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David Lindblom

28-10-2009, 04:07 AM

There is a two part (so far) teaching by Fr. Thomas Hopko concerning the wrath of God. It is found here: http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko. He says some things I found to be somewhat different than what I had been taught thus far. Basically, he is saying that the wrath of God, the anger of God, the pleasure of God etc. are all very real things. While God in His essence is none of these things, in His energies or His activities in creation that are defined as wrath etc. these are very real none the less. That the experience of God by a person whether it be wrath or blessing it is truly God being wrathful or blessed. He further states that to limit this experience to the spiritual state of the person is to make that particular manifestation (like wrath) unreal. He says that that view is an example of western theology not eastern.

Now, to me, this butts up against the teaching of the Church concerning Heaven and Hell. Up till now I have been taught that all people are headed for the same place. And that it is our spiritual condition that determines what our perception of God's love is going to be, heaven or hell.

I'd like to hear others opinion on this who have been around the Orthodox block more than myself.

Paul Cowan

28-10-2009, 06:22 AM

I've not been around as most others, but there is a very real place called heaven and another called hell. It is not just our spiritual condition that gets us to one place or another, but our choice to accept God's love or reject it. God is omnipresent. He is in heaven and hell and everywhere. Those that are tormented are no further from God than those that are blessed by His presence. Those in hell cannot accept His love by choice and are "burned" by His brilliant light.

We are not all going to the same place. As Jesus said some are on His right and some are on His left. They are both equally distanced from Him, but separated nonetheless. Don't confuse anger with righteous anger as Jesus showed in the temple. God is Love. He is not a pansy. He is strong in His love. Jesus also said no earthly father would not discipline his child. neither will God not discipline us. He is a loving Father and takes us to the wood shed when necessary to correct our poor actions or to get our attention so we pay attention. What kind of a Father would do less? For these types, you can look in our cities and see absentee fathers and how their children turn out.

Paul

Aidan Kimel

28-10-2009, 04:32 PM

Here is a comment I left over at Fr Stephen's blog:

I very much appreciate Fr Thomas’s effort to salvage the wrath of God. One of my concerns about Kalomiros’s “River of Fire” is its virtual nullification of the divine wrath, thus making it impossible for pastors to preach huge portions of the Holy Scriptures, both Old Testament and New Testaments. Clearly the divine wrath poses a difficulty for us, but it is a difficulty that is posed to us by the Word of God. Fr Thomas reminds us that we should not too quickly retreat to abstraction, but rather we need to dwell in the biblical story and allow the Scriptures to teach us the meaning of the divine love and wrath. We may end with St Isaac of Syria but perhaps we should not begin with him.

I wish to offer one criticism (19:00-22:00): Fr Thomas accuses St Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent of asserting that God’s love, mercy, sadness, kindness, and wrath do not really exist in God; they are only ways of speaking of our experience of God. God as God is the “immobile, static supreme being.” Now I confess that I find Thomas Aquinas and all the scholastics difficult to comprehend; but I do know enough to know that this is a caricature of the Western tradition. For Aquinas God is pure act. He is not immobile and static being; he is the very act of existing. Heck if I know what this means, but I know it does not mean that the Christian God is the static unmoved mover of Aristotle. Eastern theologians really do need to stop caricaturing the scholastics. Either read and understand them or stop talking about them altogether.

Fr Thomas appears to believe that our language for God can be interpreted in a purely literal, univocal sort of way, that when we speak of God’s wrath, we mean precisely the same thing when we speak of the wrath of our next door neighbor; yet surely this is not the case. The scholastics were not the first Christian theologians to analyze language for God under the categories of metaphor, analogy, and anthropomorphism. I do not believe that the Palamite distinction between essence and energies so easily resolves the question “When we say that God loves us or gets angry with us, what precisely do we mean?” “What kind of language is this?” Aquinas’s discussion of these questions is one of the most important in the Christian tradition.

David Lindblom

28-10-2009, 07:03 PM

Owen

28-10-2009, 07:16 PM

Calvinism is nothing but theological determinism, and Orthodoxy is not deterministic.

The notion of a wrathful God--what I call the Great God Zappus--was always present in the Bible (the ancient Israelites seemed to be divided into two camps regarding His perceived nature). In the Christian West, this notion was reinforced by assumptions about our nature based on Tertullian's legalism and St. Augustine's flawed anthropology.

God does, indeed, act always out of love, but it can sometimes be tough love. Sometimes, we need a whack upside the head (i.e. a miracle) to get our attention, but His aim is not to break us but to refine us.

Matthew

28-10-2009, 08:13 PM

Up till now I have been taught that all people are headed for the same place.

I think that the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man is helpful to learn that there is a great divide between those in torment and those in paradise. It's also clear that fire is involved.

Yeah, this is the crux of the matter for me. I came from a very conservative Protestant background where they teach that we are literally being saved from God by God [in contrast] God is love.

I'm having also difficulties coming to terms with a Good and loving God, along the existence of God's wrath and anger. Fr. Thomas Hopko is saying that the wrath of God, the anger of God, the pleasure of God etc. are all very real things. I believe that this is true.

Proverbs 1:7 say that the fear of God is the beginning of all knowledge. The psalmist says that God is slow to anger and will not keep his anger forever. This implies that God has these attributes, although he will show mercy and not afflict us accordingly.

How then do I reconcile that with Saint Anthony in the Philokalia, quoted in the River of Fire, (and I'm editing for brevity) "God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and be offended are passions... God is good, dispassionate and immutable." (Chap 150) Because I believe that this is true also, and that God is love.

Are the answers to this dilemna in some of Aquinas's discussions that Alvin mentions? Although I'm hesitant to go there for answers, I'd rather hear from an Orthodox Christian.

Aidan Kimel

29-10-2009, 12:25 AM

Matthew, I do not know how Thomas Aquinas would analyze the question of how we should understand the biblical language of God's wrath; but perhaps the reflections of a student and translator of Aquinas, Fr Herbert McCabe, might be of interest. McCabe would say that the language of wrath must be interpreted figuratively. See this short piece that I wrote last year, "Finding the God who is Love (http://pontifications.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/finding-the-god-who-is-love/)."

Geoffrey Miller

15-11-2009, 02:57 AM

I rather enjoy Fr. Thomas' podcasts, though I do not always agree with him. I sent the following email, so hopefully I will get a response; if so, it seems some of your questions, not just mine, will be answered as well.

Dear Fr. Thomas,

Many of the things you said in part II of your series on God's wrath were very enlightening and cleared up some confusions I had about what you said in previous podcasts. However, your suggestion that St. Augustine bordered on modalism really threw me for a loop. I offer the following passage for your consideration, from this source (Chapter 4): http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130101.htm.

"All those Catholic expounders of the divine Scriptures, both Old and New, whom I have been able to read, who have written before me concerning the Trinity, Who is God, have purposed to teach, according to the Scriptures, thisdoctrine, that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit intimate a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality; and therefore that they are not three Gods, but one God: although the Father has begotten the Son, and so He who is the Father is not the Son; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and so He who is the Son is not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but only the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, Himself also co-equal with the Father and the Son, and pertaining to the unity of the Trinity. Yet not that this Trinity was born of the Virgin Mary, and crucified under Pontius Pilate, and buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended intoheaven, but only the Son. Nor, again, that this Trinity descended in the form of a dove upon Jesus when He wasbaptized; nor that, on the day of Pentecost, after the ascension of the Lord, when there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, the same Trinity sat upon each of them with cloven tongues like as of fire, but only theHoly Spirit. Nor yet that this Trinity said from heaven, You are my Son, whether when He was baptized by John, or when the three disciples were with Him in the mount, or when the voice sounded, saying, I have both glorified it, andwill glorify it again; but that it was a word of the Father only, spoken to the Son; although the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as they are indivisible, so work indivisibly. This is also my faith, since it is the Catholic faith."

I simply cannot see any difference between the theology you offer in your talks, and the one I encounter when reading St. Augustine. Both of you appear, at least to me, to be in almost perfect agreement.

Moreover, St. Thomas and other Western figures simply do not deny that when we speak about God being wise or good, that such things are not really real; quite the contrary. In the Summa Theologica, the following articles of question 13 (source: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1013.htm) of part 1 assert 1) we can call God wise or good or angry; 2) these names express something real in God, not just metaphorical; 3) names can be applied in the literal sense, so God really truly forgives, really truly gets angry, but in a way different and more perfect and surpassing such attributes as we observe in creatures, whose forgiveness or anger is but a pale reflection of the Divine forgiveness or anger; 4) God's anger and love an wisdom are not just different names for the same thing, but are really different, really diverse, and again, really real, even though they describe the single perfection of the one and only divinity, etc...

Again, I really enjoy your talks, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on these matters. I find the issues you often raise fascinating; I have never quite looked at things in the way you do, and I cannot overemphasize, your unique perspective is very refreshing to me, both intellectually and spiritually. Please father, do not think I am just out to criticize you. I am so sorry to hear about the poor treatment you have received from others, some of whom have even called you a heretic. But my inquiries with you are sincere and of good will.

Pax Christi,
Geoffrey

Owen Jones

15-11-2009, 03:45 AM

With respect to this thread and the topic on Orthodox understanding of hell, I think there is a certain freedom of thought for Christians to explore and apply that which works for the edification of their own souls. This is not the same as theological relativism at all, but acknowledges that salvation is a practical enterprise, not a theoretical one. And so, for example, a wise and loving father expresses wrath toward his children when they misbehave, utilizing the threat of punishment, knowing that they must fear him in order to learn the importance of doing the right thing, and then, in time, they too will acquire wisdom and understand that their father's wrath was not out of a malign hatred but only love for what was best for them. I must tell you how illuminating it was when I first read the statement -- the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom -- in its fullness, with some degree of spiritual understanding. fear is the beginning, not the end. This is my own appropriation of meaning (and power) from the verse, which is still open to further illumination for me. I don't just end there, having concluded that I have the answer to that particular puzzle and then move on to solving the next puzzle. It is a source of unlimited spiritual meditation.
And so while it is right and good to compare, say, Aquinas and an Orthodox Father on the subject of God's wrath and hell, or compare various Fathers on these topics and ask ourselves what is true, it could be that they are each true in their own way, and the truth still depends on willing and receptive ears. In the Philokalia I have run across examples of a father quoting a particular story to exemplify a spiritual principle, and then go on to say, "on the other hand, abba so and so said this..." The point being that what seems, to an unillumined mind to be a logical contradiction between two statements, is nothing more than two different ways of approach toward the same solution -- a pure and contrite heart.

We can also observe what happens when we exclude certain things because we perceive them to be in violation of some spiritual absolute that we strenuously cling to, only to find that much damage ensues. It is best that when such a case arises we simply acknowledge that we do not yet understand the meaning, being yet in a stage of spiritual infancy, rather than making some absolutely pronouncement on the subject. I kind of like the scene with the Ethiopian eunich, asking about the meaning of the Biblical passage. I am struck by what seems to me to be the spiritual simplicity and purity and naivite of the question, which is probably how we ought always to approach Scripture and Fathers, rather than thinking, what logical deduction can I make from this in order to form some absolute answer.

Geoffrey Miller

15-11-2009, 04:26 AM

And so while it is right and good to compare, say, Aquinas and an Orthodox Father on the subject of God's wrath and hell, or compare various Fathers on these topics and ask ourselves what is true, it could be that they are each true in their own way, and the truth still depends on willing and receptive ears. In the Philokalia I have run across examples of a father quoting a particular story to exemplify a spiritual principle, and then go on to say, "on the other hand, abba so and so said this..." The point being that what seems, to an unillumined mind to be a logical contradiction between two statements, is nothing more than two different ways of approach toward the same solution -- a pure and contrite heart.

We can also observe what happens when we exclude certain things because we perceive them to be in violation of some spiritual absolute that we strenuously cling to, only to find that much damage ensues. It is best that when such a case arises we simply acknowledge that we do not yet understand the meaning, being yet in a stage of spiritual infancy, rather than making some absolutely pronouncement on the subject. I kind of like the scene with the Ethiopian eunich, asking about the meaning of the Biblical passage. I am struck by what seems to me to be the spiritual simplicity and purity and naivite of the question, which is probably how we ought always to approach Scripture and Fathers, rather than thinking, what logical deduction can I make from this in order to form some absolute answer.

Amen and Amen. I concur. What strikes me as ironic is that Fr. Hopko appears to be arguing for this position as well, but while accidentally falling into the same trap, indeed, the very same trap he is attempting to disarm, of trying to circumscribe the uncircumscibable Divinity with logic.

I honestly get the same benefit from Western and Eastern theology. Call me blind, but I have yet to come across a contradiction. I read the Fathers as if I was having a conversation and coffee with them, and in a sense, I suppose whenever I read their writings, that is exactly what I am doing. I read them for spiritual enlightenment, edification, and moral motivation or to learn how to defend my beliefs.

I do not comprehend the minutiae of theological word games. I think they are all just misunderstandings.

Owen Jones

15-11-2009, 02:38 PM

On the other hand, I would never say that theological differences that appear to be over the meaning of words are only just misunderstandings. Far from it.

Evan

15-11-2009, 09:34 PM

Father Thomas Hopko has effectively led me to Orthodoxy, about which I knew nothing until a gym workout buddy of mind recommended I listen to one of his podcasts. I can't think of a single podcast of his that I didn't enjoy, save his podcast about terrorism.

What strikes me most about him is his fairness and forthrightness. He simply, intelligently, and passionately expounds the teachings of ancient Christianity. He also makes the distinctions between West and East understandable, neither glossing them over nor diametrically opposing them to one another for the sake of doing so.

I've particularly enjoyed his podcasts about the wrath of God. I've been unsatisifed with some writings from Orthodox authors that seem to deny that God "gets angry" (although it's possible I've misunderstood them). Hopko presents God's wrath in a way that affirms its reality without turning God into a kind of cruel tyrant.

Owen Jones

15-11-2009, 09:55 PM

OK, I'll bite. What did he say about terrorism???

Evan

15-11-2009, 10:24 PM

Oh, boy. I really don't want to misrepresent what he said, and it's possible that I didn't understand it correctly. Nevertheless...

He seemed to frame 9/11 in the context of God chastising us, in the same way he chastised the Jews by means of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians (well, not so much the Persians), etc. He made reference to our abortions and pornography and how we ought to reflect upon what we're doing to make Muslims hate us so much. He also said that the terrorists were not cowards (I am not sure why, and I can't say I agree).

Now, I felt (personally, I stress) that he mischaracterized the attacks on the World Trade Center as some kind of measured criticism of Western moral ills, as opposed to a hateful act that was about nothing so much as Islamic supremacy. I find it hard to believe that Mohammad Atta cared about our abortions, as opposed to the fact that we did not submit to Islam or pay the jizya, as Bin Laden requested us to do, prior to 9/11.

I suppose the answer to this is, Nebuchednezzar wasn't engaging in measured criticism either, but God permitted him to do what he did in order to humble the Jews-- regardless of how evil his own motives might have been. Perhaps He permitted Mohammad Atta to do evil for the same purpose. I tend to lean towards the idea that the lesson to be learned from 9/11 is how much we are hated simply because we are perceived as being a Christian nation, as opposed to how evil pornography and abortions are. Now, of course our nation is rife with such evils, but I just can't see the connection between the one and the other. And I think that there's something problematic about worrying about the kind of example we're setting to people who are so clearly bent on our destruction, and who will take whatever kindness we offer them as weakness.

I am also aware that this may be a disagreement that has nothing to do with ancient Christianity, but rather with contemporary politics.

Lord forgive me if I am wrong, and help me to do better the next time.

Fr Raphael Vereshack

15-11-2009, 10:43 PM

Evan

15-11-2009, 11:41 PM

To interpret the correctness of this we would first have to come to an understanding of the pattern or paradigm found throughout the Old Testament.

i) Israel betrays through idolatry their call by God to faithfulness. This betrayal is described as a form of adultery.

ii) after refusing to repent God chastises Israel through foreign enemies. These enemies are brutal and desire only to enslave Israel. They share in none of the moral or spiritual values of Israel.

iii) God makes it clear however that once having fallen into such slavery to the foreigner that this is the time for repentance. Any attempt at escape in a human fashion without the required period of repentance will result in further oppression by the foreigner.

iv) only after this required period of repentance and humiliation will Israel find its way back home.

So does this pattern fit what is before us?

In Christ- Fr Raphael

Father, bless:

It certainly seems to, in the Old Testament context.

But still, I must ask: Can we say that our success in resisting oppression can reveal how we should respond to it, interpret it? Hezekias certainly met with more success in warding off oppression than Joakim, precisely because he feared God. Because he was humble and righteous, God showed Him favor. Should Hezekias have submitted to humiliation and oppression?

Owen Jones

16-11-2009, 12:20 AM

I shudder to think that any of the Fathers would say something like: it was true in the Old Testament "context." I think it is more accurate to say that the hidden truth of the Old is revealed in the context of the New.

Owen Jones

16-11-2009, 12:27 AM

btw, apparently Fr. Hopko has interpreted 9/11 in the same theological fashion as did Jerry Falwell, who was pretty well "crucified" over it. But the issue is this: what spiritual meaning if any can be derived, beyond the obvious -- that we were cruelly attacked? And so this is a perfectly legitimate spiritual interpretation of historical events, imho. Remember how many people temporarily flocked to church afterwards? They were probably greeted by some pretty drearily innocuous sermons and quickly departed. Fr. Hopko is rather infamous for not pulling any punches. Of course, who the heck cares what an Orthodox priest says? He's not likely to get on the nightly news.

Our priest gave a sermon today somewhat along the same lines, but I really felt that it fell on deaf ears, and the reason is that it lacked sufficient tonality. It was more like a stock recitation of does and don'ts rather than a catharsis. Just condemning materialism is a pretty empty slogan. There is not much salvation in condemnation...

Evan

16-11-2009, 12:38 AM

What I should have said, is that it seems to be consistent with the inspired accounts of God's activities (or energies, if you prefer) we are given in the Old Testament. Which activities are Christ's, in the Spirit, by Whom and in Whom the God of Israel works.

I'm just not sure that Hopko really came to terms with the cruelty of the attack. It felt like he was presenting murderers as justly indignant martyrs. It's one thing to say God permits such things for purposes of instruction, another to say that those who carry them out were motivated by just grievances about our decadence.

But again, perhaps that's just how I interpreted it. I agree that the theological point is entirely consistent with what he says about God's wrath in the podcasts that inspired this thread.

Owen Jones

16-11-2009, 03:56 AM

Fr. Hopko is a man who feels everything very, very intensely. So you have to kind of put anything he says into that perspective.

