On Hell
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I've been told to go to hell many times in my life and it's bizarre to actually be here.

We're here in hell at the moment. In fact, we're told that in Jerusalem, hell's the place you take your children on the weekend because there's this beautiful play area behind us now. But it wasn't always like that. In fact, this place we're standing in is Gehenna, one of the most common images of hell in the New Testament. Well, in fact, the word Gehenna appears 11 times in the New Testament and 10 of them are from Jesus' lips. He spoke about it more than anyone.

That's a conversation I had with my mate, Dr. Greg Clark. It's a documentary he and I made for Aussie TV all about the life of Jesus. And we called it Life of Jesus. We are strolling through a park in southwest Jerusalem that in Jesus' day was known as Gehenna. And as you're going to hear later on in the show, that's the Bible's word for hell.

The evil and violence that took place in this grassy valley centuries earlier turned Gehenna into a Jewish byword for ruin, for destruction, hell.

It's truly weird to walk through it today knowing it's now a family picnic area. Anyway, this is that episode. One I've promised for ages, but haven't felt capable of making, or at least doing the topic justice. Despite my quip at the top, there's nothing fun about this subject.

Unsurprisingly, hell is a lot less popular than heaven. In 2023, Pew Research found that while 71% of Americans believe in heaven, 61% believe in hell. Actually, I'm surprised it's that high on both fronts. I don't have the data for my homeland. It's not the sort of thing pollsters think of asking Australians, but I'm pretty sure the percentages wouldn't even be half that of the U.S.,

Hell is repugnant to many. Even the great C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, The Problem of Pain, It's strong stuff from the patron saint of undeceptions. I suppose much of it, though, depends on what we mean when we say hell.

The cliché of a fiery abyss with unquenchable flames just seems perverse. It's a joke, even. I vaguely remember a Simpsons episode where Homer visits Hell and it's exactly like that caricature. It's a fiery lake with the devil there to poke and prod you. It's mockable. It's cartoonish. I've been asked straight up over the years, quite a few times, are you one of those Christians that believes in Hell?

I usually pause and respond with something like, I probably don't believe in the hell you're thinking of when you ask me that. But I do believe in the thing Jesus referred to when he used the word. And as I mentioned up top, of all the characters in the Bible, no one comes close to using the word hell as much as Jesus does. So what did he mean?

How is it plausible? And what does it matter? Okay, here we go. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics that

that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. I think all of us know, you know, whether we've sat down and watched a film or read a book or lived a life, that the end of the story...

changes how we look at the story up to that point. That's friend of the podcast, Rebecca McLaughlin, author of the award-winning 2019 book, Confronting Christianity, which I still reckon is the best all-round defense of the Christian faith in the last 10 years.

Rebecca holds a doctorate in English Literature from Cambridge University, and for good measure, she has a degree in theology as well. She travels extensively these days, helping others see the good sense of Christianity.

But she admits hell is one of those ideas that just doesn't make sense to many. A bit like C.S. Lewis, she calls it the most difficult thing Christians are called to believe. I'm reading the Harry Potter series at the moment with my six-year-old son. And we just read the sixth book where there's this massive, devastating scene.

where Severus Snape kills Dumbledore. Sorry if that's a spoiler for those who haven't partaken. And it's only in the last book towards the end that we realise, oh, actually, no, we've completely misunderstood what was happening there. We think that it's the final proof that Snape is on the side of evil, and actually it's Snape doing something incredibly hard for him

because Dumbledore has told him to. And I think when it comes to the Christian story and when it comes to the sort of message of Christianity for the world today, one of the questions we need to ask is what is the end of the story in Christian terms? And I think Christianity offers us a beautiful and compelling and extraordinary end to the story beyond our wildest dreams that anybody and everybody is invited to join.

And at the same time, it offers us an end to the story that is horrifying beyond our worst nightmares in many ways. And we're kind of left with the tension of that because each of us will find ourselves in one of those two stories. And I think that that's really the hardest thing

thing to wrap your mind around as a follower of Jesus, as somebody who deeply believes that Jesus is who he claims to be and takes therefore everything that Jesus says with the utmost seriousness. The warnings that Jesus himself gave about the judgment of God are terrifying warnings and ones that in some ways I wish weren't there on the pages of my Bible because it's not a truth I gravitate towards.

But when the most loving man who's ever lived gives us a sober warning, I think we need to take note. "As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Matthew chapter 13.

That's just one of the times Jesus describes the final judgment of God as a fiery hell. He explicitly uses the word hell 11 times in the Gospels. We'll hear a bunch of them in this episode. What's interesting is that that's 11 twelfths of all the appearances in the Bible. The only other reference to hell comes from Jesus' half-brother, James, in chapter 3 of his letter.

I know it's tempting and fashionable to think of hell as something invented by the nasty church after Jesus. But the evidence is clear. It comes from the man from Nazareth himself. And there's a good reason for that. In Jewish expectation, beginning with the Old Testament, it is the Messiah, the king descended from David, who will bring justice to the world, overthrowing oppressors and lifting up the oppressed.

Isaiah chapter 11.

Here, and in many other places actually, judgment is about righting wrongs, justice for the needy. God isn't a strict schoolmaster looking for naughty children to punish. He's more like a passionate justice commissioner whose mission is to right the wrongs of the world.

And importantly, it's the Messiah in the Jewish tradition who's destined to execute this justice. The text says he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. With the breath of his lips, he will slay the wicked. That's the role, the role of justice commissioner that Jesus consistently claimed he would fulfill.

It's not as popular as Jesus Meek and Mild, but the historical data is conclusive. Dale Allison is one of today's most celebrated New Testament historians, and he is no friend of Christian apologetics. But in one of his monographs, he remarks how the contemporary distaste of hell often obscures the original Jesus. Given that so many people nowadays dislike hell but still like Jesus,

It is not surprising that some modern reconstructions no longer depict him as a believer in future punishment. One could here be cynical and wonder to what extent the wish has cultivated the conclusion, a conclusion that certainly goes against the impression that the Gospels leave. Jesus gave us hell, whether we like it or not. And plenty of us don't like it.

I mean, it makes me think, though, that, you know, this gut reaction that even, you know, the most sincere and learned Christians have about the problem of hell is perhaps an indication of its inherent implausibility. Or at least I can imagine a skeptic pointing that out. You know, even you guys don't like this. Even you guys can see it's horrible and maybe not plausible.

I think so. And that's where we really need to take a step back, in my opinion, and look at what it is that we actually believe about hell.

When I started to dive into these studies and looked very carefully at what Scripture has to say, I found it to be surprisingly opaque about details of what hell is like. That's Brian Tong, Assistant Professor of Theology at California Baptist University.

Brian recently completed an important dissertation on hell under American theologian Kevin Van Hooser, who's another recent Undeceptions guest and a very big deal in theology.

There's a lot of metaphorical language. There are cultural references taking place. And as I tried to set myself into a more settled location on this, I realized, well, my view of hell is a lot like my view of heaven. They've been filled with maybe centuries of mythology that have built up to the point where I have this picture that maybe scripture is not even trying to paint.

