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

Isaiah 2 - Swords Into Plowshares

² It shall come to pass in the latter days
      that the mountain of the house of the Lord
   shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
      and shall be raised above the hills;
   and all the nations shall flow to it,
³       and many peoples shall come, and say:
   “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
       to the house of the God of Jacob;
   that he may teach us his ways
      and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
    and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
⁴ He shall judge between the nations,
       and shall decide for many peoples;
   and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
       and their spears into pruning hooks;
   nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
       neither shall they learn war any more.

Lubac - Humanity created, fell, redeemed as a whole

The supernatural dignity of one who has been baptized rests, we know, on the natural dignity of man, though it surpasses it in an infinite manner . . . . Thus the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity of the human race. So the Fathers of the Church, in their treatment of grace and salvation, kept constantly before them this Body of Christ, and in dealing with the creation were not content only to mention the formation of individuals, the first man and the first woman, but delighted to contemplate God creating humanity as a whole. "God", says St Irenaeus, for example, "in the beginning of time plants the vine of the human race ; he loved this human race and purposed to pour out his Spirit upon it and to give it the adoption of sons."¹ For Irenaeus again, as indeed for Origen,² Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, for Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus, Hilary and others, the lost sheep of the Gospel that the Good Shepherd brings back to the fold is no other than the whole of human nature; its sorry state so moves the Word of God that he leaves the great flock of the angels, as it were to their own devices, in order to go to its help. The Fathers designated this nature by a series of equivalent expressions, all of a concrete nature, thus demonstrating that it was in their view a genuine reality.

They seemed to witness its birth, to see it live, grow, develop, as a single being. With the first sin it was this being, whole and entire, which fell away, which was driven out of Paradise and sentenced to a bitter exile until the time of its redemption. And when Christ at last appeared, coming as the "one bridegroom", his bride, once again, was the "whole human race".

Our early Fathers' habitual manner of thought must be borne in mind if we would understand certain strange ways of speaking—whatever their precise origin—that are met with in such writers as Methodius of Olympus, who appears to make of Christ a new appearance of Adam himself brought back to life by the Word.³ If several of them held so strongly, as we know, that Adam was saved, one of the reasons for it was undoubtedly that they saw the salvation of its head as the necessary condition of the salvation of the human race. "This Adam, within us all", says one of the homilies of Pseudo-Epiphanius.⁴ And another homily, of Pseudo-Chrysostom : "By the sacrifice of Christ the first man was saved, that man who is in us all." ⁵ Is not this also the inner meaning of the legend according to which Adam, who had been buried on Calvary, was baptized by the water which flowed from the side of Jesus? Surely, too, the many liturgical texts about the descent of Christ into " hell", where the first man is alone mentioned, are, like the works of art which correspond with them, indications that that same way of thought continued until much later. 

Before embarking on the study of this human nature, from its beginning until the end of the world, the Fathers made a fundamental examination of it in order to perceive the principle of its unity. Now this principle appeared no different to them from that on which rests the natural dignity of man. Was it not shown to them in Genesis, where it was taught that God made man in his own image? For the divine image does not differ from one individual to another: in all it is the same image. The same mysterious participation in God which causes the soul to exist effects at one and the same time the unity of spirits among themselves. Whence comes the notion, so beloved of Augustinianism, of one spiritual family intended to form the one city of God. . . . 

Clement of Alexandria, in pages brimming over with poetry, after exposing the baseness of the pagan mystery cults, extols the mysteries of the Logos and displays the "divine Choregus" calling all men to him :

Be instructed in these mysteries and you shall dance with the choir of angels before the uncreated God, whilst the Logos will sing the sacred hymns with us. This eternal Jesus, the one high priest, intercedes for men and calls on them: "Hearken," he cries, "all you peoples, or rather all you who are endowed with reason, barbarians or Greeks! I summon the whole human race, I who am its author by the will of the Father! Come unto me and gather together as one well-ordered unity under the one God, and under the one Logos of God." ⁶

1  Adversus Haereses, passim.

2  In Genesim, horn. 2, 5 ; 9, 3; 13, 2 (Baehrens, pp. 34, 92, 114).

3  Methodius of Olympus, Symposium, 3, c. 4-8 (French trans. by Farges, pp. 42-52). [also see this post]

4  Homily 2 (P.G. xliii, 460—I).

5  In Pascha, sermo 2; cf. sermo 1 (P.G. lix, 725 and 723).

6  Protreptic, c.12.

Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (1947; tr. 1958), 25-33

Note: Most footnotes have been omitted, and those included have different numbering than original.

