Theological Journal - April 28: Torrance Tuesday - God's Love

“God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.” (The Mediation of Christ, 94)

This bold and bracing statement of Torrance’s may be too bold for some of us. It seems rather universalistic. Maybe not taking the biblical demand for faith seriously enough? These are important concerns, and a difficult to answer as important.

Let me at least offer an illustration not as an answer but rather as a spur to our imaginations to perhaps think even more evangelically about God’s love. This illustration comes from C. S. Lewis, no universalist himself, to be sure!

In the last of his Narnia Chronicles, The Last Battle, Lewis sketches a memorable picture of the dwarves. Throughout the story the dwarves have stubbornly refused to join either Aslan’s side or the Calormene side in the last struggle before the final judgment. “The dwarves are for the dwarves” is their mantra. They believe only in themselves. Not in the Calormene deity Tash nor in Aslan, Narnia’s true and living God.

At the last battle, however, the dwarves, fighting for themselves, are killed. However, they end up in Aslan’s country (heaven) along with the rest of the “redeemed” of Narnia. They don’t realize it, though, and experience the glorious abundance of Aslan’s country as if they were still huddled in the dirty, dank, and dark corner of the stable. Queen Lucy takes pity on this miserable group and tries to tell them where they are and what their surroundings and circumstances really are. The dwarves do nit/cannot hear her however.

Frustrated, Lucy asks Aslan for help. He says there are limits to what even he can do for them He tries to speak to the stubborn creatures but they only hear terrifying roars from the Lion. Aslan provides food, shelter, protection, and anything the dwarves need and allows them to stay in his country even though they can neither recognize, benefit from, or acknowledge or praise him for his glory and goodness to them.

It remains an open question in the story whether the dwarves can or do “repent” of their stubborn resistance to submitting to the good rule of Aslan or stay under their self-imposed “house arrest” (as it were) forever. And we must acknowledge that Queen Susan (Peter, Edmund, and Lucy’s sister and member of the first group to enter Narnia), who loses interest in things Narnian in her adolescence and disavows its reality, is not in Aslan’s country with the others. But since she does not die in the accident which claims her siblings in our world and precipitates their arrival in Aslan’s country her destiny when she dies in our world remains an open question within the story world of Narnia.

As I noted above, Lewis was no universalist. He believed in the reality of “hell” and its population by those who did not trust Christ (see his The Great Divorce). And his clear statements to that effect are decisive for his own views. I am simply suggesting that the situation of the dwarves in The Last Battle gives readers a way to possibly rethink their own views even if in the ways that run counter to Lewis’ own. A way to think even more evangelically about God’s love than Lewis did.

A word picture in a children’s story is a slender reed to build much on. I admit. It can never be more than that. A doctrine or properly theological account of humanity’s final destiny must be grounded in the logic and grammar of the biblical story itself (as in Torrance’s quote above). But this story does gives a spur to imaginations to envision fresh expressions of it. And I hope that’s what it does for us as we

In short, could it be that even those who realize the “impossible possibility” (Barth) of resisting God’s love to the end of their lives, remain within God’s loving care, protection, and provision within God’s kingdom though they neither realize nor acknowledge it? Thus they remain existentially separated from God and the benefits of knowing and loving him and his people though objectively kept in that love? Might they eventually be won over?