Jerry Walls: Hell: The Logic of Damnation
If Walls argument goes through, then Molinism, augmented by the doctrine of optimal grace, affords an account that ‘may provide a way to maintain both that God is perfectly good and that some will be eternally damned’. Walls rejects William Lane Craig’s proposal that God so arranged things that those who never hear the gospel suffer from transworld damnation5, and therefore do not require an equal opportunity to be saved. ‘It is exceedingly hard to entertain seriously the notion that all the persons who have lived and died in countries the gospel didn’t reach for centuries would have rejected it if they’d heard it’. Whilst the unsaved, on Walls’ view, do suffer from transworld damnation, it isn’t the case that those who fail to hear the gospel and die are among the damned in all feasible worlds. The hypothesis of optimal grace is needed to retain the plausibility of this account.
But Walls is sensible of possible objections to his take on divine goodness. For example, doesn’t it encourage presumption about further chances beyond the grave? Walls doesn’t think so: post-mortem grace is not a matter of giving some people more chances than others, but about ensuring they get no less; each person has ‘no more than the opportunity to make a decisive choice’. Moreover, this gives no ground for supposing ‘present choices do not count’. Those who reject salvation now on the presumption that they can repent later may well be ‘forming, by that very attitude, a settled disposition to prefer their will to God’s’. A more serious concern for some is that this leaves us with no motive to evangelise: ‘missionaries do not convert people who would otherwise be lost’. Walls agrees that they do not – and it’s a good thing too: ‘the traditional view… entails that some persons may be damned largely because of the failure or disobedience of others’. But this does not mean evangelism is left without a motive. ‘If the Christian message is crucial for human fulfilment and happiness, it is good for all persons to hear that message as soon as possible’. We are offered the analogy of a group of people suffering the pains of malnutrition. Would it be right to ignore their plight, even if we knew with certainty that they’d be getting all the food they needed in several years time? Another worry Walls deals with is that, on his account, grace is given ‘as a matter of necessity’ instead of being freely bestowed. Walls concedes that point, but disagrees with the characterisation of grace that lies behind it: ‘what is essential to the notion of grace is not that it is bestowed or withheld at will, but that it is undeserved’. And of course, God did not have to create anybody to be good to. One of the more substantive objections to Walls’ account (in my view) is the claim that a good God wouldn’t create anybody he knew would reject His goodness, and be damned. Walls acknowledges this to be ‘a serious difficulty’, but questions the assumption that ‘God could have created only persons who would accept grace’. Perhaps not, if his aim is to bring great multitudes to salvation. The important thing Walls emphasises is that nobody is lost in the actual world who would be saved in another feasible world. It is not the case that some are being sacrificed against their wills that others might know God; ‘they willingly and persistently choose their role’.
Walls believes this account of divine goodness can be adapted to resolve the moral problems of the general foreknowledge view. The principle that ‘God does everything he can to save all persons, short of destroying their freedom’ is retained. The important difference here is that ‘God does not have the advantage of middle knowledge to help him create a world in which the number or proportion of the damned is kept at a minimum’; He is left with probabilities. And it seems at least a theoretical possibility, prior to creating, that all would be lost. The question, then, is whether it would be consistent with God’s goodness to create a world where there was such a possibility? Walls believes that it would: ‘God need not be able to save any fixed percentage… His perfect goodness consists essentially in the fact that he saves the highest number or proportion he can’. The alternative, with its entailment that no created person could ever receive supreme happiness, does not seem to Walls to be a better state than a world of free creatures who have that opportunity, even if many are damned in the end.
This summary does not exhaust the range of concerns covered in this chapter. But a recurrent issue in the discussion is the question of whether or not God, in His goodness, should respect or override human free will. The subject of hell and its relation to human freedom is further explored in the fifth chapter.