Questions Concerning Hell (feat. Jeffrey Dill)

Jeff and I, once, during an outing to eat at a most wonderful hibachi and sushi restaurant, had a brief discussion concerning the notions of an eternal Hell and of annihilation. From his point of view, for God to punish unbelief with an eternal Hell would be the equivalent of placing a gun to one's head and demanding that this person love you or die. I, on the other hand, argued that without consequences for our actions - without Hell, free will is meaningless. We broke off the argument upon entering the restaurant, but to illustrate my point that Hell is not quite equivalent to a gun to our heads, I created a parable and sent it to Jeff via e-mail. That e-mail began the following dialog.

[Aaron] "Long ago, a young man and his father became estranged when the young man, refusing to follow the strict rules of his father's household any longer, left his father to live according to his own way and his own means. Though the land outside of his father's homestead was harsh and the dangers of the wilderness were extreme, the young man wandered on his own throughout the land with no power or wisdom to see what lay ahead of him.

Knowing the dangers that his son faced, the young man's father, even immediately after his departure, began to send a messenger to him so often as he could find him. The messenger implored the young man to return home to his father's house, warning him of the danger of the wilderness and the evil creatures that lurked there.

For long years, the young man refused to listen to the messenger's pleas, and he remained a wanderer, skirting danger by chance alone. But after a time, the young man grew weary of the meager living he could find for himself in the harsh land, and he longed once again to live in his father's household. However, he could no longer remember the paths he had wandered, and he did not know how to find his way home.

Soon, the messenger found him again, and the young man heeded his message. The messenger bade to the young man to follow behind him, and he would lead him on his return to his father's house. The messenger described to the young man the path they would follow, and though the directions were long, complex, and specific, the messenger warned the young man not to deviate from them, for the way to return to his father's house had grown even more perilous since the young man's departure, and there was only one safe way to reach home.

The young man gratefully accepted the instructions from the messenger and began to follow him back to his father's house. Soon, however, the young man grew weary of the difficult path and decided to stray from the narrow path in favor of a broader, more easily trod path. The messenger once again warned the young man that only one path could lead him home to his father's house, but the young man would not listen, and immediately struck out on the easy path.

Knowing that the young man would find death, the messenger quickly returned to his master's house and told him all of the things that happened. Fearing for his son's life, the young man's father immediately set out to find him. When he came to the place where his son strayed, the young man's father found him there, struggling to pull himself up from a sandpit - a pit from which he could never hope to escape. The young man's struggling only pulled him more deeply into the pit.

The young man's father reached out his hand to him and said, "My son, take my hand, or you will die." Hearing this, the young man took his father's hand, and he pulled the young man from the pit and carried him safely back to his homestead where he washed him, gave him new clothes, and restored him to his former position."

[Jeff] "The way you illustrate it seems to imply that the dangers outside the father's estate are naturally occurring hazards, unrelated to the father himself. The way I understand it, our understanding, is that all that is has either been created or designed by God. Translating this into the parable, it would be as if the father laid death traps or released wild, carnivorous animals around this safe haven of his house, then warned his son not to go out, because it was dangerous out there. In this way, it seems more like imprisonment. I suppose the only possible alternative does not translate well into a parable: nothing has been created beyond the boundaries of the father's land, and to wander too far would chance walking into oblivion. Like I said, kind of weird and much less concrete, but it strikes a middle ground.

What I'm saying is more of a question regarding the concept of Hell. Is it a state of being, or is it simply nonbeing? If it is a state of being, then it would follow, based on our understanding of the universe that it has been created by God, as all that is was. Such a concept does not seem to follow, given the omni-benevolence that we suppose God to embody. If it were a state of nonbeing, it would be easier to accept given our current assumptions, considering the fact that sin is considered not a positive concept but a negative concept, one of absence, such as shadow. Hell as nonbeing would seem to be a logical conclusion to these sets of assumptions, then. Or so it seems to me. Talk about eternal torment, thus, always seems strange. It's either that, or our concepts of the universe and/or God are flawed, which is possible.

My second question has more to do with the nature of humanity rather than the nature of Hell, so it's naturally a bit more complex, due to the fact that we actually have experience that relates to it. Basically, I understand that God desired humanity to have free will, so as part of our free will, we have a propensity to sin, for some reason. We could debate the intricacies of that until we find the eventual answer to these questions with our own deaths, so for now I think we can accept this basic, rudimentary framework and move on.

