Friday Takes: Is Hell Real? Edition

I confess, so many friends and readers sent me Jen Hatmaker’s post about how she came to reject a belief in hell that I broke down and paid to read her Substack for a short moment. I suppose my one month subscription will buy her a cup of coffee. Because it’s Friday, don’t worry! I am still accumulating links. I will just use them next week. Hatmaker’s post was moving enough, I thought, to give it due consideration. In fact, it falls rather nicely into six sections, leaving me one at the end to sum up. I will respond at length—length being the operative word. Grab a bible, some consoling drink, and settle in because this is going to be just a touch epic.

Hatmaker’s description of her journey from the darkness of belief in eternal torment at the hands of an angry and vengeful God into the light of metamorphized belovedness begins, as all good conversion stories do, with her own story. “From my first memory,” she writes, “all my ideas about God were tied to punishment.” She offers a brief catalogue of what that kind of punishment looked like:

When you tell a first-grader at Vacation Bible School that if they want to go to heaven instead of hell they should repeat a prayer, that six-year-old is going to pray that prayer so fast. When you tell a third-grade Sunday School class to bring their missions offering or else the missionaries will have to come home and all the rural Chinese people will go to hell, she will bring her quarters. When you tell an eighth-grader that God is logging her every thought and she’ll account for them one day standing in front of him, she’ll become terrified of this watching God keeping a record of her ordinary humanity.

Always, when I read Hatmaker talking about her own childhood I am so grieved that she never heard the Gospel with the ears of faith in her formative years. I find this even more tragic as I am nearing the end of a long (but good) week thinking about how babies and toddlers come into the world and most particularly how it is that they come to know and apprehend the Great Shepherd of the Sheep.

I read Sofia Cavalletti’s Religious Potential of the Child all the way back in 1999 and it did—as it does for almost everyone who reads it—change my life. Cavalletti described the mystery of God and the mystery of the child in a way I had never previously encountered. She caused me to look back over my early childhood, the earliest memories I thought I had of God, and realize that I had always had a strong and powerful knowledge that God surrounded me, that his grandeur and majesty didn’t strike fear in my childish soul so much as longing, and that I had always been drawn to him in love, even when the way seemed dark. Alongside that interior knowledge, the adults who loved me told me who that God is. They said his name—Jesus—so early that I always knew and understood that he is the Way to real Life, even before I had fully developed the capacity for human speech.

But, of course, we know that the way is not smooth for everyone. For some children, this easy inclination toward God and his Kingdom is hindered and obscured. Perhaps some of those hinderances have to do with the adults around the child, or the culture, or, in these latter days, the ubiquity of screens replete with distractions of every kind. For Hatmaker, I am not privy to what happened. None of us are. Perhaps she never heard about the Shepherd drawing the sheep to himself, calling them by name. Instead, she writes:

Revivals, the Left Behind series, altar calls, mission trips, youth camp bloated with emotional salvations (and rededications), tracts, street evangelism, missionary culture, purity culture, Halloween Hell Houses, “Bow your heads and close your eyes. If you cannot say beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, and if you died tonight, you would go to heaven, slip your hand up.”

I endured some of these same experiences when I was young. I was invited over and over again to ask Jesus to come into my heart, often by adults who, out of love, were looking at my stony little face and were unable to detect any spark of the light of Christ. I was a nasty child in many respects. I was rebellious though formally compliant, people pleasing yet interiorly stormy, like the great black clouds that would roll across the sky during rainy season. I was not then able to see that those inviting me to consider Jesus were not doing so because they hated me. Only much later did I understand that the invitation was made—over and over—with love. They wanted me to know the Lord and were not able to see that I already did. That wasn’t their fault.

And here I would like to observe that many people who walk away from the Christian faith, like Hatmaker, casting aspersions over their shoulder as they journey into more supposedly enlightened spaces, are no longer children. A child is helpless in the world of adults. She cannot sort out her own way. But an adult who has lived through childhood is no longer helpless. It is the duty of the adult to look at the past and humanize those who attempted to give her life. Hatmaker persistently doesn’t honor this duty, not in this post, nor in any of the others. It is as though she is perpetually mired in spiritual infancy.

It’s just that, she must be in her 50s by now. She helped to lead a church, to teach and instruct others. Indeed, that is what she does every day on social media. Therefore, she is responsible for what she says. She should search out the Truth. She should try to imagine that those who gave her the gift of her life were human people who were trying to do the right thing. If they sinned against her in some way, according to the Law of Love, she owes them forgiveness, not continual blame.