 

Lubac - Salvation not only "individual"

The joy of Jesus can be personal. It can belong to a single man and he is saved. He is at peace, he is joyful now and for always, but he is alone. The isolation of this joy does not trouble him; on the contrary: he is the chosen one. In his blessedness he passes through the battlefields with a rose in his hand. . . .  

My joy will not be lasting unless it is the joy of all. I will not pass through the battlefields with a rose in my hand.¹

What Christian has not encountered such an accusation? How many souls have not encountered upon their course this stone of stumbling? . . . 

"How," they ask in particular, "can a religion which apparently is uninterested in our terrestrial future and in human fellowship offer an ideal which can still attract the men of to-day?" . . . 

 "[The Christian] withdraws from the converse of men, exclusively preoccupied with his own salvation, which is a matter between God and himself" [as opposed to] "the modern man who . . . cannot detach himself from other men: fully conscious of the solidarity which unites him with his fellows, which makes him in a sense dependent on them, he knows that he cannot work out his salvation by himself".² 

. . .

In answer to all this we may quote this simple assertion of a believer and a theologian: "Fundamentally the Gospel is obsessed with the idea of the unity of human society."³ This shows the full extent of the misunderstanding. We are accused of being individualists even in spite of ourselves, by the logic of our faith, whereas in reality Catholicism is essentially social. It is social in the deepest sense of the word: not merely in its applications in the field of natural institutions but first and foremost in itself, in the heart of its mystery, in the essence of its dogma. It is social in a sense which should have made the expression "social Catholicism" pleonastic. 

Nevertheless, if such a misunderstanding has arisen and en-trenched itself, if such an accusation is current, is it not our own fault? We can leave on one side what is only too obviously groundless in certain objections, those which are bound up with a purely extrinsic and secular conception of Catholicism or of salvation or based on a complete misunderstanding of Christian detachment. Nor need we insist on the failings, serious though they often are, which may have given rise to these misunderstandings: the selfish piety, the narrow religious outlook, the neglect of ordinary duties in the multiplication of "devotions", the swamping of the spiritual life by the detestable "I", the failure to realize that prayer is essentially the prayer of all for all. These are all deviations to which all believers, being human, are exposed, and which it is easy to criticize. But are they in fact sufficiently recognized as such? Does not neglect of dogma increase the extent of moral failure? And if so many observers, who are not all lacking in acumen or in religious spirit, are so grievously mistaken about the essence of Catholicism, is it not an indication that Catholics should make an effort to understand it better themselves? 

1  Jean Giono, Les vraies richesses, 1936, pp. v and viii.

2 Les affirmations de la conscience moderne, 3rd edn., 1906, pp. 108-9 ; and p. 56: "Our morality is less and less Christian just because it is more and more social". p. 108 : "the Christian, like the Stoic, is sufficient unto himself".

3 E. Masure, conference in Semaine sociale de Nice, 1934, p. 229.

Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (1947; tr. 1958), 13-16

Note: Most footnotes have been omitted, and those included have different numbering than original.

Balthasar - In the end, God will fill all things

“This is perhaps that final flame, which will fill the whole world and consume it: the appearance of God’s Word in every creature, when nothing but the spiritual Light will shine any more for both the good and the bad. This is the Light which already fills all things secretly, but then it will fill all things openly. This is, I think, the flame that says of itself: ‘I am a consuming fire.’ For he will consume all things when he shall be all in all and alone appear in all things.”   JOHN SCOTUS ERIUGENA

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

Congar - Church as 'Jacob's ladder' between Christ and the world [The Wide World My Parish 4]

If then, this is the place of Jesus Christ, we have to determine what is the consequent place of the Church, in relation to him and in relation to the world. 

