Should we warn children about hell?

Looming large in many deconversion accounts are apostates who complain that their parents terrorized them by threatening them with hell. Their childhood was haunted by fear of God. Should Christian parents warn children about the danger of hell? 

i) Christian pedagogy, like pedagogy in general, needs to be age-appropriate, suited to the cognitive development of children. What we teach a 5-year-old and what we teach an 15-year old may be two different things. We may save some teachings for a later age.

ii) There's certainly a point at which the doctrine of hell should certainly be part of their instruction in the Christian faith. And they can also pick that up on their own when they're old enough to read an adult version of the Bible. 

iii) Is "warning" children about the danger of hell a euphemism for threatening children with hell when they misbehave? The whole issue of whether any children are in peril of hell is an open question in theology. I don't think we have sufficient revelation to answer that question with any degree of certainty. I don't think we should issue a warning unless we have good reason to think they're at risk. Threats should be credible threats, not empty threats. 

iv) It can also be just lazy parental disciple to threaten young children with hell. Especially for childish misbehavior that's quite unlikely to rise to the level of damnable offenses. How much of that is just an expression of parental exasperation, because it's so easy to threaten them with hell? 

v) What about adolescents and teenagers? Do they need to be warned about hell? One question is whether there's a distinction between teaching them about hell and warning them about hell. If they already understand the nature of hell, and the believe it, do they also need a personal parenting warning? I mean, just reading about hell in the Bible will acquaint them with warnings about hell.

vi) Apropos (v), do you need to be warned not to stick your fingers in a blender, then push the start button? If you know what a blender is, you don't need a warning over and above your understanding of the blender not to stick your fingers inside when it's running. 

vii) I think what young children need is not to fear God but to be taught to love and trust God. Taught that God is someone to turn to in time of need. Or pray to for the needs of others. Young children need a sense of security. 

viii) It might be objected that just as it's proper and necessary for young children to both love and fear their parents, the same holds true for God. But I think the comparison breaks down. Although God can manifest himself to children directly, I think God is ordinarily an abstraction for children in a way that parents are not. If, say, Christian parents must spank a misbehaving child, that will be followed by an act of reconciliation–reaffirming their love for the child. That's very tangible in a way that a child's relationship with God generally is not. 

Of course, above a certain age, children should cultivate a more complete and adult understanding of God and hell, which includes a God-fearing attitude, as well as love, trust, devotion. 

BTW, my parents never threatened me with hell, so my own position isn't in reaction to my childhood. 

Eschatological genocide

@RandalRauser

Some Christians seem to view the relationship between heaven & hell as being like a luxury resort beside a slum of misery. All the people holidaying at the resort have a wonderful time because a massive wall blocks out the misery just on the other side. That's a terrible picture.

https://twitter.com/RandalRauser/status/1249841346862395392

i) That's pretty rich coming from the likes of Rauser. After all, Rauser's an annihilationist. In Rauser's celestial resort, all the people holidaying have an even better time. Their view isn't blocked by an ugly wall. Rather, they enjoy an unobstructed view of the scenic countryside because God zapped the slum-dwellers out of existence. 

ii) It's ironic that Rauser constantly defames the OT as endorsing "genocide". What is annihilationism if not eschatological genocide? 

iii) BTW, notice that Rauser can never bring himself to discuss damnation in moral categories. 

Locked on the inside

1. In this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMCDMvNRQUM

apostate Randal Rauser takes issue with the view popularized by C. S. Lewis that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. Keep in mind that Rauser is an annihilationist with a soft spot for universalism, so he's attacking Lewis's position to attack everlasting punishment. 

2. Lewis's idea is that hell is justifiable because it's self-imposed exile. Self-inflicted suffering/misery. The damned choose hell. 

Rauser objects in part on exegetical grounds. Although there's an element of truth to the fact that God turns some sinners over to self-destructive behavior (Rom 1), the Bible also depicts God as the agent of judgment. 

3. Rauser then objects to the justification of hell based on the notion that it's self-inflicted, by using two examples: solitary confinement and people who practice self-harm.

