Category: Apologetics

Do our souls leave time when we die and go to be with God in heaven? God is outside of time, right? So do we go outside of time, too?

And—if we are outside of time—are we already saints in heaven, right now? Could you even ask yourself for your intercession?

And what about angels? Are they timeless, too?

Prepare for some surprises!

 

Two Types of Eternity

A key word in our discussion is eternal, and this word has two meanings.

First, something can be eternal if it lasts through all time. You can picture it as a ray that starts at a particular moment and then proceeds forward through all future moments—like an arrow pointing into the future. There are other ways you could imagine this arrow. It might point backward into the past, or it might point both forward and backward.

But the key thing is that it represents an endless stretch of time, one moment after another, going on infinitely. When you have an unending sequence of time like that, people sometimes say it is eternal. It goes on for eternity. They also sometimes say that it is everlasting.

But there is an even greater type of eternity, which is not being part of time at all.

You could picture this as a single point next to a line or arrow that represents time. Each point on the line is a different moment in time, but there’s also a point that is not part of the line, that is by itself. This moment is also said to be eternal because it is not part of time. It’s non-temporal or atemporal.

We’ll call this Type 1 eternity because it’s the greatest form of eternity—not being part of time at all. And we’ll call the other Type 2 eternity because it’s a lesser form—just an endless stretch of time. Both Type 1 and Type 2 eternity will play a role in our discussion.

 

God’s Eternity

In the early Church there was a philosopher and martyr named Boethius (c. 480-524). He denounced corruption among political officials in the Ostrogothic Kingdom, which got him locked up, tortured, and eventually martyred.

While he was in jail, he wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy, which gave Christian circles the classic definition of eternity as it applies to God. Boethius wrote:

Eternity is a simultaneously total and perfect possession of an interminable life (Consolation of Philosophy 5:6).

One of the things you’ll note about this definition is that it involves the possession of an interminable or endless life. That sounds like Type 2 eternity, which involves an endless stretch of time or life.

But there’s something else in Boethius’ definition. He says eternity is not just the possession of limitless life, it’s the simultaneous possession of it. In other words, there is no succession from one moment to another. It’s all happening at once. It’s simultaneous.

Another translation of Boethius puts it this way:

Eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment (Consolation of Philosophy 5:6).

This makes it clear that we’re not talking about Type 2 eternity, which is like a line. Instead, we’re talking about Type 1 eternity, which is like a point.

God thus lives in an “eternal now,” where time does not pass from moment to moment. If you think about that eternal now as a point, it is not on the line of time at all.

But our mental pictures can be a little misleading. If you imagine a point sitting next to a line, the point is still closer to one part of the line than others. You might think that the part of the line that is closest to the point is the present, while those that are father away are the past and the future.

This is not how it works for God. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy (CCC 600).

So the past, the present, and the future are all equally real—and equally close—to God. You might think about this as God existing at his single point of the eternal now, with time bending around that point like a circle, so that past, present, and future are all equally close to him.

Of course, the future is infinite, and we can’t really draw an infinite circle around a point, but it’s a helpful image. In fact, Boethius pictured time as a circle that had God and his eternity as its center (Consolation of Philosophy 4:6).

In any event, Boethius understood God’s eternity to be Type 1—as a point that’s not on the line of time.

 

Church Teaching on God’s Eternity

It’s not just Boethius who held this; it’s also the Church. Boethius’s definition of eternity became the standard one in Christian circles. Therefore, this was what it meant when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council stated that

We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite, and unchangeable (DS 800, CCC 202).

So—reading the council in terms of what the word meant at the time—it confessed that God had Type 1 eternity. He’s fundamentally outside of time.

And that’s the understanding of the Church today. In 1985, Pope John Paul II taught:

Because [God] cannot not be, he cannot have beginning or end nor a succession of moments in the only and infinite act of his existence.

Right reason and revelation wonderfully converge on this point.

Being God, absolute fullness of being (ipsum esse subsistens), his eternity “inscribed in the terminology of being” must be understood as the “indivisible, perfect, and simultaneous possession of an unending life,” and therefore as the attribute of being absolutely “beyond time” (General Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).

So “his eternity . . . must be understood as . . . being absolutely ‘beyond time.’”

But what about our eternity?

 

An Argument for Leaving Time

We’re obviously inside of time now, but do we leave time when we go to be with God?

Some people think that we do. This idea seems to be based on reasoning something like this:

1. 1. God is outside of time.
   2. God is in heaven.
   3. When we die, we go into heaven.
   4. Therefore, when we die, we go outside of time.

But we need to be careful here, because that’s not a formally valid argument. Consider this parallel:

1. 1. Bob is outside of Scranton.
   2. Bob is in agony.
   3. When I stub my toe, I go into agony.
   4. Therefore, when I stub my toe, I go outside of Scranton.

That doesn’t follow at all. I might stub my toe and go into agony even though I am located in Scranton. So there’s something wrong with this argument. It involves a logical fallacy. The fallacy involves a confusion between Scranton—which is a location—and agony—which is a state of being.

This is also important because being inside or outside of time involves a location, but being in heaven involves a state of being. We may picture heaven as if it is a location—classically, a location up in the clouds. But that’s not really what it is.

Instead, heaven is a state of spiritual union with God. Thus, John Paul II taught:

In the context of revelation, we know that the “heaven” or “happiness” in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity (General Audience, July 21, 1999).

Similarly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity—this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels, and all the blessed—is called “heaven.” Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness (CCC 1024).

So heaven is “a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity” and “the state of supreme, definitive happiness.”

This means that you can be in heaven whether or not you are inside or outside of time. God is outside of time, but he is supremely happy and so is “in” heaven, and when we are in full spiritual union with God, we are “in” heaven even though we remain in time.

That’s why in the book Revelation, John says:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. . . .

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:1-3).

So Revelation depicts mankind as living on the new Earth, the city of New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to mankind, and we’re told that “the dwelling place of God is with man.” But God doesn’t literally dwell in a physical location, yet he will be in full spiritual union with people as they live on the new Earth.

 

We Don’t Leave Time

This means that we don’t leave time when we enter full spiritual union with God, and this is something that the Church has been explicit about.

God may have Type 1 eternity, or true timelessness, but we don’t. We have Type 2 eternity or everlastingness. We come into being at a certain point in time, but because we are ultimately immortal, we have no end. Because of death, we may not be in our bodies for a period—of time—but eventually we will be reunited with them and experience the eternal order.

Both Scripture and standard Catholic teaching depict us as undergoing a sequence of states across our existence. First, we come into existence. Then, we live our lives. Then, we die. Then, we are judged at the particular judgment. Then, we are purified in purgatory if we need to be. Then, when our purification is finished, we have the unalloyed happiness of heaven. Then, we are reunited with our bodies. Then, we experience the general judgment, where we are judged in body and soul. Then, we experience the eternal order.

That’s a definite sequence—much of which happens after death, implying a sequentiality that occurs after our deaths. For there to be a sequence, there must be something separating the elements of the sequence–something that keeps them from happening all at once. That means that there is either time or something analogous to time in the afterlife.

That doesn’t mean it works exactly the same way that time works here on Earth. Various Medieval philosophers like St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas speculated that we might experience time differently than the way we experience it now. And they referred to this altered mode of existence as aevum or aeveternity, but it was still a form of time.

More recently, physicists have speculated that there may be more than one dimension of time. We’re used to experiencing one dimension of time that stretches into the future, but we’re also used to experiencing three physical dimensions—height, width, and length—so there is no conceptual reason why there can’t be more than one dimension of time. Maybe there are two or three or more—we just don’t experience them in this life.

But there has to be something separating the different stages of our journey in the afterlife, and so there has to be some form of time. It may be time exactly the way we experience it here; it may be an alternate experience like the medieval idea of aeviternity, or it may be even more complex, as with modern physics. But it has to exist.

 

Church Teaching on Our Timeliness

What does the Church’s Magisterium have to say on the subject? John Paul II taught:

Eternity [in the sense of being “beyond time”] is here the element which essentially distinguishes God from the world. While the latter is subject to change and passes away, God remains beyond the passing of the world. He is necessary and immutable (General Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).

He also taught that

[God] is Eternity, as the preceding catechesis explained, while all that is created is contingent and subject to time (General Audience, Sept. 11, 1985).

So “all that is created is . . . subject to time.” That means that our souls are subject to time. And this will be the case even after our deaths, since our souls do not cease to be created beings.

The same is true of angels. They are also created beings, and so they also are subject to time—answering that question for us.

 

The International Theological Commission Agrees

In 1992, the International Theological Commission (ITC) issued a document that bears on our subject in a more explicit way.

The ITC is an advisory body headed by the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, who at the time was Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict). According to its bylaws, when the head of the ITC authorizes the publication of one of its documents, it signifies that the Magisterium does not have any difficulty with its teaching.

In this case, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger authorized the publication of a document which stated:

[S]ome theologians . . . seek a solution in a so-called atemporalism: They say that after death time can in no way exist and hold that the deaths of people are successive (viewed from the perspective of this world); whereas the resurrection of those people in the life after death, in which there would be no temporal distinctions, is (they think) simultaneous.

But this attempted atemporalism, according to which successive individual deaths would coincide with a simultaneous collective resurrection, implies recourse to a philosophy of time quite foreign to biblical thought.

The New Testament’s way of speaking about the souls of the martyrs does not seem to remove them either from all reality of succession or from all perception of succession (cf. Rev 6:9-11).

Similarly, if time should have no meaning after death, not even in some way merely analogous with its terrestrial meaning, it would be difficult to understand why Paul used formulas referring to the future (anastesontai) in speaking about their resurrection, when responding to the Thessalonians who were asking about the fate of the dead (cf. 1 Thess 4:13-18).

Moreover, a radical denial of any meaning for time in those resurrections, deemed both simultaneous and taking place in the moment of death, does not seem to take sufficiently into account the truly corporeal nature of the resurrection; for a true body cannot be said to exist devoid of all notion of temporality.

Even the souls of the blessed, since they are in communion with the Christ who has been raised in a bodily way, cannot be thought of without any connection with time (Some Current Questions on Eschatology, “The Christian Hope of the Resurrection,” 2.2].

By their nature, the documents of the ITC express the common understanding of Catholic theology in accord with the teaching of the Magisterium, and Cardinal Ratzinger’s authorization of this document signals that the common understanding in Catholic theology is that some form of time “even in some way merely analogous to its terrestrial meaning” continues to apply to us in the afterlife, and that the Magisterium has no difficulty with this.

Joseph Ratzinger said the same in his own writings, such as his book Eschatology, when he was still a theology professor.

Catholic theology thus does not hold that we leave time upon our deaths. In fact, it would be difficult to hold that we do so, given the reasons that the ITC cites.

So while we do indeed have eternal souls, and while God is eternal in the sense of being completely beyond time, the Church does not understand our souls to be eternal or atemporal in the way that God is.

God has Type 1 eternity, and we have Type 2.

 

Can You Ask for Your Own Intercession?

This gives us a framework for answering our remaining questions, like “Are you currently a saint in heaven?”

Well, your future self may be a saint, but your future is not now. Therefore, on the face of it, you would not be a saint in heaven now.

However, strictly speaking, we don’t know how time works in the afterlife. We know it exists, but we don’t know how it works. It’s possible it might involve more than one temporal dimension, or it might incorporate time travel—which is something Einstein’s field equations say is theoretically possible.

If something like time travel happens in heaven then technically, yes, you could be in heaven “now.” I wouldn’t count on that, though, because the idea of time travel in heaven is totally speculative, and we have no evidence supporting it.

But can you ask your saintly self to pray to God for you?

Here comes a twist, but the answer is yes. And it doesn’t matter whether you are in heaven “now” or not.

In fact, people ask their future selves to pray for them all the time—even in this life. For example, you could leave your future self a note that says, “Don’t forget to pray tonight!” Or you might set an alarm or some other kind of reminder to prompt your future self to pray.

There is thus no reason why you can’t ask your future sainted self to pray for you. All the future, sainted version of you has to do is remember to pray, and I’m pretty sure that in heaven we will have perfect memories.

Also, theologians like Aquinas commonly hold that the way saints know about our prayers is that God tells them—he tells them anything they would want to know about, including our prayer requests. So if Saint You forgets, God can remind you.

And God can respond to your future prayers and help you out right now! Remember: God is outside of time, and the past, present, and future are all equally real to him. So suppose that you’ll be a saint in heaven 100 years from now. That future version of you prays to God and asks him to help you right now—in our present. Well, our present is just as real to God as our future, so God can take your future prayer and apply it to you right now.

In fact, saints like St. Padre Pio have talked about the principle behind this, and I discussed it in Episode 208 of my podcast Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. You can go to Mysterious.fm/208 if you’d like to learn more.

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God bless you always!

 

Recently a number of individuals have advocated the idea that the prophet Jonah died and was resurrected while in the belly of the whale (or big fish).

This is a striking claim that is at odds with the historical interpretation of the book of Jonah, which is that he remained alive during his experience.

I have not been able to find any historic interpreters—Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish—who held that Jonah literally died. There may be some that I just haven’t found, but if so, they seem to have been quite small in number.

It’s possible that startling new insights can be discovered in familiar biblical passages with established interpretations, but the odds of this happening are not high, and there would need to be compelling arguments to overturn the way a passage has been historically understood.

So let’s look at some arguments that have been or might be proposed for the Jonah Death Hypothesis.

 

The Sign of Jonah

In Matthew 12, some scribes and Pharisees request a sign from Jesus, but he tells them:

An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here (Matt. 12:39-41; cf. 16:4, Luke 11:30).

Taken by itself, this does not provide evidence that Jonah died and rose from the dead. Jesus does not say that he did.

However, one might suppose that we should understand Jonah that way on the grounds that it would provide a stronger parallel between Jonah and Jesus if they both died and rose from the dead.

