above saying with warm feelings of approval and agreement. Presumably you do not feel it applies to you! Maybe you think Jesus has said this to try and spur us into repentance and a safely good life, in case we fall into the dreadful pit. So, are we meant to live Christian lives motivated by fear of punishment alone, and a scrupulous, ritualistic fetish for moral cleanliness? This may be true, though I hope not! It is certainly not the Gospel as expounded in the old Penny Catechism:
God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next.
Question 2
The ‘s’ word
If you really know God, you know that he is God, not The Godfather. St Benedict, in his Rule for Monks, describes coming to know God as a growth from servile fear to the love of sons and daughters, the perfect love that casts out fear. For him, it is a growth in humility. This virtue has two parts. The first is the recognition of weakness and sin within us. The second is the realization that goodness and beauty is there too. Each part is useless without the other. On its own, the first is false modesty, or unctuous hypocrisy. The second without the first is conceit, a comforting internal deafness to what we do not want to know.
Both parts together involve living in the truth, the exclusion of false gloom or over-optimism. It is also the only way to understand how Jesus’ preaching of the gospel of repentance is good news to us.
If we say we have no sin in us, we are deceiving ourselves and refusing to admit the truth; but if we acknowledge our sins, then God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and purify us from everything that is wrong.
1 John 1:8–9
For a Christian, talk of sin is immediately the acknowledgement of grace and forgiveness because ‘what proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners’ (Romans 5:8). On the other hand, talk of God’s love makes no sense without at least some sense of our darker side, the things in us that he wants to heal and change so that he can truly share with us love for love. Hence, fear of punishment cannot be the fundamental motivation for a mature Christian. But there is another way of taking Jesus’ words about an eternal sin with immediate approval. If you look around the world, there is plenty going on that should surely be unforgivable. It does not seem right that the likes of Hitler or Stalin should jump any queues into heaven ahead of, say, those millions who were killed trying to stop the evils perpetrated by them. If God waves a wand or puts a blind over his eyes with truly wicked people, and sees Christ instead of them and so lets them into eternal bliss, then this makes his love for you and me, who struggle on and do as little harm as we can, rather unreal. Salvation becomes like a debased coinage, without value because it has no cost. It must be correct, then, that a person can put him or herself beyond the possibility of forgiveness. It is like a relationship fractured to the degree that ‘I’m sorry’ can no longer heal.
So who gets it?
But, if you are inclined to agree with this, be careful. Jesus has another uncomfortable truth to tell us:
Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself, ‘I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get.’ The tax collector stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ This man, I tell you, went home again at rights with God; the other did not. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the man who humbles himself will be exalted.
Luke 18:9–14
The point at present is that, even if the tax collector had not said his truly humble prayer, the Pharisee is at fault. His prayer is superficially humble, in that he does thank God for the gifts within him. But it is only half the truth. In fact he uses his virtue as a condemnation of the tax collector. Any demand on our part that God be fair, and punish those evil-doers as they deserve, either condemns us to the same fate (be honest!) or puts us in the shoes of the Pharisee, whose prayer of thanksgiving was counted as sin. So maybe Hitler is in the hottest part of hell. But it is not for us to say that; unless, perhaps, you want to join him.
Let us assume, therefore, a certain resistance to the idea of an eternal sin, and move forward to what Jesus might mean by it. The idea itself is not hard to understand. A woman discovers that her husband has been having an affair with her best friend for the last ten years. How does she react? What is the next step? It depends, of course, on her, her husband, and their relationship. She might just walk out. She might confront him and threaten divorce unless he stays faithful to her. She may file for divorce and seek a punitive financial settlement. She might take his shotgun and murder them both. She may do nothing at all, turn a blind eye, or even collude for the sake of children, reputation or security. Most people, though, would understand if she felt that life could not be as it was before, however much he repents or makes it up to her. A basic trust has gone, and the slate will never again be clean.
We have nearly all had close relationships that have broken up – often for some reason we do not really know – or just drifted apart. Young couples sometimes insist that they are splitting up in order to ‘stay good friends’. Sometimes they can, but usually they don’t. Most of us have had the horrible experience of saying something that really lost somebody’s trust; even without meaning to, the wounding thing is out. It can take a long time to rebuild, and the foundation is never what it was, wish as we may. Human life is full of eternal sins, clocks that will not go back. In contemporary Britain, some criminal offences are eternal in the sense that once committed, they can never be forgotten. Most people agree, for example, that paedophiles may be punished for seeking to work with children. Killers released early on parole sometimes have to be protected from the vengeful public. It seems that human society, to protect itself, has to cast some of its members into the outer darkness.
If the idea of an eternal sin makes some sense, the claim that in the sight of God there are points of no return perhaps does not. Take the maltreated and deceived wife. What if she had a perfect love for her husband? She might know him very well, understand some fact of his character or history that made him unable to cope with fidelity. She might realize how much he needed her there to return to. She might reflect that no husband is ideal, and put the blame on her friend. In other words, she might do all the things we would expect of the loving Father. God is love. He sees our weakness, understands its roots, knows what we can and cannot help. He notes our attempts to repent, and stands, like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, on the road waiting for us. He knows we are fallen, none better, and he knows we are tempted by a former angel of light. And did he not wipe it all away in the death of his Son?
All shall have prizes?
This is a childish way of thinking, precisely what Jesus wants us to abandon. It is like the mad queen in Lewis Carroll’s story who exclaims after a game, ‘All have won, and all shall have prizes!’ Suppose our offended lady does all those things, and puts up with the errant behaviour, while seeking always to draw her husband from it. He is still unfaithful, and he is still, despite all protestations, someone who has been unfaithful. But because she is a good lady, on one view, she treats him still as if he were entirely hers, heart and soul. Some people think that this is what God does with us. He looks at our sins and instead of the guilty sinner, sees his Son. He counts us as righteous; this is the ‘good news’ that God loves us always despite our sins. He casts them into a bottomless sea, and forgets them.
So let us imagine heaven on that basis. We all have the full vision of God, we live in some kind of state surrounded by the