Geoffrey Miller

16-11-2009, 04:45 AM

To interpret the correctness of this we would first have to come to an understanding of the pattern or paradigm found throughout the Old Testament.

i) Israel betrays through idolatry their call by God to faithfulness. This betrayal is described as a form of adultery.

ii) after refusing to repent God chastises Israel through foreign enemies. These enemies are brutal and desire only to enslave Israel. They share in none of the moral or spiritual values of Israel.

iii) God makes it clear however that once having fallen into such slavery to the foreigner that this is the time for repentance. Any attempt at escape in a human fashion without the required period of repentance will result in further oppression by the foreigner.

iv) only after this required period of repentance and humiliation will Israel find its way back home.

So does this pattern fit what is before us?

In Christ- Fr Raphael

Aye, Fr. Raphael, why do you have to make the truth so painfully obvious? Keep it better hidden next time, so it doesn't unsettle me so much and is easier to deny.

Affectus evinco causa.

I really, really don't want to believe God permitted the deaths of hundreds of innocent people as some sort of chastisement. It doesn't seem just, it seems rather cruel. Is it true though? Probably.

I wish objective goodness would stay more in line with my personal expectations and convictions, at least every now and again would be nice.

Owen Jones

16-11-2009, 01:28 PM

Forget about these specific cases. What kind of God would create a world that He knew He would have to save? That puts everything else into perspective.

Brian Patrick Mitchell

16-11-2009, 03:08 PM

I really, really don't want to believe God permitted the deaths of hundreds of innocent people as some sort of chastisement.

"Innocent people"? Who would they be?

In Christ, Dn. Patrick

Fr Raphael Vereshack

16-11-2009, 03:40 PM

Evan wrote:
Should Hezekias have submitted to humiliation and oppression?

God bless!

I would say that this is exactly an example of how discernment is necessary so as to understand what is occurring in terms of God's particular economia.

Thus in some circumstances the Israelites were called to actively but righteously resist.

But in other circumstances they were categorically told by the prophets that the foreign invasion was a time not for resistance but rather for humility & repentance. In fact one king of Israel if I recall correctly was slain because he sought help from the Egyptians.

But in any case I am not saying the OT pattern needs to be matched exactly to our circumstances to give us an either/or as to how we should respond. I am just saying that if the OT was brought up already in this discussion then look at the patterns it provides.

It could be that what we need to follow combines elements from both patterns above: repentance/resistance. I don't know.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

Fr Raphael Vereshack

16-11-2009, 03:50 PM

Evan wrote:

I'm just not sure that Hopko really came to terms with the cruelty of the attack. It felt like he was presenting murderers as justly indignant martyrs. It's one thing to say God permits such things for purposes of instruction, another to say that those who carry them out were motivated by just grievances about our decadence.

I'm purposely avoiding a political discussion here as to the 'motive' and 'justification' of such attacks. Not just because this isn't a forum for such discussions (that's true) and I don't have a very clear sense of such events (that's true also). But because such discussions often end up interpreting what has occurred through the familiar lens of 'victimization'. Most all of us instinctively feel the weakness of such arguments- but we're also afraid to grapple with this openly.

In any case theologically it is important to keep in mind that chastisement through human agency in the OT does not connect directly to motive.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

Herman Blaydoe

16-11-2009, 03:55 PM

Despite what some Protestants think, the USA is not Israel, it is not a "chosen people". At least the Children of Israel occasionally listened to what God had to say and were able to see God's hand in the events that shape their lives. I am not sure America is near as responsive, nor does it have any reason to be.

God permits bad things to happen. The question in my mind is why would God go out of His way to STOP these things in America over any other place in the world? Why is post-Christian America any more deserving of God's special attention than any other place?

There are very bad people in the world. The negligence of the leadership of the USA allowed some very bad people to do a very bad thing. Whether or not God "caused" it, He is the ultimate opportunist and can certainly USE it for His Glory. But God does not "lead" the USA as He lead the People of Israel, and remember that the People of Israel are no longer a country (and certainly not the USA!), but the Church!

But then, just to throw some interesting fuel on the fire, which CHURCH was actually destroyed in the horrible events of 9/11? Protestant? Catholic? Mormon? What does THAT mean? Anyone? Bueller?

Little thoughts from a bear of little brain,
Herman the troublemaking Pooh

Fr Raphael Vereshack

16-11-2009, 04:01 PM

Geoffrey Miller wrote:

I really, really don't want to believe God permitted the deaths of hundreds of innocent people as some sort of chastisement. It doesn't seem just, it seems rather cruel. Is it true though? Probably.

Maybe the monastic approach is better. Let's say that it was WWII and the Nazis had just attacked Russia. How did the Church respond?

The holiest among the faithful responded: "this was for our sins." But at the same time the very same people blessed the effort at resistance and characterized every life laid down as part of this effort as being sacrificial.

There's something to think about in this approach.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

Evan

16-11-2009, 04:35 PM

Evan wrote:

I'm purposely avoiding a political discussion here as to the 'motive' and 'justification' of such attacks. Not just because this isn't a forum for such discussions (that's true) and I don't have a very clear sense of such events (that's true also). But because such discussions often end up interpreting what has occurred through the familiar lens of 'victimization'. Most all of us instinctively feel the weakness of such arguments- but we're also afraid to grapple with this openly.

In any case theologically it is important to keep in mind that chastisement through human agency in the OT does not connect directly to motive.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

I'm not sure I understand, Father. I agree that Nebuchednezzer wasn't engaging in measured criticism of Jewish decadence. But to bring the discussion back to Hezekias-- it seems to me that God granted victories to Hezekias because of his righteousness AND Sennacharib's blasphemies. Indeed, Hezekias calls upon God to look upon Sennacharib's arrogance and bring him low for it. The evil of the enemy seems relevant.

And I think Herman raises a good point about (I shudder to say it) the particular context of the Old Testament, through which we see a stubborn people, but a people chosen by God nonetheless, brought along slowly, towards first the Promised Land, and then towards the Heavenly Jerusalem. As I understand it, Jews were brought low that they might see how incapable they are as mere human beings of living absolutely righteously, in preparation for the Incarnation. They were brought low, that they might be properly disposed to receive that life which is truly Life. Thus the humility of the Theotokos, through which she received the grace to say "yes" can be understood as the product of many, many hard lessons.

I wonder if we might be mixing apples and oranges, even as I acknowledge that the Scriptures reveal that God has acted in such ways respecting the Jews (and that the Jews do stand for the world).

Geoffrey Miller

16-11-2009, 05:04 PM

Maybe the monastic approach is better. Let's say that it was WWII and the Nazis had just attacked Russia. How did the Church respond?

The holiest among the faithful responded: "this was for our sins." But at the same time the very same people blessed the effort at resistance and characterized every life laid down as part of this effort as being sacrificial.

There's something to think about in this approach.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

Yes, kind of a both/and mentality rather than an either/or one. I like it.

Eric Peterson

16-11-2009, 09:35 PM

The principle problem I see in trying to point to incidents of the wrath of God today is that we just do not know for sure if a certain happening is due to God's wrath or something else, because this sort of purpose needs to be revealed by God Himself. At least this is how it seems to me. Nowadays, a lot of folks, even Orthodox, try to make large statements purporting to see into God's purposes. Who told them it was so? If we examined the processes that led them to such conclusions, we may well find that it came from their own opinion, and not from divine revelation. It is dangerous speculation to say on one's own what God's purpose was in doing something or allowing something to happen--I refer in this case to specific events like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. All sufferings are, of course, a summons to repent. We all need to repent, however, even when there is no disaster. I think the Lord tells us something, when he speaks in the Gospels about two disasters that happened in His time, one of which was the collapse of a tower that killed several people. "Do you suppose they were worse sinners than yourselves? No. But unless you repent, the same will also happen to you." I would like to read some Patristic commentary on that statement.

Another problem, which I see more in Protestant leaders than in Orthodox (maybe Fr. Thomas is an exception), is giving America the place of Old Israel. This certainly is bizarre. Contrary to the propaganda, America is not a divinely-guided or chosen nation. It has no special relationship with God as a people or entity. It's just another of the nations, with problems like all the others. Disasters strike every nation. If one wants to harp on abortion, for example, there are far fewer abortions in the United States than in some Orthodox countries, like Russia, for example. We can't look at America without looking at the rest of the world when dealing with problems such as this one.

9/11 could be part of the wrath of God, however, in that it is another of the tribulations scheduled to visit the world before the Lord returns. But that is it, I think. It's all conjecture, really, until God reveals it. I could be wrong. Things in Orthodoxy are exceedingly complicated. Either way, it's time to repent for all of us, just as it was on Sept. 10, 2001, and Sept. 12.

Evan

16-11-2009, 10:13 PM

Luke

26-12-2009, 03:34 AM

There are many treasures in this thread:

1) Owen's "What kind of God would create a world that He knew He would have to save?" was a great example of the self evident truth of Christianity, like all of Jesus's teachings.

2) Herman's post was right on as well. Very thought provoking.

3) Eric's thoughts on human conjecture. A wonderful summation.

He says, "All sufferings are a summons to repent." Indeed. When we own who we are, what we are, and what we [should] strive to be --- God will grant us mercies and comfort us. I've felt a calling to do my cross particularly during our prayer "That we may complete the remaining time of our life in peace and repentance." because I find it a wonderfully simple idea that simultaneously shows us what we desire and what God desires for us. These two things, amidst all the confusion in our lives, will be harmonious.

I've found from my studies of science and history, as well as my experience as a human among humans, that we try to control things that we have no hope of controlling. Part of this idea includes a mental control or grasp of what has gone on, what goes on, and what will go on. Thus, we get speculation of WHY this bad thing happened to us, whatever it may be. Ironically, our leaders at time give reasons that capitalize on this desire to further control a situation or its aftermath, in order to make it better or "understand it". We do it as individuals, too. I have hypothesized that these speculations, just as Eric has said, tend to be self-centered (USA is a chosen nation) and thus miss the mark.

Now there is a crucial nuance that must be mentioned. Many of the characteristics that have lead the USA to be so cherished and prosperous are precisely because they are of the truth, so insomuch as these characteristics are beloved, the USA will indeed be a place of light. Soon, these things may vanish, so the entity that we are talking about is only as good as the true characteristics that may remain. That said, it is not the entity, but those within it. The framework may have been enlightened, but when the inheritors rip out the foundation, what good is the house? It can be blown over or crushed quite easily. I've expounded on this to make it less specific to our great country and to show how successful places can rise and fall, just as they always have, with or without "God's" blessing or curse.

I find this way of thinking similar to situations when people die and some say, "The Lord decided to take him." I find this deterministic in ways. Does God know when all will happen? Certainly, he is out of time. But He created a world where resources are finite, and there are laws and sciences, competition and time. Sometimes the Lord takes me because I didn't take statin drugs when I could have; I smoked for 50 years instead of quitting; or I refused to see a doctor who could save me or put me on a healthier path. Sometimes I drive a machine at high speeds in a world where others drive drunk, crash and instantly kill me. You get the point. Can God intervene? I'm sure He can. It seems to me that he mostly doesn't and that could be (is) for the best of reasons. If the person we are suppposed to be like had to suffer all of it, how much more will we, the imperfect, suffer (as he said)? I guess my point is that he makes the knowledge of this world foolish and non-sensical so that we realize that true life and hope is in the everlasting. Try as we may, all of our explanations are in vain. We can't grasp the WHY of countless material interactions, because that's not what we were made for. It seems to me we can grasp the Way, the Truth and the Life if we try and the harder we try, the more will be granted to us (and the more we'll suffer). It's uncomfortable due to our lack of "understanding" but we wanted the Truth, and we got it.

Christ is Born!

M.C. Steenberg

26-12-2009, 05:52 PM

Dear friends,

I've only just returned to this thread, which I skimmed over before but hadn't any time to read thoroughly.

The original question is excellent, and I do hope some further discussion on it can be had - setting perhaps to the side the tempting tangents that can creep in. The idea that 'hell' is simply 'heaven experienced differently' is certainly not at all uncommon in a number of modern-day Orthodox writings and thinkers; and there is a very real question as to whether this sits well with the patristic vision of heaven and hell that is the Church's mainstay.

I'd be very grateful read other's considerations of this issue.

INXC, Dcn Matthew

Aidan Kimel

27-12-2009, 01:42 AM

The original question is excellent, and I do hope some further discussion on it can be had - setting perhaps to the side the tempting tangents that can creep in. The idea that 'hell' is simply 'heaven experienced differently' is certainly not at all uncommon in a number of modern-day Orthodox writings and thinkers; and there is a very real question as to whether this sits well with the patristic vision of heaven and hell that is the Church's mainstay.

The thesis that Hell is "heaven experienced differently" is a view that one finds expressed by many contemporary theologians and preachers, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. This has in fact been my view for the past twenty-five years or longer. Given my belief that God's infinite and unbounded love for humanity is unconditional and unmerited, it seems logical to conclude that the damned suffer because they hate God. Just as many find sitting through opera to be intolerable, so the damned find being in the presence of God to be unendurable torment. God does not punish; we punish ourselves by rejecting God and his mercy.

But I still have a couple nagging questions about it this understanding of Hell.

First, does it accord with the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament? The contemporary position puts God into a passive position: God does not "condemn" to Hell; he does not punish; rather, he "permits" the sinner to eternally reject his love and mercy. It is the sinner who damns himself. Yet in Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment (Matt 25), the Son of Man is cast into an active role: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." Perhaps the words of judgment can be interpreted as mere ratification that the damned have chosen their damnation; but it's more difficult, I think, to construe the eternal fire of which Jesus speaks as being God himself. Similarly, in Jesus' parable of the wedding feast (Matt 22), it is the king who orders the man without the wedding garment to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness. Consider St Gregory Palamas's interpretation of this parable:

In the earlier passage the Lord commanded that the tares be bundled up first, then thrown into the fire. Now He first orders that the man be bound hand and foot, then that he be cast into outer darkness. In both cases, He adds that there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, so hell-fire must be the same as outer darkness. As that darkness is without any gleam of light, why is it not called "innermost" darkness rather that "outer"? God is the true, eternal light without evening, where the spirits of the just are now, and later the saints will dwell bodily. He is the Sun of righteousness. People who live impure, unjust lives are outside this Sun and its light even now, but in this life they do have the hope of repentance, and enjoy the light of the visible sun and the consolation of the rest of God's creation, while the Lord in His love for mankind forbears, patiently awaiting their conversion. However, any who do not repent here will be deprived then of God's tolerance and long-suffering, and the pleasure of His visible creation. They will find themselves much further away from God, bereft of hope, and will be handed over to eternal punishment. So they are without the true light now, but then, as we have said, they will be even further removed from it and will be delivered up to that darkness far outside the light, to unmitigated suffering and anguish. ...

Who will withstand the Lord's anger? Who will endure the accusation and shame which the Lord indicated to us in the Gospel through His words in the parable to the man wearing sin's ugly garb? Who will be able to bear that wrathful divine sentence, of the angels' violent haste to carry it out, as they snatch the condemned man from the company of the righteous, separating him as tares from wheat, bind him without mercy and thrust him, alas, into hell? Who can endure that outer darkness for ever without light, the unceasing inconsolable turmoil of extreme grief, the gnashing and grinding of teeth, the continuous unbearable pain of being burned by the unquenchable fire? What sort of fire is that which burns physical beings and bodiless spirits, causing hurt while keeping them alive for ever, and which melts the fiery element of our own bodies, according to the words of Scripture: "The elements shall melt with fervent heat"? How much worse will the agony be because there is no hope of deliverance! Nor shall we see to what level of evil we have sunk, for that fire is completely without light. (Homily 27: 10-12)

Second, would most of the Church Fathers have agreed with the view that Hell is Heaven experienced differently, or to put it differently, do the majority of the Church Fathers understand the fire of hell as identical to the fire of God's love? I am not a patristic scholar, nor have I read an extended treatment of the beliefs of the Church Fathers on matters eschatological. Last month I decided to go through all the citations included in the three volume The Faith of the Early Fathers that speak of Hell, as well as the citations included under the topic of Hell in John R. Willis's The Teachings of the Church Fathers. Using florilegia is always hazardous: (a) they are inescapably selective and (b) the excerpted texts are ripped from their literary context and therefore are easily mis-read. Acknowledging these cautions, I did not find a single text where the fire of Hell is clearly and unmistakably identified with God or God's presence or God's love. I did not find a single text that clearly states that the damned suffer because they hate the love of God. A couple come close, perhaps; but none are as clear on this as St Isaac the Syrian is, and most appear to say just the opposite.

Here are three texts I found that might be invoked in support of the thesis that Hell is Heaven differently experienced:

St Basis the Great:

"The voice of the Lord divides the flame of fire." ... I believe that the fire prepared in punishment for the devil and his angels is divided by the voice of the Lord. Thus, hence there are two capacities in fire, one of burning and the other of illuminating, the fierce and punitive property of the fire may await those who deserve to burn, while its illuminating and radiant part may be reserved for the enjoyment of those who are rejoicing. (On Psalm 28, no. 6)

Basil does not explicitly identify the fire with God, but given that this fire both punishes and illumines, perhaps one might argue that Basil implies an identification of sorts.

St Gregory Nazianzen:

I know a cleansing fire which Christ came to hurl upon the earth; and He Himself is called Fire in words anagogically applied. ... I know also a fire that is not cleansing but avenging, that fire either of Sodom, which, mixed with a storm of brimstone, He pours down on all sinners, or that which is prepared for the devil and his angels, or that which proceeds from the face of the Lord and burns up His enemies all around. And still there is a fire more fearsome that these, that with which the sleepless worm is associated, and which is never extinguished but belongs eternally to the wicked. All these are of destructive power, unless even here someone may prefer to understand this in a more merciful way, worthy of Him who chastises. (Oration on Holy Baptism 40.36)

Note the distinction between the Christ's cleansing, purifying fire, with which he might be identified, and the avenging, retributive, inextinguishable fire that is poured out on the obstinately wicked. The latter must be considered to be a purely destructive power, unless, Gregory obliquely intimates, one believes in the apocatastasis.

St John Damascene:

We shall rise again, therefore, our souls united again to our bodies, the latter now made incorruptible and having put corruption aside; and we shall stand before the awesome tribunal of Christ. And the devil and his demons, and the man that is his, the Antichrist, and the impious and the sinners shall be consigned to everlasting fire, not material fire such as we know, but such fire as God would know. (The Source of Knowledge 3.4.27)

St John here asserts that the fire of hell is not a material fire but rather a fire known only to God (a spiritual fire?). But he does not explicitly identify this fire with God himself.

