When I was in high school and trying to figure out the whole following Jesus thing, I encountered the guy in this video. He was a young, up-and-coming pastor at a church a couple hours north of us, a guy who asked the kind of questions that I was asking and gave answers that I was able to understand. He helped a lot of my friends think about what it meant to follow Jesus. And then, a few years later, he wrote a book.

In his book, this pastor asked a lot of the questions that he asks in the video we just saw: Is God sending everyone to burn in hell without Jesus? How could a good God send people to a bad place? How is that part of the Good News of Christianity?  And as I read this book, his questions really struck a chord with me. Sure, he wasn’t asking the questions the way I would ask them and yeah, he was pushing back on the view of heaven and hell I had been taught. But he asked good questions. Questions about if people are just sinners in the hands of an angry God—or if there’s a better way to make sense of reality.

Maybe you’ve asked these kinds of questions before. Questions like, what is God really like? Or, if God is good, how can He send people to a place of eternal torture? Maybe you’ve wondered how what Christians say about heaven and hell and the afterlife fits with what Scripture says about those places…. Or how Christians reconcile the message of God’s love with the punishments of hell…. Or maybe you’ve never explicitly asked those kinds of question, but you’ve had a sense of unease or uncertainty about this afterlife stuff. Maybe you’re just now wondering what this is all about.

If you’ve found yourself in any of those places, you’re in the right place. Because today, we’re wrestling with the question of how a Good God could send people to a Bad Place, we’re wrestling with what Christians say about hell.  We’re talking about these uneasy subjects as part of a series I’m calling The Good Place where we’re exploring ideas about heaven, hell, and the afterlife. Someday, we’re all going to die and find ourselves in the life after death. So we need to be prepared, not only for our own sakes, but also for all those around us.

Some Key Ideas

Last post, we took a deep dive into what Scripture said about the Bad Place—the place in the afterlife that people commonly call hell—and we learned a couple of things. We saw that Scripture tells us that the Bad Place exists and you don’t want to go there—a place of punishment described as fire and darkness.  And we ended on the reality that Scripture leaves plenty of gaps when it comes to understanding the Bad Place—what it’s like, who goes there, for how long, and why. In fact, there’s very little commentary about why the Bad Place exists in the Bible; most of the time, it simply is.  Because of this, for the past 2,000 years, Christians have read Scripture and asked questions and tried to make sense of what the Bad Place is really like and what happens there.

Today, we’re looking at these interpretations of what Scripture says about how a Good God could send people to a Bad Place.  There are three basic views on the Bad Place, and we’re going to look at each of them today. But before we get to them, I want to be really clear about a couple of things.

Primarily, I share these views not because I want you adopt one, but because I want you to understand that whichever view of the Bad Place you adopt, you need to keep the big picture in mind. This stuff matters—for you, for your loved ones, for how you live your life—but it’s also not the be-all-end-all for your faith and life. We can believe different things about the Bad Place and still be following Jesus together.

Brandon’s Story

Let me tell you a story about my friend Brandon. Brandon had a rough childhood and grew up thinking that Jesus was a myth. A friend invited him to youth group at our church, where he decided to follow Jesus. A little while later, I met him and eventually began hanging out with him on a regular basis to help him learn what it meant to follow Jesus. After we’d been meeting for a few years, he learned that the church he was attending believed that hell was a place of eternal torture and torment where those who didn’t follow Jesus would spend eternity with no chance of escape.

And Brandon was really shocked and angry about this. He felt like he’d been tricked into believing that God was loving and cared for people, only to find out that He was a wrathful and evil God who was going to torture people for eternity. And he began to question whether he could believe in a God like that. So we talked about his questions and concerns for several weeks. And finally, one day as we were talking and eating Taco Bell, I finally had to say, “Brandon, I understand that you’ve got questions about what your church teaches. But you need to realize that there are other people following Jesus who believe other things about hell. There are Christians who understand what Scripture says about hell in different ways than your church does. You don’t need to abandon Jesus because you don’t like what your church says about hell—you can listen in and learn what other Christians believe about hell too.”

That’s what I want to foreground for you today: as we talk about the Bad Place, we need to keep the big picture in mind.  You might have a particular view of the Bad Place in mind—and that picture might be troubling. But if the parts of the Bad Place that trouble you are not the parts that Scripture is clear about, let me strongly encourage you to consider other ideas about the Bad Place.  Don’t let someone’s interpretation of the Bad Place separate you from Jesus. Don’t let a view of hell—even one that’s traditionally and widely held—prevent you from following Jesus. There are other ways within the family of God that is the big-c Church to make sense of all this.  Don’t give up on Jesus because of one part of the story about the Bad Place. Keep the big picture of who Jesus is and how He loves you in mind!

