The notion of radical freedom is that God lets us choose what we want and we essentially jump off the Moral Ark and drown in a flood of our own depravity and solipsism.
Hell can be the natural consequence of “individual liberty and self-actualization” and to use another Allison term, a form of “narcissistic indifference” to the world’s suffering.
Allison challenges the notion that we are “free,” the leading actors of our lives: “In the modern myth, our names are on the marquee, and our destiny is up to us.” Such a view ignores how much we’re lacking in freedom. As Allison writes, “Although not an old-fashioned Calvinist, I think it’s obvious that all of us are broken creatures, that we’re selfish and self-deluded, and that we constantly abuse our freedom, which is so often illusory. Because of this, I find little use for a deity who lets me decide my fate. I don’t want to be my own God. Nor do I want the Supreme Being to respect my alleged autonomy no matter what, just as I don’t want the police to respect the autonomy of the despondent guy threatening to jump off the top of the high-rise. I rather desire, for myself and for everyone else, rescue.”
Later in the paragraph, Allison writes: “Even if we’re allowed, in our freedom, to kindle the fires of hell and to forge its chains, isn’t it God’s part to break our chains and put out the fire?”
Another problem with the radical freedom theory, Allison points out, is its over simplified “binary logic.” One isn’t either moving toward or away from God. That is an over simplification. Allison writes: “Human beings aren’t unidirectional vectors but bundles of contradictions. Saints are sinners; sinners are saints. Everyone is Jekyll; everyone is Hyde.”
Our movement toward and away from hell is complicated so that Allison asks, “Who travels the straight and narrow, whether up or down? The modern direction we’re already headed. Our momentum, so to speak, carries us up to heaven or down to hell. Yet what if, like me, you keep moving in circles?”
The modern hell of freedom is somewhat of an improvement over the Dantean Torture Chamber, Allison observes. However, this modern hell still asserts retributive justice. “We reap what we sow.”
Retributive justice doesn’t sound like justice or fairness except that when a Christian apologist says, “God’s ways aren’t our ways. He can do as He pleases and we are not to question Him.” Or as Allison quotes John Gerstner, “God is love but he is more than love and other than love.”
As a response to the above, what is one of the most powerful and salient passages from the chapter:
“Such a proposal deeply disturbs me, because I’m of the same mind as Berdyaev: ‘I can conceive of no more powerful and irrefutable argument in favor of atheism than the eternal torments of hell. If hell is eternal then I am an atheist.”
Making reference to Isaac of Nineveh, Allison writes that God’s grace, evidenced in the Prodigal Son and elsewhere, most notably of course, Christ on the Cross, has nothing to do with justice but all to do with grace. Later, Allison expresses encouragement that the canonized Isaac says that God always “acts towards us in ways He knows will be advantageous to us, whether by way of things that cause suffering, or by way of things that cause relief.”
Isaac challenged the notion of traditional hell. Allison writes, “It was inconceivable to Isaac that ‘the compassionate Maker created rational beings in order to deliver them mercilessly to unending affliction for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned . . . and whom (nonetheless) He created.’”
Allison recommends other universalists, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Hans Denck, Jane Leade, J.A. Bengel, Thomas Erskine, George MacDonald, Sergius Bulgakov, Jacques Ellul, John Hick, Marilyn McCord Adams.
Allison doesn’t so much argue that hell isn’t forever. He rather hopes it isn’t based on his understanding of a loving God.
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