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Why Hell Is Fair and Heaven Won’t Be Boring

Can the Existence of Hell Be Reconciled With a Loving God?

My conversation partner was becoming agitated. I had been trying to explain that God’s goal for humanity is to draw us into the life of the Trinity to live with him in loving relationship for eternity. In other words, I was presenting some of the material we covered in the previous three chapters of this book. The skeptic was not buying it. “How can you call God loving?” he exclaimed. “Would you call me loving if I locked my daughter in a dungeon and tortured her for not doing her homework? Would you call me loving if I imprisoned my wife in a room and then tormented her day and night for burning the toast?”

If there is one objection that is almost guaranteed to come up in a conversation about Christianity, this is it. Many people simply cannot reconcile the idea that God loves us but some people end up in hell. As James Lileks writes, “As a tot I was given the usual terrifying mixed message: (a) God is love; and (b) If you don’t believe how much He loves you, you will stand in the corner for eternity.”49

The first key to dealing with this objection is to admit that if hell is a place where an angry God tortures people for eternity just because they failed to believe the right propositions or meet some of his arbitrary standards for a few measly years here on Earth, it is unjust and we shouldn’t label God loving. The god of Lileks’ childhood memory is sending a terrifying mixed message. Unfortunately, this is the type of God that many Christians have been proclaiming for too long.

It is also the type of God the man I was talking to was rejecting. In speaking to people who have this view, I recommend that we first explain to them that we reject it as well. Then we have to provide a more accurate account of the afterlife. For example, here is how the rest of my conversation went.

“Of course I wouldn’t say you were loving if you did those things,” I replied. “But that is not analogous to God and hell. Now let me ask you something. Would you call yourself a loving husband if you cheated on your wife? Or would you call yourself a loving son if, assuming you had good parents, you rejected all that they had done for you and refused to acknowledge or speak to them? And would these decisions have inherent consequences? By that I mean, would your relationship with your wife and parents be affected by your attitudes and behavior?”

“Well, no, that wouldn’t be loving, and yes, it would have consequences,” the caller admitted.

“Of course,” I said. “And that is the better picture of what happens between humans and God. Heaven and hell are not places of arbitrary rewards and punishments. Rather they are the state of existence that results as a natural consequence of either loving God or failing to do so.”

I argued in chapter 4 that love is the most foundational truth in all of reality. In short, love is the meaning of life. We were made to give of ourselves for God and for others; it is inherent in our existence. I also suggested that reality is hierarchical. Certain parts of existence are more objectively valuable than other parts and we are to love according to that order. In other words, we are to love God above all and love everything else in keeping with its inherent value.

Sin is disordered love. It is to give of ourselves to (worship and serve) something or someone to a degree beyond which it is worthy. Such love carries with it its own inherent punishment (Romans 1). We probably all know people who have been sucked further and further into a particularly destructive pattern of life that ruins their relationships. For example, the man who worships and serves alcohol or money more than his wife and children is out of touch with reality and will bear the consequences of that decision.

The ultimate consequence of disordered love is the state of existence we call hell. The more we love things other than God, whether money or power or simply ourselves, the further away we get from the relationship for which we were created. In the same way that a husband will grow further and further away from his family as he continues to worship and serve other things, people grow further and further away from God. Eventually we are completely alone. That is hell.

People don’t get sent to hell because they didn’t believe the right things while on earth. They don’t get rejected at the pearly gates because they failed to jump through the right hoops. They end up in a state of alienation from God because that is what happens when you don’t love him. It’s simply the nature of reality. Dallas Willard offers this good insight:

We should be very sure that the ruined soul is not one who has missed a few more or less important theological points and will flunk a theological examination at the end of life. Hell is not an “oops!” or a slip. One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God. “Outer darkness” is for one who, everything said, wants it, whose entire orientation has slowly and firmly set itself against God and therefore against how the universe actually is. It is for those who are disastrously in error about their own life and their place before God and man.50

The picture of God standing over hell gleefully throwing poor souls into the pit because they didn’t measure up to his rules is simply false. People take themselves to hell. Regis Martin rightly notes:

Hell is the condition of man who, having habituated himself to a life of complete self-enclosure, announces forever before God, “I don’t want to love. I don’t want to be loved. Just leave me to myself.” It is a Judgment that the unrepentant sinner will himself have made; God is there merely to ratify the truth of what it really means.51

