What does God want from us? (re: Predestination)

Overview of Christian Theology: Assignment 4

The difficulty with predestination, as I see it, is located in two primary notions: the idea of exclusivity (that only knowledge and acceptance of Jesus Christ offers salvation) and in the premise of eternal damnation (that the sinner will be perpetually punished for choices made in the context of a finite and limited human life). It is hard to reconcile these notions with the premise of a genuinely loving and just God.

Suppose I build two robots, and endow them with a desire to survive and a limited but meaningful form of artificial intelligence, which among other things allows them to chose whether or not to obey orders given for their own good by the one who made them. The two robots are identical in this respect. Then, for some perverse reason, I make one robot deaf to the sound of my voice or place it in a soundproof roof where it cannot possibly hear me. I tell both robots who I am and that I will destroy them if they do not obey only me. I give both of them instructions. While the first may occasionally fail to follow my orders (as I have created it to do), not surprisingly the deaf or sequestered robot does not even know I have given an order or understand that its survival is at stake. It may obey me from time to time, but if it does so it will be a happy coincidence — perhaps it is following similar instructions given by someone else or that it has worked out on its own. I see that the robot has failed to follow my orders, so I dismantle it and melt its body down for scrap while its mechanical brain (now informed of its error) sits on a shelf suffering forever the forfeiture of its life.

How can the deliberate creation of the deaf robot possibly be described as loving? How can the destruction and perpetual punishment of the deaf robot for failing to follow orders, as given by a master it could not hear, possibly be described as just?

I am afraid that I am a dyed-in-the-wool universalist. With Julian of Norwich, I can only say that, whatever the teachings of the church, I believe that “all will be well and all manner of things will be well,” and that every soul will somehow be saved. I cannot bring myself to worship and praise a God that deliberately created some for eternal damnation. (A loving parent doesn’t keep punishing a child for behavior that stems from a congenital birth defect!)

In wrestling with the notion of God’s righteous judgment, I can only think that we do not understand the form that judgment might take and that our understanding of punishment in perpetuity is misguided. Perhaps there is some form of salvation through judgment... although I freely admit I haven’t yet managed to figure out what that might mean. We human beings think of justice, fundamentally, as at best a tit-for-tat proposition (“karma’s gonna get you!”); my hope and expectation is that God’s justice is as much deeper and more expansive than human justice as God’s love is wider and more comprehensive than human love. In any case, the Jesus of scripture is most emphatically not a tit-for-tat kind of guy; he’s not even a three-strikes-and-you’re-out guy (apparently you get at least 70 x 7). Forgiveness is an attribute that can be predicated both of love and of judgment.

I do, however, agree with Guthrie that those of us who have come to know a just and loving God made manifest through Jesus Christ are under obligation to serve as God’s messengers in word and deed, and that we have a special responsibility toward those for whom God is invisible or silent. If we, the church, are now the Body of Christ in the world, we must embody God’s extravagant love and justice to all, and especially to those who have not or for some reason cannot or will not hear the Word of God for themselves. Let them then at least see us, as we attempt in our feeble and limited way to be witnesses to the good news. As St. Francis is reported to have said, we must preach the Gospel at all times... and, if necessary, use words.