"If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."
As I noted in a previous post, the free-will defense of hell, for many reason, ultimately fails. A rejection of God results from either limited freedom or limited knowledge, thus to say that a creature can have knowledge of who God is as his (the creature's) ultimate desire, and yet also freely reject God forever is impossible.
Yes, God loves our freedom. However, He loves us more; that is to say that God does not love our freedom more than He loves us. What sort of mother who, out of respect for her child's freedom, would allow her child to constantly harm himself? If the child chooses to constantly touch the burning stove, would not the mother stop him? If she were to allow him to continually harm himself out of respect for his freedom, then she does not truly love him, but only his freedom. If one were to learn that the mother is allowing this, she is not only seen as a bad mother, but one for whom child protective services would need to step in.
If this is true about a mother, how much more so about God? Sure, God allows his children to make poor choices with the hope that we will learn from those chocies. But could He allow such rebellion eternally?
The question then, is simple. Does God know how to get to each of His children or is God like Frankenstein and we his monsters over whom He has no control? Here, the infernalist might be tempted to say that God simply doesn't know what each person needs in order to be saved. This, however, goes against both Scripture and the Tradition. Psalm 139, Romans 8:27, and virtually all of the fathers and medievals state firmly that God knows each person better than they even know themselves. All Thomists true to Aquinas' teachings will admit that God knows how much grace each person needs in order to be saved. To disagree would call into question God's omniscience. God knows how much grace each person needs to be saved, however He doesn't give it, or so the claim goes. This may sound strange, but this is the logical conclusion if one wants to simultaneously hold both an endless hell and divine omniscience.
The problem here is that this is totally foreign to the God who is Love and who desires all to be saved. Let's not complicate things here: if God knows how to get to each person then He will get to each person. In my estimation, any Christian theological opinion contrary to this violates the message of the Gospel. It is so remote from the Christ who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one that it can scarcely even be called a Christian view. Any theologoumenon (theological opinion) that undermines the Love of God and the Gospel of Christ so drastically should hold no place in Christian thought.
A proper phenomenology of conversion will illustrate these points more clearly. Think, if you will, back to your own conversion. When this occurred, did you feel overpowered? Did you feel unfree? Or, in experiencing Christ, did you not experience freedom unlike you had ever experienced before? Though you did not "have the choice" to experience conversion, it was still a moment of profound interior freedom.
The beautiful thing about conversion is that it does not have the same formula for each person. What converts one person might not convert another and vice versa. It is inherently subjective in the sense that Christ encounters all of his beloved children in a different way, a way in which they can receive His Love. As the old Latin proverb goes, "what is received is received according to the mode of the receiver." What exactly it takes for each heart to find its rest in Christ is unique because each human heart is unique; each person is an unrepeatable image of God who reveals something about God's heart that only that individual person can. There is no such thing as a person in the abstract because persons cannot be abstracted, only experienced.
Since persons cannot be abstracted, the logic of personal love does not fit into syllogistic reasoning. As Pascal so poetically put it, "Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point" -- the heart has reasons which reason does not know. Love does not fit into the nice and tidy box of reason. The logic of love is suprarational, not able to be fully comprehended by our minds; not because it is irrational, but because it belongs to a realm above reason. Why did you fall in love? Why did this experience lead to conversion and not another? These questions have no precise answer, but belong to the realm of mystery.
Ultimately, the sole intelligible answer to be found is the Person of Christ, incarnate out of complete Love for us. He alone knows which particular encounter with Him will cause the sin and shame of our individual hardened hearts to melt away. There is no heart so hardened that it is outside of the reach of this encounter, every person is loved and every person is redeemable.
When people encountered Christ in the Gospels, they all responded to the same call; follow me, but they responded to it in their own way. For Peter, it was through a great catch of fish. For Matthew, it was through a call to a higher life. For the Samaritan woman, it was through being seen as fallen, yet still being loved despite that. Love encounters each of us in a way that we are able to receive it.
Christ stands at each heart gently knocking. Not only knocking, but knowing at which time each will receive Him. Until the last heart opens the door, the mission of the Good Shepherd remains; leave the ninety-nine in search of the one. When all are finally found, all of heaven will together rejoice for I have found my lost sheep.