The Ocean and the River

I say this neither as a devout adherent nor as one schooled in the canons of theology; I say it as one whose trust in the infinite mercy and goodness of the Creator is not to be shaken by so low a motive as fear, for the impulse to rise and to endure and to build and to love was set within us by that very mercy, and He who planted the Will to stand upright in the breast of Man would not desire dominion that keeps him upon his knees.

I have never been able to accept the notion that a finite life, marked by finite acts and finite understanding, merits a punishment that has no horizon. The very idea strains both reason and conscience, and when laid at the feet of the Almighty it grows stranger still. If a loving father would not set before his child a device that, once mishandled, must destroy him without remedy, how then shall we call it love when the Creator of minds and ages is said to have fashioned the world upon such a scheme? Give a man a rope and he may climb, give him a rope with no safeguard and you tempt him to fall forever; I cannot bring myself to name this wisdom or mercy. Nor can I bend the knee before the likeness of a usurer, who lends life on terms that slip so easily into perpetual debt. If that be God, then He is not good, and if He is good, then this is not His judgment.

The argument that follows is simple in its bones. If God be God, then He is not merely great, but without measure, not merely kind, but the fountain of kindness, not merely patient, but the rock whence patience is hewn. No creature surpasses the Creator in any virtue, and no son out-loves the Father of all. If I, a fallible man, can forgive, and if whole communities can forgive, and if even the wounded can bring their hearts to rest, shall we pretend that the Infinite is more stubborn than dust, or that the Ancient of Days must be taught by His children how large a heart ought to be? I say rather that the stream speaks of the river, and the river speaks of the sea; whatever glimmers of mercy are found in us are but small reflections of what is perfect in Him.

There is also this, and it is not trivial: omniscience does not learn; it knows. Before the first star burned, every thought and deed of every soul was present to the Divine intellect entire, not as a tale that unfolds, but as a whole that simply is. Omnipotence does not strain; it Wills. If God knew me fully and made me still, then He made me having come to terms with everything I would one day attempt and fail, fear and desire, speak and regret. What is foreknown need not be answered with fire, and what is permitted into being has already passed beneath the gaze of perfect wisdom. The cry of surprise cannot be raised by One who foresaw all, and the plea of compulsion cannot be raised by One whom nothing compels. If souls are condemned without end, it is not because Heaven was cornered; it is because Heaven chose it. I do not believe that.

Some will answer that sin bears the weight of the One against whom it is committed, and since God is infinite, the offense is infinite, and the proportion of justice must follow. Yet dignity does not only increase the gravity of insult, it increases the capacity for magnanimity also; the king has more to forgive than the peasant, and also more to forgive with. When we say that God is high, we speak also of the highness of His forbearance, and when we say that God is holy, we speak not of a brittleness that shatters at the touch of weakness, but of a goodness so whole that it is never threatened and never mean.

Others will say that Hell is not cruelty but consequence; not a cell built by God, but a condition chosen by man, for love does not coerce, and Heaven will not force its company upon those who refuse it. I grant that freedom is costly and that love without liberty is a hollow thing; nevertheless, a wise builder does not fashion a house whose every stair may drop into a pit without bottom, and a good physician does not design a cure whose side effect is endless pain. If it be within God’s power to honour freedom and yet set a limit to ruin, and if it be within His wisdom to heal without erasing the Will that He Himself bestowed, then love requires that such a world be made. A fail-safe does not insult liberty; it guards its use for the ends that make liberty worth having.

When I was a schoolboy I formed a suspicion that has not left me, that not all words called revelation carry the same weight of light. The scene at Sinai declares itself differently, for there the commandments are not whispered impressions or private dreams, they are public and carved into stone, the sort of speech that does not lean upon the memory of hearers or the skill of scribes. I do not spurn the rest, yet I keep a scale in my hand, and I set near the top those moments where the message is most clear, most shared, least tempted by the drift of years. Charity, justice, mercy, fidelity to truth, these shine with a steadier flame than any speculation about the architecture of torment, and where conflicts arise I let the brighter stars set the course for the dim.

