In a warm and friendly online fan group for David Bentley Hart, one member recently asked two questions from a friend:
- If everyone will be reconciled to God after death, why is suicide not an intelligent option to avoid all of the heartache and misery of this life?
- If we should not use the fear of hell as a means of invitation to the gospel, are we not simply ignoring the fact that people who die without God will still come to Him out of fear in the next life?
These questions were stimulated by Hart’s 2019 book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. This post does not engage Hart’s book. (As I have expressed here, I personally fall close to Clarion’s own Brad Jersak as he has expressed here and here.) My goal now is only to survey the responses that these questions elicited on this fan page.
We currently think that we love hell, I suggested in the first comment. (Yes, I’m sometimes one of those first commenters.) Likewise, we think that we hate God’s presence. Although what we truly want is God, we are not able to access our deepest loves. What needs to change is how well we understand our own deepest loves and desires. The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis portrays this tragedy. Killing myself now does not help me learn to better understand my own deepest desires.
In the end, it is our Father’s love for us that wins us over to a recognition of our own love for Him. All of this talk about not understanding my own greatest desires brings to mind this passage from George MacDonald (anthologized by Lewis as reading 106 in George MacDonald: An Anthology of 365 Readings):
To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues; in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With His holy influence, with His own presence (the one thing for which most earnestly we cry) He may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request—has answered it, and is visiting His child.
In response, someone recommended Caremilite nun Ruth Burrows as one contemporary writer who expresses this idea that God's work on every soul is "underground"—beneath or beyond our consciousness. In Essence of Prayer, she writes:
John of the Cross, too, sees that the heart of prayer is the presence of God within the soul, a presence that is not static but an unceasing, positive loving that prepares us to receive ever more love, an action that is purifying, transforming, uniting.
One classic statement of this is Augustine’s prayer: “You were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest” (Confessions 3.6.11). Or turning to George MacDonald again: “The God to whom we pray is nearer to us than the very prayer itself ere it leaves the heart” (Paul Faber, Surgeon, chapter 35, “A Heart”).
Further comments explained that suicide would not save us from hurting or help in the transformation that will still be needed in the next life (through "fire" as the rational soul learns to desire its true good which is God). We seek to become holy now in order to experience true joy in this life and to be as ready as possible for the exposure to God’s love that ultimately awaits us. As an aside, any reference to “true joy” brings to mind Christian Wiman’s incredible essay on joy in his introduction to Joy: 100 Poems (which I’d sample for you if I had not lent it to a dear friend). This commenter concluded that “people will choose the good in the next life after having their sense of the good gradually transformed as they are exposed to the true reality of an infinitely good God” which is likely “to be painful to experience at first.” They also referenced the discomfort and distress experienced by Lewis’ characters stepping off of the bus that takes passengers up to heaven.
Continuing through the thread of comments: we cannot assume that the goal of the Christian life is to get into heaven. The Christian life is instead about discipleship and living from the life of the age to come that is given to us now by Christ. Every appearance story after Christ’s resurrection presents people sharing the good news out of joy and awe. If we do not find this joy and awe in this life, we will eventually come to God with joy and awe, but we will come out of desire and not fear.
Near the end, an admin on the group put it very directly: “I don’t think your friend understands what salvation is.” The answer to the question about suicide being a good idea was no “because there’s just more heartache and misery in the next life, especially for those who are selfish and impatient.” As for coming to God out of fear in the end: “fear is irrelevant in both lives.”
With the concluding comment, we come full circle to a consideration of the “unhealthy underlying mentality” that rests behind such questions. If there is eternal life, then it is our current life that is eternal. Eternal life doesn't begin after we die. It starts right now:
The Gospel isn't about escaping this world, it's about the world being a good creation, about the heavens being torn open and God descending into the world. ...The world will be restored and deified, not abandoned. The resurrection dragged forward the age of the resurrection (the Kingdom of Heaven) from the future outside of time into the present day through the church. The Kingdom has begun its reign already and the church is to embody it. So to speak of suicide is to completely misunderstand the Gospel.
Hart has written about this in "Death, Final Judgment, and the Meaning of Life," [published in The Hidden and the Manifest Essays in Theology and Metaphysics, 2017]. Suicide is antithetical to the very core of human nature which is “life-oriented” or “future-oriented.” God created us with a natural yearning for more life (God), and our salvation lies in the infinite satiation of this yearning. And the life of Jesus of Nazareth teaches us that this satiation is not abstract but concrete and bodily. Death has been defeated so that we can have eternal life into ever and ever-deepening union with God in love and ecstasy.
Of course, G.K. Chesterton famously (and infamously) says (Orthodoxy, chapter 5): “The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” Whatever exactly we make of that, it is the inverse of this greater point by C.S. Lewis (from The Four Loves):
True Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.”
In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have.
To return, however, to the point about what we will face at death, Wendell Berry says in A World Lost:
I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it, they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves in it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it, they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.
Read that passage a few times. Maybe daily. This is what God offers us in Jesus Christ. In the light of the “Only Lover of Humanity” (as Jesus is called over and over in ancient hymns), we start to see how far we “have failed the only justice of loving one another.” However, “in suffering that light’s awful clarity,” we also “see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled.” In God’s presence, we “are loved completely, even as [we] have been, and so are changed into what [we] could not have been but what, if [we] could have imagined it, [we] would have wished to be.”