R. Zachary Manis

Much recent Christian philosophy has been devoted to defending hell, in some form or other, and addressing the various problems the doctrine raises. In this chapter, a set of problems is developed that is generally underappreciated, problems stemming not from the doctrine of hell itself, but from individual and collective belief in the doctrine. It is argued that, in numerous ways, the revelation of the doctrine of hell seems to bring about a situation in which it becomes psychologically impossible to do what is required to avoid hell, and in numerous ways, belief in hell seems incompatible with other beliefs, actions, and attitudes that are fundamental to the Christian faith. The chapter aims to demonstrate the seriousness of the challenge these various doxastic problems pose for defenders of the traditional view of hell.

The view of hell proposed by C. A. McIntosh, elsewhere called “the spectrum view,” is both promising and important, but I argue that it needs to be qualified; otherwise, it is a perilous thesis. Even in its qualified form, however, the spectrum view faces a problem: it’s not clear that it actually qualifies as a version of traditionalism, as McIntosh claims. I argue that the spectrum view is best construed as a new version of natural consequence annihilationism—one that avoids the major problem of its closest competitors, but also faces problems of its own. I close with a suggestion for how the spectrum view might be strengthened.

The Christian tradition teaches that some people will suffer eternally in hell. But why? Doesn't an all-powerful God have the ability to prevent this from happening to anyone? Wouldn't a perfectly good and loving God want to prevent it? And doesn't the traditional teaching about hell function as a threat, coercing those who truly believe it? These questions convey the problem of hell, the most disturbing of all theological problems and one of the most difficult to solve. Thinking Through the Problem of Hell is a rigorous yet accessible treatment of the issue. The solution that it develops, called the divine presence model, is that heaven and hell are the various ways that the righteous and the wicked experience the presence of God after the final judgment. In its fully developed form, the divine presence model addresses a whole host of theological issues: the purpose of suffering, the meaning of salvation, the nature of free will and self-deception, and the reason that God remains partially hidden in this life, even to those who earnestly seek Him. This is a book for those who refuse pat, simplistic answers to the hardest questions of the Christian faith.

This project is an exploration and development of several key concepts in Kierkegaard's writings. The primary focus is on the concept of freedom, which, in Kierkegaard's writings, is problematic for at least two reasons. First, there is the "metaphysical" problem of freedom in Kierkegaard's works, which is the problem of understanding what, exactly, Kierkegaard's view of human freedom is and how (and whether) this view of freedom is reconcilable with Kierkegaard's view of God as absolutely sovereign. Second, there is the "existential" problem of freedom. For Kierkegaard, the highest form of human freedom is existentially expressed as faith, and thus, the existential problem centers on the difficulties of living out, on a day-to-day basis, the kind of genuine faith that Kierkegaard perceives as essential to Christian existence. Both aspects of the problem are crucial for understanding Kierkegaard's overall theological and philosophical position. In fact, the two are interconnected: his solution to the logical problem has important existential implications, but his existential views are only tenable if they rest on some sort of plausible metaphysical foundation. With regard to the logical problem, I will argue that Kierkegaard holds a view of freedom in which the human subject is truly free in every significant sense of "free," but that the subject's will does not act independently of God's will. The individual's will has its very being in God's will, and God's sovereignty is actually required to make the individual free. With regard to the existential problem, I will argue that, for Kierkegaard, genuine faith is essentially characterized by suffering, and this suffering is manifested in a variety of forms. By renouncing all things to God, by declaring His goodness in the midst of suffering, and by embracing the essential characteristics of what it is to be human (namely, that one is finite, temporal, and limited in both knowledge and power ), one is finally able to "rest transparently" in God. This act of resting transparently, which includes as an essential component a recognition of one's absolute need for God, is, for Kierkegaard, both the true act of faith and "man's highest perfection."

Though Kierkegaard's ethic in "Works of Love" frequently has been a target of harsh — and often uncharitable — criticism, a number of recent treatments have sought to defend both its viability and its relevance to the contemporary discussion. Increasingly, the literature is replete with interpretations that situate it within the traditions of virtue ethics and/or divine command theory. I evaluate these readings, focusing primarily on the issue of moral obligation in Kierkegaard's writings. I argue that both the virtue and divine command interpretations are deficient, though Kierkegaard's ethic indeed shares significant points of contact with both traditions. I explicate and defend an alternative account of moral obligation that seems to me most to warrant the label, "Kierkegaardian," and attempt to expand the view, taking Kierkegaard's ethic as a foundation upon which to build a theoretically rigorous account of moral obligation. The resulting view, I argue, captures the best of both virtue ethics and divine command theory, while avoiding the most serious problems of each.

