“Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love”
-Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Christian Love
To me, the appeal of Christianity is its insistence on imbuing love with a sense of divinity. We instinctively know that there is something beautiful and powerful about love. Love is at the heart of many artistic endeavors and it seems to be one of the few constants valued across every culture and throughout time. Christianity asserts that God is the source of this love. Furthermore, it asserts that the love that we humans experience is but a diluted version of what God is capable of. God is the sole being capable of unconditional love. God loves everyone regardless of their background, experience, appearance, beliefs, or actions. This is the idea behind Christian forgiveness.
Predestination
Presbyterians (Calvinists/reformed theologians may be more precise) go one step further and assert that God’s love is not something that we have the power to choose. In fact, us imperfect, irrational, incoherent humans are not deserving of God’s grace. There is nothing we can do to earn God’s love (Total Depravity). And yet God’s unconditional love is said to be irresistible (Irresistible Grace). The conclusion of these ideas is that God chooses who to save irrespective of merit (Unconditional Election). In principle, these are attractive ideas and a seemingly reasonable extension of God’s infinite love and humanity’s imperfection and default state of sin. However, we quickly run into the problem that there certainly seem to be people that do not accept God. This would contradict God’s irresistible love unless these people were simply chosen by God to have a worse fate. So, Presbyterians bite the bullet and say that because God is the one that created the universe, he has ultimate authority over everything inside it, including the humans he chose to not include in his love. The warmer version of this argument says that those not chosen by God do not necessarily suffer a bad fate. They are simply outside the reach of God’s love and perhaps cease to exist instead of receiving eternal life.
My Qualms
Putting aside the problem of free will, the assertion that God has already chosen those he will not love is disturbing at a guttural level. It brings up the problem of evil and almost seems to contradict the assertion of God’s divine unconditional love. Is it even really unconditional love if some people are not included? Why create such people in the first place? For those that suffer in this life but are not chosen to live eternally, is there no redemption?
Presbyterians will usually respond to the above questions in two ways: first, since God created the universe, he can do whatever he wants; and second, we as finite beings can never truly understand an infinite being’s ways. It seems that this is what a lot of Christian responses to arguments against God look like. However, I find them to be highly unsatisfying.
One of the main draws of religion is its capacity to explain the unknown. The question that Abrahamic religions answer well is the existential one: why are we here? However, their struggles are often in the form of problems of evil (and divine hiddenness). And the best answer they can give mostly leads to more of the unknown. Perhaps this new unknown is more comforting than the previous one, but that’s no reason to believe it to be true.
Of course, the only thing that can bridge the gap of this rational objection to the unknown is one’s personal experience. Most believers are not convinced by rational arguments for religion. They are swayed by their experiences, and usually afterward seek justification. I suppose this speaks to the power of personal experience and faith.
“If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Letters