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Would a loving god allow hell?

In the popular imagination, hell is a place of post-death, fiery, long-term torment. Not many people, who think seriously about hell, see it in that graphic of a way. At least, not many in the Christian traditions do. I don’t want to speak for how Islam sees hell for that I defer to Muslims. Nor would I like to speak for other faiths and their views, if they have any, on hell.

I only want to address a few questions we have about the Christian version of hell. First, we question if God – if a God exists – would actually bother to give hell any space. We have a hard time with a God of judgement.

Why is that? Of all the possible reasons for this, the one that may be strongest is this: We live in the age of modern expressive individualism. Most people who were brought up in non-Western communities have not felt the impact of expressive individualism as much as those of us whose background is European, or European-influenced.

But, today, even non-Western people feel the effects of expressive individualism – the belief that everyone has the right to express their individuality to the maximum degree with minimal restrictions.

In a society where expressive individualism is assumed, the concept of a God who judges and has hell as one of the tools in his kit doesn’t make sense. We can’t, can we, possibly be held to account for ourselves before a moral order, a moral authority that is not of our own making, that is not a product of our expressive individualism? Hell suggests just such a moral authority, one that we cannot reshape. It doesn’t seem to fit.

However, we should be wary here. If it is true that there is no moral authority beyond the Western one(s) we expressively construct, then we are still stuck with the problem of moral authority. Only now that authority is grounded on the prevailing winds of Western culture with its bias toward expressive individualism.

Second, can a God of love be also a god of judgement? I think God can. In fact, I would say that a God of love has to be a God of judgement. This is because I don’t want the Nazi architects of the Holocaust to never be called to account or the Hell’s Angels who pimp women and sell pills to pre-teens.

There are other advantages to a God of justice. If God is the ultimate judge, it removes from us the – impossible and unattainable – role of handing out ultimate justice. We don’t have the resources, the time or the wisdom for it. We must leave that in the hands of God.

Further, consider this. The assumption of the absence of a God of justice secretly nourishes violence. For if there is no final accounting, many will take advantage. The real opiate of the masses is not religion but the opinion that there will be no accounting for our betrayals, deceptions, spousal beatings, exposing our kids to drugs, date rapes, terror attacks and wartime savageries.

But would a loving God allow hell? Perhaps he would. Perhaps hell is as much our choice as the destination that our choices lead to. Maybe it all begins with grumbling. Then hatred grows. As time goes on, feelings of tenderness and friendship die. Then, by the time we die, is heaven any longer even possible, even desirable? Might it not be too bright, too alive, too rich, and too filled with friendship, both for God and for others, to be attractive to us if we have fed our anger and superiority for too long? Maybe in the end, God allows us to go where we want.

Hold on, though, I can hear someone saying. All of that may or may not sound good in theory. But even if it did, don’t people who believe in hell see themselves as superior because others are going there?

Of course people can begin to think and feel that way, and some do. But that is a betrayal of the teachings of Jesus. He doesn’t allow for any superiority complexes. Those who believe in hell must not think of themselves as better than anyone else. However, they do know that the results of our choices today are more important than they might appear– and more dire if they are the wrong choices.

Finally, someone will say, “Well I just don’t believe in hell because I believe in a God of love.” It is right on the money to believe in a God of love. But if we do, we should be aware that the God of love doesn’t show up anywhere with any kind of clarity except in the Christian (and Jewish) Bible and in the tradition of the Church. For as John, one of the Jews who wrote the Bible, said, and as Christians are famous for quoting, the Son of God died because God so greatly loved the world.
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