Board index ‹ Heaven and Hell

[Benji]

Let's take Hitler. Obviously he's one of the worst people in human history. But maybe after 1 billion years of torture even he has had enough?

[Lamar]

No one deserves an eternity of torture. Which is why quite few Christians actually believe in a literal Dante's Inferno kind of hell.

1) Some believe that being in God's presence will be bliss for the redeemed, but painful for the the unrighteous. I.e. being faced with God would be very painful because you would realize that every selfish act you have done was actually evil, and that you have wasted your earthly life. The unsaved are left in their state of perpetual sin, condemned to an unsatisfying existence forever. Another way of putting it might be that compared to the New Earth, continued existence on the old earth would be hell.

2) Others believe that the unsaved will simply be destroyed (annihilationism).

3) Some believe that all will be saved (Christian reconciliation).

If you combine the first and third options, you get purgatorial universal reconciliation: the belief that the unsaved will be saved after a period of suffering (as described in the first, or through actual purging torture).

[jimwalton]

You seem to have several misunderstandings that I'm happy to discuss. First you need to realize that people choose hell, they are not chucked there. As someone has said, the door of hell is locked from the inside. Second, it helps to know that fire is an image, not the reality. There are degrees of punishment in hell, so the fire cannot be literal. Fire is a word picture of agony, so it is used. But the agony of hell is spiritual, not physical. People don't want to be with God, and so they choose to separate themselves from him. The agony of hell is the separation from God's presence, not physical torture. As Lamar said, Christians do take various perspectives on it. What we know for certain from the Bible is that after life there is an accounting. The first stage of accounting is whether one has the nature of Jesus or the nature of sin. Those who have the nature of Jesus get to spend eternity with him, and those who did not want the nature of Jesus don't have to spend eternity with him. After that comes an assessment of what good and bad one has committed, and those regulate the degrees of reward in heaven or the degrees of punishment in hell. In any case the teaching of Scripture is that it will be perfectly fair based on (1) how much people knew, (2) what they did with what they knew, and (3) a judgment that fits their particular circumstances and choices.

[Delicate]

Eternity, though. I have a feeling that if we'd had a way to keep Hitler alive indefinitely (nanomachines, maybe) and torture him every day, you would eventually be sickened by the idea that 20 generations from now he'd still be in agony every waking moment.

If Christians could see Hell being practiced, they would see the greatest evil of all. Misery without end? No human, and I do mean no human, could possibly deserve eternal punishment for decades of wrongdoing.

[jimwalton]

I do empathize with your sensitivities, and I share them. Hell is portrayed in the most negative terms possible: torment for eternity. I think to get true sight of hell being practiced, two understandings are necessary: first, to grasp the true extent of the offense (so that we can properly assess justice), and second, to grasp the place of free-will in the equation.

In the first case, we are looking at the offense (including all offenses and all sins), from a vantage point of (1) human perspective, and (2) limited knowledge of the situation. I would guess that our human perspective could possibly be gnarled up with all sorts of other components and not be totally objective, and that our limited knowledge of the depths and the truth of the offense (how many, for how long, to what extent) is also going to cause us to be quite limited in our capacity to accurately assess the situation.

Secondly, as I mentioned, hell is a choice, not an assignment. Your sentences show a misunderstanding, as if God forces them there and keeps them there, when the Biblical picture is better represented by a person choosing not to want to be with God, and continuing to do so. The "misery without end" is the lack of God's presence that an individual selects, not a sentence that God pronounces. Hell was made for the devil and his angels. Any human who goes there goes there by his or her own choice.