Hell: Why don’t Christians do more?

If those who reject Jesus Christ as Lord and Sav­ior are going to Hell, why don’t Chris­tians do more?

Hell is not sim­ply the nat­ural con­se­quences of reject­ing God. Some peo­ple say this in order to reject the thought that God sends peo­ple there. They say that peo­ple send them­selves there. That is true. Peo­ple make choices that lead to hell. But it is not the whole truth. Jesus says these choices are really deserv­ing of hell. “Who­ever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to [that is, guilty of, or deserv­ing of] the hell of fire” (Matt 5:22). That is why he calls hell “pun­ish­ment” (Matt. 25:45). It is not a mere self-imposed nat­ural con­se­quence (like cig­a­rette smok­ing lead­ing to lung can­cer); it is the penalty of God’s wrath (like a judge sen­tenc­ing a crim­i­nal to hard labor).¹

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spi­der, or some loath­some insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dread­fully pro­voked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as wor­thy of noth­ing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thou­sands times more abom­inable in his eyes, than the most hate­ful ven­omous ser­pent is in ours.²

[T]his is one of the huge prob­lems with the tra­di­tional under­stand­ing of hell, because if the Cross is in line with Jesus’ teach­ing, then I won’t say the only and I cer­tainly won’t say … or even the pri­mary or a pri­mary mean­ing of the Cross is that the King­dom of God doesn’t come like the king­doms of this world by inflict­ing vio­lence and coerc­ing peo­ple. But that the king­dom of God comes through suf­fer­ing and will­ing vol­un­tary sac­ri­fice right? But in an ironic way the doc­trine of hell basi­cally says no, that’s not really true. At the end God get’s his way through coer­cion and vio­lence and intim­i­da­tion and dom­i­na­tion just like every other king­dom does. The Cross isn’t the cen­ter then, the Cross is almost a dis­trac­tion and false adver­tis­ing for God³

To begin, ‘emer­gent thought’ con­cern­ing hell isn’t all that new, it’s more or less lib­er­al­ism™ re-packaged. While the major­ity emer­gent view con­cern­ing hell isn’t new, it is cer­tainly not with­out prob­lems. If we engage the ques­tion above then I think what we find most prob­lem­atic is that as Chris­tians we present a con­flict­ing mes­sage (sur­prise). We have on the one hand the view that hell is ‘eter­nal con­scious tor­ment’ and on the other the view that either (1) tra­di­tional teach­ing about hell is wrong or (2) hell, for one rea­son or another, sim­ply doesn’t mat­ter (e.g. pur­ga­tory). When you take into con­sid­er­a­tion these the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal sep­a­ra­tions within the body of Christ, we real­ize the ‘prob­lem’ is only exac­er­bated when con­sid­er­ing a largely un-churched soci­ety. What we have is a sec­tion of Chris­tians who, like Piper, Edwards and many oth­ers, believe that hell is eter­nal con­scious tor­ment and in response are very active in the pro­mo­tion of the Gospel, con­trasted with Chris­tians who, like McLaren, aren’t con­vinced about tra­di­tional teach­ings of hell and rather than pro­mote the Gospel pro­mote a form of moral­ism. It seems then that some Chris­tians don’t do more because in their view, there’s noth­ing more to do.

This down­play­ing of hell as a result of a down­play­ing of God’s wrath within lib­eral and emer­gent thought (which is also increas­ingly symp­to­matic of evan­gel­i­cal­ism in recent years) is what prompted H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous descrip­tion of lib­er­al­ism as ‘a God with­out wrath who brought men with­out sin into a king­dom with­out judg­ment through the min­is­tra­tions of a Christ with­out a cross’.⁴ This descrip­tion increas­ingly holds for the emer­gent church and a grow­ing num­ber of evangelicals.

Within this chang­ing view of hell [Cana­dian] the­olo­gian Clark Pin­nock stated, “I was led to ques­tion the tra­di­tional belief in ever­last­ing con­scious tor­ment because of moral revul­sion and broader the­o­log­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, not first of all on scrip­tural grounds. It just does not make any sense to say that a God of love will tor­ture peo­ple for­ever for sins done in the con­text of a finite life.… It’s time for evan­gel­i­cals to come out and say that the bib­li­cal and morally appro­pri­ate doc­trine of hell is anni­hi­la­tion, not ever­last­ing tor­ment”.⁵ What’s dan­ger­ous above are the rea­sons Pin­nock made changes to his the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal view con­cern­ing hell: “moral revul­sion and broader the­o­log­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions”. Con­trast this with the words of John Men­ham, “Beware of the immense nat­ural appeal of any way out that evades the idea of ever­last­ing sin and suf­fer­ing. The temp­ta­tion to twist what may be quite plain state­ments of Scrip­ture is intense. It is the ideal sit­u­a­tion for uncon­scious ratio­nal­iz­ing“⁶ or John Stott, “Emo­tion­ally, I find the con­cept [of eter­nal con­scious tor­ment] intol­er­a­ble and do not under­stand how peo­ple can live with it with­out either cau­ter­is­ing their feel­ings or crack­ing under the strain. But our emo­tions are a fluc­tu­at­ing, unre­li­able guide to truth and must not be exalted to the place of supreme author­ity in deter­min­ing it … my ques­tion must be — and is — not what does my heart tell me, but what does God’s word say?“⁷ Our the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal stance must be dic­tated in what God’s word says, not moral con­sid­er­a­tions or ‘broader the­o­log­i­cal issues’. This is exactly what J.I. Packer warns us against when speak­ing of Stott and Wen­ham, “Both men adopted anni­hi­la­tion­ism, in which they may be wrong, but they embraced it for the right rea­son — not because it fit­ted into their com­fort zone, though it did, but because they thought they found it in the Bible. What­ever our view on the ques­tion, we too must be guided by Scrip­ture, and noth­ing else.⁸. Words which have appar­ently gone unheeded.

