Hell and Judgment

Charles Darwin was not driven from Christianity by his theory alone. In the autobiography he wrote for his family in 1876, he said that he could hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true, because the plain language of the text seemed to show that those who did not believe, his father, his brother and almost all his best friends among them, would be everlastingly punished. 'And this is a damnable doctrine,' he wrote. Fifty years later Bertrand Russell, in his 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian, named what he called one very serious defect in the moral character of Jesus, that Jesus believed in hell, and argued that no deeply humane person could believe in everlasting punishment. Neither man was attacking a straw man. Both had been taught the doctrine, and both thought it disqualified the faith before any argument about evidence began.

The philosophical form of the objection is sharper still, and it should be stated in the form its best proponents give it. The first strand is proportion. Every human life is finite, and every sin committed in it is a finite act by a finite creature. A punishment without end is infinitely greater than any finite wrong, so a God who inflicts it is not just but excessive. Marilyn McCord Adams pressed this from within the faith in the 1970s and later, and Jonathan Kvanvig's The Problem of Hell (1993) set out with care which features of the traditional view generate the problem. The second strand is love. If a human father could never consign his child to endless suffering, however rebellious the child, how can a heavenly Father who is love itself? The third strand concerns the saved. Friedrich Schleiermacher argued in The Christian Faith (1821 to 1822) that the redeemed could not be perfectly blessed while knowing that others were in endless misery, because the sympathy that Christ creates in them would not allow it.

Where you live, the objection may take another form. In many African and Asian churches the question is not abstract. It is about grandparents and ancestors who lived and died before any missionary arrived, and about a family that converted while an elderly mother refused. Are they lost? A young convert who is told yes, without any further word, may conclude that the God who sends the gospel is crueller than the ancestors he replaced. That question belongs partly to lesson 4 of this module, on those who have never heard, and it is part of this lesson because it is usually asked as a question about hell.

Before answering, notice what the objection already concedes. It assumes that justice is real, that punishment ought to be proportioned to wrong, and that a good judge does not treat the innocent and the guilty alike. Those are exactly Abraham's assumptions in Genesis 18. The objector and the patriarch are making the same kind of appeal to the same kind of standard. That does not answer the objection, but it shows where the conversation has to take place: not over whether God should be just, which both sides affirm, but over whether hell, rightly understood, is just.

Abraham's question at Sodom is the place to begin, because it is the Bible's own statement of the principle the objector is invoking. God has said that he will go down to see whether the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is justified (Genesis 18:21). Abraham steps forward and asks, 'Will You really sweep away the righteous with the wicked?' (Genesis 18:23). He bargains from fifty righteous people to ten, and at every step God agrees. The anchor verse is the hinge: it would be unworthy of God to treat the righteous and the wicked alike, and the Judge of all the earth will do what is right. God does not rebuke Abraham for the question. The narrator presents it as the kind of conversation the friend of God is permitted to have.

Several things are common ground for every Christian position in this lesson, and an apologist should say them first because the objector has often never heard them. Judgment is real and personal: God himself judges, through the one he has appointed (Acts 17:31). Judgment is proportioned: the servant who knew his master's will is beaten with many blows and the one who did not with few (Luke 12:47-48), and it will be 'more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you' (Matthew 11:22). God takes no pleasure in it: 'I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked should turn from their ways and live' (Ezekiel 33:11), and the Lord is 'not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance' (2 Peter 3:9). And no one will be treated worse than they deserve.

Something else needs saying, and it often surprises the objector. For much of the world, judgment is good news. The martyrs under the altar in Revelation cry, 'How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge those who dwell upon the earth and avenge our blood?' (Revelation 6:10). The psalms call the fields and the trees to sing because the LORD 'is coming to judge the earth' (Psalm 96:13). A world with no final judgment is a world in which the torturer and his victim are finally treated alike, which is exactly what Abraham said God would never do. Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian who wrote out of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, argued in Exclusion and Embrace (1996) that Christian refusal of revenge depends on the belief that God will judge, and he observed that the opposite belief comes easily in a quiet and comfortable place and much less easily in a land that has been burned. People who have suffered atrocity rarely object to judgment as such.

