A central feature to Christian soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) addresses whether “hell” exists, and if so, what nature it may have. The most important feature is probably what happens to a human soul upon the death of the body.
The three primary doctrines describing the fate of man after death are
- Annihilationism or “conditional immortality” or “conditionalism” – such that the wicked will be annihilated and fully cease to exist– or, that they won’t be given eternal life like the faithful;
- Eternal conscious torment (ECT) – all souls are immortal, but the wicked will remain forever conscious while being punished in hell in a form of eternal “living death;”
- Universal salvation or universal reconciliation (“US/UR”) – several variants, but all understand that every soul is eternal and will be eventually saved over the course of eternity, even if they do not make such a choice before physical death.
1) Annihilationism
From the website https://theologyintheraw.com/biblical-support-for-annihilation/
There are many passages in the NT that talk about the fate of the wicked, and use language that suggests finality, such as:
- “Destruction” or “perish” (Greek: apoleia or olethros): Matt 7:13 / John 3:16 / John 17:12 / Acts 8:20 / Rom 9:22-23 / Phil 1:28 / Phil 3:19 / 2 Thessalonians 2:3 / 1 Tim 6:9 / Heb 10:39 / 2 Pet 2:1 / 1 Thessalonians 5:3 / 2 Thessalonians 1:9 / 1 Tim 6:9
- “Death” (Greek: thanatos or apothnesko): Rom 1:32 / Rom 6:21 / Rom 7:5 / Rom 8:6 / 1 Cor 15:21-22 / 1 Cor 15:56 / 2 Cor 2:16 / 2 Cor 7:10 / James 1:15 / James 5:20 / 1 John 5:16 / Rev 2:11 / Rev 20:6 / Rev 20:14 / Rev 21:8
- “End” (Greek: telos): Rom 6:21-22 / 2 Cor 11:15 / Phil 3:19 / 1 Pet 4:17
- “Disintegration/corruption” (Greek: phthora): Gal 6:8 / 2 Pet 1:4 / 2 Pet 2:12
There are also many other images that would also suggest the cessation of life for the wicked, such as:
- burned up chaff, trees, weeds, branches: Matt 3:12 / Matt 7:19 / Matt 13:40 / John 15:6
- a destroyed house, discarded fish, uprooted plant, chopped down tree: Matt 7:27 / Matt 13:48 / Matt 15:13 / Luke 13:7
- the Day of Judgment is compared to OT examples of the flood, destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife turned into salt: Luke 17:27-32
- wicked compared to ground up powder or cut to pieces: Matt 21:41 / Matt 21:44 / Matt 24:51
Wayne Grudem summarizes annihilationism as follows: “Arguments advanced in favor of annihilationism are:
- the biblical references to the destruction of the wicked, which, some say, implies that they will no longer exist after they are destroyed: Phil. 3:19 / 1 Thess. 5:3 / 2 Thess. 1:9 / 2 Peter 3:7
- the apparent inconsistency of eternal conscious punishment with the love of God;
- the apparent injustice involved in the disproportion between sins committed in time and punishment that is eternal; and
- the fact that the continuing presence of evil creatures in God’s universe will eternally mar the perfection of a universe that God created to reflect His glory.”
Malachi 4:1 says “For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze,” says the LORD of hosts, “so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.”
This language is annihilationist; chaff does not persist in a fire forever, or even for very long, and the verse talks of the destruction of root and branch, not an eternal presence in the fire. The fire is persistent, but the things that enter the fire are necessarily consumed. So it is the FIRE that is permanent, not the things (or the people) who enter the fire. “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29) – and if God is eternal, so is that fire. But that does not imply that those who enter the fire are there forever – for things are only consumed if they do not continue to exist.
Malachi 4:1, by the way, is also used to support universalism, from the perspective that anything burnable will be burned away by the fire, but the things that are good will be purified, not destroyed. Thus the fire becomes a purifying agent to the soul, not a destructive agent.
John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” could actually support the idea of annihilationism, in that it says that whoever believes in Jesus will inherit eternal life – which is not necessarily the opposite of eternal torment – and implying that those who do not will “perish” which is not the same as “be consciously dead forever in pain.” Early interpreters may have understood this to mean that they would not have any eternal form (other than as a wispy, forgetful, forgotten shade in Sheol) unless they believed in Jesus. The idea that the opposite would be eternal conscious torment would have been an odd idea to first century believers who did not generally believe that a person would exist in any meaningfully conscious state after death. It seems to me that insisting that the opposite of eternal life is eternal conscious torment after death is illogical. The more obvious opposite of life is insensate death, especially from the perspective of someone with Jesus’ Hebrew Bible and cultural background, where becoming a shade in Sheol was the lot of all humans.