4. There are some problems with his comparison vis-a-vis solitary confinement:

i) Inmates in solitary confinement don't choose to be in solitary confinement. Indeed, they hate it.

ii) To my knowledge,  the purpose of solitary confinement isn't typically punitive but to control inmates who don't play by the rules. Inmates who attack prison guards or attack other inmates. They are separated from the general population because they don't get along with anyone else. They are too disruptive to fit into the prison regime.

In addition, some high-value witnesses are put in solitary confinement for their own protection as they wait to testify at trial. So his parallel breaks down at several points. 

iii) Rauser's second example concerns individuals who suffer from pathological self-loathing. They resort to self-harm to temporarily release emotional and psychological stressors.

He cites a personal anecdote about a high school girl cutting herself in the kitchen. He and others took the knife away. It would be wrong to stand by and do nothing just because it was self-inflicted harm.

Of course that's true but Rauser typically omits a key consideration. Intervention is morally mandated in the case of "cutters" because they are mentally ill. It's for their own protection. 

But the comparison falls apart in the case of the damned because they aren't suffering through no fault of their own. Damnation isn't a misfortune. That's quite different from someone whose actions are self-destructive but blameless due to exculpatory or extenuating circumstances like mental illness. There are no mitigating factors in the case of the damned. 

5. In addition, Rauser blurs the distinction between self-inflicted suffering or misery from self-inflicted punishment. But while suffering or misery can be punitive, suffering or misery can also be innocent or unjust. So these are not equivalent categories. Just desert is not a necessary condition of suffering or misery.

6. It's revealing how Rauser oscillates between moralism and amorality. Rauser is very moralistic and judgmental when it comes to things he disapproves of, like OT ethics, but when he attacks everlasting punishment, he switches to amoral illustrations which leave guilt and retributive justice out of consideration. 

Bishop Barron Q/A

This month, Bishop Barron did another Q/A, this time from non-Catholics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_dQOHyfts

1. I didn't watch the whole thing since not all of the questions interest me. He did a pretty good job of fielding the question about alleged pagan parallels because Jesus and mythic heroes. 

2. He also gave an adroit answer to how a loving God can send people to hell: 

It's like someone at a party, everyone is having a great time, but you've decided, because you're in a kind of a funk, to sit sullenly in the corner and refuse to participate. Not only are you happy in yourself but the party around you is making you more unhappy. If you're in a really bad frame of mind, who are the most annoying people? Those who are in a good mood.

We're often our own worst enemies. Drug addicts. Choosing contrary to self-interest. 

There's a grain of truth to those explanations. They're useful up to a point.

But what was glaringly absent from his justification is any reference to the punitive function of hell, even though that's fundamental to the biblical concept. 

In Scripture, damnation isn't primarily about rejecting God's love but retributive punishment from wrongdoing. The theme of eschatological justice, which is hell's primary rationale in Scripture, has disappeared from Barron's concept of damnation.

That may be because Barron is a hopeful universalist, so he believes in remediation rather than retribution. 

In contemporary Catholicism as well as contemporary freewill theism, the concept of damnation and warrant for damnation has been recast in terms of love rather than justice. It's all about rejecting God's love, not about just deserts.  

Self-inflicted punishment

@RandalRauser

Christians sometimes defend the doctrine of hell as eternal conscious torment by saying that hell is self-imposed (rather than divinely-imposed) torment. But it is doubtful that this qualification helps much. 

It's true that that in itself is an insufficient justification. The criterion of self-affliction is too facile to stand on its own, although it can be a morally relevant factor.

If a person was engaging in egregious self-harm, wouldn't you restrain them, forcibly if necessary? Hell on this view is surely the ultimate form of self-harm. And we are to suppose nobody intervenes for eternity? 

The problem here is that Rauser is recasting the issue as if we were dealing with innocent victims of mental illness. People who engage in self-harm through no fault of their own. He uses the morally neutral language of "person" rather than the "wicked". Rauser's outlook is amoral. 

If, however, a terrorist was about to accidentally step on a cobra or a serial killer was about to accidentally step into quick sand, I wouldn't intervene to save them from self-inflicted harm. Hell is about retributive punishment, not misfortune. 

