There is a periodic argument on Christian Twitter, perhaps revived when David Bentley Hart writes something new, between “universalists”—people who claim that all humans will enjoy eternal blessedness and none be eternally damned—and what are called “infernalists”—people who believe that there is such a thing as Hell or eternal conscious torment. Like all recurring Twitter arguments, it never advances or even changes. I’m not very knowledgeable about the technical details of the cases and I am probably not even describing the positions to anyone’s liking. For whatever it’s worth (nothing), my read is that the “infernalists” have the preponderance of Scripture and tradition on their side, while the “universalists” have some intriguing minority reports from both, as well as a strong case from the doctrine of God.1 But I do not choose a side here. My actual position is that I do not wish to find out if “the worm that dieth not” and the “unquenchable fire” are rustic metaphors for any misery less final than eternal separation from God. More to the point, I can’t fathom why someone in my position would risk lowering the stakes of sin and death. Woe to those who say “peace, peace” and there is no peace. That’s to say, I’d hate to tell people that everyone will be saved and then turn out to be wrong, having misled them into complacency about their sins. But more to the point: doing wicked things is bad.
Hell Isn’t a Leprechaun
It’s certainly possible to think of Hell as something human beings create for ourselves and each other all the time (I want to say that C.S. Lewis wrote something to this effect, that Earth would to the blessed appear as the lowest rung of Heaven and to the damned the antechamber of Hell). I’m not going to sucker myself into attempting theology here so I’ll keep it as literal and non-speculative as I can: we seem to want to do bad things to other people and ourselves and, if we could do those things forever we probably would. Even the most beautiful, self-sacrificial and unexpected acts of creativity and love happen in the context of general misery and chaos created by human beings doing human things. The photogenic plight of the Haitian migrants who were chased down and beaten by mounted U.S. border patrol officers is a case in point. In one sense, the problem is the unwillingness of the U.S. to obey international and natural law in accepting asylum-seekers, and in another it is the cruelty of the methods used to repel them. No more horses, the White House suggests. But the history of Haiti is one of unrelenting economic and political punishment by France, the U.S. and other great powers for their refusal to be slaves and to give away their land. The crime began long before any of us was born and yet it is repeated and added to in great and small ways all the time, down to this very moment.
One way to hear the apocalyptic passage in Matthew 25 is that the nations to the left have failed a test of human empathy and solidarity by not feeding, clothing, visiting, or welcoming the brothers and sisters of the Son of Man and are subsequently punished. Another way to hear it is that they are being consigned to the world they create. It strikes me as churlish to impugn the justice of a God who decided to just let us do what we want forever. “You like doing this to people? Ok, now you’re people.”
I don’t want to push this distinction or get into the questions it raises. It just establishes sufficient reason, as far as I’m concerned, to try to be clearer in my work about what things are bad and should not be done, and what things are good and should be done more. Not that salvation comes from avoiding bad things or doing good ones (more on that in a minute), just that bad things are, in fact, really bad and good things are, in fact, actually good. You, and I, and everyone else, should do less of the former and more of the latter.
Saying this has come a little more naturally to me as time has gone on. Like everyone I came up with, I absorbed Tillich’s dictum that “sin” should never be pluralized, that it was a condition of estrangement yadda yadda. I preached a lot about our existential encounter with God in Jesus Christ and the change this was supposed to effect in us in our perceptions and attachments. I never read Richard Rohr but I saw him excerpted endlessly on Facebook and in forwarded emails and in general accepted, or at least regularly worked with, a heavily psychologized version of grace, faith, and salvation. And I don’t think any of that was wrong, just that it was incomplete. Maybe as I got older and my own life changed, the interior drama of cosmic anxiety assuaged by divine acceptance became less real and compelling than the concrete obligations in front of me, which I was always meeting or failing, and finding meaningful or futile, in various degrees. Maybe it was the doubt-inducing effect of watching people I knew were committing adultery and had exposed spouse and children to untimely sorrow showing no sign of remorse or even bashfulness, or who had noisily removed themselves from all public worship walking back to demand the Sacrament at a spouse’s funeral. It felt more urgent to say things like “don’t commit adultery” or “don’t tell lies” or “don’t defraud people” without first establishing the annihilating despair that might prompt some of us to do those things. We don’t need perfect reasons for doing the right thing, and our extenuations for doing the wrong thing are probably not as compelling as we think.
