The Final Destiny of All

"It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them – and whom nonetheless He created."

– St. Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Homilies

Creation

The Christian doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilio is a claim about the world’s relation to God, and consequently a moral claim about the nature of God. God did not create the world because He needed it. He created it in order to express His immense goodness. And so God is not dependent on the world, the world is dependent on Him. And thus the destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are inseparable.

The following, then, is a meditation on 1. The Creation (the purpose of it), 2. The Creator, or Father (God's role as such), and 3. The Creatures (their destiny).

St. Gregory of Nyssa in his ‘On the Soul and Resurrection’, and especially in his ‘On the Making of Man’, laid out how the world will truly have been created only when it reaches its consummation in “the union of all things with the first Good.” And humanity will have truly been created only when all have been united with Christ, and thus humanity fully becomes “humankind according to the image.” Or as Paul put it:

“When all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all,” (1 Cor. 15:28). God will not only be all to all, but He will be all in all, and this He will be in “the end” (24).

Paul saw the world, not as going to hell in a handbasket, but as going toward Christ. “For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things [directed]” (Rom. 11:36).

God did not roll the dice and hope for the best. He created the world and knew that man would fall. Yet God “saw that it was good”. Because God “intends all human beings to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth,” (1 Tim. 2:4).

God can not then intend a soul’s ultimate destruction, or even allow that a person completely destroys himself. For that person is a part of God – an image of God.

Hence, if all that God created was good, and if his intention with creation was good, then all creatures must finally have their end in the Good. “For by Him all things were created,” and the same all God was pleased “to reconcile to Himself,” (Col. 1:16-20).

To jeopardize the life of your child for some other than a good end is, morally, already to have killed your child. As the good Creator of all, then, he must also steer His creation towards the good – to Himself.

Creator

Over and over again Jesus instructed his followers to think of God as the Father. Thus God’s actions must show at the very least paternal love.

“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” (Matt. 7:9)

Furthermore, Paul identified God’s universal fatherhood. He told the idol worshippers in Athens:

“In Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone,” (Ac. 17:28-29)

And he told the Ephesians that every family in heaven and on earth is named after the Father, (Eph. 3:14-15).

We can at least then know what not to expect from God. Father God can not be less loving than the best fathers we know. For example, a father who punishes his child not for the purpose of that child’s improvement, is a poor father. One who mercilessly beats his child is a child abusing psycho. God is not a poor father or a psycho. But strangely He's been accused by professing Christians to be far worse.

It is the role of the father to love his children unconditionally, to want their well-being, and do everything in his power to save his child from any bad condition the child is in. And that's how God is like!

Creatures

George MacDonald and Thomas Talbott take it as far as to say that God has a moral obligation to human beings. Just as parents have a natural obligation to do what good they can for the children they bring into the world, so God freely assumes the responsibility to secure the ultimate welfare of the human beings He brings into existence.

“God could no more choose to create persons without accepting that responsibility,” says Talbott, “than human parents can choose to raise children without acquiring an obligation to promote their welfare,” – (The Inescapable Love of God, p. 149).

So a loving God, for Thomas and George, could never permit his loved ones to make a choice that would eternally harm them – hence the cross.

Just as loving parents restrict the “freedom” of the children they love, so a loving God restricts the “freedom” of the children he loves. I say “freedom”, because a bad choice is not a free choice, and does not therefore result in freedom.

“The capacity to eternally act against all of my motives would introduce into my life a potential for profound irrationality that I would rather do without,” Reitan commented, “and if I exercise my libertarian freedom as described above, dooming myself to the outer darkness without reason, I sincerely hope that God would act to stop me–just as I hope a friend would stop me if I decided to leap from a rooftop for no reason. I would not regard the actions of that friend as a violation of any valuable freedom, but would see it as a welcome antidote to arbitrary stupidity.” – (Human Freedom, p. 137).

And so God “must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet,” (1 Cor. 15:25) and thus God will finally be all in all.

“In love did He bring the world into existence; in love does He guide it during this its temporal existence; in love is He going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of Him who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised,” – St. Isaac of Nineveh (Ascetical Homilies, II.38.1-2).