Revisiting the unforgivable sin

i) The unforgivable sin is much discussed in pastoral ministry. In terms of the immediate context, the nature of the sin is clear enough. 

ii) What makes it a topic of ongoing dispute is whether the particular example is just a special case of a general principle, over and above the immediate context. Can that be extrapolated to analogous cases?

iii) Other questions include whether a Christian can commit it. 

iv) Whether, if an unbeliever commits it, he is doomed. Repentance is futile. No point attempting to become a Christian once you cross that line of no return. 

v) And what makes it uniquely unforgivable? Why is it unforgivable to blaspheme the Spirit but not the Son?

The unforgivable sin is endlessly discussed because it raises a number of issues without clear-cut answers. There's no general agreement, although there are cliche responses, which may be correct. 

However, I'd like to suggest a different angle. I'm not proposing that this explanation is necessarily correct. I haven't run across it before. But given the fumbling, flailing, somewhat ad hoc explanations we usually run across, given the lack of theological consensus, it might be worth considering a fresh approach.

The unquestioned assumption is that the unforgivable sin is a damnable sin. Indeed, that's what makes it unforgivable. If it's damnable, then it's unforgivable, and if it's unforgivable, that must mean it's damnable. It will not be forgiven in this life or the afterlife (Mt 12:32). They committed an "eternal sin".

I'm simply point out that there's a possible fallacy lurking in this inference. The basic contrast between forgiveness and the alternative isn't forgiveness or damnation but forgiveness or punishment. Offenders either experience pardon or punishment, forgiveness or judgment. 

However, while damnation is punitive, the principle of punishment is not intrinsically damnatory. Many punishments, including divine punishments, fall short of damnation. Retributive punishment isn't inherently damnatory, although damnation is a type of retribution. And remedial punishment is restorative rather than damnatory (e.g. Heb 12:8). 

What makes it seem damnatory is the statement that it won't be forgiven in the afterlife. And that would be consistent with a damnatory sin. But that's equally consistent with a temporary postmortem punishment. The punishment is held over or postponed for the afterlife. But the contrast doesn't logically entail damnation. Someone who commits this sin might be punished in the afterlife, rather than forgiven in the afterlife, but that doesn't necessarily imply that the punishment is never-ending, but that the offender faces punishment or judgment rather than forgiveness regarding this particular sin. 

In general, biblical punishments don't mean you're doomed. The fact that you weren't forgiven just means you will experience judgment or punitive justice instead. But in many biblical instances, there's life after punishment. Punishment isn't always how the story ends. Sometimes punishment has a refining effect. Sometimes punishment is followed by amendment of life. 

The traditional interpretation of the unforgivable sin as damnatory may be correct. I don't rule that out. I'm proposing an original interpretation for consideration, due both to the potential fallacy of the standard inference, as well as unresolved confusion regarding the unforgivable sin. 

And I don't dent everlasting punishment. I'm not a universalist. I'm just raising questions about the interpretation of this particular transgression. 

Are the dead aware of the living?

1. The dead

What, if anything, do the dead know about the living? Catholicism has an elaborate mythology, as do various pagan faiths.

There's a danger when Christians leave a vacuum that others are only too eager to fill. Are there any reasonable, responsible suggestions we can give?

The Bible has little to say on the subject, although it sets necessary boundaries for pious conjecture. Some Christians think we shouldn't seek answers outside of Scripture. That's often prudent, but the Bible is not an encyclopedia. We rely on reason and evidence for much of what we believe. So it's partly a question of intellectual modesty. Recognizing the limits of speculation. In addition, some lines of speculation are more reasonable, better grounded, than others. Some lines of evidence have some evidence. While we shouldn't build a theological edifice on speculation and stake our immortal soul on theological conjectures, it's permissible to consider orthodox possibilities and sift the evidence we have. It's a mistake to vacate the field to let Catholics or pagans offer the answers. 

2. Angels

Before discussing the dead, we might say something about the angels. How much do angels know about us? Certainly angels have some knowledge of human history. Angelic history intersects with human history at multiple points.

It's possible that angels have detailed, up-to-date knowledge of what's going on here below. One issue might be how much heavenly angels know about the goings on of fallen angels. Since fallen angels are deeply involved in human affairs, if heavenly angels to some degree counteract the inference of fallen angels in human affairs, then heavenly angels must be pretty aware of what's happening on earth. 

It may also be on a need-to-know basis. A heavenly angel whom God has dispatched on a mission to earth will be briefed for his mission. 

