In 2002, Christianity Today presented one of the most troubling explanations of hell that I have ever encountered. The April 22 issue bothered me, but not because of a Jonathan Edwards style description of an angry God. That sort of argument would have been troubling enough but at least internally consistent. The CT article was, to my mind, much worse because it presented the tortures of an eternal hell as somehow consistent with the character of Jesus. In other words, hell is the creation of a loving God.
In that piece, now 16 years old, the evangelical theologian J. I. Packer had attempted to answer a difficult but sincere question: “Won’t heaven’s joy be spoiled by our awareness of unsaved loved ones in hell?” To his credit, Packer did not take a dismissive approach to the question. “First, I resonate with the question to the depths of my soul,” he said. “Loved ones of my own, some living, some dead, have not shared my faith in Christ. That is painful.” He went on, however, to use the same sort of logic as countless other hellfire theologians have down throughout Christian history. He’s in good company, not the least of which is Augustine of Hippo in the late 4th to early 5th centuries. Packer and all of those asserting the traditional view assume the indestructible nature of human beings throughout eternity. They have immortal souls regardless of their saved or unsaved status. It follows then, that in God’s created universe, eternal torture constitutes some sort of predictable consequence. “Hell is God giving people what they chose. That is reality—retributive reality…” said Packer.
The belief that a person could have the capacity and will to choose eternal torment in hell is bad enough. But it gets worse. The actual question had to do with how hell might affect saved people throughout all eternity. Good question! Can you really enjoy the blessings of heaven if you are also conscious of people you love suffering constantly and eternally? Packer said yes. Why? Because, according to his logic, we only ask that sort of question because we are sinful, not redeemed and recreated. We do not think like Christ. If we did, we would not mind having our loved ones tortured eternally! “Their hell will not veto our heaven, Packer said. And here is his horrifying conclusion: “Granted, this sounds to us more like hard-heartedness than Christ-likeness, yet Christ-likeness is precisely what it will be.”
Such is Packer’s logic of love and hell.
At the risk of sounding overly sarcastic, I wonder what would happen if we really believed in this kind of “Christ-likeness?” Maybe we would happily torture our criminals—and not just the murderers but also the adolescent shoplifters and old people (like me) who accidentally run stop lights (those inconvenient traffic cams!). Maybe we should go back to the barbaric times of burning heretics at the stake. And perhaps the interrogators of the infamous Spanish Inquisition were Christ-like after all.
Yes, the doctrine of an ever-burning hell deeply offends me. I believe it should offend every human being. But what is worse is that this doctrine not only twists our ideas of justice and appropriate consequences, it seriously perverts our understanding of God’s love to the point that it is meaningless. In order for the statement, “God is love” to mean something, it must have real world implications that humans are capable of understanding. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” It seems to me that the Bible presupposes that human beings must in some way be capable of tasting, seeing, and understanding something—at least the rudiments of what love and evil are. The notion that if I was Christ-like enough I would be ok with people I love suffering forever flies in the face of both love and logic. And it also flies in the face of everything we know about the love of Christ.
In Matthew’s rendition of the Sermon on the Mount there is a very profound sequence of teachings, which includes a passage in chapter 5 about loving your enemies. Hating your enemies, says Jesus, is the natural thing for humans to do, especially for pagans who don’t know the true God. By contrast, he says, your Heavenly Father sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous. So be perfect like your Father in heaven. Love everyone! Then in chapter 6 Jesus talks about being sincere in giving and worship rather than just doing it for show. And after showing the value of trust and the futility of worry, Jesus, in Matthew 7:1, drives home his message of love and restoration saying, “Do not Judge, or you too will be judged!”
And here’s one of the most significant verses in the whole sequence. After declaring that God gives good things to those who ask, Jesus says in verse 11, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”
I suggest we need to pause long enough to let the implications of that statement sink in. Sinful or evil people (that’s all of us) may not live perfectly. But we know something good when we see it. And I would add, we know evil when we see it also. We don’t do it perfectly. But we humans, according to Jesus, know the difference between good gifts and bad gifts. It seems if we can know that, at the very least we ought to understand whether hell is a good belief to have or not. It’s not a difficult puzzle to figure out. The amazing thing about Jesus’ statement is that he not only defends the notion that God is good. But he also declares that God is good in a way that is easily understood by humans, even evil ones.
There is a logic to hell. And if you accept the assumptions on which it is built, the logic is pretty air-tight. And if you buy into the assumptions and the logic, you will find texts to support your conclusions. That is unfortunately how we often read the Bible. We go looking for texts to prove what we already believe. But none of those assumptions, points of logic, texts or conclusions about hell can legitimately include the proposition that God is love. The logic of love and the logic of hell do not mix.
In the church context in which I work, I am not really concerned about the doctrine of hell. Most people I talk to have worked through that problem and come out on the other side believing in a loving God instead. Even prominent evangelical preachers like Rob Bell have decided that the doctrine of hell is incompatible with the love of God. (See Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, by Rob Bell, published in 2011.) I’m guessing Packer has not changed his mind since his 2002 article. But it appears that a number of other people have. What does concern me however, is that in other recent conversations, especially those related to national security, religious dogma, and social justice, people will use the logic of hell to defend a lack of compassion for people who are hurting or who don’t fit their norms and standards. We may not believe in hell of the eternal kind. But we sometimes want to take revenge and give our enemies a little hell on earth.
The logic of hell calls evil good. And it often uses the language of justice to defend anger, revenge, and violence. It can cause apparently otherwise good people to be ok with bloodshed, discrimination, and hate—and even calling it compatible with God’s love. Sometimes this logic is used to justify cruelty to enemies. In that sense it crosses the line from defense into the bottomless pit of revenge. Sometimes it is used to increase the suffering of the poor and the displaced. The logic of hell says they deserve to suffer because they don’t benefit us or they threaten our security.
Whenever someone defends discriminatory and heavy-handed tactics of an organization, whether religious or secular, by saying the ends justifies the means, they are calling evil good. And if someone says, “If you just understood the Bible correctly, you would be ok with revenge and giving your enemies hell,” beware. It’s a cover for perpetrating evil in the name of a loving God.
