I began this series by reflecting briefly on Rob Bell’s book, which claims to reveal ‘the fate of every human who ever lived.’ In brief, he wants to convince us that there is no hell. On the other side of Protestant theology we have the conservative evangelicals, who claim that every person will experience eternal conscious torment in hell, unless they accept the Gospel (which I have been referring to as the Evangelical Hell Doctrine [EHD]). Indeed, they are so certain about this belief that it often makes an appearance on a list of official church doctrines, and it is thus what its members are expected to believe.
In the last weeks, I have not chosen one of these sides, but taken a different route entirely, namely, to claim that there is not really much information given about the negative side of the after-life in the Bible, and this is true of both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian New Testament. This is particularly problematic for Bell and the conservative evangelicals, because they tell us that their beliefs are formed entirely by Scripture.
Bell’s position strikes me as arrogant, but I reserved most of my disdain for the EHD, because in addition to the arrogance problem, they are making a dramatic, terrible claim about almost every person who has ever lived. If you are going to state that you know that another person is going to live in conscious torment, you really should have some good evidence for your claim. However, when we examined the passages that supposedly offered proof of the EHD, we found something different. There were three groups of passages. First, there a handful of passages in Matthew and one in Luke that say that you go to hell (or something like it) for moral failings such as neglect of the poor, and not for a lack of belief. There are also several passages that talk about how the unbeliever will someday die, or perish, or be destroyed, which is explicitly defined in Scripture as the opposite of living forever in torment. The third group of passages is from Revelation, which describe the eternal conscious torment of the devil and his worshippers. But nowhere do we find anything close to a passage that supports the EHD.
What I have to say next may sound like a joke, but it is not. When you experience what is sometimes called a ‘brain freeze,’ try to imagine that pain lasting forever. That pain is excruciating, but it is bearable because it lasts only a few sounds. But what if it never stopped? If you are a conservative evangelical, you are saying that you know for sure that something like this kind of pain will happen to almost every person who has ever lived. And, importantly, you are saying this without any Scriptural evidence.
Two parting notes before I start a new series next week. It strikes me that people who believe in the EHD should order their lives far differently than they do. For example, why in the world would you have children if you thought that there was a decent chance that one of them would be tortured forever? Why would you oppose abortion? Isn’t it better for a being to die as a fetus than to grow up and thus have a chance of being tortured forever? Also, why would you spend time with family, friends, church, leisure, travel, career, sports, hobbies, etc? Because if the EHD is true, life is an emergency, and the only point to it is to make sure that as few people are tortured forever as possible. I really wonder if anyone - including those who outwardly affirm it - really believes in the EHD.
In Scripture, we learn what kind of lives we should lead. If we are Christians, we should order our lives accordingly. What we are not told is what will happen to those ‘on the other side.’ And so, if we are honest, we will continue on in ignorance, as we must do already with very many issues.
