Without Reward: Further Thoughts on The Good Place

“Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis.”

Doctor Who S10 E6, ‘Extremis’ (2017)

 

Medals. A reward for some achievement for other, I imagine.

I begin this post by informing you of the threat of impending spoilers. A common enough occurrence on my blog, you might remark, and entirely fairly, but this instance is a little different to usual, in that the threat operates on two levels. On one level, you my dear and cherished reader are threatened that, if you continue reading past the end of this sentence, you’ll encounter an outline of some of the major events of the recent third series of Netflix’s The Good Place, which I anticipate might cause you some distress if you’re not yet all caught up with said recent third series.¹ On another level, when, in the fourth episode of the series, the Brainy Bunch stumbled upon Michael and Janet operating an interdimensional portal, they were threatened that, if they kept pushing for a plausible explanation to the point where Michael and Janet saw no option but to resort to the truth, they would encounter an outline of some of the major operating principles of the afterlife, which would unavoidably end up causing them a very great deal of distress indeed.

The Brainy Bunch is a collective title adopted by our heroes Eleanor Shellstrop, Chidi Anagonye, Tahani al-Jamil, and Jason Mendoza, who by this point have all died; been sent to the Bad Place; blown holes in Michael’s experimental torture method of getting dead humans to torture one another (rather than he and his fellow demons doing all the work themselves), a feat they achieved mainly by becoming better people (and therefore less deserving of being sentenced to the Bad Place) as a result of their interactions with one another, and then by persuading Michael that he really ought to be on their side; and then had Michael interfere with their timelines so that they never died in the first place and don’t remember any of that, in order that he might conduct a new experiment into whether humans are capable of moral improvement if granted more time.² Whew. So right now, they’re totally ignorant of the rules about needing to accrue a certain number of ‘points’ by performing good deeds while alive in order to snag a spot in the Good Place afterwards – but they’ve seen and heard enough that it simply doesn’t seem possible to keep things that way for long.

“Michael, they’ve seen through the door into the afterlife, and they’ve heard how it works,” Janet counsels Michael, out of earshot of the increasingly suspicious Brainy Bunch. “It’s over.”

“Ah.” Michael spends a couple of seconds taking this in and composing himself, then resigns himself to the necessary task. “Fine.” He turns to address the Brainy Bunch. “I guess I’ll start at the beginning: you all died.”

Time elapses as he explains, or so we gather from the ensuing shot of the exterior of the building. When we return to the scene indoors, our heroes are looking rather stunned. The first we hear speak is Eleanor: “Well, this sucks.”

Chidi, pacing nearby, is next: “So, to sum up, there is a heaven and hell. We’ve been to hell, and now, no matter how good we are for the rest of our lives, we’re going back to hell.”

“Again, it’s not the classic Christian hell,” Michael replies – which rather makes one wonder what ‘the classic Christian hell’ is imagined to be in the mind of the viewer, but regardless³ – “but that’s the gist, yes. As soon as you learned about the afterlife, your motivation to be good was corrupted, so you can’t earn points any more. So sorry for eternally dooming you.”

“And that’s our bad, guys,” interjects Janet helpfully.

So you see what I mean about the Brainy Bunch being threatened with spoilers of a dramatically more grievous nature than any you’ve met in my blog: their knowledge of these spoilers is nothing less than a sentence to everlasting damnation. The principle is that as soon as someone knows that her good deeds in this life are stacking up points to win her a pleasant experience in the next one, she is no longer capable of performing any truly good deed. Her motivations, as Michael puts it, have been corrupted: she would, inevitably, be doing good in order to gain something nice for herself, rather than to help others. And goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Virtue is only virtue in extremis – without reward.⁴ Right?

But if it were true that doing good in expectation of a reward renders that good no good at all, why on earth would our Lord repeatedly tell us in no uncertain terms that we can expect rewards in the next life for righteousness in this one?

Rejoice when others hate and persecute and tell horrible lies about you for my sake, he says, for your reward is great in heaven. Do more than love those who love you, he says, for if you do merely that, what reward do you have? Give in secret, and pray in secret, and fast in secret, he says, for in each case, your Father who sees in secret will reward you. He tells us to lay up treasure in heaven for ourselves, and so prove that it’s to heaven that our hearts belong. He tells us to love our enemies, and do good, and lend expecting nothing in return, and our reward will be great. And the same tune is taken up in the letters the first apostles wrote under inspiration of his Spirit: if what one has built on Christ the foundation survives trial by fire in the day of the Lord, he will receive a reward; we’re to watch ourselves, that we might lose nothing, but win a full reward; we’re to carry out work heartily, as for the Lord, knowing that from the Lord we will receive the inheritance as our reward.⁵

