There is… no escaping the fact that Jesus speaks in the Bible of a hell for the “condemned.” He sometimes uses the word Gehenna, which was a valley near Jerusalem associated with the sacrifice of children by fire to the Phoenician god Moloch; elsewhere in the New Testament, writers (especially Paul and John the Divine) tell of a fiery pit (Tartarus or Hades) in which the damned will spend eternity. “Depart from me, you cursed [ones], into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” Jesus says in Matthew. In Mark he speaks of “the unquenchable fire.” The Book of Revelation paints a vivid picture ”” in a fantastical, problematic work that John the Divine says he composed when he was “in the spirit on the Lord’s day,” a signal that this is not an Associated Press report ”” of the lake of fire and the dismissal of the damned from the presence of God to a place where “they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”
And yet there is a contrary scriptural trend that suggests, as Jesus puts it, that the gates of hell shall not finally prevail, that God will wipe away every tear ”” not just the tears of Evangelical Christians but the tears of all. [Rob] Bell puts much stock in references to the universal redemption of creation: in Matthew, Jesus speaks of the “renewal of all things”; in Acts, Peter says Jesus will “restore everything”; in Colossians, Paul writes that “God was pleased to … reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”
So is it heaven for Christians who say they are Christians and hell for everybody else? What about babies, or people who die without ever hearing the Gospel through no fault of their own? (As Bell puts it, “What if the missionary got a flat tire?”) Who knows? Such tangles have consumed Christianity for millennia and likely will for millennia to come.
Of course, Hell can’t die, because it isn’t alive. The question actually in view is “Does Hell exist.” The answer is “Yes.” Now, there may be many men who would prefer that Hell not exist, because they prefer an image of God that does not include justice. None of that really matters because men have neither the authority nor the power to uncreate Hell and suspend God’s judgments regarding its population. They can only speculate about their hopes and tell themselves “There is no officer, and he will not come for me.” Right up until the moment the officer knocks on the door.
carl
I, synically, think this is Rob Bell trying to stay in the limelight as a “Christian” celebrity. The orthodox view won’t get him on Larry King or sell books. We’ve seen similar behavior from Brian Maclaren.
But you know if thee is no hell, no final justice, there can be no heaven.
Lacking these three, then one should avoid dying as long as possible; the good life is here or nowhere. And this is just the point. Larry
The argument that Hell must exist and must be populated because God is both merciful and just is, in my view, the weakest and most problematic of the arguments advanced for Hell. It presumes a conflict between love and justice within the divine life of the Holy Trinity, but this is simply impossible. God is love. This love is the communion of the Divine Persons in the one Godhead. Justice is but a dimension of his love and mercy in action. It is a way of talking of God setting all things to right in his kingdom. Divine love and divine justice are not opposed. Is God unjust when he forgives?
But does not justice demand that God punish all evildoers–an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Justice, so many believe, demands that God inflict suffering upon those who have inflicted evil upon others. At this point a retributive construal of justice upon which our human judicial systems are founded is projected into divinity. Does God inflict eternal suffering for mere retributive purposes? Many of the Eastern Fathers denied this, as did the great evangelical preacher and writer George MacDonald. God only inflicts suffering to heal, convert, repair, transform, save. I commend especially MacDonald’s [url=http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/31/]sermon on justice[/url]. MacDonald declares:
[blockquote]I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing; without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice; that such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son, and the many brethren–rush inside the centre of the life-giving fire whose outer circles burn. I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.[/blockquote]
It seems to me that MacDonald has profoundly grasped the heart of the gospel, which is the heart of the living God.
Justice and mercy cannot be one thing, for mercy is used to extenuate what otherwise would require punishment. This means logically that justice carries the threat of punishment and that mercy is used to alter its fulfillment. Moreover justice would become a meaningless phrase if there were no standards to separate the sheep from the goats. Justice therefore implies standards other than mercy alone. Can love still be love and yet punish? Of course it can for God, for his love is perfect justice, and this of necessity implies standards. We cannot earn such merit as will guarantee us heaven, be we can earn such as will make us worthy for his compassion. If this is not true, the the beatitudes are meaningless. Larry
Larry, the connection that you describe between mercy and justice/punishment may seem logical (particularly from our very human point of view), but it is precisely this logic that Jesus overturns in his parables and teachings. Where is the justice in giving to the workers of the vineyard the same wage, no matter how many hours they worked? Where is the justice of Jesus’ summons to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us? Where is the justice in forgiving seventy times seven? At the very least, should not the teaching of our Lord encourage us to be cautious about insisting upon a real distinction, and even conflict between, the divine attributes of mercy and justice? God has already died on the cross for the sins of the world. Is this not where we see the fundamental union of mercy and justice? Is this not where we discover that God is absolute and infinite love?
So why do we think that God is at all interested in punishing eternally the wicked? Why do we think that justice requires the infliction of eternal suffering? The righteousness of God is not the punishment of the wicked. The righteousness of God is putting the world to right–delivering the oppressed, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead. The righteousness of God is a new heaven and a new earth. Divine justice is restorative and remedial, not punitive. God does not give us what we deserve, thank God. He gives us his kingdom and thus is his justice vindicated.
How does the infliction of pain upon the wicked satisfy the demands of perfect and eternal justice? What good does it secure? It is, of course, perfectly “natural” for us to cry out for the punishment of those who have injured us or have injured those we love–and in a world where perfect justice is unachievable, perhaps a punitive judicial system is the best we can do–but we are talking here of the execution of perfect and eternal justice at the Great Assize. Does God benefit from the sufferings of the damned? Of course not. He is neither damaged by the sins of his creatures nor does he gain anything from their torment. Do the victims benefit? No. The punishment of those who have wronged them does not restore to them what they have lost. Do the evildoers benefit? Only if repentance remains a possibility for them, but presumably they are beyond repentance, at least according to Western belief.
What do the victims of injustice really need? They need resurrection. They need new life. They need the good and goods that only God can provide. Once this good is given, though, once all that has been lost has been restored and more than restored, is not justice fulfilled and the righteousness of God vindicated?
Perhaps one might also add that the victims of injustice need the confession, contrition, and repentance of those who have injured them. Certainly reconciliation is impossible apart from such confession, contrition, and repentance. Evildoers need to repent. Evildoers need to do all that they can to contribute to the healing of those they have injured. (Perhaps this is the moral intuition that lies behind, or at least partly lies behind, the Latin tradition’s formulation of purgatory and the temporal punishment of sin.) There can be no return to God and the communion of saints apart from conversion. But if sinners should remain obdurate in their impenitence, if they should eternally choose Hell rather than Heaven, they only damage and hurt themselves. That they suffer eternally is therefore “just,” for they have brought their suffering upon themselves by their presumably definitive and irreversible rejection of their ultimate good; but God has not directly imposed this pain as an extrinsic penalty upon them. God does not need to impose infinite and everlasting suffering in order to satisfy a standard of justice external to himself. The Kingdom of Christ is the accomplishment of justice in all perfection and goodness.
And so I hope and pray that Hell may prove to be empty. God has already spoken his final word in the Paschal Mystery, and it is a word of mercy and forgiveness and therefore justice.
Larry Morse wrote: “We cannot earn such merit as will guarantee us heaven, be we can earn such as will make us worthy for his compassion.”
This strikes me as profoundly unbiblical; even heretical. No human ever created by God is “unworthy for his compassion.” If God truly desires that all people are eventually reconciled with him, to have anyone endure eternity in Hell is a contradiction of God’s power to achieve his ultimate will. If people remain in Hell, either God is powerless to save them, or he desires them to be there. I’m not sure that God would be worthy of worship in either case.