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Everlasting Hell and Its Rivals

Hell: The Issue and the Rivals

Two New Testament passages provide the clearest definition of hell we have. Second Thessalonians 1:9 says, "And these [who do not know God or obey the gospel] will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power" (NASB).

The other passage, Matthew 25:41 and 46 states: "Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels' … And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

From these (and other) verses we see that the essence of hell is the end of a road away from God, love, and anything of real value. It is banishment from the very presence of God and from the type of life we were made to live.

Hell is also a place of shame, sorrow, regret and anguish. This intense pain is not actively produced by God; He is not a cosmic torturer. Undoubtedly, anguish and torment will exist in hell. And because we will have both body and soul in the resurrected state (see 1 Corinthians 15 for more details), the anguish experienced can be both mental and physical. But the pain suffered will be due to the shame and sorrow resulting from the punishment of final, ultimate, unending banishment from God, His kingdom, and the good life for which we were created in the first place.

Moreover, the flames in hell are most likely metaphorical. If metaphors for hell are taken literally, contradictions result. Hell is called a place of fire and darkness, but how could there be darkness if the fire is literal? Hell is a bottomless pit and a dump. How can it be both?

In addition, Scripture calls God Himself a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29) and states that Christ and His angels will return surrounded "in flaming fire" (2 Thessalonians 1:7). But God is not a physical object as is fire (Now, sometimes, he manifests His presence through physical objects such as fire [Genesis 15:17], but we cannot conclude from this that He Himself is physical), and the flames surrounding the returning Christ are no more literal than is the sword coming out of His mouth (Revelation 1:16). Flames are used as symbols for divine judgment.

There are two main rivals to the traditional doctrine of hell. Each fails to be convincing.

A Second Chance After Death

The first alternative to the traditional view holds that, for the sake of justice, those who die will get a second chance to go to heaven; the most often form of this position is the doctrine of purgatory. The Bible, however, is very clear on this issue. For example, Hebrews 9:27 says, "[I]t is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment." But is this teaching really fair and just? Yes. At least two factors tell us why.

First, certain passages indicate that God gives people all the time they need to make a choice about eternity. Second Peter 3:9 teaches that God is postponing the return of Christ because he is "not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." From this, we can infer that if all a person needed were more time to make a decision, God would see to it that she got the extra time instead of dying prematurely.

In other words, because God knows who will and will not be saved, and because He "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), He will not cut short a life that He knows will turn to Him if given one more chance.

Second, people most likely do not have the ability to choose heaven after death. Character is shaped moment-by-moment in the thousands of little choices we make. Each day our character is increasingly formed, and in each choice we make we either move toward or away from God.

As our character grows, some choices become possible and others impossible. As we often observe, the longer one lives in opposition to God, the harder it is to choose to turn that around. If God permits a person to die and go to hell, it seems reasonable to think that God no longer believes that this person is savable. Only God could make that type of judgment, and we must trust His wisdom in doing so.

Those who claim God has created purgatory as a place in which He continues to work on people to draw them to Himself forget two things.

First, purgatory seems to imply God was somehow lax and did not do all He could to save the person this side of death, but this view is morally and theologically repugnant.

Second, the doctrine of purgatory fails to acknowledge that the longer a person is away from God the harder it is for him to turn around. A choice of heaven would be more difficult after death, not easier. One's choice to live apart from God would be more settled in hell than it would have been on earth. Purgatory makes this life redundant. Why didn't God just create us in purgatory instead of dragging us uselessly through this life while the real work affecting the afterlife begins once we're dead?

Annihilationism

Recently, some have argued for conditional immortality for the unsaved on both scriptural and moral grounds. The argument from Scripture is as follows: In the Bible, hell is described as a place of fire and fire destroys whatever it burns. Therefore, those who are sent to hell will ultimately be destroyed. Morally, it is claimed that infinitely long punishing is disproportionate to a finite life of sin. Thus, everlasting punishment through extinction is morally preferable to everlasting punishing.

The scriptural argument is weak. Clear texts whose explicit intent is to teach the extent of the afterlife overtly compare the everlasting conscious life of the saved and the unsaved (Daniel 12:2, Matthew 25:41, 46). As for the literal rendering of hell, I have already noted above that this picture is most likely a metaphor for judgment (see Hebrews 12:29, 2 Thessalonians 1:7).

The moral argument fails as well. For one thing, the severity of a crime is not a function of the time it takes to commit it. Thus, rejection of the mercy of an infinite God could quite appropriately warrant an unending, conscious separation from God. Further, everlasting hell is morally superior to annihilation as becomes evident from the following consideration.

Regarding the end of life and active euthanasia (the intentional killing of a patient), sanctity of life advocates eschew active euthanasia while quality of life advocates embrace it. The former reject it because on the sanctity of life view: one gets one's value not from the quality of one's life, but the sheer fact that one is created in God's image. The latter accept it because the value of human life accrues from the quality of life. Thus, the sanctity of life position has a higher, not a lower moral regard for the dignity of human life.

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What's your view of hell and why?

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Now the traditional and annihilationist views about hell are expressions, respectively, of the sanctity and quality of life ethical standpoints. After all, the only grounds God would have for annihilating someone would be the low quality of life in hell. If a person will not get saved and if God will not extinguish one made in His image, then God's only alternative is quarantine and that is what hell is. Thus, the traditional view, being a sanctity and not a quality of life position, is morally superior to annihilationism.

In conclusion, I find that the traditional view of hell most accurately reflects biblical, moral and logical considerations.