There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.
—C. S. Lewis1
I have been arguing that the Christian drama is not only a great comedy but also a great love story. It is because the ultimate nature of reality is Love that Christians anticipate a comic end to the story. If ultimate reality is matter and the laws of physics, however, the story seems destined to come to a bad end.
“But,” the critic may ask, “what about hell? How can a comedy include hell?” This is a question that cannot be ignored. At this point we have to face the fact that the Christian drama seems to include an element of the tragic that cannot be swept under the rug.
Indeed, hell is interjected by way of vivid contrast, right in the middle of that great vision of heaven in Revelation 21. Just after reading the promise of water from the spring of life for those who are thirsty and the promise that those who overcome will inherit the joys of heaven, including the ultimate joy of knowing God, we come to these sober words: “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death” (Rev. 21:8).
The fiery lake of burning sulfur and the second death seem to put a damper on the party, to put it mildly. How can hell exist if God is truly love and will bring his world to the perfect comic end we explored in the first chapter? Well, what I want to argue is that hell can exist precisely because God is love. Because God is love, the comic ending is assured, but because he is love, hell is also possible.
The Basic Logic of the Matter
Before exploring this more fully, let us examine the basic logic involved in the claim that hell is simply incompatible with a God of love. We can spell out the basic line of thought as follows.
This sort of argument has often been advanced by those who hold the doctrine of universal salvation, which denies that anyone will be in hell forever. Some may go there temporarily according to some proponents of this view, but eventually all will be saved if God is perfectly loving and good as well as all-powerful.
Now the first thing to notice about this argument is that it mirrors exactly in its logic a more famous argument that evil itself is incompatible with the existence of God. We can spell this argument out as follows.
Obviously, evil exists. Therefore, the skeptic argues, there is no God, at least not a God who is perfectly loving and good as well as all-powerful. The existence of such a God is simply logically incompatible with the existence of evil. This, in essence, is the notorious logical problem of evil.
While this basic argument has been wielded against believers in God for centuries, one form of reply has been central to the Christian response. In particular, Christians have appealed to human free will to account for how evil can be compatible with God’s existence. That is, Christian thinkers have pointed out that if God makes us truly free and gives us a significant range of free choice, then we may use our freedom to choose evil rather than good. While God prefers that we choose good, we may choose evil instead, and if we are truly free, he cannot simultaneously leave us free and prevent that evil.
I want to emphasize that the appeal to freedom does not exhaust the Christian response to evil, but it is fair to say that most philosophers and theologians believe freedom is at least central to whatever reasons God has for permitting evil. Freedom is arguably an intrinsic good, but the crucial point is that it is a necessary means to other important goods that cannot be achieved without it. So in order to achieve those goods, evil may be the price that must be paid.
The relevance of this to the problem of hell is probably already apparent. Recall that the logical argument of evil mirrors the argument that hell is incompatible with a God of love. So here is the basic point. If freedom can account for the evil in this world, the same freedom may explain why hell exists in the next. If people may use their freedom now to resist God and choose evil, they may continue to do so in the next world, and that may explain why some people are in hell forever. God may not be able to save some people, even though he is willing to do so and is all-powerful. Some people may use their freedom to resist God forever.
It is important to be clear that on this account of hell, no one is there against his or her wishes. Rather, people are there entirely because of their own choices. C. S. Lewis has famously summed up this view of hell in the following words: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”2 This, of course, is very much at odds with many popular views of hell that picture the lock on the outside. That is to say, those in hell want to come out, but God will not let them. On Lewis’s view, they will not come out by their own choice.
Hell and the Great Love Story
Let us examine more carefully why hell is possible precisely because God is love. Recall from chapter 1 that original, primordial reality is love in the form of an eternal loving relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus referred to this in his high priestly prayer when he spoke of the love his Father had for him before the world was ever created (John 17:24).
