The Inescapable Love of God

Second Edition

Thomas Talbott

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625646903
  9781498222419
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876746
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Will the love of God save us all? In this book Thomas Talbott seeks to expose the extent to which the Western theological tradition has managed to twist the New Testament message of love, forgiveness, and hope into a message of fear and guilt. According to the New Testament proclamation, he argues, God's love is both unconditional in its nature and unlimited in its scope; hence, no one need fear, for example, that God's love might suddenly turn into loveless hatred at the moment of one's physical death. For God's love remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. But neither should one ignore the New Testament theme of divine judgment, which Talbott thinks the Western theological tradition has misunderstood entirely. He argues in particular that certain patterns of fallacious reasoning, which crop up repeatedly in the works of various theologians and Bible scholars, have prevented many from appreciating St. Paul's explicit teaching that God is merciful to all in the end. This second edition of Talbott's classic work is fully revised, updated, and substantially expanded with new material.

Part I

Some Autobiographical Reflections

1

An Encounter with Western Theology

“To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?”

—John Stuart Mill

My purpose in this essay is to impart, or begin to impart, a vision of God. “Oh taste and see,” the Psalmist exclaimed, “that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8). That is the vision I have in mind. Against the many religious doctrines that appeal to and cultivate our fear, I shall urge upon my reader this simple proposition: contrary to what we might fear, the Creator and Father of our souls—the Lord of hosts and King of kings—is good.

Towards the end of communicating that vision, however, I shall not begin where some might think I should begin: with some kind of an argument for the existence of some kind of a God. For though I have reflected upon such arguments for the better part of my life, and though I now find some of them far more compelling than I once did, the vision I have in mind is larger than any specific argument; it includes more than any series of arguments could establish beyond question. Indeed, the full vision includes more than I could possibly write down within the confines of a single book. It includes an interpretation of the world as a whole—that is, a way of putting things together, of understanding our religious traditions, and of making sense of our experience. Above all, it includes a particular conception of a worthy or a fitting object of worship. I have therefore chosen, as a kind of thesis for the essay, a statement that some may regard as especially vague because, as they see it, the word “good” is itself especially vague. I could no doubt do a lot, even at the outset, to sharpen that thesis—by pointing, for example, to the New Testament idea that God is good, because God is love and love is good; love is the one quality that makes any life, whether human or divine, worth living forever. But I can think of no better place to begin than with something a little vague—a mere hint of what I hope eventually to communicate with greater precision.

Neither can I think of any better place to begin than right in the middle of my own religious and philosophical concerns, however provincial some may find them to be. For like many others, I have felt a need to come to terms with my own heritage, particularly my religious heritage; and though some of that heritage now seems to me limited and defective, I have nonetheless tried to penetrate to the very best within it. I have an abiding faith, moreover, that beneath the particular forms of the religion I acquired in my youth—and, for that matter, beneath the particular forms of many religions and many mythologies—there lies something of enduring and even permanent value.1 But as we embark upon a quest for that which has enduring value—a quest for religious truth or spiritual enlightenment, if you will—we must all proceed today from where we are today, and where we are today is, at least in part, a product of where we have been in the past. Accordingly, I shall begin not with an argument, but with a story, a bit of autobiography: an account of how my own religious views evolved during the early years of my formal education when I, like many of my classmates, began for the first time to raise serious questions about serious matters and to search for satisfying answers to them.

God and Evil

After a relatively sheltered childhood, I attended a conservative Christian high school of a kind that may no longer exist. I say “may no longer exist” because, at my high school, a good Christian was identified as someone who does not smoke, drink, dance (roller skating was “iffy”), play cards, or attend Hollywood movies. But I thoroughly enjoyed high school. I made a lot of friends, and we argued about everything—about whether, for example, the Rapture (i.e., God’s sudden removal of Christians from the earth) would occur at the beginning or in the middle of the Great Tribulation, about whether someone who accepts the theory of evolution could still be saved, about whether it really was a sin to attend Hollywood movies (I ran with a group of rebels who let it be known that we sometimes did go to the movies). It was here also that I first learned to challenge authority. One of our Bible teachers had taught that in the last days the stars will quite literally fall upon the earth; and when a friend of mine pointed out that a single star would consume the earth long before striking it, he was severely reprimanded. But my friends and I, being something of a rebellious lot, would have none of that. It was also here that I encountered the writings of C. S. Lewis, who first awakened me to the larger world of ideas and inspired me to take a philosophy course during my first year in college. But nothing I experienced in high school had quite prepared me for what awaited me when, after graduation, I enrolled at Portland State University.