Instead, Hatmaker always paints the starkest, angriest picture of those people, many of whom must still be alive, who might remember what kind of child she was and the character of the church in which she was nurtured:

I can’t remember doing anything out of spiritual joy. My “faith walk” was a weighted orchestration to keep myself out of hell, get (or try to stay) on God’s good side, and rescue all my classmates and everyone on earth from a fiery eternity that God was eager to sentence them to because they weren’t born in evangelical Kansas. He would gladly set them all on actual fire and let them burn for the rest of time. God was mad. God was offended. God was punitive. God was vengeful. I was terrorized by an arbitrary, blood-thirsty God. We all were.

No, that can’t be true. Millions of people hear about hell all the time and many of them, of course, are troubled. I certainly have had times in my Christian journey where I struggled to understand what the word means, what it describes, and why God would include it as one of the elements of his spiritual cosmos. He is, after all, Love. So how can he also be offendable? How can he punish? Is he vengeful? Is he arbitrary? Blood-thirsty? Christians in every age have striven to understand the nature and character of the God who reveals himself in the Scriptures. And those Scriptures do speak about hell. And not all Christians are “terrorized” by a blood-thirsty God because God is not blood-thirsty.

Hatmaker is not giving a fair account of what the Christian Scriptures say. She is like the Servant who, upon being given one talent by the Master, goes and buries it in the ground, saying to the Master, I knew you were a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and harvesting where you had cast no seed. How did that Servant know that, since it wasn’t true? The Master gave each Servant everything he needed to serve him faithfully. The Servant, as he goes away gnashing his teeth, has spoken a falsehood about the Master.

God is not blood-thirsty. He is not vengeful. What he is is Just. He is Holy. And he cannot contradict his own nature. So he cannot let the sinner who rejects him and then lies about him go unpunished. He must do something, even while he does not desire the death of any sinner.

Leaving behind her childhood, Hatmaker leaps forward to the time, by my own rough calculation, that she was deconstructing. She had become an enormously popular Christian author. She had a solid following on social-media. And then it transpired that she was “rethinking” her position on human sexuality. She no longer believed that sex is reserved by God for one man and one woman. She became affirming. Not surprisingly, it seems that rethink upended a lot of orthodox Christian theology that had been sort of latently present in her spiritual life. She describes it this way (observe the manner in which she makes a villain out of a “teaching pastor” at a “reformed megachurch”):

Ten years ago, I was having lunch with a friend who is verrrryyyyy prominent in evangelicalism. We were having yet another debate about reformed theology (her: for, me: against), and she told me this: “I was talking to ______” - the teaching pastor at her reformed megachurch - “and I asked him what to think about my beloved family members who weren’t Christian. He looked me squarely in the eye and said: ‘One day in heaven, you will look at them burning in hell and say AMEN.’”

W-T-actual-F.

This is so deranged. With a God like this, who needs the devil?? This cold calculation of human worth in a sacred context is genuinely deluded. That one normal human could find another normal human worthy of eternal torture while he is worthy of eternal glory frankly helps us make sense of the Christian nationalism destroying our country like a wildfire.

Of course, that sort of answer to anyone who asks it lacks charity, if indeed this is what that pastor really said. When someone comes to ask about a family member they love, who does not know the Lord, there are many answers the pastor could give that would console the heartache and spur on that Christian to prayer and hope.

But the person who believes that God does allow his creatures to reject him forever is not therefore guilty of being a Christian nationalist—goodness is this boogey person growing into grotesque and ridiculous proportions. Nor can that person be described as “one normal human” finding “another normal human worthy of eternal torture.” That’s not what’s going on.

Every person who believes that hell is real is admitting two essential facts, however uncomfortable they may be. First, she is admitting that God’s perfect holiness causes him to be so other, so beyond the reach of human creatures, that no one would be able to stand in his presence and live. Any person who approaches God on her own, without some redeeming, propitiatory aid, is like wretched Uzzah, sauntering up to the Ark of God to steady it with her hand and just falling over dead. I know Hatmaker doesn’t believe this, but there is none righteous, not even one. All of us are condemned before we even take our first breaths because, following in the footsteps of our Father Adam, we are turned inwards towards ourselves and away from God, the source of life.

Admitting this does not turn each person into moral monster. On the contrary, it leads to the confession of the second essential fact, that any sin, however small, separates the creature from the Creator. When we do anything, however public or however hidden, that breaks God’s holy law, we are committing ourselves to be separated from him forever. There is no “normal human” worthy of life at all, for we are so eternally separated from the glory of God. Discovering this and confessing it does not make the human into a cretin or a Christian Nationalist, it makes her poor in spirit. When she discovers that without some divine help she will perish forever, she is ready to finally see the Kingdom of God with eyes of faith and love.