A problem with this approach is that it reads a later, New Testament situation onto a text written centuries earlier, that was composed in a different situation, and that differs in numerous ways (the story of Jonah is not the same as the story of Jesus—e.g., Jesus wasn’t fleeing God the way Jonah was).

All that can be confidently concluded from what Jesus says is that there is an analogy between him and Jonah that involves Jonah being in the whale for three days and Jesus being in the earth for three days. What happened to Jonah thus serves as a sign of what will happen with Jesus.

But every analogy has its limits. When Jesus called Herod Antipas “that fox” (Luke 13:32), he meant that Herod and foxes have certain characteristics in common (e.g., being cunning), but we cannot infer from this that Herod was a red-furred quadruped of the canine family. We must distinguish between what the two elements of an analogy have in common and what they don’t.

In the sign of Jonah, Jesus has already told us what he and the prophet have in common: They both spend three days in something. We can’t infer from this that they both literally died and resurrected.

In fact, Jesus has warned us that there are things that he and Jonah don’t have in common, for he said “behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” Literally dying and rising has been one of the ways in which Jesus has historically been understood to be greater than Jonah.

Therefore, if we are to establish that Jonah died and rose again, we will have to do it from the text of the book of Jonah and not from the Gospels.

 

An Argument from Silence

Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have noted that the author of Jonah never says that the prophet was alive for three days and nights in the fish.

That’s true, but the narrator also doesn’t tell us that Jonah died and rose from the dead.

Fundamentally, this is an argument from silence, and arguments from silence are notoriously weak.

They are especially weak when an author is narrating events in someone’s life and fails to mention something as important as the person dying and rising.

Consider a parallel: The book of Ruth narrates events of the matriarch Ruth’s life, and the author never says that Ruth was alive for the entire course of the book. It’s thus hypothetically possible that she died and was raised back to life—say, just before she and Naomi arrived in Bethlehem (Ruth 1:19).

However, it would be a mistake to infer from the fact that the author never says Ruth was alive throughout the story that she must have died and been raised back to life at some point.

Death and resurrection are big things, and there is a compact between the author and the reader that the text will contain the important events of the story being told. If something as important as a death and resurrection took place, the author will tell us.

But that doesn’t happen—either in Ruth or in Jonah. Given that silence, we should presume that both figures were alive throughout the course of their own stories.

 

Sheol and the Pit

In chapter 2 of Jonah—after he has been swallowed by the whale—the prophet prays to God, and in the course of that prayer, Jonah (as opposed to the narrator) says things like:

I called to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice

I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever;
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O Lord my God.

When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple (Jonah 2:7).

Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have pointed out that “Sheol” and “the Pit” are references to the realm of the dead, and this is true.

It has also been claimed that “my soul fainted” is a reference to Jonah’s death. This is not true, as we’ll see in a bit. However, we’ll let that pass for the moment.

The fundamental problem with interpreting the above as indicating that Jonah literally died is that Jonah’s prayer is a poem, as you can see even in English since it is composed of couplets in parallel with each other.

Specifically, it’s what’s known as a psalm of thanksgiving, and biblical poems and psalms regularly use non-literal expressions. Often, these take the form of hyperbole, which is deliberate exaggeration used to heighten the emotional impact of the text or to make a point.

For example, when the Psalmist says, “Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn!” (Ps. 108:2), it doesn’t mean that harps, lyres, or the dawn are conscious beings that fall asleep and can then be woken up. This is a poetic way of saying that the psalmist is so excited about God that he’s going to stay up all night praising him with harp and lyre (and even that length of time may be hyperbole).

In the same way, referring to the realm of the dead in a poetic context does not mean that the person literally died. All it need mean is that the person was in danger of death or almost died.

Neither do descriptions in poetry of being rescued from Sheol mean that the person literally died and was resurrected. In Psalm 30, we read:

I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up,
and have not let my foes rejoice over me.

O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.

O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit (Ps. 30:1-3).

This is a psalm for the dedication of the temple, and it is attributed to David. “You have brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit” does not mean that David literally died and was resurrected. These are hyperbolic, poetic expressions used to give thanksgiving for deliverance from a serious illness (that’s why he says “you have healed me”), with the result that God has not “let my foes rejoice over me.”

In light of the non-literal language used in poetry, we can’t use the references in Jonah’s psalm of thanksgiving as proof he literally died—only that he was in danger of dying and God rescued him.

 

“Arise”

Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have noted that once the prophet is coughed up on the beach, we read:

Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you” (Jonah 3:1-2).

They note that the term “Arise” in Hebrew is qum, and that this is “the same” Semitic word that Jesus uses when he raises Jairus’s daughter, saying “‘Talitha cumi’; which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise” (Mark 5:41).

This is actually not true. Qum is a Hebrew word, and cumi (alternate spelling: qumi) is Aramaic. Hebrew is not the same language as Aramaic, but the words do come from the same root, and they both mean “stand up” or “arise.”

But here’s the problem: The basic and usual meaning of these terms is “stand up”—not “rise from the dead.” It may have the latter sense in Mark 5:41, but that is not its usual meaning. Normally, it refers to the physical act of standing.

And that’s what it means here. Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis seem to overlook the context in which the command to stand up occurs. Notice that in Jonah 3:1-2 it says, “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time.”

So when was the first time? It was at the beginning of the book, where we read:

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me” (Jonah 1:1-2).

There, Jonah is alive and well, and when the word of the Lord comes to him, “arise” has its normal meaning of “get up on your feet.” The reason Jonah is to get on his feet is so that he can go to Nineveh and prophecy. Instead, the prophet goes AWOL, and God has to reel him back in.

Thus, after Jonah has repented, appealed to God for deliverance, been rescued, and been coughed up on the beach, God’s word comes to him “the second time,” and the message is the same: Stand up and go to Nineveh.

Here—like the first time the word of God came to Jonah—“arise” means the physical act of getting to one’s feet. It does not mean “rise from the dead.”

 

The Conversion of the Ninevites

Some have also noted that, just as the Ninevites repented after Jonah was spit out by the fish, so the Gentiles repented after Jesus rose from the dead.

This is true. However, it does not give us reason to suppose that Jonah literally died and rose from the dead.

Jesus tells us what occasioned the Ninevites repenting: “They repented at the preaching of Jonah” (Matt. 12:41). And that’s the same thing indicated in the book of Jonah:

He cried, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them (Jonah 3:4-5).

There is nothing in either text about the Ninevites being impressed by how Jonah died and rose from the dead. They were impressed by his announcement of doom, and they hoped God would relent. Thus the king of Nineveh said, “Who knows, God may yet repent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we perish not” (Jonah 3:9).

One can draw a parallel between the conversion of the Ninevites and the later conversion of the Gentiles in general, but neither text says that the former was because of Jonah dying and rising.

The arguments favoring the Jonah Death Hypothesis thus are weak and unconvincing.

 

Why the Jonah Death Hypothesis Is Wrong

Now let’s look at the arguments against the Jonah Death Hypothesis.

There is a huge problem with the proposal, which is that it fundamentally misunderstands what is happening in the book of Jonah.

To see this, we need to walk through the key events, starting at the beginning of the book.

 

The Runaway Prophet

The word of the Lord comes to Jonah and tells him “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me” (1:2).

However, Jonah disobeys and takes a ship bound for Tarshish, “away from the presence of the Lord” (v. 3).

Then “the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up” (v. 4).

This causes the sailors to cry out to their gods, but they get no relief. Jonah is asleep in the hold of the ship, so the captain wakes him up and tells him to call on his God, who may pay attention to their plight and save them (v. 6). The sailors also decide to draw lots to find out who brought the calamity on them, and the lot falls on Jonah (v. 7). They then ask Jonah who is he and where he is from (v. 8).

And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them (vv. 9-10).

 

Jonah Expects to Drown!

They then ask what they need to do to him so that the sea will quiet, and he says, “Take me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you” (v. 12).

At this point, Jonah knows nothing about the big fish, so when he tells the sailors to throw him into the sea, he is expecting to drown. They understand this, too, but they are reluctant to take human life, so “Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them” (v. 13).

They then pray to God, saying, “We beg you, O Lord, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you” (v. 14). Notice that they ask not to be held guilty of Jonah’s blood, because God is doing as he pleases in this situation.

Having been thwarted in their attempt to get back to land, and with the sea growing worse, they then throw Jonah into it, and the sea quiets down. “Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows” (v. 16).

 

The Whale SAVES Jonah!

At this point, both the sailors and Jonah know that his fate is going to be death unless God does something miraculous. But the sailors have just prayed for God not to lay the guilt of Jonah’s blood on them, and perhaps in response to that prayer, we read:

And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights (1:17).

The fish is thus the means that God has “appointed” to save Jonah from drowning. Being in the whale is not what kills him. It’s what saves him.

The idea that Jonah died in the whale thus fundamentally misreads what the whale is doing in the book. It isn’t an agent of death but the means of God’s salvation for Jonah, as we’re about to see.

 

Jonah Gives Thanks to God for Sending the Whale

The next thing we read is, “Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish” (2:1), and what follows is a psalm of thanksgiving.

Psalms of thanksgiving have a common structure, and they frequently begin with a short statement that summarizes the whole psalm. This is what happens in Jonah’s prayer. It begins:

I called to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice (2:2).

That’s a summary of the entire psalm we’re about to read: Jonah called out to God when he was in distress, and God responded. As we saw earlier, “out of the belly of Sheol I cried” is a hyperbolic, figurative way of illustrating the extreme danger of death that Jonah was in. It does not mean that he literally died, as we shall see.

 

Jonah Before the Whale

Psalms of thanksgiving then commonly back up in time and give a description of the kind of distress the person was in, which happens here:

For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood was round about me;
all your waves and your billows passed over me.

Then I said, ‘I am cast out
from your presence;
how shall I again look
upon your holy temple?’

The waters closed in over me,
the deep was round about me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains (vv. 3-5).

Notice what this is describing. It is not Jonah’s experience in the whale. It is what happened before that. Jonah says God “cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas.” “The flood” surrounded him, and he was submerged by “all your waves and your billows.”

Jonah perceived himself as abandoned by God and despaired of seeing his temple again. He’s expecting to die.

He’s now covered by “the waters,” in the midst of “the deep,” and then he gets down to the bottom of the sea, “at the roots of the mountains,” where “weeds wrapped about my head.”

None of this is describing Jonah being dead. It’s describing what happened to him while he was alive in the waters—before the whale swallowed him.

 

God Saves Jonah with the Whale

We then get the statement:

I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever (v. 6a).

This is an allusion to death, but it’s clearly meant hyperbolically, for the gates of death did not literally “close upon me forever,” because we then read:

yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O LORD my God (v. 6b).

The message is that Jonah almost died, but he didn’t. Because God sent the whale, and that’s what “brought up my life from the Pit.” Jonah was down at the bottom of the sea, with his head entangled in seaweed, he was about to drown, and then the whale from God swooped in and saved him.

As we saw before, in poetic psalms like this, references to going down to and brought up from “Sheol” and “the Pit” do not mean someone literally dying and rising. Thus, King David expressed thanks to God for saving him from a dangerous illness by saying, “O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit” (Ps. 30:3).

 

When Jonah Prayed

After describing the individual’s great distress, thanksgiving psalms then give us a description of how the individual cried out to God, which is what we find here:

When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple (v. 7).

Notice when Jonah says he remembered the Lord and prayed to him: “When my soul fainted within me.”

Advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have claimed this is a reference to his death, but it isn’t. The Hebrew word translated “fainted”—hit`attep—does not mean “died.” It means weakened or felt weak. This is the same meaning it has in other passages where it describes a person’s “spirit growing faint” or their “soul growing faint” (Ps. 77:4, 107:5, 142:4, 143:4).

This means Jonah was still alive! What he’s saying is that, when he was at the bottom of the sea, he was fainting (running out of oxygen!), and that’s when he remembered God and called out to him. That’s when God sent the whale to rescue him.

 

Concluding Praise of God

Psalms of thanksgiving then customarily end with things like praise, testimony to God as the true God, and a vow, which we find here:

Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their true loyalty.

But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” (vv. 8-9).

The last statement uses the word yeshu`ah and would be more familiarly translated “Salvation belongs to the Lord.” It is the point toward which the whole psalm has been driving, and it celebrates God sending the whale to rescue Jonah from drowning.

 

Jonah After the Whale

We then read:

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land (v. 10).

What we see is that Jonah ran away from God by ship, this brought on a severe storm, and when Jonah was identified as the cause, he was willing to die by being thrown into the sea. The sailors resisted and tried to get to land, but the storm got worse. They then prayed to God not to let them be guilty of Jonah’s blood and threw him overboard.

Jonah then almost drowned, and he is described as getting as far down as the bottom of the sea, but—as he was running out of oxygen—he remembered God, prayed for salvation, and God sent a whale to rescue him. He then spent three days and nights in the whale and prayed a psalm of thanksgiving for the salvation God had provided, upon which God spoke to the whale, and it spit him out on dry land.

This is the natural reading of the text. The Jonah Death Hypothesis takes it in a very unnatural sense that does not recognize the function of the whale in the story. Being swallowed by the whale is not what caused Jonah to die; it’s what saved him from death.

 

When the References to Death Occur

Notice also that the references to the realm of the dead all occur in the description of his near-drowning in the sea. If he was dead at any point, it would have been before the whale swallowed him, not while he was in the whale.

But the text reveals that he was still alive at the bottom of the sea, “when my soul fainted within me” and he prayed to God. He also was alive inside the whale, when he prayed his hymn of thanksgiving, culminating with “Salvation belongs to the Lord!”

Indeed, the 1954 A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (Bernard Orchard, ed.) notes: “As Jonas prayed in the belly of the fish, 2:2, it does not seem possible to hold that he died and was restored to life” (Jonah, §d 2:1–2).

Finally, if Jonah had died and resurrected, this would be an even more amazing miracle than being saved by a big fish, and the narrator would have told us about it explicitly—in the narrative.