The Church is Church only because of Christ, but she is made up of human beings. She is a gathering of men among other gatherings of men, but bearing amongst them the mystery of Jesus Christ. She is the company of witnesses to him. In as much as it depends on men's faithfulness, she brings Christ to the world, offering it opportunities to recognize him as the key to its destiny. 

Provided we are careful not to turn a convenient and, surely, necessary distinction into a separation, it will be useful to look at the Church from each of two points of view: (1) as God's people, the community of Christians, she represents mankind towards Christ; (2) as institution, or sacrament of salvation, she represents Christ towards the world. Jacob 'dreamed that he saw a ladder standing on the earth, with its top reaching up into heaven; a stairway for the angels of God to go up and come down' (Gen. xxviii. 12; cf. John i. 51). Two mediations are joined in the Church, one going up, or representative, the other coming down, or sacramental; and through them she is the place where Christ gives himself to the world, and the world gives itself to Christ, the place where the two meet.

In this two-fold movement the Church actualizes the biblical idea of first-fruits. Coming from Christ and composed of men, she constantly bears the whole of one towards the whole of the other. When she takes root in some human grouping, there she makes Jesus Christ present and at work, that Son of God of whom St Paul writes that it is God's pleasure 'through him to win back all things, whether on earth or in heaven, into union with himself, making peace with them through his blood, shed on the cross' (Col. i. 20). No doubt this does not mean that all men, in the sense of each and every individual, will in fact be saved; it means that the act by which Christ makes the union effective is of itself really directed towards and includes all men, the totality of the world as such, offering all that is necessary for the achievement of the end that God has in view for them. 

Since the Church makes Jesus Christ present and active to the world, all worth is finally judged by her, and it is in regard to her that men are seen to be blessed or rejected. Clement of Alexandria had this in mind when he wrote, early in the third century, 'Just as God's will is a deed and it is called "the world", so his intention is man's salvation, and this is called "the Church".'* That is not plainly seen as physical things are: 'What do we see now? Not all things subject to him as yet' (Heb. ii, 8). What St Paul says of the Christian is not true of his personal life alone, but also of apostleship and of all that the Church does: 'Your life is hidden away now with Christ in God. Christ is your life, and when he is made manifest, you too will be made manifest in glory with him' (Col. iii. 3-4). 

It is true that to the eye of faith the Church never looks small in this great world. There she wears the best aspect she can, for the people she is able to reach. But, however modestly, she has always to seek to have and to show an appearance that betokens the Gospel, that betokens the Covenant, and a covenant that is in principle universal, for of that she is the sign and sacrament. 

Each one of us for his own little world, all of us for the world at large—we are Jacob's ladder. The representative going up of mankind to God and the representative coming down of Jesus Christ to the world pass through us. The whole Church is sacramental and missionary, and so is each Christian in his degree. Each of the members of any group (e.g. a parish) that seeks Christ through the Church stands for the whole group. To what extent do they effectively aid the group in its journey to God? It cannot he known. But they are its first-fruits, a sheaf offered up, and they are intercessors for it: had there been ten righteous men in the city, God would have spared it (Gen. xviii. 32). 

We can only look ahead, and so we cannot see anything, for there is nothing to see in the future, unless with the eyes of faith and hope. It has been rightly observed that mankind goes forward in its history backwards, because it only sees the road it has already travelled. When we reach the end, we shall see how the final results took shape in the beginnings, the first-fruits. And we shall give thanks. 

* Paedagogus, i, 6. It is very remarkable that this idea, of bearing the world's meaning like a living seed, was given expression at the very time when Christians were a small minority, looked on with contempt, persecuted and often killed off. See also the Letter to Diognetus (2-cent.): 'Christians are in the world what the soul is in the body. The soul is dispersed throughout the members of the body, so are Christians among the cities of the world. . . . Christians are as it were held in the prison of the world; yet it is they who sustain the world.' St Irenaeus (d. c. 200) speaks of the 'recapitulation' of all things in Christ, the Church's head (cf. Eph. i. 10). Origen (d. c. 254) calls the Church 'the universe of the universe'. And so on. 

