There is a joke within my religious tradition that goes
something like this: two grade school boys were having a theological argument
on the playground. The first boy, who
attended the United Methodist church, said to the other “there isn’t a literal
hell!” to which to second boy, who attended First Bible Baptist replied, “the
hell there isn’t!” I find this quite
humorous because as a young boy this was actually the content of my first
theological argument. I attended Sunday
School at the Methodist church and our teacher told us that Hell was not a real
place but the human experience of “being far away from God.” A couple of my playmates at the time came
from a devoutly Baptist home and they were certain I was going to hell for not
believing there was a hell. There wasn’t
a lot of yelling and arguing in our theological debate, just fists and
shoving. In other words, we were
behaving as if we were bishops at one of the early Ecumenical Councils of the
church where theology was not just hammered out, but punched out and kicked out
as well. Not very saintly to be sure,
but for me, theological truth is actually important enough to merit a sock in
the nose if you’re going to be a damn heretic about it! But, I digress.
Hell most definitely is the orphan-child doctrine of
evangelicalism in America today.
American Christians are only second to Canadians in niceness. Church must be nice, sermons must be positive
and very biblical, and nothing should ever happen that would make someone
uncomfortable from not having the air-conditioning turned down enough to
telling someone they can’t drop their baby off in the nursery with green mucus
dripping from its nose (especially if they are ‘a-first-time-visitor’). People need to feel glad they took the time
to come to church and in fact should be honored for doing so because they
turned down one hundred other options they had to spend Sunday morning. So needless to say, the topic of hell and
judgment clash with our current mental furniture much like bright avocado green
shag carpeting does with a plaid chesterfield couch (and if you think those two
things go together nicely you should probably stop reading at this point and
ask God to please give you some fashion sense).
But, whether or not hell is something that makes us uncomfortable to
think about or talk about, it is an idea deeply rooted in the Gospel of Christ
and if it doesn’t exist, God as we know Him is probably not God.
Typically the ‘anti-hell’ party platform goes something like
this: God is love. A loving God would never send a person to
hell because that is neither lovely or the loving thing to do. Therefore, hell must not exist. It must merely be the creation of some
benighted medieval mind to scare people into going to church and giving their
money away. Obviously, all people must
go to heaven when they die. The problem
with this line of thinking is a misunderstanding of God’s love. God is love and this is the direct teaching
of the Bible (1 John 4:8) but, as any parent knows, love is not the same thing
as permissiveness and total indulgence of a person’s whims. To never discipline or punish a child for
wrong-doing and let them get away with anything or do anything they want
usually creates a monster. Not only does
the scripture suggest this is a form of hatred under the guise of love (Prov.
13:24) but our society patently understands this concept as sure-fire recipe
for creating a sociopath. Even in human
relationships such as marriage, if I say I love my wife, and then do things I
know will break her heart like love someone else’s wife on the side or threaten
her well-being by spending my paycheck on gambling, most people would conclude
that my idea of love is either quite twisted or is not even real. Love that has any real value does come with
boundaries and limitations of one kind or another. In applying this to the love of God, what I’m
saying is God does love all people but His love does not preclude the necessity
of justice.
Changing perspective just slightly, what we need to
understand more fully is the nature of humanity and the gravity of what is
called sin in the Bible. God is the
creator of the universe. As Creator, the
universe runs according to His laws. His
laws do include physics, but more importantly they include laws of love and
moral rectitude because goodness is at the heart of who God really is. When God made man, he did make him flesh and
blood but also with a rational soul.
This means there are appetites and instincts within mankind such as
hunger, thirst, and the desire for sex.
But man is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27) which means that man
is rational, relational, and religious in addition to being flesh and
blood. The Christian way to look at
human beings is that they are embodied souls;
both are important, both are united by design. There is a high purpose in man being an
image-bearer of God. Man’s raison d’etre is to rule and steward the
earth as God desires and so honor God and make the world a place where all life
flourishes. This higher level of
consciousness would enable man to learn to discern the good and evil and to
choose to do the good. The choice to do
the good being the choice to act, think, and work according to the way God has
ordered the universe.
But clearly things have changed because of the catastrophe
often called “the fall” where our forebears became corrupt by believing the lie
of Satan that if they chose the path of disobedience with respect to God’s law,
they would become gods in their own right.
The temptation of Satan was not to eat some good tasting fruit, but to
make a deliberate choice to spurn the law of God (the very goodness of the
universe) and become a law unto themselves.
Since that time man has continued to possess his rationality and
consciousness but has what Anselm of Canterbury calls a natural indigence when
it comes to discerning good and evil and choosing the good. Not only is there an unwillingness to
discern, but the consistent choice is to do the evil which is to spurn the law
of God.
With all this said as prologue, let me deliver on the
promise of this essay’s title. The fact
is we do not live in a just world but we do live in a just universe. In this world and within the span of anyone’s
life, it is quite possible that grievous evil can be done to you for which
there is no remedy. I will not rehearse
a bunch of possible scenarios here, but if you’ve lived long enough, you know
that life doesn’t always work the way it does on TV. People do get away with things and it seems
that justice is unable to touch them.
This is actually a common objection many have to believing in God. If God is real and God is good, how come this
bad thing happened to me or this good thing was taken from me? The answer is that God is real and God is
good and because this is true, there must be justice in the universe that goes
beyond this life. If God is omniscient,
he most certainly knows the truth of all matters and will be able to mete out
justice perfectly. But if there is
perfect justice, there must be a way for you to receive it (either as an
offender being punished or a victim being avenged) and therefore this would
necessitate a continued life beyond the grave in either case. Heaven and Hell exist for the reasons of God’s
love and justice. If God is loving,
there would be no way he would permit evil to go unanswered or unpunished. If God is just there is no way he would not
bless those who have faithfully suffered in this life in a measure greater than
their suffering. Therefore there is a
link between justice and eternal life that there might be sweet aequitas in the universe.
In a way this is very comforting but it does beg another
question: are there any of us who have lived so blamelessly, so lovingly, so
unselfishly, as to only merit being recipients of God’s justice and not his
punishments? To think so is not only
hubris but really an act of willful blindness towards your own faults. The scripture clearly teaches that all
people, no matter how good we (or they themselves) think they are, are in fact
sinners (Romans 3:23) and are therefore liable recipients of the penalties of a
just God (Romans 6:23). This is where
the Christian message is particularly unique.
What if God can show love and accomplish justice simultaneously? The message of the Gospel is that Jesus
Christ is the son of God sent to live the life you should have lived and to die
the death your sins deserve. In so doing God shows his love in providing a means of
forgiveness and salvation, and at the same time satisfies justice in that
yours, mine, and everyone else’s sin was taken upon himself when he died on the
cross. It is unusual, but certainly not
unorthodox that the one who would judge us, would also take our penalty upon
himself which is exactly what happened on Good Friday so long ago. From that day until judgment day, there is an
offer from God for you on the table. I
will pay for your sins, or you will, but justice will be done. That choice is entirely up to you.
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