Does God create some to be eternally damned?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

If God is all-knowing (knows every move we'll make until we die) and all loving... Why does he create souls from inception knowing they will not be with him in heaven? Being all-knowing, he knows when we'll be born, when we'll die and all the choices in between. Example: All God creates is good, yet he knew the choices and evil Hitler would bring upon world... And he created him anyway.  Does it affect our free will if we are created with our choices already known, maybe not known to us, but known by God who creates us anyway?

Yours,
 

Will Freilich
 

 Dear Will,
 

   The answer to this question is the little discussed and much overlooked heart of the Christian faith. Christianity is absolutely contrary to all other religions, at least the ones I know about. Most religions of the world seem to be an attempt to manipulate the powers that be; god, the gods, the forces of nature, etc. etc. to lighten up a bit, or at least a way to cope with the general disappointment that is life on this planet. You know suffering, alienation, crop failure, flooded basements, terminal diseases, death, that sort of thing.

Ancient Roman religion was a kind of voodoo that offered sacrifices just to keep the capricious faceless spirits of nature from making their lives miserable. It was a little like the pre-Walt Disney understanding of leprechauns, fairies and the other quaint creatures of Irish folklore. In truth, the leprechauns and fairies were cut from the same cloth as the banshees. They were nasty little nature spirits that would make life miserable for you if you crossed them. This seems to be a pattern in world folk religions. Religion was all about how to get the powers that be to leave us alone, and a big enough sacrifice might just get them to do what we want. More theologically developed religions like Hinduism and Hellenism had elaborate mythologies that attempted to explain everything. I know very few people, Christians or non-, for whom things similar are not believed.  
 

Your question is THE question. If God is for real and, especially if as the Christians say, He is all-powerful and all-loving, why is life such a struggle?  And if Christianity is right about an all-powerful all loving God, why does He allow eternal evil by creating those he knows will make evil choices and be eternally damned? The answer is, I think: Freedom. 

God has created beings that are truly free for the sake of Love. We Americans think we know all there is to know about freedom and love. We are clueless about both. We mistake freedom for enslavement to our desires and we confuse love with narcissism.  A real choice that reveals the essence of my being is necessary for love. If I must love you, I cannot love you. Here’s an example of what I mean. 
 

We’ve all seen those puff pieces on the telly, an interview with a 20-year old starlet who is about to marry some old geezer who is richer than God. There she sits next to some drooling, 90-year old fool of a billionaire who has one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave. She has hair as blonde as bleach can make it and has clearly had “some work done.” She says something stupid like, “Oh, I don’t care about the money. I love him and would marry him if we were the poorest man in the world.” 
 

In a few months, he dies of enthusiasm and leaves his entire fortune to the blonde bombshell and her two vicious little Chihuahuas. At that point a battle royal ensues between the lawyers of the grieving widow and the lawyers of the first, second and third wives. She didn’t love him. She was unable to love him. She was not free to love him. 
 

Your question rests on the assumption that the purpose of life is happiness, the assumption on which this country is founded. “We have been endowed by our creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We Americans pursue happiness with a vengeance, even if the pursuit makes us miserable. The assumption of the Gospel is different. It holds that the purpose of life is Love because God is Love. (Understand that the specific word used in the Scriptures for this divine love is agape, or in English, sacrificial love, not just emotional attraction or affection.) The catechism says that God made us to know, love and serve Him in this world and so to be happy with Him forever. 

For moderns, the purpose of life is happiness.  For Christians, happiness is not a goal. It is a byproduct, a fruit of having pursued and attained the true purpose of life, which is true love. Heaven created us for Love and so heaven has endowed us with freedom and will not interfere with freedom. In short, we Christians worship a humble God. 
 

Once, many years ago, I was serving in a very poor parish. It was so poor that not only did the windows have no screens; the windows had no windows! I was all alone one day, offering Mass. The little flies were dive-bombing the chalice. In my mind I said to the Lord, “I believe that this is no longer bread and wine, but has become Your body and blood, but couldn’t You convince the fruit flies of this great miracle for just a moment?” 
 