Yves Congar, The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and its Problems (1962) p. 19-21

Congar - Christ as the meaning of the world [The Wide World My Parish 3]

There is a hallowed truth in 'personalism', the feeling for the unique value of every person; a person is a whole in himself, one cannot be substituted for another, he is the contrary of Koestler's definition of the individual in a communist society: 'A mass of one million people divided by a million.' But we must not lose sight of other truths. Every man and woman is a person, but they all have something else in common, their humanity. Mankind is made up of persons, but they are born one of another, they need one another in order to expand and develop, each one has his own destiny, but together they pursue a common cause: 'The whole succession of men should be seen as one and the same man, continuing always to exist and to learn.' The world too is a totality; science treats it more and more as a whole, made of the same stuff, and all held together by an aggregate of interactions, attractions and compenetrations. 

The world as a whole has movement and therefore a meaning. Materialism treats this movement and meaning as purely a result of forces within nature, though adding that it is man's business to interpret them by his intelligence and to apply his energies to them. But from the Christian point of view the world as a whole has a meaning which comes to it from God's plan. Plan and meaning are not simply those which the mind can recognize by carefully looking at things. Into the world taken as a whole, into the pattern of human history, God put the revelation and then the gift of something new; it was not contained within the energies of the world but, once given, it became its central point and constituted its meaning: the Covenant, fully actualized in Jesus Christ who is indeed the union of God and man. Jesus is for the world, and the world is for Jesus: totality in quest of a meaning, and fullness of meaning. We cannot be sure that in Jesus Christ the world recognizes its meaning, but it is certain that he is that meaning. 

Let me make a comparison. At one time I was living my life from day to day, and pretty happily, for my job was interesting. But, without having the sophisticated absurdity of Sartre's 'Everything that exists is born for no purpose, continues through weakness, dies by chance', that life of mine was not illumined by the shining light of some clear purpose. Then one day I met somebody who put an idea into my head, something worth-while, an undertaking, in which I recognized the meaning of my life; it not only determined my present and future, but threw light on the past, for everything had been pointing in this direction, although I had not realized it. Taken up with living and doing my work, I had overlooked it, but even so it was the meaning of my life; it made sense of everything and held the whole together. Boris Pasternak is right: 'You have said that facts don't mean anything by themselves—not until a meaning is put into them. Well—the meaning you have to put into the facts to make them relevant to human beings is just that: it's Christianity, it's the mystery of personality.' 

Yves Congar, The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and its Problems (1962) p. 17-19

Congar - Biblical idea of 'first-fruits' (part that represents the whole) [The Wide World My Parish 2]

THE BIBLE AND STATISTICS

[T]he Bible shows little interest in the quantitative aspects of things. . . . 

It is disconcerting to notice how often numbers given in the Bible do not mean just the same as numbers mean for us. It happens quite often that, in parallel accounts, the figures given in one do not agree with those given in the other. . . . Biblical exegetes have a ready answer: they tell us that there were several different sources and editors. But the difficulty remains; for the final editor or whoever gathered the sources, who was no more stupid than we are, must have noticed that the figures were different, and yet he left them. They cannot then have had the same importance or exactly the same meaning for him as for us. In many other passages numbers have a symbolical signification . . . Or again, sometimes numbers are arranged according to a certain idea, to convey some meaning, or even for the sake of symmetry and balance in the context: a good example is the genealogy of Jesus as set out by St Matthew, who groups the generations in three series of fourteen. There is another example in the figures of the members of Jacob's family who came into Egypt, the total of whom has been so arranged as to make seventy, a mystic number. 