Several of the Fathers speak of Hell as separation from God:

St Basil the Great:

Those who have grieved the Holy Spirit by their evil ways, or have not increased the talents they were given, will be deprived of what they received, and their share of grace will be given to others, or as one of the Gospels says, they will be completely cut to pieces, meaning that they will be separated from the Spirit forever. ... It is as I have said: the cutting to pieces is eternal separation of the soul from the Spirit. At present, before the day of judgment comes, even though the Spirit cannot dwell within those who are unworthy, He nevertheless is present in a limited way with those who have been baptized, hoping that their conversion will result in salvation. On the day of judgment, however, He will be completely cut off from the soul that has defiled his grace. That is why Scripture says that in hell no one confesses God and in death none can remember Him, since the Spirit's help is no longer present. (On the Holy Spirit 40)

I note that the separation from the Spirit appears to be self-inflicted.

Similarly St Irenaeus:

And to as many as continue in their love towards God, does He grant communion with Him. But communion with God is life and light, and the enjoyment of all the benefits which He has in store. But on as many as, according to their own choice, depart from God, He inflicts that separation from Himself which they have chosen of their own accord. But separation from God is death, and separation from light is darkness; and separation from God consists in the loss of all the benefits which He has in store. Those, therefore, who cast away by apostasy these forementioned things, being in fact destitute of all good, do experience every kind of punishment. God, however, does not punish them immediately of Himself, but that punishment falls upon them because they are destitute of all that is good. Now, good things are eternal and without end with God, and therefore the loss of these is also eternal and never-ending. It is in this matter just as occurs in the case of a flood of light: those who have blinded themselves, or have been blinded by others, are for ever deprived of the enjoyment of light. It is not, [however], that the light has inflicted upon them the penalty of blindness, but it is that the blindness itself has brought calamity upon them: and therefore the Lord declared, "He that believes in Me is not condemned," [John 3:18-21], that is, is not separated from God, for he is united to God through faith. On the other hand, He says, "He that believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God;" that is, he separated himself from God of his own accord. "For this is the condemnation, that light has come into this world, and men have loved darkness rather than light. For every one who does evil hates the light, and comes not to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that does truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that he has wrought them in God. (Against Heresies V.27)

But many more patristic texts can be invoked to support the thesis that Hell is divine punishment imposed by God:

St Hippolytus of Rome:

Standing before [Christ's] judgment, all of them, men, angels, and demons, crying out in one voice, shall say: "Just is your judgment!" And the justice of that cry will be apparent in the recompense made to each. To those who have done well, everlasting enjoyment shall be given; while to the lovers of evil shall be given eternal punishment. The unquenchable and unending fire awaits these latter, and a certain fiery worm which does not die and which does not waste the body, but continually bursts forth from the body with unceasing pain. No sleep will give them rest; no night will soothe them; no death will deliver them from punishment; no appeal of interceding friends will profit them. For neither are the righteous any longer seen by them, nor are they themselves worthy of remembrance. (Against the Greeks 2)

St Cyprian of Carthage:

An ever-burning Gehenna and the punishment of being devoured by living flames will consume the condemned; nor will there be any way in which the torments can ever have respite or be at an end. Souls along with their bodies will be preserved for suffering in infinite agonies. ... The grief at punishment will then be without the fruit of repentance; weeping will be useless, and prayer ineffectual. Too late will they believe in eternal punishment, who would not believe in eternal life. (To Demetrian 560)

Oh, what a day that will be, and how great when it comes, dearest brethren! when the Lord begins to survey His people and to recognize by examining with divine knowledge the merits of each individual! to cast into hell evildoers, and to condemn our persecutors to the eternal fire and punishing flame! ... When that unveiling has come and when the brightness of God shines about us, honored by the condescension of the Lord, we shall be as blessed and joyful as they will remain guilty and miserable--those deserters of God and rebels against God, who have done the will of the devil, so that it is necessary for them to be tortured along with him in the unquenchable fire. (Letter to the People of Thibar 579)

St Cyril of Jerusalem:

We shall be raised, then, all having eternal bodies, but not all with bodies alike. If a man is righteous, he shall receive a heavenly body, so that he may be able to converse worthily with the angels. But if a man is sinful, he shall receive an eternal body fitted to endure the penalties of sin, so that he may burn in the eternal fire without ever being consumed. (Catechetical Lectures 18.19)

St Jerome:

There are many who say there are no future punishments for sins nor any torments extrinsically applied, but that sin itself and the consciousness of guilt serve as punishment, while the worm in the heart does not die, and a fire is kindled in the mind, much like a fever, which does not torment the ailing person externally but punishes, even bodies by its seizures, without the application of any torments that might be brought to bear from without. These arguments and fraudulent fancies are but inane and empty words having the semblance of eloquence of speech but serving only to delude sinners; and if they give them credence they only add to the burden of eternal punishment which they will carry with them. (Commentary on Ephesians 3.5.6)

St Augustine:

Why can we not say that even incorporeal spirits are able to be afflicted in some real ways, however, remarkable, with the punishment of corporeal fire, if the spirits of men, certainly themselves incorporeal, are able now to be contained in corporeal members, and in the future will be able to be bound indissolubly to the bonds of their own bodies? ... Gehenna, the which is called also a slough of fire and brimstone, will be a corporeal fire and it will torture the bodies of the damned, either of both men and of demons, the solid bodies of men and the ethereal bodies of demons; or the bodies of men only, with their spirits, while of the demons, their spirits without bodies shall so cleave to the corporeal fires as to feel their punishment but not so as to give them life. But there will be one fire for both, as Truth itself has declared. (The City of God 21.10.1)

St Gregory the Great:

When we say that a spirit is held fast by fire, we mean that it is in torment of fire by seeing and by feeling. For it begins to suffer from the fire when it sees it; and when it sees itself attacked by the flames, it feels itself burning. That is how a corporeal thing burns an incorporeal one: an invisible burning and pain is received from a visible fire, and an incorporeal mind is tortured by the incorporeal flame of a corporeal fire. From the words of Scripture, however, we are able to gather that the soul suffers not only by seeing but also by experiencing. ... If the Devil and his angels, although they are incorporeal, are to be tortured by a corporeal fire, what wonder if souls, even before they are reunited with their bodies, can feel corporeal torments? (Dialogues 4.29)

Some think that hell is in a definite place on the earth, but others suppose that it is under the earth. It does seem to me, however, that if we call something infernal because it is situated in a lower position, then hell ought to be infernal to the earth, just as the earth is infernal to the heavens. (Dialogues 4.43)

At the very least, I think it is fair to say that many (most?) of the Church Fathers understand Hell as a form of separation from God and as just punishment for sin. What do we do with these testimonies?

M.C. Steenberg

27-12-2009, 01:52 PM

Dear Father Alvin,

Thank you for the excellent post. I’m grateful that you’ve saved me the time necessary to bring together so many quotations from the Fathers! It is clear that you have been thinking a great deal about all this.

The idea that hell is ‘heaven experienced differently’ seems to have reached a new height of popularity in the 19th, especially 20th, and now 21st centuries—amongst, as you say, various Christian groups. Yet it has cropped up from time to time throughout history, and in and of itself is not wholly new (though some of the ways that it is expressed may be). It seems to me that this view emerges out of two key issues:

The desire to see God as loving, without this vision of love being compromised by the apparent contradiction of ‘punishment’, much less eternal punishment; and
The desire to, nonetheless, respect man’s freedom;

That is, the impetus for this view is ‘positive’—it attempts to articulate a vision of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ that account positively for the goodness of the loving God and the goodness of human freedom, in a manner that compromises neither. Thus, man genuinely can choose good or evil, and God genuinely will exercise loving judgement; but since His judgement is always love, the ‘punishment’ received if man chooses evil is simply love (or light, or fire, or glory, or whichever vocabulary is being used) experienced differently. So a fire which may illumine one, is a fire experienced as burning another; a light that brightens one is experienced as overwhelming another, etc. This expression almost always appears, tied in to another assertion: that God cannot be understood to ‘punish’ (which is taken to mean, inflict vengeance or wrath), therefore ‘love’ and ‘punishment’ must be seen as mutually exclusive.

On one level this is all very inviting. It seemingly accounts for a reality to different states or conditions after death based on the manner in which one lived one’s life; it seemingly accounts for God’s response to human freedom always being an expression of His love; it seemingly accounts for the ‘realities’ of hell and wrath, largely as metaphors for God’s love experienced in different ways by different people, preserving a disparity between ‘love’ and ‘punishment’.

The problem, however, as your references to the Scriptures and your quotations from the Fathers already suggest, is that this view has little to no grounding in either the Scriptural or patristic heritage of the Church, and in fact that heritage very regularly makes assertions that wholly deny the possibility of this view.

The chief problems with the view, which you already articulated well, can be listed like this:

The biblical and patristic assertions that heaven and hell are places, and different places, must be either ignored or rendered wholly allegorical;
The biblical and patristic assertions that God actively sends the sheep to one side, the goats to the other—and not that they simply end up their by their own measure with God as passive observer—must be either ignored or rendered wholly allegorical;
The biblical and patristic assertions that Gehenna is a place in which sins are actively punished by the demons (i.e. not a place where love is simply experienced as want or separation) must be either ignored or rendered wholly allegorical;
The assertion that God’s love and God’s justice are mutually opposed (which is a false assertion, a deeply un-scriptural assertion) must be maintained, allowing for the exercise of ‘justice’ only of it is identical in form to love. It is quite correct to see God’s justice as His love in nature: i.e. God always acts in the same manner toward creation, which is a manifestation of His loving nature. But the form that this love-in-justice takes in response to sin can be radically different than the form love-in-justice takes in response to righteousness—a view strongly maintained in the Fathers, yet which must be largely abandoned to maintain this view on hell as ‘heaven experienced differently’.

I probably do not need to go into too great detail here, since you’ve already provided a host of patristic quotations that emphasise these points in various ways. But suffice it to say that the Christian tradition has always emphasised the active role Christ takes in sending the just to one place and the unjust to another in the judgement (e.g. He will send His angels, who will ‘sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire’ [Matthew 13.49]; He will come to ‘reward every man according to his works’ [Matthew 16.27]; He shall say ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire … and these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal’ [Matthew 25.41, Matthew 25.46]; etc.). Such proclamations cannot be easily or rightly reconciled with a view that everyone ends up essentially in the same ‘state’ or place, experienced differently solely by one’s mindset or expectation. This view challenges the confession of true places of reward and punishment, and the confession of Christ actively judging and sending men to such places. Liturgically, it would be impossible to sing the hymns of the Sunday of the Last Judgement with such a view in place.

Further, such a view challenges the true nature of God’s love. It is well and true to say that God always acts in love. It is absolutely true to say, as you do, that:

God's infinite and unbounded love for humanity is unconditional and unmerited, [and so] it seems logical to conclude that the damned suffer because they hate God. However, the next step in the chain of assertions seems to be that the suffering one experiences through hating God is solely one’s own self-induced suffering—but this is neither a logical second step, nor is it authentically compatible with the Scriptures. It is genuinely true that the damned suffer because they hate God; but that hatred invokes consequences—consequences which are just as real as the hatred; and these consequences do not in any way suggest that God is not unconditionally loving. Man’s hatred has effects: it separates one from God, which allies one to the demons, which allies one to suffering. The dominion of death is made truer master, rather than defeated enemy. One can add to this the fact that God’s love may well become painful in receipt in such a condition—so that the same love experienced by the righteous is also experienced by the sinner, but in a radically different way (and surely God’s love extends everywhere: ‘Lo, though I do down into the depths of hell, yet Thou art there…’)—yet this cannot be taken to deny the full reality of the other consequences of one’s sin.

Many of the Fathers teach that the change in ‘perspective’ that comes through sin is a critical factor in one’s relationship to God’s love in eternity. St John Chrysostom speaks of deprivation of God’s love as more fearful than the punishments of Gehenna (see his Homily 1 to Theodore); St Gregory the Theologian contrasts the seeing of light to the seeing only of darkness (Homily 40 on Baptism); etc. But these never make such proclamations exclusive. For St John, the deprivation of the active embrace of God’s love may be more terrible than the fires of Gehenna—but those fires are nonetheless real, and are not simply metaphors for the wanting experience of that love. They are decidedly not the fires of heaven: they are a fire to be escaped (‘Many foolish people desire only to be delivered from Gehenna…’).

Perhaps I can conclude by offering a few passages from the Sunday of the Last Judgement (http://www.monachos.net/content/lent/materials/60-lenten-reflections/456-services-triodion-sunday-of-last-judgement) that I already mentioned—a Sunday that occurs just before the start of Great Lent. Here we here a number of hymns that portray the correct vision of judgement and hell, as seen also in the Scriptures and the Fathers. For example:

The books will be opened and the works of all men laid bare:
The vale of tears will echo with gnashing of teeth;
The sinners will mourn in vain, as they depart to eternal damnation.
Thy judgements are just, O Lord Almighty!
We beg Thee, Master, full of goodness and compassion:
Take pity on us who sing to Thee, most merciful One! (Sticheron at vespers) Here we see the traditional view of the judgement: Christ sits enthroned with ‘the books’ opened, and based on what is discovered there, ‘the sinners mourn in vain… they depart to eternal damnation’. They are cast to a specific place, actively by Christ, in loving judgement of their life and will.

So too another hymn from ‘Lord I have cried’ at vespers:

I shudder in terror when I think of that dreadful day;
I weep as I consider the darkness that will never see light:
There the worm shall not cease, or the fire be quenched;
The pain of those who reject Thee will never end.
Save me, Thy most worthless servant, Righteous Judge,
For Thy mercy and compassion are my only hope! Here we see a vision of darkness and light that is wholly incompatible with a view that both heaven and hell are ‘light’ experienced differently. Hell is here a very different place: a ‘darkness that will never see light’, a place where worm does not cease, fire is never quenched, etc. And it is explicitly made clear that this condition arises because man chooses to reject God (i.e. your assertion that the damned suffer because they hate God); but this suffering is not simply the pain of that hatred, but the full slate of its consequences.

This is emphasised, too, in the fourth canticle at matins:

Do not let me come into the valley of lamentation, my Christ and Word;
Do not let me see the place of darkness;
Do not let me be bound hand and foot,
Cast out from Thy bridal chamber,
Because in my complete wretchedness
I have defiled the garment of incorruption We should note again, here, how the reality of heaven is proclaimed as a ‘casting out’ of the bridal chamber: i.e., it is not simply a different way of experiencing that chamber. Similarly, one is cast out because ‘I have defiled the garment of incorruption’—i.e., because of one’s active sin and rejection of God. Again, this shows the measure in which it is our hatred / rejection of God that brings us to suffering, but that this suffering goes beyond simply the experience of that hatred.

Perhaps the right view of judgement and hell is best summed up in a hymn from the praises at matins:

I think upon that day and hour
When we shall all stand naked as men condemned
Before the Judge who respects no man’s person.
Then the trumpet shall sound
And the earth’s foundations shall shake:
The dead shall rise from their graves,
And men shall be brought together from all generations.
Then each man’s secrets will be openly brought before Thee,
And those who have never repented shall weep and lament,
Departing to the outer fire;
But with gladness and rejoicing
The company of the righteous shall enter the heavenly bridal chamber! Once more, it is impossible to maintain the theology of these hymns with the view that hell is simply a different experience of heaven. The Scriptures, the Liturgy, the Fathers—all make clear a very different reality.

The great hope of this right vision is that we have seen the extent that God will go to, to ensure our redemption. We see each day the cross, we proclaim the resurrection. We are called into the ancient story of creation and redemption, and see time and again how God traverses every obstacle to reclaim man from sin, to draw us back to Himself. The true reality of hell, which is proclaimed to us with stentorian and unwavering voice by the Fathers, would only be a cause for despair if we did not hear it from the very mouths of those who proclaim God’s infinite love. We do nothing to honour that love if we, attempting to conform it to our weak understanding, diminish the full, terrible reality of what sin can mean in eternity: for it is that full, terrible reality that God has known, from which He makes ready an escape through His love.

INXC, Dcn Matthew

Evan

27-12-2009, 02:15 PM

Father, bless:

The conception of Hell (as Heaven experienced differently) you've spoken so stridently against -- with the indisputable weight of Scriptural and Patristic testimony on your side-- seems to be precisely that articulated in Kalomiros's "River of Fire," of which many contemporary Orthodox theologians speak quite positively. At the risk of greatly diverting the discussion, I must ask, as one who is a week from being enrolled as an Orthodox catechumen: Is this view entirely unacceptable for an Orthodox to hold?

In Christ,
Evan

M.C. Steenberg

27-12-2009, 05:07 PM

Dear Evan,

Thank you for your reply and comments. You’ve managed, by your genuine question, to get me to do what I’ve never done before: read Dr Kalomiros’ River of Fire (which has previously been discussed several times in this Community, perhaps most notably here (http://www.monachos.net/forum/showthread.php?2014-Is-The-River-of-Fire-Orthodox-doctrine)). Please do take into account that my comments to follow are based solely on this first reading; I cannot claim to have studied that text at all deeply.

However, that said, I think that with even a first reading one is able to respond to your question.

My reading of ‘The River of Fire’ is that Dr Kalomiros, in attempting to articulate certain key points in Orthodox doctrine, falls prey to traps in his own argument, causing him in certain, limited regards to wander far from the patristic and scriptural heritage of the Church. This is particularly the case when he considers precisely what hell is (e.g. his statement, ‘Paradise and hell are one and the same River of God…’). I would not say that he is wrong in his overall statements: in fact he emphasizes many important and critical points in the understanding of God’s love and the life after death, several of which are indeed distinguishing marks of Orthodoxy’s distinctiveness with respect to other traditions (though not always in the ways Dr Kalomiros’ rather sweepingly insists). However, in ‘making his case’, as it were, he in the end goes beyond the testimony of the Fathers and makes a few assertions that certainly cannot be supported by the Church’s hymnography, Scriptures and patristic writings.

His basic argument (staged against something of a straw-man caricature of ‘Western theology’) is that man’s eternal condition is not the result of God’s vengeful wrath in the face of sin, but wholly the result of man’s freedom misused. God is not the author of evil: if man spends eternity in a condition of suffering, this is not God’s doing but man’s. This is, in and of itself, an entirely Scriptural and patristic confession, right at the heart of the Orthodox understanding of God, man, and salvation. On it, Dr Kalomiros has some rather nice comments:

Paradise or hell depends on how we will accept God's love. Will we return love for love, or will we respond to His love with hate? This is the critical difference. And this difference depends entirely on us, on our freedom, on our innermost free choice, on a perfectly free attitude which is not influenced by external conditions or internal factors of our material and psychological nature, because it is not an external act but an interior attitude coming from the bottom of our heart […]. (Section 10) Again, this is entirely in accordance with the Church’s confession. The condition of man in his transgression, including all the suffering that this bears, is the result of his free action in departing from God. The pain, the suffering that ensues is not God enacting some vengeance upon man for his wrongdoing: it is, rather, the consequence of departing from the one source of life.

