Dale Allison asks the question: Does hell have an expiration date? Is such a question an act of heresy? Dale Allison explores these questions in Night Comes as he addresses one of orthodox Christianity’s biggest problems: We are commanded by God to love all, yet God will burn billions of people in eternal hell. This contradiction moreover comes from a God who we are told is love, the great all-loving God. Allison accounts Christians trying to lessen hell by introducing a declining suffering over time, annihilation, purgatory, etc.
While orthodox Christians towed the company line for many centuries, there was a shift. As we read,
“Not until relatively recent times, however, did hell begin to encounter far-flung, reflexive incredulity. The number of doubters swelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when some decided that the Greek word, aionios, means not ‘eternal’ but rather ‘age-long,’ so that hell has an expiration date.”
Allison observes that Isaac Newton and John Locke opted for a belief in annihilation for the unsaved.
In the 1600s and 1700s there was a movement to argue that Gehenna was not hell itself but a trash dump outside Jerusalem with no metaphorical pointers to an eternal dungeon.
Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was a reaction, we are told, to a growing movement of hell deniers, some of whom were universalists. One such hell denier was Jacob Ilive who published a pamphlet “which lampoons literal hell fire as the invention of self-serving clergy.”
Allison writes, “The tipping point came finally in the nineteenth century” when European Protestantism rejected hell for the long-haul.
During this time, Charles Darwin, who had studied to be a minister, wrote in his Autobiography his distaste for the hell doctrine: “I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do no believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” Darwin’s wife, an Anglican, did not want this passage even published.
With hell losing fashion, Allison points out that in his 60 years of attending church he can only recall two sermons on hell.
Even conservative churches are back-pedaling from hell. Allison quotes John Wenham: “Unending torment speaks to me of sadism, not justice.”
Allison points out that former evangelical conservative Rob Bell has famously given up on hell and sees his renunciation of hell as “a harbinger of things to come.” Allison’s point is in disagreement with evangelical writer and comedian Thor Ramsey who argues in The Most Encouraging Book on Hell Ever that Rob Bell and other universalists are irrelevant, just a blip on the historical screen of Christian thought. Ramsey is such a champion of eternal hell that the possibility that his deceased mother, who did not exude Christian living, may be tormented in hell this very moment does not deter him from a preaching a belief in eternal hell. Ramsey argues that our belief in eternal hell gives honor to God. I suspect this sentiment is more widespread than Allison indicates.
For in fact, there is the sense that without hell even pious Christians would succumb to their depraved selves in a wave of atavistic sinful behavior. Much to Allison’s dismay, a Christian friend of his said that if you take away hell the first thing his friend, married with children, will do is look for an orgy. To use the exact quote, “If hell is not eternal, I’m going to the orgy tonight.” Allison is appalled. As he writes, “Here was a well-educated man confessing to me that he refrains from sexual promiscuity, not out of love or respect for his wife or for some other noble reason, but in order to avoid eternal damnation.”
I assume Allison wants the love of Christ to be the impetus for holy living, but fear of hell may be needed for less evolved Christians. To be honest, I don’t know how holy I can be in a world without hell. I fear I’m so lacking in maturity that I will do the minimum just to get by, just to be perceived by others as decent. I fear that I am like most people.
However, for the record let me state here I’m not in support of a belief in hell as a necessary bulwark for moral behavior. Like Allison, I appear to be incapable of reconciling a belief in eternal hell with a belief in a loving God. I am not alone. Allison writes about other world religions re-thinking hell.
However, he makes it clear that hell is not going extinction. Universalist pastors are getting expelled from their churches, including the southern Baptist church which declares “eternal, conscious punishment.” The youth pastor of my teens has gone off to be the minister of a church in central California and the home page on the church’s website states a belief in “eternal conscious torment.”
This conscious torment has evolved from earlier orthodox depictions of hell as a place of physical torture—being burned alive for all eternity and other images so odious that I have to assume the Christian mainstream felt this type of hell was bad public relations. In spite of Ramsey Lewis telling his fellow Christians to disband public relations for more hell preaching, there is an evolution of hell, which as Allison discusses in the next part of his chapter is influenced by the writings of C.S. Lewis.
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