There’s two views of hell to be found among today’s evangelicals, not one. This piece will quote two Aussies, both well regarded evangelicals.
Let’s start with the traditional view of an everlasting punishment. A nuanced traditionalist view of Hell comes from John Dickson on the Undeceptions podcast. “Ultimately the biblical images of judgement , whether of fire, darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth or gehenna itself are all metaphors. They just can’t be read literally. It makes no sense to add them all up together and say there that’s what hell is going to be like. Picture language doesn’t work like that. It’s a bit like the pictures of Jesus return for judgment in say the Book of Revelation we’re told he’ll come riding on a white horse and have a sword coming out of his mouth. No responsible Bible reader can miss that. This is picture language, it’s the language of victory, it’s the language of Jesus speaking the verdict. So we can’t say exactly what hell will be like as a concrete experience, but there are some general principles about the judgement that we can work out from both Jesus teaching and the teaching of the apostles in the New Testament. We can know it’s eternal, it’s just and therefore proportional and it’s entirely avoidable.”
Dickson allows the Bible readers to take into account all the Bible material, and not be stuck as many of us were in childhood with one metaphor most likely this one.
(From a Chick tract – hell as eternal fire.)
Talking of Gehenna – Hell – Dickson recalls when he and Greg Clarke went there: “I’ve been told to go to hell many times in my life and it’s bizarre to actually be here. We’re here in hell at the moment. In fact, we’re told that in Jerusalem hell’s the place you take your children on the weekend because there’s this beautiful play area behind us now, but it wasn’t always like that. In fact, this place we’re standing in is gona one of the most common images of hell in the New Testament.” That’s an outake of visiting Jerusalem intheir Life of Jesus video.
Rebecca Mclaughlan joins Dickson on the Undeceptions episode and outlines the traditional understanding: “I think Christianity offers us a beautiful and compelling and extraordinary end to the story beyond our wildest dreams that anybody and everybody is invited to join and at the same time it offers us an end to the story that is horrifying beyond our worst nightmares in many ways.
“And we are kind of left with the tension of that because each of us will find ourselves in one of those two stories … the warnings that Jesus himself gave about the judgement of God are terrifying warnings and ones that in some ways I wish weren’t there on the pages of my Bible because it’s not a truth I want I gravitate towards, but when the most loving man he has ever lived gives us a sober warning, I think we need to take note.”
John Dickson explains why he remains a believer in an everlasting punishment, and turns to the book of Revelation. “Annihilationism has a certain attractiveness, but it creates problems, at least for me. For one thing, however much I squint at all the texts about hell and judgement , I just can’t make the Bible sound like it’s not talking about actual ongoing punishment. In Revelation 20, we see a picture of final judgement that says the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of burning sulphur where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever. Obviously the devil is tormented for, but so are the beast and the false prophet, and these are clearly pictures of humans. They’re despotic Roman officials, actual people who are going to be punished forever. And in the very next paragraph of Revelation 20, we’re told that plenty of other human beings, those whose names aren’t written in the lamb’s book of life are sent to the same place.”
Dan Paterson of Questioning Christianity takes the opposite view on whether Hell means eternal torture.
“What I believe now at 34 years old would shock my 24-year-old self.” he says in a video podcast “Why I changed my mind about hell” decribing a move towards “conditiuonal immortality” that the saved have eternal life, and others do not. (A third view of hell, that all or nearly all will be saved is held by some, most prominently today by David Bentley Hart (author of That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation), and some church fathers such as Origen, or Gregory of Nyssa, and but this piece is aimed at evangelical beliefs.)
But Paterson acknowledges the majority evangelical view: “Well, the reality is the traditional view about hell, it’s aptly named ever since Augustine, some version of eternal conscious torment has been the overwhelmingly dominant view across all three historic branches of the church, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism. That being said, what passes for Traditionalism today is radically different to what Jonathan Edwards believed or John Calvin or Anselm, even Augustine. Their focus was primarily on the physical torments of hell of fire, literally burning ever regenerating flesh in an immortal body. “
Paterson found plenty of evangelical dissidents who don’t belive in a hell where people are eternally punished. “I discovered that there were a number of high profile evangelicals, Anglicans and Baptists mostly and largely from the UK who held to conditional immortality. Richard Bauckham, David Instone-Brewer, Michael Green, John Wenham, John Stackhouse, Jr. E Earl Ellis, RT France, Anthony Thistleton and I Howard Marshall, just to name a few. Even John Stott, one of my heroes of the faith who co-founded the Lausanne movement with Billy Graham. He had come out in defensive conditional immortality in the 1980s at great cost to his reputation as an evangelical statesman and a trusted theological flag bearer.”
Paterson found on re-examining the Bible that the traditional belief about hell did not hold up. “I found myself jumping from verse to verse through the gospels and letters in the New Testament looking for passages that clearly taught my traditional view, only defined with fresh eyes. The conditionalist logic of the gospel was solid. It contrasted the gift of eternal life to the saved with the punishment of eternal destruction or death for the lost.
“Jesus says that the wicked will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. Paul says in Romans 6 23 that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And John in those infamous words captures the beauty of Christ’s gospel invitation in John 3:16. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.’ You see, the more I tried to explain this vivid contrast with an appeal to spiritual life, spiritual death instead of bodily death and bodily life, I realised I was straining the consistent meaning of those words as used by each biblical author.
Paterson maintains that he changed his mind because of the Scriptures: “In our secular and sceptical age, this may come as a surprise to some, but I still believe in the scriptures. I believe Paul was divinely inspired when he wrote to Timothy in two Timothy 3:15 and 16 that all scripture is God breathed, that it’s useful for teaching rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that we can become mature, that we can be equipped for every good work. For now, you’ll have to settle with that assertion as to the nature of scripture rather than an argument. But suffice to say shorthand the Bible is why I changed my mind about hell. Now, I often hear in the ongoing hell debate that conditionalists have ulterior motives for their position that they’re in the business to borrow [US baptist leader] Al Mohler’s language of ‘air conditioning hell’ simply because they cannot stomach the thought of suffering in Hell for all eternity.'”
Which goes to prove that belief about hell is perhaps always going to be uncomfortable.
Summarising the views of others on such a complex topic has dangers – for example of leaving out parts they would hold as important.
So here’s where you can listen to John Dickson and others in an Undeceptions episode on Hell.
And here is where Dan Paterson tells how he came to a conditional mortality view of hell.
Image: The Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment by Michangelo. Image Credit: picryl.com