Not a Hope in Hell by Fr Rooney – where I resonate & where I struggle
I am pleased to see that Fr Al at Eclectic Orthodoxy has introduced Fr Rooney Discusses Not a Hope in Hell.
I had previously engaged _Not a Hope in Hell_ because I liked its phraseology & it helped me to deepen my own self-understanding. So, I published the following, which was not a review:
A Foil to my Universal Restoration: Not a Hope in Hell by James Dominic Rooney
I did at the time keep notes wherein I identified what I thought were the book's most helpful points as well as those I had a hard time following.
The following musings, aided by AI, set forth what I saw as the book's strengths:
Overall, the book demonstrates the intricate relationship between God's permission of sin and the problem of evil. It posits that understanding God's allowance of sin is crucial for addressing the problem of moral evil. It attempts to reconcile God's providential control with human free will in a way that avoids making Him the necessary author of sin, i.e. without Him being its direct cause.
It defends God's benevolence, asserting that God's unconditional love for persons is the fundamental reason behind His permission of sin. It addresses the problem of evil by placing the emphasis on God's love and the importance of free will. It demonstrates that the permission of sin and the problem of evil are inseparable, and that any attempt to resolve the latter must grapple with the former.
In approaching the relationship between the permission of sin and the problem of evil through the lens of God's providence and human free will, it argues that the "permission of sin" involves God allowing moral evils (sin) to occur, rather than directly causing them. It shows how this aligns with the broader "problem of evil," which questions how an all-good, all-powerful God can permit evil to exist by highlighting that God's permission of sin respects human free will—an essential component of moral agency—while simultaneously serving His ultimate plan of goodness. It thus suggests that God’s permitting sin isn’t arbitrary but is instrumental in His providential governance of the world.
Even though God doesn't will evil, He may allow it as a way to bring about greater goods, like the development of virtues or the revelation of His justice and mercy. This reasoning emphasizes that the permission of sin and the problem of evil are intricately linked through the interplay of divine wisdom, human freedom, and the ultimate purpose of creation.
God's providence thus governs the world in such a way that everything, including moral evil, is permitted for a greater purpose while never willing sin directly but only ever allowing it as part of His overarching plan for creation.
Since human freedom is essential for moral agency, if God prevented all moral evil, human beings would lack true freedom, thereby undermining the possibility of virtue, moral responsibility, and genuine love.
Because the book frames the permission of sin as a subset of this broader issue—God allows moral evils (sins) because they contribute to His providential governance, it aligns with classical theodicies, which argue that God permits evil to bring about greater goods. It makes the point that, while sin is a moral evil, its permission is not arbitrary—because it serves a purpose in God's divine wisdom. As a specific case within the problem of evil, the permission of sin entails that, if God allows any evil (including sin), He must have a morally sufficient reason.
The book's explanation hinges on free will and divine wisdom, showing that the two concepts are inseparably linked. Its reasoning suggests that the existence of moral evil (sin) is not evidence against God’s goodness but rather a necessary consequence of creating free creatures who are capable of love, virtue, and moral responsibility.
A coherent concept of sin thus entails that humans with sufficient knowledge and sufficient consent can be sufficiently responsible for moral evil, so can with sufficient freedom violate a sufficiently formed conscience by rejecting the moral laws implanted in all hearts (generally revealed) and even the love of God (specially revealed).
The book's conception of freedom is consistent with the view that grace is nonnecessitating, that our intellect & will are inseparably operative in volition, that freedom’s not innate to the will but only ever the fruit of the will & the mind in collaboration, i.e. deliberatively. While grace would not, therefore, "irresistibly" secure our consent, this is not to deny that our consent could otherwise be both efficaciously secured & deliberatively delivered, providentially & infallibly.
The following musings focus on what appeared to me arguments that, because they generally elided modal distinctions of one type or another that I consider indispensable, were not at all compelling.
A question might thus beg regarding why God doesn't thus providentially & infallibly secure our eventual cooperation with grace. The book makes the point that God could indeed prevent each sinful act from occurring, whether providentially & infallibly or by justifying anyone in sin at any moment, but that this is not "to grant that God harms someone by allowing them to persist in sin" as that "would imply that God harms people every time anyone sins or persists in sin."
While on the surface this might seem true, it elides the indispensable nuances that might better be conveyed by temporal modalities. Could there not be meaningful differences between persisting transiently versus everlastingly?
Similary, by eliding such modal distinctions as would be indispensable to distinguish realities that are variously finite or infinite, that are variously absolute or relative, that present in degrees rather than in terms of all or nothing and either - or, we risk drawing facile conclusions from arguments that, however valid logically, fail to successfully reference reality.
Specifically, because divine & human persons differ in being simple versus composite, variously non/determinate & in/finite, with absolute versus relative perfections, syllogistic arguments that elide such distinctions will be modally fallacious. Because human persons are relatively --- not completely ---knowledgeable regarding general & special revelations, they can only ever be considered relatively --- not absolutely --- free in their deliberations regarding atemporal & eternal realities, including beings, entities, acts, relations and consequences, and so can only ever be considered relatively ---not fully ---responsible for rejecting God.
This means that a coherent concept of sin, would also entail that, while humans can with sufficient knowledge and sufficient consent be sufficiently responsible for some moral evils, humans don't have sufficient knowledge of Truth, Himself, such that they could freely & willingly consent to a complete, final & definitive rejection of Goodness, Himself.
Accordingly, in line with the relevant meaningful modal distinctions, legitimate proportionality objections will obtain whenever claims are made that human moral evils are to be remedied with what are prima facie disproportional --- hence unjust --- consequences.
At this juncture, disquistions regarding putative possible good arguments are inapposite as the reality of anyone's putative suffering such prima facie disproportional consequences would not arise as the consequence of a free choice counterfactual, in the first place, since one's interlocutors are not even stipulating to such consequences as being possible world counterfactuals.
However, might those interlocutors be pumping false intuitions?
Well, according to most people's shared parental instincts, moral insights, aesthetic sensibilities and common sense, Eternal Conscious Torment should strike them as parentally abhorrent, morally unintelligible, aesthetically repugnant, nonsensically absurd, performatively contradictory, disproportionally consequential & anthropologically incoherent.
But who's to say that these evaluative dispositions are divine connatural inclinations and not, rather, false intuitions about perfect love, however appealing or emotionally attractive they might otherwise appear when initially stated?
As long as one can invoke a mysterian appeal that
even if it doesn't surpass our fondest parental hopes, aesthetic sensibilities & moral insights with an unimaginable weight of eternal glories building on those dispositions, and even if it does overturn them by enshrining what’s parentally alien, aesthetically repugnant & morally unintelligible, which is to say in a way that's absolutely foreign to what we'd truly believed had been implanted in our hearts ---
invokes some putative greater good (for how high His Ways are above our own!), then they're not a thoroughgoing voluntarist, theoretically.
They could, however, be reasonably considered a virtual voluntarist, practically?
My overall stance can be accessed here: