The Future of the Human PersonFrench philosopher Blaise Pascal once remarked that the immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter. Indeed. The Bible says that God placed eternity in our hearts. And nothing is more evident than that. Associated with the earliest archeological traces of the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve is the afterlife—depicted in cave drawings, rituals for burial, and so on. The pyramids stand as a testimony to our hunger for immortality. There is something in us that, unless it is repressed, reminds us regularly that this life is fleeting and that there must be more to it than our three score and ten.
If you think the afterlife is not real, it is not my purpose to provide evidence for it in this chapter. I have done that elsewhere.1 I only note that if Jesus was raised from the dead, He has been to the afterlife and is qualified to tell us about it. And He assures us that there is a heaven and a hell. Further, if the biblical God exists, God values us who bear His image too much to let us pass out of existence. And He has a project/purpose He is working out on and for and through us. That project will never be finished, so He won’t let us go. The project—and we ourselves—means too much to Him. No competent artist destroys his work of art he likes while it is still in the process of being completed, and God is no different with respect to His unending work concerning us.
Finally, while the Bible is our ultimate source of authoritative information about heaven and hell, there is a growing, quite substantial body of evidence for heaven and hell from near-death experiences (NDEs) in which people become clinically dead, actually experience angels, demons, God, heaven or hell, and return to life. One must always be careful not to derive doctrine from such experiences, but the fact that they are real is, in my view, beyond question.
The Bible says that we die once and after that is the judgment (Heb. 9:27). But this truth does not rule out the reality of NDEs for two reasons. First, “death” in Hebrews 9:27 could mean “irreversible death,” and, if so, it is not the same as clinical death. The latter allows for NDEs but not the former. Second, even if the passage just means “to die” without the notion of irreversibility, it still doesn’t rule out NDEs. Why? Because throughout the Bible and in periods of church history, people such as Lazarus (John 11) died, continued to be in a conscious, intermediate state, and came back to life.
Here are two of many, many credible NDE accounts.2 The first involves a woman named Kimberly Clark Sharp who worked at Harborview Hospital in Seattle. While she was attempting to resuscitate a clinically dead young patient—Maria—the patient suddenly became conscious, grabbed Kim’s arm, and reported that she had left her body, floated out and above the hospital roof, and had seen an old large blue shoe with one part worn to the threads and with the laces tucked under the heel on an upper ledge of the hospital roof! The ledge was not accessible to anyone but hospital personnel, nor visible from buildings nearby, and Maria had never been to the hospital before. With her curiosity aroused by this bizarre story, Kimberly was shocked to find the shoe just as Maria had described in the location she had named.3 Maria was interviewed by other witnesses that day who corroborate the incident.
A second, well-known account is about a woman named Viola who was checked into a hospital in Augusta, Georgia, in 1971 for routine gallbladder surgery. Six days after the surgery on May 5, her condition had worsened to the point that she was operated on again and died at 12:15 p.m. on the operating table. When the doctor said she was dead, Viola was confused. She had been in excruciating pain, when she suddenly felt a ring in her ear and, then, she popped out of her body! She found herself floating near the ceiling and gazed around the operating room, noting a number of things, including her own lifeless body. Though the room had been sealed off for surgery, she could hear voices in the outside hallway and passed through the wall where she saw her anxious family. Immediately, she noticed her daughter, Kathy, who was wearing an outfit Viola did not like. (Kathy had rushed to the hospital and put on the mismatched outfit hurriedly and without thinking.) She then noticed her brother-in-law talking to a family neighbor and saying, “Well, it looks like my sister-in-law is going to kick the bucket. I was planning on going to Athens, but I’ll stick around now to be a pallbearer.” Viola was infuriated by the insensitive comment.
She also sensed presences around her that she took to be angels. And get this: She could travel anywhere her thoughts directed her, so she found herself instantaneously in Rockville, Maryland, where she saw her sister getting ready to go to the grocery store. Viola noted carefully the clothes her sister was wearing, her search for misplaced keys and a lost grocery list, and, finally, the car she drove. Moments later, she was whisked through a tunnel. Space forbids me to describe all she saw, but I must mention one thing. She met a baby who told Viola he was her brother. Viola was confused because she did not have a brother. The baby then showed himself to her dressed in quite specific clothing and told her that when she went back to tell her father about all this.
When Viola came back into her body, each and every detail I have shared was verified by the people involved, often with additional eyewitnesses. Viola’s dad confirmed that only he, Viola’s mother, and the doctor knew about the brother who had died as an infant but about whom the father and mother had decided to remain silent.
Make no mistake about it. The afterlife is real. In this closing chapter I want to do two things. First, I want to briefly say something about heaven and how important it is. Second, I will spend the bulk of the chapter describing the nature of hell and explaining why its existence is not only reasonable, but very important, and essential to God’s purposes in the world.
A human being is a functional unity of two distinct entities—body and soul. The human soul, while not by nature immortal (its immortality is sustained by God), is nevertheless capable of entering an intermediate disembodied state upon death, however incomplete and unnatural this state may be, and, eventually, being reunited with a resurrected body. Heaven will be a place where there is no longer any suffering, and life will be filled with joy, fulfillment, and a host of interesting, meaningful things to do.
I am not an expert at describing the nature of heaven, so I won’t try. Happily, others have done a fine job of this.4 Instead, I want to encourage you about how important heaven is. The cartoon character Charlie Brown once said, “I’ve developed a new philosophy of life. I only dread one day at a time.”5 Archibald Hart explains how many of us adopt this stance: “All of life is loss. … Life is all about loss. Necessary loss.”6 In point of fact, in this life we experience three kinds of losses. First, we often suffer the natural consequences of our own bad choices. We lose a job, a marriage, friends, health, and much more. And these losses stay with us. They are hard to shake.