He would not have done so merely in poetic allusions in a psalm. These are known for non-literal, hyperbolic speech, and would not have been understood as indicating literal death given both the statements Jonah was still alive at the bottom of the sea and in the whale and given the book’s portrayal of the whale as the means of his salvation from death.

 

Conclusion

As this example illustrates, every text must be read and understood on its own terms before trying to relate it to other texts. If not, we risk fundamentally misreading it, as advocates of the Jonah Death Hypothesis have done by incautiously applying things from the story of Jesus back onto it.

All we can safely say that the two had in common is what Jesus told us they did: “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). Both of them were in something for three days, but beyond that, their experiences diverge.

Jonah almost died and was saved from death by the whale, while Jesus actually died and was saved from death by his resurrection. This was greater than the deliverance Jonah received, for—as Jesus said—“behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matt. 12:41).

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One of the biggest schools of thought in the Protestant world is known as Arminianism, and today we’re going to find out if an Arminian would need to change his views in order to become a Catholic.

Over thirty years ago, I wrote a piece called A Tiptoe Through Tulip, in which I explored how close a Catholic could be to Calvinism without violating Catholic teaching. I concluded—based on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas—that he could be very close indeed!

This piece led some to think that I, myself, am a Thomist, though I am not. I’m not a member of any particular theological school within Catholicism. I’m just an orthodox Catholic.

For a long time, I meant to write a balance piece on how far away from Calvinism one could be without violating Catholic teaching, but I haven’t done that yet.

I decided, though, to go ahead and write a piece about the main rival to Calvinism in Protestant circles, which is known as Arminianism, and discuss it from a Catholic perspective. So that’s what we’re considering today.

 

Jacob Arminius

First, a bit of history to set the stage. Jacob Arminius was a theologian in Holland in the late 1500s. He had been taught by Calvin’s successor—Theodore Beza—but he came to question some of Calvin’s teachings. This led to a controversy, but before it could be settled, Arminius passed on to his reward in 1609 at the age of 49.

However, the next year—1610—Arminius’s followers put forward 5 claims based on his writings. His followers were called the Remonstrants.

To remonstrate means to lodge an objection, and Arminius’s followers were lodging objections to Calvinism, so they were call the Remonstrants.

The claims they made were known as the Five Articles of Remonstrance. In 1618 and 1619, a Dutch national synod was held known as the Synod of Dort, and the synod condemned the five articles.

But that did not put an end to the matter, and the Five Articles became the central tenets of Arminianism, which has become very influential in the Protestant world and is found among Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches. In fact, Arminianism is the main rival to Calvinism.

Today we’re going to be looking at the Five Articles and considering whether a Catholic could agree with them.

 

1. Conditional Election

Here’s the first article. Arminians hold:

Article 1

That God, by an eternal and unchangeable purpose in Jesus Christ his Son, before the foundation of the world, has determined, out of the fallen, sinful race of men, to save in Christ, for Christ’s sake, and through Christ, those who, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, shall believe on this his Son Jesus, and shall persevere in this faith and obedience of faith, through this grace, even to the end; and, on the other hand, to leave the incorrigible and unbelieving in sin and under wrath, and to condemn them as alienate from Christ, according to the word of the Gospel in John 3:36: “He that believes in the Son has everlasting life, and he that does not believe in the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God remains on him,” and according to other passages of Scripture also.

What the Remonstrants are objecting to here is what is commonly known in Calvinism as Unconditional Election.

Unconditional Election is the idea that God has elected or chosen certain people to be saved on the last day, and he did this without them meeting any kind of condition. That’s why the election is said to be unconditional. God just picks certain people—for no reason connected with them—and decides that they will go to heaven.

The Remonstrants objected to this idea, and so in this article they say that God elected or chose “those who, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, shall believe on this his Son Jesus.” In other words, God chooses those who believe in Jesus to be saved, and the ones he does not choose to be saved are those who don’t believe.

So election is not unconditional on the Arminian view. There is a condition that needs to be met to be chosen by God—it’s whether you will believe in Jesus or not. And here we’re not talking about babies or the mentally handicapped or people who’ve never had a convincing presentation of the gospel. Those are separate issues. We’re talking about the normative, mainstream way of getting to heaven.

Because it’s not unconditional, the Arminian position is thus called Conditional Election.

So what would a Catholic make of it? Well—as we saw in my TULIP article—he would not have to agree with this, as there are Catholic figures like St. Thomas Aquinas who held to Unconditional Election. But he also would not have to disagree with this, because Catholic thought on this subject is mixed.

In Catholic circles, there are two schools of thought about when God predestines someone to go to heaven. One school says that God predestines them ante praevisa merita, which is Latin for “before foreseen merits,” and the other says God predestines people to heaven post praevisa merita, or “after foreseen merits.”

And—because the term merit has become theologically loaded since the Reformation—I should point out that it doesn’t mean that you “earn” heaven. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church points out:

With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, for we have received everything from him, our Creator (CCC 2007).

So don’t think of “merits” as earning heaven, though they do refer to good things that we do by God’s grace, such as believing in Jesus.

According to the first Catholic school of thought, God predestines certain people to go to heaven before he looks at their lives and sees if they do things like believe in Jesus and cooperate with God’s grace. This is equivalent to Unconditional Election, and this view is held by St. Augustine, by St. Thomas Aquinas, by the Thomists, and by some of the older Molinists.

The second school says that it’s the other way around. First God looks at a person’s life and sees if he does things like believe in Jesus and cooperate with grace and—if he does—then God predestines him to go to heaven. This view is held by most of the Church fathers—both Latin and Greek—by St. Albert the Great, by most Molinists, and by St. Francis de Sales.

This second position is equivalent to the Arminian view of Conditional Election, and since it’s a permitted Catholic opinion, an Arminian would not need to change his view upon becoming a Catholic.

In fact, in recent times the Church’s Magisterium has begun to use language that is suggestive of this view. For example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination,” he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace (CCC 600).

In fairness, I should point out that here the Catechism is discussing the predestination of Christ’s death on the Cross. However, if this is a general principle that God uses when predestining other things, it would mean that—from his viewpoint outside of time—he takes into account “each person’s free response to his grace,” meaning that he predestines them conditionally rather than unconditionally.

 

2. Unlimited Atonement

Now we turn to the Second Article of Remonstrance. Arminians hold:

Article 2

That agreeably thereunto, Jesus Christ the Savior of the world, died for all men and for every man, so that he has obtained for them all, by his death on the cross, redemption and the forgiveness of sins; yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins except the believer, according to the word of the Gospel of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And in the First Epistle of John 2:2: “And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Here the Remonstrants are responding to what is known in Calvinism as Limited Atonement, which is the idea that Jesus only died for those who will be going to heaven. His death did not atone for all human beings, but only for the elect.

Arminians reject that idea and take verses like 1 John 2:2 literally—that Christ died “for the sins of the whole world.” Their view is thus called Unlimited Atonement since it isn’t made for a limited group of people. Christ’s death atoned for everyone, and those who believe in Jesus get the benefits of that atonement.

What would a Catholic make of this? Frankly, he’d agree! As we saw in my TULIP article, this is one of the places where a Calvinist who becomes Catholic needs to modify his view to an extent, because the Catholic Church is very firm on the fact that Jesus died for everybody.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

The existence in Christ of the divine person of the Son, who at once surpasses and embraces all human persons and constitutes himself as the head of all mankind, makes possible his redemptive sacrifice for all (CCC 616, emphasis in original).

An Arminian thus would not need to change his view on this point, either.

 

3. Total Inability

We now turn to the Third Article of Remonstrance. Arminians hold:

Article 3

That man has not saving grace of himself, nor of the energy of his free will, inasmuch as he, in the state of apostasy and sin, can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do anything that is truly good (such as saving faith eminently is); but that it is needful that he be born again of God in Christ, through his Holy Spirit, and renewed in understanding, inclination, or will, and all his powers, in order that he may rightly understand, think, will, and effect what is truly good, according to the Word of Christ, John 15:5, “Without me you can do nothing.”

Here the Remonstrants are essentially affirming what is known in Calvinist circles as Total Depravity. However, that term has led to a lot of confusion, because it has led many people to think that Calvinists hold that humans are as wicked as they could possibly be—that they are totally depraved and can never do anything but constant evil.

But that’s clearly false. Your sweet little grandma is not Hitler or the Antichrist, and Calvinists know this. Consequently—despite the TULIP acronym—some have preferred other ways of expressing this point. For example, Calvinist Loraine Boettner referred to this point as “Total Inability,” meaning a total inability to turn to God without divine grace.

The Remonstrants essentially agree with that position, and so does the Catholic Church. The Council of Trent thus infallibly rejected the following proposition:

That without the anticipatory inspiration of the Holy Spirit and without his assistance man can believe, hope, and love or be repentant, as he ought, so that the grace of justification may be conferred upon him (Trent, Decree on Justification, can. 3).

So, yes, we all agree that we need God’s grace in order to be able to come to God. Because of original sin, we can’t do it on our own. God must take the initiative to give us his grace and enable us to come to him. An Arminian thus would not need to change his view on this point.

 

4. Resistible Grace

We now turn to the Fourth Article of Remonstrance. Arminians hold:

Article 4

That this grace of God is the beginning, continuance, and accomplishment of all good, even to this extent, that the regenerate man himself, without prevenient or assisting, awakening, following, and cooperative grace, can neither think, will, nor do good, nor withstand any temptations to evil; so that all good deeds or movements, that can be conceived, must be ascribed to the grace of God in Christ. But respecting the mode of the operation of this grace, it is not irresistible; inasmuch as it is written concerning many, that they have resisted the Holy Ghost [in] Acts 7, and elsewhere in many places.

Here the Remonstrants are objecting to what in Calvinism is known as Irresistible Grace. According to Calvinists, God gives those he chooses an “efficacious grace” that infallibly assures that those who receive it will come to faith in Christ. They cannot resist it and refuse to come to faith, and so it is called Irresistible Grace.

Arminians disagree, and they commonly refer to the grace that God gives people as “prevenient grace”—as they do here. Prevenient means “coming before,” so this grace is given to you before you come to faith in Christ. However, they hold that this grace is not irresistible; people can refuse to act on the grace they are given and refuse to turn to God. This position is thus sometimes called Resistible Grace.

What would a Catholic make of this? First, Catholics have no problem with the concept of prevenient grace. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Every time we begin to pray to Jesus it is the Holy Spirit who draws us on the way of prayer by his prevenient grace (CCC 2670).

You’ll note that this refers to prevenient grace being given to us every time we pray to Jesus, and it is generally understood that the same is true of every good action we perform—which is one of the things the Fourth Article of Remonstrance is concerned with. The Council of Trent stated:

Christ Jesus himself as the “head into the members” [Eph. 4:15] and “as the vine into the branches” [John 15:5] continually infuses his virtue into the said justified, a virtue which always precedes their good works, and which accompanies and follows them (Trent, Decree on Justification 16).

Second, the Catholic Church does not have a problem with the idea that prevenient grace can be resisted. The Catechism states:

God’s free initiative demands man’s free response, for God has created man in his image by conferring on him, along with freedom, the power to know him and love him. The soul only enters freely into the communion of love (CCC 2002, emphasis in original).

Third—although this goes beyond what the Remonstrants explicitly said in the Fourth Article—they held that God offers prevenient grace to everyone, making it possible for everyone to be saved if they would believe in Jesus. The Catholic Church agrees. The Second Vatican Council stated:

Since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes 22).

“Being associated with this paschal mystery” means being saved through Jesus.

In view of the above considerations, an Arminian would not need to change his views regarding prevenient grace.

 

5. Conditional Perseverance

We now turn to the Fifth Article of Remonstrance. The Remonstrants stated:

Article 5

That those who are in­corporated into Christ by true faith, and have thereby become partakers of his life-giving Spirit, have thereby full power to strive against Satan, sin, the world, and their own flesh, and to win the victory; it being well understood that it is ever through the assisting grace of the Holy Ghost; and that Jesus Christ assists them through his Spirit in all temptations, extends to them his hand, and if only they are ready for the conflict, and desire his help, and are not inactive, keeps them from falling, so that they, by no craft or power of Satan, can be misled nor plucked out of Christ’s hands, according to the Word of Christ, John 10:28: “Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.” But whether they are capable, through negligence, of forsaking again the first beginning of their life in Christ, of again returning to this present evil world, of turning away from the holy doctrine which was delivered them, of losing a good conscience, of becoming devoid of grace, that must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scripture, before we ourselves can teach it with the full persuasion of our mind.

Here the Remonstrants are questioning what in Calvinism is known as Perseverance of the Saints, which is the belief that God will keep the elect from performing those actions that would cost them their salvation, so that all of them—without fail—will persevere in grace until the end of life and thus be saved on the last day.

In other words, if you are ever saved, God will stop you from committing mortal sin so that you would lose salvation.

At the time they drafted the Five Articles in 1610, the Remonstrants were questioning Perseverance of the Saints and suspected that people could lose their salvation, but they were not yet fully convinced that this was true. This is why they say that it “must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scripture”—in other words, they needed to study the issue more.

By the time the Synod of Dort met in 1618 and 1619, they had become convinced that Perseverance of the Saints is false and that people can lose their salvation. This has been the standard belief among Arminian Christians ever since.

So, what would a Catholic make of this rejection of Perseverance of the Saints? He’d agree with it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back (CCC 1861).

The Catholic Church thus agrees with Arminians that it is possible for a person to lose salvation.

Fortunately, it also is possible to regain it, which ordinarily happens through the sacrament of confession. In any event, Catholics and Arminians are in agreement on the possibility of losing salvation, and so an Arminian would not need to change his view on this point.

In my TULIP article, we saw that it was possible for someone coming from a Calvinist background to embrace the Catholic faith with some modifications to his view, but here we have seen that an Arminian would be able to become Catholic without modifying his views on the points that we’ve covered.

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The question of why God would create someone he knows is going to go to hell is a common one, and many have tried to answer it online.