THE FEW WHO REPRESENT THE WHOLE

The fundamental biblical category is not quantity but rather the idea of representative elements having a universal dynamic value; these features are found in the typically biblical notion of first-fruits. 'Biblical thought is all-embracing, it includes the particular in the whole, whether as seed, root or fruit of a tree' (W. Vischer). We must look at this more closely. First of all, the Bible is not concerned with numbers as such, but with the fact that a number of individuals actualize the characteristics of the real type that governs and precedes them: we have only to consider what the Old Testament says of Edom and Israel respectively. The New Testament is interested in the totalities which are deemed to be present in a representative part of each. . . . St Paul often speaks in this way. He refers to 'the gospel which has been preached to all creation under heaven' (Col. i. 23); the Jerusalem Bible suggests that this is only an hyperbole, but surely there is something else in it as well. Paul also writes 'the gospel which has reached you, which now bears fruit and thrives in you, as it does all the world over' (Col. i. 5-6) . . . These pointers might seem insignificant were it not for the fact that they form part of a whole context, well known to specialists, in which the idea of totality is very strongly marked. 

But this totality is considered as represented in a part of itself, which is the bearer, according to God's 'plan', of the destiny of the whole. Such biblical studies as those of Wilhelm Vischer show that this dynamic and continuous plan is characterized by the idea of Pars pro toto, a part for the whole. Mankind is chosen to represent the world, to give God the praise of all creation; Israel is chosen for mankind, to be God's witness and priest amongst men, and at bottom the Jewish people has maintained its consciousness of this vocation and ideal as the indelible mark of its chosenness, even when it has fallen short of its call : 'A minority in the service of a majority." But for us Israel is now the Church, and it is to Christians that we have to apply the idea of being the dynamic representative minority that is spiritually responsible for the final destiny of all. 

Even within Israel a part often stood for the whole. When the more fervent Jews were gathered at Jerusalem for the great feasts, it was all Israel that was, mystically, assembled there. When, from the eighth century B. C., the prophets began to foretell the destruction of the Holy City and its Temple, they spoke prophetically of 'the remnant', whose size was of little importance and was not made clear, but which would represent the whole of the new Israel. Finally, the new Israel is represented and has its points of departure, not in a collective remnant, but in one person, the Son of Man, who bears in himself all the Holy People of the Most High. Fundamentally, the Christian doctrine of the Redemption cannot be understood apart from the biblical idea of representative inclusion of which a few examples have just been given. It is indeed constantly 'a part for the whole': God looked at a great multitude and brought them into his design, seeing them in a little group or in a single person who providentially was bearer of the good that was meant for all. 

THE SEED OF LIFE

That is why we said above that the ideas of totality and of representative value are joined in the typically biblical notion of first-fruits. The apostolic writings are full of it. According to St James' epistle, Christians, to whom birth is given by the Father through his true word, are the first-fruits of all his creation (i. 18). For St Paul, Christ is the first-fruits of resurrection (1 Cor. xv. 20, 23) ; and Stephanas and his fellows are the first-fruits of Achaia (I Cor. xvi. 15), Epaenetus of Asia (Rom. xvi. 5). Clearly Paul saw in the first of a group or a country an example of the divine pattern according to which that first contains all that is to follow. The idea can be applied to the founder of some group, e.g. of a church or a religious order . . . We are now such rabid individualists that ideas of this sort no longer occur to us; and yet, even humanly speaking, we should not be what we are, or rather, we should not be at all, had there not been a First in whom the future was contained. In one of his sermons, Newman has a fine passage on the bond that unites us with our forerunners, of whom we often know nothing but to whom we nevertheless owe things that are very dear and precious to us.* Who built the house in which we were born and grew up? Who began the society in which we have found opportunity and happiness, human or specifically Christian? In biblical language all these things would be 'first-fruits'; but here we have to go beyond the purely human point of view. 

We all know that for Christians, there is a real history of salvation: that is, a chain of events and divine dealings in accordance with a design seen by God in its wholeness from all eternity, but which is unfolded bit by bit during the course of time. To the eyes of God, its continuation was in its beginning, he saw the whole in the first-fruits. For God, Abraham, alone in a world that was already populous, was already the people that would make up the company of believers; the promises and blessings given to the patriarch were given for this people. Thus Abraham in his solitude was as it were a seed that was able to fertilize the field of the world, a kind of sacrament of universal faith and salvation. 

