Chapp - The Message of the Gospel is "Come Out of Hell"

The blog post this was taken from was a defense of Hans Urs von Balthasar's teaching on hell, especially in Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved" (1988) against its critics. 

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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. . . .

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 . . .

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.  [H]is 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 [the other] 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 . . .

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 [that] 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 [Balthasar's critics] 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.

From Universalism, Balthasar, the Massa Damnata, and the Question of Evangelization by Larry Chapp

Balthasar - God is to us "what the air is to the birds and the sea to the fish" (St Francis de Sales)

“The Godhead, my dear Theotimus, is to us what the air is to the birds and the sea to the fish. One day we will [fly] through this divine element and swim in this sea and rejoice that our powers are not sufficient to embrace the whole space. It will be an ever-new delight for us to see that God—even if giving himself to us without restraint or limitation—still remains an abyss we are not capable of plumbing: we cannot enjoy him in a manner that does justice to the infinity of his perfections, for these shall always transcend our power of comprehension. Incomprehensibility is the essential mark of the beauty we will behold in paradise. This beauty would not be infinite, it would not be God, if we could comprehend it.”   FRANCIS DE SALES

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled God

[Note: In what I think is a typo, the ebook has the word "fry" instead of "fly".]

Balthasar - In Purgatory we will know that we are finally going to overcome our sins

Purgatory: perhaps the deepest but also the most blissful kind of suffering. The terrible torture of having to settle now all the things we have dreaded a whole life long. The doors we have frantically held shut are now torn open. But all the while this knowledge: now for the first time I will be able to do it—that ultimate thing in me, that total thing. Now I can feel my wings growing; now I am fully becoming myself. . . . .

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled God

Teilhard de Chardin - Work of perfecting our souls contributes to redemption of the world

The masters of the spiritual life incessantly repeat that God wants only souls. To give those words their true value, we must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable, in its birth and in its growth, from the universe into which it is born. In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way. But this summing-up, this welding, are not given to us ready-made and complete with the first awakening of consciousness. It is we who, through our own activity, must industriously assemble the widely scattered elements . . .

Thus every man, in the course of his life, must not only show himself obedient and docile. By his fidelity he must build—starting with the most natural territory of his own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world. For in presenting the christian [sic] doctrine of salvation, it must not be forgotten that the world, taken as a whole, that is to say in so far as it consists in a hierarchy of souls—which appear only successively, develop only collectively and will be completed only in union—the world, too, undergoes a sort of vast 'ontogenesis' (a vast becoming what it is) in which the development of each soul, assisted by the perceptible realities on which it depends, is but a diminished harmonic. Beneath our efforts to put spiritual form into our own lives, the world slowly accumulates, starting with the whole of matter, that which will make of it the Heavenly Jerusalem or the New Earth.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1957) p. 60-61

Teilhard de Chardin - Natural faculties transformed to adore God in Heaven

We hardly know in what proportions and under what guise our natural faculties will pass over into the final act of the vision of God. But it can hardly be doubted that, with God's help, it is here below that we give ourselves the eyes and the heart which a final transfiguration will make the organs of a power of adoration, and of a capacity for beatification, particular to each individual man and woman among us.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1957) p. 60

St Charles Borromeo - Jesus prepares a place for us

By his Ascension he has prepared for us a place as he had promised, and has entered as our head, in the name of us all, into the possession of the glory of heaven. Ascending into heaven, he threw open its gates, which had been closed by the sin of Adam; and, as he foretold to his disciples at his Last Supper, secured to us a way by which we may arrive at eternal happiness. In order to give an open proof of this by its fulfillment, he introduced with himself into the mansions of eternal bliss the souls of the just whom he had liberated.

Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566 - overseen by St Charles Borromeo) p.60

I love this description of the Ascension because it includes us as well as Jesus. He enters Heaven, not alone or for His own sake, but "as our head" and "in our name", bringing with Him our forebears in faith and ensconcing them in their new heavenly homes to show us what lies in store for those who follow.