Does This Mean We Have to Be Jerks?
I think I can understand why moral theology got psychologized away from sin toward alienation, estrangement and so forth in the 20th century. The idea of a moral law had been abused and everyone was, I’m told, unhappy and feeling repressed. Strict moral judgment was in practice if not in theory indistinguishable from petty moralism. What if, as Abba Bruce of Asbury Park said, it ain’t a sin to be glad you’re alive?
How far this sense of maturity was abused, and how far this spiritual liberty could be turned into license and mistreatment of others, is hard to say. Abuse does not remove use, and I’m not prepared to say there’s no use in this stuff. What concerns me more is that it feels to me inadequate to the nature of human evil and suffering. The optimistic and indulgent language of the post-60s church (compare the prayers of the 1978 and 2006 Lutheran worship books to the 1917 and 1958 versions or to the Rite 1 material in the Book of Common Prayer from which we cribbed heavily to see what I mean) is at odds both with the world as we see it now, and with the supposedly censorious and righteous mood of our culture. It’s certainly not that we’ve irrecoverably lost a sense of right and wrong; it’s just that we aren’t very clear about it. We call things problematic or sus or dicey less as tribunes of a new public morality than as people coping with an inability to really articulate one. I haven’t seen anyone explain when an “age gap relationship” between adults goes from dicey to just plain wrong or when cultural hybridization and cross-fertilization becomes appropriation. I had to take an inventory that classified some (good, multicultural) workers as using “cultural generalizations to recognize cultural difference” and other (bad, monocultural) workers as using “broad stereotypes to recognize cultural difference.” How can I tell if I’m making a generalization or a stereotype? I asked. If there’s a real answer to that question, I haven’t heard it.
I don’t know if these are much more than mental bad habits. At least, the impulse to query right and wrong is good, even if it is untutored and misdirected. And it’s hardly a weakness confined to culturally liberal communities. In the white evangelical world, there is a fondness for the language of “racial reconciliation,” such a pleasing phrase suggesting no particular wrongs and no specific guilty parties but simply a shared obligation to overcome an undefined mutual unpleasantness. It does not suggest the concrete moral demands of “racial justice,” which is oftener heard in my contexts. The church formerly led by John Piper has gone further, with an emphasis on “ethnic harmony”—a phrase more Maoistic than anything invented on the Left recently. There is no need for accounting, for hard truths to be unearthed or accepted, for sins to be confessed or absolved in order for everyone to accept the yoke of “harmony.”
Christians, and especially people in parish ministry, don’t need to confine ourselves to these malformed atmospherics. I find Catholic teaching on salvation and justification unclear and uncertain, a cocktail of assent to truth, inner dispositions, and external acts whose recipe is precise but unknowable. But it’s certainly been edifying to me to try to learn the language of moral theology and its rather impersonal rigor. Lying to protect oneself is not simply an abstract violation of duty to The Truth, an expression of cosmic anxiety, or an abuse of a power relationship. It’s also a failure of charity toward those people who justly rely on us, and an improper weighing of our own interests relative to others’. Violence and discrimination are not merely expressions of bad views but concrete denials of justice as “giving each what they are due.”