As C. S. Lewis so eloquently put it,

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. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.52

But what about all those passages that talk about burning in the lake of fire? Don’t we have to take the idea of hell as punishment seriously? Absolutely. Hell is certainly punishment. However, that does not mean that this punishment is not a natural consequence of rebellion against God. The key is to realize that the punishment people receive in hell is not an arbitrary pain inflicted just for the sake of inflicting pain, which is what human punishment often amounts to. It is not vindictive. I recently talked with an ex-Muslim who had rejected Islam largely because he would not accept a vision of hell in which sinners have their flesh burned off, then grown back on again, then burned off again in an eternal cycle of torture. He assumed the Christian teaching was basically the same. It isn’t. Hell is not pain for the sake of pain. It is the punishment that is inherent in rejecting God. To not love God is a form of punishment in itself; indeed it is worse than what we normally think of as punishment. From Peter Kreeft:

What is hell? The popular image of demons gleefully poking pitchforks into unrepentant posteriors misses the point of the biblical image of fire. Fire destroys. . . . Hell is not eternal life with torture but something far worse: eternal dying. . . . The images for hell in Scripture are horrible, but they’re only symbols. The thing symbolized is not less horrible than the symbols, but more. Spiritual fire is worse than material fire; spiritual death is worse than physical death. The pain of loss—the loss of God, who is the source of all joy—is infinitely more horrible than any torture could ever be.53

Kreeft notes elsewhere that many believe the existence of hell dictates that God must be a God of wrath and vengeance and hate.

But this conclusion does not follow from the premise of hell. It may be that the very love of God for the sinner constitutes the sinner’s torture in hell. That love would threaten and torture the egotism that the damned sinners insist on and cling to. A small child in a fit of rage, sulking and hating his parents, may feel their hugs and kisses at that moment as torture. By the same psychological principle, the massive beauty of an opera may be torture to someone blindly jealous of its composer. So the fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, or rather by the damned’s hatred of that love.54

But what about judgment day? Doesn’t that involve handing out particular punishments for particular sins against God? Again, it is important to understand that God’s judgment is not an arbitrary list of penalties he cooked up in response to certain crimes. Judgment too should be understood as a natural consequence of our sin. God’s judgment is all about the truth being revealed to all. God is not a judge in the sense that we usually think of. He doesn’t weigh various arguments in court, make a decision based on his best attempt at interpreting the evidence, and then pick a punishment that he thinks best suits the crime. God doesn’t weigh the merits of various competing positions on judgment day. He simply reveals the true position. Judgment day is not the day God decides the verdict on your life, it is the day when the verdict of your life is made clearly known to all. Joseph Ratzinger writes,

In death, a human being emerges into the light of full reality and truth. He takes up that place which is truly his by right. The masquerade of living with its constant retreat behind posturings and fictions is now over. Man is what he is in truth. Judgment consists in this removal of the mask in death. The judgment is simply the manifestation of the truth.55

When people come face-to-face with Jesus, who is the truth, his very presence will be the final judgment. The reality of each person’s relationship with him will be revealed. Either he knows us and welcomes us home or he doesn’t (Matthew 7:23).

Let’s address one final question before we move on from this section. It comes from a listener named Brian. Brian wasn’t sold on the biblical notion of free will, so I was trying to explain to him that God desires relationship with humans; he refused to make us robots. Instead, he gave us the ability to reject him. A healthy, loving relationship is dependent on both parties being in it because they want to be, not because they have to be. I told Brian that “God understands this and so refuses to coerce us into a relationship with him. He wants us to be in it of our own accord.” Brian replied,

Didn’t Jesus himself say that nonbelievers will be thrown “into the furnace of fire” where “men will weep and gnash their teeth” just as “the weeds are gathered and burned with fire” (Matthew 13:40–42 RSV)? Why then throughout the Bible is there constant appeal to transcendent punishment for nonbelievers? Transcendent punishment isn’t coercion? The Old Testament seems to very much try to force man into a relationship with God. Placing a punishment on nonbelief is as close to coercion as I can ever see.

In fact, it is not coercion. To coerce (in the sense used above) is to “bring about by force or threat.” To receive money or sex, say, at the point of a gun is to coerce. The threat of death brings about the action. It is important to note here that in coercion, neither death nor the action would have occurred without the coercive intrusion. In the normal course of events, a woman attacked by a rapist wouldn’t have had sex with him or been shot. Only because some evil power entered her life is she forced to make a choice between two bad alternatives. That is the nature of coercion.