So the honest question is narrower than it first sounds. Christians are agreed that God will judge, that he will judge justly and in proportion, and that the outcome for those who refuse him is loss so grave that the New Testament calls it destruction, death, outer darkness and fire. They are not agreed on what that final state is. Three positions are held by Christians who hold a high view of scripture. They are set out below in the same order of parts: the position as its defenders state it, its texts, its answer to the objection in section 1, and the difficulty it still carries. The Systematic Theology track gives the fuller exegetical case in the lesson Hell, in its module Last Things, where universalism is treated in its stronger form; read it if you want the words and texts worked out at length. This lesson asks a narrower question: what each view says to Darwin.

The position, as its defenders state it, is that those who finally refuse God are raised, judged and consigned to a punishment that is conscious, just and without end. Its defenders insist on two things the objector usually does not know. First, the heart of the punishment is exclusion from God, the good for which every human being was made; the fire, the worm and the darkness are images of that loss and not a description of a torture chamber. Calvin treated them that way, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church at 1035 calls separation from God the chief punishment of hell. Second, the punishment admits degrees, as section 2 showed. This is the position of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, the Athanasian Creed and the great confessions of every major communion. By a very large margin it is the majority teaching of the church in every century.

Its texts are direct. 'And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life' (Matthew 25:46), where one adjective governs both halves of the sentence. Jesus' warning about Gehenna, which closes by quoting Isaiah 66:24 on the worm that never dies and the fire that is never quenched (Mark 9:48). 'And the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever. Day and night there is no rest for those who worship the beast and its image' (Revelation 14:11). The devil, the beast and the false prophet 'will be tormented day and night forever and ever' (Revelation 20:10). The rich man in Luke 16 is conscious and in anguish, and 'a great chasm has been fixed' (Luke 16:26). 'Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels' (Matthew 25:41).

Its answer to the objection has several parts, and they are independent. The first concerns the one offended. Anselm argued in Cur Deus Homo (1098) that the gravity of an offence is measured partly by the dignity of the one wronged, so that sin against an infinite God is not a small thing. The second concerns duration. The lost do not repent; their refusal continues, so the punishment answers a rebellion that is itself unending rather than a single finite act. The third is C. S. Lewis's, in The Problem of Pain (1940) and The Great Divorce (1945): God does not drag anyone into hell against their will, and in Lewis's phrase the doors of hell are locked on the inside. Hell is God's final respect for a creature's refusal of him. The fourth concerns victims, and it is pressed by those who have seen great evil: a judgment that simply ends the unrepentant may leave the worst crimes in history without an answer proportionate to what was done. On the question of the saved, defenders reply that the redeemed will see as God sees, and will not be held hostage by a sympathy that would overrule his justice.

Its difficulty, stated as its critics state it, is that the proportion problem does not wholly go away. Anselm's argument, if pressed, would make every sin equally infinite, which the tradition itself denies when it teaches degrees of punishment. The argument from continued rebellion depends on the lost going on sinning, which some think is an assumption rather than something scripture states. Lewis's account fits some texts better than others, since the New Testament also speaks of God actively casting out, and many defenders combine his view with a stronger account of God's judicial act. And the position has to explain the vocabulary of destruction and death that runs through the New Testament, which it does by arguing that ruin need not mean cessation. Its defenders give serious answers to all of this. The answers are arguments and not self-evident readings, and an apologist who holds this view should present them as such.

The position, as its defenders state it, is that immortality is not a natural possession of the human soul but a gift God gives in Christ. The lost are raised, judged justly and punished in proportion to their guilt, and then they cease to exist, permanently and irreversibly. Its defenders prefer the name conditional immortality to annihilationism, because the doctrine is first a claim about what a human being is and only second a claim about the end. They insist that it is not a denial of hell: the judgment is real, God's own act and terrible, and its result is eternal in the sense that it is never reversed. In the twentieth century it was argued by Basil Atkinson, John Wenham, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes and above all Edward Fudge in The Fire That Consumes (1982), and John Stott stated a tentative preference for it in print in 1988. It has ancient defenders, such as Arnobius around the year 300, and has always been a minority view.

