11 September 2023: made a minor edit.
How should we act / allocate resources (how much should we), given the possibility that some people will be lost to hardening? One idea is that if even one person is at risk, it's worth expending effort to save them. If they make it into God's rest, then that is of eternal value. The resources expended to save them will probably disappear at the end of human history or be trivial to recreate if lost.
But in practice, we tend to find it acceptable to not try to save everyone, when people's lives are at risk, either of the first or the second death. We try a certain amount, and then leave them up to their own devices, or chance, or other factors out of our control.
Yet, we do find it compelling to try to save lives, as a society, if enough people are at risk.
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For reference, what kinds of resources are expended to save lives, from the first death? (Secular life-saving.)
I don't trust myself to come up with specific numbers for COVID-19, so I won't try to say what that is on a societal level. Either someone has done this for the pandemic so far, or someday likely will. But on a personal level, I could ask myself "roughly estimate the unpleasant experiences and foregone opportunities due to trying to deal with the pandemic -- have I spent this much trying to save people from being lost?"
(I think for some Christians, the answer will be "I sacrifice more to save lives on earth that are going to end anyway, than I do on people's eternal well-being." Others, like myself, might say "I don't know.")
I do trust myself with one number, the order of magnitude of potential lives lost from COVID, the lives at stake which our anti-COVID measures have partially saved -- which is in the 10s of millions (judging from the death toll of the 1918 flu of 50 million given by the CDC). We are willing to have a major societal response around the world in order to deal with things that threaten death tolls in the 10s of millions of lives.
On an individual level, what are the risks of hardening? This then aggregates to the societal risk of hardening.
A traditional evangelical (I'll say here) believes that everyone's eternal state is decided at the moment of death. It depends entirely on two factors: God's grace and their response. But God's grace never fails. So practically it depends on one factor, their response or decision to sufficiently fully trust Jesus for salvation. When people die, if they aren't going to heaven, they are going to hell. Hell might be a sort of "separation from God" that is not as literally what the Bible talks about (maybe more like C. S. Lewis' imagination of it), or it could be a more literal being burned in a fire. It lasts forever.
For a traditional evangelical, it is clear that at least all the people who don't profess Christianity, and possibly some of those who do, are in peril as I write this, at risk of losing their chance to avoid the second death, by dying the first, perhaps at their life expectancy, and perhaps much sooner. Traditional evangelicals could actually calculate the number of lost, kind of like how I used the death toll from the 1918 flu as a reference for what the death toll of COVID-19 could be.
But from an MSLN perspective, instead, it is harder to tell that specific people are definitely lost, and harder to say how much time they have. Most people have a lot more time to become saved than the duration of their lives on earth. They have the whole Millennium. But salvation is much more involved than in traditional evangelicalism. Many non-Christians are being saved because they are listening to God (the Father) without realizing it, and are becoming more in tune with him. Christians who have ceased to grow are in danger of being hardened. Who knows if someday I won't cease to grow?
I think that there is a big practical question to answer, which is "should MSLN people favor an 'urgent' or a 'patient' approach to salvation?" It may not matter too much in the end which is chosen as a global approach, because what is most effective in each particular case is either more urgent or more patient, and we shouldn't try to make sweeping, simplistic practical decisions, when we can simply deal with the people around us as they actually are in their particularity.
I would say the "urgent" approach is like that of the most intellectually honest true traditional evangelical believers. A stranger of that sort encounters you, talks to you, cares about you deeply, pushes you, corners you, forces you to say things, to confront whether or not you have met the standard that they are convinced of. It's sort of jarring to laid-back Americans like myself. I think there is a sort of basic belief in laid-back American culture (properly basic or not) that no one is in any deep danger -- fear is not allowed, concern is not allowed. We are okay and we are okay with each other. The urgent approach is almost unhearable from that perspective.
The "patient" approach is that of theologically moderate people, or those who may have hell "on the books" but practically speaking ignore its existence. In a laid-back, pleasantly loving way, they gently lead non-Christians to make a commitment to Jesus, as though when those converted get to heaven, God will say "by the way, that whole time, you had no idea how much you were at risk of eternal hellfire".
The urgent and the patient approach each have their downsides. Urgent people can be pushy, invasive, and, given the traditional soteriology, "manufacture" a lot of shallow Christians. There is more fear in the urgent culture, which has its upsides and downsides.
The patient approach risks forgetting why Christianity is necessary in the first place. It may be that the beauty, community, and therapeutic benefits to Christianity are enough to attract many people, but then, maybe people don't need beauty, community, and therapy beyond what they already have, or secular sources are better. If it is actually the case that hell doesn't matter, that lack of a sense of necessity is not that bad. But if hell does matter, and patient Christians don't have a sense that Christianity matters, then they won't believe it does, and the people in the culture around them won't believe it does, either -- but actually it will, in a frightful and sorrow-inducing way.
11 September 2023: Originally "in perhaps the most frightful and sorrow-inducing way imaginable", which I think is unrealistic (the human imagination is capable of coming up with extreme thoughts, but the most extreme thoughts probably have little connection to reality). "Frightful and sorrow-inducing" is bad enough.
