Skeptics have long objected to Catholicism on grounds that it is obvious that the Blessed Virgin Mary, if real, could not possibly hear and answer all those hundreds of millions of prayers addressed to her personally every day by faithful Catholics and many other Christians.

Given that we can barely concentrate on but a single question at a time, this objection seems, on its face, impossible to answer rationally. This element of Catholic belief seems simply absurd.

Still, there exist several possible explanations as to how this central element of Catholic spiritual practice can be true. These explanations may also apply to other Catholic saints, such as the much overworked St. Anthony, who hear and answer nearly countless prayers each day.

First, there is the possibility that God simply answers the prayers on Mary’s behalf. In this way, the Blessed Virgin might appear to hear and respond to prayers from all over the world at once, while not requiring her to do anything that is impossible on her part – since the entire process would be accomplished by the infinite knowledge and power of God, not directly by Mary herself. Nonetheless, since Mary wills whatever her divine Son wills, her will would be in accord with everything that God thereby does for those whose prayers were addressed to her.

A second possibility results from the fact that time is limited in duration, whereas eternity is entirely outside of time.

It is extremely important to understand that, when we imagine Mary or the saints somehow knowing all these seemingly countless prayers at once, we are thinking about how we ourselves process such information through time in our present bodily state. For us, it takes time to hear and understand and to think of how to reply to a petition. And so, to think of handling all these prayers at once simply defies belief.

Yet, when the soul is free of the body and united to God in eternity, this temporal experience, which is so bound up with our bodily existence, no longer obtains. Trying to imagine all these prayers at once is very misleading. The soul’s actual existence in eternity does not have this daunting temporal component. It must be conceived in an entirely different manner. After death, the separated soul is no longer limited in time by dependence on its physical body. Through infused knowledge from God, the soul can know instantly that which would take much time to assimilate during bodily life.

Since time and eternity are incommensurable, it is also conceivable that Mary could actually hear and respond in the eternal now of eternity “after” the many billions of prayers were uttered throughout a lengthy, but limited, duration of earthly human existence.

Since God is entirely outside of time, Mary’s intercession even after temporal occurrence would impact past events. Her actions would produce effects retroactively, since God would know “ahead of time” that she would intervene on someone’s behalf. Literally, Mary would have the rest of eternity in which to address the prayers of her devout believers.

I do not make the mistake here of thinking of eternity as merely endless duration, but rather understand that the soul, even of Mary, that participates in the experience of God’s eternity, does so without the limitations of temporal duration.

One of the reasons we find it so hard to imagine Mary simultaneously knowing so many prayers is that it takes time for us to process such knowledge while in our physical bodies. But, united with God in his eternity, the soul’s knowledge participates without the passage of time, and so, would not be limited as it is in this life as to how many elements could be known “at the same time.” Regardless of the exact way in which time relates to eternity, God can act on the basis of the prayers to Mary, as well as her intercession which God would foresee and apply even to past events.

Third, and finally, just how much diverse knowledge can an individual person possess and respond to simultaneously? Such knowledge could be of immense magnitude. This possibility is drawn from a phenomenon unnoticed by most thinkers, but which is still very real. I take this possibility from what we know about the simplicity of cognition – both at the sensory and intellectual levels. I have written on this topic previously on Strange Notions here and here as well as in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review.

How Immateriality Enables Perception of Wholes

The key insight is that even mere sense perception is based on the immateriality of the knower, since even animals having solely sensory cognitive powers can still know things as unified wholes, that is, all at once. Such unified knowledge of wholes simply cannot be had by any purely physical instrument or mechanism.

Consider how physical instruments store or represent data on an extended medium, such as a computer disk or television screen. Each part of the medium represents one part of the object depicted. For example, to represent an entire carrot on a television screen, the surface of the screen is composed of hundreds of thousands of separate pixels, which are either illuminated or not. Individual pixels know nothing. An entire carrot can be “imaged” by a pattern of thousands of illuminated, but separate, pixels. Yet, the screen itself knows nothing. It takes a living rabbit, with a non-extended sense faculty to see the whole carrot at once as a single object.

The complete explanation is in a Homiletic & Pastoral Review article by me, but here are some of its insights:

 “And yet, our dumb bunny sees a carrot as a whole — with all its parts distinct from its other parts. Seeing something as a whole means apprehending the entire object and all its parts at once (at least as seen from a single perspective) — something no merely physical device can do. And neural patterns in the brain suffer the exact same problem as does a television set, that is, that distinct parts represent distinct parts of the object — be it an image or an externally-sensed object — so that no single part “sees” the whole object apprehended. Attempting to achieve unity would entail collapsing all the distinct parts on top of each other, which would only completely destroy the intelligibility of what was being viewed.”

Since a materialist philosophy depicts a world in which all things are extended in space-time, the fact that animals can sense things as a whole proves that animals must have some immaterial element in them which enables them to sense objects as a whole:

“The basic reason for this inability of material devices to “see” a whole in a unified manner is because every physical entity is extended in space. This means that it can intelligibly depict another object only by having one part of it representing one part of the object and a diverse part representing another part of the object. No single part can “see” the whole. This, in fact, is how artificial recording and observation devices as well as the corresponding neural receptor patterns in biological organisms work. This is true at the macroscopic level, as … [is evident from] … the television example. But, it would also be true at a submicroscopic level (assuming such artificial or natural physical “observation mechanisms” existed.)”

The materialist’s world of purely physical things is not a world in which experience of wholes is possible. Still, animals do experience things as wholes. This means that metaphysical materialism or physicalism is a false philosophy. The existence of certain sentient beings proves that some immaterial realities exist – and they exhibit their reality in cognitive acts of sense perception of wholes, such as is the case with the power of sight.

Role of Immateriality in All Cognition

The argument for sensation’s immateriality is fully developed in my Homiletic & Pastoral Review article. Moreover, I use this necessary immateriality of sense acts to show that the ability to apprehend cognitively many objects -- whether images or concepts or judgments -- in a single unified act is based on the various levels of immateriality of the involved cognitive faculties.

In one of my Strange Notions articles, I show that this immateriality of cognition is how God is able to know all things in a single unified act which is the divine essence:

“What has all this to do with God’s ability to know and to cause the near infinite multiplicity of the created world? Simply this. While we do not know exactly how the immateriality of God’s or man’s cognition enables them to know multiple, whole objects, or even how animals do it at their own merely sentient level of cognition, still, the fact remains that immateriality is the key to explaining how cognition can unify the complexity of experience into wholes, which can be experienced in a single, unified act of cognition.”

Basic Aristotelian philosophical psychology tells us that, because of the immateriality of their intellective souls, human beings are able to form concepts, make judgments, do reasoning, and understand multiple meanings of words in a single complex thought. This is why we do not say, “I hear all your words,” but “I get your meaning.”

Those meanings may be multiple and complex, but express a unified insight or thought, or even a group of related meanings or thoughts. All this is based on the immateriality of intellectual cognition, whose conceptual content, in turn, is abstracted from the images that arise out of initial sense perception. Still, the human material condition limits the quantity of things we can know simultaneously. On the other hand, God knows all things in a single, simple, eternal intellectual act, which is identical with the divine essence.

Just as immateriality enables animals to perceive sensible wholes in  single act of sense perception and just as God can understand all things in a single act of intellectual apprehension, so too, human beings and other finite intellectual substances (angels) can understand multiple things in a single act. Yet, in man, this ability to understand many things at once is limited by the material condition of his bodily organs.

But How Does Mary Know All Our Prayers?

Still, how does all this explain the fact that the Blessed Virgin can know and respond to hundreds of millions of prayers to her each day? While she was living as an ordinary human being on this earth, she could not do so. That is because physical matter limits the number of things we can know at once, even though our ability to do so in a unified way still demonstrates the immateriality of our cognitive powers.

The body that limits the soul in its intellectual activities. This limitation arises particularly because of the dependence of the intellect on the phantasm or image during the thought process.  And, since the image is apprehended under the conditions of matter, our power to apprehend multiple cognitive objects at once suffers from the limitations of matter. The mere fact that we cannot imagine the apprehension of so many experiences at once underlines the limitations inherent in the sense faculties which are dependent on material organs, since the imagination is an internal sense faculty.

But, after death, the separated soul’s knowledge is directly infused in it by God and no longer depends on the operations of either external or internal sense faculties. After death, the separated soul no longer learns through sense experience. After death, God can infuse into the soul multiple cognitive objects at once with virtually no limit other than the soul’s own inherent finitude.

“Just as animals and man can do this at our own finite and limited levels, by way of transcendent analogy, the same explanation must be applied to God so as to render intelligible how he can know all things and cause all things, even in their near infinite multiplicity – all the while remaining absolutely simple and undivided in himself. We do not need to know exactly how he does this, any more than we need to know how we do it – in order to know that it is true (1) that it happens and (2) that it can happen solely because of the immateriality of the cognitive powers involved.”

But, to return to our theme about the ability of Mary to answer a multitude of prayers, all we need know is that (1) freedom from matter is the key to knowing multiple sensory or intellectual objects at once, and (2) that once freed from the limitations of the body, the immaterial soul can know as many cognitive objects at once as God chooses to infuse into it. Hence, both Mary and the saints can have virtually unlimited knowledge of particular things at once, that is, in a single, unified experience – just as God can know all things in a single, unified experience.

While this may also be true of the other saints, who now exist as separated souls in a purely spiritual state, consider the following curious objection. Since Mary is dogmatically defined as having received a glorified body already in Heaven, would not that body, in virtue of its materiality, prevent her from knowing what lesser saints can now know in virtue of their purely immaterial condition?

Now, it may be true that Mary would be limited as to her knowledge insofar as it is gained through the operations of her glorified body’s senses. But, this in no way prevents God from directly infusing into her mind virtually unlimited intellectual and even sense knowledge, which is not dependent for its origination upon the function of bodily organs.

In this life, all knowledge comes through the senses and is limited in the conceptual order by the material phantasms which the body enables the imagination to form. It is understandable that these inherently material limitations as to how we learn and know things in this life would be superseded once the soul if freed from such intimate dependence on material organs, such as the brain. Such independence is easily achieved once God directly infuses knowledge, such as when he gives to Mary and the saints direct knowledge of the prayers of men – entirely independent of the role of the various sense organs of the body.

Conclusion

Therefore, whether (1) God answers the prayers of the faithful on behalf of Mary in her stead, or (2) Mary has an unlimited eternity in which to respond to prayers offered to her by humans living in time, or (3) Mary has virtually unlimited ability to know all prayers offered to her, because God directly infuses that knowledge into her intellect without dependence on the limitations of bodily senses, or (4) in virtue of some combination of the first three alternatives, the objection of the skeptics, who claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary cannot attend to massive numbers of prayers at once, is refuted.

What happens when an atheist doctor and historian is given access to the Vatican’s Secret Archives to investigate miracle claims? Just such a thing happened in the early 2000s, and both the story behind it, and the doctor’s conclusions, are worth recounting.

Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a hematologist (M.D.) and historian (Ph.D.), was the Hannah Chair of the History of Medicine at Queen’s University from 1988 until 2017, and she’s served as both the President of the American Association for the History of Medicine and Canadian Society for the History of Medicine. It was in her role as a hematologist (a blood doctor) that she got involved with miracles in the first place, as she would later recount:

About twenty years ago, in my capacity as a hematologist, I was invited to read a set of bone-marrow aspirates “blind,” without being given any clinical details or the reason why. The fourteen specimens had been taken from one patent over an eighteen-month period. Using the microscope, I found this to be a case of severe acute leukemia with a remission, a relapse, and another remission. I assumed that the patient must be dead, and the review was for a lawsuit. Only much later did I learn, to my great surprise, that the patient was (and is) still alive. Although she had accepted aggressive chemotherapy in a university hospital, she attributed her recovery to the intercession of Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, a Montreal woman who had died two hundred years earlier. This case became the capstone in the cause for Youville’s canonization as the first Canadian-born saint. Again, I was surprised.

