In his recent book Erasing Hell Reformed pastor Francis Chan addresses the question “How can God be loving and still send people to hell?” This is his first point in response:
“First, God is love, but He also defines what love is. We don’t have the license to define love according to our own standards and sensibilities. We often assume that love means achieving the ultimate happiness of everyone you are able to. If this were love then yes, hell would be incompatible with God’s love. But scripture doesn’t define God’s love in this way. Love is part of who God is. And God defines what love is. God does not have to save everyone for Him to show love. Love, in other words, is essentially wrapped up in the character of God. Though God acts in ways that seem unloving by our standards, they are not unloving by His standards–and His standards are the ones that matter.” (Francis Chan, Erasing Hell (David C. Cook, 2011), 162)
I’m going to respond to this passage sentence by sentence.
First, God is love, but He also defines what love is. We don’t have the license to define love according to our own standards and sensibilities.
The good news for Chan is that this is true. The bad news for Chan is that this is trivially true. No Christian I’ve ever met disputes the fact that God is love or that God defines what love is. Nor have I ever met a Christian who proposed that human beings have the license to define love according to our own standards and sensibilities. It seems to me that this second sentence is really functioning as a rhetorical swipe at Christians who interpret the Bible differently than Chan. As good rhetoric, the swipe becomes much more powerful when you drop out the hermeneutical step altogether and imply simply that some people (i.e. those who disagree with you) are the one bringing their own standards and sensibilities to the text.
We often assume that love means achieving the ultimate happiness of everyone you are able to. If this were love then yes, hell would be incompatible with God’s love.
Now let’s hold on a moment here. Chan seems to be confusing “love” with “omnibenevolence”. For the purposes of our discussion I’ll distinguish these two different attributes as follows:
love: the desire that an entity achieve shalom so far as this is possible.
omnibenevolence: the desire that all entities achieve shalom so far as this is possible.
There is no problem with affirming that God loves some creatures (those he saves) while not loving others (those he damns). This is the position of many historic Calvinists. There is also no problem with God loving all creatures even though it is not possible to save all (i.e. there is no feasible world where all freely choose God). This is the classic Arminian position. Consequently, an Arminian can affirm that God loves all (is omnibenevolent) while a Calvinist can affirm that God loves only some.
Where the Calvinist gets into trouble is with any insistence that God is omnibenevolent whilst not desiring that all entities achieve shalom even though this is possible. And on Calvinism it most certainly is possible since God is the primary cause of free human willings. So while the Arminian is not obliged to accept the existence of any feasible world in which all creatures freely choose God, the Calvinist is committed to the existence of such worlds.
(A Calvinist could deny the existence of any feasible world in which all creatures freely choose God by claiming that God must maximize his glory of necessity and there is no feasible world in which God maximizes his glory and in which all creatures freely choose him. But such a position must surely be one of the most extraordinarily implausible theological theses imaginable.)
“But scripture doesn’t define God’s love in this way. Love is part of who God is. And God defines what love is. God does not have to save everyone for Him to show love. Love, in other words, is essentially wrapped up in the character of God. Though God acts in ways that seem unloving by our standards, they are not unloving by His standards–and His standards are the ones that matter.”
The one thing that grabs my attention here is Chan’s admission that his actions “seem unloving by our standards”. What I take Chan to mean here is that we should expect God’s maximally loving nature to entail, among other things, omnibenevolence with respect to all created entities. I am heartened to hear that Chan shares the deeply held intuition. I am disappointed that he didn’t begin his sentence differently. Perhaps like this: “Though Calvinism teaches that God acts in ways that seem unloving…” This would be a more accurate description, for it would illumine the fact that one reason people are rightly skeptical of a Calvinist reading is because it requires us to deny deeply held and very powerful intuitions about the nature of maximal love, namely that such a love would be omnibenevolent rather than being inexplicably restricted to a subset of created entities.
A closing postscript on time
In conclusion, let me note a deep irony. Most Calvinists adopt an atemporalist view of God according to which God transcends time. This is not a biblical perspective for the biblical texts themselves instead support a view of God as sempiternal, that is as a temporal being who is backwardly everlasting and forwardly everlasting. So why do Calvinists adopt an atemporalist view of time? Because they’re deeply impacted by a tradition that equates maximal greatness with atemporality, a tradition that extends back through Boethius and Augustine and on back to Plato and Parmenides. They adopt this position despite the fact that, to borrow Chan’s phrasing, scripture doesn’t define God’s relationship to time in this way.
And this provides me with no end of troubled fascination. Why is it that Calvinists are so quick to adopt abstract extra-biblical philosophical reasoning about God’s relationship to time while they shun the most fundamental intuitions about the nature of maximal love as entailing omnibenevolence, intuitions that (despite Chan’s claims to the contrary) are borne out in several biblical passages? What kind of prioritization is this?