Next, reflect on these words of Jesus in light of his words from the high priestly prayer: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you” (John 15:9). This is an extraordinary claim in its own right, but it is all the more momentous when we recall Jesus’s comment about the love the Father had for him before all creation. Jesus is saying that his love for us is an expression of that eternal trinitarian love that has existed from all eternity. The eternal dance of love and joy that is the primordial reality is lived out for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As we see how deeply he loved, how he wept at the tomb of Lazarus, and how graciously he gave his life so that we could live, we see a fleshly portrait of the ultimate springs of truth and reality.
Consider now a third text in light of those two: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34). Notice the staggering implications of this. The Father and the Son have loved each other from all eternity, before the world was ever created. Jesus, the eternal Son of God incarnate, loved us with that same kind of love. Now he commands his disciples to continue to transmit that same kind of love to each other! In other words, we are called to live out eternal trinitarian love in our relationships with each other! The eternal dance of love and joy in the Trinity should be on display in how Christians treat each other.
But here is the point I am driving at. When we come to this third text, it involves a commandment, not a simple statement of fact. It is an imperative, and as such it requires our cooperation. The first two texts pertain to the love of God, first as that love has existed from all eternity and then as that same love was shown to us by Jesus. But in this third text, we are invited, indeed commanded, to reproduce that same kind of love. But for that to happen, we must be willing to love as he loved us.
This is both exhilarating and intimidating. How, after all, can fallen, frail people like us be expected to reproduce trinitarian love in our relationships? Isn’t that a fantastic notion, to put it mildly?
Well, I suppose it would be if Jesus had not commanded it. But as John Wesley observed, such divine commands are equivalent to promises.3 So when God commands us to do something, implicit in the command is his promise that he will enable us to do it. Of course we could never love like that on our own power. But as Jesus explained, he is the vine and we are the branches. “No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me” (John 15:4).
Consider one more text from John that is relevant to this point: “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching” (John 14:23–24a). Again, what I want to emphasize here is our free choice in this matter. Notice the conditional statement: if we love Jesus and obey his teaching, he and the Father will make their home with us!
Recall from chapter 1 that the crowning feature of heaven is that God will live with us in intimate fellowship. “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them” (Rev. 21:3). The text from John teaches us that we can experience this in a preliminary fashion even in this life. But notice: for God to live with us, we must love and obey him. Love and obedience are closely connected, but obedience is not simply a matter of rote performance. The obedience God wants from us is an obedience that flows out of genuine love.
And this is what brings into focus the staggering reality that hell is possible precisely because God is love. For what this text also brings to light is that some may choose not to love Jesus or obey his teaching. As astounding as this is to contemplate, some human beings may refuse the gift of perfect love. They may choose not to welcome God into their lives. They may choose to reject the trinitarian God of eternal love, the Creator of the universe who gave his Son in order to give us eternal life with him.
This is what makes the connection with hell obvious. Any who choose not to love God and invite him into their lives have chosen to exclude themselves from heaven by that very choice. Remember, heaven is the ultimate experience of “God with us.”
To see the force of this more clearly, let us reflect on why it is that genuine love for finite beings requires freedom. God is love by his very nature as a being who exists from all eternity in a loving relationship of three persons. He is necessarily good; indeed, he is goodness itself and cannot be tempted by evil (James 1:13). By contrast, creatures like ourselves who are made in God’s image but who are still finite must freely choose to love God if our love is to be real.4 While acts of obedience can be forced, we may still rebel. As the defiant child famously said to his father who demanded that he sit down, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I am still standing up on the inside.” So obedience is one thing; willing obedience is quite another.
Even more so, love cannot be forced. God loves us and desires our love in return. True love can be invited, elicited, and won, but it cannot be coerced, programmed, or simply demanded. When Christ commands us to love one another as he has loved us, he can do so because his love has elicited our love in return. But those who do not love him will not obey him.
It is because love is at the very heart of our freedom as creatures made in the image of God that some people may choose not to return the love of God. Rob Bell was exactly right when he wrote the following: “Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God’s ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.”5
And that is why it is the case, ironic though it is, that hell is possible precisely because God is love.
A Challenge: Freedom Cannot Stop God from Saving Everyone
The argument from human freedom is the one most philosophers today employ to defend the doctrine of eternal hell. However, the argument is not without its detractors, and some of its most vocal critics are other Christian thinkers who espouse the doctrine of universal salvation. I will look at two of those critics.
