So what does orthodox theology say about “hell”? To answer this question we might want to ask another question, one that Tony Thiselton raises in his sketch of classic German liberal thinker: If love is a permanent feature of God, and wrath is not a permanent feature of God, then how can hell be eternal? Thiselton doesn’t really chase this idea down in his book Life after Death, but he does sketch the three major views of the early church.

Relying on the well-known study of David Powys on hell and the afterlife (‘hell’: a Hard Look at a Hard Question), Thiselton observes that there were actually three views in the time when orthodoxy became fixed, and no one view dominated. The three are:

1. A vague form of annihilationism, perhaps connected to what is today called “conditional immortality,” namely, that only God is life, that immortality is a gift of God, that no one has immortality by nature, and that therefore the final state of the wicked is not immortality but destruction. Powys maps this view in Irenaeus, and he was connected to a widespread apostolic tradition.

2. Gregory of Nyssa taught a kind of universalism, namely one in which God’s love and life eventually overcomes all sin and wickedness and rebellion. All will be restored to their original state — that’s the view of Nyssa.

3. Augustine taught eternal, conscious torment. God raises unto punishment. Augustine was followed by Aquinas and Calvin and many. [Read more...]

When Rob Bell unleashed the fury of responses to his book Love Wins, many were caught off guard. Why? Because many did not know that this issue has been simmering among evangelicals for a generation. In some ways it began when John Stott confessed he was an annihilationist, which brought to the surface the fact that a number of UK theologians were also annihilationists (like John Wenham, RT France, et al).

That statement of Stott’s gave others courage to come forward, and it appears the late Clark Pinnock was one of them. Clark’s piece in Four Views on Hell is one of the finer brief sketches of the annihilationist view. I want to touch on a few of his ideas this morning.

To begin with, here is his sketch of the traditional view:

According to the larger picture, we are asked to believe that God endlessly tortures sinners by the million, sinners who perish because the Father has decided not to elect them to salvation, though he could have done so, and whose torments are supposed to gladden the hearts of believers in heaven. The problems with this doctrine are both extensive and profound (136).

Then he asks this question:

Would God who tells us to love our enemies be intending to wreak vengeance on his enemies for all eternity? (140)

Hell is proof of how seriously God takes human freedom (142). [Read more...]

The best book I’ve read on hell is by Jerry Walls, and it is called: Hell: The Logic Of Damnation. Not only is the book readable, and not only is the book alert to the scholarship on this heavy topic, but it lands on fundamentally important ideas that make us think, and re-think, what we believe.

The fundamental issue animating this book is the morality of hell, or put differently and in a question, Can a morally and absolutely good God punish the wicked eternally in a place we call hell? How is such an action morally coherent if God is good? Some people don’t find such questions viable or important, but I do and so this book mattered (and matters) to me.

I can’t possibly summarize this book adequately but I will say that is worth your effort. Instead of a full summary, I want to make sketch a few of his conclusions and then focus on but one of those.

Questions for today: Do you believe in this idea of “optimal grace”? Do you think God’s goodness entails optimal grace?

First, Walls believes in libertarian free will, which means humans, when confronted with a decision, are also capable of choosing other than they did. Second, Walls contends the Calvinist approach to God’s goodness and eternal punishment/hell is rationally inconsistent and incoherent, since it wavers between determinism/compatibilism (God determines everything, or determinism and choice are compatible) and libertarian free will. I would add that the Calvinist notion that God determines everything then followed by asserting God is not responsible for evil makes no sense to me. Asserting something doesn’t make it viable or coherent. So I agree with Walls. Third, Walls takes traditional views on both human misery, though he does a much better job than most at showing that humans enter into their own designed miseries, and that hell is some kind of place.

What I want to focus on today, though, is another of his ideas: the idea of optimal grace. [Read more...]

By Jeff Cook

Erasing Hell – Might Makes Right

Hell is making us all think really hard about God. In order to push our thinking I am working through a few big ideas in Dr. Preston Sprinkle and Francis Chan’s recent book, Erasing Hell: What God Said About Eternity and What We Have Made Up. I have deep admiration and respect for these two men, and their book is worth our careful reading and engagement.

To get things going let me float our question right up front: Does God’s immense power and knowledge give him “the right” to do whatever he wants?

A central claim of Chan and Sprinkle—which creates their foundation (and breathing room) for embracing the traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment—is the idea that whatever God chooses to do is, by definition, “right”. At the outset, the writers in defining the purpose of their book say,

“This book is actually much more than a book on hell. It’s a book about embracing a God who isn’t always easy to understand, and whose ways are far beyond us; a God whose thoughts are much higher than our thoughts; a God who, as the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of all things, has the right to do, as the psalmist says, “whatever He pleases” (Ps. 115:3). God has the right to do WHATEVER he pleases. If I’ve learned one thing from studying hell, it’s this last line. And whether or not you end up agreeing with everything I say about hell, you must agree with Psalm 115:3 (p.17, emphasis theirs). [Read more...]

This post is by Jeff Cook, and it examines how “desire” is connected to our view of the fate of the wicked.

Erasing Hell: On Desire   (Jeff Cook)

I realize some of you are tiring of this discussion, but I love the hell debate taking place this year. The dialogue is much bigger than the dark side of the afterlife. The questions being raised about hell cannot be separated from an analysis of God’s character, how we interpret scripture, how Christians disagree constructively, what we can know about God and his intentions, as well as the nature of goodness, justice and love. The central pillars of philosophy—epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics—as well as the heart of theology—God’s attributes and self-disclosure—are each under reconsideration because of this debate at the most popular levels of American Christianity—and that’s a great thing.

What does it tell us/you that many of us “wish” there wasn’t an eternal hell? Do you think God could have created a world in which there would be no hell? Why, then, do you think there is a hell?

Hell is making us all think really hard about God.

After reading Erasing Hell: What God said about eternity, and the things we made up a handful of questions came to my mind and over the next month I would like to explore a few with you. These are not meant as a critique of Sprinkle and Chan’s book. Instead, Erasing Hell will serve as a launching point for considering beliefs I think Christians ought to be more critical of.

Let’s start with emotions and desires. Frequently in Erasing Hell, Sprinkle and Chan said they “did not” want hell to exist. For example: [Read more...]