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Presumptions and Possibilities
The Inferno
If Dante were to revisit the Inferno today, he would find his visions of hell deeply embedded in our Western psyche, culture, and religion. Images of fire and brimstone, dungeons and torture, demons and judgment continue to ignite imaginations and controversy. In our era of CGI, everything Dante described in poetry can be recreated on the big screen for those who want to face their deepest fears in a climate-controlled environment where the smell of buttered popcorn masks the stench of sulfur. Modernized upgrades of medieval artwork imbue movies like Jacobâs Ladder (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998); comic books like Hellblazer and Hellboy; and video games like Inferno. One can even take the Danteâs Inferno Test online, where visitors are exhorted, âTest your impurity, find out which level of Danteâs hell you will be spending eternity in.â And for a personal taste of hell, why not marinate some chicken wings in Dan-Tâs White Hot Inferno sauce? Iâm sure even Dante would be confused: Is hell a place, a state, or a brand?
Western civilization does not hold a monopoly on the dreams and nightmares of the afterlife. Taoist and Buddhist mythology contain their own layered maze of terrifying torture chambers (Diyu), and the Hindu Naraka features the usual fire, boiling oil, and other instruments of abuse for karmic atonement between incarnations. And Danteâs hell barely holds a torch to the hellish punishments described in the Koran:
Global belief in some form of divine judgment remains as unquenchable as its flames, the New Atheists notwithstanding. For their part, writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins give voice to those whose atheism is rooted less in unbelief than in hatred of a religion-projected god whose mind reflects humanityâs need to best one eternal excruciation with another. They and Bill Maher mock such notions as patently religulous and write off faith as laughable were it not for its dangerous capacity to incite fear and violence.
Do they have a point? I can only offer my own experience in response. As a sensitive little boy raised in the evangelical church, I was a horrified but Bible-convinced infernalist. I accepted in good faith the word of camp counselors who described the fate of the lost as we stoked orange coals during late night marshmallow roasts. Seeing as I had prayed the âsinnerâs prayer,â they assured me I had no need to worry. But worry I did. What about the unchurched cousins I loved so dearly? God loved them, but if they didnât love him back, he would skewer them on an everlasting rotisserieâjust like the stick I used for roasting my marshmallows. My great commission was to âsnatch others from the fire and save themâ (Jude 24). And if I failed, I feared their blood would be on my hands (Ezek 33:6).
Just as awful as being that traumatized eight-year-old camper was the fact that I was being groomed to become the next zealous counselor. My first convert responded quickly to the choice between eternal life and everlasting flames. I remember being troubled by his expressionânot the wide-eyed fear I expected, just incredulity and a rushed prayer before the dinner bell rang. I sensed that he was unconvinced of the gravity of the decision, especially when I discovered that he had âfallen awayâ within days of returning home.
Highly visual, I became overwhelmed by mental images of bubbling skin and the attendant shrieks of the masses with whom I went to school, stood in line with at McDonalds, and prayed for every night before bed. Unlike Hitchens and Dawkins, I knew and loved (and feared) a living God too much to junk my entire worldview just because the idea of eternal, conscious torment in hell clashed with what I conceived to be his loving character. I tried to swallow the discrepancies in denial or wallpaper over the holes like a writer trying to hide glitches in a bad plot. But eventually, the necessary rational and emotional disconnect got caught in my throat. There it would remain until I could discover an alternative view that was just as faithful to the Bibleânot that I even dared to hope one existed. If only I had realized that the Christian theologians were already on the caseâhad been for centuries.
Renovating Hell: Theological Options for Divine Judgment
Sheltered in my tiny corner of Christendom, like many evangelicals I was unaware of the heated discussion around damming up the river of fire through various alternative perspectives on hell that did not transform God into a wrathful tyrant-judge who consigns the unrepentant to Dante-esque tortures for eternity. As it turns out, the view of hell with which I grew upâinfernalismâis only one of several options handed down to us through our forefathers in the faith. We will survey each of them briefly here.
Infernalism
Many or even most Christians across the church spectrum are still convinced that to be a good, Bible-believing Christian, they must accept a hell of eternal, conscious torment. They may secretly repress doubts or privately concede to skepticism, but they still believe that the Bible teaches infernalism only. Infernalists range in opinion from belief in hell as a literal place with actual flames to a spiritual state of anguish of the soul. They are taught to presume that hell must be populated by the damned: those who refused salvation during their lifespan. After all, they reason, how else can one interpret key texts like Matt 25:31â46 (the goats who go into eternal punishment), Luke 16:19â31 (the rich man who is in inescapable âagony in this fireâ), and the âlake of burning sulfur where the smoke of torment rises forever and everâ (Rev 14, 20, 21)? This view of hell leads to evangelical fervor, a desire to see as few people as possible condemned to such a terrible place.
Annihilationism
Others teach that âperishingâ (John 3:16) is synonymous with death or eradication, rendering a full stop to the existence of the unredeemed. Some annihilationists believe that death itself is the end and that only those prepared for everlasting life will experience the resurrection (âconditional immortalityâ). Others believe that the wicked will be raised to life again, judged for their deeds, and then damned to the lake of fire, where they are completely consumed. Rather than being supernaturally sustained to endure endless torture, âboth body and soul are destroyedâ (Matt 10:28) in a âsecond deathâ (Rev 21:8), which vaporizes the whole person (Ps 37) to ashes (Mal 4). The annihilationist sees justice done justly, with spiritual capital punishment performed quickly and compassionately. Any weeping, wailing, or gnashing of teeth refers to the grief over receiving oneâs sentence, not some ongoing, agonized state of consciousness.
Universalism
A breadth of other views find shelter under the umbrella term âuniversalism.â Many modern universalists believe that hell doesnât exist and that everyone goes to heavenâwhatever that happens to be. No particular faith is necessary, and not even the most heinous crimes can disqualify anyone from Paradise. After all, in Godâs indiscriminate grace, âHe causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteousâ (Matt 5:45). At the opposite end of the universalist continuum is the doctrine of âultimate redemption.â Ancients like Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa are often labeled âuniversalists,â but they certainly believed in the existence of a lake or river of fire and insisted that many must pass through it. But for them, the cleansing fire would be curative chastisement that prepares one for Godâs presence. In fact, the fire might even be Godâs presence. Therefore, hell would eventually be empty or its refining purpose would come to an end.
All of these points of view reflect theological concerns for representing Godâs character aright, pastoral concerns for guarding and guiding Godâs flock in the truth, evangelistic concerns for presenting the Gospel with integrity, and biblical concerns for faithfulness to Christian Scripture. So how is it that weâve come to such differing positions?
Informing Theology
How do we arrive at our cosmology of hell? What informs o...