Second, we suffer losses due to the fact that we live in a fallen, imperfect world. We grow old, lose our eyesight, our physical attractiveness (such as it may be!), athletic ability, loved ones due to death, our children to marriage, our sexual potency, and so forth. We discover that our marriage, career, and overall life satisfaction isn’t what we hoped it would be. And as we age, we realize that many of our dreams will never come to pass.
Finally, there are several forms of injustice we all suffer that are never made right. From friends who gossip about us to bosses who bully us, to more severe crimes committed against us, the injustices of this life are not balanced and the harm done to us not completely healed.
This is where heaven becomes so very important. As Hart points out, a major problem with losses of various kinds is that we are over-attached—please note, I say over-attached—to this life and the things it offers: reputation, safety, our possessions, people who meet our deepest needs. Psychologists tell us that we need to have daily hope and optimism in life, and that such optimism must be rationally based so it isn’t just a form of denial or a fantasy world out of touch with reality. In my view, to do this, we need to be able to place our losses—indeed, our entire, brief lives with all their attendant ups and downs—into the context of a broader, true, objectively meaningful picture. If we can do this, we can break our over-attachment to this life. The rational hope of heaven as the Bible presents it is just the sort of background belief one needs to navigate day-to-day life appropriately and with a proper perspective in assessing what it brings our way. And heaven gives us the rational hope that the injustices and other losses will, in fact, be made right.
This is no small deal. It’s actually an essential perspective for living life well each day in God’s kingdom. It’s kind of ironic, really. People claim that the belief in heaven robs people of the value of life on this earth. But it’s really just the opposite. In light of eternity, this life takes on incredible meaning and one has the perspective needed to live life well with the right priorities and the appropriate degree of attachments.
Hell is an unpleasant topic that we typically avoid. We may think about it from time to time, or even in our more fearful moments, talk about it with someone we trust. Some people even pull out the topic to scare someone into making a decision of faith. Others have brought it up and thrown it into a person’s face, declaring damnation on that person for his harmful, disdainful acts.
But more often than not, the subject creeps up on us, silently, almost seditiously, until it enters our conscience and plagues us with thoughts of personal torment and judgment, or causes us to think about the agony a loved one will face if his life doesn’t turn around. The topic can bring so much concern and pain into our lives that we put it into the back room of our minds and padlock the door. We do not want to talk about hell, much less dwell on it. We would rather the topic never came up.
But locking it away will not dispel its reality. In fact, throughout history, the concept of some kind of judgment and punishment for wrongdoing has played a critical role in religious life individually and communally. Certainly this has been true in the history of Judaism and Christianity—two of the most dominant religious forces in Western history.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Daniel warned, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2 NIV). Turning to the New Testament, we find Jesus Himself advising His disciples not to “fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). Then we see Paul, the great Christian missionary, proclaiming that “these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thess. 1:9).
These leaders and teachers did not attempt to prove hell’s reality. They knew it existed and warned their audiences appropriately. In prior periods of church history, there was a time when the reality of hell was so gripping, so pervasive, that the threat of excommunication was a powerful and feared danger.
Things have certainly changed. Today, hell is not a topic for polite conversations, and it rarely surfaces anywhere else, including sermons. We are afraid of it, embarrassed by it. Some even reject it as infantile and obnoxious. Atheist B. C. Johnson frankly states that “the idea of hell is morally absurd.”7 Morton Kelsey even notes that believers are ambivalent about the doctrine: “The idea of hell is certainly not popular among most modern Christians.”8
Two New Testament passages provide the clearest definition of hell we have. Second Thessalonians 1:9 says, “These [who do not know God or obey the gospel] will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.” The other passage, Matthew 25:41 and 46, states: “Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels’; … These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” From these (and other) verses we see that the essence of hell is the end of a road away from God, love, and anything of real value. It is banishment from the very presence of God and from the type of life we were made to live.
Hell is also a place of shame, sorrow, regret, and anguish. This intense pain is not actively produced by God; He is not a cosmic torturer. Undoubtedly, anguish and torment will exist in hell. And because we will have both body and soul in the resurrected state, the anguish experienced can be both mental and physical. But the pain suffered will be due to the shame and sorrow resulting from the punishment of final, ultimate, unending banishment from God, His kingdom, and the good life for which we were created in the first place.
Moreover, the flames in hell are most likely metaphorical. If metaphors for hell are taken literally, contradictions result. Hell is called a place of fire and darkness, but how could there be darkness if the fire is literal? Hell is described as a bottomless pit and a dump. How can it be both? In addition, Scripture calls God Himself a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29) and states that Christ and His angels will return surrounded “in flaming fire” (2 Thess. 1:8). But God is not a physical object as is fire, and the flames surrounding the returning Christ are no more literal than is the sword coming out of His mouth (Rev. 1:16). Flames are used as symbols for divine judgment.
The severity and finality of the Bible’s view of hell has been thought by some to be too horrendous, too absolute, too tragic to accept. It is no surprise, then, that the biblical picture has had many detractors. So now I want to examine the justification of hell by focusing on some of the issues, objections, and alternatives that have been proposed.
Oxford University philosopher Richard Swinburne has offered an important defense of the orthodox view of hell.9 Swinburne asks why it is that you have to have right beliefs and a good will (a properly directed will, one that desires God, salvation, and heaven) to go to heaven? Why are people with wrong beliefs and a bad will left out?
His basic answer is twofold: Heaven is the type of place where people with wrong beliefs and a bad will would not fit, and heaven must be freely and noncoercively chosen.
According to Swinburne, heaven is a place where people eternally enjoy a supremely worthwhile happiness. This happiness has three important aspects. First, it is not the mere possession of pleasant sensations. You could have pleasant sensations, say, by taking drugs all day or by having people constantly lie to you about how wonderful and intelligent you are. But for that you should be pitied. You would not have a supremely worthwhile happiness.
