Jerry Walls: Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory

Jerry L. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most, A Protestant View of the Cosmic Drama (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos, 2015), 235 pages, ISBN 97815874313566.

The volume under review presents a compelling case for a Protestant reception of a literal heaven and hell (not metaphorical torment), and an afterlife, and it reads as a breath of fresh air, especially in a contemporary religious cum cultural climate that tends to sideline or dismiss the aforementioned topic. In eight chapters besides an introduction and a conclusion, the book distills for a popular readership the Houston Baptist University philosopher Jerry Walls’ academic trilogy – Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame University Press, 1992) [Editor’s note: read a physicist’s in-depth review], Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford University Press, 2002), Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2012). The book under review also examines corollary conversations, such as the intricate relationship between the trinity, the meaning of life, the nature of personal identity, the intricacies of sin and salvation, the problem of evil, the wideness of divine mercy, and the contemporary foundations of moral philosophy behind human decision-making.

Chapter 1 defends the reality of heaven with seven salient truths. The truths are based upon Walls’ reading of Revelation 19-21. Walls challenges perspectives that pitch the heavenly-minded against the enjoyment of earthly, material life (pp. 40-41). And instead of following Nietzsche to trivialize the body and to devalue the earthly life, Walls argues that because heaven preserves the best of human culture (cf. the cultural mandate at the Genesis creational account; pp. 34-35, 43), believers who love God more and more would also love the world and materiality to an increasingly greater extent (p. 38). In Walls’ reasoning, when Christ offers the gift of salvation, Christ desires more than the liberation of the human soul from the temporal life; God seeks the renewal of the cosmos and for Christ’s glory to be reflected everywhere (p. 39). The theology of salvation cannot be divorced from the theology of creation (p. 32). As the author, the director, the God that empowers, and the source of all that ever exists, the Alpha wants to bring creation to its glorious cosmic end (the word “end” is read as goal). Hence, when humans stay in right relationship with the Alpha, they will anticipate, and not dread, the Omega (pp. 24-25), and accordingly, they will desire heaven, and heaven as on earth.

Chapter 2 critiques some philosophical alternatives to the Christian conception of heaven. In particular, Walls rejects Bertrand Russell’s substituted paltry for heaven as the worship of a freed humanity (pp. 48-53). Walls finds Richard Taylor’s analysis that people will follow a life-course that is analogous to the man reported in Sisyphus, who would roll stones up and down a hill repeatedly and for no meaningful purposes unsatisfying (pp. 55-56). Walls read as absurd, Thomas Nagel’s assertion that humanity will attain greatness in life when God is ironically absent from human lives (p. 57). Walls also finds Keith Parsons’ recommendation pessimistic. Parsons urges people to abandon any presumption that life is only meaningful when life is thought to continue from this temporality into eternity (pp. 59-62). And to Carl Sagan’s atheistic assessment of a wishful heaven, Walls reminds that hoping for heaven will grant true consolation; heaven is not too good to be true or imaginary but it is real (pp. 63-64).

Chapter 3 argues that hell necessarily exists because God is love (pp. 68, 73). The logic of God as love and as savior does not absolve humanity from choosing good (instead of evil) and in being responsible (pp. 68-70). Though God’s people are commanded to live out God’s kind of love (cf. John 13:34), God does not coerce or pre-program humanity to love God automatically. Humans are created with the freedom to love (cf. John 14:23-24; 15:4, pp. 71-73). Those who choose evil would exclude themselves from God and his love: implicitly, they would have chosen hell since “heaven is the ultimate experience of ‘God with us’” (p. 73). To philosophical interlocutors such as Marilyn Adams who conceives God to be like a parent who can and will override the child’s freedom to keep the child from harm and damnation, Walls rebuts that the husband-wife analogy better portrays God’s relationship with humanity instead of Adams’ mother-child analogy (pp. 74-76). Thus, God also does not restrict the freedom of those who choose to commit horrendous evil (p. 76). And to Thomas Talbot’s reasoning that even the wicked (those who choose evil in the short run) will eventually seek God/happiness in heaven rather than to dwell in their misery, Walls reminds that God does not have to use suffering to chastise humanity into repentance and into heaven (pp. 76-81). Expositing Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man, Walls interprets that hell is not a separation from Christ’s presence but a chastisement of the hardened heart/soul that refuses God’s mercy, thereby resulting in one’s exclusion from God’s glory (pp. 81-86).

Chapters 4 to 8 postulate Walls’ view of the afterlife. Walls defends a theological and philosophical necessity of purgatory as a station for believers to be perfected (i.e., cleansed from impurities) before they enter heaven (chapters 4 and 8). Walls holds that at death, departed believers remain less than impeccable (p. 94), and he conceives purgatory as “a form of grace” for believers’ sanctification/transformation (pp. 97-99, 115). In Walls’ words, purgatory offers a process for “completing the work of making us [the departed] truly and fully holy … without which no one can see the Lord” (pp. 95-96). Walls does not conceive purgatory as a satisfaction of God’s justice. The early Protestant Reformers already rejected the satisfaction model when they repudiated the Catholic practice of indulgences in the late middle ages (pp. 96-98). Hence, “purgatory is not [received as] … an alternative to salvation by grace” (p. 115). Purgatory is held to be only for deceased believers, and not as a second chance for the unsaved (chapter 8). Drawing from Dorothy Sayers’ introduction of Dante’s Purgatorio, Walls concurs with an assertion by a thirteenth century historian Jacques Le Goff that “purgatory is [and offers] hope” (pp. 189-190). The purgatory presents itself as a necessary intermediate state (1 John 3:2) to give time and opportunity for believers to internalize God’s truth, and be perfected to meet God at the Last Judgment. Walls draws on C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm and Mere Christianity (pp. 99-101), among others to conceive his Protestant view of the purgatory.

