“Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God’s ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.” – Rob Bell
“Farewell Rob Bell.” – John Piper
Hey Baby, you’re going to Hell
Around 2002 a group of teenagers sat in the gymnasium of a local high school on a Sunday morning along with several youth leaders and their youth pastor. The topic of discussion: Whether the unborn and young children go to Hell, which is just the thing you’d expect a group of teenagers to be discussing at church on a Sunday morning.
The conclusion? After discussing for an hour, we found that we, as a collective, didn’t know. The Bible doesn’t directly address this issue. There is no verse that says, “Babies? In Hell? Nah.” Our youth pastor was quick to point this fact out. Not that he fell on the pro side of Babies Burnin’ (soon to be copyrighted) but he did push us to consider our mantra of ‘for the Bible tells us so’. The phrase “age of accountability” was passed around, but again this is not found in scripture that we could find. For most of us, that small children would spend eternity in hell just because they died too soon to make a decision for Christ was something we could not stomach. We argued that just because the Bible did not spell it out, a loving God would not send souls to hell if they were too young to make that decision for Christ. Oh, also those who were mentally disabled were excluded from eternal torment. And maybe those people who were in tribes in the Amazon that never heard of Jesus. Also…
Of course, there were detractors who stated simply that since all were under the curse of sin, all had inherited Adam’s sin nature that there was no changing their destiny. For all had fallen short, and were enemies of God. Hell was a just punishment for all of humanity for our rebellion against God and no one was exempt. The argued that by allowing all these exceptions of who was able to enter heaven without a saving knowledge of Jesus, we weakened the Gospel and perhaps even preached a false gospel. I was a part of that second group.
Hey baby, you’re going to Hell.
A Just God
We ended the discussion with the conclusion that whatever happens, once we saw God’s complete plan, we would finally understand and know how just God actually was. We would say, “Wow God, you are so fair!” And this satisfied me for a while. I believed that no matter what, God would be fair and just.
Couple that with the fact that I believed Hell was the just reward for all people, the natural consequence for a life lived in sin. Sin separated us from God and a holy God cannot be in the presence of a single sin, and we had all sinned. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death and even our righteousness is like filthy rags. We were unclean. We were dirty. We were guilty. We deserved Hell.
Just to make sure we are on the same page with the whole Hell thing, I want to define what Hell has meant to me for most of my life. Hell is the absence of God, who is the source of all good, blessing and pleasure. So, a complete absence of God meant that there was nothing good, there was nothing pleasurable and it was the sum of all our fears. It was eternal and we were aware of our suffering. It was the Holocaust of no end, the final torture chamber that went on forever and ever. The reason that we deserved this is because we chose to reject God and his goodness. It was his final acquiescence to our desire to be free of him. He didn’t send us there, we chose it. We opted to be apart from God and he was allowing us our free will. He wasn’t torturing us, but rather he was allowing us to get what we thought we desired.
Even more, God had provided a way out! Because he loves us, Jesus came to earth, took our punishment on the cross, satisfied God’s holy wrath against us and if we only confessed with our mouth and believed in our heart that Jesus died for us, we would be saved.
Wrestling With Hell
That’s a lot to unpack, most of which I will not. Suffice it to say that the ability to believe that we deserve eternal, conscious torment is directly proportional to our ability to believe that we are completely and utterly dirty and guilty. If you believe you are worthless, it’s easy to believe that God would throw you away.
Before we go any further, I want to make myself very clear: I do not believe in Hell today. At least, not the Hell that I defined above. I will not believe that a if a loving God exists, that we would create a finite creature whom he says he loves and allow that creature to suffer, consciously, for all eternity. If that is true, then God is not good. If Hell must exist in order for me to believe in God, then that god is not worthy of worship and would only be worthy of fear and derision. If I am to be forced to believe in Hell as justice and that God not only allows this, but demands this, I will gladly reject that god. If Hell must exist to believe in god, then that god is worse than all humans who are damned to go there.
I know this may come as a shock to some, and others not so much. While I welcome any discussion, I am not here to argue with anyone. There is nothing that will convince me that Hell is morally acceptable. I have wrestled with the theological concept of Hell for years and if there is one single idea within Evangelicalism that has driven me away, it is this one. But I hope through my recounting of my wrestling with Hell, you can come to understand that my rejection of Hell has only brought a clearer acceptance of Christ in my life.
