Her Gates Will Never Be Shut

Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

Brad Jersak

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781606088821
  9781498254281
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630871284
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Everlasting hell and divine judgment, a lake of fire and brimstone--these mainstays of evangelical tradition have come under fire once again in recent decades. Would the God of love revealed by Jesus really consign the vast majority of humankind to a destiny of eternal, conscious torment? Is divine mercy bound by the demands of justice? How can anyone presume to know who is saved from the flames and who is not? Reacting to presumptions in like manner, others write off the fiery images of final judgment altogether. If there is a God who loves us, then surely all are welcome into the heavenly kingdom, regardless of their beliefs or behaviors in this life. Yet, given the sheer volume of threat rhetoric in the Scriptures and the wickedness manifest in human history, the pop-universalism of our day sounds more like denial than hope. Mercy triumphs over judgment; it does not skirt it. Her Gates Will Never Be Shut endeavors to reconsider what the Bible and the Church have actually said about hell and hope, noting a breadth of real possibilities that undermines every presumption. The polyphony of perspectives on hell and hope offered by the prophets, apostles, and Jesus humble our obsessive need to harmonize every text into a neat theological system. But they open the door to the eternal hope found in Revelation 21-22: the City whose gates will never be shut; where the Spirit and Bride perpetually invite the thirsty who are outside the city to "Come, drink of the waters of life."

1

Presumptions and Possibilities

Through me the way into the suffering city,

Through me the way to the eternal pain,

Through me the way that runs among the lost.

Justice urged on my high artificer;

My maker was divine authority,

The highest wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me nothing but eternal things were made,

And I endure eternally.Abandon every hope, ye who enter here.1

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 Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998); comic books like Hellblazer and Hellboy; and video games like Inferno. One can even take the Dante’s Inferno Test online,2 where visitors are exhorted, “Test your impurity, find out which level of Dante’s hell you will be spending eternity in.” And for a personal taste of hell, why not marinate some chicken wings in Dan-T’s White Hot Inferno sauce? I’m 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),3 and the Hindu Naraka4 features the usual fire, boiling oil, and other instruments of abuse for karmic atonement between incarnations. And Dante’s hell barely holds a torch to the hellish punishments described in the Koran:5

Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed with rods of iron. Whenever, in their anguish, they try to escape from Hell, back they shall be dragged, and will be told: “Taste the torment of the Conflagration!” (22:19–23)

Global belief in some form of divine judgment remains as unquenchable as its flames, the New Atheists6 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 humanity’s 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.7

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.8 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 “sinner’s prayer,” 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 didn’t love him back, he would skewer them on an everlasting rotisserie—just like the stick I used for roasting my marshmallows. My great commission was to “snatch others from the fire and save them” (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 expression—not 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 “fallen away” 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 Bible—not that I even dared to hope one existed. If only I had realized that the Christian theologians were already on the case—had 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 up—infernalism—is 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 25:31–46 (the goats who go into eternal punishment), Luke 16:19–31 (the rich man who is in inescapable “agony in this fire”), and the “lake of burning sulfur where the smoke of torment rises forever and ever” (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 “perishing” (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 (“conditional immortality”). 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, “both body and soul are destroyed” (Matt 10:28) in a “second death” (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 one’s sentence, not some ongoing, agonized state of consciousness.9

Universalism

A breadth of other views find shelter under the umbrella term “universalism.” Many modern universalists believe that hell doesn’t exist and that everyone goes to heaven—whatever that happens to be. No particular faith is necessary, and not even the most heinous crimes can disqualify anyone from Paradise. After all, in God’s indiscriminate grace, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45). At the opposite end of the universalist continuum is the doctrine of “ultimate redemption.” Ancients like Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa are often labeled “universalists,” 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 God’s presence. In fact, the fire might even be God’s presence. Therefore, hell would eventually be empty or its refining purpose would come to an end.10

All of these points of view reflect theological concerns for representing God’s character aright, pastoral concerns for guarding and guiding God’s flock in the truth, evangelistic concerns for presenting the Gospel with integrity, and biblical concerns for faithfulness to Christian Scripture.11 So how is it that we’ve come to such differing positions?

Informing Theology

How do we arrive at our cosmology of hell? What informs o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Presumptions and Possibilities
• Part 1: “Who Then Can Be Saved?”
• Chapter 2: The Biblical Possibility of Ultimate Judgment
• Chapter 3: The Gehenna Tradition(s)
• Chapter 4: The Biblical Spectrum of Descriptions for Hell and Judgment
• Chapter 5: The Lake of Fire
• Excrusus 1: The Rich Man and Lazarus
• Chapter 6: The Biblical Possibility of Ultimate Redemption
• Part 2: “Every Knee Shall Bow”
• Chapter 7: Possibility and Hope in the Early Church
• Chapter 8: Mercy Proposed
• Chapter 9: Judgment Presumed
• Excrusus 2: Purgatory
• Chapter 10: Mercy Triumphs over Judgment
• Excrusus 3: Visions of Hell
• Part 3: “Her Gates Will Never Be Shut”
• Chapter 11: Approaching Revelation
• Chapter 12: Eschatological Hope in Revelation 21–22
• Chapter 13: The Alpha and Omega
• Addendum: A Word to Fellow Evangelicals
• Afterword: Hell: The Nemesis of Hope?
• Bibliography