My response to annihilationism
Aside from my preferred position of universal salvation/reconciliation, this is perhaps the most closely aligned with the clear (even in the Greek) language in the Bible. Many verses imply that eternal life is a gift (which does NOT say that eternal living tormented death is the absolutely necessary alternative), and this also implies that failure to trust in God results in a failure to become immortal. This is a nearly-compelling line of thinking.
However, the fundamental problem I see with the annihilationism perspective is the number of verses that describe God as unwilling that ANY should perish, and that just as in Adam ALL sinned, ALL will be saved by Jesus’ work on the cross. Not “all who agree with a certain doctrine;” instead, it’s ALL, period.
As an aside, if an evangelical inerrantist (who would also traditionally insist that annihilationism is heretical) is willing to assert a level of omnipotence such that God was capable of either (a) engineering human thinking, or (b) setting up circumstances such that humans would arrive at exactly the right words, such that the Bible was perfectly written, then it’s hardly a stretch to also allow that God would be able to do the same for not losing any of the “all” that Christ saved. So I see opposition to that concept as dogmatic, not necessary from the Biblical principles.
2) Eternal Conscious Torment
Eternal conscious torment (ECT) is certainly all the rage (pardon the pun) among evangelical Christians today. But it’s actually a fairly recent majority position for any sizable fraction of the Christian church, despite the claim of most evangelicals that “this is what the church has always believed.” Actually, not it’s not; see “Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife” by Bart D. Ehrman for a very well-sourced review of this history. And it’s definitely not the consensus view among all Christians today. Evangelicals tend to forget that the church is much larger than themselves; globally, from a 2011 Pew study, they form only about 13% of the entire global family of the Christian God (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/). At any rate, let’s take a look at ECT.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/hell-as-endless-punishment/ is a good summary of the ECT arguments.
ECT apologists point to the phrase “unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43 and 9:48) as justification for believing that “hell” is eternal.
(However, taking that verse in isolation, the fact that a fire is unquenchable does not mean that any soul will remain in that fire for eternity. Many universalist apologists assert that God, being eternal, and being identified many times in the Bible as a holy fire, especially a purifying fire, is naturally unquenchable, and that nature will never change. But something that is purified is affected only until the purification is complete, even if the fire continues after that purification. This reasoning is similar to annihilationism, in that the eternal fire has temporal consequences; the difference is seeing the fire as consuming versus purifying.)
Mark 9:48 includes Jesus quoting Isa 66:24 includes this section of God talking:
“Then they will go forth and look on the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me. For their worm will not die and their fire will not be quenched; and they will be an abhorrence to all mankind.”
(However, the problem with this interpretation is that it ignores the preceding verse, Isa 66:23, which specifically says that “all mankind” come and bow down before God, and THEN they will go forth and look on the corpses. If all mankind is looking on, how are some men not part of the “all flesh” (which is a very unambiguous “all” in the Hebrew)? Also, it’s identifying in verse 48 that the BODIES will be eaten by worms and burned by fire – not the eternal souls of those men. Thus, it seems to be a choice of interpretation.)
The majority of the points raised in that article collapse back to this pair of ideas: the fire is unquenchable, and God uses fire to destroy or punish the wicked. The “destroy” part has been addressed above, and an ECT apologist would reject the interpretation that “destroy” means that unbelievers stop suffering after being destroyed. Thus they inherently argue against a complete acceptance of the scriptures.
Also important to ECT is Matt 25:31-46, the idea of “final separation” at the last judgement. This asserts finality based on the concept of “eternal,” which hinges on the Greek word aiōnion, the origin of the English word “eon.”
(However, this Greek word has been firmly established by numerous trustworthy scholars as clearly having a wide range of meanings, from simply “the period of time that is assigned” to “ages” to “age upon age.” It can mean “world” or “the length of a man’s life” or “for a very long time of unknown length” or “permanently.” From what I understand, choosing the interpretation “eternal” or “forever” as it applies to ECT in our modern understanding is a recent change to doctrine on the 2000-year time frame of Christian thinking.
This site presents a VERY thorough analysis of the meaning of the Greek word usually translated “eternity” and its understanding during Christian history:
This is also good:
https://tentmaker.org/FAQ/forever_eternity.html
Many other such resources exist.)
ECT apologists also assert that the annihilationist concept of destruction is over-applied – one does not assert that a crashed automobile ceases to exist, but it is nonetheless called “destroyed.” Rather, it means ruined or lost. (I find this to be a weak argument; it asserts a dogmatic position that the soul is not destroyed but is punished forever.)
