Open AccessOn St. Isaac The Syrian’s Argument Against Divine Retribution
Author(s) -
Jordan Wessling
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
faith and philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.301
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 2153-3393
pISSN - 0739-7046
DOI - 10.37977/faithphil.2021.38.1.7
Subject(s) - flourishing , argument (complex analysis) , retributive justice , philosophy , punishment (psychology) , theism , teleological argument , incompatibilism , epistemology , existence of god , free will , economic justice , law , psychology , teleology , social psychology , political science , compatibilism , biochemistry , chemistry
Many theists maintain that God punishes humans retributively, whereby God intentionally harms those punished as their sins deserve, without also aiming qua punishment to contribute to the immediate or ultimate flourishing of those punished, or to the flourishing of some third (human) party. By contrast, St. Isaac the Syrian in effect contends that such an understanding of divine retribution is incompatible with a plausible understanding of God’s initial creative purposes of love and is thus untrue. In this paper, I present and substantially build upon Isaac’s contention, and I defend the resulting developed argument as a good argument worthy of further consideration.