Traditionalism

So what are these three ways that Christians interpret what Scripture says about the Bad Place?

The first view is what we’ll call Traditionalism, sometimes also known as the “eternal conscience torment” version of the Bad Place. In this understanding, those who are separated from God in the Bad Place face never-ending torture and misery that they’re aware of.  According to this view, humans are made in the image of God and thus possess immortal souls—souls that last forever. This fact, combined with the reality that sin separates us from God, means that after death, human souls that do not follow God must end up in a place of separation from Him for eternity. In other words, God’s justice demands punishment, and the just punishment for a sin committed by an immortal being against an ultimately holy God requires everlasting punishment.

There are numerous passages of Scripture that are used to support this view. In Mark 9.43-48, Jesus says, If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where “‘the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched.’ Likewise, Revelation 14.10-11 says that, as for the wicked, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.

There’s a lot more we could say here. But what I want you see is that, for Traditionalism, the language of eternity—where the fire never goes out and there is no rest for the wicked—points to the idea that the punishment occurring in the Bad Place last forever and ever, to the time beyond time.  Now, we call this view Traditionalism because for at least the last 1500 years, this has been the majority view in the Christian West on the Bad Place. In the words of Jonathan Edwards, a famous American preacher from the 1700s, people are like “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and hell, “Tis everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it for all eternity.”  In answer to the question, “why does a Good God send people to the Bad Place?,” Traditionalism says, “because humans were created for eternity and because God demands justice.”  This is the perspective of Traditionalism on the Bad Place.

Some Pushback Against Traditionalism

But there are a couple of things to keep in mind here.   The first is that this view is that it really centers around what we mean by eternal. Eternity is a hard concept for our finite minds to imagine. Quick: think of an eternal number of jellybeans—what is that like?  It’s really hard to imagine, because you can really only think of a really big number of jellybeans. So eternity is hard to conceptualize. But that’s only part of the problem.  Because the words that Scripture uses to talk about eternity—olam in Hebrew and aionios in Greek—don’t strictly mean eternity as in lasting forever and ever until the heat death of the universe and end of time as we know it. No, the words are used in many ways in Scripture, including to mean eon, age, lasting, or simply until the end. Well, something that lasts an age or until the end isn’t really what we conceptually mean by eternal, now is it?

Adding chaos to confusion, the earliest Christians who believed in the different conceptions of the Bad Place that we’re talking about today were all comfortable speaking about aionios punishment—suggesting, as scholar Steve Gregg notes, “that those closest to the New Testament times, for many of whom New Testament Greek was their native tongue, understood the word aionios to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate any of their [different] positions [on hell].” (Gregg, 108) So the view of Traditionalism that the Bad Place lasts forever really hinges on an interpretation of these words as signifying what we think of as eternity, not anything inherent to the message of Scripture.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even though this view is called Traditionalism, that’s not the same thing as “Onlyism,” as if this is only way that Christians have thought about the Bad Place through the centuries. Because it isn’t. In fact, the first several centuries of Christians contained plenty of Christians who believe at least variations of the other two views we’re about to look at. And amidst that diversity of opinion, there was at least for a time a very mere Christian approach to this question.

For example, consider Augustine of Hippo, who’s widely viewed as one of the most important Christian theologians of all time. Augustine believed in Traditionalism when it came to the Bad Place, but he didn’t doubt anyone’s salvation if they held to a different view. He understood that other people held other views and he was okay with that. In other words, what you believe about the purpose for and duration of the Bad Place was a secondary issue for Augustine.  And the same is true here at Conciliar Post: we want you to focus on following Jesus and becoming more like Him, regardless of what you think about the Bad Place.  So feel free to disagree with the traditional view of the Bad Place, because you’re in good company here.

Alright, enough about Traditionalism. What are the other two Christian interpretations of the Bad Place?

Conditionalism

A second view is what we’ll call Conditionalism, which centers around the idea that some people will experience eternity, but some will not, thus making the status of our souls conditional.  In this view, people who follow God will live forever in eternity, but those in the Bad Place will eventually experience final judgment and the second death. This is where we get the other names for this view, which are Annihilationism and terminalism, because there’s an end in and to the Bad Place.  The words of pastor Francis Chan and scholar Preston Sprinkle are helpful here, as they note that, “In almost every passage where Jesus mentions hell, He doesn’t explicitly say that it will last forever. He speaks of torment, and we get the impression hell is terrible, that it’s a place to be avoided at all costs, but He doesn’t clearly tell us how long it will last.” (C&P, 81)

Conditionalism has its Scriptural support as well. Consider what Jesus says in Matthew 10.28: Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. This is language of destruction, not eternal punishment; don’t try to make Jesus say more than He actually does, the Conditionalist says. Similarly, hear what Paul says in Galatians 6.8: Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Here it is, Conditionalism says, the two possible human destinies, spelled out by Paul for us: either you follow the way of the flesh and end in destruction, or you follow the way of the Spirit and enter into eternal life.

