Last week I began addressing what I called the Evangelical Hell Doctrine (EHD): “All people who believe that Jesus died for their sins and was resurrected and accept this sacrifice will go to heaven, and all people who don’t believe and accept it will go to a place of eternal, conscious, torment.” This week I want to offer another criticism of the EHD.
You may have noticed that the EHD I gave was something that I constructed based on my own observation of most evangelical church doctrines, instead of a quotation from a passage of Scripture. Why? It is because there are no passages or verses in Scriptures in which this doctrine is articulated. There are passages that extol the virtues of belief in the Gospel, of course, but none of those passages mention anything like a disagreeable afterlife for non-believers, let alone a place of eternal conscious torment. There are also a handful of passages that mention hell or something like hell, and two or three that talk about a place of conscious torment, but in all cases, these passages talk about hell as a place for morally evil people, not for those who do not believe in the Gospel.
This absence of mention of the EHD in Scripture is problematic for at least two reasons. First, Protestants in general (and therefore evangelicals) distinguish themselves from both Orthodox and Catholic Christians in part because they emphasize Scripture and de-emphasize tradition. Thus, for evangelicals, it matters less what tradition says and quite a lot what Scripture says.
Let me illustrate my point by talking about it from the other way around. There are certain Catholics who believe you go to heaven if you have taken the sacraments, and going to hell if you have not. Not in the Bible? No problem, they will say, this is what our tradition has believed for 2,000 years, and therefore we must accept it as true. This sounds a little suspicious to me, but at least it’s consistent. Evangelicals, however, can’t make this move. We should not let them say, “Well, we know the EHD is not actually in any passage of Scripture, but these are our traditional beliefs.” By their own admission, when Scripture and tradition are in tension, Scripture wins, every time.
Second, if there really were a way to know for sure who was going to experience eternal bliss and who was going to experience eternal conscious torment, such a thing would be the most important thing that anyone has ever discovered. And, if as the evangelicals believe, God wants this to be obvious to us, we should expect there to be a plethora of verses which unambiguously articulate the EHD. Or at least one. But none? It strikes me as very strange that a belief of such dramatic importance that is supposed to be obvious is nowhere to be found in Scripture.
