The Official Website of the Willard Preacher

Bringing Willard to the Web

"None of those who have Hell before their eyes will fall into Hell. No one of those who despise Hell will escape Hell.... Nothing is so profitable as to converse concerning Hell. It renders our souls purer than any silver."  

~St. John Chrysostom~

BOOK

Hell 

Dear Aaron,

             I can’t say I was surprised to read your latest e-mail. Doctrinal disagreements have been a part of even the most laid back Protestantism from the beginning, and Hell can be a very controversial topic. I understand your distress that the conversation got rather heated, but hopefully there are no ill feelings, and you all parted friends. In the future do your best to put forth your ideas while remaining a peacemaker. I know this is a difficult role to play, but it is necessary in any Protestant fellowship. I must say it is encouraging to hear that discussions such as this are still going on in university dorm rooms, even if they are rare.

Your e-mail was a little hard to follow. I realize it was late, and you were still a bit confused by all that was said, but I think your intuition was sound if a bit hazy. I believe your friends are laboring under a common misunderstanding of Hell. This misunderstanding states that God gave us a law in order to judge us, and He is so offended when we break it that He needs to punish us in order to satisfy His justice. Fortunately, Jesus steps in and satisfies God’s wrath for us. So, if we repent before we die, God will forgive us, but if we don’t, His justice demands that He torment us forever in Hell. To put it another way, God has come to Earth in order to save us from Himself. As in many misunderstandings, this way of thinking contains just enough truth to be plausible, and just enough error to unnecessarily turn people off.

To begin with, God gives us a law in order not to judge us, but to help us. As I believe I mentioned in a previous e-mail, God knows that we are largely ignorant and imperfect, and if left on our own we tend toward selfishness and destruction. So, as a good Father, he gives us rules in order to help keep us from going astray. If God gets angry when we break these rules—and remember he does not have human emotions—it is because He knows what breaking them will do to us. God’s anger is born out of love.

Some say—as your friends did the other night—that when we sin it is such an affront to God’s holiness that He turns his back on us. In fact, the opposite is true. When we sin we turn our backs on God. He never leaves us: we leave Him. For example, God tells us not to get drunk because it is damaging to us. If we get drunk anyway, what we are saying to God is, “Thank you for looking out for me, but I’m on my own now, and I’m going to do what I want.” Your roommate is a good example of this. God has not left him: he has left God.

Secondly, God has no need to satisfy his justice. In fact, God has no needs at all. If we say that God has a need, we make him less than divine. He then becomes subordinate to this need, which rules over Him, and which He is driven to satisfy. So then, I hear you ask, does God get jealous when we walk away from Him? Is that why he punishes us? No, once again, God is not subject to human emotions. When the scriptural writers give God such emotions, it is so we can understand Him in a human way. In His divine essence, God cannot be comprehended. There is no need or emotion in God according to which He is required to punish us. When we turn from Him we become sinful. If we carry this sinfulness into eternity, then the love of God, which was supposed to be paradise to us, becomes a torment instead.

I know this can be difficult to understand since we tend to see love only in its positive characteristics, such as forgiveness, mercy, and grace. We forget that it is love that condemns sin, and all sin is an offense against love. Whether it is against God, our neighbor, the creation, ourselves, or even our enemies, the transgression is always against love. It doesn’t matter whether it is lust, greed, envy, fornication, or abortion; if we sin we have fallen short of perfect love.

Remember, Jesus came to enable us to love perfectly and live forever, loving and being loved by God and others. If we go into eternity sinful, the love of God will expose and condemn our sin, filling us with the torment of guilt, which like a worm, will eat away at us forever. Our minds will become darkened, and instead of running to God in repentance, we will see Him as our tormenter, and flee from Him forever. Just please bear in mind that it will be our sins, in the presence of the love of God, that will be doing the tormenting.

By the way, you will notice that in this understanding, Hell is not the absence of God. This is what the sinner ultimately wants, and so it would not really be Hell to him. It is the presence of God, from which it is impossible to get away, that the sinner hates, and it is this that ultimately becomes his judgment. According to this way of thinking, Hell is eternal not because God is unwilling to forgive, but because man is unwilling to repent. He may have some sort of remorse for his sin, but not the kind that leads to true repentance. Hell is not the fault of God but of man.

The reason many have rejected the idea of Hell is that, on the one hand, they were told that God is merciful, loving, kind, and forgiving, but on the other hand, He is so harsh that if you break even one law, and don’t repent before you die, He will send you to Hell and keep you there forever. Since they didn’t want to rid themselves of a loving God, the only way for many to reconcile this apparent contradiction is to rid themselves of Hell. After all, how can one love a God from whose wrath he is seeking to escape? If we see things in the way I’ve been trying to relate to you, there is no contradiction, because it is not God, but man, who is creating his own Hell, and keeping himself there forever. It is man who is condemning himself. Ultimately, of course, God must also reject him and cast him out, but only after man has fully condemned himself.

On the more positive side of things, when the Son of God, in the person of Jesus Christ, took human flesh, He perfected human nature by uniting it to Himself. Through His incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension into Heaven, He defeated sin and death for us, and placed humanity, as represented by Himself, at the right hand of God. So, if we are baptized into, and commune with God through Jesus Christ, He will ultimately enable us to love perfectly. This is so that in eternity, the love of God will be paradise to us, as it was always meant to be. It is important that your friends understand that God has come not to save us from His wrath, but to save us from ourselves.

Some may ask about the Lake of Fire and whether this image is to be taken literally. If I understand the Fathers of the Church correctly, when the writers of the scriptures were speaking of earthly things they spoke literally, but when speaking of eternal things, they used earthly language to help us to understand that which we have never experienced. So, as I alluded to earlier, the fires of Hell likely indicate the fiery torment of our sinful passions burning within us. The darkness would be that which the mind and conscience are plunged into, and the worms eating at our soul would be the guilt and shame that gnaws at us because of our sin. This is why the Church is so intent at calling people out of their sins. It’s not to be condemning, or holier than thou, but because we know something of the awful consequences of not doing so.

            I hope this helps at least a little. I’m glad to hear that you and your friends are passionate about religion. It is good to see, and it warms an old man’s heart. Well, maybe not such an old man, but I am warmed nonetheless. God Bless.

Encouraged and hopeful,

Uncle Greg