Fr Barron and Hell

I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to hear Fr Barron make these comments on hell. I love Fr Barron and I hate to disagree with him. I am just astonished to see him embrace von Balthasar's error on hell. Anyway, here he is.



Von Balthasar writes that we may reasonable hope hell is empty and still accept all the teaching of scripture, tradition, and the magisterium. It is not a logical argument. It is what is known as a rationalization for sin. The particular sin involved here is the vice of presumption. Presuming that you are going to heaven. The difference here is von Balthasar somehow manages to spin his rhetoric in a way that confuses many philosophers and theologians. People that are normally pretty good at seeing through this kind of thing. They seem to have a blind spot around future conditionals. I have seen this before in one logic class I took. Philosophers got fooled when arguments tried to hide a logical inconsistency behind a future uncertainty. The mathematicians in the same class did not have that problem. None of them found the argument convincing at all. I am trained in math and not in philosophy so I can't really understand what they see in an argument like this. I just know logic. This isn't it. It is a contradiction that he is trying to hide with some hand waving.

It is important to make some distinctions. We should hope that everyone goes to heaven. It is a terrible lack of charity to hope someone goes to hell. But that is different than hoping hell is empty. It is like a major league baseball player. He hopes his team wins 162 games. That is that every time he goes out on the field he hopes to win. You would wonder about him if he didn't. But that isn't the same thing as hoping to finish the season 162-0. He knows he will win some and lose some but his approach to every game is to win. Same with souls. We approach every soul as savable. So we sow seed. But we know not all seed will grow and bear fruit.

The problem here is the changing of the story of salvation. Salvation happens against a backdrop of people headed for destruction. Think of the story of Noah and the ark. How does the story change if nobody is drowned in the flood? It is completely different. Humanity is no longer saved by Noah's obedience. It becomes a story of God injecting goodness into every person so just follow your heart.

St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine see our salvation the same way. We live among the mass of the damned. We have the hope of salvation only through being set apart from the normal flow of society. Fr Barron dismisses this as dark. But calling something dark is not a logical objection. It is a feeling. Dark ideas are not always false ideas. Death is very dark and very real. St Thomas and St Augustine would gladly agree that such a truth was dark. Darkness is a red herring. Is it true? What does God's revelation say? Not what do my emotions tell me?

So why do people embrace this idea? It is not that they doubt men can sin bad enough. Even though it boils down to saying mortal sin exists but nobody has ever or will ever commit one. People know from history men are capable of great evil. If they are honest people know from their own hearts that evil is not far away. Nobody really has a hard time believing that even though it is a very dark truth.

So what drives it? The idea that God should conform to the simplest notion of niceness. But the problem of hell is only one example of that. You still have many things that undeniably exist that offend God and offend us. The earthquake in Japan is just one recent example. Why does God allow that? It is precisely the same question. So you have not really removed an obstacle to the faith. God still allows things we can't fully explain.

In fact, the teaching that people might go to hell will be hard even if you allow the hope that hell might be empty. You get the worst of both worlds. You have to explain the serious possibility of hell and you also have to explain the possibility that God might teach us about hell and not actually send anyone there. That Jesus would describe the final judgement as separating the sheep from the goats and even describe what he would say to the goat-like ones and what they would reply while knowing that group will be empty. God's revelation turns out to be full of lies if hell is empty. That seems like a much bigger obstacle to the faith.

Give the fact that there are billions of people on the earth, just raising the specter that none of them will be in hell implies that the chance that I will go to hell is so small as to not be worth thinking about. That is a dangerous teaching. It leads to doctrinal indifference, moral laxity, evangelical inaction, etc.

The truth is the more seriously people take the doctrine of hell the less people go there. Jesus tells us in Mat 10:28, "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell". Jesus pits temporal fears against eternal fears. If we fear losing our soul then we will not fear losing our life or fear missing out on worldly pleasures or fear failure or whatever. History bears this out. When the doctrine of hell was widely preached widely believed then people tended to avoid mortal sin. When the doctrine of hell was ignored and/or questioned like it today then mortal sin becomes much more common.

So trying to fix the gospel of Christ by changing the doctrine of hell has not worked. It makes God a father who threatens children with punishment that he is not prepared to carry out. As a dad I know that is easy to do but it is not being a good father. Children see through empty threats and lose respect for you. You need to say exactly what you will do and if their behavior does not change then you do it. That is the kind of father I try to be and it is the kind of father God is. We need to take His word very seriously. If we are considering doing something the church calls gravely evil we need to believe it could cost us our eternal soul.

The best answer to the problem of pain is the Catholic doctrine that suffering can be salvific. But how can anything we do be salvific if God is not really sending anybody to hell anyway? Why should Paul try and be all things to all people so some may be saved? Does not this make all of human life meaningless? Temporal consequences of our actions fade in to insignificance in the context of eternity. If nothing we do has eternal consequences either for ourselves or anyone else then what are we doing here?

Von Balthasar's ideas have an emotional appeal and they have not yet been formally condemned as heresy by the church. But there are just so many problems trying to make if fit with the rest of Catholic teaching. Truth cannot contradict reason. So we can't look to him for easy answers to the hard questions of hell.