Bishop Barron, and Getting Away with Murder
The Monday Mystery Part 8: The Proclamation of the Kingdom
“'The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel'” (Mark 1:15)
Welcome to the eighth entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.
Twelve years ago, Bishop (then Father) Robert Barron ignited a firestorm of controversy when he claimed we can have a reasonable hope that all will be saved. I think his case is stronger than people who foamed at the mouth over it realize. As Barron has repeatedly clarified, he was not speaking of hope in terms of a “probabilistic judgment” e.g. “I hope that Hell is empty because I think there’s a realistic chance it is.” Hope in the way he uses the term need not require us to ‘know,’ ‘think’ or ‘expect’ that all are saved. Barron’s hope merely acknowledges the possibility of universal salvation and wants it to be so.
Indeed, this is something the Church prays for in the liturgy of the hours, the mass, and the rosary. Each time we pray the rosary we say “…lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.” Barron and Word on Fire’s statement points out that our Lady would not ask us to pray for the impossible. We would not, for example, pray for the conversion of the devil. In recent years, especially through theological reflection on baptism of desire, and the impairing effects of mental illness and distress, the Church has come to a much better understanding about how salvation is possible even in cases Christians in earlier times would have found hopeless.
But at the end of the day, I think even Barron’s heavily caveated use of hope leads us to suspend judgment in a way that isn’t warranted. While it’s true that everyone has a chance, I think it’s a stretch to go from ‘everyone had a chance’ to ‘for all we know, everyone made it.’ It’s possible, but the plain reading of scripture, and the testimony of mystics and visionaries overwhelmingly suggest that some people didn’t. I’d love to be wrong, just as I’d love for it to turn out that the titanic submarine crew is actually ok. But I don’t think it would be helpful in either case to say that there’s a reasonable hope, although it might technically be true.
While I disagree with Barron, I want to challenge a common reply to his position. It usually goes something like this: “If everyone is probably going to heaven anyways, then why go to all the trouble of living a holy life and evangelizing?” One commentator put it this way: “If there’s no hell, then what’s the point of all of this?”
I think these sorts of questions reflect a seriously impoverished view of the Gospel. Allow me to illustrate why with a case study:
I have a friend who’s promised to convert on his deathbed. Is he wrong to game the system like this? If he sticks the landing and manages to muster a sincere conversion before he dies, he will go to heaven. Many are willing to put up with the restrictions, burdens, and sacrifices of a Christian life because they know that heaven awaits them in the end. But my friend’s path seems like the best of both worlds: all the pleasures of a sinful life, none of the hardships of religious obligation, and eternal bliss at the end of it all. What should we say to people like my friend?
The standard reply to my friend’s reasoning is that it’s a foolish bet. There’s no way to guarantee that you won’t die in your sleep or in a freak accident before you’ve had a chance to convert. And after you’ve hardened your heart with a lifetime’s worth of choices against God, it’s not a given that you’ll even want to convert. Catholics will also add that with his attitude my friend will most likely face a severe and lengthy time of purification before he can enter heaven.
All well and good, and I happen to agree: delaying repentance is a foolish bet. But are Christians just hedging their bets? When we evangelize, are we just offering people a spiritual insurance policy? Do we avoid sin just because we don’t think we can get away with it? To paraphrase a priest in my community, suppose for the sake of argument that my friend knew for a fact that he’d convert in the last moment before he died, and that he’d go straight to heaven. Would he have any reason not to sin?
If you can’t say yes with total conviction, your relationship with God is on shaky ground. Imagine the only reason I didn’t kill my friend was because I was afraid of going to prison. Then along comes a Bishop who tells me that I can have a reasonable hope that nobody actually goes to prison. Imagine I vehemently oppose and rebuke this Bishop, even calling him nasty names and accusing him of being a heretic. After laying out all the reasons I would most certainly go to prison if I killed my friend, I added “besides, if I wasn’t going to go to prison, what would be the point of not killing my friend?”
Would you call this a good relationship? It’s not even on the same planet as a good relationship, even though on the outside it might look like a normal friendship. I feel silly even trying to list reasons why. But this sort of disconnect is very common in the spiritual life: what’s considered normal for our relationship with God would be comically dysfunctional in a human relationship. And remember that the bar is much higher for our relationship with God. As we discussed in my last post, our relationship with God isn’t just any relationship, it’s the ultimate relationship, requiring total and unconditional devotion. Brother Lawrence loved God so much he’d have served God even if he knew he’d go to hell anyways.1 Why is it that we might not serve him even if we knew we’d go to heaven?
If we truly realized how good God is and how much he loves us, serving him wouldn’t even be a question. It’s in Aquinas’ class of questions where “for those who have faith, no explanation is necessary.” I’m tempted to also agree with him that “for those without faith, no explanation is possible.” But I think there’d still be at least three good reasons to serve God even if we knew we could get away with sin:
1) A life without God is a tragedy: Imagine an orphan learns that his father is alive and wants more than anything to see him. The child says, I will get to know my father on my deathbed. No matter how good and sincere that deathbed reunion turns out to be, it would be a heartbreaking and senseless separation. The child would lose what should have been a lifetime of one of the most important and fulfilling connections a human being can ever have. Losses like this leave a void, even if someone isn’t consciously aware of it. Even if my friend manages to make it to heaven, he’s choosing to spend his life without a relationship that’s even more important than his own father.
2) There’s no comparison between the joys of a holy life and the pleasures of a sinful life: Deciding to live a life without God is like scheduling a trip to Disney World, but spending the day playing candy crush in the parking lot instead of entering the park. In the moment you might feel happy and content. But anyone can see that one option is better than the other. You won’t have to deal with the hot sun or long lines in your air conditioned car, but the experience you’d have in your car doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as the experience you’d have at Disney World. When we follow Jesus and experience God’s love, we discover, as the saying goes, that following Jesus is heaven on the way to heaven, and leading a sinful life is hell on the way to hell.
3) Other people are depending on us: Imagine you see a cancer doctor sprawled out on the couch in a hospital staff lounge. A nurse asks him if he will see a patient, and he replies, ‘I will help my patients on my deathbed.’ Hopefully you can see the problem with this. You can convert on your deathbed, but God has a plan for your life that starts now. There is work to be done to help people only you can help that starts now. Every moment of your life can be used to the profit of others. When we sink into sin, or wallow in mediocrity, we pull others people down with us. When we draw close to God and seek his will for our lives, we lift everyone around us up. As St. Catherine of Sienna famously said, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
In today’s mystery Jesus embarks on a mission of proclamation. The kingdom of God is at hand! This mystery reminds us that while Jesus is saving us from something, he is also saving us for something. Are you as enthusiastic for the Kingdom of God as you are afraid of hell? As you do your test run, ask the Lord to stir up excitement for the coming of this kingdom, and the “perfect love” that “casts out all fear” (1 John 4:8). May God bless you as you pray.
“…he had been long troubled in mind from a certain belief that he should be damned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned with himself about it: I did not engage in a religious life but for the love of GOD, and I have endeavoured to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of GOD.” Brother Lawrence, Practicing the Presence of God, Second Conversation https://www.basilica.ca/documents/2016/10/Brother%20Lawrence-The%20Practice%20of%20the%20Presence%20of%20God.pdf