Its texts are the vocabulary of ending. 'He alone is immortal' (1 Timothy 6:16). 'For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord' (Romans 6:23). God 'gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life' (John 3:16). 'Fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell' (Matthew 10:28). 'They will suffer the penalty of eternal destruction' (2 Thessalonians 1:9). The wide gate leads 'to destruction' (Matthew 7:13). Malachi says the arrogant and the evildoer will be stubble, and 'Not a root or branch will be left to them' (Malachi 4:1). And Revelation calls the lake of fire 'the second death' (Revelation 20:14). Conditionalists read the images of unquenchable fire and undying worm in Mark 9:48 from their source in Isaiah 66:24, where what they consume are corpses, and the smoke that rises forever in Revelation 14:11 from Isaiah 34:10, where the unquenched fire and the smoke rising forever over Edom picture a ruin that is permanent: the same verse says the land will lie desolate from generation to generation and no one will pass through it again.

Its answer to the objection is simple, and its defenders count that simplicity in its favour. The proportion problem is removed, because the punishment is finite and fitted to guilt, and only its result is eternal. The love problem is eased, because God does not sustain a creature in endless suffering, and the saved are not asked to be happy alongside an endless misery. Conditionalists add that their view raises the stakes rather than lowering them: what is offered in the gospel is life itself, and what is lost without it is everything, including existence. They also argue that the traditional view rests on a belief in the natural immortality of the soul that owes as much to Greek philosophy as to scripture, a claim about the history of ideas that its opponents contest.

Its difficulty, stated as its critics state it, is that some texts are hard to read its way. Revelation 20:10 speaks of torment day and night forever and ever, and the reply that it concerns the devil, the beast and the false prophet, and that the beast and false prophet are symbols, is available but convenient. Matthew 25:46 sets eternal punishment beside eternal life in one sentence, and the most natural reading gives the adjective the same force in both halves; the reply that it describes a permanent result rather than an unending process has to be argued for this verse in particular. The rich man in Luke 16 is conscious after death, though conditionalists point out that he is in Hades, the interim state, and not the final one. And the position stands against the overwhelming majority of the church's teachers, which is not a proof of error but is a reason for humility. Different evangelical bodies have judged differently whether it is compatible with holding office, and a student should know his own church's position before teaching it.

The position, as its defenders state it, is not that all will be saved but that a Christian may hope and pray that all will be saved. It must be kept distinct from two things. It is not pluralism: its defenders hold that salvation is through Christ alone. And it is not the dogmatic universalism argued by Thomas Talbott and David Bentley Hart, which asserts that all will certainly be saved. Hopeful universalism grants that hell is a real possibility for any person, that Jesus' warnings are meant with full seriousness, and that no one may presume. It holds only that the church is not told that any particular human being is finally lost, and that it may therefore hope for all. Its best-known statement is Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? (in English 1988, from German essays of 1986 and 1987); Karl Barth refused either to assert or to deny universal salvation; and Kallistos Ware, the Orthodox bishop, wrote in the same vein in his essay Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All? (1998). In the early church Gregory of Nyssa went further and taught a final restoration of all, and the Syriac writer Isaac of Nineveh wrote of a mercy that reaches into Gehenna.

Its texts are the universal ones, read at their full stretch. God 'wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth' (1 Timothy 2:4). 'For God has consigned everyone to disobedience so that He may have mercy on everyone' (Romans 11:32). 'For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive' (1 Corinthians 15:22), so 'that God may be all in all' (1 Corinthians 15:28). God was pleased 'to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through the blood of His cross' (Colossians 1:20). Every knee will bow and 'every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord' (Philippians 2:11). 'For the Lord will not cast us off forever' (Lamentations 3:31). And in the last chapters of the Bible the city's gates 'will never be shut' (Revelation 21:25) and the invitation still stands: 'let the one who is thirsty come' (Revelation 22:17). Hopeful universalists do not claim these texts prove that all will be saved. They claim that the texts make the hope a legitimate one.

