Hell and Judgement

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

George MacDonald:

The man wakes from the final struggle of death, in absolute loneliness—such a loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his consciousness reaches him. All is dark, dark and dumb; no motion—not the breath of a wind! never a dream of change! not a scent from far-off field! nothing to suggest being or thing besides the man himself, no sign of God anywhere. God has so far withdrawn from the man, that he is conscious only of that from which he has withdrawn. In the midst of the live world he cared for nothing but himself; now in the dead world he is in God’s prison, his own separated self.

(George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Second Series, [London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1885], “The Last Farthing,” p. 131.)

George MacDonald:

For the one principle of hell is—‘I am my own.

(George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Third Series, [London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889], “Kingship,” p. 102.)

Hell.

C. S. Lewis:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.

(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984], 3.4, p. 86.)

D. A. Carson:

     The final picture is not a pretty one. Some people think of hell as a place where sinners will be crying out for another chance, begging for the opportunity to repent, with God somehow taking on a “tough guy” stance and declaring, “Sorry. You had your chance. Too late.” But the reality is infinitely more sobering. There is no evidence anywhere in the Bible that there is any repentance in hell. The biblical pictures suggest that evil and self-centeredness persist and persist—and so does the judgment. Men and women wantonly refuse to acknowledge God as God; they will not confess his essential rightness; they will not own his just requirements; they will not give up on their perpetual desire to be the center of the universe; they will not accept that they are guilty of rebellion; they will not accept forgiveness on the ground that God himself makes provision for sinners in the sacrifice of his own Son. “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power” (v. 9).

(D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers, [Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2009], Ch. 2, p. 49.)

C. S. Lewis:

     Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984], 3.1, p. 73.)

C. S. Lewis:

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, be come through all eternity more and more free.

     In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.

     One caution, and I have done. In order to rouse modern minds to an understanding of the issues, I ventured to introduce in this chapter a picture of the sort of bad man whom we most easily perceive to be truly bad. But when the picture has done that work, the sooner it is forgotten the better. In all discussions of hell we should keep steadily be fore our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves. This chapter is not about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you and me.

(C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966], Ch. 8, pp. 127-128.)

Timothy Keller: (Commenting on Luke 16:24-31)

     A common image of hell in the Bible is that of fire. Fire disintegrates. Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now ask the question: “What if when we die we don’t end, but spiritually our life extends on into eternity?” Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.

     Jesus’s parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man in Luke 16 supports the view of hell we are presenting here. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. They both die and Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. There he looks up and sees Lazarus in heaven “in Abraham’s bosom” . . . What is astonishing is that though their statuses have now been reversed, the rich man seems to be blind to what has happened. He still expects Lazarus to be his servant and treats him as his water boy. He does not ask to get out of hell, yet strongly implies that God never gave him and his family enough information about the afterlife. Commentators have noted the astonishing amount of denial, blame-shifting, and spiritual blindness in this soul in hell. They have also noted that the rich man, unlike Lazarus, is never given a personal name. He is only called a “Rich Man,” strongly hinting that since he had built his identity on his wealth rather than on God, once he lost his wealth he lost any sense of a self.

     In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity. We see this process “writ small” in addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and pornography. First, there is disintegration, because as time goes on you need more and more of the addictive substance to get an equal kick, which leads to less and less satisfaction. Second, there is the isolation, as increasingly you blame others and circumstances in order to justify your behavior. “No one understands! Everyone is against me!” is muttered in greater and greater self-pity and self-absorption. When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing—though a good thing—becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy. Personal disintegration happens on a broader scale. In eternity, this disintegration goes on forever. There is increasing isolation, denial, delusion, and self-absorption. When you lose all humility you are out of touch with reality. No one ever asks to leave hell. The very idea of heaven seems to them a sham.

(Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, [New York: Dutton, 2008], pp. 76-77, 77-78.)

C. S. Lewis:

     The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye’ll have had experiences . . . it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there mav come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.

(C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1978], Ch. 9, p. 75.)

Cf. Timothy Keller:

     The people in hell are miserable, but Lewis shows us why. We see raging like unchecked flames their pride, their paranoia, their self-pity, their certainty that everyone else is wrong, that everyone else is an idiot! All their humility is gone, and thus so is their sanity. They are utterly, finally locked in a prison of their own self-centeredness, and their pride progressively expands into a bigger and bigger mushroom cloud. They continue to go to pieces forever, blaming everyone but themselves. Hell is that, writ large.

(Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, [New York: Dutton, 2008], p. 79.)

C. S. Lewis:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

(C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1978], Ch. 9, pp. 72-73.)

C. S. Lewis:

It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once — this very day, this hour.

(C. S. Lewis, ‘The Trouble with “X”…’ In: C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970], p. 155.)

Judgment.

E. H. Gifford:

     But God loves everything that He has made. He cannot love man as a sinner, but He loves him as man, even when he is a sinner. In like manner the Jews are described as being at the same time enemies in one relation and beloved in another (xi. 28).

     Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, or the traitor.

(E. H. Gifford, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, [London: John Murray, 1886], p. 114.)

Leon Morris:

We must not think that ‘the wrath of God’ is no more than a figure of speech which we may safely ignore. God hates every evil thing. But we are not comfortable with the New Testament teaching on the consequences of our sin. Partly at least this is because we have so well learnt that God is love. It is accepted today as axiomatic that God’s attitude to us is one of love and that it always will be. I wish to affirm this in the strongest of terms. But it is love and not sentimentality that is in question. And what we do not always see is that love is capable of very strong action. Real love will always be resolutely opposed to evil in the beloved. Nearly a century ago E. H. Gifford wrote: ‘Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, or the traitor.’ We must never overlook the fact that real love has its stern side toward the beloved.

(Leon Morris, The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance, [Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1983], p. 147.)

Rebecca Manley Pippert:

     Our problem in pondering anything about God is that we bring our human pettiness, jealousies and problems into the analysis. We can’t help that, but it makes it difficult to imagine God having emotions similar to ours without the pollution ours bring. Even so, it may help to examine a comparable form of human anger. Think of how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it. We are dead against whatever is destroying the one we love.

     Loving people who are drug addicts is a good example. It is one of the most frustrating, infuriating experiences I have ever known. I have seen two talented, bright people not be able to remember what we had been talking about a few hours before because of the effect of drugs. I have seen them so frantic to get to a bathroom to snort cocaine that they nearly knocked me over to get there. I have watched their noses dripping and listened to their self-inflated, drug-induced statements. And in their drugged deception, they were convinced they were acting normally. I don’t think that to this day they are aware that I knew what was going on. If they were, they would say it was a gross exaggeration. They were in total control, they thought. Their use of drugs was just “recreational,” they believed, though as a matter of fact it was the daily ritual of their addiction.

     How did I feel? I was grieved and sickened to see the wasted potential. But I also felt fury. Everything in me wanted to shake them, to say, “Can’t you see? Don’t you know what you’re doing to yourself? You become less and less yourself every time I see you.” I wasn’t angry because I hated them. I was angry because I cared. If I hadn’t loved them, I could have walked away. But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E. H. Gifford wrote, “Human love here offers a true analogy; the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.”

     The fact is that the languages of faith and psychology do overlap in startling ways. And since most of us are bilingual these days, we are tempted to ask why we don’t just admit it. Our problems and answers are the same, only the labels change to suit our traditions and preferences. So if some people want to say that God is their “thing,” then fine. Let them. But they should realize, the suggestion runs, that God is only another word for the human need for love and understanding. “God,” for them, is the equivalent of the therapy or political cause that gives meaning and purpose to their lives.

     Clamence contemplated this dilemma of forgiveness but stuck rigidly to his own perspective on it. He was concerned that divine forgiveness of his sins would be accomplished by an airy wave of a celestial wand and suddenly everything wrong would be made right. Thus, as the object of divine forgiveness, he would become the victim of a celestial snow job. That offended his sense of justice. And if it were so, it would offend ours too.

     But we need to switch viewpoints and ask what forgiving us does to God. How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? “Oh, never mind,” he might say. “Boys will be boys.” Try telling that to a survivor of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia or to someone who lost an entire family in Rwanda.

     No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and utterly and implacably hostile to injustice. People can’t call themselves good and have an iota of indifference to evil of any sort. And that is precisely what the Bible tells us about God—so we are back to our problem (Ezekiel 7:8-9).

(Rebecca Manley Pippert, Hope Has Its Reasons: The Search to Satisfy Our Deepest Longings: Revised Edition, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001], pp. 100-101.)

Cf. Timothy Keller, Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? [New York: Viking, 2022], pp. 77-78.

Timothy Keller:

     An older businesswoman said, “Well, I’m not much of a churchgoer, and I’m in some shock now. I always disliked the very idea of hell, but I never thought about it as a measure of what God was willing to endure in order to love me.”

     Then a mature Christian made a connection with a sermon a month ago on Jesus at Lazarus’ tomb in John 11. “The text tells us that Jesus wept,” he said, “yet he was also extremely angry at evil. That’s helped me. He is not just an angry God or a weeping, loving God—he’s both. He doesn’t only judge evil, but he also takes the hell and judgment himself for us on the cross.”

     The second woman nodded, “Yes. I always thought hell told me about how angry God was with us, but I didn’t know it also told me about how much he was willing to suffer and weep for us. I never knew how much hell told me about Jesus’ love. It’s very moving.”

     It is only because of the doctrine of judgment and hell that Jesus’ proclamation of grace and love are so brilliant and astounding.

(Timothy Keller, “Preaching Hell in a Tolerant Age;” In: The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching, gen. eds., Haddon Robinson, Craig Brian Larson, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005], p. 633. Cf. Christopher W. Morgan, Robert A. Peterson, gen. eds., Is Hell For Real or Does Everyone Go To Heaven? [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011], p. 80.)

