I hate the doctrine of eternal conscious torment. I won’t apologize for that. As a child, it tormented me with persistent nightmares, existential angst, and what I can only imagine is a bit of C-PTSD. As a post-Evangelical, perhaps even post-Christian adult, I find the doctrine morally, philosophically, and metaphysically absurd. In this piece, I’d like to explain why.
God As Moral Monster
If eternal conscious torment exists, then there are basically two ways in which people end up in such a state. Either they willingly choose it (as the Arminians assert) or God foreordains it (as the Calvinists assert). If the former, then in a way, God gets a pass. Kinda. God still designed the system in such a way where people could damn themselves to a place or state of objective horror, so he’s not entirely off the hook – but more so than the Calvinist God. In that system, God is simply a moral monster for having the power to elect everyone for bliss but choosing not to.
The typical Evangelical message, however, isn’t so cut and dried. Because in both the Arminian and Calvinist systems, it’s not like people are choosing an imperative moral good. No! They have to choose (or have had it chosen for them) Jesus Christ as their “lord and savior.” So, you can and do have atrocious people who are “saved,” while good and decent people are not. In other words, you have moral monsters who acknowledge that Jesus Christ is lord and generous and loving people who do not.
Take, for instance, the Jews who suffered through the holocaust. In the Evangelical model of salvation, all of them went from Hitler’s flames straight to God’s (as filmmaker Kevin Miller once put it). Think about it. These were folks who were slaughtered by the millions by a regime who believed it was their God-given right to do so. These were also folks who weren’t Christians, who “denied the messiah” as it were. To that end, there is no place for them to go but hell.
Again, even if they “freely” chose this, God is a moral monster for setting up a system where this is the case. For how could it be considered a moral good for millions of innocent people to go from objective suffering at the hands of humanity’s persona non grata to objective suffering at the hands of the almighty God who is supposedly love?
The Freedom To Choose Objective Horror?
The free will defense for eternal conscious torment, while a noble attempt to distance one’s self from the atrocity that is known as Calvinism, is ultimately futile. A free person who chooses hell is no more free than a person who chooses to thrust their face into a raging bonfire. In other words, neither are free. The person who chooses to subject themselves to horrific burning, all in the name of human volition, is deranged, ill, and in need of extensive help. No sane person would disagree with me. So, why do we call it “freedom” when someone does the same thing but only in a spiritual way (and I say “only” as if that’s less important than what we do with our physical bodies)?
Think of it like this: If God is Love, then to choose Love is to choose God, and to choose God is to choose Love. If someone comes along and rejects God by rejecting Love, then it raises the question “Why?” Does a rejection of Love not presuppose something inside that person that is not yet set free? And if God is good, then wouldn’t God do everything in God’s power to set this person free, even moving toward that person after they take their final breath? I’m not sure why there is a time limit in most Christian’s belief system.
Metaphysical Absurdity
Finally, eternal conscious torment, fully separated and removed from God, is a metaphysical absurdity. If God is omnipresent and is indeed the ground of all being (as Paul Tillich once put it), then God would have to be present with those in hell. Otherwise, God would not be omnipresent, meaning hell would have to have its own God or, worse yet, as my friend Jeff Turner once said, hell would itself be a god. The Eastern Orthodox at least recognize this, which is why hell for them is basically the “wrong” response to God’s love. To those in hell, instead of a balm for healing, God’s love is experienced as white-hot wrath.
For the Evangelical, however, hell is the eternal separation from God. This makes about as much sense as suggesting one could separate the wave from the ocean or the ocean from the wave.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, we don’t really choose what to believe. We believe whatever we believe because it makes sense to us in some way. But unless we are presented with some sort of evidence to the contrary, we don’t really get to choose to believe otherwise. That is to say, I can’t choose to believe in eternal conscious torment again. I could pretend to so that I wouldn’t get threatening messages from Christians, but that’s not sincere belief; that’s making a coerced decision just to save face. In the same way, if you affirm eternal conscious torment, you can’t choose to believe otherwise unless a case can be made for it. I hope I’ve started to make such a case because, as history has proven, the belief in hell has created hell on earth for thousands of years.
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