To accuse God of being coercive is to say, in effect, that he approaches us as completely independent beings and says, “Come with me or burn in hell.” The implication is that if God would just leave us alone, we could live our lives heading toward a third alternative; one that is neither with God nor burning in hell. That is what comes to mind in Brian’s phrase “placing a punishment on nonbelief.” He paints a picture of a bully God arbitrarily imposing his evil desires on a peace-loving planet. Biblically, however, that is not the way the world is. Rather, the Earth is like a colony of children separated from their parents and wandering across a scorching desert. God comes to them and issues not a threat, but a warning and an offer. He says, “You are going to die out here if you do not let me help you. Please let me help you. I have plenty of water to drink and food to eat and shelter from the sand and the sun. I am your only hope of avoiding the terrible consequences of being out in this wasteland. Please, come to me.” Indeed, this is almost exactly what God says in many places in Scripture.

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;

and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?

Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.

Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.

Isaiah 55:1–3

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Matthew 11:28–29

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.

Matthew 23:37

This is clearly not coercion. It is a statement of fact. God created us for relationship with him. In that relationship is life, joy, love, purpose, and a lot of other great things. Because healthy relationships require freedom on the part of each participant, God gave us the opportunity to opt out and forgo all those benefits. However, leaving God leads to only one place—hell. If you will not have God, you will necessarily have the opposite of that—separation from God, otherwise known as hell. There are no other alternatives, no plethora of roads to travel. It’s either relationship with God or separation from him. As we will see more clearly in the next chapter, Jesus comes to show us the way home. He doesn’t coerce or threaten, he simply warns and informs and beckons: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Come with me” (see John 14:6).

We have seen in this section that the doctrine of hell is not irreconcilable with the love of God. Indeed, it is a necessary consequence of the love of God. The bigger problem, it has been said, is how to reconcile hell with human sanity.56 Why would anyone in their right mind not choose the joy that comes with relationship with God? The sad and clearly evident truth is that sin is a form of insanity and that all of us sometimes deliberately refuse joy and truth. Every sin reflects that preference and shows us that the human race is “spiritually insane.”57

Is Focusing on Heaven Detrimental to Life on Earth?

Having discussed the notion that hell cannot be reconciled with a loving God, we will conclude this chapter by briefly addressing two other common misconceptions about the Christian doctrines of heaven and hell:

The first error is that belief in life after death causes people to be less concerned with life here and now. Skeptics argue that those who are too focused on heaven become no earthly good and may even be a detriment to the planet. Living for eternity is seen as escapist and harmful.

They couldn’t be more wrong. In truth, chasing hard after heaven leads to a much better life here on Earth.

The August 29, 2011 episode of Australian X Factor presented a good example of this fact. By most accounts that particular show was pretty standard fare until Emmanuel Kelly took the stage. The audience applauded politely as the young man with obvious limb deficiencies limped to the microphone to face the judges. Then a shocked silence fell over the crowd when Emmanuel answered Ronan Keating’s question about how old he was:

“I, um, well, actually I am not exactly sure. When I was originally found in Iraq in an orphanage—my mum found me—I was found with no birth certificate, no passport, nothing. ” Emmanuel, as the audience then learned via a recorded video clip, was born in a war zone and his deformities were caused by chemical weapons. He and his brother were found abandoned in a shoe box in a park and taken to an orphanage. There they were discovered by humanitarian Moira Kelly and flown to Australia for surgery. “It was like looking at an angel when Mum, Moira Kelly, walked through the orphanage door,” Emmanuel reported. Moira then “fell in love” with the boys and adopted them, raising them in what certainly appeared on television to be a very loving and happy family. “My hero would have to be my mother,” said Emmanuel.58

The video clip ended with most of the audience members and judges already on the verge of tears. Then they were pushed completely over the edge when Emmanuel began to sing. His song choice for the event: John Lennon’s “Imagine.” You are probably familiar with the lyrics. Lennon asks his listeners to envision a reality in which heaven, hell, and religion don’t exist. In such a state, he believes wars would cease and everyone would live together in harmony.