The little voice inside said, “With My hands nailed to the wood of the cross, I was a feast for the flies.”
 

I reeled. I could almost not continue with the Mass. To think that Jesus of Nazareth, whom I believe to be the very hand that set the stars to spinning, could not lift His own hand to swipe the flies from His face. This is God??? 
 

We Christians believe that the All-powerful became powerless for love of us. Greeks and Romans believed that god was power. Muslims believe that god is will. Moderns believe that god is not. We believe that God is Love. Heaven is humble and will not force us to do His will. He will do His will if we ask Him to. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.”  
 

Most people want God to do their will. Some people say we should pray that we are able to do God’s will. The Christian prays that God may do His will because He does not do it unbidden and uninvited. He has tied His own hands, allowed them to be nailed to the wood of the cross until we give Him permission to act as He pleases in our lives. Has it ever occurred to you that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth the Almighty knelt before human freedom? He stooped to wash the feet of Judas, His betrayer. For the sake of Love, He knelt before the man who would kill Him.  God, who is unlimited, has limited Himself for the sake of freedom. 
 

As for God knowing in advance, God does not know in advance. We cannot say that God knows in advance, because there is no “advance” for God. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. We THINK. God simply KNOWS. He is eternal, timeless. We, too, made in God’s image are timeless beings but we live in time. The choices we make are made in time by our timeless selves timelessly. 
 

The mystery of true and absolute human is freedom wrapped up in the mystery of the timelessness of God. It is something that we do not, cannot now perceive, but the very existence of suffering is the evidence of the extremity of the love of God who wishes us to become what He has always been: Infinite Love. When our children suffer, do we wish they had never existed? No, we instinctively understand that sometimes suffering is the price of love.
 

In our smallness we cannot see past the suffering. We look at the cross and see tragedy. Heaven looks at the cross and sees Love, even in the midst of evil and sorrow.  As the old hymn has it, “What wondrous love is this, o my soul?” Hope this helps. 
 

Your Friend,
 

the Rev. Know-it-all 

Why aren't our plans working? -- part 7

(Letter to Frieda Begue continued interminably)

The question at hand is why bother to have Catholic schools, if not to live the Catholic life? And  why bother to live the Catholic life? The first good answer is that Christ offers real hope in the face of death. It is fascinating to think that the hope Christ offers is so great that practically all those who knew Him fearlessly died violent deaths simply for insisting that Jesus was who he claimed to be, when simply by renouncing Him they could have lived to a peaceful old age. It is yet more amazing that this willingness to die rather that to deny Christ has persisted throughout the history of Christianity. Untold thousands, even millions, have found the Catholic way of life, the Gospel way of life preferable to life itself. I told you the story of the first person I met who claimed to have had the experience of clinical death. He was only the first person I met to claim such things. I have told that story repeatedly and often people tell me about their own similar experience. I have to admit that not all of these experiences are pleasant. There is a second reason to follow Christ by living the Catholic way of life. It seems there really is a hell.

Years back, a couple of kids asked about heaven. I told them the story that I told you just last week, the light and the tunnel and all that. Their uncle, and old friend of mine was listening. He said that it was all a load of .....! 

He said, “When you die, you’re dead. I know. I died.” Later he told me, “What I said a while ago isn’t true. I was in hell.” 

I had known him since he was a child, and believe me, he was a difficult child. He got involved in theft and then selling drugs, and then worse. Finally his liver was almost severed in a knife fight. They lost him on the table, but  they were able to patch him back together and revive him. He didn’t want to go into the particulars of hell, but I have heard a similar from others. I particularly remember a young man who had died of an overdose. He had lived a violent and self absorbed life. He said that when he died, he found himself sinking into a dark alone-ness and he knew he was going to be there for a very long time. He saw Jesus in a distant light, the Christ whom his family loved and served, but who he had rejected. He cried out to the Lord as he fell into the blackness and begged for another chance. He woke up on the an emergency room table of the local hospital. True to his word, he turned his life around and is alive to this day.

