Hi all, I’m late to this discussion, since I’m new here. Only just got my 100 posts (go me!)
Interestingly, even though the essay that is the topic of discussion here mentions the “many Christian” thinkers who have pondered the nature of Hell, conspicuously absent are those who have argued for some limited, finite Hell. So, not denying that a Hell exists, just insisting that it must necessarily be finite in nature (with reasonable sentencing, possibility of parole, etc
) And this would comprise a great many thinkers throughout the church’s long history. (See DB Hart’s recent book on this issue.) The author mentions Tertullian, Augustine, jumps ahead to Aquinas and then onto Edwards. And that’s about right. If he were to trouble himself with the much more voluminous ancient Christian East, he’d have had a harder time locating defenders of eternal-Hell.
“Christians tell us...” In one sense, some Evangelicals, with their commitment to the Augustinian vision of Hell are, like Aquinas himself, in a bit of a quandary. And although Craig is a prominent Christian apologist, he is very far from speaking for “Christianity.” His memory wipe idea sounds very magical and hints at a peculiar naïveté regarding the psychology of human persons, it seems. Once we begin to explore the human person with some depth, I think we arrive at a view of humanity that is very much mutually entangled, intertwined and co-identified. As in, we contribute to the building up of each other.
Every mother has a bit of her child in her, and every child, some of her mother within. Their very selves are entangled such that it can some times be difficult to identify where the consciousness of one precisely ends and the other’s begins. So we have expressions like, “the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree..” Something similar happens in various human relationships like spouses, siblings, best friends, etc. If this intermingled mutuality of personhood can be accepted, it becomes immediately evident that memory-wiping would be, quite literally, dehumanizing. To take away my memories of my child, which themselves form me at my very core, is to take away substantial portions of me. Keep up that process and you’ll have dwindled me down to nearly nothing, depending on how many close ones in my life didn’t make the cut.
Hell only becomes unjust if we commit ourselves to the Augustinian notions of it being forever and inescapable. Thankfully, plenty of St Augustine’s peers didn’t accept his views and had rather hopeful eschatological views like a final reuniting of the entire human race back to God, in the end (eg, St Gregory of Nyssa). To say nothing of the very many other ancient, medieval and contemporary scholars who have held similar views to St Gregory and have rejected the Augustinian vision (without rejecting Hell, per se).
But as Hans Urs Von Balthasar noted in his hopeful book on this subject, the shadow of Augustine has loomed very large over the Western church. On this issue today, we are still having a hard time breaking free from the great saint’s bleak vision of the afterlife. But the author’s criticisms really only apply to the Augustinian view of Hell. There is nothing particularly odd or shocking about an immediate state in the afterlife which would be punitive and/or rehabilitative for folks who have committed horrendous evils here and gotten away with them, so long as that state has an end.