In the back of the Scraveni Chapel in Padua, in northern Italy, you'll find one of the most impressive and terrifying paintings of God's judgment. The Florentine painter Ghiotto used the lower right-hand corner of a large spectacular fresco to depict a gluttonous, horned monster, Satan, standing at the gates of hell, devouring sinners like snacks.

then unceremoniously excreting them. Naked men and women are dragged down to hell by demons where they are spit-roasted and speared or stuffed into deep pits. Seriously, go check it out.

When painters like Giotto depicted hell on canvas, or writers like Dante laid down his vision in ink, they were trying to make serious points in pictures or metaphors. They wanted to convince us just how awful hell was, whatever the factual details. But the images became caricatures, and it's a short hop, skip, and a jump to the Simpsons episode I mentioned earlier.

And now many, including many Christians, can't take hell seriously.

I think for your average Christian or even your average non-Christian who's pulling from these mythologies that have built up, we have this picture of Satan as the red devil with the pitchfork and he and his demons are torturing people endlessly into eternity. And so that's what we're thinking of and that certainly already has

points of conflict with what scripture has to tell us about hell because for one, it's not a realm that Satan rules. Hell is a place that God rules over, so it's not a location where God sends the unrighteous to be tormented by Satan. Satan, in fact, is the one who is first judged and thrown into the lake of fire in Revelation.

And so that already pulls from this dualism that has quietly settled into church mythology of

heaven is God's realm and hell is Satan's realm and they are in this, they're locking horns and dueling into eternity. And that certainly is not a biblical view of what hell would be like. And so that would be the first step that I would want to take with people is just to realize that hell is a place of God's judgment. It is a place where God's sovereignty reigns. Let's walk slowly through the different parts of Scripture to build up a picture of hell.

I mean, obviously, we've got to start in the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures. Many would point out that you don't even have a concept of hell in the Old Testament, so it's probably a bogus idea anyway.

Yeah, that's very commonplace. And it's understandable to come from that perspective because admittedly, the Old Testament is more opaque in its approach. There are scholars, though, who look at, in particular, the use of the Hebrew word sheol and try to dig into what's going on there. I'm fairly convinced...

The word Sheol appears more than 60 times in the Old Testament, and modern experts argue a lot about exactly what it is. Here's a good example from the Old Testament book of Job: "If I hope for Sheol as my house, if I make my bed in darkness, if I say to the pit, 'You are my father,' and to the worm, 'My mother or my sister,' where then is my hope? Who will see my hope?

"Will it go down to the bars of Sheol? Shall we descend together into the dust?" Job chapter 17. Sheol commonly just means the abode of death, where all the dead go. There aren't really descriptions of it other than it's dark and it's deep.

I'm fairly convinced by Philip Johnston. He wrote a book called Shades of Sheol where he makes the case that in Old Testament characterization, it is a place that represents God's judgment on the unrighteous or as a place where God's favor is no longer present.

And so you think of the Psalms, for instance, where you'll hear phrases like, "I have descended to the depths of Sheol." And it would be in the poetic form expressing this lament of feeling like God's favor and his presence are gone.

And then in more technical usages to actually speak of God's judgment upon the unrighteous, especially in the prophets, you have God judging the Assyrians and the Babylonians and speaking of them being sent to Sheol. And so I think there is a case to be made for Sheol actually having some of those implications already in the Old Testament.

The Jewish scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, is pretty vague about the afterlife. Until the book of Daniel. "There will be a time of distress, such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time your people, everyone whose name is found written in the book, will be delivered. Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life,

others to shame and everlasting contempt. Many will be purified, made spotless and refined, but the wicked will continue to be wicked. None of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand. Daniel chapter 12

The book of Daniel is arguably the latest book in the Old Testament, and it offers a kind of bridge between the vague Jewish concept of Sheol and the full-blown message of a fiery hell on the lips of Jesus.

The main thing that I've picked up on taking place is that, for instance, right in the end of the book of Daniel, you have this language of an eternal punishment taking place, right? People go to eternal blessedness or eternal punishment in Daniel chapter 12.

And the main feature that jumped out to me was that this idea of an eternal destiny started to take shape here. Because previous to that, Sheol was just the abode of the dead. That was just where they left it. And there was not much...

taking place around it. But what happens in the intertestamental period in particular is picking up on, I think, the apocalypticism of Daniel and carrying it forward. And we do see that taking place in the New Testament. Some will say that this is an argument from silence, but I think the New Testament is implicitly picking up on those ideas, especially in its Hades language, that Sheol and Hades have a very clear connection that's taking place.

And so therefore, the New Testament is actually making those connections and bringing that idea forward of an eternal destiny for the unrighteous.

So there's a vague shadowy idea of the place of the dead in most of the Old Testament. The word is Sheol, and the Greek equivalent of that, including in the New Testament, is Hades, or Hades if we're going to be nerds. Some of you will already know that the word Hades had huge currency in the pagan Greek world. It referred to the god of the underworld and to the underworld itself.

Greek-speaking Jews felt okay using Hades as the rough equivalent of the Hebrew Sheol. But still, that's not quite the concept of hell with its clear message of post-mortem punishment. I mean, Daniel does have a picture of the wicked experiencing everlasting shame, but even he doesn't use the word hell. So there's more to explore. Where did hell come from?

And clearly, by the time we get to Jesus in the Gospels, he speaks about what the English translations translate as hell. The word is Gehenna, mostly. Tell me what you see in the Gospels, which is mainly from the lips of Jesus, about hell. What can we reliably say Jesus thought about hell?

So Gehenna, I think it's important to start off with realizing that this is speaking of an actual geographic location. It was the Valley of Hinnom that was essentially the trash dump outside of Jerusalem where they would set things on fire. So there was this literal picture of fire and destruction that Jesus was picking up on when he speaks of Gehenna. And then he

This word comes from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah in the 600s BC, who warned that God would judge the Israelites who had burned their children to pagan gods in the valley of Hinnom, Gehenna.

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: "Listen, I am going to bring a disaster on this place that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods. They have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew. And they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent.

The book of Jeremiah chapter 19.

The valley of Hinnom, Gehenna, will be the place of slaughter, of final judgement. Okay, so let's pull all this together.

Jeremiah's threat of judgment against a particular valley in southwest Jerusalem was combined with Daniel's warning of a future judgment after death. And the result was that Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was transformed into a metonym or a byword for eternal ruin.

For example, there's a text called Targum Jonathan. You don't need to know the details, but it's basically an Aramaic rendering of the Hebrew scriptures that we think predates Jesus. And in it, we read this.

And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men, the sinners who have rebelled against my word. For their souls shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched, and the wicked shall be judged in Gehenna. Till the righteous shall say concerning them, We have seen enough. That's Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 66, 24.

This Jewish way of speaking was taken up by Jesus, who added the detail from Isaiah 11 that it's the Messiah, he himself, who will determine who does and doesn't go to Gehenna.

