I found this on my hard drive. It’s a short piece I wrote back in 2005, shortly after the funeral of Pope John Paul II.

The Pope: Do They Love Him or Hate Him?

Moral Integrity vs Popular Tokenism

On Friday the 8^th of April (New Zealand Time), the city of Rome saw its biggest funeral of all time, the funeral of Karol Jozef Wojtyla, better known to the world as Pope John Paul the second.

I watched with interest as current affairs show Campbell Live interviewed from Rome funeral attendee Catherine Hebblethwaite, co-author of The Next Pope. She explained, as host John Campbell nodded in agreement, that while many millions of people may have disagreed with the Pope’s teaching on moral issues, they nonetheless all looked up to him as a “great moral figure” worthy of respect and admiration. In fact this is not an isolated perspective. From a wide range of people, politicians, celebrities and Hollywood stars, religious figures and so forth, the message is fairly consistent. “While we disagree with his views, we think he is a great moral ‘figure’.” Well actually, that’s half true. People usually don’t say that they disagree with his views now that he’s dead, they just happen to have spent the last decade vilifying them.

Just how much sense does this really make?

What does it take to make somebody a great moral teacher, leader or figure? Presumably, one would think, it has something to do with a person’s take on moral issues. If the stances that a person takes are moral, and if they teach and encourage their admirers to uphold moral virtue and avoid moral vice, then they’re a great moral teacher. Right? If some aging Palestinian went around telling all his followers to go to crowded transport terminals and blow themselves up, or if a writer encouraged all his readers to molest children, or if he preached to the masses and urged them to burn down the homes of black people, we wouldn’t call him a great moral teacher. He would have to preach a message that we really do embrace and consider moral. He would have to be a person who upholds what we consider to be morally virtuous and noble. He could not be somebody who taught against the moral values that we hold dear, or we would not consider him moral.

What is it about the Pope then, that makes leaders like Helen Clark, along with Hollywood celebrities and just about everyone else, say that he was a great moral teacher or leader? What is it about him that appeals to their moral senses?

Could it be the way the Pope shared their commitment to personal sexual autonomy, and how he managed to avoid the shackles of traditional sexual mores when it comes to stuffy old institutions like Christian marriage? Maybe it was the way he said that all relationship choices as equally valid, regardless of whether one comes to embrace heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or anything else? Perhaps they think his morals were top-notch because of the way he viewed a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy on the grounds of her right to use her body as she sees fit? Or perhaps they were attracted to his stance on sexual safety, how he agreed with them that condoms save lives and provide the answer to avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, rather than prattling on about outdated moral artefacts like abstinence. Yes, it’s just obvious why so many people praise this moral figure. Clearly he spoke their mind!

There is the odd exceptional person who is honest about it all. Some people realize that it’s dishonest to go about moping and mourning the loss of a “great moral teacher” while believing that he was really a moral idiot who got just about everything wrong as far as morality is concerned. Occasionally you’ll hear somebody say, “Why are we sobbing in the streets over the inevitable death of a man who, in reality, didn’t have much time for those of us who didn’t toe his company line?”¹

But where are the Hollywood celebrities who say “The Pope claimed that abortion is morally on par with murder. He condemned the homosexual lifestyle as immoral. He said that women ought not to be priests. He believed that abstinence, rather than condoms, is the way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. He said that people who have sex outside of marriage are sinning. Yes, he really was a great moral teacher.” It’s strange that while we hear all this trendy talk about what a great moral figure he was, we never hear about which aspects of his morality made him so great. It seems Hollywood stars and Helen Clark have one thing in common: They know which side of their bread gets the butter. If they tell the truth about what they think about the Pope’s moral teaching, they’ll end up calling him a bigot, and they’ll be unpopular. So instead they opt for some suitably vague patronising rubbish about what a great moral figure the guy was, in the hopes that people will saw “aww, they really do care!”

Before anybody gets all up-in-arms at me for having a go at a nice old man who has just died, I’m not. I’m having a go at people who say that they are sad at the Pope’s death because he was a great moral figure, when in reality they think he was a morally twisted bigot. I think the pope was a great moral teacher because I think, generally speaking, that he was correct in the moral views he upheld. That’s the difference between having moral integrity when you say that somebody was a good man, and being a hypocrite who bows to popular politically correct token gestures and poseurism. Say what you mean, the public is not so stupid that we don’t know it already.

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What? Jonathan Edwards comes to the aid of annihilationism? Why would I say that? We all know Jonathan Edwards didn’t believe that annihilationism is biblical. Yes, we do all know that, but there are ways to help a view that do not involve showing that it is biblical.

Some advocates of the claim that the Bible teaches eternal torment make the mistaken claim that just because the Bible uses the phrase “eternal punishment,” it must be taken to teach eternal torment. The falsehood of this assertion is fairly superficially obvious, and it’s not like a lengthy argument is needed to put it in its place. But what’s interesting is that Jonathan Edwards, one of the most memorable preachers on the lurid details of eternal torment and who emphatically rejected annihilationism came to the rescue of annihilationism just at this point in the argument, in a chapter entitled, “Concerning the Endless Punishment of those who Die Impenitent,” paragraph 31.