Most of the answers are unsatisfying. Frankly, they tend to do one of two things:

Sometimes the speaker will say a lot of stuff that doesn’t really address the issue and instead just talk “around” the subject instead of tackling it head-on.

Other time, the speaker will just say it’s a mystery.

Many of the answers you’ll find spend a lot of words on these two things (frankly, a painfully large number of words), but the first is irrelevant and the second is not very informative.

It’s true that, since God’s mind is infinite and ours are finite, we often can’t give definitive answers about his decisions, so an element of mystery remains.

However, we can often give partial answers—or at least make informed proposals. In other words, we often can do better than saying, “We just don’t know; it’s a mystery.”

And I think we can do better in this case.

 

Keeping the Issue Focused

To avoid going off on tangents, let’s make the issue as focused as possible. Suppose there is a person—we’ll call him Bob—and the following is true:

• • In his eternal perspective outside of time, God knows that—if he creates Bob—then Bob will freely choose to go to hell.

We’ll also assume that:

• • In his eternal perspective outside of time, God could freely choose not to create Bob (i.e., God has free will)
  • God is just
  • God is loving and thus does not want anyone to go to hell

Given these things: Why would God create Bob? Let’s look at some possibilities . . .

 

Possibility #1: There Is a Competing Good

Even if people don’t want something, they may tolerate it for the sake of a competing good.

I may not want the pain of having to get an injection, but I may tolerate it in order to avoid getting a disease.

In the same way, God may not want Bob to go to hell, but he may tolerate it for the sake of some other good or set of goods.

What might these be?

 

a) Free Will (and Love)

An answer that some propose is free will. In other words, God tolerates the decisions of some to go to hell because he wants to preserve their free will—which he does for the sake of genuine love.

Love is God’s most important priority (Matt. 22:37-40), and he wants people to be able to freely choose love. Programmed, robotic “love” would lack something—it wouldn’t be the kind of love God wants. This means he must tolerate the possibility that people will misuse their freedom and reject love.

All that’s true, but it doesn’t really address our issue.

If our starting assumption is true—that God knows what Bob will freely choose if he creates him—then God could simply decide not to create him.

In that case, he could stop Bob from going to hell without seeming to violate his free will. Bob would simply never have existed.

The free will defense thus doesn’t seem to work if our starting assumption is true, so what other possibilities are there for a competing good that would lead God to tolerate Bob going to hell?

 

b) God’s Glory

Perhaps the most commonly proposed answer is God’s own glory. The idea here is that it brings glory to God to have illustrations of his character that actually exist.

Bob’s going to hell provides a concrete example of God’s justice in that God did give Bob the offer of salvation—and Bob freely rejected it. He’s thus an object lesson that illustrates certain aspects of God’s character and brings glory to God.

Many will find this answer unsatisfying. If a human being were willing to let someone go to hell simply for the sake of his own glory, we would say that human was a raging egomaniac.

Of course, God is not a human being. We have only finite value, but God has infinite value, so his glorification would be worth more—even infinitely more—than the glorification of a human.

This would make it more understandable how God might tolerate the loss of Bob’s soul.

 

c) Something Else

It’s also possible that there might be a different good for the sake of which God tolerates Bob’s loss.

The history of the world involves a complex tangle of the billions of interrelated choices people make, and you could propose that—in order to set up the free will decisions of some to go to heaven—God must tolerate the misuse of free will by others.

Thus, God might tolerate Bob’s misuse of free will for the sake of making it possible for others to use theirs properly.

Or, since the universe is vast and we know only a tiny part of it, there might be some other good—perhaps one that we haven’t even conceived of—that justifies God tolerating Bob’s misuse of free will.

While both of these suggestions are possible, they are both very speculative, which means many will find them unsatisfying.

So perhaps we can look at the issue from a different angle.

 

Possibility #2: God Isn’t Being Unjust

One of our starting assumptions is that God is just. In the present context, that means it isn’t unjust for God to tolerate Bob’s free decision to reject salvation.

(You could challenge the justness of anybody going to hell, but that’s a different discussion. Here, we’re assuming that it is just for God to allow people to go to hell.)

In this case, God has genuinely given Bob the offer of salvation, and he has freely chosen to reject it, so God is not being unjust by respecting his choice.

Bob cannot—and, if he’s thinking rationally, would not—accuse God of injustice. God has been fair with him.

Is this enough to resolve our dilemma?

It certainly helps to realize that God isn’t being unjust, but it doesn’t seem to fully resolve the matter.

Our starting assumptions didn’t simply involve God being just. They also involved God not wanting people to go to hell.

So, if we’re not appealing to a competing good that would lead God to tolerate Bob’s loss, why wouldn’t he act on his desire to keep Bob out of hell and simply not create him?

There doesn’t seem to be a good answer to this question. So, while realizing God isn’t being unjust helps, it’s still an incomplete answer.

 

Possibility #3: God Is Actually Benefitting Bob

But perhaps God is being more than fair with Bob. Perhaps he is benefitting him by creating him, even though he will spend an infinite amount of time in hell.

Some have argued that it’s better to exist—even in hell—than not to exist at all.

If that’s the case, then God is actually being generous to Bob by creating him, despite his damnation.

And we would know what the competing good is that leads God to tolerate Bob’s misuse of free will: It’s Bob’s own existence.

If it’s better to exist in hell than not to exist at all then that’s why God chooses to create him. Bob will actually benefit!

Whether you find this solution plausible will depend on how bad you imagine hell to be and how great a good you suppose existence to be.

Based on some of the images in Scripture—like hell as a lake of fire that burns you without destroying you (Rev. 20:14-15)—many have thought that it would be better not to exist than to go there.

However, the images that Scripture uses to describe the afterlife are accommodated to our present understanding, which is limited by our experience of this life, and they should be read with some caution.

It could turn out that, from the greater perspective the next life will offer, even the damned will see that it is better for them to exist in their current condition than not to exist at all.

Some, even in this life, have made this argument.

 

Possibility #4: God Doesn’t Create Bob

But suppose that it’s better not to exist than to spend eternity in hell. In that case, if there is no competing good that would lead God to create Bob, he might simply not create him.

However, Bob is only a representative of an entire class of people—those who misuse their free will and reject God’s offer of salvation.

In that case, it would seem that God would not create anybody that would reject his offer, in which case hell would be empty.

This idea has been explored by various figures down through Church history, including the recent theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), who discussed it in his book Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?

Von Balthasar frames his proposal carefully. Since the Church teaches that hell is a real possibility, he only proposes we may be able to hope (not assert) that hell is empty.

The difficulty for this view is found in various statements in the New Testament that at least appear to indicate some people will actually go to hell (Matt. 7:13-14, 21-23, Luke 13:23-28).

(For a careful analysis of part of this issue, see Cardinal Avery Dulles’s insightful article The Population of Hell.)

 

Possibility #5: Reject the Starting Assumption

If the above possibilities are not fully satisfying, perhaps we should revisit our initial assumption concerning Bob, which was:

• • In his eternal perspective outside of time, God knows that—if he creates Bob—then Bob will freely choose to go to hell.

This assumption holds that God knows what Bob would freely choose to do if he existed.

Does God have that kind of knowledge?

Historically, theologians have recognized that God has two types of knowledge:

1. 1. Knowledge of all possible things
   2. Knowledge of all actual things

In theology, the first is called God’s knowledge of simple intelligence. It allows God to see every possible combination of events by his intellect alone—the same way we can think through every possibility of what you might roll with a pair of dice, just by thinking about it.

The second is called God’s knowledge of vision. It allows him to be aware of everything in the actual world, analogous to the way we gain awareness of the world through the human sense of vision.

And since God is outside of time, both of these kinds of knowledge cover everything past, present, and future.

If God creates Bob and makes him an actual thing, then God also knows what Bob’s actual choice is, which is to reject salvation.

However, suppose that God doesn’t create Bob. What does God know in that case?

By his knowledge of all possible things, God knows from his eternal perspective that it is possible for Bob to accept his offer of salvation. He also knows that it is possible for Bob to reject salvation.

But that doesn’t reveal which Bob does choose because Bob doesn’t exist and never makes the choice.

 

Middle Knowledge?

For God to know what Bob would choose if he were created, God would need an additional kind of knowledge that lets him know what people would freely choose if they are placed in certain circumstances (such as being created).

In the last 500 years, theologians have begun to explore this idea and have named this third kind of knowledge “middle knowledge,” since it seems part way between God’s knowledge of the possible and the actual.

In his book Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Ludwig Ott holds that the Church has definitively taught that God knows all possible things and all actual things, and they are matters “of the Faith” (de fide) (pp. 40-42).

However, he lists middle knowledge as only the “common opinion” (sent. communis.) of theologians (pp. 42-43).

There are a passages of Scripture that one can appeal to in support of God having middle knowledge (e.g., 1 Sam. 23:1-13, Wis. 4:11, Matt. 11:21).

However, there are only a few such passages, and they can be read in ways that don’t require middle knowledge.

There also is an argument to be made against middle knowledge.

 

Omnipotence and Omniscience

Because God is all-powerful and all-knowing, one always should be hesitant to say there are things he “can’t” do or know, but there are limits to omnipotence and omniscience.

Omnipotence means that God can do everything that can be done—in other words, anything that is logically possible. However, it does not mean that God could make something that involves a logical contradiction, where the terms themselves conflict.

For example, God could not make a square circle or a four-sided triangle, because these involve contradictions in terms. They are just nonsense—a kind of word salad that has no real meaning.

Similarly, omniscience means that God knows everything that can be known. However, it does not mean that he knows logically impossible things.

For example, God does not know the shape of a square circle or the shape of a four-sided triangle because they involve contradictions in terms.

What about Bob’s choice to go to hell?

 

To Be or Not To Be?

If Bob exists, then he freely makes the choice, and God knows it.

But if Bob is never created, then he would never make this free will decision, and God would have to know the outcome of a free will decision that is never made.

“The outcome of a free will decision that is never made” sounds a lot like “square circle” or “four-sided triangle.”

One of the things about free will decisions is that you can’t predict them with absolute certainty in advance.

You can’t deduce what a person’s free will is going to do—with certainty—by looking at any set of factors and then deducing it.

If you could do that, then the decision wouldn’t be a free one.

It would be logically entailed by the set of factors you deduce it from.

Instead, the essence of a free will decision is that it is really possible for a person to make one choice or another when the moment comes to choose. But if the moment never comes, then there simply is no outcome, because the choice is never made.

There is thus a case to be made that “the outcome of a free will choice that is never made” involves a contradiction in terms.

In that case, God would not know Bob’s decision—unless he creates Bob.

 

The Free Will Defense Returns

If middle knowledge involves a logical contradiction, then God wouldn’t have it.

And so he would not be able to foresee what Bob will freely choose to do if he crates Bob—and then refrain from creating him.

To know what Bob will actually choose, God would need to create him.

And in that case, the free will defense that we discussed in Possibility #1 would work!

God would create Bob, see his decision to reject salvation, and the counterbalancing good that explains why God tolerates this is his desire to let Bob have free will so that he can make an authentic choice between love and non-love.

 

Mystery Remains

Personally, I prefer the solution I’ve just described: God has knowledge of all possible things and all actual things, but knowing the outcome of a free will decision that is never made appears to involve a logical contradiction—so God wouldn’t have middle knowledge.

As a result, God must take a risk in creating Bob with free will—to give Bob the opportunity to freely choose love.

He then sees what Bob’s choice is, and he honors it.

However, there are other ways of resolving this issue.

While “It’s just a mystery” isn’t a satisfying answer, it is true that we can’t always propose a single, definite answer to matters involving God.

However, while his mind is infinite and ours are only finite, we often can at least sketch the outlines of possible reasons he makes the decisions he does.

In this case, I haven’t settled on a final answer to the question we began by posing, so mystery remains.

But we have fleshed out possible reasons that shed light on it.

Which solution you find most likely will depend on your views of various matters, but at least we can have the assurance that there are solutions.

And that God is just. And that he really does offer us salvation.

* * *

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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time

God bless you always!

 

Not long ago, I was invited to appear on Cross Examined—the podcast of Protestant apologist Dr. Frank Turek—to talk about issues that many Protestants misunderstand about Catholicism.

It was very kind of Frank to invite me on his show, and we had a really cordial discussion! Here’s a taste of what a gracious host he was!

Frank: Today we want to talk about what Protestants may misunderstand about Roman Catholicism.

Now, I’m not a Roman Catholic, although I came out of Roman Catholicism. Jimmy was a Protestant and became a Roman Catholic.

In fact, Jimmy, this is odd that we’re even doing this show. If anybody should be a Catholic apologist, it should be me, a guy from New Jersey who went to Catholic high school, and you should be the Protestant apologist because you grew up in Texas and yet you’re a Catholic apologist.

How did you become a Catholic? Let’s just start there.

I had a really great time speaking with Frank! He was a really great guy! And I want to compliment him on what a good host he was and what a great exchange it was!

 

Never Hearing About Grace?

I thought that today I’d follow up on one point that he raised, which is one that we sometimes hear from people who used to be Catholic and have become Evangelical. Here’s how Frank put it.

Frank: Now, as I said, brought up Catholic. I went to Catholic high school, and this is just anecdotal, it’s not data, right? It’s just my perspective. And I wonder if this is one reason why it seems that many Roman Catholics don’t know much about grace. I never heard the word grace from a homily.

I never in hundreds of sermons ever heard Jesus died for your sins. And by trusting in him you’re justified—until the last Mass I went to. And that was my father’s funeral, when the priest came.

Jimmy: I’m glad you heard it there.

Frank: Yeah. The priest came out and said, “I talked to Frank the other day and he’s accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior, so he’s in heaven now.” And I’m just wondering, just from, again, it’s just my perspective, why don’t we hear more about grace? Why don’t we hear more about what Christ has done in the homily?

I really appreciate how Frank said that this was just anecdotal information—just his perspective. But it is something that I’ve heard from other former Catholics, too.

