First Meditation: Who Is God? 77
if only for the flinty resolve with which it faces its creed's impli-
cations: Calvin, as I have noted, had the courage to acknowl-
edge that his account of divine sovereignty necessitates belief
in the predestination not only of the saved and the damned,
but of the original fall of humankind itself; and he recognized
that the biblical claim that "God is love" must, on his prin -
ciples, be accounted a definition not of God in himself, but
only of God as experienced by the elect ( toward the damned,
God is in fact hate). And it is fitting that, among all models
of atonement, Reformed theology so securely fastened upon
a particularly sanguinary version of "substitution," one that
finds in the cross of Christ not simply God's self-outpouring
love, but also-and chiefly-the outpouring of his impla-
cable wrath against sin. And then even this act of substitu -
tion turns out to be one of a peculiarly miserly kind, since
its appeasements avail for only a very few. An eternal hell is
still required for the great many, in order to reveal the glory
of divine sovereignty in its fullness. Very well. So this side of
Calvinism is nothing but a savage reductio ad absurdum of the
worst aspects of an immensely influential but still deeply de-
fective theological tradition. (And I could here, if I wanted to
do so, play the loftily supercilious Eastern Orthodox and de-
nounce these doctrinal deformations as just so much Western
Christian "barbarism," and then slowly, haughtily turn away
and make my indignant retreat to the pre-Augustinian idyll
of Byzantine theology.) And, needless to say, the brute invoca-
tion of divine sovereignty as an argument for the moral intel-
ligibility of hell exercised a more immediate logical appeal in
the days when the heathen cult of class still held sway over the
better part of humanity's moral imagination, and when men
and women were accustomed to servile cringing before the
arbitrary whims of potentates, and to offering up obsequious