To Think God as Love

O Lord, in thee have I trusted: let me never be put to shame. And if an angel from heaven were to assure me that I had been cast out from thy sight, I would not believe him. Even if thou thyself, O God Most High, wert to say that thou hadst damned me for all [...]

Shortly after Gregory’s brother, Basil, died, Gregory went to visit his sister, the abbess Macrina, seeking her comfort and advice. He finds that she is dying, too; in fact, she died the day after their meeting.  Gregory wrote  ’On the Soul and the Resurrection’ shortly afterward. Apparently modeled on Plato’s Phaedo (the account of Socrates’ death-bed dialogue), Gregory composed ’On the Soul’ [...]

What do you make of this? What, if anything, would you say differently? 

It’s almost an (evangelical) theological truism: All we deserve from God is hell: eternal, penal punishment for our wickedness. I think that’s terribly mistaken. In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s blasphemous. (Of course, it goes without saying that not everyone who holds this view is a blasphemer.)

Psalm 88 is the “low point” of Scripture. It is the only one of the Psalms of lament that doesn’t at some point turn toward repentance and/or praise. The psalmist’s complaint, unabashedly directed against God’s “oppressive presence,” bleeds like a deep wound that cannot be healed. The lament is, to borrow James Crenshaw’s turn of phrase, a [...]

In this sermon, Keller contends that accepting the reality of Hell is crucial for understanding your own heart, living at peace in the world, and knowing the love of God. Following C. S. Lewis and Soren Kierkegaard, among others, Keller argues that “Hell” is not retributive punishment God imposes upon all those who disappoint God, but the condition to which one [...]

At First Things, you can read Avery Cardinal Dulles’ response to the question, “Who Can Be Saved?” I want to quote only the concluding paragraph. Who, then, can be saved? Catholics can be saved if they believe the Word of God as taught by the Church and if they obey the commandments. Other Christians can [...]

In this excerpt from Spe Salvi, Benedict’s second papal encyclical, the Pope puts forward his views of “purgatory” and “hell,” views which I find largely compelling.  I especially appreciate his understanding of the Last Judgment before Christ as a kind of instantaneous purgatory. With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, [...]

“Be serious about ‘condemnation’ for a moment. If those sitting next to you are to be deprived of salvation because of their present condition, then how much of your own being would have to go down into hell as well? Or do you suppose that exceptions will be made for certain people? Such a procedure [...]

“We are therefore not required to bring a systematically conceived hell into harmony with the love of God and make it credible, or indeed to justify it conceptually as love (and not perhaps merely as the revelation of self-glorifying divine justice), because no such system could be constructed out of a possible ‘knowledge’ apart from [...]