In down­play­ing the wrath of God McLaren writes (some what mock­ingly of evan­gel­i­cals), ‘God loves you and has a won­der­ful plan for your life, and if you don’t love God back and coop­er­ate with God’s plans in exactly the pre­scribed way, God will tor­ture you with unimag­in­able abuse, for­ever’. ⁹ Rob Bell in an inter­view with Vic Cuc­cia was asked, “You recently preached a ser­mon called ‘God wants to save Chris­tians from hell.’ I was dis­cussing the mes­sage with a guy who after hear­ing this mes­sage was a bit dis­turbed and some­how came to the con­clu­sion that you didn’t believe in a lit­eral hell. Let me ask you, do you believe in a lit­eral hell that is defined sim­ply as eter­nal sep­a­ra­tion from God?” Bell, in response stated, “Well, there are peo­ple now who are seri­ously sep­a­rated from God. So I would assume that God will leave room for peo­ple to say ‘no I don’t want any part of this’. My ques­tion would be, does grace win or is the human heart stronger than God’s love or grace. Who wins, does dark­ness and sin and hard­ness of heart win or does God’s love and grace win?  I don’t know why as a Chris­t­ian you would have to make such declar­a­tive state­ments. Like your friend, does he want there to be a lit­eral hell? I am a bit skep­ti­cal of some­body who argues that pas­sion­ately for a lit­eral hell, why would you be on that side? Like if you are going to pick causes, if you’re lit­er­ally going to say these are the lines in the sand, I’ve got to know that peo­ple are going to burn for­ever, this is one of the things that you drive your stake in the ground on. I don’t under­stand that.“¹⁰

Kevin DeY­oung and Ted Kluck note, “if preach­ers in the past some times suf­fered from an unhealthy fas­ci­na­tion with hell, today’s min­is­ters, includ­ing not a few emer­gent lead­ers, are guilty of undue ambiva­lence on the sub­ject”.¹¹ Quot­ing David Hansen, “there is an impor­tant place in min­istry for hon­est ques­tion­ing over doc­tri­nal issues. But I’m not proud of my toss­ing and turn­ing over hell. Some pas­tors wear their agnos­ti­cism about hell as a badge of honor. I’ve tried it. I’ve acted as if strug­gling to believe our Lord’s words were a virtue. But I always found that when I become proud of my doubts, they sud­denly become the sin of unbe­lief”.¹²

It seems to me, then, that a major con­tribut­ing fac­tor to the view that Chris­tians aren’t ‘doing more’ is the real­ity of the many doc­tri­nal splits and result­ing views con­cern­ing hell. We do have those Chris­tians which are ‘doing more’: mis­sions, evan­ge­liz­ing, writ­ing, speak­ing. After all, to ask the ques­tion above nec­es­sar­ily means the ques­tioner knows about (even cur­sory knowl­edge) of Hell within Chris­t­ian thought. On the other hand we have Chris­tians who down­play or deny the real­ity of hell, believ­ing it to be some­thing we shouldn’t focus on over mak­ing this planet a bet­ter place for all. The doc­trine of hell may very well be a dif­fi­cult doc­trine to address, how­ever, it must be faced head on. As R.C. Sproul and Al Mohler have both stated regard­ing doc­tri­nal issues, truth is too impor­tant to kill it in the streets, espe­cially for the sake of ‘get­ting along’.

There seems to be a kind of con­spir­acy, espe­cially among middle-aged writ­ers of vaguely lib­eral ten­dency, to for­get, or to con­ceal, where the doc­trine of Hell comes from. One finds fre­quent ref­er­ences to the “cruel and abom­inable medi­ae­val doc­trine of hell,” or “the child­ish and grotesque medi­ae­val imagery of phys­i­cal fire and worms.” …

But the case is quite oth­er­wise; let us face the facts. The doc­trine of hell is not ” medi­ae­val”: it is Christ’s. It is not a device of “medi­ae­val priest­craft” for fright­en­ing peo­ple into giv­ing money to the church: it is Christ’s delib­er­ate judg­ment on sin. The imagery of the undy­ing worm and the unquench­able fire derives, not from “medi­ae­val super­sti­tion,” but orig­i­nally from the Prophet Isa­iah, and it was Christ who emphat­i­cally used it.… It con­fronts us in the old­est and least “edited” of the gospels: it is explicit in many of the most famil­iar para­bles and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teach­ing than one real­izes, until one reads the Evan­ge­lists [gospels] through instead of pick­ing out the most com­fort­able texts: one can­not get rid of it with­out tear­ing the New Tes­ta­ment to tat­ters. We can­not repu­di­ate Hell with­out alto­gether repu­di­at­ing Christ.¹³

Related posts:

1. Do Good Peo­ple go to Hell?
2. Eter­nal Punishment
3. What is Hell?
4. Hell’s doors: locked on the inside
5. Chris­tians sing lies?