The first of these is Marilyn Adams, a leading Christian philosopher who was also the first female canon of Christ Church Oxford. Adams has been challenging the doctrine of eternal hell for years, and more recently she has rejected the argument from freedom for a very straightforward reason. In her view, freedom is overrated. As she sees it, it is simply misguided to think freedom is something almost sacred and so important that not even God can override it. To give human freedom this much significance is to put God and humans on the same level, almost as if they were moral peers. Adams sees this tendency particularly in those who defend hell as the natural consequence of rejecting God and the love he offers, as I have done. In her view, it is not a compliment to us to think God gives us the freedom to damn ourselves. That is not the sort of respect God should pay to mere creatures like us.
Indeed, the appeal to human freedom to defend hell points out a deeper problem according to Adams. That problem, she thinks, is that it underestimates just how enormous the “size gap” is between God and human beings. Those who appeal to free will to defend eternal hell picture the relationship between God and human beings as something like the relationship between parents and adult children. That is, we are like adult children and God is like our parent. Given this picture, it makes sense that God could hold us accountable for our choices, even if those choices lead to damnation.
Adams thinks a more accurate model is the relationship between a mother and an infant or a toddler. This model better represents the “size gap” between God and human beings. And when we think of it this way, it makes little sense to think God would not interfere with our freedom or even override it if necessary to save us from eternal hell.
Suppose a mother saw her infant child walking toward a fire. Would she leave the child alone to fall in the fire out of respect for the child’s freedom? Of course not! She would intervene and prevent the child from such a serious injury.
Adams provides a more colorful example when she remarks that if God needs to overrule our freedom to save us from hell, this is “no more an insult to our dignity than a mother’s changing a diaper is to a baby.”6 So on this view, sinful humans are more like babies who soil their pants than like disrespectful adult children or even rebellious teenagers. We may not want our pants changed and may kick and cry. But just as a loving mother will change the diaper with or without the baby’s cooperation, God will change us, if necessary, without our free cooperation. So human freedom is no problem and will not prevent God from saving all persons.
In response to this, I certainly agree that we should not underestimate the “size gap” between God and human beings. However, I do not believe Adams’s model is a good one to capture the biblical account of the divine-human relationship. Indeed, from the very beginning of the Bible, God gives commands and expects obedience. He makes covenants with people and expects them to honor those covenants. He expresses anger and disappointment when his children fail, and he holds them accountable for their sin and rebellion. None of this squares with Adams’s picture of the divine-human relationship. Indeed, one of the most prominent biblical images for that relationship is that of a spouse to a husband. We are God’s spouse, and he expects us to be faithful and to return his love.
But there is another problem as well for Adams’s view. If God is willing to overrule our freedom, as she argues, we may wonder why he does not do it now in light of all the horrendous evil that results from the abuse of freedom. The fact that God gives us so much leeway, even at the price of so much terrible evil, gives us good reason to think that he takes our freedom more seriously than Adams suggests. Indeed, it suggests that our free choices play an important role in his purposes for creation.
In short, I do not think Adams does justice to how seriously God takes human freedom, so I am not persuaded by her critique of the freedom argument for eternal hell. The freedom to reject the love of God remains a plausible explanation for why eternal hell is possible.
But Choosing Eternal Hell Just Makes No Sense
Let us turn to another critic of the freedom view of hell, Thomas Talbott, a contemporary philosopher who has vigorously and creatively defended the view that all persons will be saved in the end. Unlike Adams, who is willing to simply dispense with human freedom if it stands in the way of God’s saving some people, Talbott has tried to argue that God can save all persons without overriding their freedom.
The heart of his case is that there simply is no intelligible motive for anyone to choose eternal hell. So the idea that persons might freely choose to remain in hell forever is utterly incoherent. It makes no sense at all if carefully examined.
Now this does not mean that we cannot choose evil in the short run, for obviously we can. But Talbott thinks there is a fundamental difference between choosing evil in the short run and doing so forever. We can choose evil in the short run under the illusion that it will make us happy. The prodigal son in Jesus’s parable, for instance, might serve as an example of this. He enjoyed his sinful lifestyle for a while.
