“Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Flannery O’Connor
Friends, I’ve wrestled for years with the Bible’s teaching on hell and its implications. Although it still troubles me deeply, so much so that I’ve chosen not to include a featured image this week, that doesn’t make it less true. Below are the most helpful quotes I’ve read on this topic:
“There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this [hell] if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, especially of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and has the support of reason.” -C.S. Lewis
“There seems to be a conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of hell comes from. One finds frequent references to ‘cruel and abominable medieval doctrine of hell,’ or ‘the childish and grotesque medieval imagery of physical fire and worms.’…
The case is quite otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of Hell is not ‘medieval’: it is Christ’s. It is not a device of ‘medieval priestcraft’ for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from ‘medieval superstition,’ but originally from the prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it…It confronts us in the oldest and least ‘edited’ of the gospels: it is explicit in many of the most familiar parables and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teaching then one realizes, until one reads the Evangelists through instead of picking out the most comfortable texts: one cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate hell without altogether repudiating Christ.” -Dorothy Sayers
David Hansen, The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without all the Answers (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994), 87-88.
“I have always wondered about two phenomena that we find in the New Testament. One, that Jesus speaks more of hell than he does of heaven. Two, almost everything that we know about hell in the New Testament comes from the lips of Jesus. I’m just guessing that in the economy of God , people wouldn’t bear it from any other teacher.” -R.C. Sproul
R.C. Sproul, Now, That’s a Good Question! (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1996) 304.
“The gospel brings warnings as well as promise, of the retention of sins as well as the remission of sins. ‘Beware, therefore’, warned the apostle Paul, ‘lest there comes upon you what is said in the prophets: ‘Behold, you scoffers, and wonder, and perish…’ (Acts 13:40-41). ‘Perish’ is a terrible word. So is ‘hell’. We may, and I think we should, preserve a certain reverent and humble agnosticism about the precise nature of hell, as about the precise nature of heaven. Both are beyond our understanding. But clear and definite we must be that hell is an awful eternal reality. It is not dogmatism that is unbecoming in speaking about the fact of hell; it is glibness and frivolity. How can we think about hell without tears?” -John Stott
John Stott, Authentic Christianity (Downers Grove: IVP, 1995), 395.
The whole universe is hurtling to Christ and to the light which fills all with joy. In that Kingdom of light, as Julian of Norwich once said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Every single corner of the cosmos will be filled with God’s presence. But what of those who refuse the light and with triumphant obstinacy refuse to surrender to it? Since the whole world will be filled with light, they will be pushed outside of it, to the borders, to the dark fringes where existence shades off into near non-existence. Their own swollen will, victorious to the end, will bind them hand and foot, and they will remain in the outer darkness, outside the cosmos of light, away from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His power (Mt. 8:12, 2 Thess. 1:9). The lake of fire, the flame which burns but gives no light, and which was never meant for humanity but only for the devil and his angels (Mt. 25:41), was not built by God as a holding cell to punish people. But it is the only realm left for people who refuse to dwell in joyful penitence in the world God made. What other fate is left for them? If the whole universe is filled with God and they refuse to live with Him, where else can they go? All that is left for them is to remain in their self-chosen misery, at the intersection of God’s wrath against sin and their own refusal of His love. In that place, there is only weeping, and the gnashing of teeth. -N.T. Wright