My response to ECT
Ignoring the very well dis-proven evangelical assertion that ECT is “what the majority of the church has always believed,” the vast majority of the ECT apologism hinges on a strictly literal reading OF A PARTICULAR DOCTRINAL CHOICE OF TRANSLATION. If you don’t dig into the Greek/Jewish thinking that lies behind the word often translated “forever” or “eternal” and how the original languages were used and meant by those who wrote the scriptures, it’s easy to get “eternal” as the simple and easy translation of anything to do with hell. But it’s just not that simple.
This trend is very much in line with those who would assert that the King James Version is the only entirely correct Bible. All the doctrinal questions were, in their mind, settled hundreds of years ago. But this view ignores the scholarship that looks at the cultural context, including extra-biblical writings where the same words are used, and the vastly larger body of literature and even older copies that are available today. It also ignores the simple fact that the people closest to the time of writing held very different views than the traditional Evangelical idea of ECT. Presumably, those closer to the writing understood the language of the writings far better than us, and their doctrinal assertions ought to strongly inform ours.
An Aside: The concept of Hell
Furthermore, I find that the place targeted by ECT apologists for that eternal punishment incorrectly conflates four dramatically different Greek and Hebrew concepts: Tartarus, Sheol, Hades, Gehinnom/Gehenna, and together with a misreading of “aeon” as “forever and ever and eternally without end,” tries to fuse them into a single concept. It assumes that the uses of those four words describe the same location, while in truth those who used them would be utterly shocked by such an assertion. The words are used for specific meanings, and conflating them not only abuses the scripture, but conceals much of the intended meaning.
- Tartarus is an entirely extra-Biblical concept, coming from a polytheistic understanding of a realm managed by the gods for punishing their enemies. And in fact, its only Bible use in 2 Peter 2:4 identifies Tartarus as a place for rebellious angels, saying nothing at all about punishing men. The conflation with human punishment comes from other verses, especially in Revelation’s description of angels and humans being cast into a fiery pit.
- Sheol is the shadowy abode of the dead – not at all a place of punishment, but merely one of grey uneventful afterlife where nothing ever happened, and both good and evil humans ended up. It was neither punishment nor reward. This concept persisted until shortly before Jesus’ time, when Jewish thinkers began to wonder about the lack of any post-life punishment of evil, and to begin coming up with new ideas about punishment.
- Hades is simply a Greek version of Sheol; the concepts were very similar between the two cultures. The underworld referred to as Hades was a concept directly from Greek mythology, an abode of the dead ruled by (naturally) the god Hades himself. As with Sheol, it was a place for both good and evil dead, there being no distinction in their fates. As with Sheol, those in Hades were barely aware, and were called “shades” in the sense of mere shadows, longing aimlessly for any return to sensation, with no corporeality and certainly unable to be punished by fire or torture. The Odyssey story of Odysseus’ descent into the underworld and much other period literature often discusses those languishing in Hades, and in most cases sounds very little like the evangelical concept of hell.
- Gehenna or Ge Hinnom (the Valley of Hinnom) was a real geographical location that was known to Jewish people as a place of both fire and decay and was associated with idol worship and child sacrifice, thus very distasteful. There are legends (which appear to be unsubstantiated) that in the valley was a long-burning refuse dump (due to the cursed nature, being a natural place to dump trash).
When Jesus was referring to the punishment for evil, 12 times He referred to the actual location Gehenna as an example of a place of shame and curse containing fire, to Hades as an opposition to heaven (Matt 11:23, Luke 10:15) (but only for an entire city Capernum, not for an individual) and as a stronghold of power against the church (which does not at all correspond to concepts of Hades or Sheol in period thinking).
- Jesus never referred to Tartarus (as noted above, which only appears in 2 Peter) or Sheol (at least, because all the translations use the Greek form Hades instead).
- In one place where Jesus refers to Gehenna (Matt 10:28) it’s noteworthy that Jesus says that God is able to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna. This directly opposes the late Christian evangelical concept of ECT. Interestingly, the Luke version of this story (Luke 12:5) omits a mention of the possibility of the soul’s destruction.
- In Matt 18:9 and Matt 5:22, and similarly in Mark, the Greek talks about being cast into “the Gehenna of the fire.” This notably does not say “the fire of hell,” but the opposite: it is about being cast into the shameful cursed Gehenna-like fire. It seems that the concept got flipped around in the evangelical model because of the dogma of hell.
