Philosophical Reasons

There also seemed to be strong philosophical reasons for accepting predestination. If God is omniscient, if he knows everything, he must have fore- knowledge of his creatures‘ fates. That suggests that there is a fact of the matter about what my fate will be, which is knowable with certainty well in advance of my birth. It doesn’t follow from this that God determined what my fate will be. But it does seem to follow that my fate is not indeterminate. Moreover, if God is omnipotent, and can do anything, or anything it is logi- cally possible to do, then nothing happens except by his will. So if I wind up in Hell, he will not only have known that from eternity, he will also have willed it from eternity.

Predestination is not so widely accepted now as it was when my church was founded in the 16th century. I find many Christians who reject it. And I sympathize with them. Their hearts are in the right place, certainly. I cannot believe that a just and loving God would create beings he knew, and had pre- determined, would spend eternity in hell. But Christians can reject predesti- nation only at the cost of ignoring the authority of their scriptures and the implications of their theology. I would not insist that a good Christian must be a fundamentalist, who thinks that everything Scripture says is literally true. But it does seem to me that if someone calls himself a Christian, he ought at least to believe that the Christian scriptures are not seriously misleading about central matters, such as salvation and damnation.

Let us set predestination to one side. Even if the Christian scriptures did not contain that commitment, there would still be a problem about Hell, to which they are committed by an even wider range of texts.* The philosoph- ical support for Hell, though, seems much weaker than the support for pre- destination. I see no philosophical reason for believing in an eternal punishment for sinners. Indeed, philosophy is against it. Philosophy teaches that the punishment should be proportionate to the crime. Let‘s concede, for the sake of argument, that we are all, in some sense, sinners. Which of us, looking into his heart, can honestly say that he has never done anything seriously wrong, at least once in his life? But the doctrine of Hell requires that most of us sinners will suffer eternal torment.**

Perhaps in some cases that is just. Hitler was responsible for the horrify- ing deaths of millions of Jews, not to mention gypsies, Slavs, and homo- sexuals. Perhaps for crimes of that magnitude eternal punishment can

* So far as I can see, the strongest scriptural support for predestination comes from the letters of St. Paul. There seems to be relatively little support for it in the gospels. This might suggest that it was not part of the original teaching of Jesus. But texts supporting the idea of Hell are easy to find in the gospels.