This experience, and the Vatican’s invitation to come to the canonization of St. Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, piqued Dr. Duffin’s interest. She asked for, and received, access to the Vatican’s Secret Archives, containing “the documentation on more than 600 miracles pertaining to 333 different canonization or beatifications from 1600 to 2000,” including at least one miracle for almost every canonization since the early seventeenth century. As a non-believer who was new to this, she wanted to know what the process was like: how medically serious were (and are) the Vatican investigations? And how unusual was it that Youville’s canonization involved the testimony of a non-believing physician?Many people assume that belief in miracles is anti-scientific. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins mocked the idea of miracles, and declared them (by definition!) to be against science:

I suspect that alleged miracles provide the strongest reason many believers have for their faith; and miracles, by definition, violate the principles of science. […] The last King of the Belgians is a candidate for sainthood, because of his stand on abortion. Earnest investigations are now going on to discover whether any miraculous cures can be attributed to prayers offered up to him since his death. I am not joking. That is the case, and it is typical of saint stories. I imagine the whole business is an embarrassment to more sophisticated circles within the Church.

This is characteristic of Dawkins’ approach: he laughs at an idea he’s incapable of actually refuting. He simply asserts that miracles “violate the principles of science” without specifying which principles or why, and then holds the whole thing up to laugh at with a sort of “can-you-believe-it” mockery… even though his own account suggests an approach resembling that of science. Dawkins’ argument amounts to saying that if a doctor says “let’s try Drug X and see if it has any effect on the patient’s disease,” that’s respectable science, but if someone says, “let’s pray to Baudouin for his intercession, and see if it has any effect on the patient’s disease,” that’s silly! The only problem is that, amidst his sneering, he forgets to actually give us any reason why. We’re just left with the blanket assertion that the sacred Principles of Science have been somehow violated.

Contrast this with what Dr. Duffin found when she actually examined the centuries’ worth of medical records related to miracle cases. Her findings were originally presented in a Presidential Address that she delivered to the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A revised version of these remarks were published in the Winter 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine under the name The Doctor was Surprised; or, How to Diagnose a Miracle. The whole report is worth a read, and includes several interesting details:

• The way that “new technologies appear in the Vatican records soon after their invention” (in other words, that miracle investigations were relying on the best medicine available at the time);
• The crucial role that medical experts play throughout the whole history of these miracle investigations;
• The use of non-practicing and non-Catholic medical experts, dating back at least to the Middle Ages;
• The high standard to which medical testimony was required to comport (for instance, an apparent miracle in 1906 involving the healing of a 49 year-old nun was treated as inconclusive because the treating physician failed to order a bacteriological examination on the pleural effusion to confirm his clinical diagnosis of tuberculosis).

Dr. Duffin concluded:

With codification of the Consulta Medica of the Vatican in 1949, the gold standard of a miracle cure entrenched three specific characteristics: that the healing be complete, durable, and instantaneous. [….]

Gradually, I began to understand that the process cannot proceed without the testimony of a physician. The doctor need not believe in miracles, the doctor need not be Roman Catholic, nor even a Christian – but the doctor must fill two absolutely essential roles.

The first role is to declare the prognosis hopeless even with the best of the art. This rigorous duty is built into the drama of every final illness. Many of the miracle healings occurred in people who had already received the last rites. No doctor – be she religious or atheist – takes that decision lightly; nor can it be taken in private. As a result, it becomes a public admission of medical failure, available for corroboration in a distant future. Its credibility resides on trust in the physician’s acumen: the diagnosis and prognosis must have been corrected; the learning and experience, solid. Treating physicians who happened to be academics held great sway over the proceedings. A doctor is a good witness, not for being a good Catholic, or a believer in miracles, but for being demonstrably skilled in medical science.

The second role, which is equally, if not more, important to the recognition of a miracle, is to express surprise at the outcome. And here’s the rub – although the doctors must have used the best scientific medicine available, they can take no credit for the cure. A religious miracle defies explanation by science. Traditionally arrogant, medicine must confess its ignorance. [….] For the Vatican, miracles occur when the patient recovers from certain death or permanent disability, following excellent, up-to-date medical care which the doctor claims had nothing to do with the cure. To turn a familiar phrase on its head: the doctor must say “the operation was a failure, but the patient lived.” And only the doctor can say it.

Unless one arbitrarily defines science as denying miracles, the entire investigation into whether a particular healing is or isn’t a miracle is a scientific question, just as much as the question of whether or not a particular healing is a full recovery or only a temporary remission. The same techniques, the same methodology, is used in both.

Duffin noticed what Dawkins was too bigoted to see: that both medicine and science are looking at the same problems, along parallel and complementary lines. When the Church declares that a particular event was miraculous, it’s not just on the basis of faith. It’s after carefully reviewing the relevant medical information, and in light of the latest and best medical technology. Rather than contradicting the principles of science, this is a healthy integration of science and faith, and her research into the process led Dr. Duffin to say, “though still an atheist, I believe in miracles—wondrous things that happen for which we can find no scientific explanation.”

Although this article will address the content of certain theological doctrines, it is written from a purely philosophical perspective. This is the same method used consistently in my book, Origin of the Human Species, in which I examine how evolutionary theory comports with divine revelation and philosophy. What characterizes philosophical analysis of theological doctrine is that reason alone is the method employed. Thus, while the philosopher as such cannot say whether the Trinity is factual, he can still examine whether it appears rationally possible.

The Scandalous Problem

Here I will examine the theological doctrine of hell to see whether it is compatible with the God of classical theism, who is claimed to be all good, all loving, and all merciful.

Many skeptics seem to think it is obvious that an all good and loving God could not possibly consign a fallible human being to the unimaginable, interminable, excruciating pain of physical fire and other torments in the form of punishment known as hell – a sanction for sin from which there is no appeal and no hope of future release. Surely, no good God and no compassionate human being could possibly even contemplate such unmerciful treatment of a human soul, merely because she made errors of choice during a single short lifetime.

One Aspect of the Solution

I do not intend to address every possible solution to this specific variation of the well-known problem of evil – a topic I have dealt with in more general terms elsewhere. Among possible solutions, it is argued that God permits evils, including physical suffering, for some greater good, which the human mind cannot grasp. Since metaphysics proves that God is all good, it necessarily follows that any evil found in the world cannot be his fault. Perhaps, the misuse of free will by certain creatures (angelic or human) has led to the introduction of evils unintended by God. Perhaps, man’s misuse of free will calls forth from divine retributive justice a punishment which seems severe, but which must be measured in terms of the infinite goodness which grievous sins offend – thus requiring the eternal pains of hell as a just punishment.

Pointedly, since God is the transcendent Law Giver, he is not bound by the natural laws that apply to creatures. Rather, it belongs exclusively to him to administer retributive justice to those who violate his laws – natural and divine. This means that it is good that God punish the wicked as part of his overall plan of creating and governing a good and just world.

But Why the Pains of Hell?

Still, I focus here on the specific question posed by some skeptics as to why an all good God would submit departed souls to eternal physical pain and suffering, even in its most agonizing form of physical fire?

Certainly, it appears at first glance that such suffering is nothing but an act of pure vengeance on the part of God. Indeed, does not Scripture declare, “Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord”¹? But, how can revenge be reconciled with the concept of a loving God?

Yet, while revenge is not an act permitted to mere mortals, it does have a legitimate meaning properly reserved to God as the ultimate administrator of retributive justice. Retributive justice is not just “getting back” at someone, but the restoration of the proper order of things – an order in which each person gets exactly what he deserves, including proper punishment for his evil deeds. Moreover, it must be understood that this right belongs in its highest instance to God alone as creator and supreme lawgiver.

Should such retributive justice include the fire of hell? And, if so, how can this be reconciled with the belief that God is all good and loving and merciful?

The Specific Solution

Most skeptics’ accusations against the punishments of hell are made on the supposition that even the Christian understanding of creation does not justify such eternal sufferings.

I will show that this divine retribution is consistent with the general order of creation presented in Christian sources as well as with the infinite goodness, justice, and mercy of the God of classical theism.

Among the central doctrines of Christianity is that man’s last end – the ultimate purpose of his very being – is to be united with God for all eternity in a face to face encounter with the divine being, what Catholics call the Beatific Vision.

But, in this present life, we do not enjoy the Beatific Vision. Does that mean that we are already in hell? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we are presently lacking the ultimate end of God’s intention in creating our nature. But, more importantly, we are not now in hell, in the sense that this is neither a punishment nor necessarily an eternal condition.

The essential meaning of hell is (1) that we finally understand fully that the Beatific Vision is the sole reason for our creation as human beings and the sole thing fully worth accomplishing in our existence, (2) to know that this end will for all eternity be denied to us, and (3) to know that this ultimate failure of our existential purpose is totally and completely our own fault and no one else’s.

All this being the case, why does not God simply punish bad lives by letting us merely fail to accomplish our intended final bliss in exactly the manner just described? Why is the threat of extreme physical punishment seemingly arbitrarily and capriciously attached to this natural spiritual sanction for a wicked life?

Man is a Rational Animal

Man’s uniqueness is that his spiritual, rational soul is embodied in an animal nature. Being an animal means that our nature is that of a sentient organism. We have senses. Our sensitive appetites help us achieve the good of the individual and of the species by making us seek sensible goods and avoid sensible evils. The natural good that accompanies attaining the sensible good is pleasure. The natural evil that accompanies experiencing sensible evil is pain. Thus, we are strongly motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

It is not merely man’s spiritual soul that is aimed at his last end, but rather it is his whole human nature – spirit and matter, soul and body – that either attains his last end or fails to attain it through his own fault.

For this reason, we should not be surprised to discover an important role is played by bodily sense knowledge with respect to how and whether man reaches his last end, the Vision of God.

If we believed that missing our last end meant merely never seeing God in his very essence – never having the Beatific Vision, that might not be a sufficient reason for many people to lead virtuous lives. Such a “purely spiritual” motivation might not move us the way that we, like other animals, can be intensely motivated by desire for pleasure and, even more so, fear of agonizing pain!

Many would say that they do not presently miss God’s presence all that much in this life anyway, so why worry about missing him permanently in the next? In truth, we are not moved decisively in this present life toward God in all our choices -- despite many of us knowing, in theory at least, that he is the highest good.

In a word, to many people in this life, if all they thought the end of life entailed was attainment of the Vision of God, they might well be inclined to forgo that final destiny, since they would easily not value it as much as the earthly pleasures they know would never lead them to such alleged heavenly bliss!

But God made man to fear physical pain – and properly so, since it moves us to avoid dangers to our well-being both as individuals and for the sake of our species’ survival.

Therefore, it makes eminent sense that God would use man’s intense fear of great pain to motivate him to reach his last end. Once in the next life, man will clearly know the value of the spiritual reward of the Beatific Vision. Those who fail to attain that true last end through their own fault will then have the appalling realization of failing to attain the very purpose of their existence. But, in this life, the intensity of most human beings’ motivation is focused on sensible rewards and punishments, on pleasure and pain.

Thus, the realistic possibility of knowing that we may fall through grave sin into an eternal pit of most intense physical pain would be, for most mortal men, the strongest possible motivation to live an essentially good life – a life best ordered to avoiding the physical suffering of eternal damnation.