And I appreciate how serious Frank and other former Catholics are about this. Hearing the message of Jesus, grace, and forgiveness is essential!

Of course, I responded at the time, and you can watch the full interview to see what I said. We’ll have a link in the show notes below.

This view isn’t anything unique to Frank. It’s something that many former Catholics who are now Evangelicals say, so it’s good to know how you can respond when you encounter it.

 

Poor Homilies

One of the first things I’d do is to acknowledge that the quality of homilies at Mass can vary. Just like Protestant preachers, some Catholic priests are better preachers than others, and some have favorite themes that they stress or that they avoid.

I’d actually say that—these days—one of the themes many avoid is the negative side of the good news. The fact that we are sinners who need God’s mercy, and that we can even be lost if we don’t.

I’d say that the problem is the reverse of what some think it is. If anything, I’d say that there’s too much emphasis on God’s mercy and grace in many Catholic churches, and not enough emphasis on God’s justice or Christ’s role as a judge.

 

The Church Steps In

It’s true that the quality of homilies can vary, but the Church knows that. That’s one reason why Catholic teaching isn’t limited to the homily. It’s actually going on throughout the Mass, because the Church wants to make sure that you get the message!

This is something that may not be as obvious to our friends in the Evangelical movement, because in Evangelical churches, the homily—or sermon—has a different role.

In fact, the sermon is frequently the largest single element in many Evangelical services. Some have even spoken jokingly of their services as a “hymn sandwich”—that is, a sermon sandwiched between a few hymns. So in Evangelical circles, the sermon or homily has to bear the full load of the teaching that happens in the service.

But in the liturgies of traditional Christians—whether they’re Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian, or even if they’re from some of the more historical Protestant groups like Lutherans and Anglicans—the homily is just one part of the service, and it doesn’t dominate the service as a whole. So it doesn’t need to bear the full load of the teaching that happens.

In fact, the proclamation of the Christian message happens all the way through the liturgy, and—in part because the Church knows that the quality of preachers varies—the Church has written the key parts of the Christian message into the structure of the Mass itself.

And not just into what the priest says, but into what you yourself say as an ordinary Catholic at Mass.

 

Interpreting Our Past Experiences

One of the things I pointed out to Frank is that there’s often a difference in how Evangelicals and former-Catholic Evangelicals speak about their younger days.

In both the Catholic and the Protestant communities, there are people who are very serious about their faith as adults, but they look back on when they were younger and not as serious about it.

If the person is a Catholic who became serious about their faith as an adult, then they generally accept responsibility for their lack of seriousness as a young person. They will say, “I was a reckless young person who didn’t really pay attention to what I was being taught, but then I had a conversion and got serious.”

And you hear the same thing if the person was a Protestant who had a religious awakening as an adult. They also will say, “I was a reckless young person who didn’t really pay attention to what I was being taught, but then I had a conversion and got serious.”

However, the situation is different if the person was raised Catholic and then became serious as an Evangelical. In that case—because of lingering tensions from the time of the Reformation—they aren’t taught to accept responsibility for their younger days.

Instead, they are taught—consciously or unconsciously—to blame the Catholic Church for their former lack of seriousness. So they don’t say, “I was a reckless young person who wasn’t paying attention.” Instead they’re taught to say things like “The Catholic Church never taught me about grace,” or “The Catholic Church never taught me about sin and my need for forgiveness,” or “The Catholic Church never taught me about Jesus and the gospel.”

But are those things really true?

 

What You Hear and Say at Mass

Let’s take a look at what you hear—and say—at every standard Sunday Catholic Mass.

I think it will be an instructive exercise to remind former Catholics of what they themselves used to hear and say at every Sunday Mass they attended. I think that—in the time since they ceased going to Mass—they have likely forgotten some of this. Or at least that they haven’t thought about what they heard and said and what it means.

Because—as we’re going to hear—the Christian message is really and profoundly present, both in terms of what they hear the priest say and in terms of what they themselves said.

Now, there are certain parts of the Mass that you hear basically every Sunday. They’re sometimes called the “ordinary” of the Mass because they’re what you ordinarily hear and say when you go. In contrast—for example—to the “proper” of the Mass, which are those elements that are proper to particular days of the year, and you only hear them then.

So let’s go through the ordinary for a typical Sunday Mass and look at what you hear and say.

 

Mass Begins

The Mass typically begins when the priest makes the sign of the Cross and says:

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,

and the love of God,

and the communion of the Holy Spirit

be with you all.

So that gets the topic of grace on the table right out of the gate. Frank said he’d never heard the word grace in a homily—at least as far as he remembered—but the priest actually begins the Mass by talking about the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.

But what about the idea of sin?

We now turn to the penitential act, where the priest says:

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins,

and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

So the priest is telling you that you need to acknowledge your sins to properly worship God, which is true. If you thought you were sin-free and didn’t need to recognize your own faults, you wouldn’t be properly worshipping God.

After the priest gives this instruction, everybody—including you—then says:

I confess to almighty God

and to you, my brothers and sisters,

that I have greatly sinned,

in my thoughts and in my words,

in what I have done

and in what I have failed to do,

And, striking their breast, they say:

through my fault, through my fault,

through my most grievous fault;

So—wow—we’re really serious about the fact that we’re sinners. You’re confessing that fact to almighty God and to all of your fellow Christians in church. You haven’t just sinned—you’ve greatly sinned. You’ve sinned in your thoughts and in your words. You’ve sinned in what you’ve done and in what you’ve failed to do—so both sins of commission and sins of omission.

Then you strike your breast—typically 3 times—and you take full ownership of what you’ve done, saying you did it through your fault, through your fault, through your most grievous fault. So you’re not just acknowledging your sins, you’re really most sincerely acknowledging them!

The priest then says:

May almighty God have mercy on us,

forgive us our sins,

and bring us to everlasting life.

The people reply:

Amen.

So the priest is asking God to have mercy on us, to forgive our sins, and to bring us to everlasting life—or save us. And—along with all the other people at Mass—you reply “Amen,” meaning that you acknowledge your need for God’s mercy, forgiveness, and salvation. This is a really clear presentation of the message of salvation!

And Jesus’ role in it isn’t neglected, because we then have the following dialogue with the priest:

V. Lord, have mercy. R. Lord, have mercy.

V. Christ, have mercy. R. Christ, have mercy.

V. Lord, have mercy. R. Lord, have mercy.

The Lord being referred to here is the Lord Jesus Christ, as is made clear by the middle reference to the Lord specifically as “Christ.”

We then typically say or sing a prayer known as the Gloria, where we give glory to God, and as part of that, we say:

Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son,

Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,

you take away the sins of the world,

have mercy on us;

you take away the sins of the world,

receive our prayer;

you are seated at the right hand of the Father,

have mercy on us.

So here—because you’re saying this—you’re acknowledging that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Lord God—he’s God himself–that he’s the Lamb of God, that he’s the Son of the Father, and that he’s seated at the right hand of the Father.

You acknowledge—twice—that he takes away the sins of the world. You ask him to receive your prayer. And you ask him—twice—to have mercy on you.

So you’ve just been really clear about who Jesus is, what role he plays in God’s plan, and your need for his mercy!

 

The Creed

We then hear the Scripture readings for the day, and the priest gives his homily.

Then we all stand up and confess the Christian faith together. The typical way we do that at most Masses is by saying the Nicene Creed, so you say:

I believe in one God,

the Father almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

the Only Begotten Son of God,

born of the Father before all ages.

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation

he came down from heaven,

and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,

he suffered death and was buried,

and rose again on the third day

in accordance with the Scriptures.

He ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory

to judge the living and the dead

and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins

and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead

and the life of the world to come. Amen.

That’s a really clear profession of the Christian faith itself, and you just said it with your own lips. You acknowledge all three persons of the Trinity and that they are all co-equal. You acknowledged Jesus as the divine Son of God.

And you acknowledged his role in our salvation, saying that “for us men and for our salvation” he became incarnate, that “for our sake” he was crucified, died, was buried, and rose again, and that he will “come again in glory,” when he will serve as the judge of both the living and the dead—including you!

You also confessed the role of baptism in the forgiveness of sins, which is acknowledged by the vast majority of Christians, including Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and many other Protestants.

In any event—we’ve once again got the forgiveness of sins back on the table, and the idea that Jesus died for our sins is explicitly stated right here in the Nicene Creed, which you yourself say at every standard Sunday Mass you attend.

 

The Lord’s Prayer

We then begin the liturgy of the Eucharist, and the Eucharistic prayers themselves repeat the core elements of the Christian faith. Since there are several Eucharistic prayers, we won’t go through them in detail here.

However, once the Eucharistic prayer is finished, both we and the priest say the Lord’s Prayer, which means that you say:

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name;

thy kingdom come,

thy will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us;

and lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

So here you ask God to forgive your sins, and—even though this is translated a little differently in different communities—the meaning is the same. And you’re using the very words Jesus gave us to use to ask forgiveness!

You’re also asking God to protect us from temptation and deliver us from evil.

Shortly after the Lord’s Prayer, you and the rest of the congregation then say:

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,

have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,

have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,

grant us peace.

So here we acknowledge 3 times that it’s Jesus who takes away the sins of the world and that he’s the Lamb of God. We twice ask him to have mercy on us, and we once ask him to grant us peace.

 

Before Communion

Finally, before going to receive Communion, you say this:

Lord, I am not worthy

that you should enter under my roof,

but only say the word

and my soul shall be healed.

So here you acknowledge that you’re not worthy to receive Jesus, but he is the one who heals our souls, and all he has to do is say the word.

Now, there’s a lot more we could use to document the Christian message in the prayers of the Mass. The Roman Missal is extensive, and you’ll find the Christian message suffused throughout its pages.

But for reasons of space, we’ve only looked at what you hear—and say—at a typical Sunday Mass, and we’ve seen that the documentation of the Christian message is extensive.

 

Language Differences

Now, this content isn’t always expressed in the same language that’s used in the Evangelical community.

Every group of Christians has its own language—its own way of expressing things. For example, in the Evangelical community, you sometimes hear about “accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.”

Those formulas—“accepting Jesus” and “personal Lord and Savior”—are not found in the Bible. They were created in the nineteenth century by preachers as an evangelistic tool, so they’re not the language of the Bible. But they are one way of expressing the Christian message.

Evangelicals also have what they sometimes call the “Sinner’s prayer,” which is another recently created evangelistic tool.

Since Catholics are a different community of believers, they have a different history of language development, and so they have their own ways of expressing the gospel.

But we don’t need to quarrel about words. In 1 Timothy 6:4, St. Paul warns against people who have an unhealthy craving for controversy and quarreling about words, and in 2 Timothy 2:14, he commands Timothy to remind people not to quarrel about words, which he says does no good but only ruins the hearers.

So we can let each community of Christians have its own way of expressing things as long as the fundamental content is the same.

And here the content is the same: You are a sinner, you’ve sinned in bunches of ways, Jesus is God the Son, he died for your sins on the Cross so that you could be saved, you need his forgiveness and mercy, and you need to ask him for it.

 

The Church’s Concern for You

The Church is so concerned that you hear and accept the message of the gospel that it didn’t leave it up to the priest to mention it in the homily. They wrote it into the prayers of the Mass that the priest says, and they put it into the ordinary of the Mass that you hear at every standard Sunday Mass.

What’s more, they didn’t just leave it to the priest to say it, they wrote it into the prayers that you say with your own mouth at every standard Sunday Mass.

So—if you’re a Catholic—you yourself have said the Christian message over and over again:

Every Sunday, you confess that you are a sinner. Every Sunday, you confess that Jesus is God the Son. Every Sunday, you confess that he died on the Cross for your sins. And every Sunday, you yourself ask him for his mercy.

The only questions are whether you paid attention to what you were saying and whether you remember what you said.

Either way, the Church has done its part. Just like a Protestant preacher can’t force a Protestant young person to pay attention and remember, the Catholic Church can’t force a Catholic young person to pay attention and remember. But the Catholic Church has gone further than what happens in many Protestant churches, where the preacher does most of the talking during a service.

The Catholic Church has scripted your lines at Mass to ensure that you yourself articulated the Christian message over and over again. So if you didn’t “get” the message, you really don’t have an excuse, because you weren’t paying attention to or remembering what you yourself were saying.

So even though it’s common for formerly Catholic Evangelicals to say they never heard about sin and grace and Jesus at Mass, they actually did. They heard it, and they confessed it with their own mouths—every Sunday.

They may not have been paying attention, and the Church can’t compel people to pay attention, but it has done its part to ensure that they were exposed to the message and that they even said it with their own mouths.

* * *

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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time

God bless you always!

 

SHOW NOTES:

Original interview with Dr. Frank Turek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XkLXw_bCfs

In the Evangelical world, there are two major schools of thought about predestination.

One is known as Calvinism, and the other is known as Arminianism.

A distinctive claim of Calvinism is that if you ever enter a state of grace, you will never leave it.

They refer to this doctrine as perseverance of the saints—that is, God will cause those who come to him to persevere in grace so that they will unfailingly be saved on the last day.

To support this view, Calvinists sometimes appeal to a passage in Romans that they refer to as “the Golden Chain.”

What is the Golden Chain? What does it mean? And does it really teach what Calvinists claim?

That’s what we’ll talk about today.

 

Introducing the Golden Chain

Calvinists sometimes appeal to a particular passage in Romans as laying out the steps in salvation. They hold that this passage refers to God unconditionally choosing certain people to be saved—as opposed to others—that it refers to him predestining them to salvation on the last day, and that it refers to their final glorification.

But as we’ll see, all of these claims are false.

This passage is found near the end of Romans 8, and they refer to it as the “Golden Chain of Redemption” or the “Golden Chain of Salvation.” Here are the verses in question:

For those whom [God] foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified (Rom. 8:29-30, RSV).

This is called a chain because of the five elements that these verses speak of: foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification. These are held to be bound together the way links on a chain are.

