Eternal damnation and suffering
Over the last 5 years, God has brought some amazing people into my life. The kind of people who light up a room with their kindness. Humility, patience, empathy. Serving others, and doing what is in their power to see others thrive. People who often not only believe in a God of love, but who seek to be His hands and feet as best they can, with grace and humor.
What confuses the hell out of me is that many of the people I’ve met like this are simply not Christians, as I understand it. I think of the men I met doing a week of trauma work in Arizona, who hugged me, encouraged me, spoke words of kindness and empathy after seeing every last skeleton in my closet. They looked into my eyes with love and told me, "Josh, you are enough." I think of the elderly woman who sat next to me on a bench in Sedona as I gazed out over the stunning red rocks as dusk approached. I told her where I was at in my life, how hard I was working on recovery, and she simply told me that she was very proud of me, and that she wished me the best. I think of an incredibly friendly young man recovering from alcoholism, wary of the rigid Christian faith he had experienced growing up, and who laughingly attributed the loving Higher Power clearly at work in his life to some alien superintelligence. These are just a few of so, so many wonderful lives that have touched mine.
How can it be that each of these wonderful, beautiful human beings is destined to die an everlasting death in darkness and fire, as mainstream Christianity firmly holds to?
The idea that the God who has tenderly pursued me and continued to heal me over the last decade would be the same Person to send these friends of mine away forever seems simply medieval, like something in a dark, grotesque painting by some depraved mind. It seems like such an illogical place that I have to intellectually contort myself into, to accept the argument that this somehow makes sense because of God’s essential attributes of infinite holiness and justice.
In fact, this picture of God actually makes me think of the Pharisees. I’ve always found it baffling and chilling that those who most devoted themselves to the Scriptures-- men who spent years of their lives memorizing word by word, writing it all over their bodies, reciting it throughout the day, the week, seasons, and years-- could end up crucifying Jesus. We look back with the benefit of hindsight and scoff at how clearly mistaken the Pharisees were, that they could so clearly miss what God is like, that they would put Him to death. I think their mistake is a very important lesson to us, though, who with a new, updated set of Scriptures in hand, are “convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children”. The lesson is that even those most intimate with God’s truth may completely miss His essential character. Jesus seems to be warning the same thing when he speaks about those who will preach and “perform mighty deeds in His name”, but, in the end, will be surprised to discover that they never knew him at all.
If I had to take a position today on Hell and universalism, I would give a fairly weak response. I would say that my desperate hope, is that God is able to break the rules that mainstream Christianity tends to think are sure-fire. If the Pharisees could not see how anyone could possibly heal someone on the Sabbath and not profane it—maybe it is so with us, believing that death must be the final moment that someone choose to live in God, lest they be lost forever. I believe that just as God “broke the rules” by bringing Jesus back to life after his apparent defeat, so He is fully capable of breaking the rules to bring the whole of Creation to redemption and life through the work of Christ. “For no one is cast off by the Lord forever.” -Lamentations 3:31
And, yet. The position I’ve laid out so far is probably too simplistic. For if it’s possible for God to just snap his fingers and overlook every sin and save every person, then why the Cross at all?
I’m told that there is a story of the Buddha, in the form of a hare, meeting a man starving in the desert. Buddha shakes himself three times, to make sure no insects are harmed, then leaps into a boiling pot to become food for this man. This simple parable of selfless, noble love pierces my heart. And, of course, it immediately brings to mind the sacrifice of Jesus, who, in his own words, offered his flesh and blood to a stricken humanity as true food and true drink, that we might live.
Now, imagine how the story of the hare becomes twisted and incoherent if, instead of a desert, the hungry man sits in a lush meadow surrounded by delicious fruits of every kind. Now, we would not see the self-sacrifice of the hare willingly dying as noble or loving, but completely unnecessary and even monstrous. This is exactly the incoherence that Universalism runs into; when we understand that Jesus was killed in such a horrifying way, and laid down his life purposely for his sheep, how does that make sense if all of it was unnecessary to begin with?
I am reminded of a writing by Robertson McQuilkin where he describes a vivid dream he once had while wrestling with the questions we have been considering. In this dream, he saw an island filled with sheep, and the island is slowly being devoured by a great fire. He comes to learn that this island has exactly one, small bridge off of it, a bridge that was built at enormous personal cost to the man who cared for these sheep and wanted them to be able to escape in case of this kind of disaster. In the dream, he encounters other shepherds who, despite seeing the raging inferno and the hapless sheep who do not know about the bridge, sit around theorizing “I’m sure there are other way off this island—it’s probably not an island at all!”, instead of frantically trying to save as many sheep on the only bridge that they know of. And why would the owner build such a costly bridge, if he knew that this wasn’t the only way to safety?
McQuilkin goes on to write words which made me weep: “In a world in which eleven of every twelve people is lost, three of four have never heard the way out, and one of every two cannot hear, the church sleeps on. How come? Could it be we think there must be some other way? Or perhaps we don’t really care that much.”
I don’t have a simple, tidy answer. I’m angered and offended by the casual flippancy and certainty some in the church have towards Hell, many of whom would apparently rather polish their Biblical arguments than actually take the time love others in a way that might cost them something. I hope against hope that God can make a way where there seems to be no way, to save the countless lost individuals past, present, and future-- each with a name, a story, full of hopes and dreams. At the same time, I, too, know of only one sure Bridge to safety, the man Jesus Christ. All I know is that I have one life which hastens towards its end, and there’s so much that is mysterious about the human condition. May I simply love well, and be a channel of God’s work through me, however he chooses to use this broken vessel.