- When Gehenna is mentioned by James, he describes the tongue being set on fire by Gehenna. This metaphor is perhaps even more compelling and distasteful when we read it in the original sense, of “the tongue being set on fire by cursed refuse dumps forever tainted by the ugly history of child sacrifice,” rather than simply “set on fire by hell.”
Other biblical references commonly translated as “hell” simply refer to fire or punishment. In the KJV, in the New Testament, the only other occurrences than noted above include four times in Revelation, which all use “Hades” in conjunction with the word “death” (thanatou in Greek, θανάτου). This makes perfect sense given that the glorified Jesus is assigned authority over the realms of ALL the dead, not just the wicked dead, and thus should probably not be used to form any doctrine regarding a place of eternal punishment.
The Old Testament is naturally full of references to Sheol. It’s most interesting that many of the descriptions involve righteous people praising God for delivering them from Sheol. If righteous, why were they there (or headed there)? For example, Ezekiel 31 and 32 describe even the innocent and good people going down into Sheol with the rulers and terrorists that God opposes.
In short, Sheol is hardly a place only for the unrighteous: in early Jewish culture, until a couple hundred years before Jesus, it was understood that literally every human’s destiny was Sheol. It was only once humans began seeking some way to understand how evil men often prospered in life that a doctrine began to form whereby the particularly evil would be punished after death.
Also, in the OT, Sheol is very often paired with death in the typical Hebrew verse form of parallelism (where key concepts are repeated with a different but similar word). A better way to read it than “death and hell” would be “death and the realm of the dead.”
In Rev 19, 20, and 21, John describes the lake of fire, which many Christians conflate with hell. However, it’s worth noting that death and Hades (again, death and the realm of the dead) are cast into that lake. This makes it very hard to assert that Hades and hell can be the same thing.
Also regarding the lake of fire, into which the sinners and those whose names are not found in the Book of Life are thrown: fire as a Bible metaphor is just as often purifying as it is destructive and punitive, so asserting that this destination for the wicked is eternal punishment is questionable. Furthermore, not many verses after all the wicked are thrown into the lake of fire, in Rev 22:15, are described all the wicked outside the gates of the city. How are wicked still there, if they were all confined to be punished eternally? In short, I find the description of the lake of fire in Revelation to be a warning about righteous living more than a doctrinal statement about hell after death.
In summary regarding hell, I cannot find any serious support for the four words being properly translated “hell” and describing the evangelical concept, because it seems simply dogmatic more than biblical.
This does not in any way deny that the Bible does often speak of punishment for sin. It simply denies that there is a singular specific place or post-life existence called “hell” that will be used by God to eternally/forever/endlessly punish sinners.
Early Church Fathers and ECT
Generally, (from what I read) the early church fathers did not support ECT; they were more inclined to believe in annihilationism. Some standouts would be Tatian (100s CE), Clement of Alexandria (200s CE), and Felix (200s CE), but they were outliers. The cultural Jewish expectation was of death, not eternal life. There was only greyness for all, or worse greyness for the particularly unrighteous.
It’s noteworthy that several Bible verses speak to Christ giving immortality to believers (like Eph 17) – which implies that those who were not in Christ did not live forever. (The dogmatic position of ECT apologists is that this means that Christ gave eternal life, as a contrast to eternal “living death” in the fire of hell. But that’s not STATED, that’s a dogmatic position.)
ECT seems to have taken hold significantly once Augustine wrote about it in the 400s CE. (Interestingly, quite a few people assert that Augustine was a gnostic heretic, basing many of his thoughts on pagan and Platonic thinking. It’s odd that those who fault Augustine would utterly depend on one of his teachings’ main legacies.)
This article carefully discusses these complexities and the history of the understanding of hell. It goes into some significant detail about how early church fathers addressed these matters (with numerous direct quotes from their writings). https://www.afterlife.co.nz/articles/history-of-hell/ (The comments are also very instructive, with a number of counterpoints raised.)
Based on all my reading about ECT, I conclude that the doctrine of eternal hellfire and torment is driven by the dogma, not by the actual text.
3) Universal Reconciliation or Universal Salvation
I found the following three-part blog post very helpful to discuss all the doctrines of hell, but this author definitely leans more towards US/UR:
- https://www.brazenchurch.com/hell-in-the-bible/
- https://www.brazenchurch.com/hell-2-lake-of-fire-lazarus-gnashing-eternal-torment/
- https://www.brazenchurch.com/how-hell-invaded-church-doctrine/
In addition to the articles, the author very carefully answers a ton of comments and critiques in the comments section, which are quite a bit longer than the original articles.
