Punishment Is an Evil That God Intends for the Sake of a Greater Good
I continue the debate between Alejandro Bermúdez and myself on the question of whether God punishes or not. This is the first part of my response to a new podcast in which Alejandro has responded to some of my arguments.
But before continuing, I wish to make a few points:
First: I regret that Alejandro’s audience still does not have direct access to my arguments, since he comments on them but does not mention the website where they are published. It is a matter of basic intellectual fairness to direct one’s audience to the sources so that they can read the arguments in their original form and judge for themselves.
Second: to the readers who have written to me expressing a certain concern that this debate might in some way cause scandal, give the impression that Catholics are divided, create division, and so on — I say: apologetics is the branch of theology that explains and defends the truths of the faith. I would be doing poor apologetics if, out of a misguided sense of human respect and excessive scruples, I were to place the preservation of appearances above the duty to combat error wherever it is found (it is the error that is combated, not the person). Pope Francis put it plainly: “Problems in the Church are resolved by confronting them, discussing them, and praying.“
Third: I wish to thank the readers who have contributed their knowledge through comments and contributions. Some have been experts in theology and Scripture, and their input has been very valuable. I am grateful for the fraternal correction as well.
Alejandro Bermúdez’s Arguments
On this occasion I will not pause to address Alejandro’s peripheral arguments, in which he insistently repeats that in my articles I limit myself solely to citing the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, the Popes, and the Magisterium in overwhelming abundance — as if I were a walking library of quotations that neither reasons nor applies “theological reasoning.” To respond to that argument, you may consult the previous chapter and judge for yourself, firsthand, whether it is true that I cite incorrectly or out of context. I will therefore focus on the two main arguments by which Alejandro maintains that God does not punish.
Objection 1: God Is Love; Therefore, God Does Not Punish
To substantiate his point, Alejandro asks his audience to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church from paragraph 212 to 217, where God is described as rich in love and faithfulness, benevolent, good, merciful, and so on. From this he concludes — by way of “theological reasoning” — that this somehow demonstrates that God does not punish.
If we were to summarize this argument graphically once again, it would look like this:
I apologize if I seem to oversimplify Alejandro’s argument, but the truth is that this is essentially what it amounts to — and it was hardly necessary to send anyone to read the Catechism to prove that God is merciful, as if anyone were denying it.
By this point in the debate, it should not be difficult to understand that if we have said that God is love, we have also said that it is precisely because he loves that he punishes — which is exactly what the Bible says: “For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (Heb 12:6). To substantiate this I have been citing, in addition to the Bible, Fathers of the Church, the Magisterium, and Popes who state expressly that punishment is an act of love. I will therefore not pause to repeat what I have already said in previous chapters, but I will take the opportunity to leave a few questions in the air.
If the fact that God is love truly implies in some way that God does not punish, then why has not a single saint, Father of the Church, or Pope in 2,000 years arrived at this conclusion? Is it that no one has ever made use of “theological reasoning” to such a degree that it would have been stated anywhere — in even a single magisterial text — that God does not punish? Why, on the contrary, is it possible to find the opposite affirmation in such abundance that Alejandro’s very complaint is that I cite too much?
Even the Catholic Encyclopedia itself — one of the websites belonging to the ACI Group, of which Alejandro is director — contradicts him plainly by maintaining exactly the opposite of what he claims:
“The second effect of sin consists in incurring a debt of suffering for the evil committed (reatus poenae). Sin (reatus culpae) is the cause of this obligation (reatus poenae). The suffering may be inflicted in this life through medicinal punishments, calamities, illnesses, and temporal evils, which tend to turn us away from sin; or it may be inflicted in the life to come by the justice of God as vindicative punishment. The punishments in the future life are proportioned to the sin committed, and it is an obligation to suffer this punishment for unrepented sins — which is what theologians mean by the expression ‘reatus poenae.'”
Yes: on his own website, his own Catholic Encyclopedia says nothing different from, for example, the Dogmatic Council of Trent cited in earlier chapters, which affirms that God sent temporal punishments. To claim that the authors of the Catholic Encyclopedia — together with the Fathers of Trent — were not making use of theological “reasoning” is asking a great deal.
Objection 2: Punishment Is Evil; God Is Good; God Does Not Will Evil
On this point, Alejandro delves into the mystery of evil and into how the fact that God punishes must be understood in the light of this mystery. He proceeds from the principle that God is not the author, the agent, or the direct cause of evil, and concludes that this contradicts the claim that God punishes.
If we were to summarize this argument graphically once again, it would go like this:
But this is not a subject that theology and philosophy have not studied extensively — and they have come nowhere near the conclusions that Alejandro reaches. Before addressing the topic, however, we must draw two distinctions when we speak of evil. We can speak of physical evil — such as pain, illness, and death — and of moral evil, which is sin, which is essentially a negation of God.
With respect to moral evil, it must be said that since it is a negation of God, He cannot will it either per se or per accidens — that is, neither as an end nor as a means. But with respect to physical evil, while God does not will it per se — that is, out of affection for evil or as an end in itself — He can will it per accidens; that is, He may permit it as a means to achieve a superior end of the physical order (such as the preservation of a higher life) or of the moral order (such as punishment or moral purification).
Therefore, although God cannot be the direct cause of evil (evil has no direct cause but only an indirect one, since it is the absence of good), He can intend physical evil as a means to achieve a higher end. Cardinal Zeferino González gives a complete explanation of this in his work Filosofía Elemental.
To illustrate this, let us once again use the punishment of Zechariah. We recalled how, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah to announce that his elderly wife would conceive John the Baptist, he doubted the angel’s words, and God punished him by striking him mute until the birth of his son (Lk 1:19-20). Let us now analyze this event from another perspective: Zechariah has committed a fault and is punished with a physical evil. Someone will rightly say: that is an evil for Zechariah — and it is true. But does this mean that God, by ordaining that his voice be taken from him, did something “wrong”? No. God ultimately did him a good, for by depriving him of his voice He accomplished an act of vindicative justice that helped him expiate his fault, and at the same time an act of corrective justice, since this physical evil served as a means for him to obtain a greater good — moving him to repentance over his sin and causing him to grow spiritually. One might object that this implies believing that God acted wrongly; to which one must reply that God, as universal sovereign, does not act wrongly when He disposes of the gifts He Himself has freely given and is under no obligation to maintain.
Another problem with this argument of Alejandro’s is that it also contradicts what he himself has been defending, since he had acknowledged that in the Old Testament God did indeed punish, and he cited countless examples. But if under Alejandro’s way of thinking — in which punishment is evil — God would then have been the direct cause of evil in the Old Testament? Alejandro will surely argue that God had chosen to reveal Himself in that way because the people were incapable of understanding God otherwise; but that does not satisfactorily explain how this fact can justify God acting contrary to His own nature.