If there really is a hell and if God is so good and so loving, how can he send anyone there? The answer is very simple. He doesn’t send us to hell. He finds us there. Think about it. When we are born into this world we are completely self-absorbed. We live in a world of one. If a baby wakes up in the middle of the night and wants a bottle, a change of clothes or mommy’s warm embrace, the whole house is up. It doesn’t matter that you have to be up before the dawn. A baby has a cry that can penetrate brick, and he wants what he wants. I know people who are 60 or 70 years old, who, if they want a bottle, a change of clothes and mommy’s warm embrace.... 

Catch my drift? Many of us never leave the place of fundamental isolation and narcissism into which we are born. We Catholics call this original sin. I suspect that when we die, all that happens is that time stops, and to paraphrase God’s words to Moses, “we are who we are.” And we will be that forever. If we reject God’s offer of grace and refuse to live for anyone but ourselves, then we will live in that absolute alone-ness eternally. Jesus compared heaven to a wedding banquet but He called hell the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

We want God to guarantee the pleasures of heaven, but we fail to understand that heaven is not so much a place as a relationship. If we refuse the relationship, we refuse heaven. More than heaven awaits us. God’s plan is to adopt us, to make us part of that relationship which is God. Remember that God is love, sacrificial love. If I cling to myself, I cannot cling to Him. If God is “agape,” sacrificial love, and I reject sacrifice, I have rejected God. God will not force anyone to go to heaven. He makes us free to reject Him or to accept Him. C.S. Lewis puts it this way: In the end there are only two types of people, those who will say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God will say, “No, thy will be done.” If we want only what we want, than we have made our choice. 

We Americans love to think that we are free. We may once have been, but are no longer. We are a nation of slaves: slaves to our possessions; slaves to our desires; to our sexual needs; to all the things we see on TV. We are enslaved to the cruelest master, our own desires. 

Jesus once said you cannot serve both God and possessions. Things, self-centered passions, an insistence on what we have decided are our “rights” and the inflated sense of our own importance are dragging us down to hell. We talk about freedom of choice. We don’t have and have never had freedom of choice. I may want to be eight feet tall and have a billion dollars. Neither is possible. I may not be able to have them, but I can want them. I can want them with a passion that excludes all other loves. 

Freedom of choice is a myth. All we really have is freedom of will. I can will my own desires, or I can say to God, “Not my will but Thy will be done. Into your hands I commend my life.” The possibility of hell is also the possibility of freedom. We want a God who gives us our every desire, and if He does not obey us, then He is not a good and loving God. Perhaps He doesn’t even exist. Most people love, not God, but what they think He can give, and when He does not give, He is no God at all. 

Perhaps you’ve heard me tell the story of the young starlet who is about to marry the rich old billionaire who has one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel. She is interviewed by the paparazzi and we all get a laugh out of her protestation that she is marrying for love. “I’d marry him if he was the poorest man in the world. I love him,” she protests!  Then, in a few months when he finally dies and leaves his fortune to her and her two chihuahuas, the battle is joined between the lawyers of the first, second and third wives and the lawyers of the starlet, over who gets the money. 

The young beauty wasn’t able to love him. She was so self-absorbed and he was so rich. She knew he was an old fool. We knew he was an old fool. The reporters knew he was an old fool. The only one who didn’t know he was an old fool was the old fool. I assure you that God is not an old fool. He can tell the difference between true love and manipulation.

To love God is not to desire Him for what He can provide, but to desire Him for who He is. He allows suffering and difficulty in order to give us the one prerequisite of love -- freedom. The possibility of eternal damnation is also the opportunity for eternal freedom. 

So why live the Catholic life? To live the Catholic life, with all its self-denial and sacrifice is to live in real freedom and to have the ability to truly love God who is Love itself.