General preface -- Preface to the second edition -- What is philosophy of religion? -- Philosophy of religion and other disciplines -- Philosophy of religion and philosophy -- Can thinking about religion be neutral? -- Fideism -- Neutralism -- Critical dialogue -- The theistic God : the project of natural theology -- Concepts of God -- The theistic concept of God -- A case study : divine foreknowledge and human freedom -- The problem of religious language -- Natural theology -- Proofs of God's existence -- Classical arguments for God's existence -- Ontological arguments -- Cosmological arguments -- Teleological arguments -- Moral arguments -- Conclusions: The value of theistic argument -- Religious experience -- Types of religious experience -- Models for understanding experience -- Experience of God as direct and mediated -- Are religious experiences veridical? -- Checking experiential claims -- Special acts of God : revelation and miracles -- Special acts -- Theories of revelation -- Is the traditional view defensible? -- What is a miracle? -- Is it reasonable to believe in miracles? -- Can a revelation have special authority? -- Religion, modernity, and science -- Modernity and religious belief -- Naturalism -- Do the natural sciences undermine religious belief? -- Objections from the social sciences -- Religious uses of modern atheism -- The problem of evil -- Types of evil, versions of the problem, and types of response -- The logical form of the problem -- The evidential form of the problem -- Horrendous evils and the problem of hell -- Divine hiddenness -- Faith(s) and reason -- Faith : subjectivity in religious arguments -- The evidentialist challenge to religious belief -- Reformed epistemology -- The place of subjectivity in forming beliefs -- Interpretive judgments and the nature of a cumulative case -- Can faith be certain? -- Faith and doubt : can religious faith be tested? -- What is faith? -- Could one religion be true?

One of the most important recent developments in the discussion of Kierkegaard's ethics is an interpretation defended, in different forms, by Philip Quinn and Stephen Evans. Both argue that a divine-command theory of moral obligation (DCT) is to be found in "Works of Love". Against this view, I argue that, despite significant overlap between DCT and the view of moral obligation found in "Works of Love", there is at least one essential difference between the two: the former, but not the latter, is committed to the claim that, necessarily, p is morally obligatory only if God commands that p

According to a (once) venerable tradition, our knowledge of the external world is crucially dependent on divine favor: our ability to obtain knowledge of the world around us is made possible by God’s having so ordered things. I argue that this view, despite its unpopularity among con­temporary philosophers, is supported by a certain inference to the best explanation: namely, it provides an effective way of reconciling two widely held beliefs that, on the assumption of naturalism, appear incompatible: (1) that knowledge is incompatible with the kind of luck present in Gettier sce­narios and (2) that arguments for external world skepticism can be effectively rebutted by “shifting” them in the style of G. E. Moore.

A significant challenge faces any ethic that endorses the view that divine commands are sufficient to impose moral obligations; in this paper, I focus on Kierkegaard's ethic, in particular. The challenge to be addressed is the "modernized" problem of Abraham, popularized especially by Fear and Trembling: the dilemma that an agent faces when a being claiming to be God issues a command to the agent that, by the agent's own lights, seems not to be the kind of command that a loving God would issue. Against a solution to this problem proposed by C. Stephen Evans in Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, I argue that Kierkegaard regards this scenario as never actually resulting in a fully responsible agent's performance of some horrendous action on account of her non-culpable misinterpretation of God's will and/or failure to discern correctly whether a perceived moral imperative truly is divine in origin

One important version of the problem of divine freedom is that, if God is essentially good, and if freedom logically requires being able to do otherwise, then God is not free with respect to willing the good, and thus He is not morally praiseworthy for His goodness. I develop and defend a broadly Molinist solution to this problem, which, I argue, provides the best way out of the difficulty for orthodox theists who are unwilling to relinquish the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. The solution is that the divine essence includes the property of transworld goodness: i.e., for any possible morally significant choice that God could have faced, if God had actually faced it, God would have chosen to will the good. This view makes coherent the otherwise paradoxical theological intuition that it is within God’s power to do something evil, but He would not ever do such a thing