This article also presents a solid assessment of the claims of UR/US: https://exploringthefaith.com/2021/11/16/considering-the-theological-case-for-universal-salvation/
For more involved readings, these books were particularly helpful.
“Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem” by Bradley Jersak
“That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation” by David Bentley Hart
“The Evangelical Universalist: The biblical hope that God’s love will save us all” by Gregory MacDonald
“Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife Kindle Edition” by Bart D. Ehrman
“Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition” by Bart D. Ehrman
“Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived” by Rob Bell (a seminally-controversial book about hell and universalism)
(These books and some others are all reviewed on my Book Reviews: Salvation and End Times page.)
Some of the arguments I find most compelling about UR/US:
- God is love.
- God is our heavenly father.
- Punishment by a truly loving father is never retributive, but restorative. Otherwise it would not be loving.
- Any eternal punishment for a temporal matter cannot be loving.
Some punishment may be preventative, to maintain order and discipline, but that is certainly not the norm (as would be the case if the vast majority of humans, aside from a small remnant, are punished eternally).
If an eternal punishment were meant to scare people into compliance during their earthly life, it makes no sense to wait to apply that punishment until after every human has finally died and the entire human race is gathered at the Judgement Seat. By that point, the finally-undeniable truth of eternal judgement has zero value in restraining behavior on earth. Punishment as deterrent only works if that punishment is undeniably seen when time remains to make a choice.
The idea that only a remnant will be saved conflicts directly with a great crowd around the throne from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. The idea of that crowd is much richer and more glorifying to God’s power and ability, if it is understood to be composed of literally every human who ever lived.
God’s victory over death and Sheol/Hades cannot be considered complete in any reasonable way if the vast majority of the souls God breathes into humans are destroyed or punished eternally.
If God simply sends the evil to hell for eternity, God has not won over the evil; rather, God has surrendered to its permanent opposition to himself, and simply shunted it aside out of His concern. That doesn’t sound much like eternal glory and victory for God.
Many ECT apologists assert that God’s eternal punishment of the wicked will be seen, gloated over, and rejoiced at, by the faithful humans and angels in heaven. The idea that believers will watch their unsaved loved ones suffer for eternity, and praise God for His justice, is appalling.
Even more than that, the idea that believers would be subjected to hearing the cursing and mocking of God coming from the fiery pit for eternity runs against any reasonable sense of a glorious heaven. Imagine building your dream home right next to a smelly unsightful garbage dump, and yet calling it perfect because that dump constantly reminds you of the better glory of your new home. The better answer is to build the dream home AND clean out the dump permanently, and reclaim that land for yet more beautiful new homes.
We who believe in God have hope (1 Thess 4:13) in God’s victory over death. In that passage, a couple of the verses reference those “in Christ,” and ECT or annihilationists typically assert that this means God’s victory only applies to those who profess Christ as savior, or somehow are otherwise not the wicked. However, the balance of the passage can be read from a universalist position. “We do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death,” period. And “the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” is typically asserted to only refer to the saved. But “those who are left” could just as readily be understood to apply to all others, who died in Christ. After all, “you are all one in Christ Jesus” says nothing about only those who are believers, even though it was written to the church in Galatia. Certainly “there is neither Jew nor Gentile” etc. does not only apply to Christians. From my perspective, as a Christian who believes that US/UR is a better reading, I have great hope that ALL who I love (and who God also loves far more than I do) will not sleep forever in death, but will be raised again to life in Christ. That doesn’t mean they don’t need to be refined from sin, but I do have perfect hope even for those who choose against God in this present life.
Philippians 2:10-11 says that at the end of time, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” “Every” is pretty clear here. It’s hard to imagine how this can glorify God if the vast majority of those are in eternal punishment and therefore cursing God and continuing to reject His authority.
Many other cases can be made for US/UR.
The Question of Post-Death Salvation
A clear challenge leveled against US/UR by ECT apologists is whether someone may die “in sin” and then be saved (such as, entering purgatory and then exiting to heaven).