God's Love

Is letting sinners go to hell then truly an act of simple retributive justice on the part of God? Is God seeking merely to punish their moral evil by allowing them to fall into the pits of hell?

On the contrary, it is the greatest act of love on God’s part to make certain that men are motivated as strongly as possible to seek and attain what is, in truth and in fact, the greatest possible happiness -- the eternal Beatific Vision.

In other words, we humans do not properly value what will make us happiest in the long run, and thus, through our own craven ignorance of proper goods, fail to attain the perfect bliss God wills for all men in his act of creating them. Hence, God makes certain that we are properly motivated to seek our true and most perfect end, by graphically placing before us the sensible horror that confronts those who willfully fail to attain their proper last end.

But Most People Don't Even Believe in Hell!

That is quite true. And, even among those who should do so – based on their religion’s public doctrines, a large number do not believe in hell’s physical reality. Of the roughly 7.6 billion people on Earth as of 2018, about 55% belong to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam – all of which religions have some real notion of hell. That makes for some four billion people. If even half of this total take the torments of hell seriously, as probably do, that makes a total of about two billion people – or roughly a quarter of the world’s population – that believes in the real pains of hell.

Therefore, a good portion of humanity is motivated by the physical pains of hell to seek salvation seriously. Fear of hell can well be the beginning motivation that leads one to those religious practices, which, in turn, may lead to a more mature and deeper appreciation that one’s highest motivation should be, not fear of hell, but love of God because of his infinite goodness and perfection.

St. Thomas makes much the same point: “From becoming accustomed to avoid evil and fulfill what is good, on account of the fear of punishment, one is sometimes led on to do so likewise, with delight and of one's own accord. Accordingly, the law, even through punishing, leads men to being good.” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 92, a. 2, ad 4.)²

Thus, the fear of hell may set one on a path leading to virtuous living for its own sake. This, in turn, can lead to the true understanding that union with God is the essence of heaven and our proper last end.

While eternal life for the inhabitants of paradise in Islam is usually associated with sensual pleasures, Islamic teaching also affirms that “the most acceptable of them with God shall look upon His face night and morning.” (Al-Qiyama 75:22,23)

In other words, for at least a quarter of mankind, belief in a literal physical hell serves the purpose of leading men in the direction of virtuous living. The net effect of this motivation toward salvation would naturally also lead many to understand the true value of our last end as being the Vision of God. From this would naturally also result an increasing number of souls seeking to please God by living more and more holy lives, that is, to achieve genuine sanctity.

Thus, if one wonders why God would make the torments of hell central to the beliefs of what is, de facto, only, perhaps, a quarter of mankind today, the answer might just be that God is actually concerned with the spiritual quality of human perfection. That is, God may be concerned not merely with the quantity of the saved, but also with the qualitative perfection to be found among those who are saved.

Oddly enough, while beliefs about the eternal torments of hell are used by skeptics as reason to disbelieve in God’s goodness, those same beliefs may motivate far greater numbers of souls to follow an upward journey of religious understanding that leads them eventually to the most holy religious insights and practice, that is, to sanctity itself.

In a word, the doctrine of hell creates a world designed to produce the greatest of saints – a qualitatively more perfect end than might otherwise be possible without hell. It is perfectly within the prerogative of God to design his creation so as to produce the most spiritually perfect creatures. Since the fear of hell, a hell which is licit in itself as a form of divine retributive justice, can serve as a licit means to that more perfect end, it is fully justified.

The Doctrine of Hell and Free Will

The Catholic Church dogmatically defines that those who die in a personal grievous sin descend immediately into hell³ and that the punishment of hell lasts for all eternity.⁴ Nonetheless, while the majority of traditional theologians do believe hell to entail a physical fire, it also remains true that the Church has never condemned the speculation that hell’s “fire” is constituted of purely spiritual pain, such as exclusion from the Beatific Vision and the pangs of conscience.⁵

Moreover, the Catechism of the Catholic Church declares that this “exclusion” from the Beatific Vision is essentially a form of “self-exclusion.”⁶ Such self-exclusion is expressed by Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost, when he proclaims, “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.” It is a measure of final obstinacy and pride that refuses to abandon serious sin and accept divine forgiveness.

It is true that the rational appetite, or will, must always choose the good. But does that mean that no free person in full possession of his faculties could refuse the highest good, God himself, so as to “self-exclude” himself from heaven and go to hell as a result?

This question reveals a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the rational appetite or free will. The good is defined as being as desirable. So, the rational appetite naturally desires every possible good. That is to say, the will is necessitated to seek the universal good or happiness. But the human will does not desire any particular good – no concrete good or action – necessarily in this life, since particular goods are good under one aspect, but not under another.⁷

Finite goods can always be refused, since there are elements of imperfection about them which may be possessed by some other goods. Hence, we choose between various goods, like chocolates in a box, where each has qualities lacked by others and vice versa – thereby, forcing us to choose between them.

But with regard to direct knowledge of God in his essence, St. Thomas Aquinas concludes that “the will of him who sees God in his essence of necessity adheres to God, just as now we desire of necessity to be happy.”⁸ (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 82, a. 2, c.)

God is known in his essence solely in the Beatific Vision. Yet, it is self-evident that the final refusal or acceptance of God must take place before God is embraced fully or rejected completely. Hence, God is not known in his very essence before the soul reaches heaven. What the soul knows before that time must then be some finite good, such as knowing the truth that God is the highest good. But, any finite good can be refused.

The problem is that we often choose lesser and improper goods even when we know that they are opposed to God’s law or to God himself – or even to our own true good! In fact, the very basis of our experience of free will is the fact that we can choose between various finite goods and even choose sinful goods that we know are opposed to the true good, or even the goodness of God himself!

Unfortunately, this is precisely why a hardened sinner, who still has essential possession of his rational faculties, can freely exclude himself from heaven by stubbornly rejecting the law of God or even some finite representation of divine majesty and love -- even on his deathbed.

How Many Are Lost?

But how many people actually go to hell? On that question, the closest the official Magisterium comes to offering an answer is found in the encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, in which he suggests that, while a few souls go directly to heaven and a few go directly to hell, the “great majority of people” go to a place of temporary purification before entering the Vision of God, the place Catholics call “purgatory.”⁹

Curiously, even Islamic writings seem to have some notion of limited duration of punishment in hell, a concept similar to the Catholic conception of purgatory. Indeed, one optimistic text proclaims that almost all people will be removed from this state of suffering:  “From every one thousand, take out nine-hundred-and ninety-nine.” (Bukhari 4:567)

Since there is no way to be certain just how many, if any, souls actually go to hell, it is also possible that those who – through no fault of their own – are ignorant of its existence, may find themselves more likely to end up in some form of purgatory, rather than hell itself.

Conclusion

On careful reflection, the notion of hell as a place of eternal punishment for the souls of the wicked after death turns out to be (1) a just application of retributive justice by a Divine Lawgiver who stands ontologically above the natural law of his creation, (2) a natural sanction that is actually self-imposed by a will stubbornly opposed to the righteous laws of Infinite Goodness, and (3) a powerful tool designed to use the natural avoidance of pain – both spiritual and physical – as a motive to follow God’s laws and prepare souls for a spiritual ascendancy leading to the direct vision of God himself, which is man’s perfect happiness.

Hell, then, is not something evil in itself, but a natural byproduct of the order of being, one which aids in bringing many human beings to the highest state of natural – or even supernatural – perfection through holiness of life. God’s divine providence aims to produce the happiest creatures possible.

One of the arguments against religion is that it’s a social construction – that is, that religion (particularly, belief in an interventionist or “moralistic” god, meaning a god interested in human affairs and morality) is something invented by society, in order to regulate its citizenry. One of the best arguments in favor of this is that more developed societies have more developed religious systems, and are more likely to believe in a god who cares about morality:

This has led to a chicken-and-egg question: does a “pro-social” religion (that is, a religion whose morality is conducive towards healthy social conduct) help to cause the rise of complex societies, or does the rise of such a state help to cause the rise of pro-social religion?

As PBS notes, dozens of studies throughout the 2000s pointed to the former answer: moral religion seems to have come first, and complex society followed. But a new study, published in Nature, argues the opposite: that complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. In other words, only once a society hits about a population of about 1 million do we see widespread belief in a god interested in moral questions.

This result is much ballyhooed, because it seems to suggest that moral religion is just a social construct – the State (or at least social forces) need to police their people, and so they start saying “God doesn’t want you to misbehave,” and boom, moral religion is born. But there are a few problems:

1. The Nature article is extremely premature. Joe Henrich, chair of Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, said “These guys were a little bit quick on the draw with putting this paper out because the data is largely not checked.” That’s a diplomatic way of putting it. The claims behind the Nature study require careful historical examination of thousands of ancient texts to determine age and whether or not the text implies moral religion. As PBS notes, actually doing that research carefully will take years.
2. Forward bias. There’s a related problem with dating. Let’s say you find a manuscript from the 4th century. Does that mean that it’s the version handwritten by the original author? Frequently, what we have are copies of copies – whatever happened to have been written on a reliable material (like papyrus) and stored in the right climate (like a cave in Egypt, where it won’t be impacted by the elements). The vast majority of what human beings have written throughout history has probably been destroyed. Back in 2012, a small Greek fragment was discovered of St. Justin Martyr’s First Apology. Justin Martyr wrote his text between A.D. 155-157. The scrap that was discovered dates to the 300s. But here’s the crucial thing: until that point, the oldest copy we had of that document was from more than a thousand years later. Why does that matter? Because the society-came-first hypothesis falls completely apart if it turns out that moral religion is older than the fragments we have.
3. The anti-religion conclusions don’t follow. Let’s say that it’s true that moral religion doesn’t really spread until a society’s population hits a million people or so. (Again, it’s quite premature for that, but let’s assume for the sake of argument). Does it follow that religion is just a social construct? Not at all. Think about it this way: science doesn’t really take off until society hits a certain point of complexity, advancement, and stability. When a society is spending its time avoiding getting eaten by tigers, they’re not pondering the Big Questions of life, or at least, they’re not taking the time to write those down and preserve them. So (despite the ballyhoo) very little about the truth or falsity of religion or science can be proven from the dating question.

To look at it from another angle, as communities develop, they’re more likely to believe in a moral god… but that’s only true to a certain point. Extremely large societies actually get a little less religious. So one could just as easily argue that irreligion is a “social construct” (or deconstruction) for particularly powerful countries. And it’s easy to come up with theories about this: powerful empires want single-minded obedience to the state and political rulers, not to the gods or religious leaders. But notice that these are just ways of impugning peoples’ motives for belief or disbelief – they tell us preciously little about the question that really matters… whether or not religion is TRUE.

The closest we get to that, at least in the PBS article, comes from the anthropologist Peter Peregrine, who says “There are no societies that are a-religious. Belief in the supernatural, in a spiritual world is a fundamental human feature. It’s part of the human condition.” This creates a real pickle for atheists. If you try to explain away this innate belief structure evolutionarily, that our minds believe a falsehood like religion because it’s beneficial for group survival, you’re undermining the reliability of the mind. In other words, if you’re using your mind to say that your mind is hardwired to believe convenient fictions, is there any reason to believe that religion is the fiction, and not your waving it away?

Fr. (now Bishop) Robert Barron points out a fascinating argument that Pope Benedict XVI made, pointing in this same direction:

Ratzinger commences with the observation that finite being, as we experience it, is marked, through and through, by intelligibility, that it is to say, by a formal structure that makes it understandable to an inquiring mind. In point of fact, all of the sciences – physics, chemistry, psychology, astronomy, biology, and so forth – rest on the assumption that at all levels, microscopic and macroscopic, being can be known. The same principle was acknowledged in ancient times by Pythagoras, who said that all existing things correspond in numeric value, and in medieval times by the scholastic philosophers who formulated the dictum omne ens est scibile (all being in knowable).