Lewis - The Great Divorce Ch.12 - Least on earth, greatest in heaven (reminds me of Mum)

This is one of my favorite passages from C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. It reminds me so much of Mum, and it encapsulates the contrast between earthly and heavenly greatness.

All down one long aisle of the forest the under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light; and on earth I knew nothing so likely to produce this appearance as the reflected lights cast upward by moving water. A few moments later I realised my mistake. Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers—soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers, though by the standards of the ghost-world each petal would have weighed a hundred-weight and their fall would have been like the crashing of boulders. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done.

I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A 
robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer’s features as a lip or an eye.

But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

‘Is it? . . . is it?’ I whispered to my guide.

‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’

‘She seems to be . . . well, a person of particular importance?’

‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’

‘And who are these gigantic people . . . look! They’re like emeralds . . . who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?’

‘Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.’

‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’

‘They are her sons and daughters.’

‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’

‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son—even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. [99]Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’

‘And how . . . but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat—two cats—dozens of cats. And all those dogs . . . why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.’

‘They are her beasts.’

‘Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.’

‘Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’

I looked at my Teacher in amazement.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.’

Balthasar - Good works in this world limited, but transformed and integrated into the Kingdom

What has to be brought together today is the justified concern for the future of mankind, which has more than ever been entrusted to human capacity and responsibility, and the inalienable demand that every individual think here and now of his relation to God and his eternal salvation. Man must give himself completely in two directions: the horizontal “forward” and the vertical “upward ”. And this should be accomplished in such a way that each direction does not hinder the other but on the contrary furthers it.

But how is this possible? How could a person such as the marxist [sic], who is absorbed completely in the service of future mankind’s well-being, have the time and desire to pray and to collect himself in God? On the other hand, how could someone who practices Eastern meditation and submerges himself in the Absolute dedicate himself completely to his earthly task?

The vertical and the horizontal cross only in the Cross of Christ: only in him is the dedication to mankind perfectly one with the immediate contact with the Father’s will. Why? Because the will of God for which Christ listens in prayer sends him always anew into the world and its distress, not with merely human programs, but with a plan of salvation that can be thought and realized only by God. Action alone is not enough; even in Jesus’ life on earth it did not reach its goal. Prayer is not enough; it points at first always to action but finally to the third thing which alone leads to the breakthrough, the great suffering that is like the synthesis of action and contemplation: the bearing of the unbearable guilt of the world which had barred the access to God forward as well as upward. The door is now open in both directions.

Forward: what good are the marxist [sic] plans for the future if humanity cannot be essentially changed and if the innumerable past generations remain unredeemed? The Christian works for change in the world in the hope, initiated by Christ, of his return, the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God which will transform everything and integrate into itself every effort for the good.

Upward: what good are all the ecstasies and submersions practiced in Eastern techniques if they do not encounter the living Heart of God, the absolute love that proved itself in the Cross of Christ, a love with which we never become identical but which gives us a share in itself in the Holy Spirit?

Man remains stretched between heaven and earth without ever bringing the two dimensions of his existence to a final harmony by his own power. Does this not show that from his creation he has been designed for the Crucified and Risen One in whom his restless heart finds rest?

The same point can be expressed even more simply with the gospel: the two main commandments, the love of God and the love of neighbor, become one only in the One who is at the same time God and man. This incomparable fact is and remains the center of Christian apologetics.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen (1980) - in chapter titled Why Still Christianity

In his discussion of the "horizontal" and "vertical" dimensions of faith—that is, service of humanity and worship of God, Balthasar concludes that they can only be brought together in the person of Jesus and his Cross. In the course of sketching his larger argument, he makes this wonderful point about both the limits and the potential of the "horizontal". 

Irenaeus - Learning in Heaven

What ground is there for complaint if. . . we are able by the grace of God to explain some [things in Scripture], while we must leave others in the hands of God. . . not only in the present world, but also in that which is to come, so that God should for ever teach, and man should for ever learn the things taught him by God? As the apostle has said on this point, that, when other things have been done away, then these three, “faith, hope, and charity, shall endure.” For faith, which has respect to our Master, endures unchangeably, assuring us that there is but one true God, and that we should truly love Him for ever, seeing that He alone is our Father; while we hope ever to be receiving more and more from God, and to learn from Him, because He is good, and possesses boundless riches, a kingdom without end, and instruction that can never be exhausted.

