All You Want to Know About Hell by Steve Gregg

Author:Steve Gregg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE PHILOSOPHICAL CASE

There are a number of philosophical issues that we must consider in coming to grips with the truth about ultimate judgment. Most of them have to do with the definition of love and the necessity of justice.

1. Eternal torment and the love of God

One great objection to the view that God will punish sinners forever is that this seems inconsistent with the biblical affirmations of the love of God for mankind. How does eternal punishment square with such a characteristic in God’s nature?

Those who raise this objection are often viewing God as a one-dimensional Being, having a single characteristic—omnibenevolence. However, God’s love is not His only attribute.

John Piper wrote, “The statement ‘God is love’ does not imply that God relates to individuals only in terms of love.”45 Arthur Pink has complained that there is a common tendency among critics to invoke “the love of God” against the traditional doctrine of hell: “The Divine love is commonly regarded as a species of amiable weakness, a sort of good-natured indulgence; it is reduced to a mere sticky sentiment, patterned after human emotion.”46

Love and wrath can coexist, as separate aspects of justice. Both are attributes of God described in Scripture. There are two alternative explanations by which God’s love and His wrath have been harmonized: the Calvinistic and the Arminian.

Calvinism teaches that God maximally loves some people, but not all. God’s redeeming love is restricted to the elect, as Calvin, commenting on 1 John 4:8 (“God is love”), wrote: “Here then he does not speak of the essence of God, but only shows what he is found to be by us [i.e., by the elect].”47 Since God really only loves the elect, in the sense of willing to save them, it is not inconsistent for Him to punish others, whom He does not love similarly.

The Arminian explanation affirms that God really does love, and desires to save, every human being, but that mankind is endowed with the capacity and privilege of free will. This means that people have the power, if they choose, to reject God’s love, and to choose His wrath and punishment instead. Robin Parry and Christopher Partridge, explaining (though not affirming) such a view, noted: “If humans keep on rejecting God’s offer of salvation, God could only save them by disregarding their freedom, and thereby treating them not as persons but as objects.”48

On this view, God makes every effort to persuade, to convict, to thwart the sinners’ headlong dash to damnation—but His love can only do so much. The sinner, on this view, may end up in hell against God’s wishes, but does so only by overcoming every obstacle God places in his way en route. One might say that whoever ends up in hell must get there by sheer determination!

Both of these explanations (though they cannot both be correct) provide alternative ways by which the fact of hell and the love of God may be harmonized.

2. The demands of justice

A. It would be unjust for sinners to go unpunished.

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