First, it’s clear that no human will die sinless (except Jesus) (and possibly preborn and infants and children who die before reaching an “age of accountability,” whatever age that may be). The Catholics recognize this, and believe in purgatory as a result (at least, of the elect). Catholics also believe in praying for the dead, understanding that something may change even after death. Many Protestants believe instead that death is a hard and clear dividing line, and that Christ’s sacrifice absolves a believer without the need for post-death purgatory. I find the Catholic position to be dogmatic, not based on specific and clear Bible teaching. I think there is more direct support for redemption by the sacrifice of Jesus – being “covered by the blood,” so that God sees Jesus’ sinlessness instead of our sin. However, a very large fraction of global Christianity believes in the doctrine of purgatory and praying for the dead, and thus I find it compelling that there is a clear allowance for post-death changes in the state of the soul, by both long church teaching and tradition.
https://www.naccanada.org/IMIS_PROD/NAC/Believe/Service_for_the_Departed/Salvation_after_death.aspx
Some Christians assert that the Catholic view is that only those who have never heard of Jesus can receive salvation post-death. However, I would assert that since the view of God that we get is from imperfect humans around us, it’s quite arguable that even those who have been told anything about Jesus have an incorrect or at least very incomplete understanding of Jesus, and as such cannot be held liable for rejecting something false. For example, if someone is abused by a church leader and rejects “God” as a result, they’re not rejecting the reality of God; they’re rejecting that church leader’s very broken portrayal of God, despite whatever words may be preached on Sunday at that church.
The Bible does describe several cases of post-death change. Specifically, John 5:25 discusses the dead hearing the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. Opponents point out that this talks about the succeeding judgement of those who come out of the grave, the just to live, and the evil to be condemned. That’s fine; it’s quite possible to understand the condemnation to be only as long as necessary to purge and purify as discussed above.
Jesus’ “harrowing of Hell” as affirmed in the Apostle’s Creed is another obvious example, specifically the idea that Christ preached to the dead and reclaimed those who believed. (The harrowing of Hell is interpreted in many different ways by different denominations and traditions.)
When I read multiple refutations of the idea of salvation after death, they all suffer from the same problems: they start from an assumption that it is impossible (dogma), they also assume that punishment is eternal (more dogma) and therefore interpret all the verses talking about eternal judgment as being permanently triggered at the instant of death. But this is not stated anywhere clearly; every verse that I find used to assert the finality of pre-death choices can readily be interpreted the other way: that the punishment is long (eons) but not eternal, and thus must allow for God’s infinite love and grace and mercy.
The parable of Dives (the “rich man”) and Lazarus is often quoted to oppose post-death conversion, as the gulf between the two men is fixed and impassible. However, Jesus often used parables that teach important principles while appearing to violate other Christian ideas, and the point of that parable was not about the eternity of hell. Taking every single portion of every parable as doctrinal is not necessarily wise. For example, other parts of the Bible (in keeping with the idea of Sheol’s grey dimness and shades) describe a forgetfulness of the things of earth once we are dead – yet in this parable Dives was concerned about his living brothers’ destiny. Or, in another parable Jesus describes a manager praising a steward for shrewdly forgiving the master’s debtors without permission – clearly unethical, yet praised.
Rob Bell wrote an infamous book “Love Wins” in 2011 that enraged many Christians for denying the eternality of hell. It’s interesting that the majority of the outrage comes from evangelical believers.
The Fruit of Hell and ECT
Certainly, the majority of evangelical thinkers have settled on the doctrine of hell and eternal conscious torment, but I don’t find the majority position to be compelling simply because it’s a majority position. (Furthermore, it’s not a majority position across all of Christianity.) I find the idea of a deeply-entrenched lie (or more charitably, misunderstanding) that bears much bad fruit to be quite possible. And from my current position, there is much bad fruit in the hell-and-ECT position.
Specifically, in summary, it creates an eschatological instead of missional focus, it teaches that the ends justify the means, it doesn’t actually restrain much human behavior, it divides people from each other and from God, it turns self-sacrifice into a tool for self-promotion, it encourages the use of fear as a tool, and it creates an implicit permission for the use of violence to achieve Christian ends. In more detail:
The entire doctrine of eternal (unchanging and unceasing) reward and punishment creates a focus on the afterlife, not on the present life – focusing only on whatever is necessary in the present life to ensure eternal reward. Jesus was strongly focused on the present life, and “salvation” in his culture referred to the temporal, not eternal. My sense is that a focus on eternal reward has consistently produced far more (not all, but more) human activity that harms people in the present, because it allows all manner of “the ends justify the means” activity.
The threat of eternal punishment for bad temporal activity is insufficient to restrain human behavior even – or especially – by Christians towards the vulnerable; I believe this is because we are naturally wired for the temporal concerns, and any stated concern about the disembodied eternal is more often preempted by our concern about the embodied temporal. In other words, the mental focus on the glorified-body afterlife doesn’t seem to override our necessary focus on our own bodies and pleasures and comforts in the temporal.
It sanctions violence against fellow man, in the name of God’s glory. When one’s doctrine teaches that another human is going to hell anyway, there is little incentive to search deeply for the Imago Dei in that person. Especially when coupled with Calvinism and predestination, ECT allows dehumanization of entire groups of people, reasoning that the chosen believers are better off without the hellbound unbelievers.