 

Ratzinger argues that the only finally satisfying explanation for this universal objective intelligibility is a great Intelligence who has thought the universe into being. Our language provides an intriguing clue in this regard, for we speak of our acks of knowledge as moments of “recognition,” literally a re-cognition, a thinking again what has already been thought. Ratzinger cites Einstein in support of this connection: “in the laws of nature, a mind so superior is revealed that in comparison, our minds are as something worthless.” The prologue to the Gospel of John states, “In the beginning was the Word,” and specifies that all things came to be through this divine Logos, implying thereby that the being of the universe is not dumbly there, but rather intelligently there, imbued by a creative mind with intelligible structure.

In other words, all science presupposes that the universe is intelligible and that our minds are sufficiently reliable that we can make sense of this intelligibility. The universe has a “language” all its own (which points to a Creator) and our minds are capable of speaking this language (which also points to a Creator). To reject the mind as unreliable doesn’t just undermine religion – it undermines all science and all knowledge, which ends up being self-refuting.

So you are left with either saying that the mind is reliable, which means we should listen to its religious impulse, or the mind is unreliable, in which case how are you sure you should trust anything (your senses, your belief in science, your rejection of religion, or even your belief that the mind is unreliable, etc.?).

I spend a lot of time criticizing contemporary Christian apologetics. Since I am myself a Christian apologist, that might seem a bit strange. But it is, in fact, simply a practical outworking of my commitment to what I call the 50/50 Rule:

50/50 rule: devote as much time to (a) defending the beliefs of your opponents and critiquing your own beliefs as you devote to (b) critiquing the beliefs of your opponents and defending your own beliefs. (Read more here)

In short, the 50/50 rule is an attempt to embody the Golden Rule in civil discourse by debating and dialoguing with others the way you’d have them debate and dialogue with you.

With that in mind, this article is focused on a type of self-critique, though in this case not specifically critique of my beliefs, per se, but rather of some weaknesses in current Christian apologetics more generally. And so, without further ado, I will now count down the top five problems with contemporary Christian apologetics.

5. Lack of imagination

I’ve touched on this problem before in the article “Apologetics and the Problem of the William Lane Craig Clones.” The basic problem is that there is an inordinate focus on a limited set of arguments and topics. For example, while I think the Kalam cosmological argument and the argument from intelligent design are both interesting and well worth debating, they both receive excessive attention at the expense of many other worthwhile arguments.

This is not a new problem: in the above-linked article on the “Craig Clones”, I make reference to a famous paper by Alvin Plantinga from more than thirty years ago in which he challenged Christian philosophers to explore more arguments and lines of evidence for theistic and Christian belief. And I’ve certainly tried to do that in my own works as in my defense of an argument from answered prayer (in God or Godless) and an argument from the mathematical structure of reality (in An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar).

One of the points I’ve often strived to emphasize is that the strength of arguments is always contextualized. I summarize the point in 59 seconds here. In that brief, 59-second treatment, I point out that good arguments must be accessible and persuasive. But both accessibility and persuasiveness are relative to individuals and that means we should be seeking to explore and develop more diverse arguments for our views. Most skeptics are already familiar with the Kalam and intelligent design arguments. So perhaps it is time to explore some other arguments that might find a more welcoming reception.

4. Excessive Focus on Debate

These days, so much of apologetics is focused on debates. When I first got into apologetics in the early-mid 1990s, it was primarily by way of watching VHS cassettes of William Lane Craig debates from our university library. Everybody loves a good dust-up, right?

Perhaps, but on the downside, the entire debate format tends to reinforce tribalism (more on that anon), competition, and spin-doctoring/motivated reasoning to the end of winning the debate. Set against that backdrop, is it any surprise that both sides often think they “won”? For further discussion of this problem, see my article “The Problem with Debates.”

3. Lack of Focus on Emotional Intelligence

I find that many amateur apologists focus a lot of effort studying arguments and evidence, memorizing various formal and informal logical fallacies. But they spend little time pursuing the emotional intelligence required to read a room, to identify the intended audience of an exchange, and to present oneself in a savvy and winsome manner so as to appear persuasive to that audience.

In my opinion, every apologist should put some readings on emotional intelligence and persuasion psychology on their reading list. What good is it if you win every argument but lose your audience?

2. Tribalism

Tribalism refers to heightened in-group loyalty to the point of discouraging critiques of in-group members and their arguments. Thus, time and again I encounter atheists and skeptics who are surprised that I devote significant time to critiquing various aspects of Christian apologetics. Consider, for example, my extensive and unsparing critiques of William Lane Craig’s defense of the Canaanite genocide or my critique of Andy Bannister’s claim that a recognition of human dignity requires belief in God.

While people are often puzzled that I would critique Christian apologists like Craig and Bannister, the fact is that Christian apologetics is not served by remaining silent when you disagree with the arguments of your fellow Christians. And when we challenge those on “our side” who offer dubious arguments, we undermine tribalism and raise our own credibility as honest and fair-minded people who really care about getting at the truth rather than merely reinforcing tribal boundaries.

1. Fundamentalism

This is the biggest problem, in my view. And it is exemplified in Josh and Sean McDowell’s recently published new edition of Evidence that Demands a Verdict. (I review the book here.) In that review, I define fundamentalism as follows:

“When I use the term, I intend to signal a position that evinces a particular set of characteristics commonly associated with the Protestant fundamentalism that arose a century ago and which has remaind [sic] a significant force among North American Protestants for the last several decades. These characteristics include biblicism, biblical literalism, rationalism, triumphalism, and binary oppositionalism.”

In my experience, most (Protestant) apologists either lack any formal theological study or their only exposure to Christian theology is through fundamentalist theologians (e.g. Wayne Grudem) and conservative institutions (e.g. Biola University).

As a result, many of these individuals end up with a narrow understanding of the Christian tradition which is manifested in a tendentious understanding of “biblical inerrancy”, a skepticism of evolution and contemporary science, a simplistic soteriological exclusivism, a single theory of atonement (penal substitution) and posthumous judgment (eternal conscious torment), and so on.

And the next step is that these apologists often confuse and conflate their own Protestant fundamentalist tradition with the broader Christian tradition. (For a particularly telling example, see my review of the book An Introduction to Christian Worldview.) But the Christian tradition is far broader and more nuanced than many Christian apologists realize. In short, they have yet to understand, let alone defend, that which C.S. Lewis called mere Christianity.

I was five years old, sitting in the back of our Oldsmobile when my mom turned around and told me that I needed to choose between Jesus and the devil. Whoa, sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?! Looking back, I probably wouldn’t have presented the decision quite like that. (My mom probably would agree.) But be that as it may, those were the options presented to me. And the decision I made that day initiated a journey into Christian faith which has continued now for forty years.

What’s So Confusing About Grace?

One thing I know after four decades: grace is definitely amazing.

One other thing I know: it’s also confusing, so confusing, in fact, that I wrote the new book What’s So Confusing About Grace? to serve as a chronicle of my forty years attempting to understand the precise nature and boundaries of salvation.

Let’s start with the question of belief: what do you need to believe to be saved? For starters, must one believe that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9)? If you do need to believe that then is that all you need to believe? Or are there additional doctrines that are required as well? And if there are, what exactly are those additional doctrines? Does salvation require belief in the Trinity, the incarnation, or the second coming of Christ, for example?

The questions also extend to ethics. Must you live a certain way if you are to be saved, doing particular good works and avoiding particular “mortal” sins? And if so, which good works must you do and which mortal sins must you avoid in order to be saved?

And are these requirements the same for everyone? Do they apply to infants and small children? Or is there a threshold (the 13^th birthday, perhaps) at which point these demands suddenly apply?

And does God “grade on a curve” in consideration of factors like a hard life and low intelligence? Or does he demand the same belief and practice of everyone? Does he demand the same of an Australian aboriginal who lived five hundred years ago as he demands of the housewife who attends First Baptist in Louisville? Or does God adjust his requirements over time and place?

And why isn’t any of this any clearer?

Like I said, grace is confusing. At least that much is clear.

The 33,000 Objection

It should be no surprise that skeptics have identified this lack of clarity as grounds to reject Christianity.  And it is at this point that the topic becomes a matter not just for theological reflection but also for apologetic concern.

The resulting objection comes in different forms. According to one version, what I call the “33,000 Objection to Christianity,” the problem cashes out like this:

“You think Christianity is true? Okay then, which Christianity? After all, there are 33,000 of them!”

While the 33,000 Objection is rarely stated with more precision than this, there is a substantial objection behind that incredulous rejoinder. And it’s worth teasing out that objection because it consists of a serious undercutting defeater to Christianity.

In case you’re wondering, a defeater is an objection to a proposition (i.e. counterevidence which purports to “defeat” that proposition). There are two kinds of defeaters: rebutting and undercutting. While a rebutting defeater seeks to provide evidence to believe that a proposition is false, an undercutting defeater aims to undermine one’s grounds to believe a proposition is true.

In my experience, the 33,000 Objection is typically presented in the mode of an undercutting defeater: by pointing out the many disagreements that exist among self-described Christians as regards belief and practice, the objector aims to undercut one’s basis to accept any single one of those versions as true.

The Confusing Revelation Objection

While the 33,000 Objection is a significant challenge worth considering, in the remainder of this article I want to consider a second objection, one that seeks to turn the diversity of Christian belief and practice into a rebutting defeater to the truth of Christianity generally. I will dub this objection the “Confusing Revelation Objection.” It can be summarized in the following syllogism:

1. Any all-knowing, perfectly wise, and perfectly good being will be maximally clear in revealing precisely what salvation requires in terms of belief and practice.
2. God is all knowing, perfectly wise, and perfectly good.
3. Therefore, God will be maximally clear in revealing precisely what salvation requires in terms of belief and practice.
4. The Christian revelation is not maximally clear in revealing precisely what salvation requires in terms of belief and practice.
5. Therefore, God did not reveal the Christian revelation.

In case you’re wondering, the argument does not assume God exists. Rather, it only affirms that if God exists then he did not reveal the Christian revelation.

Again, note the difference in scope between these two objections: while the 33,000 Objection only seeks to undercut one’s ground to accept any particular version of Christianity as true, the Confusing Revelation Objection seeks to provide a reason to believe all versions of Christianity are false. In short, this ambitious argument is definitely worth a rebuttal.

So how might a Christian respond?

The Assumptions Behind the Confusing Revelation Objection

Some Christians might be inclined to reject the fourth premise of the argument by insisting that the Christian revelation is maximally clear regarding what God requires in terms of belief and practice. However, I do not think this line of attack is promising given that, so it seems to me, Christians do, in fact, disagree widely on what is required in terms of belief and practice. In other words, premise four definitely seems plausible.

Fortunately, there is a second potential point of rebuttal. This approach consists of rejecting the first premise. To recap:

1. Any all-knowing, perfectly wise, and perfectly good being will be maximally clear in revealing precisely what salvation requires in terms of belief and practice.

In order to challenge this premise we might begin by asking why people are inclined to believe it is true in the first place.

It seems to me that the plausibility of premise one depends on two assumptions.

To begin with, there is the information assumption according to which revelation is about conveying information, data which is essential to bring the individual into conformity with what God requires. On this account, revelation is like a map directing the proper evacuation procedure in case of fire. Just as a capable map creator would ensure that her map was maximally efficient at directing people to evacuate a building, so any all-knowing, perfectly wise, and perfectly good being would be maximally clear in revealing precisely what salvation requires in terms of belief and practice.