And if this is true in this life, it is true also in the next. So Kalomiros states:

No, my brothers, unhappily for us, paradise or hell does not depend on God. If it depended on God, we would have nothing to fear. We have nothing to fear from Love. But it does not depend on God. It depends entirely upon us, and this is the whole tragedy. God wants us to be in His image, eternally free. He respects us absolutely. (Section 10) This is, once more, entirely in accord with the whole patristic confession. It leads Dr Kalomiros, then, to address the nature of ‘punishments’ as inflicted by God upon man. Here he begins by referring to the patristic insistence on the pedagogical nature of punishment: that is, punishment is in fact ‘chastisement’, which comes from the same root as ‘to educate’; and so all punishments are in fact corrective—either by causing us to mend our ways, or by removing from us the ongoing possibility of continuing in them.

On this, Dr Kalomiros writes:

However, there are punishments imposed upon us by God, or rather evils done to us by the devil and permitted by God. But these punishments are what we call pedagogical punishments. They have as their aim our correction in this life, or at least the correction of others who would take a lesson from our example and correct themselves by fear. (Section 13) However, it is when he goes on to extrapolate from this life, into the next, that Kalomiros’ words start to grate against the traditional language of the Church. For example, in the same section, he goes on to write:

All these punishments operate and have their purpose in this corrupted state of things; they do not extend beyond this corrupted life. Their purpose is to correct what can be corrected, and to change things toward a better condition, while things can still change in this changing world. After the Common Resurrection no change whatever can take place. Eternity and incorruptibility are the state of unchangeable things; no alterations whatever happen then, only developments in the state chosen by free personalities; eternal and infinite developments but no changing, no alteration of direction, no going back. The changing world we see around us is changing because it is corruptible. The eternal New Heavens and New Earth which God will bring about in His Second Coming are incorruptible, that means, not changing. So in this New World there can be no correction whatever; therefore, pedagogical punishments are no longer necessary. Any punishment from God in this New World of Resurrection would be clearly and without a doubt a revengeful act, inappropriate and motivated by hate, without any good intention or purpose.

If we consider hell as a punishment from God, we must admit that it is a senseless punishment, unless we admit that God is an infinitely wicked being. This is an example of what I referred to earlier: of Dr Kalomiros’ logic forcing him to make statements that have a hard time being held in harmony with the Church’s traditional language. Here he has asserted that since punishment is wholly pedagogical (i.e. corrective, aimed at spurring us to change), and since the possibility of change in eternity is no more, then any punishments in eternity would be ‘clearly and without doubt a revengeful act, inappropriate and motivated by hate, without any good intention or purpose’. His next line makes this even clearer: any claim that hell is a punishment from God, must lead us to confess that God is ‘an infinitely wicked being’.

How, however, are we to pair such a statement with the language of the Church? Take, for example, the following passage from canticle five of the matins canon for the Sunday of the Last Judgement:
Lord, pardon, remit and forgive all my sins against Thee;
Do not condemn me there, in the presence of the angels,
To the punishment of fire and to unending shame. This liturgical hymn makes clear reference to the condition of hell as ‘punishment’. Later, in the sixth canticle, we have something very similar:
Deliver me, Lord, from the gates of hell,
From chaos and darkness without light,
From the lowest depths of the earth and the unquenchable fire,
And from all the other everlasting punishments.The eighth canticle goes on to refer to ‘the punishment that I deserve to suffer at the judgement’, and so forth. The Church’s liturgical confession is clear on this: hell is punishment; and clearly, this is not offered as part of a belief that God is ‘an infinitely wicked being’—this is evidently not the conclusion to which we must be drawn in seeing punishment beyond this life, as Dr Kalomiros asserts. The same hymns that draw this emphasis on eternal punishment, simultaneously assert that God is ever loving and good (‘I know Thee as the Lover of mankind’; ‘Lover of mankind and King of the universe’, etc.).

The problem here is that Kalomiros’ has defined ‘punishment’ so narrowly (i.e. as God’s measures offered in this life to correct error) that he has forced himself to deny that any punishment can exist beyond this life, without being required to call God the author of evil. The result is that any suffering experienced after this life (i.e. in eternity) cannot be described as punishment, but must be identified as something else. On this, he writes:

So we see that God punishes as long as there is hope for correction. After the Common Resurrection there is no question of any punishment from God. Hell is not a punishment from God but a self condemnation. As Saint Basil the Great says, "The evils in hell do not have God as their cause, but ourselves." (Section 13) Here he has used a true claim (that hell is a self-condemnation) to make a point that in fact contradicts enormous amounts of liturgical, Scriptural and patristic confession: that ‘Hell is not a punishment from God’. As I’ve shown in the few quotations above, the liturgical hymnography of the Church simply won’t allow this.

Again, I do not think that Dr Kalomiros is wrong in his basic point: he is affirming something important. However, he has done so in a way that restricts his language and confession in a manner that ends up setting it at odds with the traditional confession of the Church—and this is clearly a problem.

It becomes more pronounced when he goes on to consider what ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ may be, in light of his statement that ‘hell is not a punishment from God’, and that ‘any punishment from God in this New World of Resurrection would be clearly and without a doubt a revengeful act, inappropriate and motivated by hate, without any good intention or purpose’. On this, he writes:

God is Truth and Light. God's judgment is nothing else than our coming into contact with truth and light. In the day of the Great Judgment all men will appear naked before this penetrating light of truth. The "books" will be opened. What are these "books"? They are our hearts. Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in these hearts will be revealed. If in those hearts there is love for God, those hearts will rejoice seeing God's light. If, on the contrary, there is hatred for God in those hearts, these men will suffer by receiving on their opened hearts this penetrating light of truth which they detested all their life. (Section 14) Once again, this is a mixture of absolutely true and critical confessions (e.g. that God is truth and light; that judgement is our engagement with God who is truth and light; that the ‘books’ are our hearts), with statements that take these confessions in a problematic direction. It is true that judgement is an encounter and engagement with God who is truth and light; but is it true that God’s judgement is ‘nothing else than our coming into contact with truth and light’?

Here, by contrast, is how one of the hymns on ‘Lord, I have cried…’ at vespers for the Last Judgement, portrays that judgement scene:
The books will be opened and the works of all men laid bare:
The vale of tears will echo with gnashing of teeth;
The sinners will mourn in vain, as they depart to eternal damnation.
Thy judgements are just, O Lord Almighty!
We beg Thee, Master, full of goodness and compassion:
Take pity on us who sing to Thee, most merciful One!There is more in evidence here than simply an engagement with God’s truth and light. Just what this is, begins to be spelled out in the subsequent hymn of the service:
The trumpet shall sound and the graves shall be opened:
All mankind will arise in trembling;
The righteous will rejoice, as they receive their reward,
But the wicked will depart to eternal fire with wailing and horror.And it is even more pronounced in the doxasticon that comes a few moments later:
When the thrones are set in place and the books are opened,
Then God will take His place on the judgment-seat.
What a fearful sight,
As the angels stand in awe and the river of fire flows by:
What shall we do, who are already condemned by our many sins,
As we hear Christ call the righteous to His Father’s Kingdom,
And send the wicked to eternal damnation?
Who among us can bear that terrible verdict?
Hasten to us, Lover of mankind and King of the universe:
Grant us the grace of repentance before the end and have mercy on us!Once more, Dr Kalomiros is not incorrect in asserting that judgement is the encounter with God’s truth and light; but these hymns give clear testimony to the fact that this is not the whole extent of what it means for man to be judged by God. The problem is with the insistence that judgement is, in Kalomiros’ words, ‘nothing else’ than this. The hymns make clear there is an active calling of the righteous into the Kingdom; there is an active sending of the wicked into ‘eternal damnation’, into ‘eternal fire with wailing and horror’, etc. These cannot be described simply as the encounter with God’s truth and light: there is an active sending away of some, a calling forth of others, which is central to the liturgical confession of the judgement.

We see this emphasised in the Fathers as well. To take but one example, from a passage by Hippolytus that has already been quoted above:
The justice of that cry will be apparent in the recompense made to each. To those who have done well, everlasting enjoyment shall be given; while to the lovers of evil shall be given eternal punishment. The unquenchable and unending fire awaits these latter, and a certain fiery worm which does not die and which does not waste the body, but continually bursts forth from the body with unceasing pain. (Against the Greeks, 2)Dr Kalomiros’ language about the judgement and hell simply do not allow for such confessions—which are entirely the norm and the majority in Scripture, the Fathers, and the Church’s hymnography. They must be made wholly allegorical to be made any sense of at all.

The problem is, once again, an inappropriate ‘logical’ narrowing of language. Kalomiros has trapped himself into a usage of language that causes him to express himself in ways quite at odds with traditional Orthodox confession, even as he is trying in good measure to articulate and defend it. What is necessary here is not a denial of any punishment after this life (which simply cannot be supported in the Fathers, the Scriptures, or the Church’s hymnography), but a more developed sense of punishment and freedom that accurately reflects the Fathers’ confession of a God who is all-loving and good, yet whose response to sin allows for its full consequences—always the result of man’s freedom and not God’s vengeance—to be realised even in eternity in the active sense the Church has always proclaimed.

This all becomes most problematic when Dr Kalomiros comes to look directly at the ‘definition’, as it were, of heaven and hell. Following on from what he had written above, he says:

So that which will differentiate between one man and another will not be a decision of God, a reward or a punishment from Him, but that which was in each one's heart; what was there during all our life will be revealed in the Day of Judgment. If there is a reward and a punishment in this revelation — and there really is — it does not come from God but from the love or hate which reigns in our heart. Love has bliss in it, hatred has despair, bitterness, grief, affliction, wickedness, agitation, confusion, darkness, and all the other interior conditions which compose hell (I Cor. 4:6). (Section 14) While his intention of preserving the integrity of human freedom against the idea of a God who is the author of evil and suffering is quite good, this language is, as we’ve already seen, quite impossible to maintain alongside the Church’s traditional expression. It is a false opposition, to say that reward and punishment either come from God, or come from our heart. God’s love is manifest precisely in the fact that he offers to us what we forge as the desire of our heart—even if this is our choice for evil. The terrible truth of human freedom, which God so cherishes, is that He will grant to us even death, if we so choose to take it over life. To say that He has no part in this, that it is solely our choice, our act, apart from any active role on God’s part, is to fly wholly in the face of Scripture and the Fathers, not to mention the Church’s hymns—and it is to make God essentially passive at the judgement, which our hymnography and confession again and again stress is His act, His work, His true judgement.

And it is precisely this that leads into the most difficult statements made by Dr Kalomiros in his talk. In the seventeenth section of the text, he writes:

God is a loving fire, and He is a loving fire for all: good or bad. There is, however, a great difference in the way people receive this loving fire of God.

Paradise and hell are one and the same River of God, a loving fire which embraces and covers all with the same beneficial will, without any difference or discrimination. The same vivifying water is life eternal for the faithful and death eternal for the infidels; for the first it is their element of life, for the second it is the instrument of their eternal suffocation; paradise for the one is hell for the other. Do not consider this strange. The son who loves his father will feel happy in his father's arms, but if he does not love him, his father's loving embrace will be a torment to him. This also is why when we love the man who hates us, it is likened to pouring lighted coals and hot embers on his head. The statement that God is a loving fire for all, good and evil, is of course entirely true. To say that the water of life (God’s loving fire) is poured out upon all, is also true. But to say that ‘paradise and hell’ are equated to this one river of true fire, that heaven and hell ‘are one and the same River of God’, is something quite different.

In the hymns on the Last Judgement, the river of fire is mentioned five times. In each, it is seen connected to God’s throne, where it is connected to the judgement that Christ there delivers (‘Every man will stand in fear before Thee, trembling at the river of fire flowing past Thy throne, as each one waits to hear the sentence he deserves…’, etc.). There is even a poignant hymn in which it is clear that this river flows upon us even now, the mystery of the Church granting us a foretaste of that divine justice so that we may turn and repent:
The river of fire devours and torments me;
The gnashing of teeth grinds me to dust.
The darkness of the abyss fills my heart with dismay,
And what can I do to gain God's mercy? (from canticle five of the matins canon)But in these hymns, the river of fire is never equated with heaven or hell themselves; it is always identified as that stream of God’s truth by which judgement is enacted and Christ, enthroned in glory, sends the righteous to heaven and the sinners to hell. To quote once again the doxasticon from vespers:
When the thrones are set in place and the books are opened,
Then God will take His place on the judgment-seat.
What a fearful sight,
As the angels stand in awe and the river of fire flows by:
What shall we do, who are already condemned by our many sins,
As we hear Christ call the righteous to His Father’s Kingdom,
And send the wicked to eternal damnation?
Who among us can bear that terrible verdict?
Hasten to us, Lover of mankind and King of the universe:
Grant us the grace of repentance before the end and have mercy on us!It is true that the river of fire is God’s love and truth, which flows out upon all; Dr Kalomiros is not incorrect in this. But in his asserting that this river is heaven and is hell, he suddenly puts himself at odds with the language of the Church and her Fathers.

A few concluding thoughts

I hadn’t—and don’t—intend my comments here to be anything like a careful review of ‘The River of Fire’: I’ve only read it the once this afternoon, and then rather quickly, and I wouldn’t wish you, Evan, or anyone else, to think that this represents a carefully considered and detailed response to his text. Yet having read it the once, I do think it suffers from setting itself up to fall into its own trap. By and large it makes points that are solid and secure (though it at times does so in language that cuts a little uneasily with the Church’s traditional vocabulary and expression). However, on a few points it does make assertions that I do not see as having any secure foundation in the Church’s teaching, and which in fact directly contradict her clear statements made in so many ways. The idea that heaven and hell are the same ‘place’, or the same reality experienced differently, is one of these. I cannot think of a single Father who would support this, nor a single passage of Scripture, nor a single liturgical hymn—and to the contrary, passages in each that directly contradict it are simply everywhere.

This is not to say that there are not passages in the Fathers that emphasise certain of the points that Dr Kalomiros stresses. Of course there are. So, for example, he can quote St Isaac, as he does in the thirteenth section of his talk:

"I say," writes Saint Isaac the Syrian, "that those who are suffering in hell, are suffering in being scourged by love.... It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God's love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love's power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it" (Homily 84). Kalomiros raises this quotation as a support for his overall statements; however, St Isaac is not saying that heaven and hell are simply one reality experienced differently: he is saying that God’s love is experienced by everyone, everywhere (a point made already in the psalms), and that it can be experienced differently depending on our spiritual state. This is wholly true. But it is not the whole of the story.

I am grateful to Dr Kalomiros for his emphasis on human freedom, and on God’s love. I would find his text more compelling were it not waged so stringently against a straw-man of ‘Western theology’ defined in largely generalised, caricatured terms; but even if we accept that and look past it, we are confronted with the fact that he makes his points in a manner that leads him to offer statements quite at odds with the Church’s traditional confession—and of this we need to be quite careful.

INXC, Dcn Matthew

David Lindblom

28-12-2009, 03:11 AM

Dear Evan,
I am grateful to Dr Kalomiros for his emphasis on human freedom, and on God’s love. I would find his text more compelling were it not waged so stringently against a straw-man of ‘Western theology’ defined in largely generalised, caricatured terms; but even if we accept that and look past it, we are confronted with the fact that he makes his points in a manner that leads him to offer statements quite at odds with the Church’s traditional confession—and of this we need to be quite careful.

INXC, Dcn Matthew

Thank you Dcn Matthew for taking the time to write this. As a year old Orthodox Christian and one who has tried hard to learn the faith I appreciate this sort of thing. There is more diversity of thought w/in the Church than I anticipated coming into her from Protestant Christianity. I was hoping for more agreement on issues. I guess that was a bit naive. I've heard that Orthodoxy is the absence of extremes. That is a good thing I have learned. But being new to the faith it is difficult to determine what is truly representative of the Church's teaching and what is an out of sync opinion being passed off as true Church teaching. I'm trying to put away my many Protestant ideas and trying to hold to true Orthodoxy but I find that I get led down paths that are not in keeping w/ the Church. It's frustrating. I'm trying to focus on mainline, universally accepted teachers of the faith and avoiding, for now, the others. This issue raised here concerning the River of Fire is one of these situations. I liked much of what he said but I too was concerned where his ideas seemed to be at odds w/ scripture. Your posting has cleared up much of that.

Sorry for blathering on but I appreciate your writeup.

D. W. Dickens

28-12-2009, 04:17 AM

David, might I suggest that the diversity in some of these opinions is a good thing. The faith isn't a formula or (despite worthy efforts) cannot really be circumscribed by a catechismal book. Anyway, just a thought from a recent convert brother.

Aidan Kimel

28-12-2009, 04:44 AM

Thank you, Fr Michael, for your two lengthy comments. I hope they will generate much discussion here on Monachos.

I was today directed to this article by Fr George Metallinos in support of the position that Hell is Heaven differently experienced: "Paradise and Hell According to Orthodox Tradition (http://orthodoxy21.blogspot.com/2008/12/heaven-and-hell-orthodox-understanding.html)." This is a more sophisticated presentation than we find in Kalomiros, but the question remains: How much patristic support does this construal of Heaven and Hell in fact enjoy? Is this "THE" Orthodox understanding or "A" Orthodox understanding?

Evan

28-12-2009, 05:29 AM

Father Deacon,

I am grateful for this invaluable presentation. The notion of Hell presented by Kalomiros struck me initially, and continues to strike me, as fundamentally inconsistent with what I've read of the Fathers, and what one encounters in Scripture. Its apparent acceptance by many modern Orthodox theologians has truly been a stumbling block for me. Thanks you for your thorough and fair critique, which will, God willling, bear much fruit.

In Christ,
Evan

D. W. Dickens

28-12-2009, 06:50 AM

I must say that I know absolutely nothing about this. I cannot escape the fact that the common position the Orthodox Church takes seems completely incompatible with a massive collection of scriptures (at least in such a way as to make them appear deceptive) including the words of Christ. Now I get that as a convert, I'm stuck reading many of these scriptures with my old mind. That's why I say I don't know anything. People say they are speaking "what the Church believes" and I can't prove them wrong.

M.C. Steenberg

28-12-2009, 10:21 PM

Fr Raphael Vereshack

28-12-2009, 10:35 PM

Fr Dn Matthew wrote:

Heaven and hell are, for us in this present life, mysteries. We cannot know them fully, cannot speak of them fully. Yet God in His mercy reveals certain aspects of these mysteries for our edification, for our spiritual development. We must cling to the whole of this revelation in our spiritual struggles toward the Kingdom.

I cannot think of anything that is not foreshadowed even now. That is why we are granted discernment in order to understand the providence of God as we are able even now.

Thus as far as heaven & hell go- we experience these as separate places even now according to the manner in which we lead our lives.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

M.C. Steenberg

28-12-2009, 10:40 PM

Dear Father Raphael, you wrote:

I cannot think of anything that is not foreshadowed even now. That is why we are granted discernment in order to understand the providence of God as we are able even now.
I of course cannot disagree with you here. These are mysteries; yet God gives us a foreshadowing of these mysteries in the present life -- above all in our worship. So the liturgical life draws us into both heaven and a deeper awareness of hell.