Second, such a happiness can only be possessed if you do what you truly want to without any conflicting desires. You could be happy doing something, even if you experienced conflicting desires about that activity, but it would be better to do something you freely wanted to do and it was free from conflict.
Third, a supremely worthwhile happiness must come from true beliefs and things that are truly and supremely valuable. We all know that happiness can be obtained from false beliefs. You can be happy in the belief that someone loves you even if that belief is false. So happiness can come from either true or false beliefs, but happiness is more worthwhile if it comes from true beliefs. If given a choice between a lot of happiness from false beliefs or a little happiness from true beliefs, we would choose the latter. Furthermore, happiness can come from doing silly or even immoral actions. Some people gain happiness from killing or stealing. But a supremely worthwhile happiness comes from true beliefs and activities that are really valuable.
To sum up then, a supremely worthwhile happiness is a deep happiness, not a shallow one. It does not involve the mere possession of pleasant sensations, but it is obtained by freely choosing to do activities when that choice is based on true beliefs and those activities are truly worthwhile. Deepest happiness is found in successfully pursuing a task of supreme value within a supremely valuable context when I have true beliefs about these and I only want to be doing these tasks in this situation without any conflict of my desires.
What are these supreme tasks and situations? Swinburne claims they include developing a friendship with God, learning to care for others who have that same friendship, caring for and beautifying God’s creation, and the like. Heaven is not a reward for good behavior; it is a home for good people. Heaven intensifies and fulfills a certain type of life that can be chosen, in undeveloped form, in this life. Only people of a certain sort are suited for life in heaven: those who have a true belief about what it is like and really want to be there for the right reasons.
People with different beliefs about the good life or heaven will value and practice different activities, so even if they are seeking the good in some sense, their character will develop in a different way than will the character of the Christian. For example, a Buddhist who spends his whole life trying to remove his desires would not find heaven a place that fulfills the things he really wants. People with a bad will or people with a good will, but with false beliefs about what God, heaven, and the good really are, will not be suited for life in heaven.
Can God force the bad to become good? No, says Swinburne, if He respects our freedom. God can’t make people’s character for them, and people who do evil or cultivate false beliefs start a slide away from God that ultimately ends in hell. God respects human freedom, which He created. We could add here that it would be unloving, a form of divine coercion, to force people to accept heaven and God if they did not really want them. When God allows people to say no to Him, He actually respects and dignifies them. We may rush in to force our children to do something in their best interests, but our paternalism drops out when they grow up because we wish to respect them as adults. Similarly, God dignifies people and treats their choices as significant by allowing them to choose against Him, not just for Him.
So, Swinburne’s argument is that heaven is suitable for people of a certain sort (those who really want to be there and who base their choice on true beliefs), and their decision to go there must be made freely. Hell is a place for people of a different character who freely choose to be there.
As it is, Swinburne’s case seems to be a good one, but we can add to it too. For example, more can be said about how hell is the result of God’s respect for persons. It is reasonable to argue that it is wrong to destroy the type of intrinsic value humans have. If God is the source and preserver of values, and if persons have the high degree of intrinsic value Christianity claims they have, then God is the preserver of persons. He would be wrong to destroy something of such value just because it has chosen a life it was not intended to live. Thus, one way God can respect persons is to sustain them in existence and not annihilate them, as some claim will eventually happen to the lost. Annihilation destroys creatures of very high intrinsic value.
Another way to respect persons is to honor their free, autonomous choices, even if those choices are wrong. God respects persons in this second way by honoring their choices. As philosopher Eugene Fontinell has noted,
The question that must be raised here is whether the doctrine of universal salvation, highly motivated though it may be, does not diminish the “seriousness” of human experience. … At stake here, of course, is the nature and scope of human freedom. … There is a profound difference between a human freedom whose exercise must lead to union with God and one that allows for the possibility of eternal separation from God. … A world in which there can only be winners is a less serious world than one in which the possibility of the deepest loss is real.10
Since God will not force His love on people and coerce them to choose Him, and since He cannot annihilate creatures with such high intrinsic value, the only option available is quarantine. And that is what hell is.
There are two other considerations to ponder concerning hell. First, some of God’s attributes—particularly His justice and holiness—seem to demand the existence of hell. Justice demands retribution, the distribution of rewards and punishments in a fair way. It would be unjust to allow evil to go unpunished and to reward evil with good. Thus hell is in keeping with God’s justice. As Paul put it, “For after all it is only just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you … dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thess. 1:6, 8).
Similarly, God’s holiness requires Him to separate Himself entirely from evil, and hell is essentially a place away from God. Thus, hell is in keeping with God’s holiness. It may very well be that our current hostilities toward the notion of hell result, not from an enlightened conscience, but quite the reverse. Our culture embraces a set of moral slogans devoid of content where individual liberties prevail, come what may. But as a society we have little concern or appreciation for holiness, and this dulling of our moral sensibilities may have inevitably led to our failure to appreciate the morality of hell as seen in the light of the demands of holiness and justice.
This matter leads to a second point. In ethics, there is a theory known as virtue ethics. The details of this theory are beyond my present concern, but one thing about virtue ethics is very important. This theory maintains that people who have a well-developed, virtuous character are in a better position to have moral sensibilities and genuine insight into what is right and wrong than those who do not have such a character. In other words, true moral experts are possible, and they are those people who have cared deeply about virtue and goodness and who have labored to develop ingrained virtues and moral sensibilities.