3. The damned

One possible explanation for poltergeists and haunted houses is that during the intermediate state, one way God punishes some of the damned is to condemn them to be wandering or restless spirits. They go back to their old neighborhoods, but they can no longer participate in the life they had. They are frustrated bystanders, on the outside, yearning to get back in. 

It's a temporary punishment, a prelude to hell. I don't mean damnation is temporary, but the intermediate state is temporary, and there's a type of punishment suitable to the intermediate state of the damned. 

4. The saints

i) I mean "saints" in a Protestant sense, not a Catholic sense. I mean Christians who go straight to heaven at the moment of death.

ii) One possibility is that they have no knowledge of what's happening on earth. They put all that behind them. They remember their own life and times, but they have no new information. No updates. The only change is when one of their Christian loved ones dies and rejoins them in heaven. 

Of course, newcomers can brief the saints on the latest news, assuming that interests them. 

iii) On the face of it, the saints have no sensory awareness of what's happening on earth. They are disembodied souls.

iv) Up to a point, saints might still be interested in earthly affairs. Suppose a pious Christian mother dies. She's survived by some children and grandchildren, perhaps a sister. So she's naturally interested in their pilgrimage, their spiritual welfare. Intensely interested. 

v) Perhaps she has some telepathic awareness of when a living loved one is going through a terrible ordeal. That might be analogous to relatives to who have premonitory dreams about the death of a loved one, or a loved one in mortal danger. That mechanism might explain grief apparitions and crisis apparitions. 

vi) Or perhaps it's not telepathic. Perhaps God reveals to her when one of her loved ones is going through a terrible ordeal. And perhaps God gives her permission to appear to them in a dream or apparition to encourage them.

vii) However, there comes a point when all her loved ones have died. Some of them rejoin her in heaven and some go to hell. She may have no direct awareness of those who go to hell. But with the passage of time, it becomes evident that they must have died by now, yet they didn't go to heaven.

At that juncture it might be natural for her to lose interest in what's happening on earth. Her younger relatives were born after she died. She was never a part of their lives; they were never a part of her life. So there's no one left on earth that she personally knows and cares about. The younger generation are perfect strangers to her. For better or worse, all her loved ones are now on her side of the grave–in heaven or hell. 

viii) Due to mortality, human experience is segmented over generations. While there's some overlap between generations, most humans are separated from each other in time and space. Human experience is highly compartmentalized in that regard. Heaven is, among other things, an opportunity to play catchup. What was scattered in time and space is regathered in one time and place. The saints, who lived and died at different times, are now moving forward together. In that regard, heaven as the world's finest history department. 

Forgiving Hitler

@RandalRauser

Your 95-year-old grandmother lost her family in the concentration camps of Auschwitz. One day she tells you that after converting to Christianity in 1950, she became convinced that Jesus wanted her to forgive Hitler and so she did. What is your reaction?

i) I'd probably make no attempt to correct her. Even when people are wrong, there are times when it's best to let it slide. 

ii) As I and others have argued, there's no duty to forgive the impenitent.

iii) What's the point of forgiving the damned? It doesn't absolve them. The damned will never benefit from human forgiveness. It makes absolutely no difference to them.

iv) At best, it has a psychologically therapeutic effect on the person who forgives them. Sometimes that helps them to let go of the past and move forward.

v) That said, why should we forgive those whom God refuses to forgive? If God hasn't forgiven Hitler, why should I? 

vi) But even assuming that she has the prerogative to forgive Hitler for when he did to her, she has no prerogative to forgive him for what he did to others. She can't presume to act on their behalf without their consent. 

Reasons for hell

Recently I was listening to philosophical theologians give bad answers on hell. I've probably discussed most of this before at one time or another, but it may be useful to summarize them in one place. By way of preliminary comment, the primary reason Christians believe in hell is because they believe what the Bible says about hell. It isn't necessary to provide an independent, philosophical defense of hell. It's useful in apologetics and evangelism to be able to do that, but the warrant for believing in hell doesn't rely on that.

1. Infinite God

i) A typical objection goes like this: how can a just God mete out infinite punishment for finite sin? How can the sins of a lifetime merit infinite punishment? The typical reply is that a sin against an infinite God is infinitely culpable, and merits infinite punishment. 