However, the inevitable result of choosing evil is that it will make us miserable. The illusion that sin can make us happy will eventually be shattered, as it was for the prodigal son when he found himself broke and alone, feeding the pigs. Everyone will eventually realize it is better back home with our heavenly Father and will return to him, just as the prodigal returned to the welcoming arms of his father.
To put this a little more precisely in philosophical terms, Talbott thinks that, strictly speaking, it is logically impossible that anyone will be lost forever. This is a far stronger position than that of those who merely hope that all will be saved, or even that of those who think it is probably true that all will be saved. On Talbott’s view, it is necessarily true that all will be saved.
So why does he take such a strong view if he does not simply dispense with freedom? Well, his view hinges crucially on a couple of central claims. First, it depends on his account of what it means to choose an eternal destiny. In short, such a choice must be fully informed in such a way that the person making it never regrets his choice. That means the person must be free of all ignorance and illusion both in his initial choice as well as later. He must fully understand what he has chosen while freely sticking with the choice.
What this shows is that there is a profound difference between choosing heaven as an eternal destiny and choosing hell. It makes perfect sense that one could choose heaven and remain happy in that choice in the long run. Those who choose heaven would never regret it. By contrast, it makes no sense that anyone could choose hell without coming to regret it at some point.
Think again of the prodigal son and the fact that he regretted his choice to leave his father by the time he was reduced to feeding the pigs. While he was initially under the illusion that he would be happier away from home, that illusion was ripped away by hard reality. If he were forced to stay in the pigpen, his choice would not be truly free. A free choice is one that is clear sighted and under no illusions.
This brings us to the second claim that is crucial for Talbott’s view, that the very idea of choosing eternal hell is simply incoherent. This is the claim that the New Testament pictures hell “as a forcibly imposed punishment rather than as a freely embraced condition,” a punishment that leads to “unbearable suffering.”7 Now if hell is such a forcibly imposed punishment with such a severe result, then his claim is reinforced that no one could freely choose to remain there forever.
Problems for Talbott
But the claim that hell is a forcibly imposed punishment that produces unbearable misery raises an obvious problem for Talbott. How could anyone who repented under those conditions truly be free? We can only absorb so much pain, so if hell forcibly imposes ever-greater suffering, no one could resist forever.
Suppose the prodigal son’s father had secretly sent a message, along with a large bribe, to the farmer who had hired his son to feed the pigs. His message instructed the farmer to beat his son every day and to make the beatings more severe each day until he admitted he had made a mistake and decided to return home.
Now if this happened, it is clear that the prodigal son would be forced to “repent” at some point or that he would simply die under the pain of ever more severe beatings. But the question is whether “repentance” that is compelled in this fashion is sincere repentance. To be sure, painful discipline can be a means that leads to repentance. But for that to be the case, the discipline must lead to a genuine change of heart. It cannot simply be a matter of knuckling under because the pain is so great that one cannot stand it.
And here is the point. Our freedom can only bear so much pressure in this regard. At some point, if the pain is simply too intense, we would be forced to either give in or die. Repentance that is compelled in this way is not true repentance.
Talbott’s Clarifications
Interestingly, Talbott recognizes this point. He has himself drawn a distinction between two kinds of compulsion and defended what he calls the “right” kind. That is the sort of compulsion that comes from dramatic conversions that are rather common in the Christian tradition. Many Christians have had powerful encounters with God that they describe in terms reminiscent of Paul’s famous Damascus Road experience. In such encounters, many people feel as if they simply had no choice but to submit.
By contrast, Talbott repudiates the sort of compulsion that unfortunately has sometimes been employed by religious believers, namely, the demand to convert under threat of lethal force. The demand to “convert or die” has too often been spoken by religious believers. Talbott rejects this when he writes, “A stunning revelation such as Paul reportedly received, one that provides clear vision and compelling evidence, thereby altering one’s beliefs in a perfectly rational way, does not compel belief in the same way that threatening with a sword might.”8
Talbott is surely right in drawing a distinction between these two forms of compulsion. Moreover, most would agree that the latter form of compulsion is not only morally objectionable but also incompatible with any meaningful freedom. Conversion at sword point is not likely to be a freely chosen decision.