Jesus Christ and His apostles were moral experts. They were remarkable people who exhibited lives of staggering dedication to goodness, virtue, and the moral way of life. Now if they, being as virtuous as they were and having well-developed moral sensibilities, did not balk at the notion of hell but even embraced it as just, loving, and fair, then our current distaste for the doctrine says more about us than about the doctrine itself. To deny this conclusion is tantamount to claiming that our modern moral sensibilities are more developed than those of Jesus and His apostles, not to say those of the overwhelming number of godly people who have followed Jesus since. But this claim is clearly arrogant and unreasonable.
These, then, constitute some of the reasons the biblical doctrine of hell is morally and intellectually justifiable. But there are still some objections to consider.
According to universalists, God will eventually reconcile all things to Himself, including all individuals, even if this means that God will continue to draw them to Himself in the afterlife. Morton Kelsey has said, “To say that men and women after death will be able to resist the love of God forever seems to suggest that the human soul is stronger than God.”11 John Hick claims that because of God’s goodness, mercy, grace, and love, “God will eventually succeed in his purpose of winning all men to himself in faith and love.”12
Universalists appeal to various arguments in support of their views, but three are central. One argument is that the doctrine of eternal banishment is immoral and unjust and, for that reason, unacceptable. Second, they argue that the doctrine of eternal banishment is incompatible with some of God’s attributes, such as omnipotence, love, and mercy. God’s mercy must surely triumph over human resistance. Finally, certain Bible texts (Acts 3:21; Rom. 5:18; 11:32; 1 Cor. 15:22–28; Eph. 1:10; 1 Tim. 2:4) are cited in favor of universalism. However, these arguments do not succeed. Let’s look at each one more closely to see why.
We have already considered some reasons for rejecting the first argument—the injustice of eternal banishment. The state of hell is fair and, in fact, an indication of human dignity. Heaven is unsuited for certain types of people and lifestyles. People can freely resist God. God’s love respects human freedom, making human choices and human history truly significant. And God will not extinguish people of intrinsic value. Eternal punishment is sad, even to God, but we must not confuse sadness with injustice. There are possibilities of real, eternal gains in this life, and this brings with it the possibility of real, eternal loss. And this latter possibility elevates the seriousness and significance of our world.
Regarding God’s attributes, we can make a similar case. Omnipotence has nothing to do with the issue of hell. Consider the task of creating a square circle. This is a logical contradiction. The task of creating such an entity is a pseudo-task. It is not something you could do by, say, working out with weights. Power is irrelevant to such pseudo-tasks. The same can be said with regard to the free choices of human beings. All the power in the world cannot guarantee that a free choice will be a good one. Determining a good result of a free choice is a logical contradiction. Thus, although God is omnipotent, He still cannot do the logically impossible, including forcing humans (who possess divinely given free will) to make the right choices.
Furthermore, while hell is in some sense a defeat to God (His desire is that all men be saved), in another sense it is not a defeat. This is because hell is a quarantine that respects the freedom and dignity of God’s image-bearers while separating the lost from His special presence and the community of those who love Him (heaven).
Finally, regarding divine love, we all know that resistance to love does not always break down. Love, even divine love, cannot coercively guarantee a proper response to it.
What about the Bible, then? Does it teach universalism? No. In fact, it contains very clear passages that contradict universalism (cf. Matt. 8:12; 25:31–46; John 5:29; Rom. 2:8–10; Rev. 20:10, 15). And the passages that appear to support universalism should be understood as doing one of two things. Either they are teaching what God’s desire is without affirming that this will happen, or they are describing not the ultimate reconciliation of all of fallen humanity, but a restoration of divine order and rule over creation taken as a whole.
So universalism does not provide adequate grounds for rejecting belief in hell. As C. S. Lewis wisely observed,
If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may refuse. I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully, “All will be saved.” But my reason retorts, “Without their will, or with it?” If I say, “Without their will,” I at once perceive a contradiction: How can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say, “With their will,” my reason replies, “How if they will not give in?”13
The Bible is clear that people do not get a second chance to go to heaven after death. Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment.” But is this teaching really fair and just? Yes. At least three factors tell us why.
For one thing, certain passages indicate that God gives people all the time they need to make a choice about eternity. Second Peter 3:9 teaches that God is postponing the return of Christ because He is “not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” From this, we can infer that if all a person needed were more time to make a decision, God would see to it that she got the extra time instead of dying prematurely. No one will go to hell who would have gone to heaven if he had just needed one more chance. Those who would have responded to a second chance after death will have their deaths postponed and be given that chance this side of the grave. God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).
Second, people most likely would not have the ability to choose heaven after death, even if it were possible. Character is shaped moment-by-moment in the thousands of little choices we make. Each day our character is increasingly formed, and in each choice we make we either move toward or away from God. As our character grows, some choices become possible and others impossible. The longer one lives in opposition to God, the harder it is to choose to turn toward God. If God permits a person to die and go to hell, it seems reasonable to think that God no longer believes that this person is saveable. Only God could make that type of judgment, but that judgment could clearly be true.
And if God gives people a second chance after death, why did He create this world in the first place? Why not just go straight to a world in which everyone starts in the afterlife? Particularly, why did He not create people such that they start their lives in the conditions present in the afterlife if they were such that they would reject Christ in this life but (allegedly) would respond with a second chance after death? The second-chance idea makes this world superfluous, especially for those just described.
Recently, some have argued for conditional immortality for the unsaved on Scriptural and moral grounds. Scripturally, it is claimed that biblical flames in hell are literal and that flames destroy whatever they burn. Morally, it is claimed that infinitely long punishing is disproportionate to a finite life of sin. Thus, everlasting punishment in extinction is morally preferable to everlasting punishing.
The scriptural argument is weak. Clear texts whose explicit intent is to teach the extent of the afterlife overtly compare the everlasting conscious life of the saved and the unsaved (Daniel 12:2; Matt. 25:41, 46). Moreover, as noted above, the flames in hell are most likely figures of speech for judgment and aren’t intended to be taken literally (cf. Heb. 12:29; 2 Thess. 1:8).
