The threat of severe punishment if one goes against the commands seems pretty similar to compulsion to me. If I commanded you to do something on pain of being thrown in an eternal pit of snakes, you could reasonably say I was forcing you to do it.
I would also be interested to know how C.S. Lewis separated righteous divine intervention from omnipotent busybodiness if anyone has the knowledge and a few minutes to save me from the terrible trials of actually looking up this myself!
Not only is it “pretty similar to compulsion”; it’s the exact sort of compulsion that we complain of in human tyrants. The problem with Hitler or Stalin or whoever isn’t that they somehow make their citizens literally unable to choose for themselves; it’s that they hit them with terrible punishments when they choose the “wrong” way.
The kind of tyranny God allegedly refrains from exercising is precisely the kind that no human tyrant has ever had the option of exercising.
(Though that might change, and plenty of people have worried about the possibility—see e.g. Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. For that matter, IIRC the paragraph quoted above is in the context of Lewis worrying about human tyrannies with the ability to mess with their subjects’ minds.)
I think Lewis’s actual response would not be the one VoiceOfRa gives; rather, I think he would say that God doesn’t really send people to hell, he merely permits them to send themselves there, and that the awfulness of hell is not a matter of devils with pitchforks or lakes of molten sulphur but of the inhabitants of hell—who have selected themselves by their refusal to align themselves with God who is the source of all goodness—living out the freedom-from-God on which they have insisted.
I should add that I think that’s also a pretty hopeless response, though less obviously hopeless (to me) than the one VoiceOfRa suggests. (But also that it’s some time since I read much Lewis and my mental model of him may be less than perfectly accurate; perhaps he could give a better account of his position than I have sketched above.)
The problem with Hitler or Stalin or whoever isn’t that they somehow make their citizens literally unable to choose for themselves; it’s that they hit them with terrible punishments when they choose the “wrong” way.
Stalin didn’t only punish people who choose the wrong way but also because he feared that they might be against him.
Hitler did horrible things to jewish people and other groups because of their identity and not because an individual did something wrong.
Sure. And Hitler started a world war, and Stalin suppressed varieties of artistic expression that he didn’t like, and both of them did plenty of other awful things. I wasn’t purporting to give a complete account of all the awfulness of Hitler or Stalin or any other tyrant. I was commenting on one particular aspect of human tyranny, the one already being compared against divine tyranny in this discussion: their tendency to try to control subjects’ behaviour by coercion.
C.S. Lewis gives his actual response in “The Great Divorce”, and it is much as you say. In fact, he asserts that people in hell do not ever want to leave it, so God is just giving them what they want.
As you say, this may ultimately not make a lot of sense, but at least he is not saying that God is being tyrannical.
I’m not sure that “The Great Divorce” is intended to tell us Lewis’s actual opinions about hell and how one gets and/or stays there. Isn’t he at pains, in his interchange with George MacDonald at the end, to insist that it’s mere speculation and not intended to be any kind of statement of doctrine?
(It’s years since I read it, so I may well be wrong; in particular, I’m not more than 80% confident that what he says there can’t be interpreted as “I expect things actually are somewhat like this, but it’s important for the reader to understand that I could well be wrong about that”.)
Yes, I think that’s right, although I think he would be much more certain that God is not a tyrant, and would be proposing this as one possible explanation.
God gave humans free will. Yes, He commands people to act morally, but He doesn’t compel people to do so.
The threat of severe punishment if one goes against the commands seems pretty similar to compulsion to me. If I commanded you to do something on pain of being thrown in an eternal pit of snakes, you could reasonably say I was forcing you to do it.
I would also be interested to know how C.S. Lewis separated righteous divine intervention from omnipotent busybodiness if anyone has the knowledge and a few minutes to save me from the terrible trials of actually looking up this myself!
Not only is it “pretty similar to compulsion”; it’s the exact sort of compulsion that we complain of in human tyrants. The problem with Hitler or Stalin or whoever isn’t that they somehow make their citizens literally unable to choose for themselves; it’s that they hit them with terrible punishments when they choose the “wrong” way.
The kind of tyranny God allegedly refrains from exercising is precisely the kind that no human tyrant has ever had the option of exercising.
(Though that might change, and plenty of people have worried about the possibility—see e.g. Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. For that matter, IIRC the paragraph quoted above is in the context of Lewis worrying about human tyrannies with the ability to mess with their subjects’ minds.)
I think Lewis’s actual response would not be the one VoiceOfRa gives; rather, I think he would say that God doesn’t really send people to hell, he merely permits them to send themselves there, and that the awfulness of hell is not a matter of devils with pitchforks or lakes of molten sulphur but of the inhabitants of hell—who have selected themselves by their refusal to align themselves with God who is the source of all goodness—living out the freedom-from-God on which they have insisted.
I should add that I think that’s also a pretty hopeless response, though less obviously hopeless (to me) than the one VoiceOfRa suggests. (But also that it’s some time since I read much Lewis and my mental model of him may be less than perfectly accurate; perhaps he could give a better account of his position than I have sketched above.)
Stalin didn’t only punish people who choose the wrong way but also because he feared that they might be against him. Hitler did horrible things to jewish people and other groups because of their identity and not because an individual did something wrong.
Sure. And Hitler started a world war, and Stalin suppressed varieties of artistic expression that he didn’t like, and both of them did plenty of other awful things. I wasn’t purporting to give a complete account of all the awfulness of Hitler or Stalin or any other tyrant. I was commenting on one particular aspect of human tyranny, the one already being compared against divine tyranny in this discussion: their tendency to try to control subjects’ behaviour by coercion.
C.S. Lewis gives his actual response in “The Great Divorce”, and it is much as you say. In fact, he asserts that people in hell do not ever want to leave it, so God is just giving them what they want.
As you say, this may ultimately not make a lot of sense, but at least he is not saying that God is being tyrannical.
I’m not sure that “The Great Divorce” is intended to tell us Lewis’s actual opinions about hell and how one gets and/or stays there. Isn’t he at pains, in his interchange with George MacDonald at the end, to insist that it’s mere speculation and not intended to be any kind of statement of doctrine?
(It’s years since I read it, so I may well be wrong; in particular, I’m not more than 80% confident that what he says there can’t be interpreted as “I expect things actually are somewhat like this, but it’s important for the reader to understand that I could well be wrong about that”.)
Yes, I think that’s right, although I think he would be much more certain that God is not a tyrant, and would be proposing this as one possible explanation.