In the same vein, Talbott has also clarified what he means by a “forcibly imposed punishment” that produces “unbearable suffering.” To illustrate what he means, he offers us the example of a foolish married man who has an affair with an unstable woman and then ends the relationship. Later, as an act of revenge for ending the relationship, the woman murders his wife and child. Talbott says the man’s subsequent guilt, sorrow, and profound sense of loss would constitute unbearable suffering for him. God could use this suffering for good, and “insofar as God uses the man’s suffering as a means of correction, or as means of encouraging repentance, we can say that the man has endured a forcibly imposed punishment for his sin.”9
But the Problems Remain: Is His Repentance Inevitable?
So what about this example of the foolish philanderer? We can readily grant that his actions and the subsequent course of events cause him great misery. But the question remains whether it is inevitable that he will turn back to God. Surely God can use his suffering as a means of correction to encourage repentance, as Talbott notes. But still, there is nothing in the case as described that makes such a response inevitable or necessary.
Indeed, we can easily imagine that instead of repenting, the philanderer might become angry and embittered if he believes God allowed the murder of his wife and baby as a means of punishment for his affair. He might judge this a disproportionate punishment for his sin and come to see God as a vengeful deity who does not deserve worship and obedience. And as a result, he might move ever farther away from God in his rebellion, hardening his heart more by every step.
This is all the more plausible in view of Talbott’s opinion that we have the freedom, “expressed in thousands of specific choices, to move incrementally either in the direction of repentance and reconciliation or in the direction of greater separation from God, and that freedom God always respects.”10 Now if this is true, it is far from clear why such incremental movement, one inch at a time, must inevitably shatter our illusions in such a way that we could not but repent and be reconciled to God.
Indeed, it seems that just the opposite would be the case. With every step we take away from God, the farther we are removed from him. These steps add up and over time can cover quite a distance. Likewise, the more we harden our heart and dull our conscience, the more we will form a character that is comfortable with sin. Again, little acts add up to form a character. And the more we have a character that is comfortable with sin, the less we will be inclined to repent and be reconciled to God.
Objectively speaking, any person who had such a character would be miserable. But subjectively, in the realm of feeling and experience, the hardness of heart would make the misery more tolerable. So the upshot is that Talbott’s example is not a convincing case of unbearable suffering.
Two Kinds of Compulsion: A Hell of a Dilemma
But let us turn now to Talbott’s distinction between two different forms of compulsion and his claim that “compelling evidence” represents the “right” kind of compulsion. That is to say, God can present us with powerful evidence that will compel us to repent, and there is nothing objectionable about that.
I am very dubious, however, that evidence is ever compelling, strictly speaking. This is especially so when we are dealing with matters as controversial as religious beliefs. The reason this is so is because belief is far more than a matter of the intellect. Our emotions, will, and desires are also involved. And if we are unwilling to repent, we cannot be compelled to do so by evidence.
This is not to deny that there is good evidence in favor of religious belief. But my point is that there is a vast difference between adequate evidence and compelling evidence. Indeed, the Bible has numerous examples of people who were presented with very impressive evidence but did not believe. The Israelites witnessed striking miracles in their deliverance from Egypt but later showed a heart of rebellion and unbelief. Likewise, in the New Testament, not everyone who witnessed miracles or had good evidence for them repented or accepted Christ.
Unfortunately for Talbott, then, neither “compelling evidence” nor “unbearable suffering” can guarantee that all persons will repent and be saved. Evidence is never, strictly speaking, compelling in the relevant sense. And any suffering that is truly “unbearable” would represent the wrong sort of compulsion. It would not bring genuine repentance. And the example of “unbearable suffering” that Talbott gives us is not literally unbearable. Rather, it might just as easily produce more rebellion and hardness of heart that would lead a person farther away from God and make him more comfortable in his sin.
