Why Hell is Fair

Can the existence of hell be reconciled with a loving God?

My conversation partner was becoming agitated. I had been trying to explain that God’s goal for mankind is to draw us into the life of the Trinity to live with him in loving relationship for eternity. In other words, I was presenting some of the material we covered in previous articles here at American Babylon. The skeptic was not buying it. “How can you call God loving?” he exclaimed. “Would you call me loving if I locked my daughter in a dungeon and tortured her for not doing her homework? Would you call me loving if I imprisoned my wife in a room and then tormented her day and night for burning the toast?”

If there is one objection that is almost guaranteed to come up in a conversation about Christianity, this is it. Many people simply cannot reconcile the idea that a God loves us but some people end up in hell. As James Lileks writes, “As a tot I was given the usual terrifying mixed message: a) God is love; and b) If you don't believe how much he loves you, you will stand in the corner for eternity.”^¹

The first key to dealing with this objection is to admit that if hell is a place where an angry God tortures people for eternity just because they failed to believe the right propositions or meet some of his arbitrary standards for a few measly years here on earth, it is unjust and we shouldn’t label God loving. The god of Lileks’ joke is sending a terrifying mixed message. Unfortunately, this is the type of God that many Christians have been proclaiming for too long.

It is also the type of God the man I was talking to was rejecting. In speaking to people who have this view, I recommend that we first explain to them that we reject it as well. Then we have to provide a more accurate account of the afterlife. For example, here is how the rest of my conversation went.

“Of course I wouldn’t say you were loving if you did those things,” I replied. “But that is not analogous to God and hell. Now let me ask you something. Would you call yourself a loving husband if you cheated on your wife? Or would you call yourself a loving son if, assuming you had good parents, you rejected all that they had done for you and refused to acknowledge or speak to them? And would these decisions have inherent consequences? By that I mean, would your relationship with your wife and parents be affected by your attitudes and behavior?”

“Well, no, that wouldn’t be loving, and yes, it would have consequences,” the caller admitted.

“Of course,” I said.  “And that is the better picture of what happens between humans and God. Heaven and hell are not places of arbitrary rewards and punishments. Rather, they are the state of existence that results as a natural consequence of either loving God or failing to do so.” 

I argued in a previous post that love is the most foundational truth in all of reality. In short, love is the meaning of life. We were made to give of ourselves for God and for others; it is inherent in our existence. I also suggested that reality is hierarchical. Certain parts of existence are more objectively valuable than other parts and we are to love according to that order. In other words, we are to love God above all and love everything else in keeping with its inherent value.

Sin is disordered love. It is to give of ourselves to (to worship and serve) something or someone to a degree beyond which it is worthy. Such love carries with it its own inherent punishment (Rom. 1). We probably all know people who have been sucked further and further into a particularly destructive pattern of life that ruins their relationships. For example, the man who worships and serves alcohol or money more than his wife and children is out of touch with reality and will bear the consequences of that decision. 

The ultimate consequence of disordered love is the state of existence we call hell. The more we love things other than God, whether money or power or simply ourselves, the further away we get from the relationship for which we were created. In the same way that a husband will grow farther and farther away from his family as he continues to worship and serve other things, man grows farther and farther away from God. Eventually he is completely alone. That is hell.

People don’t get sent to hell because they didn’t believe the right things while on earth. They don’t get rejected at the pearly gates because they failed to jump through the right hoops. They end up in a state of alienation from God because that is what happens when you don’t love him. It’s simply the nature of reality. Dallas Willard offers this good insight:

We should be very sure that the ruined soul is not one who has missed a few more or less important points and will flunk a theological examination at the end of life. Hell is not an "oops!" or a slip. One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God. "Outer darkness" is for one who, everything said, wants it, whose entire orientation has slowly and firmly set itself against God and therefore against how the universe actually is. It is for those who are disastrously in error about their own life and their place before God and man.²

The picture of God standing over hell gleefully throwing poor souls into the pit because they didn’t measure up to his rules is simply false. People take themselves to hell. Martin Regis rightly notes that

Hell is the condition of man who, having habituated himself to a life of complete self-enclosure, announces forever before God, ‘I don’t want to love. I don’t want to be loved. Just leave me to myself.’ It is a Judgment that the unrepentant sinner will himself have made; God is there merely to ratify the truth of what it really means.³

As C.S. Lewis so eloquently put it,

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.⁴

The Lake of Fire?