What Jesus very clearly picks up on in his teaching of hell, and he teaches on hell the most compared to anyone else in the New Testament, is to say that this is a place you do not want to be. This is where the unrighteous will be consigned. It is a place of fire and destruction. And that's where we want to think carefully through what moves do we make beyond that in terms of what hell actually entails. So what does it entail?

According to Jesus. According to Jesus, I think he's actually not too interested in giving us very specific details about what hell involves.

Because in the New Testament, what I'm finding is that Jesus uses it as a deterrent. This is the place you did not want to be. It is better to throw your arm into hell than to have it cause you to sin, right? And so there's always this look back of this is the destiny that could await the unrighteous.

But the thrust of it is always to push us back into the present and to say, "What is at stake right now in this moment is the way that I respond to Jesus. And will I choose to walk in his ways or will I choose the broad path that leads to destruction?" If anyone causes one of these little ones, those who believe in me, to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble. Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come. If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.

And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of Gehenna. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.

and throw that worthless servant outside into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Matthew chapter 25. I mean, he uses language of fire, clearly. He uses language

Weeping and gnashing of teeth. On one occasion, outer darkness. Another occasion, being beaten with rods. Many rods or few rods. So what do we do with this? This all seems pretty much like the cliche of hell. Are you telling me the Bible doesn't mean what it says? What I'm saying is that we don't want to impose too much on the text.

Certainly we can tell from what Jesus is saying that is that hell is not a place we want to be. It is a place where we will experience God's righteous wrath against sin. But what will that look like in particular? We don't know the details of how that will take place.

And that's where I want us to draw careful boundaries because the thrust of what Jesus is saying to us is not, "From here, let's talk about what hell would be like and the details of what we're trying to avoid." The thrust every time is always to press us toward discipleship, toward following Christ.

And so I think there's something to that in terms of it's interesting to follow our intellectual rabbit trails and even at times to have measured speculation in terms of what that might be involved. But we would be missing the point if we just let that rabbit trail determine our response to that situation in the moment, because I don't think that's

the thrust of what Jesus is getting at in particular when he invokes those statements in the Gospels. Yes, and it's pretty hard to imagine a fire that is also darkness. Yeah, and so these are images that are meant to conjure ideas of pain, destruction, but exactly what that will entail, I think there is definitely a degree of mystery that we need to be comfortable with here.

The imagery isn't meant to be taken concretely. This doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously. Yeah, I think anyone who wants to get their hands around what the Bible really says about hell, I think the thing that I would recommend to you the most to do is sit down and read through the four gospel accounts of Jesus' life and teachings. Always a good recommendation. Because Jesus, who...

is truly the most loving man who ever lived. I mean, who was going around even before his sacrificial death for his enemies, was going around healing people, caring for people, protecting people who were being under attack from others, gathering in those who were despised socially for one reason or another. This deeply loving, gentle, humble man.

And Jesus talks more about God's judgment and what we now call hell than pretty much any sort of Old Testament prophet. And the language that Jesus uses when he talks about hell is language like a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's language like the sort of unquenchable fire. Things that we sometimes think of as caricatures are actually not

massively distant from the language that Jesus uses to describe those who are cast out from God's presence, those who are experiencing God's judgment. And one of the, again, I think surprising to many who perhaps haven't spent a lot of time reading the Bible, one of the key things that Jesus taught about hell and that the New Testament teaches is that Jesus is the judge who

sends people to hell or welcomes people into heaven. So rather than it being, oh well, sometimes we have a caricature of the God in the Old Testament who's all about judgment and punishment and wrath, and then Jesus comes along and suddenly it's all kind of grace and mercy and forgiveness. When yes, there is plenty of talk of God's judgment in the Old Testament, there's also a lot of graciousness and mercy and forgiveness. And in the New Testament, we see Jesus

on the one hand, extending God's offer of forgiveness and mercy in this utterly remarkable way, and warning people very soberly of God's coming judgment on anyone who doesn't receive Him. And I think when it comes to both the New Testament's descriptions of heaven or the new heavens and the new earth, and to the New Testament's descriptions of the alternative,

We are getting our hands around a lot of imagery, a lot of things which, you know, I think we have a sense in both directions that we can't fully grasp what's being pointed toward. But it's pretty clear that...

there will be massive regret for anyone who finds themselves, in Jesus' terms, cast out when he comes back. There's a sobering moment in the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible which talks about people calling on the hills to fall on them and the mountains to cover them to save them from the wrath of the Lamb.

And the reason I always find that verse so striking is that the Lamb is a word associated with Jesus in the New Testament, and it speaks specifically to Jesus' sacrificial death. That he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, that he is the one who came to give his life so we could live. And so there is this vulnerability and generosity and love inherent in this picture of Jesus as the Lamb.

And yet this same picture is used to point in at that moment to Jesus's terrifying judgment. So we have sort of both of those things going on.

Ultimately, the biblical images of judgment, whether of fire, darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, or Gehenna itself, are all metaphors. They just can't be read literally. It makes no sense to add them all up together and say, there, that's what hell is going to be like.

Picture language doesn't work like that. It's a bit like the pictures of Jesus' return for judgment in, say, the book of Revelation. We're told he'll come riding on a white horse and have a sword coming out of his mouth. No responsible Bible reader can miss that this is picture language. It's the language of victory. It's the language of Jesus speaking the verdict. So we can't say exactly what hell will be like as a concrete experience.

But there are some general principles about the judgment that we can work out from both Jesus' teaching and the teaching of the apostles in the New Testament. We can know it's eternal, it's just and therefore proportional, and it's entirely avoidable. Stay with us. Back in 2011, a corporate branding consultant, Chris Herron, decided to have a go at rebranding Hell.

It was mostly a self-promotion project to showcase his creativity, but it is interesting. Heron took on the fictional client of the Hell Office of Travel and Tourism. The office hired him in the wake of a steady decline in visitors caused by a stale and unfocused brand strategy.

Hell underwent a complete brand overhaul. No more demons, devils, tridents or lakes of fire. Hell's new logo had a bright blue background and bubbly, friendly lettering, which Heron said would evoke instant accessibility and comfort. The whole rebrand is in the show notes for you. Heron was just having a bit of marketing fun with a pretty serious subject.

But around the same time, megachurch pastor Rob Bell wrote a serious book called Love Wins. In some ways, it was a theological attempt to rebrand hell.

Bell argued that a loving God would never sentence human souls to eternal punishment. All people would one day somehow be saved through Christ. The book was a bestseller. His book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Time magazine ran a cover story on him titled, What If There's No Hell? Time listed Rob Bell as one of the 100 most influential people in the world that year.

There are various versions of no-hell theology. One is universalism, a bit like what Rob Bell was arguing. It basically says that everyone ultimately will enjoy the kingdom of God, regardless of whether they wanted it or not.

It's not a new idea. The third century Christian scholar, Oregon of Alexandria, sometimes said origin, taught a version of universalism. He even wondered if the devil himself would ultimately be saved. I think we've mentioned that in a Q&A episode in the past.