And do we not see there a sort of general law, a 'constant' of all creation? With deep penetration did Gustave Thibon write that 'Any order that transcends another can insert itself into that other only under a form that is infinitely small'; he gives as examples the insertion of life into the inorganic world and of the power of thought into simply biological life; to which may be added, of the Church's supernatural life into the world of conscious life. And indeed, what is life, quantitatively considered, in face of the enormous mass of lifeless matter? It is so small in relation to the mass as to be hardly perceptible, and yet it is the promise and the riches and the future. 

The same can be said of conscious life in relation to life in general. Pascal's reed is a well-known symbol,† but it does not speak so persuasively as figures, and here are the figures: It has been calculated that if the whole population of the world were put into the Lake of Geneva, which is not all that large, the level of the water would rise by only 11¼ inches. That is a matter of bodies. But consciousness has neither density nor volume nor weight, and yet it is the greatest thing in the world. And then what shall we say of grace, of which the Church is as it were the shrine? Here we may recall that fine piece, No 792, of Pascal's Pensees, on the three orders: the bodily order, the order of mind, and the order of charity or holiness. 

The infinite distance between body and mind is a figure of the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity—for charity is supernatural. 

The glory of greatness shines in vain for people who are in search of understanding. 

Kings, the rich, public leaders, none of the great ones of the world see the glory of men of intellect. 

The greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if not of God, is invisible to worldlings and intellectuals. These are three orders that differ in kind. 

Great geniuses have their power, their glory, their greatness, their triumphs, their lustre, and have no need of worldly greatness, it is no concern of theirs. They are seen by the mind, not with the eyes; and that is enough. 

The saints have their power, their glory, their triumphs, their lustre, and have no need of wordly [sic] or intellectual greatness, with which they have no concern, for these neither add to nor take away anything from them. They are seen by God and the angels, not by the body or by inquisitive minds; God is enough for them. 

Archimedes would be equally revered whatever his place in the world. He fought no eye-filling battles, but he gave his discoveries to every man's mind. How glorious he was to the mind! 

Jesus Christ, without wordly [sic] goods and without any outward show of learning, belongs to his own order of holiness. He did not invent anything, he did not govern; but he was humble, patient, holy, holy to God, terrifying to evil spirits, without sin. With how much state, with what unutterable splendour, he comes to the eyes of the heart that perceives wisdom! 

It would have been useless for Archimedes to play the prince in his geometry books, though he was a prince. 

It would have been useless for our Lord Jesus Christ to come like a king to dazzle us in his kingdom of holiness; he came indeed with the glory of his own order !  

.. All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their works, cannot equal the least movement of charity—that is of an infinitely higher order. 

* Parochial Sermons, vol. iii (London, 1836), Sermon 17.

† 'Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed' (Penses, vi, 347).

Yves Congar, The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and its Problems (1962) p. 9-16

Congar - Solidarity leads to desire for salvation of all [The Wide World My Parish 1]

A man cannot content himself with the certain knowledge that the Catholic Church represents the fullness of Christianity (supposing that he has that certainty unimpaired); he needs to know what 'the others' represent in relation to that Church and the salvation of which she is as it were the sacrament. In many places, every Catholic knows people who are Protestant, perhaps a communist or two, maybe a Jew, and certainly some who 'don't care', either because of indifference or because they are positively opposed to religion. These people are his fellows, sharing a common destiny with him, and he, or she, cannot but ask how they stand with regard to his religion, his faith, and that salvation in which he believes. The Communism pervading some countries, which has imposed some of its problems on us, is in its own way underlining the question: on the one hand by the atmosphere of human solidarity and ever-growing 'worldwideness' ; on the other, by consciousness of a tremendous historical continuity which forbids us to ignore the solidarity of generation with generation and century with century. It may be that the religion of the classical epoch was characterized by a certain individualism: Peter Nicole (d. 1695), for example, declared that 'A man is created to live alone with God for ever.' A possible comment on this nowadays is one that would have astonished and even scandalized Nicole: 'Save my own soul alone? No, it shall be all or none,' Whilst not going so far as that, this feeling for human solidarity certainly haunts many Christian consciences today.*