Of course, God could also cause increasing pain to us in other ways as we move farther and farther away from him. He could, like a Spanish inquisitor, forcibly impose greater and greater physical pain upon us—tighten the screws, so to speak, with each such incremental move. And were he to do this, then surely we would reach a point where we would crack. But presumably Talbott would reject this as the “wrong” kind of compulsion.
So Talbott faces a dilemma, indeed, a hell of a dilemma. He must either give up his claim that the misery of hell is unbearable or he must affirm a form of compulsion he has repudiated. If the only sort of suffering God imposes on those in hell is like that of the foolish philanderer, there is no reason why sinners may not continue to rebel and resist him forever. But if God imposes ever-greater misery to the point that it is literally unbearable, then he would be using the sort of compulsion Talbott rejects. It appears, then, that sinners can freely resist God forever, contrary to Talbott’s argument.
But What about the Rich Man and Lazarus?
Let’s continue to explore these points in light of a famous biblical description of hell, namely, the story of the rich man and Lazarus. This story is relevant to our discussion in the first place because Talbott cites it as evidence for the view that hell is forcibly imposed punishment.11 It is also interesting from another angle, however, since I have often heard it cited against the freedom defense of hell. What this story shows, it is alleged, is that the rich man sincerely repents, but his repentance is rejected because it is too late. So the reason that hell is eternal is not because the doors of hell are locked on the inside, as Lewis would have it. To the contrary, it is eternal because its inhabitants are forced to stay there against their wishes, even though they would gladly repent and receive salvation if they could.
Now it is worth noting that this story may be a parable. But whether it is or not, we cannot press all the details of the story and assume each of them is intended to teach a specific lesson. The point I want to emphasize, however, is that there are other viable interpretations of the story. These interpretations support neither Talbott’s view of hell nor the view that the inhabitants of hell are forced to stay there despite their sincere repentance.
First, there is nothing in the story to indicate that the misery of the rich man was an unbearable punishment that led to his repentance and eventual salvation. That is precisely the scenario we would expect if Talbott’s theory of hell is correct. Contrary to this, the “great gulf” that separates the rich man from Lazarus remains between them, without any indication that it will inevitably be traversed at some point.
Second, despite the rich man’s misery, he seems more concerned to justify himself than to truly repent and sincerely throw himself on God’s mercy. Although his first request is for relief from his pain, his next request is for Lazarus to be sent to his brothers to warn them so they can escape his fate.
Think about that for a moment. What does it imply? While this appears on the surface to be a loving gesture on behalf of his brothers, I would suggest that it may equally well be understood as an indirect attempt at self-justification. That is to say, the rich man seems to be hinting in his request that if he had been better informed and warned, he would not be there either. Indeed, his demand is arguably for compelling evidence, the very sort of thing that Talbott thinks would be convincing and move all sinners to repentance.
But, third, notice that that suggestion is countered by Abraham’s response when he points out that his brothers have Moses and the Prophets. When the rich man retorts that more is needed, that they would repent if someone from the dead went to them, Abraham rejects this out of hand: “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31). The point seems clear that the rich man is not in hell because he lacked sufficient evidence. Just like his brothers, he had available to him Moses and the Prophets. And Moses and the Prophets warned against indifference to the poor, yet the rich man ignored Lazarus as he lay at his gate covered with sores. In other words, he had more than enough evidence but declined to act on the truth that was clearly in front of him.
Moreover, he is continuing to justify himself rather than truly repent. As I see it, then, hell is indeed a place of misery but not unbearable misery. This is why it can be freely chosen forever as one’s eternal destiny.
The Misery Paradox: So Close and Yet So Far Away
Let us reflect further on the nature of this misery by pondering a puzzle that was raised to me about two seemingly inconsistent descriptions of hell. The question was posed to me as follows: “Revelation 14:9–11 portrays the eternal torment of the condemned as taking place ‘in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb’ (14:10). What does this mean? And how should we understand the portrayal in relation to other traditional images of hell as banishment from the presence of Christ?”12 So the question is how the suffering of hell can take place in the presence of Christ if the essence of hell is being separated from God. Isn’t this contradictory?