As fate (or providence) would have it, my first philosophy course was one in which we examined traditional arguments for and against the existence of God. The instructor, I quickly decided, was simply the most brilliant person I had ever known, an honest man who seemed prepared to follow any argument wherever it led, though more often than not an argument seemed to lead in the wrong direction. Our class critique of the arguments for the existence of God was not a problem for me; in fact, I found it almost exhilarating (even liberating) to join with others in a vigorous critique of bad arguments, or what I then regarded as bad arguments, for the existence of God. But one of the anti-theistic arguments was different, because it attacked my religious beliefs in a powerful way and at the most fundamental level possible. That was the so-called argument from evil, which begins with a worry that almost every religious person thinks about at one time or another, namely this: how can we square the idea of a loving God with the evil and the profound misery and suffering that we see all around us? How can we possibly affirm such an idea in the face of, for example, heart-wrenching pictures of starving children in parts of Africa where 20 percent are predicted to die before the age of five?2 Many good and sensitive souls, such as my first philosophy professor, have reflected upon such questions and have concluded, perhaps even reluctantly, that they pose an insoluble problem for traditional theism; as these persons see it, the horrendous quantity of suffering around the globe is inconsistent with, or at least is strong evidence against, the existence of God as traditionally conceived. For if God were truly omnipotent, he would have the power, it seems, to prevent every instance of human suffering; and if he were perfectly loving, he would want to exercise that power. So if he were both omnipotent and perfectly loving, there would be no suffering at all in his creation. But there clearly is suffering. Therefore, a God who is both omnipotent and perfectly loving does not exist.

People sometimes speak of a defining moment in their lives, a momentous occasion when they undergo some experience, or perhaps make a decision of some kind, that has a profound effect upon the rest of their lives. Well, I am here talking about a defining moment in my own life. On that day when the teacher I admired more than any other presented the argument from evil as a decisive objection to traditional theism, the entire course of my life was changed. For I quite rightly interpreted this as a fundamental assault upon the very convictions that gave meaning to my life; in effect, I was being asked to believe that the idea of a loving God—an idea I had taken for granted throughout my childhood—is overly sentimental, too good to be true, just one more example of wishful thinking to be discarded as we mature into adults. During my undergraduate days, I encountered a good many other anti-theistic arguments; for the most part, these were just silly, mere prejudices that anyone who has had a good course in critical thinking should be able to expose. But there is nothing silly about the argument from evil, and it galled me that my instructor, who was always three steps ahead of me, was able to counter my own moves so easily. It galled me even more that he seemed to have such a low opinion of C. S. Lewis, whose book, The Problem of Pain, I had read with great excitement during my high school days, though I doubt that I had understood very much of it. I never for a moment doubted that my instructor’s arguments were defective in a variety of ways, but neither did I doubt that I would have to find better answers than I had at the time, answers that would at least have the virtue of satisfying me.

A Demonic Picture of God

By cast of mind I tend to be rather conservative. So when I first encountered the argument from evil as an undergraduate, my instinct was to turn to the great theologians of the past upon whose shoulders I was quite prepared to stand. Little did I anticipate, however, the shock and the crisis of faith in store for me when I did just that. For though it came as a complete surprise to me, I found the writings of Christian theologians to be far more disturbing—and a far greater threat to my faith, as I understood it—than those of any atheistic thinker whom I had encountered. The problem was that I kept bumping up against this awkward fact: I seemed unable to find a single mainline Christian theologian who truly believed, any more than my atheistic professor did, in a loving God. They all claimed to believe in a just and a holy God, but this God seemed not to care enough about created persons even to will or to desire the good for all of them. And anything less than a perfectly loving God, I was already persuaded, would be far worse than no God at all. So in the end, the shock of discovering what the mainline theologians actually taught—and asked me to believe—precipitated a very real crisis of faith.

Part of the problem may have been the “authorities” to whom I then turned and the filter through which I then viewed the tradition. One of the first things I read, even before turning to the great theologians of the past, was a book that a friend of mine had recommended: Gordon Clark’s Religion, Reason, and Revelation. Clark is what some might call a “hyper-Calvinist” or “double predestinarian”; he believed that from the very beginning of creation God had already foreordained that some would be saved and others lost forever. It is all predetermined. According to Clark, God causes us to sin and then punishes us for it; in the case of the reprobate, those whom he chooses to reject, God will punish them throughout eternity for sins that he himself caused them to commit. And his punishment, furthermore, will be just, since whatever God does is just solely and only because he does it. Although even many Calvinists, so I later learned, reject the idea that God is the ultimate cause of sin, Clark was the first Calvinist philosopher I ever encountered. Here are a couple of examples of what I read:

God is the sole ultimate cause of everything. . . . The men and angels predestined...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Part 1: Some Autobiographical Reflections
• Part 2: Universal Reconciliation and the New Testament
• Part 3: The Logic of Divine Love
• Works Cited