Through Christ’s saving act, those who repent will eventually receive their full nature and relationship with God and each other that had been shattered by sin and death (p. 119). In the book, Walls refutes the dualistic philosophical view that enjoins the material body and immaterial soul in life and separates the soul and the body at death (cf. Dante’s conversation with Casella in Purgatorio). Walls also refutes the monistic or physicalists’ view that in an entirely material body, consciousness, identity, and experience cease to exist at death (pp. 120-122). From both NT scholar Randy Alcorn’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:26; 2 Corinthians 5:2-4, and Revelations 6:9-11 in Heaven, and Christian physicist John Polkinghorne’s The End of the World, Walls asserts that after departed souls undergo purification at the intermediate state via the purgatory, they will be given new heavenly bodies (pp. 124-127). Whilst living on earth, Walls follows the philosopher Charles Taylor’s explanation in his Sources of the Self that one’s character is being transformed as one navigates life choices and makes moral discernment (pp. 130-133).

Chapter 6 reconsiders arguments against a literal heaven, the attainment of bliss in heaven, and the wiping away of tears of pain, sorrow, and suffering.  Walls begins with Dostoevsky’s “high moral ground” as a reason for rejecting the Christian notion of a real heaven. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky describes a number of horrendous evils and cruelties, which, as he opined, no theory of heaven could ever “resolve these horrible outrages” (p. 141). Dostoevsky cannot imagine how an “idealistic nonsense” of heaven could provide justice and “profound moral hope” for victims who may meet their repentant rapists, murderers, tyrants, and perpetrators (pp. 141-149). In response, Walls builds upon the Apostle Paul’s view of the immeasurable weight of glory (Romans 8:18; 2 Corinthians 4:17) and Marilyn McCord Adams’ claim that an intimacy with God is the greatest possible good anyone could have ever experienced, to argue that living in God’s infinite beauty and goodness permanently will surpass all suffering and wrongs ever experienced in a victim’s earthly life (pp. 146-148). Even so, a repentant perpetrator “will understand with full clarity the pain he caused and the wrong he did, and he will hate his sin, just as God does, and deeply regret ever committing it” amid the full transformation into Christ’s likeness (p. 152). As to whether those in heaven can truly enter fully into happiness and tears of pain and mourning fully wiped away (cf. Revelations 21:4) whilst knowing that some will be eternally damned (cf. philosopher Eric Reitan), Walls takes his cues from nineteenth century Scottish writer George MacDonald to claim that hell possesses no power to veto, manipulate, or destroy the bliss of eternity (pp. 156-158). Rather than a Calvinist reading of God’s sovereign grace that elects some (and by implication of double-predestination, damns others), Walls urges that “the lost have elected themselves for hell; God has not done so” (p. 158).

On post-mortem salvation, Walls’ exegesis of Hebrews 9:27-28, Luke 13:23-30, and 2 Corinthians 5:8, among other texts, leads him to assert that God’s saving grace and mercy does not preclude the possibility of the departed and disembodied souls repenting and returning to Christ after their physical death (chapter 8). God’s salvific mercy is read with a subtext: “even beyond the grave” (p. 187). One may read Walls to say that divine judgment comes only at the end, and not at death. Thus, even though normative Protestant view is that salvific grace ceases upon the death of a sinner who did not turn to Christ, Walls holds that “death is hardly a barrier” for God to save. Walls postulates that instead of merely dispensing “sufficient grace”, God could and would grant “optimal grace” for the sincere post-mortem repentant who truly desires salvation (pp. 200-205). Walls demonstrates, albeit too briefly that P. T. Forsyth, Donald Bloesch and C. S. Lewis, too supported the possibility of salvation even for the demise (pp. 205-208).

Although the book is lodged as a Protestant contribution, some of the ideas in the book would seat uneasily with conventional positions of Protestant orthodoxy. For instance, Walls’ reception of the present good life (chapter 1), the purgatory (chapters 1, 4, and 8) and the possibility of receiving repentance and post-mortem salvation in the afterlife (chapter 8) remain debatable even though Walls also demonstrates his case from recognized Protestant and Evangelical theologians of the past. As a minor critique, Walls did lean too much on Dante’s treatment (which Evangelicals, Protestants, and Pneuma-Renewalists would likely frown upon) even as his refutation of Nietzsche follows too closely many overtly critical Evangelical and Protestant reading of the said philosophical-father of contemporary nihilism. Otherwise, at a preliminary stage, Walls’ arguments seem plausible, despite the deviations from historic Protestant confessional views. Further analyses are needed to ascertain whether Walls’ interpretations are within or outside of the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. The other aspects presented in the book would likely find broad acceptance especially among confessional Protestants who have not been persuaded by non-theistic scientific, biological empirical and philosophical theories (cf. chapter 7). Still, whether Walls’ Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory would inspire a new generation of scholars, theologians, and believers to dig deeper into their faith, and consider broader views, particularly with contravening views from interdisciplinary resources, I heartily invite readers to join the conversation.

Reviewed by Timothy T. N. Lim

 

Publisher’s page: http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/heaven-hell-and-purgatory/349111

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