The moral argument fails as well. For one thing, the severity of a crime is not a function of the time it takes to commit it. Thus, rejection of the mercy of an infinite God could quite appropriately warrant an unending, conscious separation from God. Further, everlasting hell is morally superior to annihilation as becomes evident from the following consideration.
Regarding the end of life and active euthanasia (the intentional killing of a patient), sanctity-of-life advocates eschew active euthanasia while quality-of-life advocates embrace it. The former reject it because on the sanctity-of-life view, one gets one’s value, not from the quality of one’s life, but the sheer fact that one exists in God’s image. The latter accept it because the value of human life accrues from the quality of life. Thus, the sanctity-of-life position has a higher, not a lower, moral regard for the dignity of human life.
Now the traditional and annihilationist views about hell are expressions, respectively, of sanctity- and quality-of-life ethical standpoints. After all, the only grounds God would have for annihilating someone would be the low quality of life in hell. If a person will not surrender to God and if God will not extinguish one made in His image, then God’s only alternative is quarantine, and that is what hell is. Thus, the traditional view, being a sanctity- and not a quality-of-life position, is morally superior to annihilationism.
What about people who, through no fault of their own, never have a chance to hear the gospel of Christ? Do they receive or deserve unending punishing? Furthermore, why did God create people whom He knew would go to hell in the first place?
We must first affirm with Scripture that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. Christ is unique in His claims to be God (John 8:58; 10:30), to forgive sins (Mark 2:10), and in His miracles and resurrection from the dead. Buddha, Confucius, Mohammad, and other religious leaders are still in their graves; Jesus is not. Furthermore, Jesus Himself claimed to be the only way to God (John 3:18; 8:24; 11:25–26; 14:6) and this claim is reasserted by Peter in Acts 4:12.
The main issue in religion is truth, not belief. Believing something doesn’t make it true. If four people have different beliefs about the color of my mother’s hair, they can’t all be right, and believing that her hair is red does not make it so. While all religions have certain truths in common, nevertheless, they significantly differ over what God is like, what God believes, what the afterlife is to be, and how we have a relationship with God. The real issue is truth, not belief. If Jesus was who He claimed to be, then He is unique and the only way to God.
We also need to observe that, according to the Bible, God desires all people to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; Ezek. 18:23, 32), and He judges fairly (Job 34:12; Gen. 18:25) and impartially (Rom. 2:11). The biblical God is not a cold, arbitrary being, but a God who deeply loves His creatures and desires their fellowship and worship.
Also, all humans have some light from creation and conscience that God exists, that He is personal and moral, and that they are guilty before Him (Rom. 1:18–20; 2:11–16).
Moreover, the Bible is very clear about the state of those who hear the gospel and reject it (John 3:18; 5:21–24). They will be barred from heaven and sent to judgment in hell. Remember, the most kind, virtuous person who ever lived said these words.
With all this in mind, we can begin to address the first question raised: What about those who don’t have a chance to hear the gospel? The Bible doesn’t address this question explicitly and for obvious reasons. The Word of God doesn’t usually offer a plan B if the church chooses to reject God’s plan A. Scripture commands us to go into the world and be sure no one fails to hear the gospel. It doesn’t explicitly say, “Here is what will happen if you decide not to act on God’s command.” So whatever view we reach here must be formulated theologically from God’s attributes and general considerations in Scripture.
Here is another point: We must distinguish between the means of salvation and the basis of salvation. Christ’s death and resurrection have always been the basis for our justification before God. However, the means of appropriating that basis has not always been a conscious knowledge of the content of the gospel. Saved individuals before Christ (and surely justice includes people who lived and died within a few years after Christ’s execution when the gospel couldn’t reach them) were saved on the basis of Christ’s work, but they did not know the content of the gospel. They were saved by responding in faith to the revelation they had received at that point (Gen. 15:6).
Furthermore, most theologians believe that those who cannot believe (infants and those without rational faculties capable of grasping the gospel) have the benefits of Christ applied to them. Many argue this on the basis of 2 Samuel 12:23, where David expresses his conviction that he will be reunited with his deceased infant in the afterlife. They also appeal to the fact that there is no mention of perdition for children in all the Bible, and they cite God’s clear desire to save all humanity, His justice, and His love.14
So I believe it is certainly possible that those who are responding to the light from nature that they have received will either have the message of the gospel sent to them (cf. Acts 10) or else it may be that God will judge them based on His knowledge of what they would have done had they had a chance to hear the gospel. The simple fact is that God rewards those who seek Him (Heb. 11:6). It does not seem just for another to be judged because of my disobedience in taking the gospel to others, and it is surely the case that the gospel has not been taken to others in the way God commanded. I am not sure this line of reasoning is true, but some deem it plausible in light of the information we have. However, at the end of the chapter I will offer another view of the fate of the unevangelized that is at least as plausible if not more so than the one we are now considering.
If this case is correct, then why reach out to others with the gospel? For three reasons: As I admitted, this answer is somewhat speculative (remember, the Bible does not address the question explicitly). While I think it could be right, we should evangelize just in case it is wrong. Also, God commands us to tell others about His Son, and we should obey Him out of our love for Him. We are also told to spread God’s teachings and broaden His family, not merely for what happens in the future state, but to spread His rule now. Why delay and give evil more victory in the present? Why not bring people mercy and forgiveness and release from sin as soon as possible? Good news should not be delayed.