The same elements are also said to belong to the ordo salutis—a Latin phrase meaning “the order of salvation.” In other words, the process of salvation contains a series of steps that always go in a certain order, beginning with God’s foreknowledge of an individual and ending with that individual’s glorification on the last day. Calvinists commonly hold that these verses name five of the steps in the ordo salutis, and that they always occur in this order in our lives.

Calvinists acknowledge that this does not contain all of the elements in the order of salvation. For example, Paul does not mention sanctification in this passage, and Calvinists commonly understand it to take place between justification and glorification. But he does at least here refer to five of the elements in what they view as the correct order.

Calvinists also draw an implication from the way these verses are phrased—that if you ever have any one of these elements apply to you, then all of the others do as well. Thus, if God foreknows you, then it is certain he will predestine you and carry you all the way forward to glorification on the last day. For example, referring to the final two stages of this process, Calvinist author R. C. Sproul writes:

Are we safe in our salvation? Once we are justified, can we lose our salvation? We cannot if the Golden Chain is true. It tells us that all the justified will be glorified, so if we are saved now, we are saved forever. That is the Golden Chain. It is not a rusty chain, but one made of the precious truth of the gospel (Romans: An Expositional Commentary, 264).

The alleged unbreakability of this sequence of events has led some to refer to this not as the “Golden Chain” but as the “Iron Chain” of Salvation.

But is this understanding correct? Are Calvinists right—or are there other ways to look at this passage? If there are, then the Calvinist cannot simply appeal to this passage as if it proved his views. He might or might not be able to appeal to other passages to do that, but he couldn’t do it with this one alone.

So let’s take a look at this passage in context and see what options there may be.

 

Reading in Context

Paul’s argument in Romans 8 is very tightly reasoned, which makes it difficult to pull out individual verses for comment. But I don’t have time at the moment to do a full commentary on the chapter, so I’ll only back up a little bit in the context.

Paul has been writing about how “the whole creation has been groaning with labor pains together until now” (v. 22) and how “we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly” (v. 23). He then comments on how the Holy Spirit “helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (v. 26).

So—right now—we and the world are in an agonizing situation. There is suffering in the world today, and it applies even to us Christians. However, as we send up our groans to God, the Holy Spirit helps us in our prayers, interceding with him that things will be put right so that the agony of the world and the agony of its Christians will end.

And there is assurance that this will happen, for Paul writes:

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose (Rom. 8:28, RSV).

So Paul says that—in all things—God is working along with us for good, for the good that we and the Spirit have been praying for. Everything will, in the end, be put right. God will make sure that our efforts and our prayers will not be in vain.

Now, I should point out that some people take this verse in other senses, but that is not essential to our argument here.

What’s noteworthy for our purposes is that God gives two descriptions of Christians in this verse: He refers to us as “those who love him”—those who love God—and as those “who are called according to his purpose.”

 

The Nature of Calling

The description of Christians as those who love God is not unexpected, but what does it mean when it says that we are “called according to his purpose”?

In Calvinist teaching, this is understood as an effectual calling to salvation. That is, God irresistibly calls certain people to have a saving relationship with him. However, calls to salvation are not the only type of calls that God gives.

For example, in Isaiah 49, the servant of the Lord says:

Listen to me, O islands, and pay attention, you peoples from afar.

The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. . . . 

And now the Lord says, who formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him (Isa. 45:1, 5).

So in this passage, the Lord calls his servant not to salvation but to gather Israel back to him. This is a calling to a vocation, not to salvation.

In the same way, in Galatians Paul echoes this passage and says:

The one who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his Son in me in order that I would proclaim the gospel about him among the Gentiles (Gal. 1:15-16, LEB).

So Paul refers to how he was similarly called to a vocation—only this one was directed to the Gentiles instead of Israel in particular.

We thus see that calling in Scripture does not simply refer to being called to salvation, so we can’t simply assume that this is what is happening in Romans 8:28. Could God be calling those who love him to a vocation here?

There is significant evidence in the text that this is the case. Paul has just been speaking of the role of Christians interceding with groans on behalf of themselves and creation. This is a vocation that Christians are called to, and if the translation is correct in saying that God works with us in all things to direct them toward good, that would only further confirm this interpretation.

 

What is God’s Purpose?

When the text says that we are “called according to his purpose,” we also need to ask, “What purpose?”

On the Calvinist view—which understands the calling as a calling to salvation—God’s purpose would refer to his inscrutable, unknowable purpose in choosing some people for salvation rather than others.

However, does Romans 8 refer to God having any purposes that Paul might be referring to in the passage?

Indeed, it does, for Paul earlier said that:

The creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom. 8:20-21).

So Paul previously said that God subjected creation to futility in hope that it will one day be set free from its bondage to decay through the children of God.

And that would make sense of Paul’s reference to our being called according to his purpose. By being children of God, we receive the vocation to work with God to orient all things toward good so that creation itself will be set free.

We thus see significant reasons in the text to question the Calvinist understanding of what it means to be “called according to his purpose.” Not only does the text not refer to God having an inscrutable, unknowable purpose, the text names a purpose of God that is directly connected with the children of God and their vocation in the world.

 

The Golden Chain

We now come to the so-called Golden Chain passage:

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified (Rom. 8:29-30, RSV).

On the Calvinist reading, this would be a series of invariable steps that apply to each one of the saved on their way to final, heavenly glory.

However, before we look at the meaning of each element in the sequence, we should consider the question of whether the links between them are as air-tight as Calvinists suppose—that is, whether every person who belongs to one group, such as “those he foreknew,” belong to the next group, such as “those he predestined.”

 

A Logical Fallacy

The Calvinist argument on this matter is straightforward. It says that “those whom he foreknew he also predestined,” so the language of the text would indicate that everyone in the first group is also in the second group.

A Calvinist might be tempted to say that the two groups are identical, but that’s actually not indicated by the text since the second group might be larger. Speaking from a purely logical point of view, just because everyone in Group A is also in Group B does not mean that everyone in Group B is also in Group A.

For example, just because all women are humans doesn’t mean that all humans are women. Drawing that inference would be a logical fallacy. However, we can set this point aside for our purposes.

The question here is not what the language of the text suggests on its face but what it means. That is, could it contain sufficient flexibility so that the individual links in the chain—or some of them—might be general truths rather than absolute ones? If that’s the case then this golden chain might not be an iron one. There might be people who start down this path but who get off it before the end, and so there might be people who God foreknows who don’t end up saved on the last day.

This kind of reading cannot be dismissed out of hand, because people speak in general terms like this all the time. In fact, it’s comparatively rare that they speak in absolute terms, and there is usually some flexibility or play in what they say. So we have to take seriously here the possibility that Paul has some flexibility in what he says in this passage.

 

A Remnant Will Be Saved

When we look at what else he says in Romans, we find strong evidence for this. Here in Romans 8, Paul has just spoken of “those whom [God] foreknew,” and the proposal is that they all end up saved on the last day. However, in Romans 11 we read this:

God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” But what is God’s reply to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace (Rom. 11:2-5).

So Paul says that God foreknew his people Israel, but that doesn’t mean that all of Israel is saved. In fact, a large number of Israelites worshipped other gods, demolished the altars of the true God, and killed his prophets, so that only a remnant of them were saved. And Paul says that the same thing is true of Israel in his own day. So just because you’re in a group that is foreknown by God doesn’t mean you’re saved.

This points to a problem with the Calvinist reading of the text in Romans 8, which is that the Calvinist takes it in an individualistic sense. That is, when the Calvinist reads Paul’s reference to “those whom [God] foreknew,” he takes this as a reference to each and every individual that belongs to that class.

But this is not the only way to read the text. Instead of reading it individualistically, one can also read it corporately. That is, one can understand it in terms of general classes of people, which is how we see Paul using the concept of foreknowledge in Romans 11. Israel—as a corporate people—has been foreknown by God, and so God hasn’t rejected Israel as a whole. However, that doesn’t mean that an individual Israelite can’t be rejected. In fact, many individual Israelites have been rejected.

We see the same kind of language back in Deuteronomy 7, where Moses tells Israel:

You are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples; but it is because the Lord loves you, and is keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers. . . . 

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and merciful love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. . . .

You shall therefore be careful to do the commandment, and the statutes, and the ordinances, which I command you this day (Deut. 7:6-11).

So Israel as a whole is holy to the Lord, and he chose them because he loves them and made an oath to their forefathers. And going forward, he will keep his covenant with the Israelites who love him but destroy those who hate him.

In the same way, the people that Paul is discussing in Romans 8, which includes Gentile Christians, are a group that also is said to be foreknown by God, but that doesn’t mean they will all remain in his love and be saved. In fact, in Romans 11, he tells the Gentile Christians that they are in exactly the same boat as the Israelites. Using the image of an olive tree, he writes:

If some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. You will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.”  That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off (Rom. 11:17-22).

So Gentiles have no advantage over Jews in this matter, and we thus see that just because a people is foreknown by God, that doesn’t mean every individual that belongs to that group will end up saved. If we read Romans in terms of Romans and let the later passages in the book inform and clarify what you might think from reading earlier ones in isolation, this is very clear.

We thus need to read the groups mentioned in the golden chain corporately—as referring to groups of people for which God has particular purposes, but that doesn’t mean that each and every individual in those groups ends up being saved. The Calvinist’s golden chain thus cannot be taken as an iron chain guaranteeing salvation.

And we’ve seen this much before we even look at the elements in the chain. Thus far, we’ve just been assuming that the Calvinist is right in reading this chain as terminating with final salvation on the last day. But now it’s time to look at the individual elements and see what Paul actually has in mind.

 

Foreknowledge

So let’s begin with foreknowledge. Understood according to its etymology, this would merely refer to God knowing something about the person ahead of time, and this is the way many Protestant Arminians understand the term in Romans 8.

Of course, because God is outside of time, what this understanding would really mean is that God looks at the history of the world, sees what you’re doing, and can make plans at one time for what he sees you freely choosing to do at a later date. I have a whole video about God’s foreknowledge. It’s Episode 2 of the podcast, so you can check it out for more information.

On the Arminian view of this passage, God would see that you freely respond to his grace and then predestine you on that basis. Those he sees freely not responding, he thus would not predestine.

However, many Calvinists propose that Paul isn’t understanding foreknowledge this way in this passage, and I think they have a point. This is in part because we need to read the statement about foreknowledge in context. If we back up to the previous verse, we have this:

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren (Rom. 8:28-29).

Here Paul introduces the reference to those whom God foreknew with the word “for,” which connects it to the previous statement about God working with those who love him and who are called according to his purpose. This strongly suggests that those whom God foreknew are either those who love him or those who are called according to his purpose—or both.

It so happens that in 1 Corinthians, Paul says something very interesting:

If one loves God, one is known by him (1 Cor. 8:3).

So in Paul’s thought, if you love God, you are known by him. In other words, you have a special relationship with God if you love him. He knows you personally, not just in the abstract. He has a special friendship with you.

And we saw those same two elements side by side in Romans 8. First Paul refers to those who love God in verse 28, and then he refers to those who God knows—or foreknows—in verse 29. So I think that the Calvinist has a point here, that the foreknowledge referred to in this verse is likely not simply abstract knowledge of what someone will do at a particular point in time. It is more likely indicative of a special, chosen relationship that one has with God.

But the news isn’t all good for the Calvinist, because the Calvinist wants to make God’s foreknowledge of someone based on an inexplicable, unknowable choice that God makes for certain individuals over others, and that’s not what we see in Paul’s discussion of these concepts. For Paul, if you love God then he knows you. The Calvinist would like to turn it the other way around and say if God foreknows you then that makes you love him. So it looks like God’s foreknowledge wouldn’t be based simply on a choice God made. It would be based on the fact that you love him, and thus he enters into a special relationship with you.

Of course, because this is foreknowledge, God has this special affection for you before you love him, but that’s how being outside of time works. God sees those in time who love him, and he places them in a special relationship.

 

Predestination

Now we turn to the next link in the chain, which is predestination. In the Calvinist view, this term is used to refer to predestination to final salvation. After God chooses you, he assigns you the destiny of being saved on the last day.

But that is not what is happening in this verse. Instead, Paul says that God predestines those he foreknew “to be conformed to the image of his Son.” This does not refer to final salvation on the last day. Paul has already told us, earlier in Romans 8, that “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God” (v. 14), and he expresses essentially the same thought that he does here in Ephesians, where he says:

In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will (Eph. 1:4-5).

So we have already been adopted as God’s sons, and so sonship is a present reality for Christians. And Romans 8 and Ephesians 1 are the only places in the New Testament where Christians are spoken of as predestined, so this is how the New Testament conceptualizes our predestination. It is not a predestination to final salvation but a predestination to becoming sons of God.

Ephesians also adds that this is done “in love,” in keeping with the mutual exchange of love between God and those who love him. And Romans spells out a purpose for which God predestined us to sonship: “in order that [Jesus] might be the first-born among many brethren.”

 

Calling

We then move to the next element in the chain, which is calling. Since this is mentioned after predestination to sonship and before justification, it is most naturally taken as the call to become justified sons, though—as we saw earlier—God’s calls often involve the element of vocation, and in context we have the idea of Christians being called to intercede and work with God in “all things” to turn them toward good.

 

Justification

Moving to the next element, we come to justification, which is also a present aspect of the life of the Christian. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “You were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).

 

Glorification

Finally, we come to the last element in the chain—glorification. Here the Calvinist typically argues that we have leapt over the present and into the future, for glorification is something that will happen to us on the last day. On his view, the chain thus guarantees the final salvation of all those who have been included in it up to now—from God’s foreknowledge all the way through to the end of final glorification on the last day.

We have already seen that one problem with this is that the language being used in this passage contains more flexibility than that. In fact, Paul explicitly warns Gentile Christians in Romans that they can fall and “be cut off” (Rom. 11:22), so that they are in the same situation as the Jewish people “whom [God] foreknew” (Rom. 11:2).