I’m well familiar with the information assumption. Indeed, this idea that revelation is simply about conveying important information was deeply formative in my conservative Protestant upbringing. For example, when I was a kid we described the Bible with the acronym Basic Information Before Leaving Earth. That notion of the Bible as a compilation of information on how best to “leave earth” compares rather neatly with an escape map providing basic information to evacuate a building.

Next up, we have the innocent failure assumption. According to this assumption, if a revelation is not adequately clear then that allows for the possibility that an indeterminate number of individuals could non-culpably fail to acquire the information required to benefit from the revelation.

Consider an analogy: if an exit sign on the highway is not adequately clear (e.g. it is obscured by trees), then an indeterminate number of motorists could non-culpably miss their exit. Whether we’re talking motorists or salvation seekers, these individuals would be innocent of their failures (missing the exit; missing the right beliefs/actions) because these errors would be borne of a mistaken assessment of information that was inadequately presented.

Responding to the Confusing Revelation Objection

If we want to rebut the Confusing Revelation Objection, we should focus on challenging these two underlying assumptions.

I’ll begin by responding to the innocent failure assumption. Here all one needs to do is reject the claim that there is ever any person who non-culpably fails to acquire any information that would be required for salvation.

There are a variety of ways one might flesh out an account along these lines. For example, one could appeal to a “second chance” theology according to which any doctrine which is unclear in this life is presented with sufficient clarity posthumously at which point a person could then offer a fully informed assent or denial. But that’s just one possibility. All we need to affirm at this point is that God would never allow any individual to non-culpably fail to acquire information essential for salvation.

This brings us to the information assumption according to which salvation is essentially about acquiring the “right” set of beliefs and practices. What should we think of this assumption?

At this point I return to the forty year journey chronicled in my book What’s So Confusing About Grace?  And I can say that this journey has made it manifestly clear (to me, at least) that Christianity is not simply a matter of acquiring the right information (doctrines and practices). There is intrinsic value in the journey of attempting to figure out the faith, and that journey is only made possible when a lack of clarity exists.

Imagine that there was unanimity among Christians on how to answer all these questions. Let’s say, for example, that all Christians agreed that a person was required to believe doctrines x, y, and z by their 13^th birthday. This clarity could provide particular goods, but arguably it would also inhibit a deeper growth into faith as parents focused on ensuring their children assented to particular doctrines by the “deadline”.

By contrast, a faith that leaves these matters unclear opens up the space for the natural cultivation of genuine relationship between God and his creatures. For these reasons I conclude that God would have morally sufficient reasons to allow a lack of clarity on many of these questions.

Conclusion

To sum up, we began with the undeniable fact that grace is confusing. That much I will not deny!

Next, I argued that this phenomenon fuels two objections to Christianity: the 33,000 Objection (an undercutting defeater) and the Confusing Revelation Objection (a rebutting defeater). In this article I focused on responding to the Confusing Revelation Objection. I did so first by isolating two underlying assumptions – the information assumption and the innocent failure assumption. Next, I argued that a Christian need not (and indeed should not) accept either assumption.

In conclusion, it seems to me that the Confusing Revelation Objection fails. While the grace of God in Christianity is indeed confusing, that fact does not constitute a viable objection to that revelation.

As is now well known, Mother Teresa of Calcutta suffered severe spiritual afflictions through much of her remarkable life: “This terrible sense of loss – this untold darkness – this loneliness – this continual longing for God.” These first emerged in 2001, but were only fully disclosed with the 2007 publication of her private writings and correspondence in Come Be My Light, edited by Fr Brian Kolodiejchuk MC, the postulator of her cause for canonization.

In these writings, Teresa describes to her confessors and spiritual directors how over long periods, ultimately stretching to over 40 years with only fleeting respites:

"Darkness is such that I really do not see – neither with my mind nor with my reason. – The place of God in my soul is blank. – There is no God in me. – When the pain of longing is so great – I just long & long for God – and then it is that I feel – He does not want me – He is not there…"

Given these startling and graphic admissions from one who whose canonization on Sunday – 19 years after her 1997 death – will be one of the swiftest of modern times, the level of popular and media interest has been considerable. Understandably, Teresa’s words have been widely interpreted as proving her to be an atheist, pure and simple.

The truth is, as ever, far from being so straightforward. And yet there is a qualified, analogical sense in which one can indeed speak of Teresa’s experiential “atheism”. This is the “atheism” of one who acutely, and painfully, perceives God’s seeming absence. Somewhat similar experiences, of one sort or one another, are far from unprecedented within the Christian spiritual tradition. Some of the greatest of saints – John of the Cross, Gemma Galgani, Paul of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, Padre Pio – all reported periods of spiritual desolation or abandonment.

Among the many striking things about Teresa’s “atheism”, particularly noteworthy is quite how early in life she was afflicted by such darkness. While still a Loreto Sister in 1937 – and, indeed, a full nine years before the “call within the call” which would ultimately lead to her founding the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 – she wrote to her former confessor in Albania:

"Do not think that my spiritual life is strewn with roses – that is the flower which I hardly ever find on my way. Quite the contrary, I have more often as my companion ‘darkness’. And when the night becomes very thick – and it seems to me as if I must end up in hell – then I simply offer myself to Jesus. If He wants me to go there – I am ready – but only under the condition that it really makes him happy."

This early statement is far from being as detailed, or as heart-rending, as some of her later ones would be. However, we do see here one of the hallmarks of Teresa’s “atheism”, which will endure alongside even her most tortured avowals of faithlessness to come: an abiding trust in, and abandonment to, the will of God.

Arguably, Teresa’s strongest and most eloquent statement of her darkness, and of the intense suffering which it caused her, comes from 1959:

"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? […] I call, I cling, I want – and there is no One to answer – no One on Whom I cling – no, No One. – Alone. The darkness is so dark – and I am alone. – Unwanted, forsaken. – The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable. – Where is my faith? – Even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness. – My God – how painful is this unknown pain. – It pains without ceasing. – I have no faith. I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart – & make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me – I am afraid to uncover them – because of the blasphemy. – If there be God, please forgive me. – Trust that all will end in Heaven with Jesus. – When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven – there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my soul."

And yet, even here, in the midst of a string of prima facie atheistic statements, one cannot escape from the fact that one is reading a text that is consciously, and unmistakably, a prayer. This much is especially clear from her concluding paragraph:

"If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this – if souls are brought to You – if my suffering satiates Your Thirst – here I am Lord, with joy I accept all to the end of life – & I will smile at Your Hidden Face – always."

In precisely the same way that Jesus's address to “My God, my God” undermines his own declaration of having been “forsaken” (Mark 15.34), Teresa’s paradoxical choice of genre undercuts any unthinking identification of her as an unbeliever.

This realization is not in any way intended to diminish the force of her harrowing experiences. Having at other times in her life felt Jesus’s joyful and loving presence, his subsequent and sustained absences from her interior, spiritual life were all the harder to bear. The same is true, of course, for some of the other mystics mentioned above.

The 16th-century Carmelite poet, St John of the Cross, described his own experiences in similarly evocative terms:

"When this purgative contemplation oppresses a man, he feels very vividly indeed the shadow of death, the sighs of death, and the sorrows of hell, all of which reflect the feeling of God’s absence, of being chastised and rejected by Him, and of being unworthy of Him, as well as the object of his anger. The soul experiences all this and even more, for now it seems that this affliction will last forever."

John famously termed his sense of godforsakenness the “dark night of the soul”, a phrase that is commonly applied to all such episodes within the Christian tradition.

It is worth noting, however, that Teresa herself denied that her own, seemingly similar experiences, were accurately so designated. For Teresa, her own abandonment was not for the purposes of her spiritual purification (as she understood “dark night” to imply), but was instead both an identification with Christ’s passion, and a form of solidarity with the unwanted, unloved, abandoned, and bereft.

What is beyond doubt, though, is that it was her thirst for Christ that motivated and sustained her courageous life of service and devotion. Not finding him in her interior life, she sought out Christ both on the altar and “in His distressing disguise”. Hence as she once put it:

"To those who say they admire my courage, I have to tell them that I would not have any if I were not convinced that each time I touch the body of a leper, a body that reeks with a foul stench, I touch Christ’s body, the same Christ I receive in the Eucharist."

For as Teresa herself once told the superiors of her communities, without alluding to her own experience: “It often happens that those who spend their time giving light to others remain in darkness themselves.”

 
 
This article is adapted from Stephen Bullivant’s “Christian Spirituality and Atheism”, published in Peter Tyler and Richard Woods’s The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian Spirituality. It appeared originally at the Catholic Herald.

A couple weeks ago, we launched an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Dr. Brant Pitre, who is one of today's premier Catholic biblical scholars. His latest book, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Random House, 2016) seeks to debunk skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels put forward today by scholars such as Bart Ehrman.

Hundred of questions poured in and Brant answered as many as he could, sometimes grouping them together where the topics overlapped. Today we share his responses. Enjoy!
 

The Literacy of the Evangelists

Mike: Where/how did the gospel writers learn to write in Greek when they apparently spoke Aramaic and weren't educated men?

Brant Pitre: Great question! First, although a hundred years ago it was widely assumed that all first-century Palestinian Jews spoke only Aramaic, more recent scholarship has shown that the the linguistic situation in first-century Palestine was (at least) trilingual: there is evidence of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic being spoken (see e.g., Stanley Porter).

Second, as Richard Bauckham and other scholars have pointed out, although four of the apostles were “uneducated” fishermen (cf. Acts 4:13), at least one of the apostles was literate: Matthew, the tax-collector, who would have had to be able write tax-documents, probably in both Aramaic and Greek (cf. Matt 9:9; 10:3).

Moreover, from a historical perspective, the illiteracy of the Twelve apostles is largely irrelevant, since of course two of the four Gospels—Mark and Luke—are not even attributed to apostles, but to followers of Peter and Paul. There is certainly no reason to doubt that Luke or Mark could speak and write in Greek, and external evidence as early as Papias of Hierapolis (who knew the apostles personally) is clear that Mark acted as Peter’s scribe or interpreter while he was in Rome.

What about the apostle John? I see no reason to doubt that John was in fact “illiterate” (Acts 4:13). However, after decades of evangelization in Greek cities of Asia Minor, even if John couldn’t write in Greek himself, he could easily have ‘composed’ his gospel by dictating it to a secretary (or ‘amanuensis’) as even literate writers such as Paul, Cicero, and Titus Caesar (!) were known to have done (cf. Rom 16:22; Suetonius, Divus Titus 3.2). In fact, some ancient external evidence claims John’s Gospel was in fact dictated. For more on this, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 1-3.

Eyewitnesses to Jesus? The Memories of Jesus’ Students

Jim Jones: Name one person who met Jesus, spoke to him, saw him, or heard him and who wrote about the event, has a name, and is documented outside of the Bible (or any other gospels).

Brant Pitre: I’ll name two: (1) Matthaios, commonly known as “Matthew,” who was a Jewish tax-collector in Galilee who became one of Jesus’ mathetai or “students,” (commonly known as “disciples”) and was chosen by Jesus as one of the Twelve apostles (see Matt 9:9; 10:1-3); and (2) Iōannēs, commonly known as “John,” who was a Galilean fisherman who also became one of Jesus’ students and was a member of the Twelve (Mark 3:16-19; 14:17-25). According to the unanimous internal evidence of all extant ancient Greek manuscripts (e.g., Papyrus 4, 64, 66, 75, Codex Sinaticius, Vaticanus, etc.) as well as the unanimous external evidence of ancient writers outside the Bible (e.g., Papias of Hierapolis, Irenaeus of Lyons, Muratorian Canon, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, etc.), two of the four gospels were authored by Matthew and John (although Greek Matthew was universally regarded as a translation of a Semitic original).