He noted that some people advanced belief in the final annihilation of the lost, thinking that this scheme provides relief from the specter of eternal punishment (this is Edwards’ characterization of their goal). But, he warned, even if this were true, we would still not have escaped the idea of eternal punishment, since this scheme would itself be eternal punishment. Observe how he dismisses the view:

On this, I would observe that there is nothing got by such a scheme; no relief from the arguments taken from Scripture, for the proper eternity of future punishment.

Although Edwards himself thinks the scheme (annihilationism) is mistaken, this is not his point here. He says here that there is nothing got by the scheme itself (in other words, even within such a scheme, regardless of whether or not it is true) that brings relief from the Scriptural teaching that future punishment is eternal.

He was wrong, in my view, to reject the scheme. But I do applaud his objectivity. There’s a temptation among many (myself included at times, no doubt) to become intellectually slack when it means not considering annoying points in favor of views that we reject. But Edwards will have none of this. While he thought annihilationism to be false, at least he recognized that it is not an alternative to eternal punishment, but rather another version of eternal punishment.

Now, I know that in the past when speaking about the hopeless arguments and frequent mistakes made by traditionalists who critique annihilationism, I’ve used Robert Peterson as an example. I even had a paper published, pointing out the mistakes in his case. People are going to think I’m picking on the poor guy. I swear, I didn’t set out in this post to critique him, but in looking up quotes, I discovered an absolutely blatant error, and it’s an error that will, in the mind of the reader who believe Peterson, impugn another believer (Edward Fudge), so what the heck, here goes.

The above observation about Jonathan Edwards was clearly pointed out by Edward Fudge when in dialogue with Robert Peterson. As on so many other occasions, however, Peterson, far from granting the point, did not even understand it. He starts out alright, summing up the argument by saying “Fudge claims that Jonathan Edwards called annihilation eternal punishment.” So far, so good. But that’s where the hope of a good argument died. His reply was to point out by using examples (examples summed up by John Gerstner) that Edwards did not himself believe in annihilationism. Peterson concludes with what is supposed to be a rebuttal: “Plainly Edwards opposes annihilationism.” (Fudge and Peterson, Two View of Hell, p. 89.). But this is not even relevant to the argument.

After saying this, Peterson claims to have a “second reason” for rejecting this reading of Edwards (as though he has just presented one reason already). He rejects it because Edwards uses the word “proper.” Peterson says:

Edwards understands ‘the proper eternity of future punishment’ to consist in everlasting punishment [note: by this, Peterson really means “everlasting torment – GP], which he then demonstrates. He goes to some lengths to show that annihilationism is in error, concluding with the words, “so this scheme overthrows itself.”

This is all wrong, and I am at a loss to charitably imagine how Dr Peterson can say this after actually reading the chapter in question. Check this for yourself at THIS LINK where the work in question can be read online:

Scroll through to Chapter 31, which is the one in question. Read it, and you’ll see that Edwards argues exactly as I have described, only at more length. But then after this, he moves to Chapter 32 and introduces a new scheme, after ending his comments on annihilationism. In this new scheme that Edwards examines:

the torments of the damned in hell are properly penal, and in execution of penal justice, but yet they are neither eternal, nor shall end in annihilation, but shall be continued till justice is satisfied, and they have truly suffered as much as they have deserved, whereby their punishment shall be so long as to be called everlasting, but that then they shall be delivered, and finally be the subjects of everlasting happiness… (etc)

Edwards explicitly states that in the scheme he is now considering, the lost are not annihilated. It is after discussing problems internal to this view, and not annhilationism, that Edwards uses the words that Peterson erroneously quoted, at the end of paragraph 32, “so this scheme overthrows itself.” Oops. Peterson claimed that this statement was the conclusion of an argument for the claim that only eternal torment is properly a punishment that is eternal as a refutation of annihilationism. But not only did Edwards not even present such an argument in chapter 31 when talking about annihilationism, this comment was not even written in reference to annihilationism but rather to a version of Universalism. I can’t imagine getting a rebuttal more badly wrong.

The absolute irony of this obvious error is the way that Peterson sought to soften the blow against Edward Fudge, saying:

I do not accuse Fudge of impure motives here. He errs because of his zeal for annihilationism and his consequent tendency to read that doctrine into the words of historical (as well as biblical!) writers when it isn’t there (Two Views of Hell, 90).

So in other words, Fudge is reading Edwards with too much haste and too little care because he’s a little too willing to find his conclusions there? The irony is palpable, given the nature of Peterson’s error, which seems to be the result of a failure to adequately grasp Edwards’ point in the first place, and then a mistaken citation made for no other reason than too much haste and too little care.

A bit too much “zeal,” perhaps?

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