The blog post this was taken from was a defense of Hans Urs von Balthasar's book Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved" (1988) against criticisms by Ralph Martin in A Church in Crisis (2020).
So why this obsession with a densely populated Hell? The reasoning they employ is not complex and boils down to three assertions. First, the charge is made that the soft universalism of so many in the modern Church has led to a diminishment in our fervor for evangelization. Second, it is alleged that a great deal of the laxity one finds among Catholics themselves is also attributable to this alleged universalism. As one very dear friend of mine who is a devout Catholic . . . put it to me: “if everyone goes to heaven anyway why should I bother to bust my chops to be morally good or to go to Church?” A third charge, more theologically sophisticated than the first two, claims that this soft universalism robs the Gospel of its dramatic, existential seriousness since it presents us with salvation as a fait accompli. What all of these points have in common is their proposed solution: an evangelical style that once again places the threat of damnation front and center as the linchpin for any effective strategy for conversion.
But are any of these assertions true? Is it really true that the desire to avoid Hell is the primary motivation behind the desire to convert to the faith or to embrace it with more vigor? And is it really true as well that the primary motivation for wanting to bring people to Christ is to make sure that they avoid Hell? My answer might shock you because my answer to those two questions is yes. But I do not mean by that answer the same thing [some] mean and my answer thus comes with one important caveat: Heaven and Hell are not “places” where I might end up “in the future after I die” depending on whether or not I checked the right box on the religion survey, but present realities in the here and now. They are spiritual conditions of the soul which every human being has intimations of and which give us a participatory foretaste of eschatological realities. Sin is the dis-integrative power of dissipation and entropy, the power which grips us like a vice even as it rips us apart from within. It alienates and annihilates and is the source of our deepest existential anxieties and creates our deepest miseries in life. It is the libido dominandi that lives in us all and which creates the despair within us where, try as I might, I cannot escape the furies of my own decrepit soul and the self-inflicted horrors of my incessantly compromised choices.
We can experience a foretaste of Heaven in this life as well in all of the various joys that come our way through our participation in all that is true and good and beautiful. We naturally desire all of these things and move toward them to the extent that we see them properly, and in their proper hierarchy, and with a sincere hope that they will bring us happiness, which is, as Aquinas noted, what we all most deeply want. But these joys are often lost due to our ignorance of what is truly good and of our disordered desire to sacrifice higher goods to lower goods, which is the very essence of sin and its idolatries which is why only an affirmation of the true God as the highest Good can save us from these counterfeit substitutes. But the joys of this life also run up against the ultimate barrier: death. Which is why in this life even our deepest joy will be tainted with the patina of the loss of everything in the final dissolution of all things in death. It is the blunt and brutal reality of death that hollows out our experience of the good from within our terror—a hollowing out that empties the good of its goodness and leaves us with the haunting suspicion that there is no deeper good at all, but merely passing pleasures. This is why Saint Paul referred to death as Satan’s sting and the greatest generator of sin since the realization of our terminal finality is what robs us of the motivation to seek the higher goods and the greater joys they bring since death seems to call the reality of those higher goods into question. The higher goods and the deeper happiness are hard to achieve and require a death to the libido dominandi which alone appears “real” to us. Sin thus whispers in our ear, “it is all a sham and there is no God so live within the shallow waters of proximate procurements.”
This is why Christianity burst upon the ancient world with an explosive and liberating force. It was presented as the “euangelion” (good news!) which was a Greek term used by imperial Rome to announce a great victory for the Empire but redeployed by Christians to announce an even greater victory accomplished by one greater than Caesar. It was presented as a liberation from the oppressive spiritual principalities and powers that capriciously and arbitrarily ruled this world through death and force and coercion. The message was not “believe this or you will go to Hell” but rather “believe this and you will come out of Hell.” The greatest evangelist the Church has ever seen, Saint Paul, rarely spoke of the eternal torments of Hell that awaited those who rejected his message of the crucified and risen Christ. Such talk is foreign to his manner of approach. Instead he preached the risen Christ as the conqueror of death and sin and thus as the great liberator from our chains of bondage to the regime of decay. What he preached was that the Hell in which they were living was not their truest destiny and that the higher spiritual goods were now eminently attainable in the new Kingdom of life and grace. In other words, Paul preached a message that emphasized that the new Christian ordo was an ordo of eschatological rupture with the worldly world and the breaking in to this world of a supernatural light that had the power to transform everything from within as it healed the broken bonds of our fractured and despairing souls.
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My point in all of this is that it is precisely this experience of integrative liberation that should be the prime mover of our evangelizing, as it was with St. Paul. In my 25 years of teaching theology, in both high school and university, I never once walked into a classroom thinking to myself, “these kids are sinners in the hands of an angry God and are in danger of suffering eternal torments in Hell and so I must save them from God’s just wrath.” Rather, I said to myself, “I am in possession of a great treasure, the truest Beauty, and the most liberating narrative the world has ever known or will know, and I want to release these students from their bondage to the honey laced arsenic of our culture and to show them the only path to the deepest happiness.” And, to toot my own horn, I was damn good at it. And I don’t mention this to build myself up but to point out that this message still works, as it did in the days of St. Paul, and that some kind of reversion to a hyper Tridentine emphasis on mortal sins, Hell, damnation, and the superficial “litmus test” orthodoxy of pinched-up neo-scholastic inquisitors, is not only a recipe for pastoral disaster, but is also deeply contrary to the Gospel Paul preached. Indeed, it is an anti-Gospel of pharisaical anxiety wrapped up in the laced surplices of sanctimonious sadists.