Even as I write this, however, let alone try to preach it, a chill creeps in. There really are gray areas, mitigating factors, mixed motives, incomplete information, and truly impossible situations where competing goods can’t be reconciled. It’s no harder to stand up and thunder about right and wrong without any attention to all of that than it is to bathe everyone in a glow of divine sympathy and forbearance, especially if the “wrongs” are culturally conditioned and aimed at vulnerable people rather than the sorts of shared monstrosities we accept, even if we do not enact them, every day. The struggle, however, is to know and face where we find it easy to preach stern truths and where we find it easy to preach bland acceptance. The individual and the society are mutually creating and implicated in each other, so we contradict ourselves if we spread balm on the individual conscience while lancing the boil of public sin, or vice versa.
Instead, Do Good Things
We aren’t saved by doing or being good, but you can’t replace something with nothing. One fatal weakness of the sort of preaching that gets labeled as “legalistic” or “moralistic” is that it seems to lean much more heavily on what you shouldn’t do than on what you should. I’m certainly guilty of this. There are a lot of reasons for this disproportion, but one of them may be that we are just as confused about goodness as we are about evil.
I think a lot about a post Ben Crosby wrote over the summer when I consider how to frame goodness and virtue. It’s about the public worship aspect of keeping the Sabbath as a religious obligation rather than as a personal choice defined and constrained by the benefit to the worshiper:
For Thomas [Aquinas], religion is the virtue which governs the relationship of the human being to God, falling under the category of justice. Justice in the broadest sense is rendering to others their due (ST II-ii 58); religion is the virtue by which we render to God the reverence we owe him. God is owed reverence by virtue of his creation, preservation, and redemption of his creatures, and this reverence is fittingly expressed in worship both private and public. Praise and worship are, for Thomas - as for so many others - what God is owed, not because God is vain and needs to be flattered but rather because of who God is, and who we are in relationship to him. The external practices of religion, including public worship, are not primarily for or about us, but enable us to exercise the virtue of religion, rightly relating ourselves as creatures to the creator, redeemed to the redeemer, servants to a master, children to a father, and so forth. Public worship is, simply put, a moral obligation owed to God.
The whole post is well worth your time if you are interested in worship, but I highlight this bit because the language of justice is relevant to how we think about good actions. Worship is good in itself, prior to and apart from any psychological or even spiritual benefit it provides us, because it is just. A problem with the psychologizing turn in the liberal Protestant environment I came up in is that it can obscure matters of justice (expressed as duty, obligation, or impersonal virtue) behind veils of motivation, authenticity, and subjective need. But obligations to God and neighbor are not contingent on any of that. And you need some language for claiming that good things are good for knowable and non-contingent reasons, otherwise you end up with pure utilitarianism on one hand or a “God said it, that settles it” approach to the Law on the other.
Telling the truth at some personal cost, to reverse the example above, is not something to do because lies make baby Jesus cry or because it leads to better outcomes in the aggregate, but because it gives people their due, even if their due is to be mad at me. Giving money to people who need it is not just a bare command, it is, in a Christian moral sense, their money because they need it. Or it’s God’s money because everything is God’s and God wills that we supply each other in our need. Give some money for people in Haiti, for instance, like I just did writing this because I sometimes need to preach myself into doing the right thing.
Getting to Heaven Before They Close the Door
I’m still Lutheran enough to be acutely aware that both avoiding evil and doing good are works of the Law that do not make us righteous before God. And the most important task of preaching “don’t do sins, do good things instead” is to confront ourselves with our need for grace. What I’m talking about here is, I think, what we call the “third use of the Law,” for building up the righteous (through faith) in their sanctity. And probably, while I’m at it, the “first use,” which is to do things like limit the amount of wanton murders, substandard shoe sales (Luther really got bent out of shape over this sort of thing), and call the world to take measures to prevent climate disaster. But the thing about even focusing narrowly and correctly on the “imputed” righteousness of faith, for the sake of the obedience of Jesus Christ, is that it can slip into its own form of special pleading. “Only the one who believes obeys,” Bonhoeffer says in The Cost of Discipleship, but “only the one who obeys believes.” I think about that line a lot.
