The Obligation To Hope For All - Part One

Certainly, this obligatory hope is not preached as much as it should be. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to put forth some arguments for this obligatory hope.

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Adapted from: Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? with a short discourse on Hell

If the threats of judgment and the cruel, horrifying images of the gravity of the punishments imposed upon sinners that we find in Scripture and Tradition have any point, then it is surely, in the first instance, to make me see the seriousness of the responsibility that I bear along with my freedom. But do Scripture and Tradition also force me to assume from these threats of judgment, beyond what concerns me, that even only one other besides me has met ruin in hell or is destined to do so? Quite to the contrary, it seems to me that, initially, the following thesis can be advocated (only however, from the perspective of practical-prescriptive and not theoretical-cognitive reason): "Whoever reckons with the possibility of even only one person's being lost besides himself is hardly able to love unreservedly... Just the slightest nagging thought of a fianl hell for others tempts us, in moments which human togetherness becomes especially difficult, to leave the other to himself."

One should however, "make a really unreserved decision to accept every man in his total worth and to seek one's own final joy in this affirmation of others. If one sees things this way, then "heaven for all" does not mean something like and inducement to laziness in our ethical commitment but rather the heaviest demand upon all of us that one can imagine: the decision for a patience that absolutely never gives up but is prepared to wait infinitely long for the other... If, on the basis of God's universal goodness, I cannot write anyone off for all eternity, then my eternal misfortune could not consist precisely in the fact that I myself simply do not find the patience to wait infinitely long for the "conversion of the other".