St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Adv. Haer. II, 28, 3 - quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? 2nd edition (2014) chapter 8

This is a wonderful idea concerning the Beatific Vision, and a response to the often-raised (or at least often-thought) issue of "boredom in Heaven". Although we will no longer be in time, could it be that the acquisition of the knowledge of God, given its boundlessness, could entail a kind of eternal learning, that God could be forever pouring this knowledge into us? Like everything regarding eternity, we can only try our best to produce metaphors, but this one has particular appeal, I think, to those who love learning, and may on some level not understand how Heaven could really be paradise without it.

Eulogy for Mum's Memorial Service - March 13, 2021

For years, whenever I've thought about Mum and her love for us, I've found myself thinking about Mary and Martha. One of the many layers of this story is simply that both sisters sought to show their love for Jesus, and that Mary did so more perfectly. As we remember, Jesus says about Mary "She has chosen the better part, and it shall not be taken from her."

As Christians, we often emphasize that love is an action, as opposed to a feeling. And that's true—love is an action. But on the very deepest level, we believe that love is a Person. God is love. And while He expresses His love for us constantly through actions, the most essential way He loves us is in His being—that is, by being present with us in every moment of our lives. Although we do imitate God's love when we perform acts of service, we do so most purely when we stop and take time to be present for those God has given us to love. This was Mary's love for Jesus, and it's also what I remember most vividly in Mum's love for us, her children.

The story Rachel told about planting tulips captures it perfectly. My guess is that there were a couple (likely more than a couple) weeds in the yard that day that could have used pulling, and probably some clutter on the end of the kitchen table (or maybe on the counter next to the phone). But knowing Mum, those things were not anywhere in her mind as she knelt on the grass next to Rachel. For her that moment transcended weeds and clutter and worry, and consisted only of the joy her child gave her, and the love she was making present to her child.

Jesus recognized something imperfect in Martha's love—that it had lost its focus on the beloved. Even the love of a mother for her child can be warped, very subtly, as when real concern for the child's safety becomes overbearing strictness, genuine warmth becomes smothering, or normal emotional expression becomes self-serving drama. Bethany recently said something that stuck with me. She was talking about Mum's presence in the family, using words like “quiet" and "patient." She then said that Mum was never "too much" of anything—meaning that in raising us she avoided the kinds of excesses I just described. Today we have lost the ancient principle of the Golden Mean, that the most virtuous behavior always avoids extremes, rather than pursues them. Mum's love for us was even-keeled, and so much the better for it. 

Mary's love is also purer than Martha’s because it's entirely focused on a person, and not distracted by things. Mum was like this as well. Anyone who knew her will tell you that it was almost impossible to get her to care about things—even pretty important things. One very early memory I have is from when Jeff and I were little, and the girls hadn't come along yet. We were all at the beach in Maine, and Mum lost her wedding ring when she was in the water, jumping in the waves with the two of us. Years later, when she shared the story with my wife Nancy, Mum related how losing the ring wasn't a big deal, that she simply hadn't been paying attention. She said, with a characteristic grin, "I had my two little boys with me—I just wanted to play with them." 

Almost 50 years later, those two boys (not so little any more), along with two girls (both adults and mothers by now) sat around Mum's bed as she drew her last few breaths on Earth. We know, of course, that this was not the end of her life of love, but rather the beginning of it in its fullness. The love exemplified by Mary, and lived by Mum throughout her earthly life, is nothing less than practice for Heaven. Martha's love, necessary as it is here on Earth, is no longer needed there. In the fully realized kingdom of God, there are no needs or even wants for us to fulfill for each other. We will be united with the One who is Love, or as C.S. Lewis puts it, we will literally be "in Love". I believe Mum is well on her way to this blessed goal. She truly chose the better part, and it shall not be taken from her.