Early in my career I was really into bringing non-church music into church contexts. And it was good music! We did the Time Out of Mind song “Trying to Get to Heaven.” We did the Tom Waits outtake “Down There By the Train,” which is a fantastic song:
This shared image of a sort of secret occult path or entrance to heaven is beautiful in its way, and as existential parables they’re not even wrong, I don’t think. But as I listened to them both again recently for the first time in years, they sounded maudlin. There’s no secret to heaven, just as there’s no secret to hell. There’s Jesus Christ and the offering of his life and death, the adherence to his words and example, and faithfulness to his Body. It is fully open to “old Humpty Jackson,” to say nothing of Bob Dylan. Anyone to be saved from this world of woe will arrive as one slipping onto the last train in the dead of night; “every heart to love” will or will not come, as Leonard Cohen put it in another song we did in those days, but any that do will come “like a refugee.” That’s something we can learn from whips and horses and centuries of punitive debt colliding at the southern border. But grace is forgiveness, not indulgence; the paid and stamped fare to heaven is a gift, not a cosmic loophole.
That’s an important distinction to me as I try to explain good and evil and salvation to myself, if not to anyone else. No need to look for a hidden place where to willows and dogwoods grow under a golden moon, no need to endlessly search the landscape of the self for every hesitancy and hangup, no need for secret motives or mitigations: it’s all right here and right now, for ill and for good, today and forever.
Appreciation: Neo-Noir
My brother, who knows me well, gave me a subscription to the Criterion Channel for my birthday, largely because it coincided with the launch of their Neo-Noir series:
In the months that followed I watched a lot of these movies, which have fallen out of fashion in the age of the sequel and the international superhero franchise. Not all of them have been all that good, but all of them have been interesting. Part of the fascination is atmospheric. Noir films are mostly affairs of the city at night, which is just cool to look at (a couple of fantastic one-night-in-the-city stories could have been on this set but are elsewhere in the channel, Mikey and Nicky and After Hours). Incomplete information is dangled and then filled in. Protagonists you want to root for do stupid and outright wicked things (Ben Gazarra in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Gene Hackman in Night Moves have lingered with me).
But what has really tied the movies together as an experience, for me, is their ordinary and often cluttered material setting. A gentleman/lady detective story is set in front rooms and orderly spaces of elite society. Movies about professional criminals are set in an underworld. Film noir mostly lives between these two. The protagonist may call on a mansion or a plush office, and will almost certainly end up in a seedy venue or two as well, but the action is mostly in normal places. It’s all very un-idealized and plain. Linda Fiorentino’s drab but perfectly fine apartment in 90’s Brooklyn in The Last Seduction, Steve Gutenberg’s of-the-moment but raggedy bachelor one-bedroom in The Bedroom Window, even the half-abandoned sleek modern mansion of Suture seem very much of their time and very much lived in, or studiously ignored. Jogging with sweatbands pops up in Body Double and Body Heat (the latter paired with smoking) for a proper 80’s feel. Hackman and his sometime-estranged wife reconcile and are shown having some postcoital fondue at the foot of their bed. Is that what people did in the 70s? I found myself asking. Putting on some fondue, taking a break for intercourse, and then having some more fondue without leaving bed?
There’s always a crime, of course, but with these movies it’s the world around the crime that really holds the attention. It’s not just the detail itself (with a few exceptions, these are set at the time of their production, making them more plausible and less pretty by far than any “period” movie), it’s the way that dissatisfaction naturally arises from the environment. People gamble with their lives or morals because they want something their world isn’t giving them, and they suddenly see a way to get it.
It’s an old story, to be sure, but it works just as well with fern-bar neon and low-rent 70’s cabaret.
Sermon: Last of All
What I preached on my ordination anniversary:
To be clear, I don’t think it’s always best to read the minority view in Scripture in light of the majority position, or the ambiguous in light of the apparently more clear. Augustine urges us to read the harder passages in light of the clearer, but that’s a hermeneutic choice that we don’t make with, like, Shakespeare.