Its answer to the objection is that the church does not know what Darwin feared it knew. The Christian is not required to believe that his father, his brother or his friends are lost, only that they will be judged by a God who desires their salvation and who is not limited by the boundaries of this life in the way we are. Defenders point out that the church has always prayed for all people (1 Timothy 2:1), and that it would be strange to pray for what one is forbidden to hope. The Catholic Catechism at 1058 says that the Church prays that no one should be lost. Hopeful universalism keeps the warnings and the judgment, and declines to turn them into a verdict on any named person. That makes it, its defenders say, the position closest to the pastor's real situation at a graveside.

Its difficulty, stated as its critics state it, is that a hope must have grounds. Jesus says that 'wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it' (Matthew 7:13), and of Judas that it would have been better for him not to have been born (Matthew 26:24), which is hard to say of someone who will end in glory. Critics also observe that no apostle expresses the hope in these terms, and that the language of final separation, the shut door of Matthew 25:10 and the second death, is pervasive. From the other side, dogmatic universalists argue that the hopeful position is unstable: if the universal texts are strong enough to ground hope, they are strong enough to ground assertion, and if not, the hope is mere wishing. Origenist universalism was condemned in the sixth century, though historians dispute the conciliar status of those condemnations, and the Augsburg Confession of 1530 rejects the view that the punishments of the condemned will end. The hopeful form has not been formally condemned by the Catholic Church, and John Paul II nominated Balthasar a cardinal in 1988, though he died days before he was to be made one. A student should know both facts.

Set the three side by side and notice that each has a hardest text. The traditional view has to carry the language of death and destruction. Conditional immortality has to carry Revelation 20:10 and the parallel of Matthew 25:46. Hopeful universalism has to carry Jesus' many warnings of final loss. Each has serious defenders who hold scripture to be God's word, and each has produced evangelists. Anyone who tells you only one of these views can be held by someone who takes the Bible seriously is telling you something false. This lesson does not tell you which to hold, and the reason is not timidity: the great confessions state the majority view, but no ecumenical council has ruled on conditional immortality and the hopeful form of universalism has not been formally condemned, so the question is not closed in the way the doctrine of the Trinity is closed, and a teacher who pretends otherwise sets his students up to be ambushed.

What you can say to Darwin, whatever your view, is a great deal. You can say that God will judge justly, so that no one will receive worse than they deserve, and that judgment is proportioned. You can say that the picture of a torture chamber run by a vindictive God is not what any of the three positions teaches. You can say that judgment is good news for every victim of evil, and that Abraham's appeal to the Judge of all the earth is one the Bible itself makes. You can say that the verdict on a particular person, his father, his brother, your grandmother, is not yours to pronounce, and that the Judge is the one who died for sinners. And you can say honestly which view you hold and why, while naming the text that is hardest for it. That last move does more for your credibility than any argument.

This week, add the second sheet to The hardest objections. On the first line, write the objection in Darwin's form and in the proportion form, in your own words. On the second, write how it is actually asked where you live; if the question is about ancestors or relatives who never believed, write it that way, without names. On the third, write each of the three positions in one sentence that its own defenders would accept, then the view you hold and one sentence on why. On the fourth, write the strongest text against your own view and what you say about it.

On the fifth line, write Genesis 18:25 in full. On the sixth, write the sentence you will use when someone asks you about a particular person who has died, and test it: does it say what you know, what you hope and what you do not know, and can the listener tell the three apart? Then take the sheet to someone in your church who holds a different view of hell from yours, if you know one, and ask them to read your one-sentence statement of their view. If they would not put it that way, rewrite it until they would.