My wife still has the book she studied two decades ago during the instruction class before her baptism. The other day I was perusing the slim tan paperback again, interested to see what our generation absorbed about God, the Bible, and because I have been pondering it lately, the subject of hell.
Ironically, though the book’s comments on hell are forceful in tone, they are prefaced with a sentence about mystery and how we cannot know all that will take place after death. But, it continues cheerfully, we can know “enough to satisfy.” Here’s a sampling of that:
- “Before God concludes his work on earth, millions will be resurrected, only to be condemned and sentenced to eternal suffering in the lake of fire.”
- “The sinner is aware that death will bring him face to face with Almighty God. Eternal suffering is waiting for the sinner. That is something to fear.”
- “This will be a sad day for many, many people.”
I will lay my cards on the table at the start and say that I find the above formulation of hell to be misguided: skewed at best and psychologically abusive at worst. Presented in this way, it has the potential to damage young people in their spiritual formation. I propose that it ought to be reconsidered.
ECT. Eternal Conscious Torment. The teaching that after death a number of humans will experience unending bodily suffering in a literal fire. How did the teaching become so entrenched? Why do people believe it? Are its proponents horrid monsters with red tights and a pitchfork?
Usually not. The reasons for believing ECT are often well-intentioned and worth engaging. I would like to offer my perspective on three common ones.
Reason #1: God is sovereign and can do whatever he pleases, including orchestrating ECT. Verses such as Romans 9:20 (“Who are you, a human being, to talk back to God?”) are used to argue that God’s ways are inscrutable. His justice and morality are rooted on an altogether different plane.
While the tone of such talk is appropriately reverent, it is doubtful that anyone really operates from this framework on every issue. Most people know, for example, that it would be wrong of God to require parents to sacrifice their firstborn child in the manner of bloodthirsty ancient Near Eastern deities, or to have violent love affairs like the capricious gods of Greek mythology.
Even in these examples, God could, given enough time, reveal how his actions were just and redemptive. But let’s call a spade a spade: leaving someone in eternal hell is immoral and disproportionate even for the most retributive of deities, not to mention the God whose very essence is love (1 John 4: 8,16). And while Reformed theologies have tried hard to reconcile ECT with God’s love, all too often both God and love are changed into psychologically abusive parodies. Sincere seekers turn away and detractors gain fodder for their strawman arguments.
In his recent book That All Shall Be Saved, David Bentley Hart argues that we cannot trust a Creator who conceived of a universe in which there was a chance, however infinitesimal, that even one creature would suffer eternally without the possibility of redemption. Hart’s language may seem arrogant. Doesn’t the Bible make it clear that eternal hell exists and that’s that? A mere human should not argue with the God revealed in the authoritative Holy Bible.
But what if Hart’s sense of justice originates with God himself, who programmed it into humans as his image bearers? And as for the biblical passages on hell, what if they are indeed authoritative and inspired, but we miss what they’re really saying?
Which brings us to the second common reason for belief in ECT.
Reason #2: You have to believe in ECT to take the Bible seriously. Indeed, taken at face value without context, some Bible verses point toward ECT. “And the smoke of their [worshippers of the beast] torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night” (Revelation 14:11). There are also a handful of other passages that, at least in some English translations, seem to presuppose ECT (Jude 7,13; 2 Thess. 1; Matt. 25:31-46).
But as Robin Parry points out in The Evangelical Universalist, if someone is into proof texts for establishing doctrine on the afterlife, they might well consider that there are just as many proof texts for universal reconciliation as there are for ECT. For starters, consider these passages:
- “The Lord will not cast off forever. He does not willingly afflict the children of men.” (Lamentations 3:31)
- “[God] desires all people to be saved.” (1 Timothy 2:4) One translation says God intends for all people to be saved.
- “His mercy endures forever.” (A phrase that occurs 26 times in Psalm 136 alone)
- “Just as all died in Adam so all will be made alive in Christ.” (Romans 5; 1 Corinthians 15)
- In the fullness of time God will unite and reconcile all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, in the whole cosmos. (Ephesians 1:20 and Colossians 1:20)
- God’s will is that all come to repentance. (2 Peter 2:9) Does God get what God wants?
- Every knee will bow to Jesus. (Philippians 2:10)
- Every creature in heaven and earth will praise Christ. (Revelation 5:13)
The goal of this article is not to argue for universalism, but to show that there are viable understandings of hell other than ECT. (See also Preston Sprinkle’s biblical defense of Annihilation.) However, before leaving this point, it is worth commenting briefly on several other factors that color the discussion on ECT and the Bible.
First, proponents of ECT often employ selective biblical literalism. For instance, when reading Revelation, they contend that “the lake of fire” and “the smoke of their torment” must be taken literally even though they take almost every other imagery in Revelation as metaphorical. Likewise with the separation of the sheep and the goats: everyone agrees that the sheep and goats are metaphorical, but few are ready to agree that the fire is metaphorical.