In fact, the Gospel of John itself explicitly states that it was “written” by the Beloved Disciple, an eyewitness to Jesus who was present at the crucifixion (John 21:20-24, cf. 19:35). As Jesus’ Jewish students, Matthew and John not only would have “met Jesus, spoke to him, saw him and heard him,” they would have lived with Jesus for up to three years, traveling with him everywhere and listening to him teach on a daily basis.

It’s not only Christian sources that attribute the Gospels to eyewitnesses. Even Celsus, the famous 2^nd century pagan apologist and critic of Christianity, could not deny the fact that the Gospels were written by “Jesus’ own pupils and hearers” who left behind “their reminiscences of Jesus in writing” (Origen, Contra Celsus 2.13). Now, one can of course claim that the disciples were liars—and Celsus did—but there is not a shred of text-critical evidence that the Gospels were ever anonymous and no positive historical evidence attributing them to anyone but the apostles and their companions. For more on this topic, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 2-4.

Are the Gospels Biographies?

Jim: To my understanding, there is now reasonable scholarly consensus that the Gospels are best understood as belonging to the genre of bioi or Graeco-Roman biography. First of all, do you agree that this is a correct and useful classification? If so, what are some of the most noteworthy differences between that genre and the genre of modern historical biography? In particular, what liberties might we reasonably expect authors of bioi to take that a modern biographer would not, and what are some of the literary devices might we expect authors of bioi to use that modern biographers would not?

Brant Pitre: Yes, you are right about the scholarly consensus that the Gospels are ancient biographies or “lives” (Greek bioi), especially since the work of the British scholar Richard Burridge’s ground-breaking book, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography (2004). And yes, I think this consensus is correct. With that said, there are some important differences between modern biographies and ancient forms of biography like the gospels, or Plutarch’s or Suetonius’ “lives,” that we should keep in mind:

1. Order: ancient biographies don’t have to be in strict chronological order, but can be more thematically arranged;
2. Length: ancient biographies are often fairly brief, averaging between 10,000 and 20,000 words;
3. Selectivity: ancient biographies often emphasize that they aren’t telling you everything about their subject (see e.g., John 21:25; Lucian Life of Demonax, 67; Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 1.1). They tend to selective rather than comprehensive.
4. Exactitude: ancient biographers are not purporting to give verbatim “transcripts” of what a person has said or done, but rather the “general sense” of what was “really said” (cf. Thucydides, History, 1.22.1)
5. Supernaturalism: ancient biographers—in contrast to modern naturalistic historiography—had no qualms about recording purportedly supernatural events in the life of the subject (e.g., the miracles of Jesus).

Finally, it’s important to remember that just because the Gospels are biographies does not mean that they are verbatim “transcripts” of what Jesus did and said. For more on the Gospels as biographies, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 6.

Fact, Symbolism, and Allegory?

VicqRuiz: Dr. Pitre, upon reading the Biblical account of an event, how to you determine whether it is (1) a factual account of something that happened in history as described, (2) a retelling of an actual event perhaps containing some symbolic or allegorical elements, or (3) a purely allegorical story designed only to explain a deeper truth?

Brant Pitre: The first and most important task in this regard is to establish the literary genre of a book. This means asking questions like: What kind of book is this? What are the closest ancient parallels in form and contents? What kind of book did ancient people think this was? And what did the ancient author think he or she was writing? What are the author’s intentions and the audiences’ expectations? Is the author intending to record a historical event? Or is the author intending to compose poetry, allegory, prophecy, parable, or midrash, etc.?

As I try to show in The Case for Jesus, a close comparison with ancient Greco-Roman biography shows that the literary genre of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is closest to ancient biographies (see above). To be sure, the gospels contain micro-genres such as parables, allegories, hyperbole, etc. For example, the parable of the Sower is clearly presented as an allegory which needs to be explained by Jesus to the disciples (Mark 4:1-20). But the macro-genre of the Gospels is closest to biography.

Moreover, I also show that the Gospels are not just any kind of biographies, but historical biographies, in which an ancient author shows an express concern for historical truth: as Josephus puts it in his biography of himself: “veracity” is “incumbent upon the historian” (Josephus, Life, 336-39). In other words, whether or not you believe their claims, the evangelists intend to relate accounts of actual events and even explicitly claim to be recording what Jesus actually “did” and said, based on the “testimony” of “eyewitnesses (Greek autoptai) from the beginning” (see Luke 1:1-4; John 19:35; 21:24-25). They do not see themselves as composing“folklore” or “myths” (Greek mythos) (cf. 1 Tim 3:4; 2 Pet 1:16). This just isn’t the right genre.

This does not of course mean that the gospels are “verbatim transcripts” of Jesus’ teachings, nor do they claim to be. But again, according to ancient standards, history should adhere “as closely as possible” to the “general sense” of what was “really said” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.1). For more on this, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 6.

What about “Q” and the Order of the Gospels?

Bdlaacmm: Dr. Pitre, Does it matter which Gospel was written first? I often hear people say such-and-such a Gospel was the first written and therefore the "most reliable" (which in itself is kind of interesting, since no one today thinks a book written about WWII in 1946 is for that reason more reliable than one written in, say, 1985 - in fact, usually it's the reverse). The downside of such thinking is that anything in the other three Gospels is then downplayed or even "suspect". At this point, is it even possible to determine the order of composition?

Arthur Jeffries: What is your view on the existence of "Q"? Mark Goodacre, Michael Goulder, and other scholars have argued against its existence, mostly in academic papers (though several books have also been written). However, the consensus seemingly remains unchanged.

Brant Pitre: For well over a decade, I was a diehard “Q believer.” My first book on Jesus was even written using Q as a working hypothesis. Then I read Mark Goodacre’s 2002 book The Case against Q, and it changed my mind. I for one am troubled by the fact that Q only exists in the imagination of scholars; no manuscript has ever been found, and no ancient Christian ever refers to such a book. Even more importantly, as Goodacre shows, there is compelling evidence that Luke both knew and used Matthew’s Gospel, and if that is the case, then the need for Q simply vanishes.

With that said, over the years, as I have continued to study the Synoptic Problem, I have frankly become more cautious and agnostic about ever unraveling the precise literary relationship between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I agree with what the great scholar Joseph Fitzmyer stated some decades ago: the Synoptic Problem is “practically insoluble.” We simply may not have enough data to solve the complex question of literary order and relationship.

In any case, from the perspective of the quest for the historical Jesus, it’s important to remember that the literary question of the relationship between the Gospels (who copied from whom?) is just not as important as the historical question of authorship (who wrote the gospels?) and date (when were they written? within the lifetime of Jesus’ disciples?)

Think about it: if Mark is actually based on the eyewitness testimony of Peter, for basic historical questions, does it really matter who copied from whom? And if Matthew is really written by one of the apostles, for basic historical questions, does it really matter if he copied from Mark? And by the way—as I show in the book—the old argument that an eyewitness like Matthew would never use a non-eyewitness like Mark as a source is bogus. We have evidence of exactly that taking place amongst students of Socrates (cf. Hermogenes, Plato, and Xenophon).

In sum, all of the actual historical evidence we possess points to the Gospels being first-century biographies written within the living memory of the events by apostles and their followers. That is what matters most for those of us interested in the historical quest for Jesus. For more on Q, the Synoptic Problem, and the first-century dating of the Gospels, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 7.

Did Jesus Fulfill the Jewish Prophecies?

David Nickol: Did Jesus fulfill the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah? If the answer in Dr. Pitre's book is "yes," what are the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah that Jesus fulfilled? Also, what does it mean to "fulfill" a prophecy? Perhaps a better question would be, "What was predicted or foretold in the Old Testament about Jesus?" Or were the "prophecies" outside (and after) the Old Testament? (The word Messiah is not found in the Old Testament.)

GuineaPigDan: I guess I'll give one a shot. How come prophecies of Jesus weren't more specific, like just plainly saying "your Messiah will be Yeshua, born around 4BC and is also the 2nd Person of the Trinity and will be crucified, resurrected and end sacrifices." Having the Jews develop one idea of the Messiah but then suddenly told, "Psych! This other person was the Messiah" is a bit like reading a mystery novel where the reader didn't get a chance to guess the ending on their own.

Brant Pitre: These are both great questions. A whole book could be written on Jesus and Jewish prophecy; for now, just a couple of quick points.

First, David, I’m sorry to say that someone has misinformed you about the word “messiah” (Hebrew mashiach). This word is used dozens of times in the Old Testament—usually as a title for the “anointed” king (for example, see 1 Sam 2:10, 16:6; Ps 2:2; 89:39). Moreover, it actually occurs in the most explicit prophecy about the coming death of a future “messiah” (Hebrew mashiach) that we possess (Daniel 9:25-27).

And intriguingly—to answer your question, GuineaPigDan—this prophecy in Daniel 9 not only proclaims that the messiah will one day come and be killed, it actually foretells when this will take place: namely, some 490 years after the “going forth of the word” to restore and rebuild the Jerusalem Temple and before a final future destruction of the “sanctuary” and the city, in which “sacrifice and offering” will “cease” (Daniel 9:25-27). (Note the reference to the future ‘end’ of ‘sacrifice’ you mentioned.)

Indeed, as the first-century historian Josephus tells us, that is one reason the book of Daniel was so popular among first-century Jews, because Daniel gave a timeline for the fulfillment of his prophecies (Josephus, Ant. 10.267-68). A solid case then can be made that Daniel’s prophecies were expected by ancient Jews to be fulfilled sometime in the first century A.D.

Second, the book of Daniel wasn’t just a favorite among many ancient Jews; it seems to have been one of Jesus’ favorites as well. If you read the Synoptic Gospels carefully, you will see that Jesus’ two most frequently used expressions are (1) “the kingdom of God” and (2) “the Son of man.” Where does he get these expressions? Above all, from the book of Daniel’s oracles about the future coming of the “kingdom” of “God” (Daniel 2) and the coming of the heavenly “Son of man” (Daniel 7). Significantly, the earliest first-century Jewish interpretations of Daniels’ “Son of man” identify him as the Messiah (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra). Once this is clear, Jesus' use of this expression to refer to himself becomes even more striking, since our earliest Jewish interpreters of Daniel also identified the fourth kingdom with the Roman empire. In other words, according to Daniel 2 and 7, the kingdom of God and the messianic Son of Man were expected to come not just ‘one day’ but sometime during the reign of the Roman empire.

So, GuineaPigDan, some prophecies are more vague, but some prophecies are quite specific—and it’s precisely these prophecies from the book of Daniel that Jesus chooses to refer to himself and to the kingdom he is bringing.

These aren’t, of course, the only kinds of “prophecies” Jesus sets out to fulfill. Jesus also engages in prophetic signs and actions that hearken back to the Old Testament, in which he ‘reenacts’ certain events from Jewish Scripture like the divine revelation of the name “I am” to Moses (see Mark 6) or the Cry of Dereliction from Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (see Mark 15), but reconfigures them around himself. This kind of fulfillment is more commonly referred to as typology or recapitulation.

There’s so much more to say. Put it this way: pretty much the entire second half of my book is devoted to examining Jesus, Jewish prophecy, and biblical typology. After reading, I don't think you’ll walk away thinking that “the Jews” had “one idea of the Messiah” and that Jesus had another. Check it out for yourself and see what you think of the evidence. See The Case for Jesus, chapters 8, 9, 11-12.

Was Jesus Wrong about the “End of the World”?