INXC, Dcn Matthew

Fr Raphael Vereshack

28-12-2009, 10:46 PM

Dear Father Raphael, you wrote:

I of course cannot disagree with you here. These are mysteries; yet God gives us a foreshadowing of these mysteries in the present life -- above all in our worship. So the liturgical life draws us into both heaven and a deeper awareness of hell.

INXC, Dcn Matthew

We're both adding to what we each have written. :) A most positive aspect of these discussions.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

Aidan Kimel

28-12-2009, 11:47 PM

I am reminded of the "last judgment" in the Narnian chronicle The Last Battle. A group of dwarfs refuse to believe in the existence of Aslan, despite his manifest presence. Lucy pleads with Aslan to convert them:

"Aslan,” said Lucy through her tears, “could you — will you — do something for these poor Dwarfs?"

“Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.” He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, “Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!”

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised the golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.”

But soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at least they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding nose, they all said:

“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out."

The dwarfs are blind to Aslan's presence, deaf to Aslan's voice. They have so closed in upon themselves that they are incapable of repentance and conversion; they are so closed in upon themselves that even Aslan is powerless to persuade them.

Luther described mankind as homo incurvatus in se: humanity turned in on itself. This notion makes sense of my own egotism and the suffering it brings me. I am not so much tormented by God's love. I am tormented by the separation and alienation from God that my egotism effects. I am tormented by my self cut off from the love and comfort and joy that only the Holy Trinity can give me.

Here, perhaps, is my crucial reservation about the Hell is Heaven differently experienced ("Those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love" [St Isaac]). It seems to me that those who find love of an other painful and bitter is still not yet beyond redemption. What terrifies me is the possibility of so imprisoning myself within myself that not even the roar of the Lion of Judah can pierce my self-absorption. Here, for me, is the terrible punishment of Hell: eternal imprisonment within the self. This metaphor makes sense of my personal experience.

Titus Fulcher

29-12-2009, 01:18 PM

I fear to enter into this discussion as my comments could not reach the depths of spiritual reflection as have the posters thus far. However, I recall years ago when I kept the Roman Liturgy of the Hours, one of the Psalms (Grail Psalter) had the Psalmist exclaim something to the effect that "this is my problem, that the way of the Most High has changed". Now obviously, God does not change. I understood the Psalmist to be experiencing within himself a change of heart that he perceived as a 'change' in the way of God. God is Love, and for love to be real there must be real consequences to our reaction to it. For those who reject the Will of God that love is experienced as wrath. Is the wrath real? I would say, "yes". Love that fails to include judgment cannot be true love. For love must clearly perceive whether it is being received or rejected. Now if, as St John says, Christ is the light and life of man, those who reject the light must dwell in darkness. Did not the Church Fathers teach that God is like a flame and the closer we choose to dwell with Him the more we ourself experiences the light and warmth of that flame, while the farther we choose to move from him the more the glow within us darkens and we become cold. While all metaphors break down under close scrutiny, it seems that to ascribe to God anger, sorrow, etc., is to recognize the relational quality of man's experience of God. This allows us to experience the Love of God within the context of our own lives and spiritual/moral choices while not ignoring the reality of the various manifestations of that Love within that context. Thus whether we question the Jewish Diaspora of the terrorist acts of 9-11, it is the sinfulness of the people that rejected the love of God and led others, perceiving that perverted life, to initiate those actions. (By the bye, it's not that the US or Europe is Christian that enrages the Islamist terrorists so much as the pornographic society that masquerades as Christian and so is associated with Christianity coupled with their own belief in the duty to convert the whole world to Islam by whatever means - including violence - that motivates them.)

As I said, I doubt my words contribute much to this discussion, but I could not help but offer them.

The sinful servant,

Titus

David Lindblom

29-12-2009, 10:23 PM

Sacha

08-07-2010, 09:01 PM

Dear friends,

Let me say one further thing: the idea that, in hell, God's love is truly experienced, even as it is in heaven, but that the experience of this love is altogether different for the unrepentant heart that is bound by its own sin and unrighteousness, is surely true. This emphasis is not wrong; but we cannot take it as the 'whole of the story'. In responding to the positions I have above, I do not wish to suggest that this isn't an aspect of the Orthodox understanding of hell: it surely is. But to make this the sole means by which hell is perceived to differ from heaven, to make them in fact that 'same place', does strike me as fundamentally incompatible with the testimony of the Scriptures, Fathers and the Church's hymnography -- the stretching of an idea too far.

There are solid truths attempting to be proclaimed in the views we sometimes hear today, and certain excesses and errors attempting to be redressed. But we must not let one aspect of the true reality of heaven and hell blind us to other realities also revealed to and in the Church.

Heaven and hell are, for us in this present life, mysteries. We cannot know them fully, cannot speak of them fully. Yet God in His mercy reveals certain aspects of these mysteries for our edification, for our spiritual development. We must cling to the whole of this revelation in our spiritual struggles toward the Kingdom.

INXC, Dcn Matthew

To Father Matthew and others,

I think Fr Matthew addressed the incompleteness of the 'River of Fire' fairly. Could he help us better reconcile the reasons for the existence as hell as a place of torment in addition to being separation from God?

One could say that the torment of separation from God is torment enough? Why the need for a body fitted for eternal punishment?

Could the answer to the above have something to do with the possibility that this torment will actually be the byproduct of the pairing of 'like' with 'like', rebel against rebel, in other words, sinnner against sinner, sinner against demon, demon against demon?

Also, when Jesus says in Luke 12:5

"But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him."

Our Lord is speaking clearly of 'throwing into hell'. What does patristic tradition have to say on this? And how does it fit in or not fit in with the belief in hell as heaven experienced negatively?

Thank you for your patience in dealing with my lack of knowledge.

Paul Cowan

08-07-2010, 09:36 PM

But Sacha, we are never separated from God. God is omnipresent at all times and in all places. There is no place He is not. So to say hell is separation from God is already a wrong idea of the situation. Remember the story of Lazarus and the Rich man. They could talk to each other, yet there was a gulf between them. They were in two separate places yet not. God's love is the same for all. Those of unrepentent hearts will feel His love differently than those who are repentent. Hell is a place of our making is somewhat true in that we can change and choose Life as we are encouraged. God does not change. He can be swayed, but not changed.

We all get new bodies at the resurrection not just for eternal punishment, but for eternal life. What happens to those bodies then we have to decide now. His Judgement will be Just. I pray more for Mercy.

Paul

Sacha

08-07-2010, 09:48 PM

Paul,

When I wrote separated, I meant sinners separate themselves from God, not the other way around. I agree with you on the omnipresence of God.

Are you saying that you disagree with Fr Matthew? If I understand him correctly (and please correct me if I don't), he is saying that the notion of hell as heaven experienced differently by sinners is true but does not exhaust the full reality of hell.

Also, do you understand Jesus' words "Him who has the power to throw you in hell" metaphorically?

Herman Blaydoe

09-07-2010, 12:43 AM

Sacha

09-07-2010, 02:41 AM

But we cannot separate ourselves from God. How can we have a power that He does not have. If we hate God and do not want to be near Him, how hellish would be our eternity if we cannot get away from Him? "Him who has the power to throw you in hell" is him who has the ability to turn you against God.

Or so it seems to this bear of little brain
Herman the Pooh

Cyril of Alexandria writes:

"And so ought we to reckon for ourselves; for to endure patiently, and maintain the conflict with courage, brings with it great reward, and is highly desirable, and wins for us the blessings bestowed by God: while to refuse to suffer death in the flesh for the love of Christ, brings upon us lasting, or rather never-ending punishment. For the wrath of man reaches at most to the body, and the death of the flesh is the utmost that they can contrive against us: but when God punishes, the loss reaches not to the flesh alone;----how could it?----but the wretched soul also is cast alone; with it into torments."

Is Cyril of Alexandria not recognized as one of the early church fathers?

Sean M.

11-07-2010, 11:59 AM

Patrick

27-01-2011, 04:34 AM

The thesis that Hell is "heaven experienced differently" is a view that one finds expressed by many contemporary theologians and preachers, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. This has in fact been my view for the past twenty-five years or longer. Given my belief that God's infinite and unbounded love for humanity is unconditional and unmerited, it seems logical to conclude that the damned suffer because they hate God. Just as many find sitting through opera to be intolerable, so the damned find being in the presence of God to be unendurable torment. God does not punish; we punish ourselves by rejecting God and his mercy.

But I still have a couple nagging questions about it this understanding of Hell.

First, does it accord with the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament? The contemporary position puts God into a passive position: God does not "condemn" to Hell; he does not punish; rather, he "permits" the sinner to eternally reject his love and mercy. It is the sinner who damns himself. Yet in Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment (Matt 25), the Son of Man is cast into an active role: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." Perhaps the words of judgment can be interpreted as mere ratification that the damned have chosen their damnation; but it's more difficult, I think, to construe the eternal fire of which Jesus speaks as being God himself. Similarly, in Jesus' parable of the wedding feast (Matt 22), it is the king who orders the man without the wedding garment to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness. Consider St Gregory Palamas's interpretation of this parable:

Second, would most of the Church Fathers have agreed with the view that Hell is Heaven experienced differently, or to put it differently, do the majority of the Church Fathers understand the fire of hell as identical to the fire of God's love? I am not a patristic scholar, nor have I read an extended treatment of the beliefs of the Church Fathers on matters eschatological. Last month I decided to go through all the citations included in the three volume The Faith of the Early Fathers that speak of Hell, as well as the citations included under the topic of Hell in John R. Willis's The Teachings of the Church Fathers. Using florilegia is always hazardous: (a) they are inescapably selective and (b) the excerpted texts are ripped from their literary context and therefore are easily mis-read. Acknowledging these cautions, I did not find a single text where the fire of Hell is clearly and unmistakably identified with God or God's presence or God's love. I did not find a single text that clearly states that the damned suffer because they hate the love of God. A couple come close, perhaps; but none are as clear on this as St Isaac the Syrian is, and most appear to say just the opposite.

Here are three texts I found that might be invoked in support of the thesis that Hell is Heaven differently experienced:

St Basis the Great:

Basil does not explicitly identify the fire with God, but given that this fire both punishes and illumines, perhaps one might argue that Basil implies an identification of sorts.

St Gregory Nazianzen:

Note the distinction between the Christ's cleansing, purifying fire, with which he might be identified, and the avenging, retributive, inextinguishable fire that is poured out on the obstinately wicked. The latter must be considered to be a purely destructive power, unless, Gregory obliquely intimates, one believes in the apocatastasis.

St John Damascene:

St John here asserts that the fire of hell is not a material fire but rather a fire known only to God (a spiritual fire?). But he does not explicitly identify this fire with God himself.

Several of the Fathers speak of Hell as separation from God:

St Basil the Great:

I note that the separation from the Spirit appears to be self-inflicted.

But many more patristic texts can be invoked to support the thesis that Hell is divine punishment imposed by God:

At the very least, I think it is fair to say that many (most?) of the Church Fathers understand Hell as a form of separation from God and as just punishment for sin. What do we do with these testimonies?

I do not know if this would be considered as straying off topic. But, I would like to add some more quotes for the idea that Hell is God's love, just experienced differently, and my understanding of the matter. This is from the Rainbow Series of books. http://www.oca.org/OCchapter.asp?SID=2&ID=208 He quotes St. Isaac the Syrian saying
those who find themselves in hell will be chastised by the scourge of love. How cruel and bitter this torment of love will be! For those who understand that they have sinned against love, undergo no greater suffering than those produced by the most fearful tortures. The sorrow which takes hold of the heart, which has sinned against love, is more piercing than any other pain. It is not right to say that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God ... But love acts in two ways, as suffering of the reproved, and as joy in the blessed! Again, St. Isaac the Syrian:
It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it. (Homily 84) St. Symeon the New Theologian
God is fire and when He came into the world, and became man, He sent fire on the earth, as He Himself says; this fire turns about searching to find material — that is a disposition and an intention that is good — to fall into and to kindle; and for those in whom this fire will ignite, it becomes a great flame, which reaches Heaven. … [T]his flame at first purifies us from the pollution of passions and then it becomes in us food and drink and light and joy, and renders us light ourselves because we participate in His light. (Discourse 78) Here are some quotes from this website http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html
St. Ignatious of Antioch, in the late first and early second century, describe God as the furnace that a craftsman uses to temper a sword. When a properly prepared sword is placed within the fire, it makes it stronger and the sword takes on the properties of the fire, it gives off heat and light. However, this same fire will melt and destroy a sword that was not properly prepared.
St. Basil the Great (fourth century) points out that the Three Children thrown into the fiery furnace were unharmed by the fire, yet the same fire burned and killed the servants at the entrance to the furnace.
According to St Gregory the Theologian, God Himself is Paradise and punishment for man, since each man tastes God's "energies" (His perceptible presence) according to the condition of his soul. St. Gregory further advises the next life will be "light for those whose mind is purified... in proportion to their degree of purity" and darkness "to those who have blinded their ruling organ [meaning the "mind"]...in proportion to their blindness..."
St. John Chrysostom (AD 344-407) wrote [in homily LXXVI] "let us clothe ourselves with spiritual fire, let us gird ourselves with its flame. No man who bears flame fears those who meet him; be it wild beast, be it man, be it snares innumerable, so long as he is armed with fire, all things stand out of his way, all things retire. The flame is intolerable, the fire can not be endured, it consumes all. With this fire let us clothe ourselves, offering up glory to our Lord Jesus Christ, with whom the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, be glory, might, honor, now and ever and world without end. Amen."
A prayer of St. Simeon the Translator goes: "...Thou who art a fire consuming the unworthy, consume me not, O my Creator, but rather pass through all my body parts, into all my joints, my veins, my heart. Burn Thou the thorns of all my transgressions, Cleanse my soul and hallow Thou my thoughts [etc.] ...that from me, every evil deed and every passion may flee as from fire…" Talking about the parable of Lazarus and the Rich man. The logic seemed to me to be very sound. http://www.pelagia.org/htm/b24.en.life_after_death.01.htm#par2
It should also be observed that the Rich Man saw Abraham with Lazarus in his bosom. He saw the glory of Abraham, but he had no share in this glory. By contrast, Lazarus both saw it and participated in it. This is a very significant point, for it shows that in that other life everyone will see God, but the righteous will have communion, participation, while the sinners will not. A characteristic example is what Christ said about the coming judgement. All will see the Judge, all will converse with Him, but some will enjoy His glory and others will experience the caustic energy of divine grace.
Paradise and Hell do not exist in God's view, but in man's view. God sends His grace to all men, since "He makes His sun rise on the just and the unjust and sends His rain on the evil and the good". If God gives us a command to love all people, even our enemies, He does the same Himself. It is impossible not to love sinners as well. But each person feels God's love differently, according to his spiritual condition.
Light has two properties, illuminating and caustic. If one person has good vision, he benefits from the illuminating property of the sun, the light, and he enjoys the whole creation. But if another person is deprived of his eye, if he is without sight, then he feels the caustic property of light. This will be so in the future life too, as well as in the life of the soul after it leaves the body. God will also love the sinners, but they will be unable to perceive this love as light. They will perceive it as fire, since they will not have a spiritual eye and spiritual vision.
Something similar applies to Holy Communion. All can take part, but for those who are prepared and fit it is light and life, for those who approach unworthily it is judgement and condemnation.
The Church shows this in the iconography of the Second Coming. There we see the saints in the light that comes from the throne of God; and from the same throne springs the river of fire, where the unrepentant sinners are.
Here are some quotes from Holy Scripture:
The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with the everlasting burnings? He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil. He shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks: bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure. (Isaiah 33:14-16) It is interesting to note that the ones who are in the devouring fire are the righteous.
And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.(Revelation 22:1-2)
A fiery stream issued and came forth from before Him…(Daniel 7:10) These last two verses are showing the same event...namely the Last Judgement. Daniel sees a 'fiery stream' from God's throne while John sees 'a pure river of water of life'.
For our God is a consuming fire. Hebrews 12:29 My understanding of the topic is that Heaven and Hell are indeed God's love just experienced differently. However, the Saints who talk about 'separation from God' seems to me to be separated from eternal Communion with Him. Those who reject His love are in eternal darkness (as St. Gregory was quoted as above). They can't look at the Light and be in Communion with Him because they have not been purified. They are actually UNABLE to bear His presence, so they burn for it and therefore cannot be in Communion with Him. It is similar to Theotokos. She alone was able to bear God in her womb. If it were anyone else, they would have been burned 'by the fire of His divinity' (to quote the Nativity canon) because they were unable to bear His presence.

God only reveals His presence in the measure that each are able to bear (this is quoted from many Fathers). The holier and purer you are, the more you can stand His presence. This again plays to the Theotokos in that she alone was able to bear Him. She alone was pure enough. Therefore, those who hate God, will not be able to stand His presence. They will be blinded by the Light and therefore cut off from Communion with Him. This also seems to remind me of the state of man after the Fall but before the Incarnation. Man was cut from Communion with God. He was in a state of darkness. God was always everywhere, but man could not be in Communion with Him.

This is what this miserable sinner believes when the Saints talk about Hell as being 'separation from God'.

PS: Does anyone know why my paragraphs are not separating? I'm putting a blank line between them, but they are running together as if I never put a blank line in. (Nevermind. I had a firefox addon called NoScript blocking this. Just a heads up to anyone else experiencing the same problem)

Darlene Griffith

03-02-2011, 06:08 PM

I have benefited greatly from reading this thread, especially from Fr. Deacon Matthew's contributions. I have not yet read The River of Fire because I don't think I am discerning enough, or mature enough in the Orthodox faith to separate that which is alligned with Holy Scripture, Tradition, the history of the Church, and the Fathers, and that which has strayed from the same. I once asked an Orthodox priest if he thought all would be saved and his reply to me was, "Who knows?" That answer was insufficient for me and I have struggled with this notion since being received into the Church.

In my heart of hearts, I don't want to see anyone suffer in the lake of fire of which Revelation speaks. My son is a blatant hater of God, an enemy of the cross, who makes it his aim to convince anyone who will listen that the God of the Scriptures is not worthy of worship. Yet, I still pray for his soul, that his heart will be softened, and he will repent and return to his Heavenly Father. I pray for him even though he has asked me not to pray for him because according to him, "I don't have a soul." In some sense, that comment seems to be true. He does seem as though he is soulless. Yet, in another sense, how can I know? I don't have the discernment to see into his heart. In spite of all that seems hopeless, I continue to pray for him. Will he be saved in the end? I don't know. Is there the possibility that he won't be saved. Sadly, I must say 'yes.' There is the possibility that I won't be saved as well. Not because of Calvin's notion that some are predestined to be damned by God and these who are in this category do not have, nor have ever had any hope of salvation. Rather, I can hinder my own salvation through rebellion, through rejecting the grace that God makes available to me, through a stubborn insistence to reject His salvation, prefering to be my own savior.