If the studio audience and over 14 million views on YouTube are any indication, it was a very moving performance. Personally, I found it mostly ironic. As much as I enjoyed Emmanuel’s singing, the ridiculous juxtaposition of a boy who had been rescued by nuns of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity and then adopted and raised by the founder of the Children’s First Foundation, a woman whose “Catholic faith has been her driving force to [help children in need] in New York’s Bronx, Calcutta, the Kalahari, Western Australia and all around the world,”59 singing about how belief in heaven and hell is the cause of great pain and suffering was simply too much for me. I don’t know if Emmanuel actually believes that getting rid of religion and the Christian doctrines regarding the afterlife would be beneficial to the world, but I know that his own life is evidence that points in exactly the opposite direction. Emmanuel received the abundant blessings in his life precisely because some people were convinced of the reality of heaven and hell. Christianity hasn’t caused him to suffer; it has lifted him up.

Unfortunately, Lennon’s thesis is quite widely accepted among skeptics, so it is important to recognize it and be able to correct this false view. They charge that people who seek after heaven and try to avoid hell are too focused on the afterlife to bother making this world a better place. This is simply not the case. Biblical religion is not opposed to the betterment of the world. Indeed, Christianity has been the premier means by which the conditions of this planet have become better, a point very ably argued by such thinkers as Thomas Woods (How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization), Rodney Stark (The Victory of Reason), and Vishal Mangalwadi (The Book that Made Your World). C. S. Lewis adds:

If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought the most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.60

One of the major reasons for this fact is biblical religion’s distinctive eschatological view of time. Most worldviews view time pessimistically. Eastern religions (and Western paganism) view history as either a vicious cycle or a march away from an idyllic moment in the past. Thus, the goal of these worldviews is to escape the cycle and the degradation. Western materialism’s view is that time is ultimately meaningless, a position elucidated beautifully by Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.61

For biblical religion, however, time is charged with meaning in that God is actively working to redeem all of creation. Those with a Christian worldview are looking forward to the new creation as the culmination and fulfillment of God’s ongoing work. Christians don’t look to escape time or return to the garden of Eden; instead, like Abraham, they are looking forward to the “city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).

In chapter 6 we saw the basic framework of God’s redemptive plan. It involves a pattern that is readily apparent throughout history. G. K. Beale rightly summarizes it this way: “(1) cosmic chaos followed by (2) new creation, (3) commission of kingship for divine glory, (4) sinful fall, and (5) exile”62 at which time God starts another new creation. In each instance of the pattern, God creates a family, under the headship of one man, with a mandate to be fruitful and take care of the Earth. Then this family rebels against God and ends up in exile from him. God then re-creates the family and the pattern starts again.

Let’s review this pattern briefly. Adam and Eve were the first family, but they rebelled and got kicked out of the garden. God started again with Noah and his family, but they rebelled as well and were scattered throughout the Earth after the Tower of Babel. The pattern repeated with Moses and the Israelites. They rebelled at Kadesh Barnea and had to wander in the wilderness for forty years, exiled from the Promised Land. Then the Israelites went through a new creation event and a smaller “Red Sea” as they crossed the Jordan River to conquer the land, and King David, as the next new Adam, established the family as a kingdom of God on earth. However, rebellion ensued once more, and the family was exiled by the Syrians and Babylonians. Jesus, as the final new Adam, gave birth to the final new family and established the final new kingdom. Notice that each stage in this pattern of creation involves looking ahead and working toward the fulfillment of the pattern, the final new creation. Christians view the time in which we currently live as the last stage (the “last days,” to use New Testament terminology) before that blessed event. Consequently, we actively work, just as God’s children have always worked, to fulfill the mandate God has given us. The practical result of this eschatological view of time is not that Christians sit around and wait for the New Jerusalem to arrive. Rather, we actively work to see it accomplished.

Peter Kreeft writes,

People think that heaven is escapist because they fear that thinking about heaven will distract us from living well here and now. It is exactly the opposite, and the lives of the saints and our Lord himself prove it. Those who truly love heaven will do the most for earth. It’s easy to see why. Those who love the homeland best work the hardest in the colonies to make them resemble the homeland. “Thy kingdom come . . . on earth as it is in heaven.”63

Is Heaven Going to Be Boring?

L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein raised a few hackles in 2007 when Starbucks printed one of his quotes on their venti cups:

Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the seventeenth century, but heaven has to step it up a bit. They’re basically getting by because they only have to be better than hell.

