A Question:
When God sends people to hell for all eternity, will He spend eternity weeping over those who have been lost?
Will I be allowed to weep for them too?
Or are we all - the saved and the Trinity - going say 'Those were the rules' and spend eternity in happiness and delight?
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- PamBG
- I am Pam Berardinelli Garrud (PamBG), a 54 year old wife, daughter and beloved child of God. Ordained as a minister (pastor) in the Methodist Church of Great Britain, in 2009 I re-immigrated back to Northeast Ohio with my London-born husband after 20 years residence in the UK. I am seeking to serve God by loving God and my neighbor in the ministry of hospital chaplaincy. Prior to becoming a minister, I worked in the pensions industry. The views expressed in this Blog are purely my own and do not represent the official views of any denomination, group or organization.
7 comments:
IMHO the answers are
1/. Yes
2/. Yes
3/. No
Otherwise I don't think I'll get on with God who to be worth worshipping must be infinitely better than me - and I see Jesus as the evidence that he is precisely that
I find it hard to believe a God who is love would let anyone go to hell.
I've read a couple of articles by Thomas Talbot on hell and like what he says. And then, I think Hans Urs von Balthasar also thinks no one will end up in hell - link
(hi, by the way! I found you through, hm, somehow through Andrew Rilstone, a link of a link or something.)
So this makes me think of C.S. Lewis, in (I think) The Great Divorce, where he points out that if those who are damned are allowed to make those who are saved be unhappy over their fate, that's not quite fair either. Specifically, in TGD, I believe he postulates a wonderful, loving woman who loves/was married to a mean, terrible man who made her mortal life awful and is trying to blackmail her happiness in heaven by making her unhappy about his damnnation.
Not that I have an easy answer to this... though I suppose Dante and Lewis might argue that anyone who is damned has already basically decremented his soul to such an extent that there's nothing there to be sad about anymore, though one could still weep over the former soul who refused salvation. (I'm not sure how much I like this argument, though I don't necessarily disagree.)
Reading Charles Williams, mind you, always makes me feel a little better about the whole thing. Who knows what may happen in the Omnipotence?
crystal,
thanks for the links. I really like the second article-- Balthasar's viewpoint (though we don't know all men will be saved, we hope it) is what crops up all over Charles Williams as well.
*goes to find some Thomas Talbot*
I believe he postulates a wonderful, loving woman who loves/was married to a mean, terrible man who made her mortal life awful and is trying to blackmail her happiness in heaven by making her unhappy about his damnnation.
I wasn't thinking about bad people. I was thinking about good, loving, kind and charitable people who don't believe in God, who aren't Christians or who aren't 'Proper Christians'.
Using the above analogy, does God wipe my memory of these good people I loved so that I don't weep for them?
Ah. Yeah, due to my Mormon upbringing and reading too much C.S. Lewis (here I'm thinking particularly of Emeth in The Last Battle) I don't actually take seriously the idea that good loving non-Christians will end up in hell, in the end. This makes everything much simpler for me :)
I must agree with T.C. here if those are the options- but as it happens I don't believe that eternal punishemnt is Biblical- I opt for the view that folk will cease to be... and come to that I also we don't have the mind of God that we might know who is "in" and who is "out"- for his love is deeper and higher and wider than we can possilby imagine.....
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