If eternal conscious torment fails the tests of goodness, wisdom, and proportion, we are not left with silence. There are other pictures that fit both reverence and reason. Some have held that in the end all wounds shall be bound up, and that even the hardest heart shall be softened, not by force, but by so steady a truth and so patient a love that resistance simply spends itself and is gone. Others have held that those who will not be healed are not kept alive as exhibits of judgement, but are granted the mercy of an end, and that death, once the last enemy, becomes the final kindness, for there is no virtue in suffering that teaches nothing and mends nothing and never ceases. I am not here to settle which is right; I say only that both are more worthy of God than a sentence without remedy.

For fairness, let the strongest contrary case speak. God is holy, and holiness cannot dwell with evil; God is just, and justice demands that the scales be set right; man is free, and freedom includes the right to refuse even Heaven. So runs the plea. My answer is sober. Holiness that cannot abide the presence of need is not holiness but pride, justice that never heals is not justice but vengeance, and freedom that destroys the very subject who exercises it is not freedom but a defect in design. If goodness is to remain meaningful in the mouths of the faithful, then some continuity must bind divine goodness to what we call good on Earth; otherwise we speak a word whose sense is lost, and worship becomes the surrender not of the Will but of the mind.

The proportion of penalty to act is a rule we do not lightly abandon in any court that hopes to be just. Our lives are bounded by time, our powers by circumstance, our knowledge by the narrow windows of our years. We do wrong, sometimes with intent, often with confusion, always with the frailty that belongs to creatures who did not choose their parents or their bodies or their first teachers or the hour and soil into which they were born. None of this excuses cruelty or deceit, yet all of it belongs to true accounting. If a judge on Earth must weigh such things though his sight is dim, shall the Judge of all the Earth refuse to weigh them where sight is perfect? The greater the knowledge, the more exact the mercy ought to be, for ignorance calls for patience and weakness calls for aid.

There remains the matter of creation itself. If God knew, and if God Willed, and if God fashioned a soul that would flower for a little while and then burn without end, what shall we say of that choice? We can say that the creature chose, yet the creature chose within a story whose whole arc was already present to the Maker. We can say that justice required it, yet justice that grows monstrous in order to protect its own honour is no longer just. We can say that Scripture declares it, yet Scripture itself speaks with many voices, and wisdom is to read the brighter by the brighter, not the darker by the dark. The more I turn these things over, the more I find that the doctrine of endless punishment asks me to call evil good for the sake of a system, and I will not do it.

What then do I affirm? I affirm that no man out-loves God, that no mother outlasts Him in patience, that no judge surpasses Him in equity, that no friend surprises Him with a mercy He had not considered. I affirm that the One who made the mind understands its limits, and the One who formed the heart knows what breaks it and what binds it back. I affirm that the cross of every tradition worthy of the name is not a banner for cruelty, but a pledge that loss can be redeemed and guilt can be borne and tears can be gathered and kept. I affirm that it is better, both for clarity and for courage, to live in trust of a goodness that has no end than to bow before a threat that has no end.

Some will say that such thoughts are tidy, that they taste of modern scruple and gentle ears. Perhaps. Yet simplicity is not always a fault; sometimes it is a sign that one has ceased piling stones atop a crooked wall and has gone back to the foundation. If God must be taught by our cruelty how serious sin is, then God is small. If God must soften His heart to resemble our better moments, then God is behind us upon the road. I think otherwise. Our better moments resemble Him. The river runs because the sea was there first.

So I will not abandon my faith in the goodness of God, not for the sake of arguments that need ten exceptions for each axiom, not for the comfort of belonging to an old chorus, not for the fear that someone somewhere may take comfort who ought first to feel shame. Let shame do its work, then let it pass, for its only honest task is to turn the soul toward repair. Let justice be done, and let it be the kind of justice that leaves the world better than it found it. And when I consider the end of things, I lift my eyes and I hold to this: that love which is truly infinite does not grow weary, that wisdom which is truly infinite does not blunder, and that power which is truly infinite is never forced to hate forever what it once chose to make.

If there be indeed a Hell, then it standeth empty; fear it not.

Iustum est ac decet homines quod in se ipsis profanum est sumere atque rursus sanctum reddere.

Just this once, because this Maxim is of my own making: It is right and fitting for people to take what is profane within themselves and make it holy again.

— Dr Stephen D. Jones

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