That's a popular answer because it's compact and uses the same principle as the critic, only turning that principle against the objection. But as it stands, it's a bad argument: 

ii) It equivocates over the nature of infinitude. The objection is to a quantitative infinite punishment. A temporal infinite. Everlasting punishment. For finite, discrete sins. 

However, to say a sin may be infinitely culpable swaps in a qualitative concept. An infinite degree of badness. I'm not sure if that's even meaningful. 

In addition, what does it mean in this context to say that God is "infinite." In what morally relevant sense is God infinite in this argument? Perhaps what is meant is that God is infinitely good, so that a sin against an infinitely good God is infinitely bad, meriting infinite punishment. "Infinite" in the sense that God is as good as anything can be. Indeed, better than anything else. The uppermost maxima of goodness or exemplar of goodness. Something like that. 

When you try to unpack the argument, it gets messy. I don't think this is a good argument as it stands. It does, however, contain a grain of truth, so I think it can be rehabilitated in some respect:

iii) There is a moral principle where the same action may be worse depending on who you do it to. It's worse to betray a friend than a stranger. It's worse to mistreat your elderly mother than to mistreat the telemarketer. So there can be degrees of culpability, not due to the action itself, but who it's directed to. Taken to a logical extreme, the argument is that we owe the most to God, we have the greatest obligation to God, so sinning against God is the worst kind of sin. 

iv) There is, though, another complication to this argument. In what sense can we sin against God? We can't harm God. 

It is, however, possible, to wrong someone without harming them. A thankless, malicious son can dishonor his father's memory. Suppose his dad was a conscientious father, but the son spreads scurrilous rumors about his late father that destroy his father's reputation. In one sense it's too late to harm is father. But there's still something terribly wrong about the action. 

2. Eternal existence

i) A basic reason hell is forever is because human beings are forever. If human beings have an immortal soul (not to mention the resurrection of the body), then whatever happens to human beings will last forever. They have an unending destiny because they have an unending existence. So whatever happens to them will go on forever. It continues because they continue. Annihilationists duck that by denying that human beings are naturally immortal. 

ii) Now this is more of a necessary rather than sufficient condition for eternal punishment. In principle, it could be a argued that while whatever happens to them is never-ending, it needn't be the same thing forever. It can change. That's the contention of the universalist, as well as exponents of postmortem salvation. That requires a separate response. 

It is, however, important to make the initial point that one reason damnation is inescapable is because existence is inescapable. Damnation never ceases because the damned never cease to exist. 

3. Apropos (2), a supporting argument is that damnation is forever because the damned continue to sin. An objection to this argument is that people have a capacity for change. 

That can be true, but what causes them to change? In Christian theology, God's grace is transformative. If, however, God withholds his grace from the damned, then they don't get better. If anything, they get worse. More hardened. 

4. Apropos (3), why doesn't God enable the damned to change? Why doesn't God grant them the ability to repent? 

This goes to another principle in Christian theology: in terms of eschatological judgment, some sinners get what they deserve while others get better than they deserve (no one gets worse than they deserve).

The reason the damned never leave hell is because they don't deserve to leave hell. They don't deserve a better life. That's their just desert, and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there's something right with God.

In Christian theology, God doesn't treat all equally-undeserving sinners alike. He draws a distinction. You shouldn't expect to get better than you deserve. To get just what you deserve is the essence of justice. They don't get out of hell because they deserve nothing better. They are in their natural element. 

There's something nihilistic, something morally subversive–even diabolical–about the idea that no matter what anyone ever does, it makes no ultimate different to what happens to them. To treat good and evil alike. 

5. Suppose (ex hypothesi) that human agents start out as a clean slate. By that I mean, suppose that initially they have no rap sheep. Their moral record is spotless. 

The first time I do something evil, that puts me behind. Because I can't change my past, if I do something evil, I can't get back to where I was before I did evil. I can't get out from under that. If I did something evil, then it will always be the case that I did something evil. That's indelible. It doesn't fade with the passage of time. I don't become less guilty. Once I do something evil, there's no way to put that behind me. It's permanent. Evil has a timeless moral quality. There's no decay rate. The past is irrevocable. 