The 4th century theologian Gregory of Nyssa came close to universalism. He argued that if God is to be all in all, as the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, eventually God's punishment of sinners in hell must come to an end, since evil can't persist alongside good, not in any ultimate sense. Unlike Oregon, Gregory is revered in orthodoxy, mostly for his teaching on the Trinity.

But his universalism is considered part of his speculative thought, not his authoritative teaching. Indeed, the Second Council of Constantinople in the year 553 declared, quoting, If anyone says the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary and will one day have an end, and that a restoration apocatastasis will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be pardoned.

The other kind of no-hell position is annihilationism, or conditional mortality, it's sometimes called. It's the view that those who don't enter God's eternal kingdom just stop existing. They die and nothing. I asked Brian about that.

Okay, so there's mystery, there's opaqueness, and therefore some have felt the freedom to speculate about, I don't mean the nature of hell, but speculate about the doctrine of hell. For example, it seems increasingly popular amongst certain kinds of theologians to say that hell is simply non-existence, that in the end what happens, what hell is a metaphor of, is people no longer being conscious.

So those who go to hell really just enter into the destruction of consciousness. We can call this conditional mortality, annihilationism. But what do you think of that speculation?

I think it's a view that is very understandable for people to step into. There are many scholars who hold to this. John Stott perhaps being the most notable. The Pope of Protestantism himself is one who seemed to gesture in this direction. He certainly didn't lay it down as the teaching of the New Testament. Yeah, certainly not. That language of gesturing, I think that's perfect actually.

And so he certainly held it open as a possibility. And so I think it is something to look at and to deconstruct in terms of what are the assumptions that lay there. I think one of the key aspects to a conditional mortality or annihilationist view is wanting to push back on the immortality of the human soul.

That's one of their initial questions because the traditional view of hell, or even a universalist view perhaps, would carry that in as a presumption that human souls are immortal. But we don't necessarily take that for granted given the events of the Garden of Eden and the removal of the Tree of Life from access to humanity.

And so they're asking a very legitimate question. Is it Platonism merely being smuggled in that we're assuming this immortal soul? Or is in fact this kind of destruction, if we're taking it very literally, the destruction of the human being herself when cast into the fires of hell? And so that's a legitimate question there.

I think a secondary question that usually comes into play is the question of justice, that an infinite punishment seems excessive for a finite being. For most conditional mortality proponents, I think that's one of the key aspects to their argument is that it does not compute to have a finite human being commit infinite sins and be punished for an eternity for them.

Annihilationism has a certain attractiveness, but it creates problems, at least for me. For one thing, however much I squint at all the texts about hell and judgment, I just can't make the Bible sound like it's not talking about actual ongoing punishment.

In Revelation 20, we see a picture of final judgment that says, The devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

Obviously, the devil is tormented forever, but so are the beast and the false prophet. And these are clearly pictures of humans. They're despotic Roman officials, actual people who are going to be punished forever. And in the very next paragraph of Revelation 20, we're told that plenty of other human beings, those whose names aren't written in the Lamb's Book of Life, are sent to the same place.

Now, I suppose you could say that only the devil and some super bad humans are tormented forever, whereas normal bad humans just stop existing. But that really does feel like squinting. But there's another problem with annihilationism. It means that everyone who misses out on God's kingdom receives the same arbitrary level of punishment, non-existence.

Hitler and the humanitarian could receive the same judgment. I can't believe it. As we'll soon see, historic Christianity has always pointed out that the Bible promises God will judge people proportionally in accordance with what they've actually done. God is just. It can't be the case that everyone receives the same punishment.

We know all your sins, Bender, and for each one, we've prepared an agonizing and ironic punishment. Gentlemen? Ah, crap singing. Mind if I smoke? Cigars are evil, you won't miss 'em. We'll find ways to simulate that smell. What a sorry fella, rolled up and smoked like a granitella here on Level 1 of Robot Hell.

Gambling's wrong and so is cheating, so is forging, phony IOUs. Let's let Lady Locke decide what type of torture's justified. I'm Pit Force here on level two. Ooh, deep fried robot. That's a clip from the animated TV series by Adult Swim, Futurama, when Beezlebot shows main character, Bender, what awaits him in robot hell.

We only got to level two, but just like in Dante's famous medieval poem, The Divine Comedy, where there are nine circles of hell, there are multiple levels of robot hell, representing a gradual increase in wickedness and corresponding torment.

But Robot Hell doesn't come close to Dante's vivid depictions of hell. His long Italian poem tells the story of the author's journey to the three domains of the dead, to hell, purgatory and paradise. But it's hell, the inferno, as Dante calls it, that most captures our imagination.

Dante's hell is a deep funnel with nine circular tiers. The first circle is limbo, where the unbaptized and virtuous pagans are contained. They didn't choose Christ, but they did choose human virtue. Their punishment is a deficient type of heaven, where they desire salvation but can't ever attain it.

The tears get progressively smaller and worse as we cycle deeper through worse and worse sins. Lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, and violence. Violence is the seventh circle. And to match their sins, people in this seventh circle spend eternity boiling in blood, of course.

But fix your eyes below, for the river of blood draws near, within which boils whoever did injury to others by violence. The Inferno Canto 12. The eighth circle is fraud, which is an interesting ethical choice by Dante. The final circle is treachery, and in the very center of hell, the devil.

I asked Brian what he thinks about Dante's depiction of hell. The main point Dante is trying to convey isn't any of his particular pictures. It's the idea that there are punishments that fit the crimes. Yes. And that not only do particular sins bring particular mirrored punishments, but degrees of

of sin and unrepentance bring degrees of punishment, hence the multiple levels of hell. I just want to ask, you know, leaving aside the crazy imagery that he puts forward, what do you think of that basic theological claim that he seems to be making?

I think there's something inherently deeply biblical about that picture. If we look at the Old Testament law, we see that God sets down a law that is very deeply nuanced and looks very carefully at the levels of sin that are taking place and the injustices that are perpetrated. But if just one person sins unintentionally, that person must bring a year-old female goat for a sin offering.

Numbers chapter 30.

And so, you definitely don't want to fall into the false sense of all sin is sin, right? You hear people in the church say that. We're all unrighteous before God, all sin is sin. Well,

If we look carefully at the Old Testament, God clearly differentiates and there are certain sins that are incredibly serious and there are others that can be atoned for through purification. And we could go on and on about the different levels of nuance that take place in the Old Testament law.

So when we look to Dante and we see levels of punishment, I think that squares very clearly with biblical teaching that if God is a God of justice, he's going to punish sins in just the right amount. He will never fly off the handle. His justice is never one that is done out of anger or a loss of control. It is always a measured righteous punishment that will be fitting toward the crime.

So two cheers for Dante. Maybe not three, but two. Yeah, sounds good. I need to say more about this idea of proportionality because there's a very common modern misconception that God's punishment of those who oppose his ways is going to be applied equally to all.

