‘The relevance of feelings. [Defenders of hell often] do not enter at any length into how bad horrendous sufferings are…. [They] imply that those who are offended [by the doctrine of eternal torment] will be motivated by understandable feelings, which are nevertheless not relevant to a rational consideration of the subject.

I want to close with a contrary methodological contention…: namely, that feelings are highly relevant to the problem of evil and to the problem of hell, because they are one source of information about how bad something is for a person. To be sure they are not an infallible source. Certainly they are not always an articulate source. But they are a source. Where questions of value are concerned, reason is not an infallible source either. That is why so-called value calculations in abstraction from feelings can strike us as “cold” or “callous”. I do not believe we have any infallible faculties at all. But our best shot at valuations will some from the collaboration of feelings and reason, the latter articulating the former, the former giving data to the latter.

Personally, I am appalled at [the] valuations of defenders of eternal torment, at levels too deep for words (although I have already said many). I invite anyone who agrees with [them] – that the saved can in good conscience let their happiness be unaffected by the plight of the damned because the destruction of the latter is self-willed – to spend a week visiting patients who are dying of emphysema or of the advanced effects of alcoholism, to listen with sympathetic presence, to enter into their point of view on their lives, to face their pain and despair. Then ask whether one could in good conscience dismiss their suffering with, “Oh well, they brought it in themselves!”

I do not think this is sentimental. Other than experiencing such suffering in our own person, such sympathetic entering into the position of another is the best way we have to tell what it would be like to be that person and suffer as they do, the best data we can get on how bad it would be to suffer that way. Nor is my thesis especially new. It is but an extension of the old Augustinian-Platonist point, that where values are concerned, what and how well you see depends not simply on how well you think, but on what and how well you love (a point to which Swinburne seems otherwise sympathetic). I borrow a point from Charles Hartshorne when I suggest that sensitivity, sympathetic interaction, is an aspect of such loving, one that rightfully affects our judgment in ways we should not ignore’. – Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians’, in Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann (ed. Eleonore Stump; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 326.

A note: I’ve come across too few who have made the invaluable point that McCord Adams makes here (whether or not one agrees with her conclusions on universalism is another matter). Of course, the implications of her words reach well beyond conversations concerning apokatastasis – they reach to how we think about all of life. BTW: She really needs to update her homepage.