Hatmaker, though, thinks this proper knowledge of the fallen creature in relationship to a perfect God produces “hubris:”

While the specific hubris is shocking, the premise is not. My entire understanding of God more or less rested on this exact calculus. Maybe I wasn’t as arrogant and callous, but hell loomed just as large in my eternal worldview. Sure, I hoped God was a teensy bit less of a monster than advertised, and hopefully he’d have more mercy than explained to me (maybe the elementary kids in China wouldn’t go to hell if they died? Maybe the cutoff date was age 12?), but at the end of the road it still seemed like heaven would be populated with mostly Americans and whatever global villages our missionaries evangelized. Hell was positively bursting with nearly every other community on earth.

How grievous that Hatmaker did not, in fact, hear about the mercy of God. For, of course, while we were yet sinners, the Son of Man stooped low, taking on human flesh, coming in the likeness of sinful men. Not to be a sinner himself, but to save sinners by offering himself up in his incarnation, perfect life, and redemptive death on the cross. He is the full perfect satisfaction and oblation, once offered, for the sins of the whole world. And this precious and beautiful news has gone into every corner of the world. Not a single person who seeks for the Savior will not find him. Whoever seeks finds. Whoever knocks on the door of eternal life will quickly find it open.

So Hatmaker left behind her belief in hell ten or so years ago. But still, she struggled on. There was one more step to take. She needed permission from a “most respected faith leader” to let go of hell as a troubling shadow over her spiritual life:

Around eight years ago, one of my most respected faith leaders casually said while knitting that no, of course she didn’t believe in a literal hell. Wait, what. What. That one sentence reached an interior truth I’d carried for a decade but never allowed myself to consider. I scooched my chair over and said “please say more.”

I would just like to pause here and say that I don’t know of anyone, personally, who likes believing in hell. A lot of otherwise completely orthodox Christians can’t stomach it. In Hatmaker’s case, the reason I don’t count her among the visible Body of Christ is that she has left off going to church, she is affirming, and she likes to blame Christians for all that ails us. But those Christians who do believe in hell do so after much study. They have read the Scriptures. They have accepted God’s explanation of himself. And they have admitted that his ways are higher than theirs, that his thoughts are not their thoughts.

This is not the path Hatmaker chose to take. She did not like a basic and uncontroversial teaching of the Church (more than one actually) and so she privileged her own personal experiences and preferences over revealed Truth. Her “interior truth” directed her beliefs. This is not the way of faith. For true faith marries that interior and hidden experience of God’s presence with the revealed truths about God in the Scriptures. Everyone can apprehend that there is a God, and that his attributes are divine power and majesty, but to discover that his name is Jesus and that he has the power and will to calm the storm, to heal the sick, to raise the dead, and to die and rise again for the sinner—these only come from searching for him in the Scriptures.

Hatmaker doesn’t want you, the reader of her piece, to do that. She wants you to take her word for it:

I won’t go into the scholarship, which is massive, or the exegesis, which is thorough and serious. I won’t list the endless theologians who have interpreted the few scriptures on “hell” through a rigorous cultural and linguistic lens and come to a totally different conclusion. I won’t lay out the progressive way “hell” has been misinterpreted, co-opted, and manipulated throughout centuries as a tool of fear and abuse of power. It’s all there if you are interested in looking.

Yes and if you google some of that stuff, you will come up with all the fringiest of fringe scholarship there is. You might happen on some good faith debates, but those debaters still think that hell is real. It is rather a question of whether hell is eternal, or if it burns up after a while. Moreover, if you were going to be intellectually honest, you wouldn’t go looking only for sources you know will confirm that which you desire to believe anyway. You will read everything— everything —and the Truth will always set you free. What it won’t do is let you make ignoble boogey monsters out of faithful Christian people.

But I will tell you that after a couple of years of investigation, I quietly laid down my belief in a literal hell, and it is the best thing that ever happened to me. No singular growth point has changed my faith more than this. Rather than the crushing fear you might think I’d experience, I felt ten million pounds roll immediately off my shoulders. My head and heart came back into alignment, and my belief in God was rescued. I said to God: “There you are.”

If you want to take an intellectually dishonest way out, that’s fine. But don’t say that it’s God. Making God into a monster and then rejecting that monster and then saying “there you are” isn’t noble or clever. Becoming more compassionate than the angry, fake-god you have made is the easiest thing to do.