It creates an “us/them” dichotomy, rather than a “we” synergy. It violates John 17, where Jesus focused on the oneness of believers, Christ, and God. The Gospel is inherently about man being reconciled to fellow man and to God. ECT inherently creates an adversarial relationship in both cases: it pits God’s glory against man, by making man responsible for shaming God and forcing God to punish man for the sake of God’s glory and reputation; it creates a mindset where the “insiders” (who believe themselves to be heaven-bound) rejoice in their better position than those they perceive as outsiders. ECT and annihilationism and universal reconciliation all address sin in some ways, but ECT is unique in that it creates a structure where God is forced to sequester sinful humans in punishment, explicitly FOR God’s glory. It postulates that seeing people tormented is part of God’s greater glory, by showing the universe the difference between God’s own people, and those who rejected God. This is a lesser glory, by far, than a God capable of winning literally all – every – soul to Himself by patience and love, even if it requires eons upon eons to complete.
It turns groups against other groups. This is nearly identical to the previous “us/them” discussion, but it inherently prevents worldwide peace by forcing ECT thinkers to treat entire people groups as lost, simply because they don’t believe them to know God or be known by God in a way that they can understand. Witness the situation in the Mideast today. Measurably many Christians would rather that all Palestinians be slaughtered, because they’re Muslims who have (in the Christian perspective) rejected Jesus as Lord. This directly violates the “every tribe, tongue, people group, language” insistence of the Bible. By contrast, most UR/US proponents actively seek worldwide reconciliation, even if they still believe Jesus’ claim as the only way to the Father.
It turns self-sacrifice into a tool for self-promotion. It creates an ethos of “I told them about Jesus so now they’re responsible for their own destiny and I’m no longer responsible for their souls.” What I observe in many Christians today is a sense of washing their hands of the destiny of others, once they feel they’ve done their part to notify them of their eternal destiny choices. It removes incentive to walk together over the long run even if we don’t see a change in their destiny. I firmly believe that this self-interested position has increased the division between perceived insiders and outsiders. If my focus is on my own eternal destiny, then I naturally care more about doing my own part so I “look good” to God, more than about my fellow man’s actual relationship with God, because his relationship is his concern, not really mine. Perhaps this is a broken-human interpretation, but I believe that ECT creates the conditions where this is the default for broken humans. By contrast, for those I know with a universal reconciliation perspective, the focus almost always seems to be on true gospel concerns: loving one another, and loving God, and being patient with someone’s slow (or no) perceived progress. Along with the sense of ultimate security comes a remarkable freedom from insisting (most often in a harmful way) on progress or evidence that the other person meets our own standards.
It creates a permission for violence. If the ultimate judge of our souls will use eternal violence to achieve His ends, there is an implicit permission to use violence to promote the Kingdom. This is clearly antibiblical and directly opposes every teaching of Jesus about the human use of violence.
The threat of hell never will be perceived as loving. It drives a wedge between “the lost” and the God who describes Himself as fundamentally Love. Telling humans that they are sinning will never create motion towards God. On the other hand, a true Gospel of God’s love and infinite desire and patience for relationship with them will always create motion towards God. It’s not our responsibility to convict them of sin; that’s only up to the Holy Spirit, and only the Spirit can see their true hearts and motivations and misconceptions and woundings, and draw them to God.
The threat of hell as an incentive to uncover and repent of sin is an explicit focus on fear, which the Bible repeatedly disavows. The message “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is infamous for its tone, and unfortunately is held up by many as a gold standard of how to draw people to church. However, it’s not a good model for how to draw people to GOD, instead of church. It explicitly creates a fearful posture before an angry deity, while God repeatedly describes Himself as love. The more appropriate focus is on love and relationship. Yes, He is also a just God, but justice does not require fear; the vast majority of references to God’s justice involve His determination to stand up for the oppressed and vulnerable, and bring His wrath against those who do not participate in that justice. It’s almost universally a condemnation of His own people, not outsiders. Furthermore, His wrath is more often presented as cleansing and restoring – even the extreme exile to Babylon and the loss of His temple was repeatedly portrayed as discipline unto restoration, rather than retribution.
The Fruit of Universal Reconciliation
It would not be fair to address the bad fruit of ECT without also considering the fruit of UR/US. Certainly, the proponents of ECT have addressed this as justification for their position. Some of the arguments include:
- There is no incentive to live for God if God accepts everyone.
- There is no punishment for sin.