It is both instructive and ironic, is it not, that one of the greatest evangelists of our time, Bishop Robert Barron, is also a man who shares the real hope that all will someday be saved, and who teaches what the Church teaches with regard to the possibility of salvation outside of the visible confines of the Church. This gives the lie to the notion that one will not be properly motivated to evangelize unless one first believes in some version of the massa damnata. It is my contention that the infernalists who get so hypoxic over his approach are not so much afraid that his evangelizing style won’t work, but precisely because it does. Because his success invalidates their thesis that a Church that does not step forward with its eternal damnation foot first is a Church of relativists and indifferentists. Likewise with Balthasar whose views on Hell do not seem to have robbed him of his fervor and who spent his entire life explicating the Gospel in profound ways. One would think, in other words, that if Martin's thesis is true—namely, that only a message that most will be eternally damned will motivate us to evangelize—that Barron would close up shop over at Word on Fire and Balthasar would never have written a word, and both would have retired to life on a tropical island in order to sip relativist Pina Coladas on the beach of indifference.
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As I said, I too believe that we must appeal to a message of liberation from the bondage of the Hell that is within us all, but that is far different from a message of a not so latent “insiders versus outsiders” logic where the insiders have the proper union card and the outsiders don’t. Of course, I am not denying that the Church provides us with all the means of salvation and that, therefore, faithful inclusion in her life does afford us great treasures of grace. Because it does. But don’t tell me that there isn’t a strong element of a very superficial understanding of what it means to be “saved” and “unsaved” in their thinking. There is a strong forensic tone to it all and a strong tone deafness to the movement of the Holy Spirit outside of the visible structures of the Church. The Church is necessary for salvation insofar as she is the conduit of those graces of the Spirit. But the vocation of the Christian is not to draw neat lines in the sand between the saved and the unsaved, but to offer up their prayers, supplications, penances, and sufferings in solidarity with those still awaiting liberation from bondage.
The fact of the matter is that Martin and other like-minded traditionalists get something very wrong. Namely, that the indifferentism and lukewarm laxity that afflicts the modern Church has been primarily caused by a loss of belief in the reality of eternal damnation for most. In reality, the laxity in the modern Church has not arisen from a lack of faith in the eternal horrors of Hell. Rather, the laxity comes from a lack of faith in the existential reality of Heaven. In fact, it comes more specifically from a generalized lack of faith in the eschatological power of supernatural realities in the first place. Because if people really and truly believed in the reality of our liberation from bondage and the joys of Heaven, and truly understood what these realities mean, then the very real possibility of eternal loss would be powerful and palpable. Furthermore, if people had a deeper grasp in faith of what such liberation means then the question of why I should strive to be morally good even if all end up in Heaven someday answers itself. We seek moral goodness because it is liberative and integrative. It opens us to beauty and a holistic happiness. And the more we are on that path the more we begin to realize that Heaven isn’t a Disney World in the sky, or an undifferentiated “reward” for having been a “good person,” but is rather a nested hierarchy of souls that have differing capacities for love, and thus beatitude, depending on what one has done in this life. Jesus says that in his Father’s Kingdom there are “many mansions.” I think this is what he meant. Finally, none of this will come without purgation, in this life or the next. And that purgation will be painful and difficult. Even among those Catholics who feel confident of their ultimate salvation there is still a rigorous desire to do penances now, to lead a life of holiness now, precisely in order to avoid such purgations later. Therefore, I do not need to believe that anyone is in Hell in order to desire the highest and most luxuriant of Heavenly mansions and to avoid the fiery cauldron of purgatory.
What all of this points toward is that our style of evangelizing needs to focus first and foremost on the true, the good, and the beautiful. It needs to build on our natural desire for happiness and our natural desire for the higher spiritual goods of life. It needs to build on the natural thirst for Transcendence that all people feel. And then it needs to show how Christ is the fulfillment of our deepest and most inchoate and hidden desires. It needs to show how we do not even know what it is we should desire and that Christ points the way. It needs to show that Christ has overcome the tribulations of this world and is the only person who holds the key to unlocking our chains. It needs to foreground the positive aspects of the Gospel message as our liberation from the bondage of sin and death in the eschatological present. Only then can it speak of the real possibility of an eternal loss because only then will people truly appreciate what is at stake.
But by all means … continue on with the eschatological census taking. I hope one of those so engaged will apprise me of what they find. Because so far nobody has ever really figured it out. Not even the saints. Perhaps, most especially the saints.
From Universalism, Balthasar, the Massa Damnata, and the Question of Evangelization by Larry Chapp