It's based on this aphorism that all sin is sin, whether you've stolen a cookie or committed atrocities. But that's a bit like saying all crimes are criminal. Sure, but not all criminal acts are equal or deserve the same punishment.

The Bible certainly affirms that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, as Paul puts it in Romans 3. But that doesn't for a moment mean that we're equally sinful, that we've all equally fallen short of God's glory, or that we'll experience equal punishment. The Bible teaches the opposite.

Romans chapter 2

According to what each has done means commensurate with, in proportion to what each has done. It's exactly what the Old Testament law says about different acts of injustice receiving different punishments in ancient Israel. And Paul stresses this point by saying that some people are storing up wrath against themselves.

Storing up is thesaurizo. It's a financial term. It means to accumulate. God's judgment can accumulate. It can increase depending on how recalcitrant someone is.

Jesus, too, spoke of the more important matters of God's law in Matthew chapter 23. Some of God's commands are just weightier than others. And Jesus immediately explains in this passage what he means. The more important duties, he says, are justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Breaking those commands is worse than, I don't know, swearing at your dog or something.

Jesus also said people have a lesser or greater debt before God, depending on how they've lived. He told this wonderful parable in Luke chapter 7 about two people who couldn't repay a money lender. The lender, of course, is God. Neither of them could repay, he said, but they did have different debts. One owed 50 silver coins, 50 denarii. The other, 500 denarii.

Both debts were freely forgiven in the parable. Now that's worth remembering. But Jesus is clear that one of them was forgiven more. And as a result, he says, that person is going to love the generous lender more. Check it out in Luke chapter 7.

The same idea of different levels of sin and judgment is frequently on Jesus' lips. In Matthew 11, he contrasts the judgment due to some Jewish towns with the judgment due to some famously immoral Gentile cities. Have a listen. Woe to you, Chorazin!

Woe to you, Bethsaida! If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths.

The expression here, "more bearable," makes clear that everyone's experience of judgment will not be the same. God's judgment isn't one size fits all. Yes, it's going to be better for some than others. That's what Jesus said.

In Luke 12, Jesus contrasts the judgment due to people who do wrong knowing his teaching and people who do wrong without the same knowledge of his teaching. "That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.

What else can many blows and few blows mean than that different people will experience different degrees of punishment? That's probably why in Luke 20, Jesus says the religious experts will receive more punishment than regular sinners.

Yes, religious hypocrites seem destined for greater punishment than regular sinners.

In any case, the idea that all sins are equal and everyone gets the same experience of hell, of divine justice, is a modern invention.

From the Old Testament through to Jesus and the Apostles and all the way through church history. The truth is God's judgment won't be arbitrary, one size fits all. It will be just and so it will be proportional, commensurate with our actions. Hitler and the humanitarian will not experience the same penalty.

What is this place? It's just a place. You know, an area or location. It's pretty straightforward. The Museum of Human Misery? Oh, yeah. Okay, it's a torture museum. Famous examples of bad behavior and explanations of the torture they earned. Is there a gift shop? Jason, this is hell. Of course there's a gift shop. It's the least horrifying room. It's the hall of low-grade crappiness. First person to floss in an open plan office?

Well, she deserves to be tortured. She's a monster. This was the safest place. That's a scene from the extraordinary TV show The Good Place, which manages to deal in both philosophy and comedy in equal measure. It's a show about heaven and hell, though not the ones we find in the Bible.

And yet it feels like a show somehow made for Undeceptions listeners. The humor is often found in references to Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Hercule Gore, Aristotle, and so on. Anyway, the main characters find themselves in a room of hell, the hall of low-grade crappiness, displaying the types of people who've done bad things and examples of the torture they undergo in this particular hell.

The show never actually says what torture the woman who flosses in an open plan office earned. But according to their guide, it's nothing to be overly concerned about. It's funny, but it does capture the logic, the biblical logic of proportionality in judgment.

But then the good place makes a logical error, at least from the Bible's perspective. None of this means that doing good can wipe out wrongdoing and get us into heaven. In the show, that's exactly how it works. There's a point system on both the negative and the positive side of the ledger. Help a stranded driver fix her flat tire, get 200 points toward heaven.

Lie to your professor, that's minus 100. You get the idea. But that assumes we could ever do enough to earn God's eternal kingdom. And Jesus rejected that idea. He acknowledged in Luke 7, as I've said, that someone can have a 500 denarii debt before God and another person just 50 denarii debt. But he plainly says neither was capable of repaying.

What let both of the debtors off the hook in Jesus' parable wasn't their own resources, but the pure mercy of the moneylender. Forgiveness has to be free and full. In a way, then, mercy isn't just because it's gratuitous.

But judgment can't be gratuitous or arbitrary, one size fits all, because judgment, unlike mercy, is about justice. And justice demands proportionality. Now, I don't know how people's experiences of Gehenna will differ according to what they've done. Perhaps it's to do with shame.

I mean, the picture of hell in Revelation 20 says people go to everlasting shame. Actually, Daniel chapter 12 says the same thing. Maybe that's it. Maybe degrees of shame before the pure goodness of God is how someone's experience of hell can be commensurate with their deeds. I don't know. What I do know is that the degree to which humans have defied divine goodness...

will be the degree to which they experience divine judgment. This has been the traditional theological view of things until about five minutes ago in the history of the church.

Herman Bavinck is a really good test case. He's a Dutch Reformed theologian who wrote a magisterial four-volume systematic theology. He's widely regarded still today as one of the most subtle and capacious minds in the modern history of theology. His magnum opus has just recently been republished, and it's totally amazing.

But Bavinck wrote in the early 20th century, before the all sinners sin, everyone's punished equally idea took off in evangelical circles.

And in his section about future judgment, he lays out this traditional distinction between poena damni, that's the penalty of damnation, and poena sensus, the penalty of sensation or experience. We can't speak only of the fact that people go to hell. We have to speak of the different experience or sensation of that penalty. Let me quote him. Scripture teaches very clearly...

that there are degrees of punishment. All sin is absolutely opposed to the justice of God, but in punishing sin, God nevertheless takes account of the relative difference existing between sins. There is infinite diversity on the other side of the grave. For the nerds, we're going to put the full text of Bavinck's treatment of proportionality in the show notes.

I think there is a definite positive side to the teaching of hell, and that would be that God's justice is upheld. I think you raised the question earlier of, well, what about Hitler? And there's that question of justice for each and every one of us. When we see evils perpetrated in the world, there is something deep within us that cries out for justice to be done.

And what we find all too often in this world is that does not take place. Those people get off scot-free or they do not experience the degree of punishment that is deserved for the atrocities that some of these people have committed. There certainly is the reality in this world that justice has not been fully satisfied.

And so when we look at the teaching of hell, I think what we ultimately want to do is to have that direct us back to God and to see what he is doing. What he is demonstrating to us in hell is that he will vindicate himself in the end, that he will show himself to be the God of justice and righteousness.

And I think in the end, when we all get to see that, we will say, amen. It truly is the case that God is everything he said he was and so much more. How we feel about divine judgment will depend in part on which side of the justice equation we imagine we're sitting on. Think of the 15-year-old girl, Tanja.

