Palestinian child
There’s been a lot of talk around here lately about grace, salvation, heaven, God’s plan, God’s love, and all things related. Unsurprising I suppose, with the Love Wins controversy still fresh in the air. But have we forgotten all about judgment, and punishment, and hell? If God’s love and grace and forgiveness are really as wide and expansive and all-inclusive as we’ve been claiming, how does one make any sense of the many stark biblical warnings about sin and judgment? In his latest article, Cal has taken a nice stab at understanding what God’s wrath is. On a closely related note, I want to take a look at the concept of hell. Specifically, if we hold to the “blessed hope” of universal reconciliation, are we therefore tossing hell out the window?
No, not for a moment. Hell is a forceful reality–past, present, and future. All one needs for confirmation of that is to look around. Every rape, every murder, every act of warfare and torture, testifies of it. Every time a helpless child starves, or dies of AIDS, we are witness to that tragic reality. At times, hell has surfaced in especially brutal, terrible, and gruesome ways: think Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to name but two. Every time we choose violence and cruelty we are creating hell for ourselves and for each other. Every time we turn away from God and turn instead toward anger, fear, hatred, rage, envy, lust, pride, selfishness, apathy, and the like, we are locking ourselves in our own personal hells. Hell has been a reality for all of human history, and it will continue to be a reality long into the age to come. Do all roads lead to God? Certainly not! “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction…but small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life.” God always searches for every one of us–as a shepherd searches for his dear lost sheep–no matter on which dark road we might find ourselves. But the dark roads are just that: dark pathways that lead us away from God, our source of life and light.
But how exactly are we to make sense of the biblical mentions of hell as a judgment and punishment from God? How, for example, can we understand Matthew 25:46, in which Jesus speaks of the judgment of the righteous sheep and the unrighteous goats and says, “Then they [the unrighteous] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life”? Seems like a pretty cut-and-dry, case-closed endorsement of the standard notion of hell, right?
The Greek word translated as “eternal” is aionios, which has been translated in many other ways as well: “age-enduring,” “of an indefinite length of time,” and “intense,” to name three. The debates over the proper translation of aionios are endless and heated, and further complicating the matter is that the word can carry different connotations depending on the context. So I’m not going to get into all that here, and I’d be getting in way over my head, anyway. But what is interesting to note is that the New Testament uses another word, aidios, to refer to the eternal God (Romans 1:20, for example). So it would seem that if the New Testament does, indeed, employ the concept of eternal as we think of it, it does so in the form of aidios rather than aionios.
Furthermore, the Greek word translated as “punishment” is kolasis. It seems that kolasis carries with it the notion of pruning; of correction; of restorative rather than retributive punishment. Again, the debates are endless, and I’m not going to try to pass myself off as any sort of authority on the matter.
But it appears that a very viable translation of the aionios kolasis of Matthew 25:46 is “age-enduring correction,” or “intense pruning,” or something of the sort. “Eternal punishment” in the sense of “endless torment” is by no means the only possible (or even necessarily the preferred) translation of aionios kolasis. And it seems that if the concept of “endless torment” actually was Jesus’ intent in Matthew 25:46, then adialeipton timoria would have been a far better choice of words.
All of this is to briefly suggest that we may have seriously misunderstood and mistranslated many of the keys words and phrases upon which the now-standard notion of hell is based.
Along a completely different vein, many have suggested that the New Testament warnings of judgment and punishment are not intended in an eternal heaven/hell sense, but instead function as specific warnings of concrete events within human history. [And for insight into the nature and purpose of these judgments, see Cal’s recent article.] In fact, the “lake of fire” of Revelation 20 and 21 may be the only New Testament reference to an eschatological judgment. Andrew Perriman takes this basic approach and argues compellingly. And although Perriman holds that the “lake of fire” is “incineration” (that is: annihilation, in contrast to endless torment), it was the position of Origen and many of the early church fathers that the “lake of fire” prunes and burns away our chaff, refining us and stripping away our self-centeredness. In other words, it doesn’t destroy people. Rather, it strips away the idols and evils we cling to.
In summary: I believe the now-standard notion of hell–as a prison of endless torture in which God locks up the damned and throws away the key, deafening his ears to their pleas for mercy–is a thoroughly barbaric and ungodly and insufferable and unbiblical idea. Hell most certainly is a reality, but it is one that we humans choose and create for ourselves, and from which God our dear father is always and continually working to rescue each and every one of us, his dear children, by showering his infinite love and grace and forgiveness upon us.
“Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning.” – Lamentations 3:22-23