Where am I going with all of this? Well (and this is the crux of the matter for me), if I believed that in the end I will be saved no matter what I do, then I would live like a wicked sinner, throwing caution to the wind. I would not care about the spiritual struggle for in the end "I will be saved." I would not fear God for in the end "I will be saved." I would not repent of any wrongdoing for in the end "I will be saved." Instead I would enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin for such sin would not, in the end, condemn me at all. No matter if I were the most wicked adultress, the most proficient thief, a vulgar exhibitionist, a self-righteous gossipmonger, a heartless murderer, a lover of violence, and filled with all other manner of evil and wickedness, none of these would prevent me from being saved in the end.

I think that in the mix of all the discussion of praying even for Hitler and in some cases Satan (on another thread), and in the discussion of whether we can embrace a hope that all will be saved (on another thrread), or as the River of Fire suggests, the wicked experience God's love differently, there is the danger of embracing a belief in universal salvation, something which is heretical and cannot be defended from the whole of the Christian witness and the life of the Church. The danger of redefining the wrath of God to mean something that ain't so bad, that is really God's love that will in the end save us anyway, is a notion that has the propensity to engender in the proponents of said belief a carefree attitude toward sin and it's penetrating and pernicious effect upon the soul.

Mark Harris

03-02-2011, 08:15 PM

Isn't the wrath or the vengeance of God the result of not following instructions in the way that if we are told not to put our hand into boiling water and then we go and do it and hurt ourselves as a consequence of disobeying? The burning and the pain are not a direct positive action by God as vengeance for not following instructions but a consequence of not obeying that instruction. Once again the freedom to choose is ours by gift from God and God is Love and only has love, all the rest is down to us.

Archimandrite Irenei

04-02-2011, 01:51 AM

Dear Patrick and others,

I'm not sure if I've really anything to add to the contributions I've offered in this and other threads on the subject, save the need merely to reiterate that I do not believe there is any way to reconcile this rather odd view that heaven and hell are the same thing 'experienced differently' (which I am quite certain the Fathers as a whole do not espouse) with the liturgical and Scriptural proclamations of the Church. One must choose one, or the other.

INXC, Fr Irenei

Darlene Griffith

04-02-2011, 02:35 AM

Archimandrite Irenei

04-02-2011, 03:19 AM

Dear Patrick and others,

On further reflection, the listing of references to certain Fathers provided in your post (which I realise you are sharing from an article—i.e. you didn’t assemble them yourself) is something that I think requires a proper response. It is very easy for such a listing to sound definitive and make it appear as if a view is solidly present in the heritage of the Church—the very reason why selective ‘proof-texting’ always proves so popular. However, the references and quotations provided are in fact profoundly misleading and represented a highly manipulated distortion of what these Fathers taught. Allow me, then, just a few moments to respond to each in turn:

St. Ignatious of Antioch, in the late first and early second century, describe God as the furnace that a craftsman uses to temper a sword. When a properly prepared sword is placed within the fire, it makes it stronger and the sword takes on the properties of the fire, it gives off heat and light. However, this same fire will melt and destroy a sword that was not properly prepared.
I should like to know where St Ignatius of Antioch is supposed to have said this. No reference is provided, and I cannot recall any passage in his letters where he speaks of this subject (though I do not have the letters in front of me at the moment; another could perhaps verify by searching).

But in any case, unless St Ignatius is explicitly speaking of heaven and hell in this context, it does not apply to the question. The idea of purifying metal in fire (i.e. the flame burning away what is impure and strengthening what is pure) is an ancient image—found in the Scriptures (e.g. Zecheriah 13.9); but there (as I would presume would be mirrored in St Ignatius, if in fact he speaks of it at all) not as a commentary on heaven and hell, but on the need for purifying struggle in this life. Indeed, the language of God as a ‘refining fire’ is found in Scripture, but there explicitly referring to His judgement before the casting of man into heaven or hell—i.e. precisely the separating of the wheat and chaff that is entirely incompatible with a ‘heaven and hell are the same thing experienced differently’ view (cf. e.g. Malachi 3.2); and Daniel explicitly refers to this process of refining by fire as happening before and until the end of time—but not in the eternity of heaven/hell (cf. Daniel 11.35).

As for what St Ignatius actually does say: he refers numerous times to the fact that God will judge, choose, and cast into a distinct hell those who sin and rebel against Him; this is a place into which the Lord Himself casts man (cf. Ad.Philadelph. 3); it is a concrete place ‘into which one goes’ (Ad.Eph. 16); it is definitively a ‘punishment’ (Ad.Philadelph. 3); etc. All of these, and other, statements reflect the authentic teaching of the Church, and are quite at odds with any attempt to portray St Ignatius as presenting the belief that heaven and hell are the same reality or place, simply experienced differently.

St. Basil the Great (fourth century) points out that the Three Children thrown into the fiery furnace were unharmed by the fire, yet the same fire burned and killed the servants at the entrance to the furnace.
Again, no reference is provided, so it is unclear to what text the author is referring. However, we might point ourselves to St Basil’s 13th homily on Psalm 28, section 6. Here, in speaking of the phrase in the psalm where it is said that ‘the voice of the Lord divideth the flame of the fire’, St Basil refers to the flame of the furnace into which the three children were thrown in Babylon, which was divided in two, allowing a moist breeze to come upon the children but destroying the servants nearby. This St Basil takes as a sign with regard to God’s use of fire to illumine the good and consume the ungodly:
“I believe that the fire prepared in punishment for the devil and his angels is divided by the voice of the Lord, in order that, since there are two capacities in fire, the burning and the illuminating, the fierce and punitive part of the fire may wait for those who deserve to burn, while its illuminating and radiant part may be allotted for the joy of those who are rejoicing.”St Basil points out, just before this quotation, that fire cannot normally be divided, but God so divides it in the furnace in Babylon as a sign of how He divides it between heaven and hell. His point is thus precisely not that those in heaven and hell are experiencing the same thing differently: his point is that God ‘divides the fire’ exactly so that the fire in hell burns and consumes, while the fire in heaven illumines and brings joy.

We might also note St Basil’s words in his 19th homily on Psalm 48, section 5: here, speaking of the separation in eternity of those who have lived virtuously in this life and those who have not, St Basil refers to the lot of those who do not labour in virtue as being cast ‘away from life’, where dwell those who lived virtuously, instead being in a place ‘where they will see life afar off, while being racked in the fire of the furnace’. Once again, St Basil consistently reflects the Scriptural, liturgical and traditional understanding of heaven and hell as distinct places, into which one is cast by God in just judgement; and his words simply cannot support a concept of heaven and hell as a common reality/place experienced differently.

According to St Gregory the Theologian, God Himself is Paradise and punishment for man, since each man tastes God's “energies” (His perceptible presence) according to the condition of his soul. St. Gregory further advises the next life will be “light for those whose mind is purified... in proportion to their degree of purity” and darkness “to those who have blinded their ruling organ [meaning the ‘min’]...in proportion to their blindness...”
In this instance we at last have an actual quotation provided by the author: he draws a few words from chapter 45 of St Gregory’s 40th Oration: On Holy Baptism. However, we have here a classic example of proof-texting, given that these words have been extracted from St Gregory’s text to argue a point that the saint himself explicitly refutes in the very next section of his oration. The sentence in question is part of St Gregory’s ‘brief decalogue’ of instruction for those about to be baptized. As his ninth instruction, he notes that our condition after death is related to our living of the present life (he specifically uses the terms ‘judgement’ and ‘reward’), and it is in this context that he says that this will be:
“Light to those whose mind is purified—that is, God Himself, seen and known—proportionate to their degree of purity […] but to those who suffer from blindness of their ruling faculty, darkness—that is, estrangement from God—in proportion to their blindness here.”Again, we can see how this comment might be taken and twisted to support the ‘heaven and hell are both the same light experienced differently’ concept, but to do so one has to do just what was done in the references above: remove it from its context in St Gregory’s writings. In his own text, it is clear that he is making a point of the living of virtue in this life, such that those about to be baptized come to be aware that their lot after death is directly related to their conduct in this life. But St Gregory is not offering a commentary on the contours of heaven and hell proper. If this is not emphatically clear in the sentence itself, the following section of the oration (§46) removes any doubt: St Gregory gives a whole host of examples of the differing conditions of those in heaven and those in hell, noting that those who are not prepared through virtue will be ‘cast out of the Bridechamber’ of the Kingdom; that they will be ‘shut out’,
“and they shall weep sore when all too late they learn the penalty of their slothfulness, when the Bride-chamber can no longer be entered by them for all their entreaties, for they have shut it against themselves by their sin”Like St Ignatius, like St Basil, St Gregory articulates the traditional position of the Church: that heaven and hell are distinct places, separate from one another; that one is cast into one or welcomed into the other in the judgement; that existence in hell is a genuine separation from those in heaven; etc. There is simply no way—apart from proof-texting and exploring only single sentences in St Gregory—to maintain that he supports the idea of heaven and hell being the same thing ‘experienced differently'.

St. John Chrysostom (AD 344-407) wrote [in homily LXXVI] “let us clothe ourselves with spiritual fire, let us gird ourselves with its flame. No man who bears flame fears those who meet him; be it wild beast, be it man, be it snares innumerable, so long as he is armed with fire, all things stand out of his way, all things retire. The flame is intolerable, the fire can not be endured, it consumes all. With this fire let us clothe ourselves, offering up glory to our Lord Jesus Christ, with whom the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, be glory, might, honor, now and ever and world without end. Amen.”
Though the author mis-ascribes this quotation (it is actually from St John’s Homily 34 on Hebrews, section 8, not from his Homily 76), the words here are accurately quoted. However, one must wonder to what real end. St John is in no wise speaking of a description of heaven and hell in this sermon; rather, in commenting on the text of Hebrews 13.24, 25, he is making an observation of the fortitude of those among the faithful of the past who have borne challenges, sufferings and abuse with strength. His instruction is that those who clothe themselves with a ‘spiritual flame’ are like those who carry a physical flame in this life: if one holds out a flame-bearing torch before him in a forest, beasts flee, enemies run away, etc. In the same manner, those who are clothed with a ‘spiritual flame’ (and St John is explicitly referring to St Paul, whom he mentions a few sentences earlier) find that whatever trials and tribulations may stand before them flee through the presence of this heavenly fire. And so, having referred to St Paul and others (as mentioned in the text of Hebrews), he concludes the sermon with the passage quoted:
“Let us then stretch our mind towards Heaven, let us be held fast by that desire, let us clothe ourselves with spiritual fire, let us gird ourselves with its flame. No man who bears flame fears those who meet him; be it wild beast, be it man, be it snares innumerable, so long as he is armed with fire, all things stand out of his way, all things retire. The flame is intolerable, the fire cannot be endured, it consumes all.”How is this purported to be a support for an idea that heaven and hell are the same ‘flame’/reality/place experienced differently? Once again we have an example of selective proof-texting, taking a passage that contains words or phrases that one wants to employ, wholly out of the context in which it occurs.

Finally, a quotation is offered from the famous pre-communion prayer of St Simeon Metaphrastes:

A prayer of St. Simeon the Translator goes: “...Thou who art a fire consuming the unworthy, consume me not, O my Creator, but rather pass through all my body parts, into all my joints, my veins, my heart. Burn Thou the thorns of all my transgressions, Cleanse my soul and hallow Thou my thoughts [etc.] ...that from me, every evil deed and every passion may flee as from fire…”
To understand fully what this passage means, one needs to know something of the Eucharistic theology of the Church (and indeed, this is an important image in explaining why Orthodox do not give Holy Communion to non-Orthodox); but suffice it to say here that this is not a passage on the definition of heaven and hell. It is, quite explicitly, a prayer on the immediate effects of receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. And here it is perhaps necessary to point out that of course the Church believes Christ is a fire that consumes the unworthy yet purifies and strengthens the faithful: this is Scriptural, ancient, universal. But the Church does not and has not ever used this fact to create a description of heaven and hell. Heaven and hell are clearly described, again and again, as distinct places, separate realities, and places into which one is brought by a distinctive, deliberate judgement by God.

INXC, Heromonk Irenei

Darlene Griffith

04-02-2011, 09:15 PM

Father,

I encourage you to write a book about this subject, and in it, refute the points made in the River of Fire and the false understanding of Heaven and hell that it purports. This idea that Heaven and hell are one and the same reality just experienced differently is gaining momentum and popularity. I've heard many allude to it. I suppose it's because the reality of Heaven and hell being two different and separate places, where one is punished and another rewarded is just too harsh of a reality for some. I think this reality engenders the fear of God.

Ivan Miletic

23-03-2011, 08:00 AM

Would anyone here say that Hopko is not Orthodox in his views? From what I read, I think they would not.

Beyond that, I think the comments made that we are all looking for the same answer, a contrite heart, but that we are finding it from different angles is correct.

I think Hopko's podcasts are very interesting and they are making me meditate more. This is good if you ask me. I don’t think he is so far off base that we as his listeners need to worry. If we did need to worry, should we think that his Bishop would have asked him to rethink his position by now?

From what I have seen and heard, I don’t think there is much to worry about. :)

Paul Cowan

23-03-2011, 04:07 PM

I believe his proper title is Archpriest Fr. Thomas Hopko. But at a minimum "Fr." should be inserted in there somewhere. watcha ya think?

Nina

23-03-2011, 04:50 PM

I believe his proper title is Archpriest Fr. Thomas Hopko. But at a minimum "Fr." should be inserted in there somewhere. watcha ya think?

I think that when you find this improper, I find it even more improper when people address the Theotokos as just simply Mary. I know I have been reprimanded here about voicing this before, since as I was told here Fathers of the Church use the name Mary just like that for the Panagia (however I have been taught in catechism that only demons call Panagia only Mary since they are too dark to admit her holiness and can not say saintly things). And I have payed attention in my readings of the Fathers since then and I think I have never seen it as free floating just as Mary, but I have seen it as Mary the Mother of God. This is fine and proper, but Mary just like that free floating I have not seen it - maybe there is I do not know all books from the Fathers (although these are translations in English and I haven't seen it in other languages). In any case, yes, I think it is important now and then to remember that proper addressing is right, appreciated and never goes out of fashion. I do not want any titles for myself but I want for our Saints and Panagia.

P.S There was a friend who is a common friend of Mary (our friend form monachos) and I. So when this other woman and I met one day we were talking and she asked me a question and I do not remember the exact one now but it was in line with "What do you think about Mary?" So I thought this was in relation to our Mary here and said "Oh I think she is wonderful!" and continued to specify traits I appreciate about our friend and at some point our friend starts laughing out loud and told me that she had asked about Mary, the Theotokos. How funny was that! lol I am glad I was in accordance with the words Fathers say that in each woman see the icon of Panagia, otherwise imagine if I had badmouthed Mary (not that she deserves that because she is really an amazing sister in Christ), I would have spoken not well of Panagia literally. God was merciful to me. :)

Herman Blaydoe

23-03-2011, 05:25 PM

The subject of this thread is to discuss Fr. Thomas Hopko and his thoughts on God's wrath. Let us try to keep to it.

When referencing Orthodox clergy, an appropriate honorific such as "Fr." and the priest's first name is the preferred method. The last name is generally used to differentiate a specific priest when there is potential for confusion. Exclusive use of last names is generally considered poor form.

Proper address of the saints or pet peeves in general is really beyond the subject matter for this thread.

Herman

Ivan Miletic

23-03-2011, 11:50 PM

Regarding this: "... But at a minimum "Fr." should be inserted in there somewhere. watcha ya think? "

I will refrain from starting an argument over this since to me it’s very much a side issue in this thread; however, while I understand what you are hinting at and while I do get the tone in your note, my answer to that is no. :)

If you would like to know why I think this way, please start another thread on this topic.

With no prejudice or offence meant at all, I wish you and everyone here all the best. If offence was taken by you or anyone due to my choice of language, you have my apology for how you feel regarding this issue.

Paul Cowan

24-03-2011, 05:54 AM

If you would like to know why I think this way, please start another thread on this topic.

That's not going to happen as it is outside the bounds of the rules of the forum and rightly so. Regardless for your respect or lack thereof of Fr. Thomas or any clergy, they still have the God annointed title of Fr. To refer to any clergy with less than this basic title is improper. We still have to respect the position even if one does not respect the man.

Paul

Fr Raphael Vereshack

24-03-2011, 02:37 PM

From the Discussion Community Handbook

(e) The Monachos.net Discussion Community is intended to be a friendly environment of supportive and cooperative dialogue. As such, basic norms of etiquette and politeness are expected at all times.
Informative tid-bit A note on politeness: It has become the custom in the Discussion Community to address other members and guests by their title and surname (e.g. 'Mr Johnstone', 'Ms Williams', 'Fr John') until one has gotten to know them. This is not a rule or policy of the forum, but a habit that has emerged out of the general politeness of the members.

Ivan Miletic

25-03-2011, 06:04 AM

As I said, I mean no offence to anyone; however, although I understand the viewpoint being made, the position you are taking is not my personal view on this matter and because of that, my opinion will not change any time soon based on this discussion or any other.

I am sorry that someone may feel scandalized, but saying that is about as far as I will go along that road.

Maintaining decorum and social norms on this site is another matter.

If this forum has norms, I will follow them for the sake of conversation, but that does not mean that I see any reason to agree with the opinion of why the norm is set in place.

I hope you understand that, and realize that there is no need for me to agree with you or anyone for that matter in order to go along with the norm that is established here.

This practice is what it is, and it should be followed if it is seen by most as correct since many need to share this site, and should feel comfortable on doing so. I can do that. It’s not a big deal at all.

Now, I hope we can stop hijacking this thread and let the main conversation happen. :)

Paul Cowan

25-03-2011, 06:51 AM

If this forum has norms, I will follow them for the sake of conversation, but that does not mean that I see any reason to agree with the opinion of why the norm is set in place.

I hope you understand that, and realize that there is no need for me to agree with you or anyone for that matter in order to go along with the norm that is established here.

This practice is what it is, and it should be followed if it is seen by most as correct since many need to share this site, and should feel comfortable on doing so. I can do that. It’s not a big deal at all.

Now, I hope we can stop hijacking this thread and let the main conversation happen. :)

I'm glad we got that cleared up.