She's a Roma girl trafficked from the Czech Republic to a brothel in Germany. We did a whole episode about this theme. It's episode eight, cyber sex trafficking. She's brutalized into compliance. She services 10 customers a day and is then made to pose for images for the internet. She slumps into bed at night, offers the prayers her grandmother taught her, not really knowing if there's anyone on the other end to hear her.

How do you think she feels about God's proportional judgment? I bet she's thinking, how long, Lord? But then let's think about the others in the same equation. Think of the madam of the brothel. She tells herself Tanja has it better with her. Or the men who use her services and think that they have some sort of bond with her because she's been taught to smile. Or think of the Sydney teenager who views her images online and

Images she enjoys, he thinks. She must have chosen it, he thinks. These people are going to resent any talk of God judging people. How we feel about judgment depends on which side of the justice equation we imagine we're on. The doctrine of hell says that God will overthrow all that is opposed to his love and justice.

The degree to which I've participated in hate, in injustice, is the degree to which, if I haven't looked to God for mercy, I will experience the judgment of hell. Viewed from this angle, judgment isn't a theological scare tactic. It's at least in part God's pledge to wounded humanity that he hears our cry for justice.

and he'll bring his justice to bear on every human evil. God will bring justice for Tanya, for the poor we have neglected, for genuine refugees we've shunned, for victims of church abuse, and so on. The degree to which we've participated in injustice, in defying God's ways, is the degree to which we will experience Christ's judgment.

If God were not angry at injustice and deception, and did not make a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship.

That's our voice actor, Yannick Laurie, reading the Yale philosopher-theologian Miroslav Volf, who joined us back in episode 50 to talk about the good life. Here, though, he's talking about God's final judgment as the righting of wrongs. My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many.

To the person inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone. Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have first been plundered, then burned and levelled to the ground. Whose daughters and sisters have been raped. Whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit.

Soon, you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God's refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. If you can bear more, please stay with us. Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever.

and this must either be true or false. Now, there are a good many things that would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only 70 years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse, so gradually that the increase in 70 years will not be very noticeable.

but it might be absolute hell in a million years. In fact, if Christianity is true, hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others. But you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it.

But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God sending us to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. C.S. Lewis wrote that the doors of hell are locked from the inside.

He means that hell is a place of our own choosing. In his fictional work, The Great Divorce, Lewis writes about a man who gets to take a bus trip from hell to heaven as a kind of vacation.

In Hell, the streets and residences stretch out so far that it requires centuries of travel to get from one end of the city to the other. But as the bus reaches Heaven, it becomes clear that Hell is just a tiny crack in the ground of Heaven. Heaven by comparison is expansive.

It's meant to show that heaven is an opening of reality in its fullness, and hell is the reduction of reality to the concerns of the self only. It's an Augustinian idea, of course. Sin is the state of being incurvitous in se, curved in on oneself. Hell is at once isolating and claustrophobic.

Okay, another good speculation or an important speculation is C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, where hell is a dreary town that's lost down a crack in the floor of heaven, where people mostly just choose to stay there because it's such a diminished life. They're so used to their...

diminished half existence that even when they're offered a chance to, you know, take a bus trip up to heaven, no, they choose the familiarity. I guess I'm just asking you, what do you feel when you think of C.S. Lewis's attempt to get his head around this?

I do find something compelling about C.S. Lewis's picture that when people enter into hell, they're sort of confirmed into the state that they had been. There's something to that that even mirrors what has happened in the spiritual realm with Satan and his demons and God and his angels at some point in the past.

They had a rebellion and Satan and his demons were affirmed into this eternal destiny. And they're just fighting a losing battle until God finally declares his victory. And so to hypothesize that this might be the case for humanity as well, there is some resonance there for me. I think it makes sense that this would be the case.

Okay, finally, I have to give something very different. It's in The Guardian newspaper, a story about a man in Mumbai who's suing his parents for giving birth to him. Yeah, who would have thought this? Rafael Samuel, that's his name. He's a 27-year-old Mumbai man, a so-called...

Antinatalist. He's very much alive, the Guardian says, but clearly regrets it, so much so that he's taking his parents to court for giving birth to him without his consent. Antinatalist is actually a movement, they say it's morally wrong for people to procreate and that a vast amount of human misery could be avoided if people simply weren't born or don't exist. He admits that he has a great relationship with his parents, but that he was born for their joy

and not his. Not sure if he's aware that fetal consent is not... That's a clip from France 24 English, the English version of the French public broadcast service. It's from 2019, and this story spread across the world.

The anti-natalist movement has grown in recent years thanks partly to social media, and it's more than people deciding not to have kids or limiting the number of kids they have because of environmental concerns. Apparently, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex think along these lines.

Philosophers like David Benatar have argued for years that we shouldn't bring new children into the world because there's nothing to be gained by doing so and quite a lot to lose. The suffering of existence makes it just not worth it. Christianity potentially adds fuel to this antinatalist outlook. What's the point of someone being born if they're just going to experience suffering in this life and then hell in the next?

What's the point of someone's existence if they're just going to end up in hell? I mean, wouldn't it have been better if they'd never been born? And therefore, if someone's going to end up in hell, their life is meaningless. Yeah, I mean, interestingly, Jesus himself refers to people for whom it would be better if they'd never been born. So that is absolutely a category, and I think it's a category into which anyone who finds himself facing hell will absolutely think, I wish that I had never been born.

I think the meaningfulness of our lives as we sit with this choice, again, which the New Testament gives us in the starkest terms, are we going to repent and believe and put our trust in Jesus, who alone

deserves everlasting joy and life with the Father? And are we going to participate in that as people who are in Christ, not on our own merits, not because we are good, but because Jesus has welcomed us into him, his very self, when he died on the cross? Are we going to embrace that or are we going to reject Jesus's offer? In which case our lives actually still will testify to the

the truthfulness and the glory of who Jesus is. It's a little bit like, it's a moment in a Russian novel that I used to depict this a little bit in my first book, Confirming Christianity, because in this novel, the hero at one point discovers that this young country girl who lives near his estate is in love with him. And he

offhandedly rejects her. He has no interest in this girl. And then later in the story, he is confronted with this woman again in her kind of radiant beauty and sort of in a glorified state essentially. And he finds himself longing for a relationship with her and she rejects him. And you sort of think to yourself in the context of that story, well, actually he had the chance. He had the chance earlier in that narrative

for the relationship with that woman that she was offering him, and he turned it down. And so when he then sees her in a different light and bitterly regrets that choice, you know, in one sense we feel sorry for him, in another sense we don't, because actually he lost his opportunity there. I think in some ways that's where we find ourselves when it comes to Jesus today.

you know, right now Jesus may seem to us easily dismissed, easily rejected, easily shoved aside. But one day, according to the Bible, he's going to come back in a way that is so unmistakable that it's like the lightning in the sky. And we will either leap with joy on that day because we have said yes to Jesus, or we will be calling on the mountains to fall on us and the

in the hills to cover us, but we won't, in that second category, we won't be able to say, "Oh well, I really never had a chance." Because actually, right now, every single person listening to this podcast, the offer is available to them to enter into that relationship with Jesus now that will last for eternity. I'd like you to keep this card on your person at all times. If you keep it in your wallet and you lose your wallet, your first call isn't to American Express, it's to us. Who's this? I'm sorry, I thought you knew. I'm with the NSC.