Miroslav Volf:

     One could object that it is not worthy of God to wield the sword. Is God not love, long-suffering and all-powerful love? A counter-question could go something like this: Is it not a bit too arrogant to presume that our contemporary sensibilities about what is compatible with God’s love are so much healthier than those of the people of God throughout the whole history of Judaism and Christianity? Recalling my arguments about the self-immunization of the evildoers, one could further argue that in a world of violence it would not be worthy of God not to wield the sword; if God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence God would not be worthy of our worship. Here, however, I am less interested in arguing that God’s violence is not unworthy of God than in showing that it is beneficial to us. Atlan has rightly drawn our attention to the fact that in a world of violence we are faced with an inescapable alternative: either God’s violence or human violence. Most people who insist on God’s “nonviolence” cannot resist using violence themselves (or tacitly sanctioning its use by others). They deem the talk of God’s judgment irreverent, but think nothing of entrusting judgment into human hands, persuaded presumably that this is less dangerous and more humane than to believe in a God who judges! That we should bring “down the powerful from their thrones” (Luke 1:51-52) seems responsible; that God should do the same, as the song of that revolutionary Virgin explicitly states, seems crude. And so violence thrives, secretly nourished by belief in a God who refuses to wield the sword.

     My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

(Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996], pp. 303-304.)

Timothy Keller:

     It is at this point that many people complain that those who believe in a God of judgment will not approach enemies with a desire to reconcile with them. If you believe in a God who smites evildoers, you may think it perfectly justified to do some of the smiting yourself. 

…it is the lack of belief in a God of vengeance that “secretly nourishes violence.” The human impulse to make perpetrators of violence pay for their crimes is almost an overwhelming one. It cannot possibly be overcome with platitudes like “Now don’t you see that violence won’t solve anything?” If you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped, such talk is laughable — and it shows no real concern for justice. Yet victims of violence are drawn to go far beyond justice into the vengeance that says, “You put out one of my eyes, so I will put out both of yours.” They are pulled inexorably into an endless cycle of vengeance, of strikes and counterstrikes nurtured and justified by the memory of terrible wrongs.

(Timothy Keller, The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Dutton, 2008], pp. 74-75.)

D. A. Carson: (Commenting on 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10)

     Many find the notion of retribution repugnant. This eye-for-an-eye theology, they say, does not reach the high level of the Christian gospel, where grace reigns and forgiveness displaces revenge. It is vindictive, petty, harsh, and utterly unworthy of those who follow Christ—the Christ who cries, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” Surely this passage is simply an unworthy throwback to the more primitive stance of the Old Testament.

     But this analysis will not do. It will not do even at the simple level of fairness. Less than a year ago, a stunning case was tried before a British court. A British soldier, in a fit of rage, shot and killed his wife and their infant. The soldier did not plead insanity; quite transparently he was crushed by the guilt and shame of his own brutality and murderous rage. The judge finally acquitted him, on the ground that he had already suffered enough.

     Where is the justice in that? Where is the fairness? Where is there any flavor of what is right? Is there not something to be said for retribution?

     In fact, the Christian gospel is solidly based on some elementary notions of retribution. Where evil occurs, it must be paid back, or God himself is affronted. If God forever overlooks evil, ostensibly on the ground that he is loving and forbearing, is he not also betraying the fact that he is pathetically unconcerned about injustice?

     The truth is that every Christian who has thought long and hard about the cross begins to understand that God is not merely a stern dispenser of justice, nor merely a lover who lavishly forgives, but the Sovereign who is simultaneously perfect in holiness and perfect in love. His holiness demands retribution; his love sends his own Son to absorb that retribution on behalf of others. The cross simultaneously stands as the irrefutable evidence that God demands retribution, and cries out that it is the measure of God’s love (see Rom. 3:21-26). That is why, in the Christian view of things, forgiveness is never detached from the cross. In other words, forgiveness is never the product of love alone, still less of mawkish sentimentality. Forgiveness is possible only because there has been a real offense, and a real sacrifice to offset that offense.

(D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers, [Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press,.2009], Ch. 2: The Framework of Prayer, pp. 47-48.)

C. S. Lewis:

For what alarms us in the Christian picture is the infinite purity of the standard against which our actions will be judged. But then we know that none of us will ever come up to that standard. We are all in the same boat. We must all pin our hopes on the mercy of God and the work of Christ, not on our own goodness. Now the Jewish picture of a civil action sharply reminds us that perhaps we are faulty not only by the Divine standard (that is a matter of course) but also by a very human standard which all reasonable people admit and which we ourselves usually wish to enforce upon others. Almost certainly there are unsatisfied claims, human claims, against each one of us. For who can really believe that in all his dealings with employers and employees, with husband or wife, with parents and children, in quarrels and in collaborations, he has always attained (let alone charity or generosity) mere honesty and fairness? Of course we forget most of the injuries we have done. But the injured parties do not forget even if they forgive. And God does not forget. And even what we can remember is formidable enough.

(C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958], p. 13.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria