58 The Question of an Eternal Hell
scient love toward the infinite benignity of his own nature, all
of whose acts terminate in perfect goodness. For Christians,
this is frequently stated in trinitarian terms: God loves his own
essence as known in his Logos and delights in it in his Spirit.
Thus, he is unlike finite moral agents precisely by being infi-
nitely better than they-by being himself, that is, perfect be-
nevolence, an infinite willing and loving of the Good, revealed
as such for Christians in Christ.
Hence, again, it really is only a spurious sort of apopha-
ticism that prompts a Christian at this point to refuse to draw
obvious conclusions from what Christian tradition claims are
revealed truths about God. And one principle that absolutely
must be deduced from Christian metaphysical tradition, and
from the logic of "classical theism" as a whole, is that it is pre-
cisely because God is not some finite ethical agent-precisely,
that is, because he is transcendent perfection and simplicity
rather than a mutable individual of variable goodness - that
one can assume that all his acts must be expressive of his na-
ture's infinite benevolence. He is not, like one of us, a limited
and changeable thing among other limited changeable things,
who might on occasion act in ways contrary to his nature. To
imagine that he could ever possibly be only imperfectly and
inconstantly good in this fashion would be the worst kind of
anthropomorphism. It would reduce him to a finite instance
of reality, in whom the possible exceeds the actual. It would
make him a conditioned being, dependent for what he is on
a reality greater than himself: a goodness that he only partly
exemplifies. Or else - what amounts to the same thing- it
would reduce "goodness" itself to an artifact of the will of some
"supreme being" rather than one of the "divine names": one,
that is, of the true manifestations of the divine nature, con -
vertible in reference with the very essence of God. If that were