So in the golden chain passage, Paul is speaking of corporate groups, so that as long as we remain in them—as long as we remain among “those who love him”—our destiny will be assured, but that does not mean each individual member will always remain saved, for—as Paul indicates both for Jews and for Gentiles—only a “remnant” of the foreknown group may remain (Rom. 11:5).

 

Paying Attention to the Verb Tenses

However, there is another, equally fundamental problem with the way the Calvinist is taking the concept of glorification in the golden chain. He is assuming that it refers to a future reality, and that is not what Paul says. It’s true that all of the things Paul has mentioned up to now—foreknowledge, predestination to sonship, calling, and justification—are all past realities for the Christian.

That is indicated by the verb tenses Paul uses. Each of the verbs is in the aorist tense and the indicative mood in Greek, and this indicates an event taking place in past time. So the verb tenses tell you that each of these things has already happened to those who love God.

It would be possible for Paul to then move to the future for glorification, but he’d need to use the future tense and say that God will glorify those who love him, and that’s not what he says. Instead, he continues to use the same aorist indicative verb form: “glorified.”

This means that Paul presents the glorification of those who love God as a past event just as much as he does justification, calling, predestination, and foreknowledge.

 

Present Glorification

We thus have to take seriously the idea that Paul is speaking of glorification as an already existing reality in the life of the Christian, and this is exactly how he speaks of it in the parallel passage in Ephesians 1, where he wrote:

[God] predestined us to adoption through Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace that he bestowed on us in the beloved (Eph. 1:5-6, LEB).

So God has already bestowed on us the glory of his grace. It is a present reality for Christians that Paul also mentions in what is essentially a reworking of the same elements that he presents in the golden chain passage.

Furthermore, in 2 Corinthians Paul states:

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).

So Paul indicates that Christians are already being changed “into his likeness from one degree of glory to another,” which fits with his reference in Romans 8 to us being “conformed to the image of his Son” and thus “glorified” as a present reality.

 

Future Glorification?

Of course, one could point out that, in the future, we will be transformed to be like Christ in even greater degrees of glory, so there is an aspect of our glorification that is still future. In Romans 8, Paul has already spoken of “the glory that is to be revealed to us” (v. 18) and how creation will “obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (v. 21), so there are definitely future glories that are still coming.

But this doesn’t change the fact that in the golden chain Paul speaks of glorification as a past event, as something that has already occurred to Christians.

 

The Beginning of a Process?

Could you propose that—even though he is using a past tense verb here—he’s only envisioning that as the beginning of a process that will complete in the future? You could, and by making that proposal for this verb, you’d have to allow it for all the others that Paul uses.

We’d thus be looking at an ongoing call that God gives us, an ongoing justification that God is working out in our lives, and an ongoing predestination to be “conformed to the image of his Son,” because there is also a future aspect of sonship. Paul has already said in Romans 8 that “we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (v. 23).

I’m entirely happy to entertain the proposal that God has begun each of these processes in us and that they will be completed in the future. The grammar doesn’t suggest this. The verb tenses suggest a series of past events. But it’s a possible reading.

But that isn’t a good reading for the Calvinist, because if these are just initiated, ongoing processes then you can’t simply assert that they will all complete for every single person involved. The golden chain is thus not an iron chain, because some may cease to cooperate with God—they may cease to be among “those who love him”—before the end.

And we already know what happens to people like that. As Paul will say later in the book:

You stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off (Rom. 11:20-22).

We thus see that the Calvinist can’t use the Golden Chain passage as a proof of his views.

Not only can it be read in other ways, but a straightforward reading indicates that it should be read in another way.

 

Summing Up

To sum it up, Paul is saying that God has chosen to have a special relationship with those who love him, that he predestined them to become like his Son, he has called them to the vocation of helping put the world right, he has justified them, and he has already given them a share of his glory.

At least that’s what the passage would mean if you give it a straightforward reading and take the past tense verbs seriously.

There is absolutely nothing in here about God choosing people for mysterious, inscrutable reasons that have nothing to do with the people in question. He’s talking about people who love God. Those are the ones this passage is talking about, and those are the people God foreknows and chooses.

And there is nothing here that says—if you ever enter into that class of people—that you can never leave. In fact, just a few chapters later Paul explicitly warns that not all of God’s chosen people are in a state of salvation and that, if we cease to have faith in God, we will also be cut off.

So—as with so many passages—we find Calvinists reading their theology into the text rather than deriving it from the text.

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A lot of people think that if God knows what we’re going to do ahead of time, then we have no free will.

But that’s a huge mistake—and to see why, you’ll need to watch to the end of this short video.

Classical theism holds that God is omniscient, meaning that he knows everything, and this means that he knows the future. This is how God lets the biblical prophets know what’s going to be happening in the future.

However, the terms “foreknow” and “foreknowledge” don’t appear at all in the Old Testament, and they appear only seven times in the New Testament. With that small a number of examples to study, we have to be very careful about how we understand it and what inferences we draw from them.

In Greek the verb that means “to foreknow” is proginôskô, and the noun for “foreknowledge” is prognosis—yes, the same as the English word prognosis.

 

Foreknowledge in the Bible

When we study the seven occasions where the word appears, we find that they aren’t always referring to God’s foreknowledge.

• • In Acts 26:5, St. Paul tells King Agrippa that the Jews had known—or, literally, foreknown—him from the start.
  • And in 2 Peter 3:17, the text refers to how Christians know beforehand—or foreknow—that the ignorant and unstable twist the Scripture to their own destruction.

That leaves us with only 5 cases where God’s foreknowledge is referred to.

• • In Acts 2:22, Peter says that Jesus was delivered up for crucifixion according to the foreknowledge of God.
  • In Romans 8:29, Paul says that those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.
  • In Romans 11:2, he says that God has not rejected the Jewish people, whom he foreknew.
  • In 1 Peter 1:2, it says that Christians are living in various regions according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.
  • And in 1 Peter 1:20, it says that Jesus was foreknown before the foundation of the world and has now been revealed for us.

So that’s it! Those are all of the passages where God is said to foreknow something in the Bible.

 

Foreknowledge = Love?

One of the controversies about foreknowledge in theology has to do with whether it just refers to knowledge of future events or whether it means something more than that.

One proposal is that foreknowledge refers to love between God and the people he foreknows—if God foreknows you, that means he loves you.

You might try to relate that idea to what people sometimes refer to as “knowing in the biblical sense,” like where Genesis 4:1 says that Adam “knew” his wife and she conceived a son. Just stick a “fore” on the front of that kind of knowledge—or the preposition pro in Greek—and you’d have a kind of loving foreknowledge.

Except that won’t work, because knowing “in the biblical sense” doesn’t refer to love in general. It always refers to having sex with someone. God is not having sex with the people he is said to foreknow, and if you look in a standard Greek dictionary, you won’t find a meaning for progniôskô listed as some kind of general loving ahead of time.

 

Foreknowledge as Knowledge and Choice

What you’ll find instead are two definitions, the first of which is just intellectually knowing something ahead of time, and the second of which is forming a judgment or making a choice ahead of time.

That second sense of choosing something also corresponds to one of the ways that the Hebrew verb for “know”—yada`—is used, like in Amos 3:2, where God tells Israel, “You only have I known of all the clans of the earth,” which some versions translate as “You only have I chosen of all the clans of the earth,” which is obviously what it means since God intellectually knows about the other clans. Only Israel was his chosen people.

Those two definitions adequately explain the seven instances where the concept appears in the New Testament.

When Paul says the Jews foreknew him from the start, when Peter says that Christians foreknow that the ignorant and the unstable twist the Scriptures, it’s very obvious that we’re simply talking about intellectually knowing something.

The matter is a little less clear in the other verses. For example, when Acts says that Jesus was delivered up for crucifixion according to the foreknowledge of God, it could mean that God was intellectually aware of what would happen to Jesus. It also could be a reference to God choosing this for Jesus. The passage could go either way, so this is ambiguous.

You also could read the other 4 passages we looked at as references to God choosing things ahead of time, though I think that they also are ambiguous and could be read more than one way.

However, choosing something ahead of time also involves intellectually knowing about it ahead of time, and the main thing that I’m interested in discussing at the moment is how that works in God’s case. Because there has been a shift in how this is understood.

 

Time and Eternity

Today—because of the leading of the Holy Spirit—we understand that God is fundamentally outside of time. That’s what we mean when we say that God is eternal. But if he’s outside of time, then what does it mean for him to know about something ahead of time? How can we make sense of that?

In the biblical period, the fact that God is outside of time was not yet clearly understood. They didn’t have the concept of eternity the way we understand it today.

What they did have was an understanding that God does not change. For example, in Malachi 3:6 God says, “I, the Lord, do not change,” and in James 1:17 it says that with God “there is no variation or shadow of change.”

As Christians reflected on this, they realized that time is the measure of change, and so if God is fundamentally changeless, then he must be outside of time. He must be eternal.

The classic definition of eternity was given in the early 500s by Boethius, who said that “Eternity therefore is a simultaneously total and perfect possession of an interminable life” (The Consolation of Philosophy 5:6). This was the meaning that the term had in later Christian circles.

Therefore, this was what it meant when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council confessed that “We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite, and unchangeable” (DS 800, CCC 202).

As the Church understands it, all created beings—including humans and angels—are inside of time.

But God alone is not.

 

Anthropomorphic Language

So if God is outside of time, how can he know something beforehand? To the biblical authors, this question would not have occurred since they didn’t have a clear understanding of God’s eternity. They weren’t yet at that stage of doctrinal development. But to us the question does occur.

The situation is similar to what we read in various passages of Scripture—and particularly early on in Scripture—where the biblical authors depict God as if he were a human being. For example, in Genesis we read:

[Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden (Gen. 3:8).

This depicts God like a king who is taking a stroll through his pleasure garden after the heat of the day has worn off, and you can hear the sound of his footsteps crunching on leaves and twigs.

Similarly, a bit later in Genesis, we read that:

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart (Gen. 6:5-6).

But if God knows everything, then he knew what man would do in the future, so how can God repent or regret that he made man? That’s something men do because they don’t know the full consequences of their actions, but it’s not something an omniscient being should do.

The answer—in both cases—is that the biblical authors are using anthropomorphic language—that is, language that depicts God as if he were a man. This is likely because they were at a stage of progressive revelation and doctrinal development where they didn’t yet understand just how different God is from us.

So what we have to do is ask what the fundamental thing was that the biblical author was trying to communicate and strip away the layers of anthropomorphization that he uses to express it.

For example, in the first passage, the author was trying to communicate that Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness and hid. This is then depicted as an encounter with God where they heard him walking in the garden.

And in the second passage, the biblical author is affirming that humanity had become very wicked, that this was what led to the Great Flood, and the situation is depicted as God regretting that he made man.

 

God and Foreknowledge

To understand God’s foreknowledge, we have to do essentially the same thing. Since God is not inside of time the way a man is, we need to set aside that idea and think about the situation in terms of what’s really going on for God. That will give us the key to understanding what’s really going on when “foreknowledge” language is being used about God.

So the first thing to realize is that—being outside of time—all moments in history are equally present to God. The past, the present, and the future are all equally real to him. Thus the Catechism says:

To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination,” he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace (CCC 600).

This means that—from his viewpoint in the eternal now—God simultaneously sees the beginning, the middle, and the end of every story in history. For example, he sees what you were doing last year, what you are doing now, and what you are doing a year from now. They are all equally real to God, and he sees them all.

Now let’s change perspectives and put ourselves back in time. Currently we are in the present, but God still knows what you will be doing a year from now. Therefore, God could tell a prophet what you’ll be doing in a year’s time, and the prophet could announce it to you. The prophet might say, “A year from today, you’ll get a new job offer . . . or buy a new car . . . or have a new baby” or anything like that.

And from your perspective here—inside of time—it looks like God knows what’s going to happened to you ahead of time. He thus foreknows what will happen to you in the future.

But from God’s perspective there is no time. Therefore, God does not literally know what happens before it happens. The future is just as real to him as the present and the past. So he simultaneously sees what is happening with you in every moment of your personal history. He doesn’t see one moment before he sees another.

 

God’s Foreknowledge = His Knowledge

So while we—here in time—may speak of God knowing things ahead of time, from God’s perspective he just knows everything simultaneously. It’s foreknowledge to us, but it isn’t foreknowledge to him. To him, it’s just knowledge.

And this is not just my opinion. It’s also how St. Augustine—one of the key authors who explored God’s relationship to time—understood things. He wrote:

What is foreknowledge except the knowledge of future things? But what is there that is future to God, who is beyond all time? For if God’s foreknowledge contains these things, to him they are not future but present, and hence this can no longer be called foreknowledge but simply knowledge. . . . It is right, then, that we should speak not of God’s foreknowledge but only of his knowledge (Miscellany of Questions in Response to Simplician 2:2:2).

At least, we should not speak of God’s foreknowledge when we are discussing things from his perspective outside of time. For him, there is no foreknowledge because he simultaneously sees all of history.

However, from our perspective—inside of time—we can speak of God’s foreknowledge because he can reveal to us what will happen in the future. We just need to be careful not to confuse this humanly accommodated way of speaking with how God experiences knowledge of our future.

 

Foreknowledge and Free Will

This has important implications for the existence of free will.

As I mentioned, a lot of people think that if God knows what we’ll do in the future then it means we don’t have free will.

But once you understand that for God all times are equally real, you can see why this isn’t the case.

Remember: God sees everything you will ever do simultaneously. He sees what you did in the past, what you’re doing in the present, and what you’re doing in the future.

But merely seeing what someone does doesn’t deprive them of free will.

If it did that for God, it would do that for everyone.

But if I see you doing something—say, reading a book—then I’m not forcing you to read the book. You’re doing that all on your own—by your own free will. I’m just aware of it.

And if I got in my time machine and travelled a year in the future and saw you reading a book, I similarly wouldn’t be forcing you to read the book. Again, I’d just be aware of what you freely chose to do.

