Many people cannot even begin to consider the claims of Christianity because the idea of a God that sends people to a hell - a place of eternal punishment and torment - is so repugnant. Dan Barker, in a recent debate, put it this way: “A threat of violence, which is what Hell is; it's a threat of eternal torture, any system of thought that has that thought in it ... is a morally bankrupt system.” And yet when we look at the Christian Scriptures, of all the biblical writers, the one who spoke the most frequently and vividly about the reality of hell was Jesus. Mark 9:43-48 is just one example:

"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where 'their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."

As difficult a problem as hell is - and one certainly cannot presume to fully address the issue in a short post - there are at least three things that I think we have to keep in mind when we consider the problem of hell.

The first is the reality that justice demands it. Christopher Hitchens, in his characteristically acerbic wit, spoke with CNN's Anderson Cooper about Jerry Fallwell just after Fallwell's death. In that conversation, Hitchens said that he wished "there was a hell for him.” Regardless of whether we might agree with Hitchens on that point or not, the larger point is well taken: we instinctively feel there are some people who are so bad that death alone does not do justice. And this instinct is apparently present in people regardless of what they believe.

When we consider the atrocities committed by humans to other humans - the 6 million Jews exterminated by Hitler, the 500,000 people killed in the Rwandan genocide in just 100 days, the 3.5 million people starved to death under North Korea's totalitarian regime - justice seems to demand more. In fact, when we look at all of these atrocities, it seems that the proper question to ask is not "How could a loving God send people to hell?" but rather “How could a loving God not do anything?” Yale scholar Miroslov Volf makes this point and takes it a bit further. A Croatian by descent, Volf witnessed many of the horrors of the violence that took place in Eastern Europe. He writes:

"My thesis is that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance…My thesis will be unpopular with many in the West…But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…Your point to them–we should not retaliate? Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God…Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword…It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind…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.”

If Volf is right, not only does justice demand a God who punishes evil, but world peace and human flourishing require it as well. That is all well and good, you might say, but for the most part we don’t know people as bad as Hitler and what Christianity claims is that unless you believe in Jesus you will share their same fate! Which is why we must also keep in mind a second point.

Not only does justice demand punishment, but people also choose it. Tim Keller, in his article on The Importance of Hell, makes this point powerfully and it goes something like this. C.S. Lewis reminds us that the doors of hell are locked from the inside first and then therefore locked from the outside. Here’s what he means by that. Hell is, at its core, utter separation from God. And all those who wanted nothing to do with the living God in this life finally get what they want in the life to come. J.I. Packer, in his Concise Theology says that "Scripture sees hell as self-chosen . . . [H]ell appears as God's gesture of respect for human choice. All receive what they actually chose, either to be with God forever, worshipping him, or without God forever, worshipping themselves." We tend to think of hell as a place where God sends people and locks them in. Both Lewis and Packer remind us that it is first the place where we have run to lock God out. Keller says "We wanted to get away from God, and God, in his infinite justice, sends us where we wanted to go."

Finally, we must remember that God himself has experienced it. The most terrifying part of the creed that Christians have confessed for centuries that Jesus "...was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell.” The thing that helps to begin to reconciles the God of love with the justice of hell is contained succinctly in this creedal formula. It tells us that God doesn’t just callously send people to hell from his sterile throne up on high. The Apostle's Creed tells us that, to our utter horror, God went through hell himself for the sole purpose of providing a way so that people wouldn’t have to. On the cross, we see Jesus, the eternal Son of God, separated from the Father. We see the Trinity being torn asunder from the inside. We see a terrifying separation from God. And it was even more hellish because Jesus never wanted to get away from God. Jesus never sought to be left alone by God. Rather, Jesus experiences this dreaded absence because of his great desire to be with us. In this act of unspeakable solidarity with the human race, Jesus is plunged into our hell so that we might have the face of God again.

If we keep these three things in mind, the conversation around hell could shift a bit. Remember we started this conversation with the objection: “I believe in a God of love who would never send anyone to hell. “ But the utter holiness of God’s love seems to demand something more. It says that God's love for us was so great that he didn’t destroy hell - he loved us too much to not deal with evil - but was himself destroyed in hell so that we would never have to be. A quote from that same article by Tim Keller sums it up well:

“So [if you want to believe in a God of love who doesn’t punish human evil] the question becomes: what did it cost your kind of god to love us and embrace us? What did he endure in order to receive us? Where did this god agonize, cry out, and where were his nails and thorns? The only answer is: "I don't think that was necessary." But then ironically, in our effort to make God more loving, we have made him less loving. His love, in the end, needed to take no action. It was sentimentality, not love at all.”