What is almost impossible, without grace, is to go to God in abject humility, as a beggar, ask him to reveal himself, open his book to the end of any of the Gospels, and look honestly at what you see there. The God revealed there has become a Man acquainted with sorrows. That Man has become sin in order to punish sin. To look at the Cross of Christ is to look at the hell we choose over and over again, every time we embrace ourselves over him.

Hatmaker, tragically, has never grasped the depth and mercy and grace of Christ because she redefined love a long time ago:

Now love made sense. Everything about God made sense. I was no longer trying to maintain allegiance to a tyrant who willingly sent most of the world he created to an eternal fiery torment. I knew that didn’t make sense. This opened up a whole new world to get to know God, really, for the first time, because if this whole life wasn’t a terrifying test to stay out of hell, then maybe it was a sacred experience meant for love and joy, peace and patience, kindness and goodness, faithfulness and gentleness, and self-control that led to a truly abundant life.

If God wasn’t watching over his glasses keeping a record of my wrongs, maybe he just loved me. Perhaps he understood that living on this fluctuating earth full of sorrow and trauma and pain and injustice is often its own hell, and Jesus meant it when he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

He did mean it. Indeed he does mean it because he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He alone understood the heaviness of the burden because he alone understood the catastrophe of sin.

Do you think when Eve and then Adam ate the fruit in that primordial garden they could possibly have understood the full implications of what they had done? We know that they didn’t because they went into the shrubbery and gathered some leaves to try to cover themselves. And they seem to have thought it would be sufficient.

When you or I sin, we don’t do it with full conscious understanding of what we are doing to the beauty and order of the cosmos. We do it because we are selfish. We think it will make everything a little easier. We don’t understand—because we don’t want to—that we are throwing God out of our lives. We don’t even know that we are picking up a great and intolerable burden, the burden of condemnation, the burden of an eternity cursed outside of the presence of God.

When God prevented Eve and Adam from eating of the Tree of Life, when he clothed them with skins—and how horrible it must have been to see that first death—when he sent them forth to till the ground and labor to make a family, he was already making their burden light, for he went with them. He alone understood what the remedy for their rejection of him would be. He bore it himself to the uttermost, drinking down to the dregs the cup of his own wrath. When he offers to share your burden, that you be yoked to him, of the two of you, he is the only one who knows what that really entails.

Hatmaker, tragically, doesn’t want to even peer into the mystery of God’s unfathomable love for us in the redemption of the world:

If you take eternal punishment off the table, what is your faith? What are your relationships like? What do you notice about your fear and shame? What sort of freedom rushes into the vacuum? If a literal hell is not real, how are we able to think about our neighbors, our churches, our place in the community? What does it do to your striving? How does that feel in your body? What do you make of God?

When you look at the cross, of course, and discover that some people look at it and remain unmoved, it is hard to understand why they can’t see what you see. That is what is happening to me right now. When I think about fear and shame—fear and shame I deserve because of how black my heart and mind and soul are—and then I look at the Cross and see that Jesus took all of that to himself so that I could go free, my understanding of what hell portends is radically altered. Jesus endured the hell I deserved for reasons that I cannot even begin to understand. All I know is that he is love. Seeing him there, enduring my shame, I am much more easily able to forgive the people I feel might have injured me. A great freedom flows out of his whole Person.

What if God is far more loving than we could even fathom? Not loving with an asterisk. Loving to the end of time, for all of us, for everyone, for this whole earth he claims to love so. What if instead of assigning the darkest, cruelest, most murderous human traits to God, we understood he was the absolute best of every good trait times a million? No darkness in him, only light. Embodying a love and patience and compassion we can’t even conceive of, more than we could imagine receiving and more than we want for our enemies. No shadow side. No setting people on fire for millenia, which is pretty dark.

We don’t assign those traits to God. We know that God endured those things that we are and do. We know that he endured our cruelty, our scorn, our hatred of him. We know that he used our collective wrath to undo the curse we brought upon ourselves.

What is actually dark is to invoke the Person and Name of God and refuse to look at the Cross of the Christ and then to presume to tell those who do look—persistently, with their whole beings—at it, what rotten people they are for accepting what he says about this world and the one to come.