- There is no distinction between Christians and other religions.
These suffer from a misunderstanding of the position of most UR/US proponents.
They do not believe there is a lack of punishment; rather, they simply don’t require that punishment to be eternal and thus excessive.
There definitely is a reason to live for God, and avoid what the Bible identifies as sinful. There are two reasons, in fact: one is the multiple promises in the Bible of earthly, temporal salvation for those who live according to God’s Word. The other is avoiding the need to be “refined as if by fire” after the end of our earthly lives.
As to supposedly losing any distinction between religions, the issue is not whether someone believes in Jesus before they die. Instead, US/UR typically asserts that God judges people according to what they do with whatever they’ve been given to understand during their lives (much like Jesus’ parable of the talents). Consider a Muslim who has faithfully followed Allah (the same God of Abraham, by the way; Arabic Christians also refer to the Christian deity as Allah, simply the Arabic word for “God”) but with no awareness of Jesus, or a devout Buddhist who has never read the Bible but seeks human flourishing and selflessness, or even an American who has rejected a false presentation of the Christian gospel by flawed humans who don’t faithfully represent the name or character of God. When such people finally encounter the true and living God in person, it is likely that the Truth (which is far beyond our human comprehension) will be quite familiar and welcome to them, and most UR/US proponents would expect them to be welcomed by God as fully justified. Yes, Christ said that He was the only way to the Father, but most US/UR believers understand this not to mean that saying the “Sinner’s Prayer” is the only way to heaven, but instead to mean that Jesus’ death and resurrection cleared the way for all to be reconciled to the Father, and that we must be careful to not exclude those who encounter and welcome the Truth in deeper ways than we readily see from our limited American evangelical perspective.
Summary of the Bad Fruit Discussion
Certainly, by itself bad fruit is an incomplete metric of the righteousness of a theology or doctrine. A good theology can be corrupted by imperfect humans applying it imperfectly. However, I believe that if good men applying the theology as honestly as possible turns out to produce more bad than good fruit, I have to consider that the theology is in fact deficient.
Conclusions
I believe part of the fundamental problem with trying to form a coherent doctrine of hell and the eternal destiny of humans is that the Bible simply presents a number of inherently vague and somewhat contradictory concepts. This should not surprise us too much, since
- The Bible was written over a thousand years by authors from many different cultural influences, including ancient Hebrew, late Hebrew, Greco-Roman, early Christian, and later Christian (up to 96 years after Jesus).
- Jewish theologians and rabbis are as a rule quite a bit more comfortable with lack of clarity than most modern evangelicals; this flexibility results in confounding diversity within numerous doctrines across the Bible’s pages, and eternal destiny is just one example.
- Due to this diversity, it’s quite possible to take any starting dogmatic view, and find verses to support it, but requiring some gymnastics to handle the verses that oppose it.
We moderns want certainty so that we can be absolutely sure of our rightness of beliefs and thus – particularly in this case – our destiny. But I’ve found myself needing to sit back and admit this uncertainty that obviously does exist once I set aside my dogma and begin to read the text on its own terms, not at my insistence that a certain doctrine is right.
In short, I believe I was changing the Bible’s meaning based on my dogma and doctrine, and not letting the Bible change my doctrine and dogma.
To me, this insistence on certainty shows a lack of faith in God’s inherent goodness, love, and mercy. We have a need to “get it right,” so we end up with thousands of divergent denominations with differing doctrinal positions, each vigorously and passionately defended as the only faithful and orthodox Christian answer, yet often incompatible.
I think the far harder, yet far more honest and wise approach, is to simply admit we don’t know the answers. For that reason, I feel significant liberty to not be bothered by the uncertainty, and to select what most closely comports with my overall sense of God’s revealed character and the overall balance of all the references to eternal destinies.
Thus, I would call myself a hopeful universalist. I fully recognize the presence of annihilationist passages, despite the clear presence of universalist passages. In considering the overall thrust of Scripture, I find US/UR to be more in line with my understanding of the nature of God and God’s relationship with man. But I cannot perfectly prove US/UR – nor can I perfectly disprove annihilationism – from scripture.
However, I do utterly reject the assertion that the doctrines of hell and ECT are entirely right and correct and “biblical,” because when I read the Bible without an ECT filter, I see too many clear things that refute those positions.
For these reasons, I’ve chosen – and I readily admit it is a choice – to reject the traditional evangelical doctrine of eternal conscious torment and the corresponding doctrine of an eternal hell managed by God and the righteous angels, that exists for the purpose of retribution against nonbelieving humans and rebellious angels, with no chance of future repentance.
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