They told me that. I meant, what's the card do? It tells you where to go in the event of a nuclear attack. You're kidding me. Obviously, we want to get everyone up on Air Force One or into one of the underground command centers as quickly as possible. Sure. Well, um... Okay. I really... I don't know what to say. I guess that's it, then. Well, should you have any questions, you should feel free to call. Sure. Sure. And my staff goes with me, or do they have separate... Oh, God. Sorry. You know what? I just got it. Sorry. Okay. Okay.

Sure, I'll just stick this right here, right next to my video club membership. And there's no reason, I guess, why my staff ever has to know anything about it. So there it is. And I think the best thing to do is just forget all about it. Producer Kayleigh will always try to sneak in a reference to the West Wing TV series. That's why we pay her the big bucks.

That's one of the main characters in the West Wing, Josh Wyman, Deputy Chief of Staff, who's just been given a special card giving him a seat on a plane in the event of a nuclear attack on the US. There is, in fact, a special plane that the United States has built to withstand a nuclear attack in real life. It's nicknamed the Doomsday Plane.

Many of its features are classified, but it can apparently only seat 112 people. So that card that Josh was given is his ticket to safety, but only for him. His staff, who are his dearest friends, his only friends, can't go with him.

You can't see it, but Josh's reaction when he really understands what he's just been given is so, so good. He doesn't want it. He doesn't want to leave the people he loves behind. It's fantastic acting in the greatest show ever. Fact. But the point is relevant to this episode. How will people who enter God's kingdom possibly maintain joy and

given the thought that so many of their loved ones are experiencing these horrors that you're speaking of? Yeah, that's a real question and experience. I was talking with a friend just recently who became a Christian just over a year ago, and he was feeling the weight of that, of the fact that almost nobody in her family or previous friend group right now

is trusting in Jesus. And so unless they do repent and believe that that is the path that they're on, I think it is one of the implications of what Jesus says when he makes this sort of strange claim about anyone who wants to follow him needing to actually be ready to set aside their family and their community in order to follow him. This is not a

a kind of mandate for abandoning our families of origin or our communities when we put our trust in Jesus.

but it is a reordering of loves which says that actually, if Jesus is all he claims to be, then I need to be ready to leave everyone for him. If you've ever been in love, one of the things that you will find yourself feeling is, "This is the one person in my life who really matters. This is the person who I'm going to orient everything around." And if you trust in Jesus, then you'll find that starting to happen

in your heart that actually Jesus is the centre of your affections. Now, there's a sort of beautiful counter-intuitive sort of irony in becoming a Christian because on the one hand

We're called to leave behind everyone and everything else for Jesus. And on the other hand, if we follow Jesus' teaching, we will be more loving toward everyone in our communities than we have ever been before. So there will be a kind of active love flowing out of us. But there will, I think, ultimately also be a sense of where Jesus goes, I want to go, even if nobody else is going there as well. Because actually he is the one, he is the one who is my...

my heart's desire. That sense of self-sacrifice makes sense on this side of the kingdom because it's also accompanied by a lifelong lament. I guess the real question though is how will that lament be transformed into joy? Or are you suggesting we'll have that sense of sacrificing everything for Jesus, you know, no matter how hard it is for eternity? You know, I find the Apostle Paul's example here really interesting.

Because on the one hand, Paul is desperately troubled and distressed by the fact that so many of his fellow Jews had not recognized Jesus as the Messiah. He's desperately distressed by the fact that so many of his fellow countrymen aren't followers of Jesus. He even says at one point, "I could wish that I myself were accursed for the sake of my brothers." It really, really bothers Paul.

And at the same time, he says, "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind could conceive what God has prepared for those who love him." The beauty and the glory and the goodness and the joy of the new creation is beyond our wildest imaginings. There is no sense in which when we see

the new creation depicted in various ways in the New Testament, there's no sense in which people who are with Jesus then are feeling sad or feeling like God is unjust because some of those they love deeply on earth here have not gone with them to be with Jesus. I think it will change our perspective on everything. I don't think I remotely understand the gravity of Jesus' death for me.

I don't think I remotely understand the seriousness of my sin or just the extraordinariness of the fact that the Son of God chose to die for love of me. I say those words and I believe them, but I haven't barely dipped my toe into the massive ocean of those truths. And when Jesus returns,

I will have a much, much, much, much fuller understanding of that, of who he is, of how he has loved me despite me not deserving it whatsoever. So I do think that in an instant, my understanding will be transformed. There's no sense, if you read through the New Testament, there's no sense of people in the new creation saying to God, "Well, I think you were really unfair on all those people who didn't get in."

Like actually, we will be astonished by God's mercy rather than by God's judgment.

Rebecca is suggesting that maybe the perspective of those in God's eternal kingdom will be transformed. They'll have a deeper appreciation of just how horrific human evil really is, and therefore how just God's judgment is. And they'll be so enveloped by God's love and joy that these will eclipse all sorrow at the thought of those in hell. It's a worthy thought experiment to puzzle through.

Thought experiments have been valuable on this topic for centuries. The fact that almost all talk of hell in the Bible employs metaphors rather than concrete descriptions actually invites this kind of imagining. Careful, reverent speculation. I already mentioned Gregory of Nyssa's thought experiment in the 4th century. He wondered if eventually God's punishment of sinners in hell will come to an end and all eventually will be absorbed into the good.

As I said, the wider church rejected this idea, but they tolerated it as a speculation generated by Gregory's passionate insistence on God's goodness. Then there's the thought experiment you often hear, that hell is just separation from God. It's not torture in any real sense, but it's hellish because what could be worse than being outside the presence of God?

I've often run with this myself in public discussions of hell, but I'm less comfortable with it nowadays. Because if God holds every particle in existence in every moment, which he must, how could anyone or anything be beyond the presence of the omnipresent one? Anyone in hell with functioning logic would know that God is actually present in the deepest possible way.

We mentioned C.S. Lewis's thought experiment in The Great Divorce. Hell is diminished existence, such that people don't just deserve hell, they actually choose to stay there because they can't bear the glorious realities of heaven. Well, there's another thought experiment. It's one that's helped me reflect on this issue. What if the horrific descriptions of hell in The Teaching of Jesus...

are horrors only relative to the glories of God's kingdom. 1 Corinthians 2 says, In other words, although we do have lots of pictures of God's kingdom, pearly gates, streets of gold, fruitful abundance, eternal singing and all of that, all of it is inadequate.

The metaphors excite the imagination and the expectation of bliss, but they don't capture what's in store. Something like that must also be true of the equally dramatic metaphors of hell, fire, darkness, beating with rods and so on. They're pictures designed to shock the imagination into contemplating the loss of God's glorious kingdom.