New Testament scholar Leon Morris puts this whole discussion in perspective:
Peter told [Cornelius] that God is no respecter of persons, “But in every nation he who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:35). This surely means that people are judged by the light they have, not by the light they do not have. We remember, too, that Paul says, “It is accepted of a man according to what he has and not according to what he does not” (2 Cor. 8:12). Long ago Abraham asked, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25), and we must leave it there. We do not know what the fate of those who have not heard the gospel will be. But we do know God, and we know that he will do what is right.15
But a final question remains: Why did God create people whom He knew would not choose Him? In my view, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has provided a very helpful answer to this question.16
According to Craig, among the things God knows is His knowledge of what every possible free creature would do under any possible set of circumstances. This is sometimes called *“middle knowledge.” This is knowledge of those creatable worlds God can actually create. For example, I do not have a sister, but God knows a possible person who would have been my sister if my parents had married earlier and given birth to a daughter. Again, I was raised in Missouri and never decided to become a lawyer, but God knows what would have happened if I had moved to Illinois as a teenager and what I would have freely done had I been challenged as a boy to become a lawyer. This is knowledge of what a free creature would do in certain circumstances, even if those circumstances do not happen. God knows all the possible creatures He could have created but didn’t, and He knows all the free choices all His creatures—those He actually created and those He did not create—would make in all the circumstances they could be placed in (some actually happening, some not happening).
What does this have to do with the doctrine of hell? God knows every possible creature and every possible response they would make to the gospel in every possible circumstance. Given this knowledge, why did God create a world in which people are not saved (He knew before they were born that they would not trust Christ)? Furthermore, because God knows what circumstances need to happen for each person to trust Christ, why didn’t God bring those circumstances about instead of other circumstances such that persons placed in them freely reject Christ?
Craig breaks this problem down into four statements:
(1) God has middle knowledge.
(2) God is omnipotent (all-powerful).
(3) God is all-loving.
(4) Some persons freely reject Christ and are lost.
According to Craig, the problem is this: If we accept the first three statements, an objector would claim that we cannot also accept statement 4. For if we accept statements 1–3, the objector holds that we also ought to accept these statements:
(1’) God knows under what circumstances any possible person would freely receive Christ.
(2’) God is able to create a world in which all persons freely receive Christ.
(3’) God holds that a world in which nobody rejects Christ is preferable to a world in which somebody does and consequently is lost.
The objector claims, then, that since God has middle knowledge, He would know for every possible creature just what circumstances need to happen to bring him to Christ, and since God prefers a world in which nobody rejects Christ over a world in which some reject Christ, then God would have the knowledge and power to create a world in which everyone is saved.
Craig’s solution to this problem is to reject 1’–3’ and replace them with these statements that are more likely to be true:
(1’’) There are some possible persons who would not freely receive Christ under any circumstances.
(2’’) There is no possible world in which all persons would freely receive Christ.
(3’’) God holds that a world in which some persons freely reject Christ but the number of those who freely receive Him is maximized is preferable to a world in which a few people receive Christ and none are lost.
Let us look at these in more detail. We have already discussed 1’’ in conjunction with universalism. There we saw that God cannot guarantee that a free creature would accept Christ. That is just what it means to be free. Therefore, of all the possible persons God could have created or did create, some would freely reject Christ no matter what the circumstances. How could God guarantee a set of circumstances for each person in which that person freely receives Christ? Statement 1’’ seems clearly true then.
For all we know, of all the possible persons God could have created, the vast majority of those who would have rejected Christ never get created in the first place. The number of people who reject Christ may be an act of mercy on God’s part. But still, Craig reminds us, the objector may respond by asking why God created anyone whom He knew would not trust Christ.
Craig’s answer is 2’’. Perhaps there is no world God could have created in which all persons freely receive Christ. Now, on the surface of it, 2’’ does not seem plausible. Suppose of all the possible persons God could have created (including some He did create and some He did not create), there is a set n composed of all and only those people who would trust Christ. Then why couldn’t God just create a world composed only of people in set n? What is the problem here?
Craig replies as follows: It may not be possible to create just those persons and just the right circumstances for all to be saved. Why? It may well be that if God changes the circumstances that allow Smith to freely trust Christ, this alteration may bring it about that Jones will freely reject Christ even though Jones would have accepted Christ in a world without the circumstances needed to bring Smith to saving faith.
An example may help to illustrate this point. Suppose God can bring about two circumstances, one in which my father is offered a job in Illinois while I am a young boy, and one in which no such offer is made. In the former case, suppose my father freely accepts the offer and we move to Illinois. In the latter case, we stay in Missouri. Let us call these events C and D, respectively. Suppose further that in circumstance D, three years after the offer could have been given (but wasn’t), I will meet just the right person in just the right circumstances and come to Christ. It is entirely possible that I would have had no such opportunity in circumstance C. So my salvation is dependent upon D obtaining as opposed to C. In addition, suppose that if D obtained, I would lead five others to Christ in Missouri in my lifetime, but if C had obtained, then a neighbor of mine in Illinois would have come to Christ by watching my non-Christian life fall apart, but without my bad example he would freely reject Christ. Now suppose this neighbor would have eventually led ten people to Christ. In circumstance D, six people come to Christ (I and five others), and in C, eleven come to Christ. C and D cannot both obtain, and thus free human choices responding to different influences make it impossible for God to bring about the conversion of all seventeen people.
This example shows that adjusting the circumstances in a possible world has a ripple effect. Not even God can change things piecemeal and respect freedom. If one thing is changed, this has an impact on other things. Additionally, the more people God creates, the greater the chance that some of the people He makes will not trust Christ. So 2’’ seems reasonable and quite plausible.
There is another point that can strengthen 2’’. In the ancient church there were two major views about the origin of the soul: *creationism and *traducianism. According to creationism, our bodies are passed on to us through normal reproduction by our parents, but God creates each individual soul out of nothing, most likely at fertilization. According to traducianism, both the body and soul are passed on to us by our parents. Now the soul is the thing that makes us the unique individuals we are. I could have had a different body, but I could not have had a different soul. My soul makes me, me.
