Hell: Rebecca McLaughlin’s Hardest Question

 

 

For Christmas, I asked my wife for Rebecca McLaughlin’s book, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. With anticipation I unwrapped my book-shaped present Christmas morning and soon began to pour through her book. As I finished it, I could see why her book won Christianity Today’s Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year for 2020.

As the title suggests, McLaughlin engages with twelve of the most difficult questions that skeptics and Christians alike often struggle with today concerning Christianity. Here are the 12 questions:

1. Aren’t we better off without religion?

2. Doesn’t Christianity crush diversity?

3. How can you say there’s only one true faith?

4. Doesn’t religion hinder morality?

5. Doesn’t religion cause violence?

6. How can you take the Bible literally?

7. Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?

8. Doesn’t Christianity denigrate women?

9. Isn’t Christianity homophobic?

10. Doesn’t the Bible condone slavery?

11. How could a loving God allow so much suffering?

12. How could a loving God send people to hell?

Those are tough questions. And they are questions that people are really asking. McLaughlin does not set up easy straw men to knock down. She acknowledges and addresses the most difficult forms of most of these questions. Overall, she does a great job of addressing these questions. She doesn’t claim that there are quick and easy answers, but she shows that Christianity makes sense even when we honestly face the toughest questions people ask about it. In my view, while the chapters are not equally strong, they all address the issues in meaningful ways with one glaring exception: the chapter on hell.

Near the beginning of her final chapter, McLaughlin writes:

In this chapter, we will explore the hardest question in this book: How could a loving God send people to hell? Every other question pales in comparison. (pg. 210)

I agree that the nature of hell, as traditionally and widely understood, may be the most difficult of all the difficult questions that McLaughlin discussed. Unfortunately, when she gets to this most difficult question, she stumbles. The first problem is that she never lays out why hell is such a difficult issue. This stands out because in every other chapter she does explain why the question she is discussing in that chapter is a difficult issue for Christianity. The second problem is that she never explains how the things she writes about in the chapter on hell help address the issue of hell. In fact, she barely mentions hell in the rest of the chapter after stating that it is the hardest question. It’s not that I disagree with her justification of hell, it’s that I don’t see where she provides one.

So, what’s the problem with hell?

I’ll attempt to do what McLaughlin did well in her other chapters but failed to do with the issue of hell. I’ll try to explain why this issue is difficult.

The reason the issue of hell is difficult is that most Christians have believed that hell involves some type of eternal torment. Eternal torment seems to be grossly unjust and monstrously cruel. Why would a good, just, loving God create a world where a large number of people will end up in some type of eternal misery? People do some pretty bad stuff, but how can a finite person who lives a short life of perhaps 80, 90, or 100 years deserve eternal suffering? How can they still deserve more punishment and suffering after billions and trillions of years in hell? You would think that even someone like Hitler would have suffered enough after a few trillion years. However, under the popular understanding of hell, not only Hitler, but every person who is not saved through faith in Christ, will still have a lot more suffering to come after their first 100 trillion years of misery.

Atheists have cited this problem of hell as a reason to reject Christianity. Others don’t reject Christianity altogether, but they reject anything resembling evangelical Christianity and are often left with something they still call Christianity that bears little resemblance to the faith described in the Bible or the traditional Christian faith most Christians have held for the last 2,000 years. (I discuss and document how the doctrine of eternal torment has driven people to theological liberalism and atheism in another blog post: here). Further, I have heard testimonies from Christians who, while they maintained their biblical faith, experienced continuing and severe emotional distress at the thought that many people, including some of their family and friends, would be in torment forever.

I can understand why McLaughlin says that this is the hardest of the 12 hard questions she discusses in her book. Unfortunately, she neither defines the problem clearly nor offers a satisfying answer. Most likely this is because she herself holds a common, but unbiblical, view of hell.

The Solution

Neither McLaughlin nor other well intended Christians will be able to provide a satisfying answer to the question of hell as long as their view of what happens to people in hell is unbiblical. McLaughlin does not explicitly explain her view of hell, but based on reading and rereading this chapter, it seems that she holds the traditional view of eternal conscious torment. She does not speak of eternal torment, but she does state that those who reject Jesus will be “eternally devastated” (pg. 219). If we say a person is devasted, we almost always mean something like: they are experiencing severe emotional distress in the form of sadness, depression, despair, or similar dark emotions. If you’ve known someone who has felt like that for a period of months or even years, you know how terrible it is. Imagine feeling like that for hundreds, then thousands, then millions and billions of years on and on for eternity. In this life, when people are devastated there is still hope for them. And in their darkness, there are often at least glimmers of hope and flickers of joy and peace. But in the common view of hell that most Christians hold there is never any hope, joy, or peace mixed in with the eternal despair. Never so much as a flicker of hope. In addition to emotional suffering, I could not tell if McLaughlin also believes hell will include physical torment. The infliction of intense physical pain in hell has been part of the traditional view of hell for well over a thousand years of church history and is still widely believed today – a fact McLaughlin fails to acknowledge, must less give an explanation for.