Maybe it is obvious how New Wine soteriology (especially as I've developed it in MSLN) lends itself to both urgency and patience. Hell is not eternal conscious torment, but it is still an eternal loss to God. Instead of a positive point of decision "for" Christ that seals a person's fate, there is a negative point of decision "against" Christ (hardening). On the plus side, there is a generous amount of time to decide "for" Christ, but on the minus side, the longer that time takes, the more time one could be at risk for deciding "against" Christ. The things we do in this life can give us some spiritual calculus (in the "dental" sense) which has to be undone at some point -- if we hold to it forever, it could be the thing that makes us choose "against" Christ.
As I've described things in the last paragraph, I feel like what is called for is to be "urgent", but with a long time limit. Or maybe what's really called for is something that doesn't map perfectly well with a simple "urgent" or "patient" mindset and actionset. Maybe there is no answer on that axis -- but I think an epistemic "no answer" defaults to "status quo assumptions" or "patience" practically.
It would be nice if we could know something like a "reference rate of lostness" like how the 1918 flu gives us clues to how much COVID could kill if we didn't do anything about it.
Philip Brown (IIRC) estimates that only a small percentage of people will be hardened. (As far as I know, he's the only other person other than me with an idea on this.) From a global perspective, only a small percentage of people died of the 1918 flu (50 million deaths / 1.8 billion total population in 1918 = 2.7%, or 10s of millions / 1s of billions = 1s of percentage points). So then it matters how we define "small". Some "small" percentages call to us to put out total effort. As a Christian civilization (the "kingdom of God"?) we might ought to mobilize a response as strong as that against COVID for the sake of the "1 sheep" who has gone astray. But maybe there are some "small" percentages that are so low that as a civilization we can not worry about things, round it off to zero. Perhaps for those who, like God, are directly concerned with such "sheep", it is called for for them to care, but otherwise the rest of us can live like we're in heaven on earth, or we can rest in the assurance that we and those we know are exceedingly unlikely to ever reject God. (There's danger in that kind of sense of safety, and maybe only those who are really devoted to helping whatever people may be at risk of being lost are maximally safe themselves.)
I think it might be good, in a sequel to this post, to see if I can come up with any reasoning from an MSL perspective that might suggest roughly what the rate of "potentially hardened" (or "those most at risk of hardening" or "the amount the 'death rate' is at play") could possibly be. At some point in the future (maybe a long time from now when I do my Bible commentary) I may be able to find clues from how God approaches dealing with his people, to see what kind of "small" percentage that number might really be, or how he acts in the absence of knowing (given that the decisions we make to become in tune with God, or not, are up to us, in the present and future).
My general sense, as of this point in the writing process, is that reality calls for an urgent response, except that for practical reasons, the most effective response in the long run may be somewhat patient. (Kind of like how sleeping can be seen as valuable insofar as in the long run it serves the purpose of working.) I think for me this should be (and to some extent is) an update away from an inner default of patience.
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(Later:) If one person is lost, that's an eternal cost to God. Shouldn't we spend all our resources trying to save just one person? Any finite investment pays off if the outcome is eternal good. I think a good reason not to, in any individual case, is because by using too many resources on one person, we let two (or more) other people become hardened. Otherwise, all economic decisions are dominated by the risk of people losing out on eternal life.
People have free will and you can't force them to be saved or manufacture a good state of their hearts. (But you can (sort of) force one person, you, to be saved and manufacture the good state of your own heart, in the sense that who you are is up to you. You are among the people at some risk of hardening someday, as far as you know.) And you can care about other people's salvation in an urgent way while relating to them in a patient way, or with a kind of "modulated urgency" (like the urgency of a deadline... which is 1,000 years in the future).
Those last two paragraphs are about what is rational or even religious. According to rational ethics (the MSLN-based kind) and religion, we should be using all our resources to save as many people as possible from the second death. But, society runs on a different logic.
Society allows itself to not care about things because that's just what it has evolved into. Maybe society says "the individual is required to be ethical but in practice doesn't have to be". (Society does not speak coherently, although it speaks powerfully.)
Society sets a bar for "what we care about", and it motivates itself with some kind of thought process. That thought process has some relationship to what is rational or religious. So, our society says "50 million deaths" (first death) "from the 1918 flu is a big deal and we will do 'whatever it takes' to make those kinds of things not be allowed to do their worst, so we'll put people into lockdown and maybe make them do other things to deal with this basically similar COVID-19 threat". But, if society says that, why not say something similar with the threat of the second death, which could easily put at risk 50 million people? If I'm talking to society, it might make sense to bring up our COVID-19 response as a way to say "According to how society thinks about big populations risking death, we (society and its individuals) should mobilize a response at least as strong as that of dealing with COVID-19."
Even if in reality (rational/religious), we shouldn't need that kind of argument. As humans, "society-style" arguments ("sociological", in a sense) work on us, whether they should or not. (I don't want to say "as humans, society-style arguments work on us" as some sort of profound or normative description of who we deeply are and thus how things ought to be, but more as "this is a sort of bias or bias-like thing that we have to deal with".)
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Presumably God would always act rationally/religiously, rather than human-sociologically. Also, God's behavior is somewhat constrained by his negotiations with Satan. So I will guess that God's behavior in the Bible isn't the clearest source of information about the percentage of those hardened. It may depict some hardened people, or discuss some kind of concept of hardening.
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