In the last three articles in this series  we have been questioning our assumptions about hell and looking at what the Bible actually says. We will now ponder the implications of those assumptions as they relate to the character of God .

The belief that many evangelical churches seem to support is this:

God is just, and eternal torment is an appropriate punishment for those who reject his love.

How many of us have honestly stopped to take a good hard look at what this means? Can we really worship a God who could contemplate inflicting everlasting suffering on sentient beings?

Endlessness

Perhaps we should start by thinking about what eternity actually means. Woody Allen quipped, Eternity is a really long time; especially towards the end (Side Effects: Woody Allen, Random House 1980). This serves to illustrate the fact that endlessness is not a concept that we can fully grasp as temporal beings. Think of the last time you were bored. There’s a certain agony of mind, even in that. Now imagine if you can, being in that state with no sense of it ever ending. Ever. The ultimate form of boredom is probably Solitary Confinement. Just this will ruin an individual within a matter of weeks, without even introducing physical pain or torture.

The House of Fun

There’s a room in the Special Branch Headquarters in Dubai. It generates white noise to pulse at a frequency that will ultimately destroy the human body. It also houses a strobe light set to the same frequency. The British engineers who installed it called it The House of Fun, and it will reduce anyone inside the cell to a screaming helpless supplicant within moments (Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century: Jonathan Glover, Yale University Press 2012). Now multiply those moments to hours, years, thousands of years, forever. This is the sort of thing we’re talking about. And we are talking about it as being the fate of the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever, or will ever live on this planet.

It seems that the vanishing few of us who are spared this awful fate will be like a thin skin of bliss on a seething sea of the most appalling suffering. It’s really hard as a human to understand the justice: A lifetime of sin rewarded with an eternity of suffering? (Incidentally, if the ‘wages of sin’ are an eternity of punishment, not death, then surely Jesus has not paid that price and we remain unredeemed?)

Dodges

How can we, or a loving God, live with these contradictions? Here are a few of the dodges I’ve encountered:

1) ‘God doesn’t send anyone to hell, we choose to go there ourselves by rejecting his love.’ 


This implies that God chose to create hell and to create us eternal with the prospect that we would almost certainly end up there. Wouldn’t it have been more loving to have not created us in the first place, if an eternity of suffering was our almost inevitable fate?

2) ‘Hell isn’t torture; it’s just being cut off from God and from all goodness.’

I’m sorry, but when it has no end that sounds like torture to me. Is this what God wants?

C.S. Lewis

And in his marvelous novel The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis attempts to get around this problem by presenting hell as a grey world in which people live dreary lives and drift endlessly further away from one other. Lewis had a brilliant mind and saw the contradictions that I’ve been outlining above, but dodged them at the end of the book by making hell physically tiny in comparison to heaven. This was a brave attempt but I’m afraid that ‘Honey, I shrunk the damned’ just doesn’t cut it for me.

Like so many of us, he tried to work with the assumptions that he had been dealt rather than stepping back and examining those assumptions and questioning their validity.

Do you think God has prepared eternal torment for unbelievers? 

What do you think this says about God?