Some Christians talk of God being a God of justice. And if God is just, all of us can rest easily in our beds, because a just God will ensure that all wrongs get righted and that in the end even the Fall won't stop his justice from being executed. I like this view of God. And so do the ScripturesBut then, insert the traditional evangelicalist view of hell as eternal conscious torment into the picture and God's justice becomes highly questionable:
How can a finite human being commit so much evil that s/he could deserve (because deserving is central to our understanding of justice) forever and ever in eternal conscious torment? Put another way, if a person leads a relatively good life, messes up fairly often and then makes the heinous mistake of not accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, how is year after year, millennium after millennium and billions of billions of years of eternal conscious torment just?
Try and justify getting chucked into the flames forever and ever by a perfectly just God.
Some Christians talk of God being a God of love. I like it. In fact, the Biblical view is that God is in his very nature love. This means God is not loving one day and not-loving the next. He is always love, even when he is angry. His wrath is simply his love in the face of contradiction. Hell, then, must be an expression of God's nature, which is love.
Right. So, then if hell is eternal conscious torment, how can God be love?
1,000,000,000,000,000 x 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 doesn't come close to giving us a picture of eternity. Eternal conscious torment at the hands of a God who is in his very nature love doesn't, philosophically make any sense.
Unless love includes a picture of God as an abusive Father. If that is love, then I'm lost.
Then, there are those who say God is sovereign. This means he gets what he wants in the end. But, the proviso is this: God has given us free will, which leaves his sovereignty and our human responsibility in permanent tension. Now, with the definition of hell as eternal conscious torment, chosen by many billions of human beings, what do you do with an understanding of God as being sovereign? And the answer is: you assume that God wanted it so. Double-predestination, we have a winner! God chooses some to get into heaven and some to go to hell.
Calvinists have to conclude this because to suggest that in the end people get what they want is to place human free will above the free will of the Divine.
So, my point is, when you insert hell as eternal conscious torment into all three of these descriptors of the nature of God, what you end up with is the Devil.
Take time out of the equation and you end up with a serpent in a Garden who instigates the Fall. Take reason out of the equation and you end up with a God who is irrationally just: i.e. his justice isn't quite perfect; a God who is irrationally loving, only when it pleases him; and a God who chooses that some people get to spend the rest of time (which has no end) consciously suffering in the flames.
I wish I could go into the details of how to sort out and reconcile these different views of God with the idea of hell. The long answer is found in the thoroughly scholarly Gregory McDonnald's "The evangelical universalist" and the shorter answer is:
The traditional conception of hell as eternal conscious torment is wrong. I have yet to meet someone who can defend the doctrine of hell as eternal conscious torment without falling into the first trap of the fall: the splitness of reality and understanding. It's not only unbiblical, but it is philosophically ludicrous. I don't buy it. I never have. Does that make me a universalist?
Maybe. It doesn't matter really, I think. The main point is, if God is just, loving and sovereign, then Biblically rooted, critically engaged universalism isn't necessarily a poor way to solve these conundrums. I have yet to make up my mind about whether I truly believe any of this in the first place.
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