For the creationist, I could have had different parents from the ones I had. Why? Because God could have created my soul out of nothing and placed it into a different body formed by different parents. In this case, I would have been united to a different body and born to different parents. For the traducian, I could not have had different parents from the ones I had. Why? Because essential to my identity is the fact that I have this very soul, and essential to a particular soul’s being the very soul it is, is that it come from just these two people. The soul is passed on from the parents—different parents, different soul.
If we accept traducianism, then God could not have created me without creating my specific parents, and He could not have created my specific parents without creating their specific parents, and so on. In other words, God could only get to me, as it were, by reaching me through my entire ancestral chain. If my great-grandparents had married different people, I could not have existed. So when God is comparing alternative possible worlds, He is not just comparing alternative individuals, but alternative ancestral chains in their entirety. It may be that God allows some chains to come about, with some individuals in them who reject Christ (say my great, great-grandfather), but which allow for others to be born who do trust Christ. In this case, God would be balancing alternative chains and not just alternative people. Of course, if one accepts creationism regarding the soul (not to be confused with creationism as opposed to evolution), then this solution would be unavailable.
These considerations show that creating a world with a large number of people may have the result that a number of them may be permitted to be lost in order to respect human freedom and accomplish some task known by God. What might that task be? Statement 3’’ gives us an answer: God prefers a world in which some persons freely reject Christ but the number of saved is maximized, over a world in which a few trust Christ and none are lost.
Consider two worlds, W1 and W2. In W1, suppose fifty million are saved and five million are lost, while in W2, five million are saved and none are lost. It is not clear that W2 is morally preferable to WI. If W2 is morally preferable, then hell has veto power over heaven. God’s purpose becomes the negative one of keeping people from hell, not the positive one of getting people to heaven. In contrast, it may be worth having more people go to heaven to allow more to go to hell. At the least, this is not clearly immoral. If something like this is correct, then, with Craig, we can affirm the following and add it to his opening four statements:
(5) The actual world contains an optimal balance between saved and unsaved, and those who are unsaved would never have received Christ under any circumstances.
This would seem to explain why God would create individuals whom He knew would not trust Christ in any circumstances.
Our discussion of middle knowledge has been conducted with a view toward solving the problem of why God created people whom He knew would not choose Him. Before we close the chapter, we want to relate middle knowledge to a closely connected question discussed a few pages earlier about the fate of people who never have a chance to hear the gospel message. In our earlier discussion we suggested a possible answer to this question: either God will get the gospel message to such people or else He will judge them based on His knowledge of what they would do if they had been given a chance to hear the gospel. We now offer a third alternative solution to the question that is at least as likely to be true as the other options.
According to the third solution, no one who does not hear the gospel message and accept it will be saved. Moreover, this solution can be clarified by taking it to imply the following two (apparently conflicting) theses:
(6) In unevangelized areas, there will be people who will be saved if someone were to take the gospel to them who would not be saved if no one took the gospel to them.
(7) In unevangelized areas, there will be no one who will go to hell who would have accepted the gospel if someone would have taken it to them.
Proposition (6) assures us that if we take the gospel to unevangelized areas, there will be people there who will be saved who would otherwise not have been saved and (7) expresses the idea that no one who does not get a chance to hear the gospel and is lost would have trusted Christ if they had been given the chance. But how can both (6) and (7) be true? How can it be the case that if we go to an unreached people, there will be people saved who otherwise would not be saved while at the same time accepting the idea that if no one takes the gospel to that unreached people group, no one will be lost who would have been saved had someone gone to them?
The answer involves God’s middle knowledge. Suppose that God is contemplating some people group through its history and He is deciding whom He will and will not create among all the possible persons He could create there. Surely, the number of people in the history of the people group under consideration could have been larger or smaller than the actual number that obtains in the real world. There are possible persons God could have created and placed in this people group but for some reason or another are not brought into the world. Now suppose that among the possible persons God knows He could create in this people group, there is some specific set of possible persons who would respond to the gospel if they were given the chance. God would know the number of those possible persons and He would know who they were. Let us use the name “set A” to refer to the set of possible persons in this people group who would trust Christ if given the chance.
Now God is deciding who to create in the people group under consideration. Should He create the people in set A or not? It depends on whether or not someone is willing to take the gospel to the people group in question. If God knows someone will bring the gospel, He will create the people in set A and there will be people saved (those in set A) who would not be saved if no one was willing to go to the people group; yet, if no one is willing to bring the gospel, God will refrain from creating the people in set A, knowing that they would never be saved. This is what (6) means. If no one is willing to bring the gospel to this people group, then the only people God will allow to be created are unsaveable people, those who would not trust Christ even if they had a chance to hear about Him. This is what (7) means. God’s choice to create the people in set A depends on whether or not someone will freely go and preach the gospel to the relevant people group. This, then, is a third solution to the question of the unevangelized that we are considering. In sum, the unevangelized on this view are not lost because they never have a chance to hear and respond to the gospel, but because God knew in advance that they would not respond (even if given the chance), and thus placed them in their specific geographical location. As a result, their salvation does not depend on contingencies of history over which they have no control (missionaries being sent), and God is just in His actions toward them. Instead, God gives anyone He knows would respond the opportunity to hear the gospel, and thus places them in circumstances where they can in fact hear and respond. Consequently, no one is lost whom God knows would accept the gospel if given the opportunity.
In this closing chapter, I have tried to share with you some important facts about the reality and nature of heaven and hell. I can’t think of a better summary of these things than the one offered by the apostle Paul (which I paraphrase): “For the wages of sin is death—eternal separation from God—but the free gift of God is an eternal kind of life that begins now and lasts forever in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).