Conditionalism seizes upon that fact and argues that the Traditional view overstates the length and purpose of the Bad Place. Souls aren’t made to suffer forever, a Conditionalist says, they’ll only experience punishment proportional to their guilt. Which means that the Bad Place won’t last forever, because it’s impossible for beings trapped in time to deserve endless punishment—that would be unjust and contrary to God’s character.  In answer to the question, “why does a Good God send people to the Bad Place?,” Conditionalism says, “because people must pay the price for their disobedience before their final judgement.”  In a nutshell, that’s Conditionalism.

Restorationism

The third Christian view of the Bad Place is what we’ll call Restorationism, also known as Christian Universalism or the Universal Reconciliation view. In this understanding, since all souls will eventually be with God, the Bad Place is only temporary.

The thinking here goes like this: Scripture tells us that God desires for all people to be saved and Christ died to redeem and restore the world. To cite one passage on this, in 1 Timothy 2.4-6a, Paul writes describes God as someone, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people. Does God not get what He wants, asks the Restorationist? Does Satan win some of his battle against the Almighty? No, God wants everyone to be saved and thus, in the end, they will be.

Now of course, Christians believe that after death, the wicked will receive appropriate punishment by ending up in the Bad Place. But for the Restorationist, they will also eventually be brought to repentance.  In the words of Philippians 2.10-11, in the end, at the name of Jesus every knee [will] bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. In the end of all things, all creation will be restored, making the Bad Place short term at worst. For Restorationism, there is no part of creation and no person for whom the victory of Satan is anything other than temporary.

One other thing to note is that Restorationism appears in many different forms and intensities over the years, but as a specifically Christian view of the Bad Place, it distinguishes itself from postmodern universalism in a couple of different ways. Postmodern universalism is what you might encounter in our culture today, the idea that no matter what you do, human beings will all end up in the same place. That’s not right, Restorationism says. If you don’t follow Jesus, you’ll still end up suffering in the Bad Place until you come to recognize that Jesus is King and only He can save you. So the Bad Place still exists and still has a purpose for the Restorationism view—it’s just a different sort of purpose than Traditionalism or Conditionalism suggest.

In answer to the question, “why does a Good God send people to the Bad Place?,” Restorationism says, “because people must experience justice for their disobedience until they come to recognize Jesus as Lord.”  This is Restorationism: the Bad Place is temporary because one day, everyone will be restored to relationship with God.

Some Reminders

These are the three historic Christian interpretations of what Scripture says about on the Bad Place: Traditionalism, Conditionalism, and Restorationism.  And as you reflect on which of these views you might hold, let me close our time together with a couple of reminders.

First, I want to remind you that it’s not even remotely okay for the Bad Place to be something you think about or believe but not act upon.  Far too often, Christians get so caught up in talking about the Bad Place that we forget to people need to avoid going there.  If you take the perspective of Traditionalism, that’s the worst imaginable fate for a person, an eternity of torment. What are you doing to help people avoid an eternity in the Bad Place?  If you believe in Conditionalism, ceasing to exist is also not great; it’s perhaps less bad than an eternity of torment, but it’s still far from the ideal. What are you doing to help people avoid annihilation in the Bad Place?  If you believe in Restorationism, that might involve the least pain, but people are still headed for anguish and separation from God. What are you doing to help people avoid spending any time in pain in the Bad Place?

Second, I want to remind you of the fact that the Bad Place exists and you want to avoid going there—so whatever your view on the Bad Place, you need to give your allegiance to Jesus in order to avoid going there.  It’s interesting to me that nowhere in Scripture does it explicitly say that Jesus came to save you from hell.  Did you know that?  Jesus is never talked about as “fire insurance” the way that some people following Jesus will talk about Him.  Scripture does say that Jesus came to save you from the present evil of our world, from your alienation from God, from your bondage to sickness, sin, and death, from you aimless and hopeless life, and from the fear of death. But nowhere does Scripture say, “you should believe in Jesus because He’ll save you from the Bad Place.

The Bad Place is simply not a central issue for Jesus, and it’s not a primary issue for most Christians throughout history. It’s worth knowing about and acting on. But what you believe about how long the Bad Place lasts and what purpose it serves are secondary issues, subservient to following King Jesus.  Following Jesus isn’t about avoiding the Bad Place; we follow Jesus because He’s worthy of our allegiance as the rightful King of the cosmos.  So if you’re reading this today and you haven’t decided to follow Jesus, what better time to begin that relationship than right now?

This post originally appeared as a message at Arise Church.

Image courtesy of IU