But what about all those passages that talk about burning in the lake of fire? Don’t we have to take the idea of hell as punishment seriously? Absolutely. Hell is certainly punishment. However, that does not mean that this punishment is not a natural consequence of rebellion against God. The key is to realize that the punishment people receive in hell is not an arbitrary pain inflicted just for the sake of inflicting pain, which is what human punishment often amounts to. It is not vindictive. I recently talked with an ex-Muslim who had rejected Islam largely because he would not accept a vision of hell in which sinners have their flesh burned off, then grown back on again, then burned off again in an eternal cycle of torture. He assumed the Christian teaching was basically the same. It isn’t. Hell is not pain for the sake of pain. It is the punishment that is inherent in rejecting God. To not love God is a form of punishment in itself; indeed it is worse than what we normally think of as punishment. From Peter Kreeft:

What is hell? The popular image of demons gleefully poking pitchforks into unrepentant posteriors misses the point of the biblical image of fire. Fire destroys….Hell is not eternal life with torture but something far worse: eternal dying…The images for hell in Scripture are horrible, but they're only symbols. The thing symbolized is not less horrible than the symbols, but more. Spiritual fire is worse than material fire; spiritual death is worse than physical death. The pain of loss—the loss of God, who is the source of all joy—is infinitely more horrible than any torture could ever be.⁵

Kreeft notes elsewhere that many believe the existence of Hell dictates that God must be a God of wrath and vengeance and hate.

But this conclusion does not follow from the premise of hell. It may be that the very love of God for the sinner constitutes the sinner’s torture in hell. That love would threaten and torture the egotism that the damned sinners insist on and cling to. A small child in a fit of rage, sulking and hating his parents, may feel their hugs and kisses at that moment as torture. By the same psychological principle, the massive beauty of an opera may be torture to someone blindly jealous of its composer. So the fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, or rather by the damned’s hatred of that love.⁶

Judgment Day

But what about judgment day? Doesn’t that involve handing out particular punishments for particular sins against God? Again, it is important to understand that God’s judgment is not an arbitrary list of penalties he cooked up in response to certain crimes. Judgment too should be understood as a natural consequence of our sin. God’s judgment is all about the truth being revealed to all. God is not a judge in the sense that we usually think of. He doesn’t weigh various arguments in court, make a decision based on his best attempt at interpreting the evidence, and then pick a punishment that he thinks best suits the crime. God doesn’t weigh the merits of various competing positions on judgment day. He simply reveals the true position. Judgment day is not the day God decides the verdict on your life, it is the day when the verdict of your life is made clearly known to all. “In death,” writes Joseph Ratzinger, “a human being emerges into the light of full reality and truth. He takes up that place which is truly his by right. The masquerade of living with its constant retreat behind posturings and fictions, is now over. Man is what he is in truth. Judgment consists in this removal of the mask in death. The judgment is simply the manifestation of the truth.”⁷

When people come face to face with Jesus, who is the truth, his very presence will be the final judgment. The reality of each person’s relationship with him will be revealed. Either he knows us and welcomes us home or he doesn’t (Matt. 7:23).

Isn’t This Coercion?

I received another objection to this argument in a correspondence with a man named Brian. Brian wasn’t sold on the biblical notion of free will, so I was trying to explain to him that God desires relationship with humans so he refused to make us robots. Instead, he gave us the ability to reject him. A healthy, loving relationship is dependent on both parties being in it because they want to be, not because they have to be. I told Brian that “God understands this and so refuses to coerce us into a relationship with him. He wants us to be in it of our own accord.” Brian replied,

Didn’t Jesus himself say that nonbelievers will be thrown “into the furnace of fire” where “men will weep and gnash their teeth” just as “the weeds are gathered and burned with fire…” (Matthew 13. 40-42 RSV) Why then throughout the Bible is there constant appeal to transcendent punishment for non-believers? Transcendent punishment isn’t coercion? The Old Testament seems to very much try to force man into a relationship with God. Placing a punishment on non-belief is as close to coercion as I can ever see.