In this final chapter we looked at what the future holds for the human soul in the afterlife. Scripture has much to say about heaven and hell, and near-death experiences provide extrabiblical confirmation that the soul survives the death of the body. We saw that heaven provides the Christian with a great source of rational hope for the future, and that hell is a tragic but avoidable final destiny. Although many have challenged the morality of hell, it makes sense both in relation to God’s attributes and to human character, which can develop in ways that are antithetical to heaven. We also discussed a number of alternatives to the traditional view of hell, and ended by considering the destiny of the lost and the unevangelized and how we should understand this in relation to God’s justice.
The Future of the Human Person
Because Jesus was raised from the dead, and has been to the afterlife, He is qualified to tell us about it. And He assures us that there is a heaven and a hell.
God values us who bear His image too much to let us pass out of existence.
Near-death experiences provide significant evidence for heaven and hell.
Heaven Is a Wonderful Place
Heaven will be a place where there is no longer any suffering, and life will be filled with joy, fulfillment, and a host of interesting, meaningful things to do.
Heaven offers us rational hope and optimism in life. We place our losses—indeed, our entire, brief lives with all their attendant ups and downs—into the context of a broader, true, objectively meaningful picture.
Hell: A Tragic Yet Avoidable Outcome
2 Thessalonians 1:9 and Matthew 25:41, 46: the essence of hell is banishment from the very presence of God and from the type of life we were made to live.
Some Reasons to Believe in Hell
Swinburne’s first argument: Heaven is the type of place where people with wrong beliefs and a bad will would not fit.
Swinburne’s second argument: Heaven must be freely and noncoercively chosen, which makes hell a real possibility for some.
Hell is the result of God’s respect for the intrinsic value of humans as well as their free, autonomous choices.
God’s justice demands a fair distribution of rewards and punishments. It would be unjust to allow evil to go unpunished and to reward evil with good.
God’s holiness requires Him to separate Himself entirely from evil, and hell is essentially a place away from God.
Jesus and His apostles were remarkable people dedicated to goodness and virtue. If they did not balk at the notion of hell but embraced it as just, loving, and fair, then our distaste for the doctrine says more about us than about the doctrine itself.
Some Objections Answered
The Problem of Universalism
The state of hell is fair and, in fact, an indication of human dignity.
Love cannot coerce.
Scripture contradicts universalism (Matt. 8:12; 25:31–46; John 5:29; Rom. 2:8–10; Rev. 20:10, 15).
A Second Chance after Death
Scripture indicates that God gives people all the time they need to make a choice about eternity (2 Pet. 3:9; 1 Tim. 2:4).
If God permits a person to die and go to hell, it seems reasonable to think that God no longer believes that this person is saveable, perhaps because of their formed character.
Annihilationism
Clear texts whose explicit intent is to teach the extent of the afterlife overtly compare the everlasting conscious life of the saved and the unsaved (Dan. 12:2; Matt. 25:41, 46).
The severity of a crime is not a function of the time it takes to commit it. Thus, rejection of the mercy of an infinite God could quite appropriately warrant an unending, conscious separation from God.
If a person will not surrender to God and if God will not extinguish one made in His image, then God’s only alternative is quarantine and that is what hell is. Thus, the traditional view, being a sanctity- and not a quality-of-life position, is morally superior to annihilationism.
What about Those Who Have Never Heard?
The Bible is not explicit on this issue, but we can be confident that God is just in all that He does. One approach to this question is to understand that the world contains an optimal balance between saved and unsaved, and those who are unsaved would never have received Christ under any circumstances.
Annihilationism: The view that immortality is conditional and that some will be completely destroyed, as opposed to existing in eternal punishment in hell.
Creationism: Our bodies are passed on to us through normal reproduction by our parents, but God creates each individual soul out of nothing, most likely at fertilization.
Middle knowledge: God’s knowledge of what creatures would freely do in any given set of circumstances.
Traducianism: Both the body and soul are passed on to us by our parents.
Universalism: The view that God will eventually reconcile all things to Himself, including all individuals, even if this means that God will continue to draw them to Himself in the afterlife.
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The Moody Publishers Team
1. Gary Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998; rev. ed. of Immortality: The Other Side of Death [Nashville: Thomas Nelson], 1992).
2. Both are from Peter Shockey, Reflections of Heaven (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 147–48 and 163–72, respectively. For an interesting story of an atheistic university professor who died, went to hell, came back, left teaching and is now in the ministry, see Howard Storm, My Descent Into Hell (New York: Doubleday, 2005). There are a number of details reported by Storm with which I disagree theologically, but the general account itself seems to me to be credible.
3. See Habermas and Moreland, Beyond Death, 212–14, for more on Maria’s case.
4. For example, Randy Alcorn, Heaven (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2004).
5. As quoted in Archibald D. Hart, Unmasking Male Depression (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 125.
6. Ibid.
7. B. C. Johnson, The Atheist Debaters Handbook (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1981), 116.
8. Morton Kelsey, Afterlife: The Other Side of Dying (New York: Paulist, 1979), 237.
9. Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 143–72; Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 179–200; “A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell,” in The Existence & Nature of God, ed. Alfred J. Freddoso (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1983), 37–54.
10. Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1986), 217. Cf. a review of this work by J. P. Moreland, International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989), 480–83.
11. Morton Kelsey, Afterlife, 251.
12. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 342; cf. Death and Eternal Life (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 242–61.
13. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 106ff.
14. See Robert Lightner, Heaven for Those Who Can’t Believe (Schaumburg, IL: Regular Baptist, 1977).
15. Leon Morris, “The Dreadful Harvest,” Christianity Today, May 27, 1991, 34–38.
16. See William Lane Craig, “‘No Other Name’: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation through Christ,” Faith and Philosophy 6 (1989), 172–88; The Only Wise God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1987), 127–52; No Easy Answers (Chicago: Moody, 1990), 105–16.