The solution to the problem of hell is to recognize that the Bible does not teach eternal torment. Instead, the Bible teaches that the unsaved will perish (John 3:16), that God will destroy their bodies and souls in hell (Matthew 10:28), and that they will be burned to ashes (2 Peter 2:6). This biblical doctrine is popularly referred to as annihilationism, but many of us who have seen this truth in the Scripture prefer the term conditional immortality.

As one who believes in conditional immortality, this is what I believe will happen to the unsaved based on the Bible: they will be resurrected to face judgment, the process of being judged and experiencing God’s wrath will bring anguish including weeping and gnashing of teeth, and in the end they will completely and permanently perish. There may be something like ashes or smoke left over, but there will be no living, conscious people remaining. This will be a permanent state. It will last forever. In the meantime, all those who have been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus will have eternal life in a world without any evil or suffering. We will be in God’s loving presence and will experience joyful life and fellowship with Him and each other forever.

Understanding this takes the air out of objections to hell. Instead of explaining why the unsaved deserve to be tormented forever, we merely must explain why they do not deserve to live forever in a perfect world. Do you know anyone who deserves to live forever in a perfect world? God does not owe anyone eternal life. Those who are given eternal life recognize that it is a gift given because of God’s great grace.

It’s worth noting that in the doctrine of conditional immortality, the penalty for sin is death – a complete and total death of both body and soul (Matthew 10:28). However, there is also room in this doctrine for various amounts of suffering before each unsaved person loses consciousness forever. Even in this life, there is far more suffering leading up to death for some people than for others. And some forms of execution are relatively painless (lethal injection if it works as designed), while other forms of execution involve extreme pain and suffering (crucifixion). So conditional immortality allows for degrees of punishment even though in the end all the unrighteous perish.

This still leaves the question of why everyone does not get the gift of eternal life? Different Christians will answer this differently. I think the most likely answer goes something like this. God created us to be in His image, and a very important part of being in His image is having the ability to love like God loves. That kind of love must be given freely or it is not really love. Thus, God gave us a measure of free will (see: Does Love Require Free Will?). Starting with Adam and Eve, people have often chosen to use their free will in ways that hurt God and hurt each other. God made a way for us to be both forgiven and transformed so that we will not continue to hurt others for eternity. Jesus is the way. Our part is to trust Jesus as our Lord and Savior. This is an amazingly gracious way to save us from the consequences of our own sin. It even involved Jesus dying for us on the cross. His death pays for our sins. His death is also a powerful example of love that changes our hearts and lives (see: The Atonement: Its Importance and Meaning, Three Theories). Then He rose again. Those who refuse to accept Christ are not allowed to live forever because that would result in eternity being filled with the same hurt and pain we see in the world now. It is just to sentence them to death (Romans 1:32, Romans 6:23). Perhaps God could have removed their free will and turned them into loveless robots in order to safely give them eternal life, but that was never His plan for humanity. It makes sense that instead of being turned into loveless robots, the unrighteous are burned to ashes and then gone.

In her chapter on hell, McLaughlin does a beautiful job in some places of describing how God saves us. She shares the gospel effectively. What she does not do is explain how that good news could harmonize with God sentencing the unsaved to eternal torment of some type (emotional torment or worse). She does not do that because there really is no good justification for eternal tormen. However, if she and others come to see that the Bible actually teaches conditionally immortality, the hell question will no longer be the hardest question to answer.

Two final thoughts: (1) McLauhglin’s book and (2) evidence for conditional immortality

I have focused on the last chapter of Confronting Christianity, the chapter on hell. If you want a book that does a good job addressing the hard questions related to hell, I would not recommend McLaughlin’s book. However, in my opinion, she addresses the other eleven hard questions in ways that range from pretty good to excellent and powerful. Overall, I would not hesitate to recommend her book to anyone who wrestles with the hard questions she discusses or anyone who wants to help others who  wrestle with those questions. It took courage to address the  twelve toughest questions she could think of. It is unreasonable to expect anyone to bat a thousand when facing a pitcher whose name is “Twelve of the hardest questions in the world.” Her writing style is engaging and winsome and her content is insightful and helpful. She shares stories from her own life and the lives of others that shows that these are not mere intellectual exercises for her. She understands that these issues weigh heavy on many human hearts. She writes with both grace and truth.

In this post, I have claimed that the view of hell called conditional immortality is the correct view based on the Bible. However, the only evidence I have given in this blog post is in the form of some Bible references without even explaining those references, much less addressing the arguments and counterarguments for my view. I’m aware that there are verses that many Christians believe teach eternal torment. I have addressed these types of issues in other blog posts and in several YouTube videos. I have also provided information on other resources for those who want to study the nature of hell in more depth. You may find all this collected in one place here:

Mark’s Resources on Hell

May God bless and guide you as you seek His true and deeply satisfying answers to our most difficult questions. And may God bless Rebecca McLaughlin and others like her who are seeking to help others who struggle with these questions.

Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .