Hell and broken thinking

Life is worth nothing. Having eternal life is worth nothing. Nothing at all. Enjoying eternity with God is not something to be prized, so if you lose it, you have lost nothing. No big deal. It has no value. If you lost your life, or you had the chance of eternal life taken from you (when it is actually a real possibility), then you have lost nothing at all. Zip.

If you tell anybody that this is not so, then you’re not a real Christian, but a phony. If you deny these things, then you’re accursed. You must tell people that these things are true, because if you tell them anything else, you’re not being loving. You’re just letting them die in their sins. If you want to be faithful to God, then you must tell people that their lives are worthless, and that there is no value in eternal life. This is an essential part of defending the Gospel.

Of course none of that is true. It is bizarre, false, and certainly not a view that I would ever call biblical or Christian. And yet, I have just read an article by the head of a major Evangelical apologetics organisation in which he claimed all of these things. The claims look absurd when you make them explicit and state them one after the other. But they are all there. I’m not dropping names in this article, but you can go and take a look for yourselves. The article has been there since May 2013. I maintain that the above claims, bizarre though they seem, are straightforward implications of what you’ll find in that article.

We have gotten to a point where this is what many young Evangelicals look up to as useful, vital, and most unexpectedly of all, biblical teaching. This should not be. The doctrine of eternal torment inspires people to engage in some of the most awkward, contorted and damaged thinking that I have ever encountered in Evangelical culture.

The truth is that life is good. Just read through the Psalms as the writer pleads with God to give him life so that he can remain among the living and praise God. Through the Gospel God has delivered us from the fear of death by bringing life and immortality to us through Christ. Just look at what Scripture says about eternal life. It is the very gift of God to those who seek glory, honour and immortality. The biblical teaching is that we can have eternal life through Christ alone but that the alternative is death. Contrast that with this author, who says, “Even annihilationism gives false hope, because if you are annihilated, you lose nothing. You are not around to recognize the loss that you might have had as gain. You disappear. And when you disappear, there is no loss for you” [emphasis added].

Under normal circumstances of course we all see that these claims are ludicrous. Death is bad. Life has value, and eternal life with God in glory has immeasurable value. The writer of the article that prompted me here, when he is thinking about something else, knows that life is good, losing life is bad, and being denied eternal would be terrible. He must. But when defending the doctrine of eternal torment and denouncing annihilationism, suddenly ordinary reason collapses. Now we have to say, contrary to ourselves, that death is no big deal, that in losing eternal life and disappearing we are really losing nothing and so on, adding for good measure that this is about defending the Gospel.1 This is a moment where you need to listen to that little voice that says: “Wait a minute, this is nuts.” Losing life forever when God in Christ offers eternal life is not “nothing,” unless eternal life itself is worth nothing.

The matter is made worse when the writer says: “You want criteria to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the foolishness and nonsense? This issue is it. … I think this metaphor of separating the wheat from the chaff is a good one because it helps us to separate the real Christians from the phonies, the truth from the error. In this period of time, when the Gospel and the Great Commission are under attack heavily from the outside, there are a lot of people on the inside who are starting to bend, they’re giving in, and they’re letting go of something foundational and essential, that is the existence of the place where God does eternal justice: Hell.” He literally claims that if you don’t hold to his view on hell, you are a phony Christian. Embrace this view of eternal life as something that you can completely lose, while still losing “nothing,” if you are a real Christian at all!

That some Evangelicals are prepared to descend into this sort of thinking for the sake of defending a doctrine of eternal torment should be a red flag. When your theology forces you to virtually abandon reason in its defence is a warning that you may be defending the wrong thing.

Glenn Peoples

(Hat tip to Ronnie Demler who linked me to the article that prompted this.)

1. This is to say nothing of the author’s unawareness of what conditional immortality / annihilationism actually teaches. For example, he writes: “So when someone argues there is no final reckoning and there is no Hell, either because of annihilationism (nonbelievers cease to exist when they die)…” Even a cursory glance through the literature would have corrected this obvious error. Annihilationists certainly believe in the resurrection of the dead and the final judgement, after which people receive their fate. [↩]