Why do people believe in hell?

I'm going to comment on an article by David Bentley Hart:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/christianity-religion-hell-bible.html

He's an essayist and Eastern Orthodox theologian. One of those chic fashionable theologians like Miroslav Volf or Eugene Peterson with a following among those who view themselves as progressive Christian cognoscenti. This is their idea of intellectually respectable Christianity. The Protestant counterpart to Catholic Thomists. 

It raises a troubling question of social psychology. It's comforting to imagine that Christians generally accept the notion of a hell of eternal misery not because they're emotionally attached to it but because they see it as a small, inevitable zone of darkness peripheral to the larger spiritual landscape that–viewed in its totality–they find ravishingly lovely. And this is true of many. 

i) I don't have a precise idea regarding the scale of damnation, but I hardly think it's small. 

ii) And I regard eternal retributive justice as a necessary background for a moral universe. That's not peripheral. 

But not of all. For a good number of Christians, hell isn't just a tragic shadow cast across one of an otherwise ravishing vista's remoter corners; rather, it's one of the the landscape's most conspicuous and delectable details. 

"Delectable"? 

After all, the idea comes to us in such a ghastly gallery of images: late Augustinianism's unbaptized babes descending in their thrashing billions to perpetual and condign combustion; Dante's exquisitely psychotic dream of twisted, mutilated, broiling souls. St. Francis Xavier morosely informing his weeping Japanese converts that their deceased parents must suffer an eternity of agony.

Hart's tactic is to discredit hell by amalgamating an image of hell based on disparate literary and ecclesiastical traditions. But that's an exercise in misdirection. We can strip away the traditional accretions. The core doctrine goes back to the witness of Scripture. 

Surely it would be welcome news if it turned out that, on the matter of hell, something got garbled in transmission. And there really is room for doubt.

Welcome for whom? Welcome for the wicked? No doubt it would be welcome to the wicked to elude justice in the afterlife as well as this life. 

No truly accomplished NT scholar, for instance, believes that later Christianity's opulent mythology of God's eternal torture chamber is clearly present in the scriptural texts. 

The principle of hell isn't "torture" but retributive justice. In some cases that may involve torture. It would be poetic justice for someone who tortured (or ordered the torture of) the innocent in this life to be on the receiving end of the process. But that's not the essence of eschatological punishment. 

It's entirely absent from St. Paul's writings. The only eschatological fire he ever mentions brings salvation to those whom it tries (1 Cor 3:15). 

How did Hart miss this passage?

4 Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. 5 All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. 6 God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you 7 and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. 8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might 10 on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed (2 Thes 1:5-10).

He goes on to say:

There are a few terrible, surreal, allegorical images of judgment in the Book of Revelation, but nothing that, properly read, yields a clear doctrine of eternal torment. 

So he asserts. But that brushes aside exegetical arguments to the contrary 

Even the frightening language used by Jesus in the Gospels, when read in the original Greek, fails to deliver the infernal dogmas we casually assume to be there. 

He acts like he's the only person who can read the Gospels in the original Greek. 

On the other hand, many NT passages seem–and not metaphorically–to promise the eventual salvation of everyone.  

i) Arminians and universalists help themselves to the same prooftexts. As a Calvinist, the universalist prooftexts present no new or special challenge for me because I interpret them the same way I interpret Arminian prooftexts. I don't have to make any adjustments. I already have a counter-interpretation.

ii) But over above that, there's also the problem of arranging passages into a particular chronological sequence. Consider two eschatological sequences:

a) The dead pass into the intermediate state. On the day of judgment there's the general resurrection. They saints experience everlasting bliss while the wicked experience everlasting misery. 

b) Some of the dead experience postmortem remedial punishment, after which they go to heaven. They pass through a purgatorial hell on the way to heaven.

Biblical eschatology as a consistent (a) sequence. But the universalist sequence is nowhere found in Scripture. Indeed, it requires splicing and rearranging the standard sequence. 