In fact it is not coercion. To coerce (in the sense used above) is to “bring about by force or threat.” To receive money or sex, say, at the point of a gun is to coerce. The threat of death brings about the action. It is important to note here that in coercion, neither death nor the action would have occurred without the coercive intrusion. In the normal course of events, a woman attacked by a rapist wouldn’t have had sex with him or been shot. Only because some evil power entered her life is she forced to make a choice between two bad alternatives. That is the nature of coercion.

To accuse God of being coercive is to say, in effect, that He approaches us as completely independent beings and says, “Come with me or burn in hell.” The implication is that if God would just leave us alone, we could live our lives heading toward a third alternative; one that is neither with God nor burning in Hell. That is what comes to mind in Brian’s phrase “placing a punishment on un-belief.” He paints a picture of a bully God arbitrarily imposing his evil desires on a peace-loving planet.

Biblically, however, that is not the way the world is. Rather, the Earth is like a colony of children separated from their parents and wandering across a scorching desert. God comes to them and issues not a threat, but a warning and an offer. He says, “You are going to die out here if you do not let me help you. Please let me help you. I have plenty of water to drink and food to eat and shelter from the sand and the sun. I am your only hope of avoiding the terrible consequences of being out in this wasteland. Please, come to me.” Indeed, this is almost exactly what God says in many places in scripture.

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;

and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?

Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.

Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live. (Isa. 55: 1-3)

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matt. 11:28-29)

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. (Matt. 23:37)

This is clearly not coercion. It is a statement of fact. God created us for relationship with Him. In that relationship is life, joy, love, purpose and a lot of other great things. Because healthy relationships require freedom on the part of each participant, God gave us the opportunity to opt out and forgo all those benefits. (God couldn’t keep us close to Him by tying us up in a corner, for instance.) However, leaving God leads only one place – hell. If you will not have God, you will necessarily have the opposite of that – separation from God, otherwise known as hell. There is no other alternatives, no plethora of roads to travel. It’s either relationship with God or separation from Him. Jesus comes to shows us the way home. He doesn’t coerce or threaten, he simply warns and informs and beckons: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Come with me.”

The doctrine of hell is not irreconcilable with the love of God. Indeed, it is a necessary consequence of the love of God. The bigger problem, it has been said, is how to reconcile hell with human sanity.⁸ Why would anyone in their right mind not choose the joy that comes with relationship with God? The sad and clearly evident truth is that sin is a form of insanity and that all of us sometimes deliberately refuse joy and truth. Every sin reflects that preference and shows us that the human race is “spiritually insane.”⁹ In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a character named Grushenka tells a parable that nicely illustrates this condition and sums up some of the themes we have covered so far: 

Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; “She once pulled up an onion in her garden,” said he, “and gave it to a beggar woman.” And God answered: “You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.” The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. “Come,” said he, “catch hold and I'll pull you out.” he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. “I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.” As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away.¹⁰

Other Objections to the Doctrines of Heaven and Hell

In upcoming articles we will address a couple of other common misconceptions about the Christian doctrines of Heaven and hell:

1)    Some suggest belief in life after death causes people to be less concerned with life here and now. Indeed, they argue, those who are too focused on Heaven become no earthly good and may even be a detriment to the planet. Focusing on the eternal is escapist and harmful.

2)    Heaven seems boring. Who wants to live in a place where wispy ghosts float around playing harps and singing tedious praise choruses forever?

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1. James Lileks, Notes of a Nervous Man (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 167

2. Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 2002), 59

3. Regis Martin, The Last Things (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 92

4. C. S. Lewis, (2009-05-28). The Great Divorce (p. 75). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

5. Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), excerpt available at http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/hell.htm

6. Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 289

7. Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology – Death and Eternal Life, trans. by Michael Waldstein (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 206

8. Kreeft and Tacelli, 290

9. Ibid.

10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Signet Classics, 1986), 339