What does that faith look like walking around this earth? First off, it would be purged of judgment, since we no longer get to be excited about sneering at people from heaven while they scream and burn and saying AMEN. Take out every condescending spiritual authority terrorizing people into behavior modification. “Us” and “them” is over. Self-importance and self-righteousness don’t make sense anymore. We’d have to purge our faith instruction of fear and shame-based threats. We could finally hang up our very embarrassing tools of evangelizing and proselytizing, and just be good, normal neighbors.

As I like to say, Christians are people too, and they are sinners, so sometimes they do and say the wrong thing. Some of them might sneer. Some of them might adopt an “us” versus “them” attitude. But bad Christians, which are twenty dollars (that’s how much a dime is worth) a dozen, do not negate the Truth about Jesus. Indeed, my sense, reading Hatmaker’s whole post, is that I, as a Christian, am being sneered at. I feel condescended to. But that’s ok, because I know that I am not one wit better than her by any measure. All I know is that I can cling onto Jesus every hour and be forgiven for the things I do wrong, whereas she has had to make a god in her own image who doesn’t plan on making all things new, who is apparently fine the way things are now.

Hatmaker concludes with a depressing, very human, very this-worldly solution to the problem of evil:

Then we’d have to learn to settle into a new relationship with God, one where he just really, really loves us, all of us. It may take awhile, but we’d figure out he isn’t rewarding church attendance or martyrdom or some western version of faithfulness. He is probably cringing about our little denominations and how worked up into a lather we’ve all gotten with our policies and hierarchies and structures, bless us.

I bet he feels sad that so many of us are terrified of him. Jesus came to show us but we messed everything up. Fear and self-loathing are actually easier than believing we are cherished. We’d have to relax (no one says, “You know what word I’d use to describe Christians? Relaxed.”). We’d have to divert all that energy we spend on shame to something else, and perhaps it would metamorphosize into belovedness, as intended.

Doesn’t that sound like heaven?

No it doesn’t. It sounds awful. Jesus sounds like some sad numbskull up there, an ineffectual GenZer living in his great-aunt’s basement wishing with all his might that everyone would just get along but unable to do anything to accomplish it. That, to me, very much sounds like hell.

The problem for all of us is that the Person in the Bible who talked about hell more than anyone was Jesus. And the images he used to describe it were visceral, upsetting, stomach churning. It’s like he knew what he was talking about. And one story he told—I’m sure you remember—was about a rich person who feasted sumptuously every day. The Lord doesn’t give him a name, though he does observe that he wore purple and fine linen. He must have been very important. People must have often asked him for advice, for certainly his abundant wealth made obvious his success. In modern terms, we might have said that he was “functional.”

A very dysfunctional man lay at his gate. This person was poor and covered with sores. He was starving. He never amounted to anything. He would watch the rich man eating his dinner and would long to eat the scraps that fell from the table. This poor man’s name was Lazarus which means “God has helped” which I’m sure everyone thought was some kind of joke. Clearly God hadn’t helped him at all.

Both of these men died. And the rich one went down to hell, into, as Jesus put it, “torment.” Whereas he had eaten and drunk anything he desired in his life, in his death, he longed for just the barest taste of water to cool the flame of his flesh. I expect none of his friends and hangers on knew he had gone down there. Being so rich, they trusted he had gone to Abraham’s side. But he hadn’t. No, the person who went to Abraham’s side to be consoled forever was Lazarus.

And that might have been an interesting story if Jesus had stopped right there. But he didn’t. He went on. The rich man, now in torment, could see Lazarus there in eternal bliss and he didn’t think that was fair. He thought that Lazarus should leave his consolation, his rest, his soul’s exultation, and come and dip his finger in water to cool the rich man’s tongue. For the rich man still did not know that Lazarus was a man, a person, someone he could have noticed and cared about.

It is almost as if the disposition of the human heart in life towards the poor and cast down, toward the ignorant and troubled, toward any other human person with a soul reveals something about what that person thinks and feels about God. Is God allowed to govern his own creation? Is he permitted to be just and yet also merciful? Or will will we creatures dictate to him the measure of his ways?

You might remember how the story ends. The rich man wants Lazarus to go, like a slave, to warn his brothers about hell. But Abraham refuses. Those brothers won’t listen to someone “from the dead” because they haven’t listened to those they did have, Moses and the Prophets. The warning is clear. If anyone of us don’t attend to the Scriptures, we are in danger of seeing something with our eyes, or hearing something with our ears, and not knowing what it is.

Personally, I prefer to be a beggar by the gate, to acknowledge that my sin is ever before me, to be continually overcome by the immense love of the Shepherd who laid down his life for me. After all, God mixes his metaphors all the time, which means it’s fine for us to follow in his way.