LanDroid: Huston Smith, in his classic book The World's Religions, wrote, "We know almost nothing about (Jesus); and of the little we know, what is most certain is that he was wrong—this last referred to his putative belief that the world would quickly come to an end." There are several passages where Jesus warns that some in his audience would see the kingdom of God in their lifetime. What are we to make of these incorrect predictions 2,000+ years later?

Brant Pitre: Important question, LanDroid. First, although I don’t go into this particular issue in The Case for Jesus, I’ve written a whole book on the Olivet Discourse (2005) and a lengthy article on Jesus’ prophecies of the destruction of Temple and the end of the world for the new Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (eds. Joel B. Green et al., IVP Academic, 2014, pp. 23-33). In that piece, I show that Jesus can’t have been “wrong” about the end of the world, since he expressly states that although “heaven and earth will pass away,” “not even the Son” knows “the day or the hour” (Mark 13:32).

Second, I find it fascinating that your question assumes that “the kingdom of God” is identical to the “end of the world.” What makes you think that? As I show in The Case for Jesus, when Jesus speaks about the Son of man and the kingdom of God, he is principally alluding to the book of Daniel, in which the “kingdom of God” does not refer to the “end of the world,” but the coming of a heavenly kingdom which will arrive sometime during the Roman empire, begin small like a little “stone”, and then spread throughout the world to become a great “mountain” (Daniel 2). In Daniel, the kingdom of God is a mysterious kingdom that has its origins in heaven but spreads throughout the whole world on earth while being ruled from heaven by the mysterious “Son of man.” This future kingdom will be ruled over by the heavenly being who is “like a Son of man” (Daniel 7) and who was identified as the “Messiah” by first century Jews (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra).

In other words, far from showing that Jesus was “wrong” about the coming of the kingdom of God, I try to show that his prediction that the kingdom would come within the lifetime of his disciples is in fact precisely what happened. But people often misunderstand what the kingdom is. Albert Schweitzer’s great mistake was to collapse the kingdom of God and the “end of the world” into one as if they were two ways of talking about the same thing. See The Case for Jesus, chapter 8.

The Divinity of Jesus

Jason Sylly Crabtree: I'm an atheist. I believe Jesus existed, but what real support is there to the claim of his divinity (inside, and especially outside the Bible)?

Brant Pitre: This question is really at the heart of my new book. There’s no way to do it justice here. But I’ll say this: You’re probably familiar with the now common idea that Jesus only claims to be divine in the (later) Gospel of John, but not in the (earlier) Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I spend three chapters in the book showing that Jesus does claim to be divine in the Synoptic Gospels, but he does it in a very Jewish way: using riddles, parables, and, most of all, allusions to the Jewish Scriptures to both conceal his divine identity from his opponents and reveal it to his companions and those who “have the ears to hear.” I look at six or seven episodes, but here I’ll just pick one: in Mark 14, Jesus is handed over by the Sanhedrin to the Romans to be crucified under the charge of “blasphemy.” Now, despite what many Christians assume, it wasn’t blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah. How else would you know who the king was? But it was blasphemy to claim to be divine.

And so the question is this: If Jesus isn’t claiming to be divine, then why is he charged with blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity? Far from not claiming to be divine in the Synoptic Gospels, the climax of these Gospels is precisely the explosive divine claims of Jesus and his subsequent execution. In other words, to answer your question: ‘What real support is there for the divinity of Jesus?’ There are four first-century biographies agreeing that Jesus speaks and acts as if he were divine and that he was in fact charged with blasphemy because of who he claimed to be.

What about the Resurrection?

Ignatius Reilly: The only evidence we have that [Jesus' resurrection] is historical in Mark is that a few women found an empty tomb. Maybe it was the wrong one. We also have the fact that nobody expected Jesus to rise, even though Jesus supposedly kept telling them his plan. The suggestion that the disciples did not understand Jesus when he told them about his resurrection seems like a way of covering over an inconvenient historical fact.

Rick Bateman: Why did the disciples/apostles wait until after Jesus had ascended to heaven to start preaching that he had risen? Wouldn’t it have been far more effective to start preaching while he was still around? For that matter, why didn’t Jesus continue preaching while he was still around (to anyone but the disciples)? For that matter, why did Jesus leave at all? Doesn’t it seem just a little convenient, not unlike the kind of explanations they might’ve come up with later if he hadn’t really come back to life at all?

Brant Pitre: These are great questions, and I can’t do them justice here. But I think they’re related, so I’ll try to make a couple of quick points to consider.

First, Ignatius, it’s simply not true that the “only evidence” for the resurrection we possess is the empty tomb in Mark. The empty tomb is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the early Christian belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (since, obviously, tombs can get emptied in lots of ways besides resurrection.) As I noted above in the question on the literary genre and authorship of the Gospels, we have four first-century biographies of Jesus—attributed either to the apostles or their followers—that testify that (1) Jesus died and was buried, (2) the tomb was empty on Easter Sunday, (3) Jesus appeared on multiple occasions in his body to his disciples (including Matthew and John, to whom two of the four Gospels are attributed (see Matt 28; Mark 16:1-9; Luke 24; John 20-21).

Now, you can say that they’re all lying (as you suggest they may be), but you can’t claim we don’t have any evidence. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that all four authors are ‘covering up an inconvenient fact’, but it also possible (and I would argue much more plausible) that the disciples of Jesus really didn’t understand (or believe) what Jesus meant when he said he would die and rise again. After all, as dense as the disciples sometimes were, even they knew that ordinarily, dead people stay dead.

Second, Rick, the question of why Jesus doesn’t have the apostles start preaching before he ascends seems to be answered in the Gospels of Luke and John, which not only depict the apostles as too afraid for their own skins to go out and preach, but in which Jesus also spends those 40 days instructing the disciples about the mysteries of the kingdom and preparing them to be his “witnesses” (John 20; Luke 4).

Likewise, the question of why Jesus left all is a great question. It revolves very clearly about the meaning of the Ascension. Unfortunately, I don’t get into the Ascension much in the book. From one angle, it does indeed seem ‘convenient’ as you put it, if your goal is to cover up the fact that Jesus’ corpse was really mouldering somewhere in a tomb and never really raised. (So I ask you what I asked Ignatius: Do you think all four biographies of Jesus—including the two attributed to eyewitnesses—are deliberately deceiving their readers? If so, what’s your evidence?)

On the other hand, I would suggest that you consider the possibility that Jesus ascends into heaven precisely to fulfill the prophecy of Daniel, in which the “Son of man” ascends to the Ancient of Days to take his seat on a heavenly throne (contrary to what many assume, as James Dunn points out, the “Son of man” in Daniel 7 is ‘ascending’, not ‘descending’). It is, after all, the kingdom of “heaven.” But this doesn’t mean that Jesus ‘leaves’ (as you put it). Indeed, the whole account of the Road to Emmaus shows that the risen Jesus remains with his disciples in “the breaking of the bread.” (For more on this, see my 2011 book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.)

In the final analysis, it seems clear that throughout his public ministry and into his resurrection and beyond, Jesus does not go around shoving the mystery of his identity down people’s throats. To the contrary, he invites people to answer the question for themselves: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29). In other words, he respects the freedom of his disciples and he wants them to trust him. In other words, he is not only giving motives of credibility (miracles, teaching, resurrection, etc.) for believing him (cf. John 10:38), he ultimately wants to call people to trust him, even when they can’t fully comprehend everything he says and does. This, of course, is what Christianity has traditionally referred to as “faith,” and this kind of trust is an essential part of any healthy relationship, including (and perhaps especially) a relationship with God. For more on the resurrection, history and faith, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 12-13.

In a few days, Dr. Brant Pitre, one of today's premier Catholic biblical scholars, will release a new book titled The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Random House, 2016). It seeks to debunk many skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels put forward today by scholars such as Bart Ehrman.

Here's a brief summary:

For well over a hundred years now, many scholars have questioned the historical truth of the Gospels, claiming that they were originally anonymous. Others have even argued that Jesus of Nazareth did not think he was God and never claimed to be divine.

In The Case for Jesus, Dr. Brant Pitre, the bestselling author of Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, goes back to the sources—the biblical and historical evidence for Christ—in order to answer several key questions, including:
 

• Were the four Gospels really anonymous?
• Are the Gospels folklore? Or are they biographies?
• Were the four Gospels written too late to be reliable?
• What about the so-called “Lost Gospels,” such as “Q” and the Gospel of Thomas?
• Did Jesus claim to be God?
• Is Jesus divine in all four Gospels? Or only in John?
• Did Jesus fulfill the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah?
• Why was Jesus crucified?
• What is the evidence for the Resurrection?

As The Case for Jesus will show, recent discoveries in New Testament scholarship, as well as neglected evidence from ancient manuscripts and the early church fathers, together have the potential to pull the rug out from under a century of skepticism toward the traditional Gospels. Above all, Pitre shows how the divine claims of Jesus of Nazareth can only be understood by putting them in their ancient Jewish context.

Since these are all questions we discuss and debate regularly here on Strange Notions, I reached out to Brant and asked if he'd be willing to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on our site, answering whatever questions we threw at him. Thankfully, he accepted!

He's particularly interested in hearing from skeptics and atheists. So whether you doubt Jesus was a real historical person, or that the New Testament offers reliable testimony, or whether the earliest Christians really believed that Jesus rose from the dead, we want to hear from you!

What question would you ask a Catholic Biblical scholar?

What makes you most skeptical about Jesus or the Bible? What's that query you've posed to Christians and never received a good answer?

Again, we're particular interested in questions from skeptics or atheists, but everyone is welcome to submit questions. And they don't have to be challenges or "gotcha" questions. We're interested in plain old curiosity questions, too.

(It should go without saying, but if your question is disrespectful or snarky, it won't be chosen.)

Just type your question below in the comment box, and over the next few days we'll select a handful. Brant will then share his answers here within the next 1-2 weeks. Thanks!

NOTE: Today we conclude our three part series from Tamer Nashef on the relationship between philosophy and theology. Tamer's previous piece at Strange Notions, "I’m a Muslim But Here’s Why I Admire the Catholic Church", remains one of our all-time most popular posts.
 

 
The third and last segment of the essay will shed light on the brilliant theologians of the cathedral schools and 12^th-century Renaissance. The theologians in question include Peter Abelard, Adelard of Bath, William of Conches, Hugh of Saint Victor, John of Salisbury, Peter Lombard, and many others. I will conclude the essay with a brief discussion on Thomas Aquinas whose philosophy constitutes the culmination of harmony between reason and revelation.

Peter Abelard (1079-1143) stands as one of the most eminent champions of reason and logic in the Middle Ages. He was a French philosopher, theologian, and logician who taught in the schools of northern France, particularly Paris and Laon, and “extended the rationalist program begun by Anselm” (Lindberg’s Beginnings of Western Science 208). He advocated the use of reason and doubt as a means of reaching the truth, stressing that “the first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning….For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth” (Durant 939). He is also reported to have told his students that “nothing can be believed unless it is first understood,” suggesting that understanding precedes faith (Hannam 43). In his view, “truth in search of itself has no enemies” and “truth cannot be opposed to truth” in the sense that the truths of revelation and the truths of reasoning are compatible because their source is one and the same, namely God (Huff’s Rise of Early Modern Science 141).

Abelard’s most famous work Sic et non (Yes and No or Pro and Con) assembled perceived contradictory or conflicting statements by Church Fathers on theological issues and sought to solve these contradictions through dialectical or Scholastic method. He also advocated the unfettered pursuit of knowledge irrespective of its source, as all forms of knowledge are beneficial, including knowledge of evil: "All knowledge is good, even knowledge of evil...the study of all knowledge is good" (141).

