Jimmy Akin

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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God bless you always!