Beyond the Abyss 2

Sharon Baker is attempting to construct a Christian belief in the afterlife, particularly hell, that squares somehow with the unconditional love of God and the fundamental verse she continually mentions:

2:3 Such prayer for all is good and welcomed before God our Savior, 2:4 since he wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy).

In some ways her study puts onto the table the necessity of explaining hell once one admits that God genuinely wants all to be saved. How does one explain it? Is God not powerful enough? Or is God not good enough? How can God be both altogether good and altogether powerful and create a hell that lasts forever. So, she’s asking where the goodness of God is in all this.

In Sharon Baker’s Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment, we get a sketch of seven major problems for the traditional view of hell. (I’m not convinced these are actually seven different points but variants on a few points, but still, here are the points.)

In your own study and thinking what are the biggest issues for belief in a traditional view of hell — that God will punish sinners or non-Christians, with no hope of redemption, endlessly for the sin of not believing in Christ? Or, which of the seven below are the most challenging for you?

1. Theodicy: how does God deal with evil if it, in effect, exists for ever in a hell-state? Does evil not continue to exist, even in spite of the statement in Revelation 21:1-4 that death and suffering will be no more? So, the issue here is squaring God’s goodness with eternal evil.

2. Eternal hopelessness: a traditional hell does not permit any hope after death for anyone, including those who have never heard. Is there a law that says God’s grace can only be active in the temporal sphere — that is, during our physical lifetime?

3. Eternal evil: does not the traditional view entail the view that God never really does purge his world of evil?

4. Justice vs. Love: the issue here is an old one. If God is love, how does justice fit in with that love. Is God ambivalent or split? An image of God that emerges for many is a cruel father who guides people to think of eternal punishment as an act of love.

5. Eternal divine violence: assumptions are that punishment is an act of violence and eternal punishment would mean God is eternally violent. She connects this view of God with acts of violence in history. She thinks God’s violence contradicts God’s love.

6. Retributive justice: again, a major issue is that God’s justice in the Bible — in Christ — is restorative but hell is a belief in a retributive justice that never becomes restorative.

7. Eternal punishment for temporal sin: how can it be just to punish a human being, who sinned temporally — that is over a life time (and no more), for an eternity for that temporal sin?