It’s the exact opposite of the The Good Place view. Far from concealing from us the fact that righteous deeds will be rewarded in heaven lest our motivations be corrupted, the Bible actively encourages us to let the expectation of a heavenly reward prompt us to do good. Indeed, the implication here goes beyond merely confirming that one can, after all, receive the reward for one’s righteous deeds despite knowing that that reward was coming; it goes so far as to suggest that one must know that the reward for one’s righteous deeds is coming in order to receive it. And indeed, to push that point a bit harder, we know that whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.⁶

The issue at hand, then, actually turns out not to be so much the precise justification behind this good deed or that, but rather what one believes about the character of God. Is God just? Does he value and recognise righteousness? Well, yes he does – and so, inkeeping with that, he must give fitting rewards to those who seek to obey him. Expecting to be rewarded for good deeds isn’t a corrupt motivation: it’s an expression of faith in the fact that God is good and righteous. To do good without expecting reward, meanwhile, would be to suppose that God can’t be relied upon to render justice, and hence to impugn his character.

It’s something of a counterintuitive idea, and so I’m keen to rein it in with a couple of clarifications. First off, it does nullify a good deed to perform it in anticipation of a reward from other humans; Jesus was very clear that if one does good before others in order to be praised by them, that’s all the reward one’s going to get.⁷ If that’s what’s going on, the point about the character of God doesn’t come into it. Under this principle, it’s to some degree valid for The Good Place to talk about corrupt motivations and so forth, because in that imagined universe, God as he is in the real world isn’t a thing; there isn’t an ultimately good and just Judge whose perfect character one can unfairly impugn.⁸

Second, none of us is, in her natural state, capable of performing a truly good deed worthy of heavenly reward. Man is born spiritually dead and enslaved to sin; every inclination of his heart is only evil all the time; there is none who does good, not even one.⁹ But Jesus, when, for the joy set before him¹⁰ – for the sake of obtaining his own reward, justly due him from his Father’s hand for his perfect righteousness – when for that he endured the cross, he swapped our sinfulness for his righteousness and bore the full punishment for the former, cancelling every debt of sin; and that means that, if we’re trusting in him, our nature has been changed, and we are now capable of good. We are now capable of such good as justly earns a heavenly reward. If that weren’t so, what would be the point of Jesus encouraging us to conduct ourselves in such a manner as to obtain one?

It’s not just that goodness can still be goodness if it anticipates a reward; beyond that, goodness is not truly goodness, not goodness by God’s standards, if it doesn’t anticipate a reward. In order to be counted good, it’s necessary to believe in the ultimate goodness of God who is the judge and measure of all goodness – and an ultimately good God cannot but reward goodness as it deserves. But thank God that his goodness goes beyond rendering to us what we deserve, even as far as giving up his beloved Son, the only truly good human being who ever lived, to the punishment that we in our utter lack of goodness deserved, in order that we might be made good, even as good as he is – and share in the reward he justly earned by that goodness.

Footnotes

¹ If you want to get up to speed quickly now, here it is: https://www.netflix.com/title/80113701.

² I wrote about some of those earlier events of the serial in ‘For the Eleanor Shellstrops of This World’, in January of this year.

³ The English word ‘hell’ is used to translate three different Greek terms in the ESV translation of the New Testament: Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus. Not my strongest theological suit, I’ll admit, but I’m pretty sure those are not all the same thing.

⁴ ‘Extremis’ was a cracking episode: Moffat being clever without being too clever, you know? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rydyk/doctor-who-series-10-6-extremis

⁵ Oh crikey, here come the references … Matthew 5:11-12, 44-46; 6:3-4, 6, 17-18, 19-20; Luke 6:35; 1 Corinthians 3:11-14; 2 John 1:8; Colossians 3:23-34. Here’s the Matthew to get you started: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+5&version=ESVUK.

⁶ And that’s out of Hebrews 11: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=heb+11&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Check Matthew 6; just click once to the right from the link two footnotes up.

⁸ On the contrary, our heroes were at one stage genuinely entertaining the possibility that the judge of the universe was literally a burrito. It’s not exactly what you’d call weighty viewing.

⁹ You’re looking at Genesis 6 and Romans 3 and, oh, I don’t know, like, the whole Bible, basically.

¹⁰ A phrase out of Hebrews 12:2. Fancy a beautiful track by Pas Neos that takes it as its title? Yes, yes you do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G3lWQFNkf8.