In the same way, if God sees you reading a book in the present, the mere fact he knows that’s what your doing doesn’t force you to read the book.

And if—from his eternal perspective outside of time—God sees you reading a book at a point that’s still in our future, it doesn’t mean that you’re being forced to read it—by God or by anything else.

You can freely choose to read the book at some future date—and, if you do, then God will be aware of it in the eternal now.

He could then tell a prophet in the present what you’ll freely choose to do at a point in our future.

So the bottom line is that merely knowing what someone has done, is doing, or will do doesn’t in any way take away their freedom.

All it means is that you know what they freely choose to do—whether they made that choice in the past, the present, or the future.

What we call God’s foreknowledge thus doesn’t deprive us of free will.

I want to talk about something fundamental. We’re going to discuss what God really wants—the most important thing to God.

So here are 9 mysteries concerning this subject

 

1. What God Really Wants

The thing that God really wants from us is love, and there are several ways we know this.

One of the ways is that Scripture flat-out tells us that God himself is love. In 1 John 4, we read:

God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 John 4:16).

Love is a major theme in the Gospels. In one of the most famous verses—John 3:16—we read:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).

That’s one of the key ways God manifests his love for us: he sent his Son to save us.

But love is not only one of God’s characteristics. It’s something he also expects of us. In all 3 of the Synoptic Gospels—or Matthew, Mark, and Luke—we learn about a controversy regarding the greatest commandment of the Law.

The Law of Moses contained hundreds of commandments, and Jewish scholars debated which were the most important. You might think that the 10 Commandments—which are found in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5—were the most important.

But one day a scholar asked Jesus which was the most important commandment of all. In Mark’s version of the event, we read:

Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’

The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31).

So the two greatest commandments are love of God and love of neighbor. That tells us that God’s highest priority for us . . . is love. It’s the thing he’s most concerned about.

And we see this all across the New Testament, including statements from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul

 

2. Love and the Ten Commandments

The principle of love is behind the 10 Commandments, which is why love is higher than them.

The early commandments, like “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me, you shall not make idols,” “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord,” and “You shall keep holy the sabbath”—the Lord’s holy day—all of those have to do with loving God.

The later commandments, like “Honor your father and mother,” you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, and you shall not covet anything that is your neighbor’s—all of those have to do with loving your neighbor.

In fact—speaking of these commandments—St. Paul says:

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law (Romans 13:8-10).

So it’s clear that love of God and love of neighbor are what God really wants from us

 

3. Who Is My Neighbor?

Fallen humans—like us—are always looking for exceptions, and if you’re considering the idea of loving your neighbor.

A natural place to look for an exception is by asking, “Well, who is my neighbor? Who counts as the neighbor I am supposed to love?” Maybe I don’t have to love everybody without exception, but only certain people.

In Luke’s version of the controversy about the greatest commandments, that’s the next question that gets asked. Jesus says you need to love God and love you neighbor, and the scholar immediately asks, “And who is my neighbor?”

In response, Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan, in which a Jewish man is brutally mugged and left for dead on the road. A priest passes by but avoids him. Then a Levite passes by and avoids him. And finally, a Samaritan comes by.

At this time, there was a lot of tension between Jews and Samaritans. As we read in John 4:9, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.” In fact, Jews often looked down on and despised Samaritans.

But in Luke, something extraordinary happens with the Samaritan:

He had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back” (Luke 10:33-35).

So the Samaritan—who you’d expect to be a hostile foreigner that Jews look down on—has compassion on the man who got mugged. He treats his wounds, including pouring oil and wine on them (oil being a soothing agent, and wine being a disinfectant). He arranges for the man to be taken care of at a local inn, which he pays for himself. And he even offers to pay back the innkeeper for anything else he spends taking care of him—all out of his own pocket!

Having told this parable, Jesus asks the scholar a very important question:

“Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”

He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:36-37).

So Jesus wants us to show mercy on everybody—even if they look down on you and despise you, the way Jews often treated Samaritans.

Matthew’s Gospel also makes it absolutely clear that all human beings are our neighbors, and we need to love even our enemies. In the Sermon on the Mount, we read:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:43-45).

Now today, we don’t often think of rain as something we need, because most of us are not farmers—and so rain can be more of an annoyance. There’s even that saying, “Into every life, some rain must fall,” which is from a poem by Longfellow.

But in Jesus’ day, they had an agrarian society, and they were intensely aware of their need for both sun and rain. So Jesus’ point is that God shows love for everybody by giving even the wicked the sun and rain that they need to grow their crops.

But the wicked are the enemies of God, and yet that’s how God treats them, so Jesus says we must also love our enemies. He continues:

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:46-48).

So yeah, it’s natural to love those who love you, but that’s nothing special—so it doesn’t receive a reward from God. However, it’s supernatural­—meaning like God himself—to love everybody, and that does receive a reward from God.

So we need to be perfect—meaning complete—in who we love. We need to love everybody . . . just like God

 

4. What Does It Mean to Love Someone?

Does loving everyone mean that we need to have warm, rosy feelings for everyone—all the time?

The answer is no. Emotions are not what’s under discussion here. Emotions come and go and are not fully under our control. They also are an unreliable indicator of love.

For example, suppose you’re a parent, and one day you see your toddler go running out in the street in front of an oncoming car. Now, you love that child, and so you rush out after the child to snatch them back from the oncoming traffic.

But at the moment you do that, you are not experiencing warm, rosy feelings. You are feeling terror and horror. You may even be angry with the child for taking such a foolish risk. But you are genuinely loving the child by getting them back to safety.

This shows us the difference between love as an action—a choice—and love as an emotion.

The kind of love we are called to have for others is not the emotion. Our emotions come and go, even with the people we love most—like our friends and family. We don’t always feel rosy around them—like in the saving the toddler from the traffic example.

Instead, we are called to love them with our actions—to love them with the choices we make. And that brings us to what the essence of biblical love is: It is to will the good of the other person. If you rush out into traffic to save your toddler, you are willing the good of the child by getting him back to safety. So the essence of love is willing the good of the other.

That’s why Jesus says we should love our enemies by praying for them. When we pray for someone, we ask God to give them good things, and by praying for our enemies, we are willing the good of our enemies.

 

5. Unconditional Love?

In recent years, a lot of people have been talking about “unconditional love.” This phrase was basically unknown before about 1940, but by the 1990s, it really took off and became a buzz word. It rocketed up in popularity, and it peaked around the year 2011, after which, it began to fade somewhat.

That’s fine with me, because I’ve always felt people were using it in a sloppy way, without really grappling with the issues involved. Because—while there is an unconditional aspect to love—there is also a conditional aspect that is entirely appropriate.

Just think about it: You could take the teaching that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves to mean that we’re supposed to love everybody absolutely equally. And there is an element of truth to that. We are supposed to will the good of everyone. That’s the unconditional aspect of love.

But if you press that idea too much, it would mean that we don’t have a special love for those close to us. In other words, we shouldn’t love our parents, spouses, children, or friend any more than we love a random stranger on the street. And that’s not true.

Even though we’re called to love everybody, we do have special duties to those who we have ties with. “Honor your father and mother” is still part of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 5:16). And we know that’s still binding because when Jesus was asked what one should do to inherit eternal life, he replied:

You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother (Mark 10:19).

Similarly, St. Paul tells his readers:

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. (Ephesians 6:1-3).

So—despite our love for everybody—we are supposed to give special consideration to certain people on the condition that they are members of our family. There is thus a conditional aspect to love as well as the unconditional aspect.

We see the same thing with the broader family of Christians. St. Paul tells us:

As we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10).

So we need to do good to all men—that’s the unconditional aspect of love. But we need to especially do good to others on the condition that they are fellow Christians. That’s the conditional aspect of love. We thus shouldn’t talk as if unconditional love was the only important thing.

 

6. Love and Forgiveness

The conditional aspect of love has a special application that can otherwise cause confusion, and it has to do with forgiveness. Jesus tells us that we need to forgive others if we want to be forgiven. He put it right there in the model Christian prayer. We’re supposed to pray:

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us (Matthew 6:12).

And to make sure we get the point, immediately after teaching this prayer, Jesus says:

For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you;

but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 6:14-15).

So forgiving others is really important.

But what if they don’t repent? What if they’re not sorry for what they did to us? What if they don’t even want us to forgive them? Do we have to forgive them then?

First, we should probably mention what forgiveness is. It fundamentally means willing their good—or loving them. That doesn’t mean that we forget what happened. If we’ve learned by experience that someone may hurt us, then we don’t need to treat them as if they’re completely safe. But it does mean willing their good.

And it means being willing—to the extent we can—to set aside the emotion of anger we may have toward them.

We must always be willing to forgive them in this sense. Like Jesus said, we’re supposed to pray for our enemies. That’s the unconditional aspect of love.

But too much sloppy talk about unconditional love can make people think that we’re supposed to forgive people irrespective of whether or not they repent—irrespective of whether they even want our forgiveness.

But that doesn’t make any sense, because—while God wants everyone to repent and be saved—he doesn’t forgive them and send them to heaven unless they repent. Demanding that we forgive people without repentance would mean that we’re supposed to be more loving than God, which makes no sense.

If God expects people to repent to be forgiven, then we are expected to do the same. As Jesus said, in order to be children of God, we need to be like God—not out do God. And this is what we find when Jesus discusses the issue of forgiveness. In Luke, we read:

If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him;

and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him (Luke 17:3-4).

So—the way Jesus taught forgiveness—we should always be willing to forgive someone, even if we may not have warm feelings toward the person. And that’s the unconditional aspect of love.

But the granting of forgiveness is conditional on the person actually repenting.

 

7. “With All Your Heart, Mind, Soul, and Strength”

Some people have a question about the first great commandment: What does it mean to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength?

Some Christians argue that we can never fulfill this commandment. They’ll even argue that—since this is the greatest commandment—any violation of it must be a mortal sin. So we are constantly, inevitably all in mortal sin because we can’t fulfill this commandment.

If you aren’t—at every moment—loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, then you’re in mortal sin, and thus the Catholic understanding of salvation must be wrong since the Church holds that we are not always in mortal sin.

But this fundamentally misunderstands the commandment. In fact, it’s reading a set of assumptions into the text and thus distorting its meaning.

The command itself is found in Deuteronomy 6, where we read:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord;

and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

Now, to understand a passage of Scripture—whether it’s a commandment or anything else—you need to read it in its original context and ask what it would have meant to the original audience.

In this case, notice that we have the opening statement that the Lord our God is one Lord. That’s a denial of polytheism. The Israelites are not supposed to be worshipping other gods.

Instead, they are to love the Lord with all their heart, with all of their soul, and with all of their might.

• • In other words, their hearts are to be devoted exclusively to the Lord—not to other gods.
  • Their souls are to be devoted exclusively to the Lord—not to other gods.
  • And their might is to be devoted exclusively to serving the Lord—not serving to other gods.

But does that mean that they’re never supposed to do anything else? That they’re supposed to spend every bit of mental energy doing nothing but loving and worshipping God? Of course not!

We know from common sense that God expects us to do other things. He expects us to earn a living—which means thinking about and spending energy on other things. He expects us to cook and eat food—which means thinking about and spending energy on other things. And he expects us to relate to and raise our families—which means thinking about and spending energy on other things.

In fact, if you just read the rest of the passage, you’ll see that God expressly indicates that we’re supposed to do these other things. He goes on to say:

And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).

God expects us to live normal, active lives in which we devote time, attention, and energy to other things.

So what does it mean to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength? In context, it means loving the Lord rather than other gods—having him—not other deities—as the one to whom we devote our heart, soul, and strength.

It also means having God as our ultimate priority. In other words, if push comes to shove, we need to stick with God no matter what. In fact, if we’re called upon to lay down our lives for God, we must be willing to do so. Fortunately, most of us are not called to that, but as long as you have God as your highest priority—as long as you would be willing to side with God whenever the stakes are grave and you are called upon to do so—then you do fulfill this commandment, and you are loving God the way you should

 

8. “Love and Prayer”

Love can also clear up another mystery that people wonder about: Why do we pray?

After all, it’s not like God doesn’t already know what we need and want. When he introduces the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus himself tells us:

When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him (Matthew 6:7-8).

So prayer is not about giving God information that he doesn’t already have. He’s omniscient and knows everything. He already has all the information that he needs.

Why, then, does he want us to pray?

Well, God has no needs—for information or anything else—so prayer isn’t about helping him. Therefore, it must be about helping us.

But what is it helping us with? Here is where God’s top priority—love—comes into the picture.

In the first place, we are supposed to love God, and by praying to him and asking him for the things we need and want, we’re not simply thinking about ourselves. We’re thinking about him, and we’re thinking about him as the source of all we have. So that gives us reason to love him.

Similarly, we’re supposed to love our neighbor, and by praying for our neighbors, we’re not just thinking about ourselves. We’re thinking about them and willing their good. So prayer also gives us the opportunity to love our neighbors. That’s why St. Paul can say:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:1-4).

So prayer gives us both the opportunity to love God and love our neighbor, which is why God has chosen to reward prayer by granting some of our requests.

Incidentally, any time you have a puzzle like prayer—why should we do this?—it’s a good idea to look at the problem through the lens of love, because we know that love is God’s highest priority, and it explains an awful lot.

 

9. Love and Salvation

Since love is God’s highest priority, love is ultimately what we need. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1-3).

And, as he put it in Galatians:

In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love (Galatians 5:6).

If you have faith working through love, you are in a state of grace. You are—as Jesus said—a son or daughter of the Father if you show the love that he does. If God is your highest priority, then he is your ultimate destination, and so you will be saved.

This is why the Bible sometimes speaks of salvation in terms of fulfilling God’s commands—all of which involve loving God and neighbor. As we saw in the passage from 1 John that we started with:

God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 John 4:16).

So—in a very real sense—the Beatles were right when they said, “All you need is love.”

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