A Brief Comment on Hell

I have spent a lot of time thinking about Hell. When I was young, my eldest sister told me that Hell was walking around in darkness forever and ever. The idea terrified me, and occasionally haunted my thoughts as a child.

I became a Christian when I was 18, and still my thoughts were haunted by Hell. Not a fear for myself, but just a horror at the idea. Many people I cared about did not know God, and the idea that this was their destiny was unbearable. Even for those I didn't know, it seemed cruel.

For many years I played around with annhiliationism. According to this idea, God's judgment does not go on forever. Instead, the godless are completely extinguished at death, nothing is left.

This is a very attractive idea for a number of reasons, and I spent much time reading and thinking about it as a young Christian. Ultimately I rejected it though. There are a lot of passages in Scripture that don't provide a lot of detail about God's final judgment, and which could be taken to support annhiliationism. But there are a couple of passages that very plainly and directly contradict the idea. And the plain scriptures must inform the ambiguous scriptures, rather than the other way around.

So what do you do with that? How do you cope with an idea that your mind finds appalling? Things like this really test your faith, your trust in God. To be able to say, "I don't like this God, I don't understand it. I really don't like it. But I'm going to trust You, trust You know what You're doing," - that's a small victory.

Mockers occasionally say that God is just some benevolent father-figure in the sky that we've invented to feel good. Hard teachings like this put the lie to this suggestion. Were we to invent a god, we would make him much tamer and easier.

So there has been a growth in faith for me, because of these hard ideas. I believe that God will be vindicated at the end. No-one will be able to credibly charge Him with being unjust. That which seems harsh now will be shown to be perfectly right and fair, and even good.

Another thing that helps, perhaps, is a growing understanding of evil, a growing awareness of it. As an adult in this world, you see some terrible things, some on the news and some in real life. The existence of terrible crimes makes terrible punishment more palatable.

There is another idea, popular in the evangelical world but originating (perhaps) from Eastern Orthodoxy. This is the thought that everyone who goes to Hell chooses it for themselves. Hell is the ultimate declaration of independence. The choice is between being a servant in heaven, or being your own little king in Hell. Human pride is such that some would choose Hell. The final stanza of Invictus might be the anthem of the damned -

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

This is certainly an easier picture of hell to deal with. We might mourn people's stubbornness and stupidity, but you cannot fault the justice of God, He is merely giving people what they want. As CS Lewis wrote so eloquently, "There will be two kinds of people in the end: Those that will say to God 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God will say 'Thy will be done."

There is some scriptural support for this attractive idea. We read about people rejecting God will He patiently holds out His hand, that no-one seeks after Him, that everyone is going his own way. And in Revelation we see people still spitting out defiant blasphemies against God, even as they are enveloped by the apocalypse.

Yet there are other scriptures too, perhaps the most terrible of all, which tell of people knocking on the door to the kingdom, desperately seeking entrance, yet being told they are too late, too late, too late. Will those who rejected God their whole life, suddenly wish to seek Him after their death? I don't know, I have to give it more thought.

But can any of these ideas, rationalisations some might call them, can any of them help us survive the idea of someone we really love going to Hell? A friend, a parent, a spouse - a son or a daughter?

Another comment from Lewis I've found helpful here, and I think this one has some substance. He wrote -

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

We think of Heaven as a place where we are better, more holy, than we can imagine, where every fault, every sin, everything wicked and hateful has been taken out of us. Is the reverse true of Hell? Perhaps it is the place where people become worse than we can imagine, where everything that was good and loving and kind and virtuous is taken away, and all that is left is a "horror and corruption" from a nightmare. It is perhaps not so hard to believe that such a creature belongs in Hell, regardless of what it once was on earth.

I've just about run out of thoughts. It's not a subject that occupies me like it used to. Yet it is clearly a very important subject, one of the most important, so I'm glad this conversation has been happening - we need to talk about this stuff. If you've made it through to the end, many thanks for reading. I hope it has been useful.