It is an old joke, as Stein himself later realized. In a piece about the controversy the cup had created, he noted: “Gary Larson did it in a ‘Far Side’ cartoon with a guy on a cloud saying, ‘Wish I’d brought a magazine.’ Mark Twain did it in Huckleberry Finn. Isaac Asimov—who was not even funny—said, ‘For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.’”64

I don’t think so. And actually, this is a far more serious subject than it might seem at first glance. Stein may have made his point in a lighthearted way, but he was obviously touching on a serious objection to heaven, one that I hear quite often. As Kreeft notes, “No one can run with hope or passion toward a goal that seems boring.”65 Therefore, we must be able to recognize and counter the bad theology that is present here and present a vision of heaven that is more biblically accurate and attractive.

That may well start with reading some of Randy Alcorn’s work. In response to Stein’s coffee cup quote, at least five people sent him a copy of Alcorn’s book Heaven, and I recommend it as well. Alcorn offers a wide-ranging biblical look at what heaven will be like and does a great job of debunking the notion that it will be an ethereal place with not much to do. His major point is that it will be a new Earth, where real people with real bodies will be “eating, drinking, working, playing, traveling, worshiping, and discovering.”66 I will entrust you to Alcorn with this general topic, except to make one brief point about eternity and how we experience time.

Objections to heaven and hell often center on the fact that they are supposed to last forever. Even if one grants that there will be lots to do in heaven, it seems inconceivable that we will want to do these things forever. And as for hell, even if one accepts that people choose to go there and deserve to go there, it doesn’t seem fair that people should have to go there forever.

One key to addressing this issue is to recognize that our experience of time doesn’t have much to do with how many actual objective units of time have passed. It has much more to do with the quality of the experience we are having. We simply don’t experience every passing moment the same way. Some seem longer and some don’t seem to have any length at all. In other words, there isn’t much of a correspondence between how many objective units of time have passed and how much time we feel has passed. The difference in our experience of time usually depends on whether or not we are enjoying what we are doing and whether or not we find it important.

For example, sometimes it feels like time passes very quickly. Think about that first date with your special someone. You started talking and before you knew it four hours had gone by. But it felt like only a few minutes. On the other hand, now think about the most boring lecture you ever had to sit through. The clock just seemed to stop, right?

So in one instance the time seemed to pass very quickly, and in the other, it just dragged along. Each minute of the date was like a split second, but each minute of the lecture was like an hour. Moments are light and fleeting in the date, but heavy and slow in the lecture.

Now, think about these events after they are finished. Something very interesting happens. Those moments that seemed so small and fleeting while we were on the date are the ones that now become large and heavy in our minds. Each second is solid and almost visible; you can remember how the evening played out step by step. You can almost smell the food and hear his or her voice; you can enjoy taking in all the details again and again because they are right there for you all the time. The event has a continual reality; there is a sense in which it has become eternal.

On the other hand, that lecture is now like it never even happened. You can’t remember one thing that was said and frankly, that doesn’t bother you because you never gave that class another thought. It’s like a wisp, something you can’t really grasp even if you wanted to (and you don’t). The event that seemed so solid and heavy as you experienced it is now nothing; it has no weight, no substance.

I think our experience of time in this life gives us some insight into heaven and hell. To focus on how many moments we will exist in either place is to miss the point. The number of moments won’t matter in heaven and hell; what will matter is our experience. In heaven our experience will be of such a high quality that we’ll never think about time passing because we will be enjoying ourselves too much. And this experience won’t be fleeting; it will have weight and importance. All of our moments will have the solidity of eternity.

On the other hand, the experience of hell will be of such a low quality that, again, the number of moments won’t actually matter because each moment will seem to take forever. On top of that, these moments won’t have any solidity to them. A person in hell won’t be able to grab on to anything. Life will be wispy, unreal.

So heaven and hell will both be eternal, but that has little to do with how long anyone will be in either state of existence.

Conclusion

Regis Martin writes that all the choices of our life “carry us to one or another everlasting end”: heaven or hell.

Surely no two words summon more powerfully the latent and dramatic possibilities of being human. The image of the one conjuring all that is most deeply embedded in human desire and longing: joy, freedom, peace, delight, perfection, God. The other an image of sorrows unspeakable, compacted of all that we most dread and abhor: infernal solitude, enmity, evil, ennui.67

This is the truth we must try to convey to those who question Christian beliefs about the afterlife.