Second, we cannot fully understand, from the remove of the 21-century West, the cultural imagery surrounding the terms that are translated as the English word hell. When Jesus talked about plucking out our offending eye to avoid hellfire, the audience heard something different than a Dantean pit replete with drunkards and prostitutes. Consider also that the English word hell is a catch-all for Sheol, Gehenna, Tartarus, and Hades, biblical words that each carry distinct, culturally-specific meanings in their original context.
Third, and related to the second factor, is mistranslation. In most English translations, Matthew 25 has the goats going into “everlasting” fire. Yet there is a growing view that a better translation would be a fire–whether metaphorical or literal–that lasts “for the age.” Translators must constantly draw from more than 5,500 extant fragments of early New Testament manuscripts and compare wording and update definitions based not only on those manuscripts but also other period texts. The Bible is trustworthy and authoritative, but it is also ancient, messy, and endlessly layered. God has always entrusted normal humans to edit, translate, and interpret the Bible. It did not drop out of the sky one day in a Ziploc bag.
Finally, the punchline of hell passages is often directed toward religious people, not sinners seeking the Kingdom. Consider that the main point of the sheep and goats passage, for instance, is not to provide doctrine on the afterlife, but to demolish religious people’s tidy categories and call them to serve the marginalized. Other subjects of hell are the hypocrites and the self righteous (Matthew 23:15) and those who trust empire over Christ (Revelation 14). Many foundational texts that tell us how to enter and live in the Kingdom–John’s gospel, the book of Acts, all of Paul’s writings, the Didache–do not mention hell.
It’s time now to look at one final objection.
Reason #3: Everything falls apart without ECT. This idea has a tenacious hold on the modern church, and it holds some weight. The reasoning goes like this: no matter how horrendous hell is, if people know it doesn’t last forever, they will do their own thing in this life.
I am willing to grant that there might indeed be a kind of universalism that immobilizes people from transformative discipleship (“Don’t worry, it will all work out in the end”). However, a similar immobilizing effect can be observed among people who dogmatize ECT, some of whom find it enough to say a one-dimensional sinner’s prayer and live the basic clean moral life (“I don’t smoke, drink, chew, or sleep with girls who do”), and then never progress into further spiritual wrestling.
Furthermore, using ECT as motivation goes directly against the idea of obedience based on love. First John 4 says, “He who fears has not been made perfect in love.” The inbuilt heaven of virtue coupled with the inbuilt hell of sin is more than enough motivation to follow the Christ–in this life! Who wouldn’t want to sign up for a life free from the tyranny of greed, anxiety, jealousy, sexual infidelity, rivalry, and slander?
I can testify that things did not fall apart for me when I took ECT out of my operative framework. On the contrary, I find it much easier to get on board with the project of the universe, knowing that its architect isn’t a sadist who will allow some (most?) of the 150,000 people who die before this day ends to suffer in a perpetual Guantanamo Bay. Being a human–a calling none of us signed up for but one we nonetheless want to embrace–is hard enough without that barbaric threat hanging over our race. The true God helps his prized creatures in every hardship. He is for us. His mercy endures forever. He won’t leave us orphans.
That is a snapshot of where my journey has taken me in the years after the tan catechism booklet. Despite my strong words in the beginning, I realize people may believe in some version of eternal hell even after engaging with differing views. I want to listen to them. Already in the first few centuries of the church, patristic-era believers disagreed on hell. Some indeed believed in eternal hell, though before Augustine they weren’t as influential as now. Others were Universalists, meaning they believed everyone would ultimately be saved but that anyone who didn’t participate in Christ’s Kingdom here would experience a purifying post-mortem hell. Still others espoused Annihilation, the belief that hell is a place of final loss and cessation of existence, a kind of diplomatic middle sibling between ECT and Universalism.
To sum up, hell is not an issue that calls for a dogmatic stance. The catechism booklet got this much right: there is mystery surrounding the afterlife. Quite possibly, time and space will function differently there; to borrow N.T. Wright’s metaphor, any language we have about the afterlife is like signposts pointing into the fog: they don’t show what lies beyond the fog, but they do show us which way to go.
In fairness, the authors of the catechism booklet may not have intended to give us the final word on hell, but a springboard for discussion. But if that is the case, then why not include alternate viewpoints? Young people will find them anyway, in a 5-minute YouTube video if nowhere else. For better or worse, the days of one-sided doctrinal positions are over. Personally, I regret that my early spiritual journey did not see more exposure to different understandings of God’s justice and the afterlife. As it is, a lot of my adult life has been a process of finding the God whose every impulse is love, and unlearning the retributive, queasy-at-our-failings god. But then something tells me that kind of unlearning is entirely normal for healthy spirituality.
Even so this is me daring to hope that two decades from now when my daughters dust off their own catechism booklet, they will find in its pages the endlessly creative, utterly undefeatable God whose will is not that millions should burn forever, but that all should come to repentance.