron – about our divine indwelling

Parallels between Logical & Evidential Problems of Evil & of Hell

The Full Maximian Apokatastases Monty: immortality, theotic realization &

apokatastenai

Toward a more Eschatologically Enhanced Apokatastenai – new & improved:

affectively sweetened & beatitudinally enriched

a storyboard regarding the “hows” of apokatastenai

Examples
Stipulations:
Sin is possible.

It is not caused by God failing to help us.

God can act and we are free to say no.

God can be helping us right now and God’s help can fail to achieve its affect.

God can love you in providing sufficient aids to conversion, making it possible,
while He is not actively causing you to be his friend.

If God can love us while we are sinners today, He can do that any time.

God could, at any moment, infallibly procure our consent to become His
friend. He could do that at any moment yet does not. God can love us at
exactly the same time He is not infallibly procuring our consent to be His
friend.

God never gives up on anyone.

If God loves us while not changing us necessarily, it doesn’t follow from that
that all necessarily change.

God can love a person at any time and want to do what’s best for them, even
while that person’s consent to love God back is not infallibly being procured.

If this can occur at any time, can it occur indefinitely?

No, not to the extent it would involve any indefinite deprivations of our original
beatitudes & teloi. Regarding higher degrees of beatitude & glory, our divine
intimacy might indeed grow indefinitely.
God, fittingly (not necessarily) in being true to Himself (His loving will
manifesting His loving nature), would (as distinguished from metaphysical
terms like could) not indefinitely deprive any rational creature of her original
beatitude or his original teloi or even leave anyone, post-mortem, peccable.

If necessary, then, God will, fittingly, infallibly procure our consent to, at least,
love God for our own sake as our sole Benefactor. He may also infallibly
procure the consent of some to be His friends & of others to even be His
lovers.

Without a sufficient knowledge of God, a finite creature could not definitively

reject God.

With a sufficient knowledge of God, a finite rational creature would be gifted,

along with impeccability, at least a love of God for sake of self.

Divine punishments that would permit such eternal consequences for finite
creatures are prima facie disproportionate.

God would not be good if he allowed even the possibility of such

disproportionate consequences.

A truly efficacious grace is infallibly followed by the act to which it tends, e.g.
contrition. Even before one’s will consents to it, that grace, infallibly sure of
success, will infallibly procure one’s consent, produce that act – of contrition.
While it infallibly procures one’s consent, it doesn’t necessitate consent,
instead leaving one free to dissent. The will will infallibly say “yes” to it, but it
is free to say “no.”

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