To the many who have asked, here are my
comments about the subject of hell that I’ve written and tweeted in the past.
* Whatever the nature of eternal punishment is — conscious torment or
annihilation — this question has never altered my desire to bring people to
Jesus Christ. Jesus is real Life, for the here-and-now, as well as for the
future. So my motive for evangelism has never been to give people a
fire-insurance policy.
* The greatest Christian minds differ on the NATURE, PURPOSE and SUBJECTS of
hell (subjects = who exactly will go there). But whatever we can say about it,
the NT is clear on two points:
1) it exists, and 2) it’s undesirable.
* I am not a universalist. I believe that all mortals must repent and trust
in Jesus Christ for salvation. With respect to those who have never heard the
gospel, or those who have only heard a distorted version of it, I’m content to
leave such matters into God’s hands. He is righteous, just, and merciful, and I
trust Him.
* Add to that, I don’t believe that every mortal automatically receives
eternal life upon birth (of the flesh). I can’t speak of what happens
immediately after death. The Bible talks about a judgment after death,
but it’s not crystal clear on what happens at the moment of death.
People can only speculate.
* “Jesus is not one of many ways to approach God, nor is He the best of
several ways; He is the only way.” ~ A. W. Tozer
* If there’s life on other planets & they need a Redeemer, Jesus of
Nazareth is it.
* Some people will pass out after they see who makes it in the end. Angels
will be running around all over heaven with smelling salts to wake them up (Luke
13:28, example). [I wrote this in Reimagining Church.]
* “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without
judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” ~ H. Richard
Niebuhr, summarizing the gospel of liberal theology.
* Here’s my concluding statement on hell: When I’m finished exploring and
declaring the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ with my brothers and sisters,
I’ll get around to dissecting the anatomy of hell.
After I wrote the above, I found N.T. Wright’s observations
on the subject. You’ll see that Wright makes many of the same points I have made
above. He says,
My usual counter question is: “Why are Americans so fixated on hell?” Far
more Americans ask me about hell than ever happens in my own country. And I
really want to know, why is it that the most prosperous affluent nation on earth
is really determined to be sure that they know precisely who is going to be
frying in hell and what the temperature will be and so on.
There’s something quite disturbing about that actually, especially when your
nation and mine has done quite a lot in the last decade or two to drop bombs on
people elsewhere and to make a lot of other people’s lives hell. So I think
there are some quite serious issues about why people want to ask that
question.
Having said that, I am not a universalist. I’ve never been universalist.
Someone quoted a theologian saying, “I’m not a universalist, but maybe God
is.” That’s kind of a neat way of saying, “Ok, there’s stuff in Scripture which
is a little puzzling about this, and we can’t be absolutely sure all down the
line.”
But it seems to me that the New Testament is very clear that there are people
who do reject God and reject what would have been His best will for them, and
God honors that decision. How that works and how you then deal with the
questions which result I have written about at some length.
I do think it’s good to stir things up because so many people, as I say,
particularly in American culture, really want to know the last fine-tuned
details of hell. And it seems to be part of their faith, often a central part of
their faith, that a certain number of people are simply going to go to hell and
we know who these people are.
- Frank Viola
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