And the more evil things I do, the further behind I fall. A lifetime of cumulative wrongdoing. 

This is why vicarious atonement and penal substitution are fixtures of Christian redemption. Without a Redeemer who atones for your sin, on your behalf and in your stead, your culpability because increasingly hopeless. 

6. Counterfactual guilt

Another factor I've discussed, although it has yet to catch on, is that it's very nearsighted to limit culpability to the sins of a lifetime. The sins we commit are related to our circumstances. Change the circumstances and we'd commit a different set of sins. It's not so much about committing a particular sin, but the character of the sinner. Put him in a different situation and he will commit different sins. It's arbitrary to exclude from consideration all the wrongdoing he'd commit if the opportunity presented itself, and he could get away with it, as if guilt and innocence in God's eyes is a matter of lucking or unlucky timing or setting. Wrong place. Wrong time. Just missed it. Had you been there an hour sooner or later. 

7. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, critics of hell approach this issue from the wrong end. In Christian theology, the default assumption is that sinners are already lost. They didn't start out in the right direction, then take a wrong turn. Rather, sinners are in a lost condition from the outset. They don't have to do anything extra to go to hell. They didn't lose their way at some point along the journey. There was no fork in the road where they made a fatal moral choice. To be saved requires divine intervention. 

It's like a movie villain. He's already a villain when the movie begins. There's no backstory about how or when he became a villain. Does it have something to do with his childhood? Did he gradually turn to evil? Was there a crossroads where he made a decisive choice for evil?

That's not where the story begins. As far as the plot goes, there was never a time when he wasn't on the wrong path. 

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. 

Counterfactual blame

I'm going to briefly revisit an argument I've made in the past, using a different illustration. A stock objection to hell is that everlasting punishment is disproportionate to the sins committed in one lifetime. 

One point I've made is that we need to take into account all the additional sins, in many cases far worse sins, a sinner might commit if he had the opportunity to do so with impunity. And that isn't just hypothetical. Consider atrocities committed by soldiers when they know they can get away with it. 

But let's take a hypothetical example. Say a hit-man has his scope trained on a boy who's the son of a Mafia Don. A rival Don. The boy is in the line of sight. The hit-man has a clear shot. He squeezes the trigger. But at the same moment a van happens to drive by, blocking the boy. The van deflects the bullet. 

As a result, the hit man failed to murder the boy. But it wasn't for lack of trying. It was just a lucky accident that something intervened at the last moment to thwart his intentions. 

From the standpoint of divine justice, is he not guilty of intent to commit murder? Indeed, he carried through with his murderous intentions. It's just that due to unforeseen circumstances, he was unsuccessful. Technically he didn't commit murder but morally he's culpable. He can't very well plead innocent before the bar of God that he tried but failed because a van unexpectedly shielded the prospective murder victim. 

I just use that illustration to establish a point of principle. You don't always have to do something to be guilty of doing it. 

Hell is what you live for

Some years ago I did a post on biblical metaphors for hell:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/10/images-of-hell.html

The point of the post is that conventional views of hell generally neglect the range of metaphors used to illustrate the condition of the damned. 

Recently I did a short story on hell ("Journey out of hell"). As fiction, it wasn't necessarily meant to be theologically accurate. The hell which the characters experienced was a hell of their own imagination.

That, however, raises an interesting question which I've touched on in the past. There may well be a sense in which hell is a theme park furnished by the imagination of the damned–like the Dark Island in Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

If so, hell is self-inflicted punishment because the source of suffering is the externalized imagination of the damned. The more evil the damned, the darker their minds.

The damned can't reasonable complain about their punishment because they are being punished by their own wicked imagination. This may mean hell is worse for some of the damned than others, because the imagination of some unbelievers is soaked in evil. Hell is only as bad as you are. The worse you are, the worse hell will be because it mirrors your heart.  

This might also mean that for some of the damned, hell is like a horror flick or gangster flick, because that's the mental world they inhabit even before they die. Hell is what you live for–even before you get there. Some moviegoers revel in vicarious sadism.

Ironically, while progressive theologians eliminate hell, secular directors reintroduce hell. For some of the damned, hell might be forever warring crime families. For some of the damned, hell might contain monsters like werewolves, zombies, vampires, Terminators, Xenomorphs, &c. Monsters animated by the lurid minds of the damned. In that respect, hell may be compartmentalized. 

By the same token, we might describe heaven (or the world to come) as what you live for. The difference is that the saints live for something different than the damned. 

I'm not suggesting that horror flicks are necessarily evil or evil to watch. Monsters in horror flicks can be powerful personified emblems of archetypal dread, malevolence, and retribution. Paradoxically, showing evil can be good. But it's a question of balance. The Bible sometimes describes evil in shockingly graphic terms (e.g. Judges, Lamentations, Revelation, Ezk 18 & 23). But that provides a contrastive background for good.  

Did Christ give up a weekend?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCu1bkfxdaA&t=4s

I agree with Craig that infernal suffering is finite in the sense that the damned experience it in finite increments. However, I don't agree that the suffering of the damned was compressed, and that's why Christ experienced. Guilt is qualitative, not quantitative, hence the atonement is qualitative, not quantitative.

Lost

I think it's very hard for moderns to appreciate the fear of being lost. In the age of maps and street signs and GPS and smartphones, it's well-nigh impossible to be really and truly lost. You have to go hiking in a remote wilderness or travel to a Third World backwater. Nowadays it takes a real effort to be utterly lost. You can almost always get directions or call for help. 

But in the ancient world, it was terrifyingly easy to be utterly lost. Have no clue how to get back to where you were before you lost your way or or how to find your destination from where you now are. 

And that's a problem because lostness is a major theological metaphor (e.g. Ps 119:176; Jer 50:6; Ezk 34:4; Zech 11:16; Mt 10:6; Lk 15:4; 19:10). Modernday Christian readers need to exercise their imagination to feel those passages.

i) A person can be physically lost or psychologically lost. In his autobiography, Mark Twain recounts a personal anecdote of the former: 

A bat is beautifully soft and silky; I do not know any creature that is pleasanter to the touch or is more grateful for caressings, if offered in the right spirit. I know all about these coleoptera, because our great cave, three miles below Hannibal, was multitudinously stocked with them…I think she [his mother] was never in the cave in her life; but everybody else went there. Many excursion parties came from considerable distances up and down the river to visit the cave. It was miles in extent and was a tangled wilderness of narrow and lofty clefts and passages. It was an easy place to get lost in; anybody could do it--including the bats. I got lost in it myself, along with a lady, and our last candle burned down to almost nothing before we glimpsed the search party's lights winding about in the distance.

ii) Perhaps more terrifying than physical lostness is psychological lostness. In some cases that has both a physical and psychological dimension. Take someone scooped off the street and carted off to a KGB prison. The prisoner knows where he is. So he's not lost in that sense.

But he's out of contact with his friends and family. No one knows where to find him. No one knows if he's dead or alive. He may spend the rest of his life in the claustrophobic recesses of a KGB prison. No one on the outside will ever hear from him again. 

He may never go home. Or he may be released so many years later that there's no home to go back to. 

iii) Or take a war orphan. He knows where he is. But he's lost in the sense that he's cut off from his relatives. He's no longer a part of anyone. He no longer has a sense of belonging. He's socially and emotionally adrift. Without relatives to love and protect him, the world suddenly becomes a very indifferent, uncaring place. 

iv) From there we shift to examples of sheer psychological lostness. Take someone who's mind is slipping away due to dementia or mental illness. A temporary example is drug-induced psychosis. Losing your mind is more terrifying than physical lostness. That's not about your surroundings; not about being in the wrong place. Rather, that's you. That's the essence of who you are. You are disappearing. You are ceasing to be, bit by bit. Or so it seems. 

Virginia Woolf was prone to bouts of insanity. During a lucid period she committed suicide because she couldn't face the prospect of being sucked into yet another bout of insanity. 

v) Or take a bad dream in which you're trying to get home. But you take the wrong bus. You keep going in the wrong direction. The distance between you and home increases. You keep moving ever further from your desired destination. You become more and more lost as the dream takes you down strange streets and alleyways into a heart of darkness. Inescapably lost–until you awaken. But the damned never wake up. Circling forever deeper into the infinite labyrinth of hell. 

When we read about the lost condition of unbelievers, we should visualize examples like these, to help regain the elemental fear that gripped our forebears.