Well, in response to this, I’d start with the observation of the psalmist that there is no place where we can successfully flee from God’s presence (Ps. 139:7–11). The God of love is everywhere, and we cannot exist a millisecond without his sustaining grace and power. Paul makes a similar point in his sermon at Mars Hill, where he reminds his listeners that God is “not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live, and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27–28).
This latter text is particularly relevant, for Paul is applying this point to people who may be seeking God but have not yet found him. The point here, then, is that even people who may be “far” from God in terms of a meaningful, loving relationship are still “close” to him in the sense that he continually sustains them in existence.
So the unhappy creatures described in Revelation 14 are in the presence of the Lamb by virtue of the fact that he sustains them in existence, and they may even be aware of this fact. However, they are utterly separated from him by their sinful rebellion. They are close in terms of something like proximity, but far apart in terms of mutual love and intimacy.
It is easy to see how this uneasy situation causes misery. Imagine a son alienated from his father who deeply loves him. He hates his father and resents the fact that he is dependent upon him, so he will not return his love but is forced by unhappy circumstances to live under the same roof with him. The misery in this case would be palpable.
Indeed, the paradoxical nature of this observation may illumine why fire is used as an image of the torments of hell. Fire in the Bible is a common image for the presence of God, not his absence (cf. Deut. 4:24; 5:24–25; Ps. 50:3; Heb. 12:29). But his presence is experienced very differently by those who are rightly related to him, as opposed to those who are not.
David Bentley Hart has noted that there is a long theological tradition, particularly in Eastern Orthodoxy, that “makes no distinction, essentially, between the fire of hell and the light of God’s glory, and that interprets damnation as the soul’s resistance to the beauty of God’s glory, its refusal to open itself before the divine love, which causes divine love to seem an exterior chastisement.”13
Perhaps we can take this a step further and suggest that this may explain why the frightful passage about the lake of fire (Rev. 21:8) appears right in the middle of the most glorious description of the Holy City in the whole Bible. And indeed, this is right after the beautiful picture of the spring of the water of life given to those who are thirsty (Rev. 21:6). As Robert Mulholland has pointed out, “if, as John says, those in hell are in fire in the presence of the Lamb (14:10), who in the vision is seated on the throne with God (7:17), and the Water of Life flows from the throne (22:1), then both the fire image and the water image are linked to the throne.”14
Again, our freedom allows us to refuse his love and go our own way, even as it remains true that “in him we live and move and have our being.” if that is our choice, his glorious love will be experienced like a burning fire rather than “the spring of the water of life” that will deeply quench our thirst.
But Seriously, Why Would Anyone Choose Eternal Hell?
Still, there is something deeply perplexing if not unintelligible about such a choice, and Talbott certainly raises an obvious question in asking what possible motive could explain it. What can we say to this?
I readily grant that the idea of any rational person choosing eternal hell is hard to conceive of. Indeed, there is something deeply irrational in such a choice, and we cannot fully make sense of it. I wrote my PhD dissertation on hell several years ago, and this was one of the most difficult challenges I faced in defending the doctrine. It still leaves me baffled to this day. Nevertheless, I believe the choice of hell does have its own sort of logic, and we can make at least some sense of it, although not entirely.
For a start, I would encourage anyone who wrestles with this question to read C. S. Lewis’s little book The Great Divorce. For those who have never read it, the premise of the book is that a group of “ghosts” from hell take a bus ride to heaven and are invited—indeed, implored—to stay. Common sense says they would jump at the offer. But contrary to common sense, almost all the ghosts reject the invitation and return to hell.
What is most striking about the book is how Lewis describes these characters in such a way that makes psychological and emotional sense of their choice to return to hell. I often urge people to read that book in conjunction with another of Lewis’s books, The Four Loves. One of the main points of that book is that the love between human beings will go bad and even become demonic if it is not transformed by divine love. Human love is not sufficient to sustain itself and remain strong without being properly related to God, the ultimate source of all love.