* This feeling could be particularly illustrated from the writings of Simone Weil, but there are much older expressions of it, though inspired by different considerations. There is Dostoevsky's theme that we are responsible for all people and everything, we have to beg forgiveness for all people and everything; and St Simeon the New Theologian (d. 1022) wrote; 'I knew a man who so longed for his brethren's salvation that, with excess of a zeal worthy of Moses, he implored God with scalding tears that either those brethren should be saved with him or he be damned with them. For he was bound to them in the Holy Spirit by such a bond of love that he did not want even to enter the kingdom of Heaven if it meant having to be separated from them' (Discourse 22; P.G., 120, 424-5)

Yves Congar, The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and its Problems (1962) p. 6

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

Von Speyr - Jesus desires salvation of all (also includes her interpretation of "the elect")

When Paul speaks of the elect he means definite individuals. He sees before his eyes the image of the disciples who followed the Lord: they are types and models, the central light falls on them. That this light falls from them on to others, is brought by them to others, is a new truth not excluded but included in the first. At first Peter is intended, or John, and not Zebedee, though he stands near the circle of light. The number itself is the Son’s secret. It could be that the Father means “many” and that, to speak in a human way, he allows himself to be surprised by the work of the Son who demands “all”. Little Thérèse “chose all” when she was offered a basketful of things to choose from. She chose not only what was beautiful but also the unattractive. Thérèse is only imitating what is the deepest in the attitude of the Son of Man: he was the first “to choose all”, even the last human being in the basket of creation, perhaps unrecognizable because of sin, but beautiful because the Father created him.

Adrienne von Speyr - Unpublished, quoted in preface to The Victory of Love

The second half of this is a wonderful description of Jesus's desire that all be saved (1 Tim 2:4), with an interesting trinitarian angle. As for the first half, I'll be interested to see whether von Speyr develops this thinking about election later in the book or perhaps elsewhere in her writings.

Kierkegaard - No certainty regarding eternal destiny

In my life I have never got farther, nor will I get farther, than ‘fear and trembling’, that point at which I am literally quite certain that everyone else will easily attain the bliss of heaven, and only I shall not. . . . Telling other people. . . ‘You are eternally lost’ is something I cannot do. As far as I am concerned, the situation is that all the others will, of course, go to heaven; the only doubt is whether I shall get there. 

Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? 2nd edition (2014) chapter 5

Dare We Hope is mainly about our knowledge—or more precisely our certainty—regarding the eternal destiny of human souls, whether our own or those of others. This is something about which Christians widely disagree, but the Catholic position (and therefore mine) is that we cannot have complete assurance either that we are saved or that any other particular person is damned. Regarding the latter, one recent catechism puts it as follows: 

Neither Holy Scripture nor the Church’s Tradition of faith asserts with certainty of any man that he is actually in hell. Hell is always held before our eyes as a real possibility, one connected with the offer of conversion and life.

The Church’s Confession of Faith: A Catholic Catechism for Adults, published by the German Bishops’ Conference, English edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 346

Danielou - Hope for salvation of the world

Too often we think of hope in too individualistic a manner as merely our personal salvation. But hope essentially bears on the great actions of God concerning the whole of creation. It bears on the destiny of all humanity. It is the salvation of the world that we await. In reality hope bears on the salvation of all men—and it is only in the measure that I am immersed in them that it bears on me.

Jean Cardinal Daniélou, S.J. Essai sur le mystère de l’histoire (1953), p. 340 - quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? 2nd edition (2014)

This is a really mind-blowing quote for me. It's perfect as the epigraph for Balthasar's Dare We Hope in that it encapsulates the major underlying theme of the book. On the surface, the debate is about the question of Hell—specifically whether we are certain that anyone goes there. But Balthasar's deeper interest is not in that question, but rather on how Christian hope should be focused. He, along with Danielou, contend that our hope is for the salvation of the world, of the human race as a whole, as opposed to simply ourselves as individuals.