The hijacker

Benjamin Smith

25-03-2011, 03:39 PM

Dear Friends,

The posts by Fathers Rapheal, Irenaues, and Kimel are all very intersesting. But I think the root problem in considering topics like the wrath of God has to do with humanism, which in this instance means trying to "comprehend" (I use this term technically) God according to human wisdom. It is true in human terms that love, peace, goodness, etc., do not fit easily with wrath, punishment, and justice, but this is just something we must accept about God, He transcends our understanding. This realization is one of the greatest insights preserved by Orthodoxy. We can say some truth things about God, but they are true about God in a way that transcends our understanding and mysteriously transcends the apparent contradictions (this is what Brother Thomas means by his doctrine of analogy and the via negativa).

Insisting that God's mercy precludes God being wrathful results from insisting that God's mercy and wrath must be like our own. This attitude is neither Biblical or Patristic.

Respectfully,

Benjamin Smith

David Lindblom

25-03-2011, 10:17 PM

As the one who started this thread, I have learned a lot. My point in starting this thread was that as a former Protestant I fully believed in the eternal damnation and torment of the unbelieving but was always troubled by how a God Who is Love could create a place of unspeakable agony to punish unbelievers for sins committed during a life of a few decades for all eternity. When, as a Orthodox convert, I discovered the River of Fire I was much relieved because it drew a picture of how on the one hand damnation was eternal it was not God who had actively created a place w/ torments of torture that would last forever but was a natural consequence of people's reaction to God. It also seems to be very prevalent in Orthodox circles so it seemed, to me, to be a true teaching. Then when I heard Fr. Hopko's podcast I was shocked and disturbed and so made this post. I have learned much from Hieromonk Irenaeus and come to view the River of Fire to be in error and not true historic Orthodoxy. So I'm kinda back to being disturbed by the concept of eternal unspeakable torments as punishment for, in comparison to eternity, a very short finite life lived in sin and unbelief. But it is what it is.

Andrew Behm

26-03-2011, 06:59 PM

I have already mentioned my questions and reservations about the popular "Hell is Heaven experienced differently" view in the thread cited by Evan and will not repeat myself. I am very sympathetic to this view, but I do not think it neatly resolves the problem it is designed to solve. The problem is eternal suffering. Romanides/Kalomiros present us with two ostensibly contradictory positions--the evil "Western" understanding of Hell, where God is seen as the Judge who actively metes out punishment for sins, and the morally superior "Eastern" understanding of Hell, where the damned inflict their own suffering by eternally rejecting God's mercy. In the former, God is the generator of suffering; in the latter, the the creature is the generator of suffering. The Eastern understanding is thought to be morally superior because it supposedly relieves God of responsibility for eternal torment.

The typology fails in two ways. First, it forgets that in the Western view, the damned are punished to eternal damnation because they have definitively refused God's forgiveness and mercy; they are irreversibly and incorrigibly impenitent. In other words, they are in the same spiritual condition as the damned in the Eastern view.

Second, there is still the moral problem in the "Eastern" position of eternal suffering. Unless one adopts the universal salvation hope of Sts Gregory Nyssen and Isaac of Ninevah, we still end up with the difficult, perhaps morally intolerable position, that God "permits" a condition of torment from which there is no escape. After the final judgment, there is no possibility of repentance; there is no possibility of healing and transformation; there is only unremitting, unrelenting, endless pain of unimaginable degree. And to make matters worse, this pain is a direct and immediate response to the fully revealed and manifested love of God! God actively and intentionally inflicts himself upon those who do not want to be in his presence, knowing that it will cause them agony and anguish. He turns on the light, fully aware that this light will cause indescribable anguish in those who cannot bear to look at the light. The fact that this condition is self-chosen doesn't eliminate the moral problem. At least the "Western" view has the virtue of describing Hell as a just punishment, whereas the "Eastern" view eschews the language of justice and thus leaves us with eternal suffering. At least humane animal owners know when it's time to put their beloved pets out of their misery.

No matter how you cut it, Hell is terrible. I pray that apocatastasis may prove to be true.

I think Fr. Kimel put it best, in this old post of his, that even the "new" way of perceiving judgement is not without it's problems. In the end, we are fighting with ourselves and our desire for less punitive consequence. Ultimately, we must focus on God, not on the consequences for not doing so.

Also, keep in mind, when you think about this, we aren't talking about innocent people being condemned. These are people that seperated themselves from God. Why did they? From a single event of 'oops'? More likely, it is from an freely adopted lifestyle and worldview of self-worship and pride. Either way, you can't be with a God that you freely reject.

David Lindblom

26-03-2011, 07:36 PM

I think Fr. Kimel put it best, in this old post of his, that even the "new" way of perceiving judgement is not without it's problems. In the end, we are fighting with ourselves and our desire for less punitive consequence. Ultimately, we must focus on God, not on the consequences for not doing so.

Also, keep in mind, when you think about this, we aren't talking about innocent people being condemned. These are people that seperated themselves from God. Why did they? From a single event of 'oops'? More likely, it is from an freely adopted lifestyle and worldview of self-worship and pride. Either way, you can't be with a God that you freely reject.

Your point is a valid one. I'm seeing things from my limited human perspective.

Brian Patrick Mitchell

28-03-2011, 04:57 PM

So I'm kinda back to being disturbed by the concept of eternal unspeakable torments as punishment for, in comparison to eternity, a very short finite life lived in sin and unbelief. But it is what it is.

As Fr. Alvin has pointed out, there's really not much difference between the old way and the new way, except that the new way does help people today see more of the love of God as well as more of our responsibility for our suffering, which removes a stumbling block to belief for many. David attests to this. There is a pastoral concern here that we ought not ignore. We have to deal with people where they are, and what most people need today is not flawless philosophy but a healthier imagination. They have been taught to see God only as an unloving, uncaring, unmerciful tyrant. The new way puts God in a much better perspective.

Darlene Griffith

28-03-2011, 06:13 PM

I attended a Lenten retreat this past weekend and one of the presentations was on the parable of the sheep and the goats. The priest who spoke made it clear that there is a separation at the Great Judgment and this separation is directly linked to the manner in which we lived our Christian faith in this life. He also stressed that this separation is final. There are eternal consequences for those who reject Christ and eternal consequences for those who obey and worship Him. Every human being will be judged by our Lord and either be with Christ in His Heavenly Kingdom forever or be cast into the utter darkness OUTSIDE of Christ's Heavenly Kingdom.

It ain't rocket science, folks. Eastern view - western view...I don't think each view is as monolithic as some would like to assert. And to somehow inject some new fancified teaching that tries to avoid and get around the suffering of the wicked in the afterlife who rejected Christ in this life is a fruitless attempt to avoid the truth of Holy Scripture which clearly teaches against apokatastasis/universalism.

Brian Patrick Mitchell

28-03-2011, 07:38 PM

And to somehow inject some new fancified teaching that tries to avoid and get around the suffering of the wicked in the afterlife who rejected Christ in this life is a fruitless attempt to avoid the truth of Holy Scripture which clearly teaches against apokatastasis/universalism.

To clarify my own comment, by "new way" I did not mean universal salvation but the differently experienced "consuming fire" that is the subject of "The River of Fire."

Darlene Griffith

28-03-2011, 11:08 PM

Dear Father Brian,

"The River of Fire" is not considered to be Orthodox dogma but the opinion of an Orthodox theologian. It has gained popularity in certain circles but is not taught as the doctrine of the Church nor must it be accepted by Orthodox Christians. And I would consider it to be a new, fancified teaching which tries to depict the wicked experiencing the love of God differently. This is only part of the story. All who reject Christ will be in torment, as the Holy Scriptures clearly teach. They will not be able to enjoy God's loving presence and worship Him in His Holy Kingdom for they will not be allowed to enter such a holy place. Utter darkness is outside of the Kingdom of Light.

Forgive me, Father. I mean no disrespect toward you. I wholeheartedly believe in the love and mercy of God. He gives humans ample opportunities to repent - He reaches out to His beloved creatures over and over again. But, He respects our freewill and does not impose it on anyone.

Aidan Kimel

29-03-2011, 04:00 AM

St Isaac the Syrian:

That we should say or think that the matter of Gehenna is not in reality full of love and mingled with compassion would be an opinion full of blasphemy and insult to our Lord God. By saying that He will even hand us over to burning for the sake of sufferings, torment and all sorts of ills, we are attributing to the divine Nature an enmity towards the very rational beings which He created through grace; the same is true if we say that He acts or thinks with spite and with a vengeful purpose, as though He was aventing Himself. Among all His actions there is none that is not entirely a matter of mercy, love and compassion: this constitutes the beginning and end of His dealings with us.

St Isaac proposes here a fundamental understanding of God the Holy Trinity and hermeneutical principle for our interpretation of Holy Scripture. This is the gospel within the gospel, if you will. I do not know how to prove its truth--one can certainly cite biblical texts that would seem to contradict it--yet if it is not true, is the gospel really the gospel?

Benjamin Smith

29-03-2011, 05:01 AM

David, Fr. Kimel, and Fr. Dcn Brian Patrick Mitchell ,

The discomfort we may feel over the mystery of God's mercy and justice is understandable, but it is not a reason to reject or over emphasize one or the other. In doing so we would be rejecting the Holy God who transcends and comprehends within Himself both mercy and justice.

Fr. Dcn Brian Patrick Mitchell, the difficulties encountered on this topic have to do with a narrow one-sided imagination and the inability to transcend imagination through reflection. What one needs to do is to have an imagination, influenced by Biblical imagery and the liturgy. Taken together these sources give us a paradoxical image of God: the Lion and the Lamb, the Judge and the Savior, the Shepherd and the just king, etc. If our imagination is one sided then we will be shocked and dismayed over notion of God's eschatological justice; however if our imaginations are balanced then the scandel need not arise (although the discomfort may remain). However, one cannot rest at the level of paradoxical images--one must try to go beyond imagination where necessary.

Contemplating this mystery the mind should recognize that the subject of these paradoxical images must transcend the images in order to unite them. God is both the Lion and the Lamb at one and the same time. We cannot comprehend or imagine this, but its being incomprehensible is a result of its being true of the incomprehensible God.

LDS,
BLS

Aidan Kimel

29-03-2011, 06:51 AM

Brian Patrick Mitchell

29-03-2011, 03:43 PM

All who reject Christ will be in torment, as the Holy Scriptures clearly teach. They will not be able to enjoy God's loving presence and worship Him in His Holy Kingdom for they will not be allowed to enter such a holy place. . . . He gives humans ample opportunities to repent - He reaches out to His beloved creatures over and over again. But, He respects our freewill and does not impose it on anyone.

Darlene, nothing in "The River of Fire" denies that those who reject Christ will be tormented. They will be, on account of their hatred of God. But God is not to blame for that tormenting hatred. It is their own doing. That's the point of "The River of Fire."

Now look at your words above: First you say the damned will be tormented because "they will not be allowed to enter" God's presence, then you say God "respects our freewill and does not impose it on anyone." There's a logical inconsistency in these two statements. Not allowing people to do something is an imposition on them, limiting their free will.

My point is that people today often need to hear your second statement about the loving God who gives us freedom more than your first statement about God not allowing them into His presence, because they are bedeviled with the image of an unloving God who gives them nothing but grief.

Sacha

29-03-2011, 05:05 PM

Darlene, nothing in "The River of Fire" denies that those who reject Christ will be tormented. They will be, on account of their hatred of God. But God is not to blame for that tormenting hatred. It is their own doing. That's the point of "The River of Fire."

Now look at your words above: First you say the damned will be tormented because "they will not be allowed to enter" God's presence, then you say God "respects our freewill and does not impose it on anyone." There's a logical inconsistency in these two statements. Not allowing people to do something is an imposition on them, limiting their free will.

My point is that people today often need to hear your second statement about the loving God who gives us freedom more than your first statement about God not allowing them into His presence, because they are bedeviled with the image of an unloving God who gives them nothing but grief.

Reminds me of the words of Abraham in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, ‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if one rises from the dead.’ We've all known people who remain brazenly opposed to God, so it would not be surprising if indeed, hell was exactly what the souls that inhabit it find themselves torturously attached to. In the parable, it is telling that the rich man only asks for water for his parched tongue, and not full deliverance.

Regarding the eternal aspect of it, we know from science that energy does not die but rather is transformed. That seems inline with Scriptural teaching on heaven and hell.

Evan

29-03-2011, 06:33 PM

Benjamin, your appeal to mystery at this point is, I believe, misplaced. It presupposes a conflict (an apparently irresolvable conflict) between divine love and divine justice. But the conflict is not within God. The conflict is between God's righteousness and our very human conviction that justice demands retribution and punishment. It is this point that St Isaac saw so very clearly. The righteousness of God is not the punishment of the wicked. The righteousness of God is putting the world to right--delivering the oppressed, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead. The righteousness of God is a new heaven and a new earth. Divine justice is restorative, not punitive. God does not give us what we deserve, thank God. He gives us his kingdom and thus is his justice vindicated.

Here is the power of the interpretation of Hell as advanced by St Isaac and contemporary Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Lossky and Hilarion Alfeyev: the sufferings of Hell are not externally imposed by the just God as punishment; the sufferings of Hell are the inevitable and terrible interior consequence of our refusal to abandon our sin and open our hearts to God's love and mercy. God eternally wills our good. He never withdraws his grace and forgiveness. His love is absolute. That this is so is the incomprehensible mystery of the gospel.

Father,

We have discussed this question previously, so I am wary of repeating myself. As ever, your presentation is articulate and thoughtful and I am loath to take issue with it because I think much of it is dead-on. But I feel impelled to say that I find something deeply problematic about regarding retribution and punishment as incompatible with God's righteousness.

While I agree that God's righteousness is manifest first and foremost in the merciful deliverance of His sinful and stubborn people, be it from the yoke of Pharoah or from the bondage of sin and death, it is also manifest in the punishment of those who enslave them and harden their hearts in response to God's mercy. Indeed, these two things are ever associated in the Scriptures, and I would submit that a "full" understanding of God's righteousness must include both. While the Hebrews didn't "deserve" their deliverance, Pharoah manifestly was actively punished for his hardness of heart, not merely left to interior darkness. By the same token, while we haven't "earned" the great salvation we've received any more than the Prodigal did his joyous reception, we have it on the authority of St. Paul that it is a righteous thing for God to repay those who afflict His people. We have it on the authority of Our Lord that He will avenge His elect who cry out to Him day and night-- even the unjust judges of the world heed the importunity of afflicted widows. St. John saw His day, and He saw the devil and his followers cast into lakes of fire. Indeed, even pagans had such an expectation-- Tartarus was not thought to be the same thing as Elysium, and Socrates went to his death in the belief that his opponents would answer before a higher tribunal for condemning him (yes, I know that we are not pagans, but I think that the urgings of the "Logos spermatikos" are in evidence here).

Our Loving Lord discerns between good and evil, sheep and goats. The sheep are received into the kingdom prepared for them, not because they deserve it, but because they've received the righteousness of God, having no righteousness of their own. That is, they didn't discard the "royal flush" they received from Him Who became poor, that we might become rich. But I think we must say that the goats are sent to the left because they deserve it, just as Esau earned the loss of his inheritance-- Jacob's questionable behavior notwithstanding (and, indeed, being precisely the point, as he was a man manifestly not "deserving" of said inheritance).

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have rested secure in the knowledge that God will avenge their blood on those who dwell upon the earth. Not merely give them up to interior darkness, but actively punish them. We should not imagine that we can be "more loving" than they, as we believe in a God who hates evil and has indignation every day. We are forbidden to desire vengeance for crimes committed against us or our loved ones --however severe-- but we must desire the vindication of God's righteousness in its full sense.

"And that no one may say what is said by those who are deemed philosophers, that our assertions that the wicked are punished in eternal fire are big words and bugbears, and that we wish men to live virtuously through fear, and not because such a life is good and pleasant; I will briefly reply to this, that if this be not so, God does not exist; or, if He exists, He cares not for men, and neither virtue nor vice is anything, and, as we said before, lawgivers unjustly punish those who transgress good commandments."

From St. Justin Martyr's "Second Apology."

In Christ,
Evan

Benjamin Smith

29-03-2011, 06:50 PM

Dear Father Kimel,

I think I agree with some of what you say, but I still think the "appeal to mystery" is quite appropriate here as with all of the various names or predicates we apply to God (I am thinking of what Thomas Aquinas says about the divine names). Moreover, your response evinces (I think) the very one-sided imagination and reflection I mentioned in the previous post.

But the conflict is not within God.

Of course I agree with this.

The conflict is between God's righteousness and our very human conviction that justice demands retribution and punishment. It is this point that St Isaac saw so very clearly. The righteousness of God is not the punishment of the wicked. The righteousness of God is putting the world to right--delivering the oppressed, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead. The righteousness of God is a new heaven and a new earth. Divine justice is restorative, not punitive. God does not give us what we deserve, thank God. He gives us his kingdom and thus is his justice vindicated.

I certainly agree that God's justice is restorative, but it simply does not follow (either logically, theologically, in scripture or patristics) that it is therefore not "punitive." Logically you seem committed to the following proposition: "if God's justice is restorative, then it is not punitive." I think this is just a non-sequitur. Justice, and especially God's justice, manifest itself sometimes in a restorative way and sometimes in a punitive way, and yet it can remain one reality. God's justice restores the oppressed and this restoration is (secundum quid) a punishment to the oppressor. In fact, sometimes, punishment is restorative of the one being punished. So just to be clear on this point, I think that God's justice includes both punitive and restorative elements. Moreover, I am quit willing to think that God's punishments are not "external" in the way we normally think. In fact, I think that God's way of punishing is only analogous to our own.

Here is the power of the interpretation of Hell as advanced by St Isaac and contemporary Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Lossky and Hilarion Alfeyev: the sufferings of Hell are not externally imposed by the just God as punishment; the sufferings of Hell are the inevitable and terrible interior consequence of our refusal to abandon our sin and open our hearts to God's love and mercy. God eternally wills our good. He never withdraws his grace and forgiveness. His love is absolute. That this is so is the incomprehensible mystery of the gospel.

Of course every punishment is a consequence of one's own evil, and moreover, evil is its own punishment. But, as before I can agree with this and still think of God as a judge who punishes (secundum quid). You seem to think that the following propositions are exclusive disjuncts: (a) Hell is an internal consequence of sin or (b) God is a just judge who punishes. But as Hieromonk Irenaues has already pointed this is a false dichotomy.

Here is perhaps the most important point. As you have already indicated that are many, many passages from scripture and the fathers that indicate that God is a just judge who punishes, this is especially true of Jesus Christ who is the Lord of all men and who will return to judge the living and the dead. Both in the East and West the image of Christ returning as the judge of mankind has been a solace to those who have witnessed the injustice of this world. So why do you insist on excluding the belief that God is a just judge who punishes. Why not accept that God is just (in the full sense I have explained) and merciful? Is it because you cannot reconcile punishment and mercy? Here again I think we confrong the mystery of God, who in simplicity incorporates and transcends every perfection, such that we can only use terms like justice, punishment, and mercy analogously when speaking of Him. Probably the best we can do is to follow up on what Hieromonk Irenaues says about love-in-justice and justice-in-love.