One of the most poignant examples of this occurs near the end of The Great Divorce. There we meet a character from hell who arrives in heaven to meet his wife, who is named Sarah Smith. She was a very loving person even during this life, although she acknowledges that much of her love for her husband had been motivated by her own need to be loved. Such “need love,” as Lewis calls it, is a genuine form of love, but it is easy to see how it can become twisted and abused. Healthy need can easily become “needy,” and this can be exploited and abused by selfish persons.
Although her love had not always been perfect, as she confesses, she had allowed her human love to be fully transformed by God’s perfect love. She is now radiant with love and joy and is no longer vulnerable to unhealthy manipulation.
By contrast, her husband was a person who used human love to manipulate others and to get his way. Thereby, his love was actually deformed into a perverse kind of hatred. Even as a child, he would pout and sulk when he did not get his way. He knew his sisters would feel bad for him and eventually give in, because they could not stand for him to have his feelings hurt.
He continued this pattern in marriage, and indeed, as he talks with his wife, it is apparent that he is still bent on using love as a weapon to cause her pain. In particular, he assumes that his wife must be miserable without him, since he has been in hell all that time. She explains to him, however, that in heaven, all needs are satisfied and all love is pure. So while she loves him, he can no longer use that love to manipulate her or hurt her. He cannot destroy her happiness by sulking in hell. She urges him to embrace true love and to remain in heaven, where he can be truly happy.
As she makes this appeal, he feels the force of it at least to some degree, and it appears that he will repent of his sins and choose to remain in heaven. Lewis describes this as follows.
Her beauty brightened so that I could hardly see anything else, and under that sweet compulsion the Dwarf [her husband] really looked at her for the first time. . . . And really, for a moment, I thought the Dwarf was going to obey: partly because the outlines of his face became a little clearer, and partly because the invitation to all joy, singing out of her whole being like a bird’s song on an April evening, seemed to me such that no creature could resist it.15
Now I find particularly interesting here Lewis’s use of the phrase “sweet compulsion” in light of our earlier discussion of the two different kinds of compulsion. This “sweet compulsion” is not a matter of using threats or lethal force. Sarah Smith’s “weapons” are love, joy, and beauty, and she aims straight for the heart.
And yet as hard as it may seem to resist such compulsion, resist he does, although at times he nearly gives in. The narrator doubts that he “ever saw anything more terrible than the struggle of that Dwarf Ghost against joy.”16 However, what he refuses to give up is the perverse pleasure he takes in the sense that he is in control and she still needs him. As she attempts to reason with him, urging him to stay, he continues to cling to the illusion that she is doing it because it will hurt her if he does not stay. “‘Ah, you cannot bear it!’ he shouted with miserable triumph.”17
The phrase “miserable triumph” perhaps encapsulates as well as anything the perverse logic that makes some sort of sense of how eternal hell can be freely chosen. No one who chooses to remain in bitterness, resentment, and alienation from those who love him or her is truly happy. And yet bitterness and resentment do offer a certain form of pleasure, twisted though it is. Those who cling to such pleasure may do so with a sense of triumph, illusory as it is, even as they defiantly lock the doors of hell from the inside, thereby remaining “in one sense, successful, rebels to the end.”
The Rich Man and the Dwarf
I would suggest that the rich man in Jesus’s story and the dwarf in The Great Divorce have something in common. They remain in hell because neither one has embraced true repentance, and neither one has a heart that is open to the transforming love of God. As a result, they experience the love and glory of God as a painful fire, and the joy of other persons only causes them grief. Both cling to a sense of being aggrieved and attempt to manipulate feelings of pity. And both take a sense of satisfaction in those feelings, perverse as they are.
Generally speaking, the reason hell can be freely chosen is that it is a distorted mirror image of heaven. There is no righteousness or holiness in hell, but it does offer the alternative of self-righteousness. It offers no real joy or happiness, but it does offer the deformed sense of satisfaction from holding on to bitterness, resentment, and hurt. There is no real fulfillment, but it does offer the illusory triumph of getting one’s way, self-destructive though it is.
Hell is the empty shell of which heaven is the pulsating, vibrant reality. But the shell is not without its pleasures, miserable though they are.