Query:

I am a bivocational pastor at a Southern Baptist church, and am currently and enjoying your recent book Pandemic of Lunacy.  Your books on sexuality and happiness are also on my shelves, and Pandemic is making me look forward to reading them too.  I hope you won't mind a question in the area of philosophical theology:  Briefly, how would you defend the traditional Christian doctrine of hell?

Reply:

I’m so glad that you’ve been finding my books enjoyable and helpful!  Coincidentally, I was raised in a Baptist home myself.  My grandfather, who baptized me, was, I think, the first pastor of a Polish-speaking Baptist congregation in the United States.  He was a true man of God.  I pray about him every day.

Briefly, here is why I think the doctrine of hell makes sense.

1.  The loving God created us in His image, rational beings capable of loving Him in return, as well as all others, who are equally His reflections.

2.  But love is something freely chosen.  Just because we are capable of loving God, we are capable of rejecting Him.  We are also capable of using others instead of loving them for His sake -- which is another way of rejecting Him.

3.  At this point someone might object that a good God wouldn’t have made us free to turn our backs on Him or on other people.  But a world without freedom would be a world without love.  Our choices wouldn’t even be choices; we would merely act as we were programmed to act.  The possibility of love is worth even the possibility of suffering.  More precisely, it is worth even the certainty of suffering, which God turns to the good of those who love Him.

4.  Now the most characteristic feature of heaven, and its chief joy, is what we were made for:  Fully seeing and enjoying God Himself.  Just for this reason, heaven itself would be hell to anyone who rejects Him.  The glory of God would be torment.

5.  So when God consigns some people to hell, he is giving them what they want.  They wouldn’t have it any other way.  As C.S. Lewis put it in The Problem with Pain, “The door to hell is locked from the inside.”  (He also wrote a sort of novel or parable about choosing hell, titled The Great Divorce.)

6.  An objection is that nobody could want this, because nobody desires suffering.  This plaint is based on a misunderstanding.  It isn’t that those in hell desire suffering, but they desire God to be absent and themselves to be absent from God.  I don’t say they are thinking “I desire to be separated from Him” – they may go to great lengths to conceal their minds from themselves.  But this one great choice is revealed in all their other choices.

7.  Since we are made for nothing less than perfect communion with the God in whose image we are made, to be utterly and finally separated from Him simply is the greatest possible suffering.  It is the ultimate futility, the consummate emptiness.  It is final ruin.

I already know that you have follow-ups, but I think that’s enough for now!