In Chapter 5 of Dale Allison’s impressive Night Comes, he tackles the question of hell and how hell squares with God’s grace.
He begins the chapter by writing, “I’m a lousy evangelist.” He explains that he was both timid as a Christian youth sharing the gospel door to door and moreover he struggled with believing that the strangers he talked to were “fated for hell.” He writes that, “The notion of post-mortem torture for all unlike me was, long before I encountered liberal theology, repellent.”
It appears that Allison could not believe in hell even if he tried to. As he writes:
“My youthful antipathy toward the conventional hell with its belly full of non-Christians was so profound that, had I regarded the teaching of the pamphlet as essential Christian doctrine, I’d have abandoned my religion. One can’t believe what one can’t believe.”
I have to say I am the same way. When Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” I am deeply desiring to find such rest in Jesus. This is one of the most beautiful things said in the Bible. But there’s a problem. Jesus preaches eternal hell. Orthodox Christians take his preaching literally. Universalists see hell as a metaphor and as a purgatorial condition at worst preceding salvation. But as someone who converted to Christianity at 17 with a profound fear of eternal hell, I can say that whatever burdens I tried to place at Jesus were far exceeded by my struggle to believe in the eternal hell Jesus talked about.
In other words, I could never feel unburdened in the warm loving arms of Jesus because I was overwhelmed by the thought of billions of people, including family members, screaming as God tortured them forever and my Christian friends believed and wanted me to believe that this God was just and righteous and I had no right to question God’s ways, including his decision to damn the unsaved forever and ever.
It appears Dale Allison has a similar struggle. We’re not alone. Allison writes that are many “Christians anxious to ameliorate hell.”
Many see this eternal hell as a human rights violations, so to speak. To quote Allison, “In other words, Mengele was an amateur. His unspeakably fiendish deeds pale beside what God has cooked up for sinners in hell.”
Allison gives us a description of hell by a pious Christian, the Reverend J. Furniss, a Roman Catholic priest from Ireland. The passage from The Sight of Hell was designed to “petrify little ones.”
Hell is so bad, so extreme, so virulent that many modern orthodox Christians shy away from it (causing orthodox Christian and comedian Thor Ramsey to encourage preachers to talk about hell more since hell, Ramsey argues, brings honor and glory to God) and Allison writes that “even apologists for hell can’t stomach Furniss.”
To make his point, Allison observes that evangelist and hell defender William Lane Craig finds Furniss “ridiculous” and would have us look at the Bible’s hell language as a metaphor for the soul’s eternal anguish.
Comments