So it is part of the human condition that we are inclined to sin, to some degree or another. So then I have an illustration. A new mother is holding her infant son in her arms. As babies are wont to do, the baby spits up all over himself and his mother's clean clothes. Clearly, this is generally unacceptable among adult humans, but quite normal among infants. Nevertheless, the mother casts her baby from her arms and, what the heck, into a small building that is on fire. The baby wails, confused in its new and horrible predicament. The door into which the mother threw the infant is still wide open and the only way out, and the mother stands in the doorway calling for the child to return to her, as she is genuinely concerned for the child's welfare. The baby, however, is confused, terrified and clumsy and the roof is quickly burning, threatening to fall on the child before long. Only when it becomes apparent that the child will not be able to escape in time does the mother quickly enter, scoop up the child and exit with hardly any effort or risk at all.

So it's a little extreme, sure, but perhaps this better illustrates the difference between the abilities of God and Man, and even then understates it. A man as compared to his grown son is negligibly more powerful. A grown person seems almost omnipotent when compared to a fragile infant. Wouldn't that mother be arrested after a scenario like that?"

[Aaron] "The whole point I'm trying to make is that Hell and its hardships aren't a place created by God to punish unbelievers. It's the state that humans put themselves in when they choose to live apart from God. Apart from God, there is darkness. So if you choose to live apart from God, you'll be in darkness. It's not as if there's some cavern of fire somewhere that God is going to cast them into; he will merely allow them to continue existing apart from him just as they wanted. He is ratifying their own decisions. As for annihilationism, God is a god of creation, not of destruction. He's not in the business of unmaking the things that he has made, because the things that he created are good - that is, they are well made. So, God isn't going to destroy you because you chose to live apart from him; he's going to give you what you wanted. On the same token, he isn't going to drag you kicking and screaming into his presence against your will, because he did give you choice.

Sin isn't really a concept that has a positive or negative attribute. Sin is very simple, really; it's merely choosing your own will over the will of God. Any time your choices are not in concert with God's will, you are sinning. We and God are similar in the regard that we both want what is best for us. The difference between us and God is that we think we know what we need to do in order to achieve what is best for us, and God actually knows what is best for us. There's no way that we can achieve it on our own, because we just don't know enough. God does. So, in aligning our will to God's, we will have what is best for us - anything apart from that just can't be the best.

See, it's not that we have a propensity to be bad. We don't make decisions on the basis of what is bad or evil. We make decisions on the basis of what we believe is best for us, often in disregard to what is good for others. The only thing that makes our nature sinful is that we have a propensity to want to do it our own way, because we believe that we know what is best for us.

The illustration doesn't conform to the reality of our situation. God does not condemn us for choices we make before we understand what choices are. The nature of a child is the clear example that Jesus gives us to be the nature necessary to enter the kingdom of Heaven. So, until we come of the age when we gain understanding, we do not yet truly have free will. Once we have that understanding, we are fully capable of making our own decisions (such as not throwing up on our mothers) and bearing the responsibility for and consequences of those decisions. It is when we gain that understanding and then discard the wisdom of God in exchange for the wisdom of men that we sin and bear the fault of those sins.

The issue at hand is not that there is not enough light in the world. The issue is that men love darkness rather than light, because in the light, the darkness of their deeds is made known. People don't like being dependent on God. People don't like being in the presence of a being so holy that we look like the vilest of the vile beside him. We like to think that we're good people, and we like to think that we know what's best."

[Jeff] "No disagreement [concerning Hell as a state, rather than a place]. And, that sounds simple, but that makes it pretty tough to actually determine [what sin really is]. I wasn't speaking literally. As I stated, it was designed to demonstrate the vast gulf in understanding and ability between divine consciousness and mundane consciousness. You mention coming of age and gaining understanding, but since your definition of sin was that which deviates from the will of God, we can never have an effective understanding, since we do not know the will of God."

[Aaron] "But we can know the will of God. That's the whole reason why God gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit. When you pray, one of the goals of your prayer is to bring your will into alignment with that of God. 'Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' 'Not my will, but your will be done.' There is a gulf of understanding between man and God, but God has made all of these things plain to us through scripture and through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

In any case, it's not about whether you're successful in this regard in the first place. The point to be made here is that you are making the effort to conform your will to God's, that you have actually made the decision to rely on God's understanding over your own. That's the choice that God wants us to make. To say, 'Not my will but yours.'"