Like Saint Anselm who felt obliged to bring forward rational proof of God’s existence due to his fellow monks’ repeated requests, Abelard applied reason and logic to the articles of faith because his students “were asking for human and philosophical reasons and clamouring more for what could be understood than for what could be said” (Grant’s Science and Religion 156). He had little patience with blind faith that was not grounded in reason and understanding because in his view “the utterance of words was superfluous unless it were followed by understanding, and that it was ridiculous for anyone to preach to others what neither he nor those taught by him could accept into their understanding” (156). In his book on the Trinity, Abelard acknowledged that this article of faith surpassed the boundaries of reason, but the powers of reason could still be harnessed to counter arguments claiming the Trinity was false (Hannam 49).

Despite his commitment to reason and doubt, Abelard’s conviction in the truthfulness of Christianity never wavered as evident in the following moving words: “I do not wish to be a philosopher if it means conflicting with Paul nor to be an Aristotelian if it cuts me off from Christ" (Huff’s Rise 141).

For his part, Peter Lombard (1095-1160), who served as archbishop of Paris for a brief period and may have been Abelard’s student, played a key role in turning theology into a systematic discipline by organizing the opinions of Church Fathers in his famous Four Books of Sentences. This work, which had served as the primary textbook in the Western schools of theology until the 17^th century and generated over a thousand commentaries in response, ranged over several theological themes such as God and His attributes, the creation, the Incarnation, the sacraments, etc. As evidence of the popularity of Lombard’s work, Grant points out that “[b]etween 1150 and 1500, only the Bible was read and discussed more than the Sentences” (Science and Religion 159). What is particularly notable about Lombard’s work is the combination of “reliance on authority with a willingness to employ reason in the explanation of theological points” (Woods 62).

Adelard of Bath (1080-1142) played a prominent role in the European translation movement between the 12th and 13th centuries, which guaranteed the transmission of Greco-Arabic learning into the West and brought the treasures of Islamic (and Classical) civilization within the purview of Latin scholars. During his travels in Palestine, Syria, Salerno, Sicily, and Cilicia, this English scholar learned Arabic and came into possession of Arabic manuscripts. He later translated Al-Khwarizmi's Astronomical Tables, Abu Ma'shar's Shorter Introduction to Astronomy, and Euclid's Elements (Lindberg’s “Science in the Middle Ages” 62). He pioneered the important distinction between empirical inquiry, concerned with how things work, and theology, concerned with why things are as they are (Howard 25). Therefore, it was the duty of the natural philosopher, rather than theologian, to investigate the causes at work in nature: “For the functioning and interconnection between all the senses are manifest in all living things…but which forces come into play in what connections with which method or mode, none except the mind of a philosopher can make clear” (Huff’s Rise 101). He is also said to have been among the first in Europe to have performed experiments, demonstrating that “water does not flow from a hole in the bottom of a closed vessel until a hole is made in the top to let air in. This contradicted Aristotle's theory of natural place" (Howard 25).

Adelard of Bath viewed reason as the hallmark of human nature, seeing that "[i]t is through reason that we are men" (Woods 87). It is this attribute, namely “the gift of reason,” that sets humans apart from beasts and compensates for their physical disadvantages: "Although man is not armed by nature nor is he the swiftest in flight, yet he has that which is better by far and worth more -- that is, reason. For by possession of this function he exceeds the beasts to such a degree that he subdues them...You see, therefore, how much the gift of reason surpasses mere physical equipment" (Huff’s Rise 102). He also denounced blind, unthinking subservience to authority: “For what should we call authority but a halter? Indeed, just as brute animals are led about by a halter whenever you please, and are not told where or why, but see the rope by which they are held and follow it alone, thus the authority of writers leads many of you, caught and bound by animal-like credulity, into danger” (Grant’s Science and Religion 161). He mocked readers and students who blindly trusted the conclusions of ancient scholars and “who require no rational explanation and put their trust only in the ancient name of a title” (161).

Adelard perceived order and harmony in the make-up of the universe, emphasizing its "amazing rational beauty” (Woods 87). While seeing God as the ultimate and primary cause of all things, he urged naturalistic and rational, rather than supernatural, explanations of natural phenomena, saying that "we must listen to the very limits of human knowledge and only when this utterly breaks down should we refer things to God” (87). Only after exhausting naturalistic accounts of nature’s operations, should the natural philosopher have recourse to miracles and divine intervention. Andrew of St. Victor endorsed a similar view, arguing that exegesis should consider all natural explanations of events in the Bible and only when such natural possibilities are ruled out, should the miraculous and supernatural be invoked: “…in expounding Scripture, when the event described admits of no naturalistic explanation, then and only then should we have recourse to miracles” (Huff’s “Science and Metaphysics” 189).

Hugh of Saint Victor (1096-1141), like Peter Abelard, called for the unlimited acquisition of all forms of knowledge, urging his students to "[l]earn everything” because “nothing is superfluous" (Watson 330). He also advised them to "[l]earn willingly what you do not know from everyone. The person who has sought to learn something from everyone will be wiser than them all. The person who receives something from everyone ends by becoming the richest of all" (Pope Benedict 220). He further stressed the necessity of studying logic, seeing it as a prerequisite to the study of philosophy: “…logic came last in time, but is first in order. It is logic which ought to be read first by those beginning the study philosophy, for it teaches the nature of words and concepts, without both of which no treatise of philosophy can be explained rationally” (Grant’s Science and Religion 150). Like his contemporaries, Hugh saw the universe as a “machine” and as an orderly and interconnected whole: "The ordered disposition of things from top to bottom in the network of this universe...is so arranged that, among all the things that exist, nothing is unconnected or separated by nature, or external" (Huff’s Rise 99-100).

John of Salisbury (1115-1180) argued that human reason could lead only to probable and incomplete knowledge and objected to its use for the elucidation of divine truths beyond the grasp of human comprehension. At the same time, however, he believed that human knowledge gradually increased through discussion and experience from one generation to another, but could never attain to perfection. Only God’s knowledge is perfect and is revealed through religion. Despite his qualms about the application of reason to revelation, John was not opposed to the use of reason per se, but saw it as a useful instrument. In fact, he hailed the “tremendous power” of logic and said those opposed to its use were “presumptuous” and “foolhardy” (Grant’s Science and Religion 150-1). Logic is necessary “to discriminate between what is true and is false, and to show, which reasoning really adheres to the path of valid argumentative proof, and which [merely] has the [external] appearance of truth” (151).

Like Adelard of Bath, William of Conches (1090–after 1154) made a distinction between the roles of theology and natural philosophy/science. The Bible and Church Fathers were the authority as far as moral and doctrinal issues were concerned but this was not the case when it came to natural philosophy: “In those matters that pertain to the Catholic faith or moral instruction, it is not allowed to contradict Bede or any other of the holy fathers. If, however, they err in those matters that pertain to physics, it is permitted to state the opposite view. For although greater than we, they were only human” (162-3). He also separated Biblical studies from science by charging that “it is not the task of the Bible to teach us the nature of things; this belongs to philosophy” (Huff’s Rise 101). William criticized priests who ruled out the study of fields of knowledge that were not addressed in the Bible and defended the legitimacy of studying natural philosophy, saying: “They don’t realize that the authors of truth are silent on matters of natural philosophy, not because these matters are against the faith, but because they have little to do with the strengthening of such faith, which is what those authors are concerned with. But modern priests do not want us to inquire into anything that isn’t in the Scriptures, only to believe simply, like peasants” (Grant’s Science and Religion 163).

William of Conches was one among many 12^th-century theologians and natural philosophers who viewed the world as a rationally structured domain operating on the basis of consistent and fixed laws independent of God: "I take nothing away from God. He is the author of all things, evil excepted. But the nature with which He endowed his creatures accomplishes a whole scheme of operations, and these too turn to His glory since it is He who created this very nature" (Woods 87). His approach to the interpretation of the Biblical text favored discarding the literal meaning if it appeared to contradict reason or natural philosophy: "’He divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.' Since such a statement as this is contrary to reason let us show how it cannot be thus" (Huff’s Rise 101).

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) is far and away the most influential Christian philosopher and theologian of the entire Middle Ages. He is particularly renowned for his grand project aimed at establishing rapprochement between faith and reason or synthesizing Christianity and Aristotelian philosophy. As part of this project, he presented a number of proofs of God’s existence (the Five Ways) by means of reason only and without appealing to Scripture. Like his predecessors such as Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr, Aquinas was more than willing to embrace the truths pagan philosophers had reached merely by reason, saying that "...sacred doctrine makes use also of the authority of philosophers in those questions in which they were able to know the truth by natural reason" (Albl 49). He particularly admired Aristotle whose ideas he believed were the best product of human reasoning unaided by revelation or divine inspiration, and he ultimately led to “ending the official Church's fears about the challenge which Aristotle's thought appeared to present to Christian faith" (MacCulloch 412).

Aquinas distinguished between truths of faith and truths of reason. The former, such as the Trinity and Resurrection, are not provable by reason and can only be believed or accepted on the authority of Scripture, while the latter, such as the existence of God, lie within the grasp of human reason and can be demonstrated through rational argument or reasoned analysis (Craig 32-3). Two points, however, should be made about the truths of faith.

First, though the truths of faith transcend the boundaries of human rational capacity, Aquinas argued that reason could still be utilized to respond to objections against articles of faith. In other words, the Christian theologian cannot prove the Trinity, but he should be able to answer by reason alone objections that this article of faith is illogical. In the words of one scholar, "[s]ince faith rests upon infallible truth, and since the contrary of a truth can never be demonstrated, it is clear that the arguments brought against faith cannot be demonstrations, but are difficulties that can be answered" (Albl 48). Therefore, “Aquinas thought that Christians should never hesitate to ask a reasonable question about their faith -- an answer could always be found" (48). Second, while the truths of faith are not rationally provable or empirically demonstrable, there are signs, such as the fulfilled prophesies of the Bible and reports of miracles, indicating that the Scriptures are divinely inspired and since the truths of faith are part of the holy text, they are to be accepted on its authority (Craig 32-3).

Christian, particularly Catholic, theology is stigmatized by many misconceptions that continue to permeate public discourse in the West. One does not have to be a Catholic or Christian to appreciate and even admire the work of theologians. Hopefully, this essay has succeeded in puncturing the myth that these theologians, especially in the Middle Ages, were anti-intellectual, superstitious, and hostile toward secular knowledge, philosophy, and reason.
 

Works Cited

Albl, C. Martin. Reason, Faith, and Tradition: Explorations in Catholic Theology. Winona, Minnesota: Saint Mary’s Press, 2009. Print.

Craig, Lane William. Reasonable Faith. 3^rd edition. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway. 2008. Print.

Durant, Will. The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization – Christian, Islamic, and Judaic – From Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325-1300. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950. Print.

Grant, Edward. Science and Religion 400 BC- AD 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004. Print.

Howard, P. Ian. Perceiving in Depth, Volume 1: Basic Mechanisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

Huff, Toby. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West. 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

_________. 2000. “Science and Metaphysics in the Three Religions of the Book.” Intellectual Discourse 8, no. 2: 173-98. Print.

Lindberg, C. David. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450. 2^nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
________________. "The Transmission of Greek and Arabic Learning to the West.” Science in the Middle Ages. Ed. David C. Lindberg. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. 52-90. Print.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Print.
Pope Benedict XIV. Great Christian Thinkers: From The Early Church Through The Middle Ages. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2011. Print.

Watson, Peter. Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.

Woods E. Thomas. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Washington: Regnery History, 2012. Print.
 
 
(Image credit: The Planisphere)