“Therefore, be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5: 48).

Preceding this verse, Jesus teaches a new teaching which goes contrary to the common thought of that day:

Matthew 5: 44 “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;”

The challenge set before those who heard Jesus on that day,  and to all who through the ages of Christianity heard and or read His words, was that we are to become like our Father in heaven. We are to do what God does, we are to be what He is – LOVE. This is the purpose and goal of salvation, the changing of our nature into being like Christ. Salvation is not some legal fiction where we are declared forgiven but remain the same persons inside. We are to imitate His gracious love in all our actions, those actions coming from a true change of our very ontology, which comes from fasting, prayer, and the power of the Sacraments.

The idea of being punished in some form in an eternal hell of fire and tormnt finds its foundation not in Scripture, but in Roman Courtroom idea of our sins being crimes against God and deserving revenge. The Western mind does not see our failure to become what we were made to become in the Creation as sickness needing to be healed, but rather as  deep offense and crime to the majesty of God.  The descriptions of salvation in the Western Church are always couched in the courtroom language of crime and punishment.

I was pondering these things last night because I ran across something on Facebook which reminded me of just how heinous human beings can be to each other. Without too much trouble, a Google search can bring up all manner of wretched behaviors in history where men took their enemies, or even just people they wanted to kill for sport and their enjoyment, and subjected them to the most horrifying deaths one can imagine. The oft-quoted example of Adoph Hitler comes to mind with his persecution unto death of millions in the concentration camps of Germany. We have a long reading list of the horrors by which he,and may other such criminal tyrants, punished those whom they felt were traitors to the good of their cause. Decades of  imprisonment, starvation, brutal dismemberment, and torture in the name of medical experiments are part and parcel of these crimes against the innocent.

But here is what I considered last night: hellists are fond of pointing to Hitler as the bete noir who deserves to be in eternal fire and torment for what he did, yet they do not realize that the descriptions of  hell which they so relish and desire to be done to their enemies is simply a description of  Hitler’s hellish behavior here on earth!

In other words, if the sadistic descriptions of eternal hell of which the hellists are so fond (Dante’s Divine Comedy comes to mind) are true, then Hitler was saint because he was doing exactly what Jesus said we must do – become like God and copy all that God does! Think about it! God tortures and burns his enemies forever – Hitler and Mao and Stalin and King Leopold of Belgium all did the same thing.

Even now I hear someone responding in anger, “Oh! But Hitler and all wicked sinners deserve everything that God will do to them.” Talk about missing the point! My whole point is that when anyone torments, tortures, cruelly kills, or murders those whom he does not like or those who are his enemies, we say that he deserves eternal punishment for being such a heinous person. Yet hellists describe God doing exactly the same thing and instead of decrying this smear on His character, they have the nerve to brand it as “justice.” They do so with no apparent concern for how this  paints of our loving heavenly Father. Such descriptions of God are what drives David Bentley Hart into spasms of justified outrage (and well-deserved pejoratives) in his book against those who so thoughtlessly picture our Father to be like the cruel despots here on earth who have done so much evil.

Someone else will object to this, stating, “But, Ed! God is just!”  YES!  That’s exactly the point! God is just, so He would never, ever act like any of the multitudes of vile tyrants who have filled the world with corpses! I am still waiting for someone to ‘splain to me how unending torture of sentient beings fulfills any idea of just treatment of the guilty. This is even understood by human beings who are broken and corrupted by sin. Laws have been enacted against punishments that go far beyond any reasonability or purpose. If broken, sinful man can come to this realization, how then does the hellist imply that God is any less just in His treatment of those who are diseased with sin? No, the only thing I get in response, like some mindless parrot, is the insistence over and over that God is just. It is a response both thoughtless and innane

“You don’t get it!  Sin must be punished!” Well, yes! Any Universalist worth the name will completely agree with that statement. But a continuous and unending punishment which goes far beyond the necessary repayment for the evil done becomes an evil in itself. It goes beyond punishment and into the realm of tyranny and sadism. More than that, you are showing by making such a statement that you don’t understand the nature of God’s justice. In His justice, the offender makes right what is wrong. A payment in kind is made with the desire that this chastening will create a change of heart in the offender.  This is why the thief is commanded to repay what he stole, with an additional twenty percent added for the loss of the use of the stolen object. It is payment in kind – lex talionis – not revenge. Hellists simply do not get this!

Why do you think that many of our prisons go by the name “Correctional Institute?” The goal of such incarceration is to correct the person so that they do not continue to do harm to themselves, their families, and society at large. The response to wrong behavior is to corect and change the person. If sinful mankind can do this, if we who are imperfect can seek the restoration of others rather than revenge, is our loving, heavenly Father any less good?

So, following the logic, if becoming like the Father is the description of a saint, then if hell and eternal torment of sentient beings is true, some of them being unbaptized babies as Augustine insisted, then Adolf Hitler was a saint. Hitler simply did to his enemies what hellists insist that God will do to His enemies forever.