LDS,
BLS

Brian Patrick Mitchell

29-03-2011, 07:53 PM

Would it help to consider that the root of the word arbitrary is the Latin arbiter, meaning "judge"? As the word arbitrary suggests, a judge in our human experience is someone weighs evidence and testimony; deliberates carefully or not; passes judgment rightly or wrongly; and then willfully imposes a sentence that may or may not be just or merciful. That's what a judge is to us, and that's why arbitrary has come to mean sheer willfulness.

But God is not that kind of judge. He doesn't need to weigh anything or deliberate about anything. He already knows who we are and what we've done. His knowledge is itself our verdict, but God doesn't decide that verdict — we do, by the choices we make. The only thing left for God to do is impose the sentence. Does He do so capriciously or arbitrarily like a human judge? No. Does He mechanically mete out rewards and punishments according to divine justice? If He did that, there would be no room for mercy. Does He show mercy to some and not to others? On what basis? If some souls deserve mercy, is it really mercy? If nobody deserves mercy, why do some get it and others not? Where's the justice in that?

When you look at these things logically and ask these questions, the image of God as judge is not always helpful. At some point, the analogy of divine justice to human justice breaks down. That's why some believers, some saints even, have sought to explain things differently for those who need explanations, who can't help but ask these questions. For those troubled by the logic, it helps to imagine God as a fire that warms some and burns others, based solely on whether they love it or hate it.

David Lindblom

29-03-2011, 10:00 PM

Aidan Kimel

30-03-2011, 01:00 AM

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have rested secure in the knowledge that God will avenge their blood on those who dwell upon the earth. Not merely give them up to interior darkness, but actively punish them. We should not imagine that we can be "more loving" than they, as we believe in a God who hates evil and has indignation every day. We are forbidden to desire vengeance for crimes committed against us or our loved ones --however severe-- but we must desire the vindication of God's righteousness in its full sense.

Evan, I need to challenge this. I do not doubt that many Christians, perhaps even Church Fathers, have thought along lines like this; but I do not see how one reconciles this desire for vengeance with the teaching of our Lord, who commands us to pray for our enemies and to forgive seventy times seven.

How does the infliction of pain upon the wicked satisfy the demands of perfect and eternal justice? What good does it secure? It is, of course, perfectly "natural" for us to cry out for the punishment of those who have injured us or have injured those we love--and in a world where perfect justice is unachievable, perhaps a punitive judicial system is the best we can do--but we are talking here of the execution of perfect and eternal justice at the Great Assize. Does God benefit from the sufferings of the damned? Of course not. He is neither damaged by the sins of his creatures nor does he gain anything from their torment. Do the victims benefit? No. The punishment of those who have wronged them does not restore to them what they have lost. Do the evildoers benefit? Only if repentance remains a possibility for them, but presumably they are beyond repentance.

What do the victims of injustice really need? They need resurrection. They need new life. They need the good and goods that only God can provide. Once this good is given, though, once all that has been lost has been restored and more than restored, is not justice fulfilled and the righteousness of God vindicated?

Perhaps one might also add that the victims of injustice need the confession, contrition, and repentance of those who have injured them. Certainly reconciliation is impossible apart from such confession, contrition, and repentance. Evildoers need to repent. Evildoers need to do all that they can to contribute to the healing of those they have injured. (Perhaps this is the moral intuition that lies behind, or at least partly lies behind, the Latin tradition's formulation of purgatory and the temporal punishment of sin.) There can be no return to God and the communion of saints apart from conversion. But if sinners should remain obdurate in their impenitence, if they should eternally choose Hell rather than Heaven, they only damage and hurt themselves. That they suffer eternally is therefore "just," for they have brought their suffering upon themselves by their definitive rejection of their ultimate good; but God has not directly imposed this pain as an extrinsic penalty upon them. God is not glorified by their eternal woe, nor do the redeemed rejoice in it (contra Dante). How it is possible that the sufferings of the damned do not contaminate the happiness of the saints I do not know. I accept that this must be the case--as George McDonald told C. S. Lewis, Hell does not have the power to veto Heaven--but it is difficult to understand nonetheless.

Evan

30-03-2011, 12:40 PM

Father,

I agree with much of what you have said. God is glorified by no one’s eternal loss. Any soul who is sent to the left is one for whom Our Lord lived, died, rose and ascended in glory in vain. One recalls Jonah, who didn't really want the Ninevites to convert and live. We are not permitted to do this. Our Lord wept over Jerusalem. Further, we are, as you say, to forgive seven times seventy times those of our neighbors who affront us. Christians always forgive their enemies and wish them no harm; this is an absolute rule, allowing no exceptions

And yet, the first sentence you drew from my post made use of the language of St. John's testimony concerning the Last Judgment. Psalm 93 tells us that the Lord is a God of vengeance, and I feel that denying that God will actively punish anyone when He comes in glory dilutes the apostolic witness:

"And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying: How long, O Lord (Holy and True), do you not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" (Revelation 6:9-10).

The "vengeance" for which the martyrs pray and which I think we must never neglect in any proclamation of God’s ultimate judgment of the living and the dead is not a personal vindictiveness, but the fulfillment of God’s righteous historical purposes. God's righteousness, manifested in the delivery of His people throughout history, always involves the punishment of the ungodly who refuse to be converted and live. As did the Babylon of old at the hand of Cyrus, the Babylon that yet stands will receive her reward at the hand of the True Cyrus, the conquering Lamb:

"Her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. Render to her just as she rendered to you, and repay her double according to her works; in the cup which she has mixed, mix double for her." (Rev 18:5-6).

Do the martyrs under the altar want blood? Would it please them to see it? God forbid! The first martyr prayed for those that stoned him to death. While there is time, we forbear, and we pray that those who do evil may choose life rather than death, because God desires not the death of a sinner, and we are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. We must weep with Our Lord over the hard-hearted and impenitent.

But we have it on good authority that all the nations will eventually be gathered before the throne of the Son of Man to receive good or evil, according to what they’ve done in the body. The final divine avenging of the persecuted righteous is not simply an “Old Testament idea” whose time is now past in our New Testament dispensation of indiscriminate love and universal nonjudgmentalism.

“Will not God avenge his elect who cry to him day and night, though He bears long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.” (Luke 29:7-8).

In Christ,
Evan

Sacha

31-03-2011, 01:23 AM

Here is another quote from Christ taken from the parable of the ten minas in Luke 19:27

He concludes as follows: "But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them- bring them here and kill them in front of me".

I reconcile the positions laid out by Fr Kimel and Evan as following: I believe that God will allow those who reject Him and His salvation to experience what they have done to others. I believe that the pain, agony and torture of those victims crying out for vengeance in the book of Revelation, will be experienced supernaturally by those who martyred them. In other words, the same evil energy that they foisted on others will be thrust back at them, because ultimately, this is what they themselves have chosen. This, to me, is but the outworking of His justice. God renders to each his own, even when repentance is naught. This is what I understand the 'fire' to be, which isn't just God's light or presence as Fr Kalomiros would argue. For this belief, I base myself primarily on the parable of the unmerciful servant, where the Lord concludes that so as you have done unto others, it will be done unto you.

Brian Patrick Mitchell

01-04-2011, 09:34 PM

Perhaps I have missed it but no one seems to have actually interacted w/ the postings of Heiromonk Irenaeus. Each just keeps stated their own views in different ways. I would like someone to show, in detail, how they think he is wrong in his reading of the Fathers, scripture and the Church's hymnography. As a former adherent to the River of Fire thoughtline I think he has done a fine job of dismantling that view. I would like to hear others opinions.

When I read this the other day, my first thought was, “Who has the time?” Fr. Irenaeus’s posts are daunting by their length alone. But my second thought was, “Who is saying Fr. Irenaeus is wrong?” I was thinking of his summary comment, #43:

Let me say one further thing: the idea that, in hell, God's love is truly experienced, even as it is in heaven, but that the experience of this love is altogether different for the unrepentant heart that is bound by its own sin and unrighteousness, is surely true. This emphasis is not wrong; but we cannot take it as the 'whole of the story'. In responding to the positions I have above, I do not wish to suggest that this isn't an aspect of the Orthodox understanding of hell: it surely is. But to make this the sole means by which hell is perceived to differ from heaven, to make them in fact that 'same place', does strike me as fundamentally incompatible with the testimony of the Scriptures, Fathers and the Church's hymnography -- the stretching of an idea too far.

There are solid truths attempting to be proclaimed in the views we sometimes hear today, and certain excesses and errors attempting to be redressed. But we must not let one aspect of the true reality of heaven and hell blind us to other realities also revealed to and in the Church.

Heaven and hell are, for us in this present life, mysteries. We cannot know them fully, cannot speak of them fully. Yet God in His mercy reveals certain aspects of these mysteries for our edification, for our spiritual development. We must cling to the whole of this revelation in our spiritual struggles toward the Kingdom.

I think this is a neat little summary, and I can’t find anything wrong with it. I would only add an Amen.

Why then do some of us still seem to disagree with Fr. Irenaeus? I put off answering that question for a couple of days, weighing whether the issue was worth the trouble, but finally deciding that I needed to be sure of what Fr. Irenaeus has said before assuming too much agreement.

Having now re-read his comments, I still don’t see much to disagree with. I do see a difference in emphasis, and I see some matters of concern with his argumentation. But David and others seem to have taken the difference in emphasis to be a complete refutation, never minding the many good things Fr. Irenaeus has said about Dr. Kalomiros’s “The River of Fire.” Let me repeat a few of his judgments of Kalomiros from comment #37, taken out of context just to show where Fr. Irenaeus agrees with Kalomiros:

His basic argument (staged against something of a straw-man caricature of ‘Western theology’) is that man’s eternal condition is not the result of God’s vengeful wrath in the face of sin, but wholly the result of man’s freedom misused. God is not the author of evil: if man spends eternity in a condition of suffering, this is not God’s doing but man’s. This is, in and of itself, an entirely Scriptural and patristic confession, right at the heart of the Orthodox understanding of God, man, and salvation. On it, Dr Kalomiros has some rather nice comments . . .

Again, this is entirely in accordance with the Church’s confession. The condition of man in his transgression, including all the suffering that this bears, is the result of his free action in departing from God. The pain, the suffering that ensues is not God enacting some vengeance upon man for his wrongdoing: it is, rather, the consequence of departing from the one source of life.

Here he has used a true claim (that hell is a self-condemnation) . . .

Again, I do not think that Dr Kalomiros is wrong in his basic point: he is affirming something important.

Once more, Dr Kalomiros is not incorrect in asserting that judgement is the encounter with God’s truth and light . . .

God’s love is manifest precisely in the fact that he offers to us what we forge as the desire of our heart—even if this is our choice for evil. The terrible truth of human freedom, which God so cherishes, is that He will grant to us even death, if we so choose to take it over life.

The statement that God is a loving fire for all, good and evil, is of course entirely true. To say that the water of life (God’s loving fire) is poured out upon all, is also true.

It is true that the river of fire is God’s love and truth, which flows out upon all; Dr Kalomiros is not incorrect in this.

By and large it makes points that are solid and secure (though it at times does so in language that cuts a little uneasily with the Church’s traditional vocabulary and expression).

I am grateful to Dr Kalomiros for his emphasis on human freedom, and on God’s love.
Finally we have comment #43, quoted above, which to my mind pretty much sums things up.

Fr. Irenaeus also offers some valid criticisms of “The River of Fire” that I don’t think any of us have disagreed with.

One criticism concerns Kalomiros’s caricature of Western theology. I myself do not think the caricature egregious. Kalomiros is trying to make his point plain with an obvious contrast between his position and the apparent position of others, and he’s not in fact creating a caricature that has not already been created by Western Christians themselves, in reaction to the West’s longstanding stress on predestination leading to the horrendous error of Calvinism, according to which God makes beings bad and tortures them eternally for it. Let us not forget that some Christians still live up to this caricature. But I don’t mean this to be a criticism of Fr. Irenaeus’s very brief comments on Kalomiros’s use of the caricature.

A much more important criticism of Kalomiros is Fr. Irenaus’s argument against this statement by Kalomiros:

So that which will differentiate between one man and another will not be a decision of God, a reward or a punishment from Him, but that which was in each one's heart; what was there during all our life will be revealed in the Day of Judgment. If there is a reward and a punishment in this revelation — and there really is — it does not come from God but from the love or hate which reigns in our heart. Love has bliss in it, hatred has despair, bitterness, grief, affliction, wickedness, agitation, confusion, darkness, and all the other interior conditions which compose hell (I Cor. 4:6). (Section 14)
Here Kalomiros presents a view of heaven and hell that is entirely psychological and internal to each creature under judgment, as well as a view of God that is entirely passive. This is going too far, and Fr. Irenaeus is very right to say so. I wonder, though, whether Dr. Kalomiros really intended to go so far and whether he might correct himself under interrogation. I suspect he would.

Now for a few quibbles with Fr. Irenaeus’s argumentation:

(1) As he often does, Fr. Irenaeus takes too much literally, not just the words of Scripture and the Fathers and the Church’s worship, but the words of others. For instance, when he hears “Hell is heaven differently experienced,” he takes this to be a denial that heaven and hell are separate places. He assumes the speaker is saying either they are the same place or they are purely states of mind (or spirit). Much of what he says in comments #35 and #37 is directed against this error, but is the error inherent in the saying? I don’t think it is. It never occurred to me to make the inference Fr. Irenaeus makes concerning place, and I don’t think most people mean it that way. What they mean is that God is not two-faced — good to those who love him and bad to those who don’t; He is the same always and everywhere, and that accounts for the difference in the experience of heaven and the experience of hell. Whether heaven and hell are separate places is another matter. (On that matter, I would say that we as Orthodox Christians we must believe that heaven and hell are literally separate places because we must believe in the literal resurrection of the body, which requires some separation of bodies after judgment to preserve the essential humanity of the damned while preventing them from continuing to torment the saints and defile creation.)

(2) Intent on taking things literally and not metaphorically or allegorically, Fr. Irenaeus seems to make the mistake of thinking that repetition of a metaphor proves that it’s not a metaphor. Thus in comment #35 he piles up scriptural, liturgical, and patristic passages of punishment, judgment, hellfire, and heaven and practically dares us to declare them all allegorical. I am not saying here how these passages should be understood; I am merely saying that Fr. Irenaeus insinuates if not argues that the frequent use of the same imagery obliges us to understand that imagery literally, when in fact we are not so obliged. Of the many quotations produced by Fr. Irenaeus and Fr. Alvin, I believe only one (St. Jerome in #34) tells us that we must understand things literally. The rest are more open to interpretation.

(3) In #35, Fr. Irenaeus holds up the hymns of the Church as the “correct vision of judgement and hell,” saying that this vision is “seen also in the Scriptures and the Fathers.” In saying this, he ignores differences between the way some of our more subtle Fathers speak of such things (e.g., St. Irenaeus, St. Basil, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John of Damascus, as quoted in Fr. Alvin’s comment #34) and the way other Fathers do. He also ignores factors like audience, occasion, and purpose that require adjustments in the way we communicate. For instance, he makes much of Kalomiros’s “narrow” definition of punishment, dismissing it as erroneous because the word is usually used more broadly (and less definitely) by the Church. It is true that Kalomiros uses the word differently, but Kalomiros is quite plain about how he is using it. He is using it to create a distinction between correction and revenge, and his main point is that punishment is not revenge, so when we hear in church that the damned are punished we should not understand this to mean that God is taking revenge on them but that they are receiving the natural consequence of their own choices. It’s true that Kalomiros’s use cannot be squared completely with the Church's use, but it’s also true that the Church’s use often serves a different purpose and is open to interpretation, being not obviously fixed in one particular meaning. To many today, it needs explanation, and just repeating the same word used the same way in other passages doesn’t help. The larger issue is that Fr. Irenaeus does often argue as if the only choice we have is to keep repeating the words of the Church, never minding the uncertainty about the meaning of those words, or their current ranges of meanings, or the confusing appearance in our world of new words and concepts, or the appearance of new problems not fully addressed in the past by the Church, or the particular people we are now trying to reach. Minding these things, I don’t think recitation of the “correct” church words is always enough. Recitation is what Muslims do. (That's what "Qur'an" means.) Christians are supposed to be able to actually think, and thinking involves forming new concepts for which we sometimes need new words.

(4) Finally, in focusing on a real fault in Kalomiros (his utterly passive God), Fr. Irenaeus stresses God’s role in “actively” separating the sheep from the goats and sending the goats to another place, but he doesn’t go much beyond the visual image of the human judge who orders the guilty hauled off to prison. He merely repeats many passages saying that that’s what happens and so that settles it. The problem is that in the courts of this world the bailiff shackles the prisoner and drags him away against his will. If that’s what happens on the Day of Judgment, then we’re left with a conundrum: How is it that the damned, finally standing in the presence of God, would willingly remain in that presence and must be forced by the angels to leave it? Might it not add more to our understanding to say that when the Judge finally appears on the judgment seat the damned scurry for cover like cockroaches when you turn on the light? That way, we can still say that God actively “sends” them away by appearing and by providing them cover (real, literal, material cover), but we can also still see their own will at work. The only question remaining is why God actively maintains the damned in existence if all they do is suffer. But of course, we don’t know that all they do is suffer. They might be of some further use to God, but, as Fr. Irenaeus says, that's all a mystery.

In sum, I see substantial agreement by all parties with the main point of “The River of Fire” and with at least two of Fr. Irenaeus’s criticisms of it, but I think Fr. Irenaeus makes too much of other issues and that his lengthy and questionable argumentation on those issues has unfortunately left people thinking that “The River of Fire” is plainly heretical and should not be read.

I don’t expect that this will settle everything. I mainly mean it to explain why some of us don’t think Fr. Irenaeus’s comments have settled everything. I also mean it to show that “The River of Fire” is still very worthwhile for some readers.

Coincidentally, just last January, at the March for Life here in Washington, DC, I met a man from the local ROCOR Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. He’s a middle-aged man of some education, a technical professional, and a convert from nothing who's been Orthodox about 10 years. As we marched, he mentioned “The River of Fire” and how much it meant to him. He said he made a point of reading it at least once a year, to remind himself what kind of God we Christians worship. About the same time, I heard from a troubled nephew struggling with belief and unbelief. His latest complaint against God was God’s slaughter of people in the Old Testament and His eternal torture of the damned. Which should I send him, the text of vespers and matins for the Sunday of the Last Judgment, with the "correct vision," or “The River of Fire”?

In Christ,

Dn Patrick

David Lindblom

04-04-2011, 03:47 AM

Fr Dcn Brian Patrick Mitchell,
Thanks for the rebuttal, that's what I was looking for. I like to hear all sides so I can make a somewhat informed decision on things.