Still, none of that accounts for the deep emotional need many modern Christians seem to have for an eternal hell. And I don't mean those who ruefully accept the idea out of religious allegiance, or whose sense of justice demands that Hitler and Pol Pot get their proper comeuppance, or who think they need the prospect of hell to keep themselves on the straight and narrow. Those aren't the ones who scream and foam in rage at the thought that hell might be only a stage along the way to a final universal reconciliation. 

i) Being the demagogue that he is, Hart has engineered a rhetorical dilemma. He imputes an untoward motive to many Christians who uphold hell. In one sense it's hard to defend yourself against the charge. If you really do harbor untoward motives, you'd deny it. So it's a maliciously circular allegation. 

ii) Then there's the false dichotomy of insinuating that if you believe something because you're supposed to believe it, you can only do so ruefully or grudgingly. If, however, something is true, it may also be morally, emotionally, and/or intellectually satisfying. We can believe something out of duty but also believe it to be good or admirable. In that event we don't even have to reach for duty. 

iii) I suspect that like many Christians, I have mixed feelings about hell. On the one hand I hope all my loved ones are saved. And natural human compassion extends that impulse to many (but not all) strangers.

On the other hand, injustice is galling. A world without ultimate justice mocks the good. Erases the difference between virtue and vice, good and evil. Ironically, universalism is casting the same shadow as atheism in that regard. Nothing you do ultimately makes any difference. Universalism has a nihilistic underbelly in that respect. Like Hinduism and Buddhism, where enlightened reality is beyond good and evil. Nihilism and fatalism go together. 

iv) While universalism has an undoubted element of appeal, there's a coercive quality to the universalist bargain. The offer is that God will save your murdered daughter for a price: only if God also saves the man who murdered her. Save both or damn both. Sophie's Choice transposed to the key of universalism. 

v) Compassion is the ability to care about the plight of those whose misfortunate you haven't personally experienced. Despite that, you imaginatively project yourself into their situation. What if that was me? Paradoxically, while it may be wrong to harbor vengeful feelings toward your personal enemies, if you have any, it can be commendable to wish the worst for someone else's enemies. That's a disinterested kind of vengeance. A longing that justice be done on behalf of others. 

Theological history can boast few ideas more chilling than the claim (of, among others, Thomas Aquinas) that the beatitude of the saved in heaven will be increased by their direct vision of the torments of the damned.

That's another trope that opponents of hell constantly trot out. Again, it's just an ecclesiastical tradition. 

But as long as he brings it up: while it would be wrong for the saints to derive glee from watching the damned suffer forever, there's nothing intrinsically wrong–indeed, there's something intrinsically right–about victims seeing assailants punished. That's not the same thing as hell mounted with cameras so that saints can voyeuristically tune into the miseries of the damned. But when victims see their assailants punished, that's a way to put the ordeal behind them and move on to better things.  

But as awful as that sounds, it may be more honest in its sheer cold impersonality than is the secret pleasure that many of us, at one time or another, hope to derive not from seeing but from being seen by those we leave behind. 

Well that depends. Suppose a Muslim woman converts to Christianity. As punishment she is gang-raped and beheaded. On the day of judgment, is there something wrong with her waving goodbye to her assailants? They watch her turn around and enter the everlasting light of paradise while they are left behind. It sinks in that they were blindly following a false prophet. They never once paused to ask whether there was any decent evidence for Muhammad's prophet pretensions? They used Islam as a pretext for sadism. They were the winners in this life but the losers in the next life. Their victim was the loser in this life but the winner in the next life.

How can we be winners, after all, if there are no losers? Where's the joy in getting into the gated community and the private academy if it turns out the gates are merely decorative and the academic has an inexhaustible scholarship program for the underprivileged? What success can there be that isn't validated by another's failure? What heaven can there be for us without an eternity in which to relish the impotent envy of those outside its walls. 

i) To begin with, the Bible does have a doctrine regarding the reversal of fortunes. 

ii) That said, Hart's imputed motive is twisted. Christian missionaries are like escapees who got out of the war zone but keep going back to rescue others. They don't say, "I made it! To hell with the rest of you!" No, having found the way out, they go back into the hellhole to lead as many of the lost as they can into the light. 

iii) Speaking for myself, when I look forward to the afterlife, it has nothing to do with keeping a tally of the losers. It has nothing to do with thinking about the damned at all.