Relative to streets of gold, hell is darkness. Relative to eternal choirs of joy, hell is grinding teeth. Relative to feasting on the tree of life, hell is a scorching fire. Hell is horror, but only as measured against the ecstasies of the kingdom.

So imagine heaven as +100 on our earthly scale of wonderful things and hell as -100. But now imagine the whole scale is elevated a thousand fold or more. The relative distance between heaven and hell, bliss and loss stays constant.

But the experience of hell is torment only in comparison to the overwhelming ecstasies of heaven. This thought experiment suggests that hell might be eternally better than anyone truly deserves. The punishment of damnation then lies in the immeasurable loss of what could have been.

Hell compares to heaven like darkness compares to streets of gold or fire compares to feasting. The metaphors end up being true in their contrasts, but the popular caricature of God torturing people in hell simply doesn't hold when viewed through this lens. In this thought experiment, everyone, including those in hell, will marvel at the justice and goodness of God.

Each person in hell will fully recognize that their degree of loss or shame is deserved, commensurate with their deeds. At the same time, they'll know that they've received far more mercy than they could ever have hoped for, given their rejection of God and his ways. Now, my point isn't that I actually believe this is what's going to happen.

But this speculation allows me to imagine how it might be possible for God's people to experience eternal joy in heaven knowing that loved ones are experiencing relative and proportional losses in Gehenna. The crucial intellectual and emotional point of the thought experiment is this:

If I, with my very limited logic and imagination, can conceive of a scenario that helps me cope with the thought of loved ones in hell, then surely the truth of the matter, whatever it is, will be even more satisfying. That's the aim of thought experiments like this, to take seriously the terrifying metaphors Jesus offered about hell, while holding fast to the knowledge

That this is the same Lord who gave up his life to save people from judgment. How can this Lord be judge and yet not a torturer? That's the question. This thought experiment offers a response. Perhaps the horrific depictions of hell are horrors only measured against the inestimable wonders of God's kingdom.

And the fact that I can conceive a half-plausible scenario like this without defying scripture is itself a good indication, to me anyway, that God in his infinite wisdom has a resolution far better and more consistent with his own goodness than anything we could ever imagine. Comes unexpectedly and the dread judge has the key of hell. He shuts and no man opens.

In hell, you will be reserved in chains of darkness forever and ever. This place of atonement, of damned souls and misery, with nothing to relieve you, no comfort, no water for your parched tongues, no place to rest or take a breath, but the everlasting, infinite convulsions of misery and ever.

That's American actor Carl Malden playing the Reverend Ford in the 1960s Disney film Pollyanna. It's a sweet, people say too sweet, family film about a little girl who helps a grumpy town wake up to some of the good around them. And it has an effect on this local minister whose fire and brimstone preaching has the township quivering in their boots every Sunday. Is the possibility of hell real?

a good reason to become a Christian, or is that just a scare tactic? I think that it's legitimate to use it because this is something that Jesus himself invokes, but I think the way that we do it needs to be carefully following what Jesus does as well. In my own background, I've heard

I've heard hell invoked in gospel presentations many times. And usually the thrust that people are getting from that is hell is a terrible place. I do not want to be there. So I will accept this Jesus that you say is my ticket out of hell.

And to me that is stopping short of where we need to be because if I think of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus is always setting out the broad way versus the narrow way. He is the solid rock. He is not the sand.

And so I think we stop short by only talking about hell. And what we would need to do, if we were to invoke it, is to begin to point people toward a very full view of who Jesus is and the fact that we are called to follow him in discipleship. The question is whether Jesus is who he claims to be or not. Because if he is, then it's not a scare tactic. It's the warning that we all desperately need.

If Jesus isn't God's son, if he didn't come to die for us, if he isn't as he claims to be the way, the truth and the life, if he isn't the light of the world, if he isn't the bread of life, then yeah, this is all made up and hell is just a scare tactic. But as I've read and explored and thought and talked with people from a whole range of different belief systems over the last

in a couple of decades of my life. The plausibility of Jesus' claims about himself have only grown in my mind. And the warning about hell, if it is a real possibility, is actually the kindest thing that we could possibly do for somebody. An evangelist who I grew up listening to in the UK would sometimes use the analogy of the Titanic, where there was a period of time after the Titanic had hit the iceberg

where everyone was just carrying on as if nothing had happened because they didn't know. They were still eating away and listening to the music and whatever. The handful of people who knew had the choice whether they would go and tell people, "Hey, you need to get in a lifeboat. Get off this ship now or not." To tell somebody, "The ship is going down. You need to get in a lifeboat now,"

is not scare tactics if the ship is going down. It's a massive act of love. Christians have made a lot of mistakes on the topic of hell. I've no doubt made them. Maybe I've made some in this episode. I'll never forget my first week as assistant pastor in my church in Roseville in Sydney, almost 25 years ago.

I was asked to visit a local woman named Judy. She was dying of cancer. And her Christian next-door neighbor reached out to our church to arrange a kind of spiritual blind date for Judy. In my first cup of tea with her, Judy told me that she walked out of church 30 years earlier after she heard a preacher, quite a famous Sydney preacher, give a sermon on hell with, as Judy remembers it, a smirk on his face.

Whatever the preacher actually said, Judy got the message that Christianity delighted in looking down on sinners and threatening them with hell. She was disgusted. She walked out and she never went back. Now, with her terrible prognosis, her question was whether there is a version of Christianity that does make sense of life, death, and even the idea of judgment.

Over, I don't know, maybe five or six visits, we talked about many of the things covered in this episode and other episodes. Certainly, there were no smirks, but there was a serious discussion about heaven and hell. I explained that I probably didn't believe in the hell she was imagining, but that Jesus did say everyone would receive only what they deserve.

The degree to which we have each refused God and his ways of love is the degree to which we'll all be held to account. Perhaps we can all agree that a disgusting human trafficker deserves a great measure of divine justice. But as soon as we admit that, we should logically accept that each of us deserves whatever measure of judgment is proportional to our participation in evil. Sure, we might not have a debt of 500 silver coins, as Jesus put it,

Maybe it's just 50, but none of us can pay our debt to a holy God. Judy was a respectable woman on Sydney's North Shore, but she freely admitted that she had fallen short of God's demands of love and justice. Her real question was about the payment of the debt. We talked a lot about Jesus in those final days.

He was never the judge with the smirk on his face. Jesus wept over those under judgment. He welcomed them to his table as he wined and dined with sinners and tax collectors. And ultimately, he carried the debt, Judy's debt, my debt, on the cross. In anguish and out of love, Jesus bore hell so that none of us has to.

I know all this must sound a little cliched, but I don't care. Some cliches are beautiful and need to be recalled. Judy embraced Jesus Christ in her final few weeks. We prayed together. We read from the Gospels together. And she worked really hard to get the image of the smirking preacher out of her head and replace it with a picture of Christ.

And she died, marveling at the judge who is saviour.