Not only was my rejection of Hell the only way I could remain a Christian, it was my only way towards a truer Christianity.
A New Path
Needless to say, the “Geez, God’s fair” doctrine was insufficient to completely silence any doubt on how a loving God could allow a creature that He loves to suffer eternal, conscious, torment forever. Even though I came out on the side of Hell in my youth group discussion, even then it felt heartless to believe that God truly could send those who had no choice to Hell forever. Most of college and early adulthood was spent ignoring how I felt about Hell and what that meant about the God I served. I could not think about it because I couldn’t reconcile what I thought the Bible taught about Hell and how a loving God could allow this to occur. Not only was is unloving, it was evil. But the Bible, I felt, was clear. God’s justice demanded a punishment for sin and if the stakes were not as high as eternal punishment, then why would Jesus even die?
Of course, some may object to my saying that God sends people to Hell. I get it. We deserve it right? Hell is our choice and God will respect our choice and allow us to enter Hell with sorrow in his heart. No dice guys. He still created it. He still set up the scenario to allow for finite beings to be able to suffer eternally. If our system of laws doesn’t allow torture, even for horrible crimes, then how could a just God create a system that would end up with the majority of humanity ending up being consciously tormented for all eternity? Uncool God, uncool.
But it’s more than uncool isn’t it? I have to bring in some levity because it is too horrible for me to think about for too long. I was taught that narrow is the way and few will find it and if that is true then that means that most of humanity past and humanity future are or will be in Hell. Most of those who suffered and died under Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler would only awaken after death to find a fate worse than the one they had just escaped from.
Where is God
I recently listened to an excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s Night which is a book about his experience in Nazi concentration camps. In it, he described a horrifying scene in which three people were about to be hung. Two of them were men and the third was a young child. Before they were hung, the two men yelled, “Long live liberty!” before the chairs were knocked from under their feet. The child said nothing. The SS forced the crowd to watch and one man yelled, “Where is God?” They were forced to march past the gallows as the three hung there. The two men had died almost instantly, but the child was too light to die quickly. He hung there for 30 minutes as the people walked past, writhing in pain, waiting to die.
While hearing this, my mind quickly turned to my son Jack, who is five. I could imagine the horror and utter hopelessness the father of this young child must have felt watching his child suffer in this way. I had not been a parent when I had last read Night and this struck me in a way that it hadn’t before. I could feel the parent’s anguish and the child’s pain and fear. It broke me. And the question asked, “Where is God?” struck me too. Watching this grotesque seen, what else is there left to ask but this?
And yet, we are expected to believe that a fate much worse than this, if that can be imagined, is to be carried out on God’s children. And God not only allows it, he demands it, because of our injustice against Him. God allows and has full knowledge of the eternal suffering of his children. Our children. The child who was hung.
In the same way that we abhor the evil the Nazi’s have done, how can we support the evil of eternal, conscious torment for the vast majority of humanity past, present and future? Further, we claim that God is good and loving, but sentencing his children to this torture would be more evil than the father of the poor child who was hung approving and agreeing with the Nazi’s actions and calling it justice.
No. I cannot, I will not chose this god.
Beyond Hell
So what God do I choose? There is a discrepancy between a good God and a God who created, allows and chooses people for Hell (if you are a Calvinist). I ignored this discrepancy for many years and this ate away at my faith, leading to an anorexic faith that left me shallow and unfeeling. It was not doubt that destroyed my faith, but rather the insistence of certainty that both a good God and a Hell sentencing God could exist, even if I could not understand it.
As I have moved out of this belief system, opting to choose a God who will not torture those who do not choose a torturous god, I have found that this God is both good and loving. Removing Hell does not weaken the Gospel but strengthens it. It removes the idea of Christianity being merely fire insurance and advances a Gospel of love, peace and freedom. It no longer forces people to accept God under the threat of torture but provides a system where people can truly hear good news for their life. When we remove Hell as the ultimate reason for our message, we can then begin to rid ourselves of the notion of an “in or out” theology. It becomes a message that truly addresses the here and the now, not save us from some far off destiny of suffering.
Finally, I chose to drop Hell because if it remained a part of my faith, then I would not. I could not morally be a part of anything, much less a religion, in which a primary message was to turn or burn. It was either continue to participate in a faith that has defined who I am my entire life without the doctrine of Hell, or it was walk away from that faith in its entirety in order to preserve that doctrine.
It was either Jesus or Hell, and I chose Jesus.