Is the UR Hell a Means to Torture People into Salvation?

[Alex_Smith]

The Evangelical Universalist

(2nd ed), Robin"]There is a powerful ethical objection to the revised vision of hell that I offer in my book. Is the God of the evangelical universalism a torturer? Why think that he would be? Well, one might suppose that he is tormenting people with dreadful agonies until they choose to accept him. In other words, he is torturing them into getting saved. He stands over those he is punishing saying, “Love me and all your pain will stop!”

Am I proposing a deity specializing in well intentioned but indefensible “human rights violations”?

In answering this question it is helpful to know what torture actually is. Let’s say for simplicity that torture involves
]the deliberate infliction/]
]of extreme forms of mental or physical pain/]
]in order to achieve some goal./]
The goal itself may be legitimate (e.g., the extraction of critical information from a suspected terrorist), but the means is considered not to be legitimate.

So is the evangelical universalist’s version of hell a torture cell? That is a great question. Consider:
]Does it involve extreme forms of mental or physical pain? It appears so—a painless hell seems unlike any hell I have heard of./]
]Is the pain used to achieve a goal? Yes. Several possibilities present themselves:
]to punish people because they deserve it/]
]to purify them/]
]to reform behavior/]
]to educate people on the true reality of sin./]/]
Perhaps all of those things and more—God is not limited to having only one purpose. And these purposes are all good ones but, of course, while they may serve as justification for the infliction of some pain they are not normally considered a legitimate defense for the extremities of torture.

So, according to evangelical universalism, God is using extreme pain to achieve a good goal. Does this not make God a torturer?

The first thing to say is that there is a big disanalogy with torture as normally understood. The pain is intended primarily—in (b)–(d) above, at any rate, and perhaps also in (a)—for the good of the person suffering it. God is seeking the ultimate blessing of the ones in hell. As Novatian says, is clear that God becomes “angry” with us “not out of vice, but for the sake of healing us” (De trinitate, 5). The torturer is not doing that. Even so we might still remain very uneasy with God’s extreme method.

Second, hell need not be seen in that way. Hell could be understood not as the infliction of pain by God but as a condition in which God allows a person to experience the inherent consequences of their sin. Sin is a corrosive element in human life and God shields us in this age from its full impact. Hell could be seen as a place where God stops shielding us and allows the corrosive power of sin to take its course. This would be a very horrible experience that could serve goals (a) to (d) above but in this case it does not seem that God is torturing us at all. He allows the pains of hell and uses them to achieve his goals but he does not inflict them. He is not torturing us but leaving us to experience the consequences of our own actions.

Is this idea compatible with Scripture? Perhaps. Stephen H. Travis argues in his book Christ and the Judgment of God that while the notion of retribution does play a role in New Testament theology, it is not central. The dominant model of judgment, he argues, concerns one’s relationship to Christ. To be rightly related to Christ is to share in his life but to spurn Christ is to fail to enjoy the life of God. Eschatological judgment is the intensification of the life that we have embraced in Christ now or the refusal of that life. So hell as exclusion from relationship with God is not, thinks Travis, a punishment imposed from outside by God but “the inevitable consequence of a person’s refusal to enter into a relationship with God.” Sin is like a sickness that afflicts a person, eating them away from the inside. (Although, we must add that it is God that sets creation up in such a way that sin is so self-destructive.) Such judgment—even if used by God to fulfill purposes such as those in (a) to (d)—could not be said to amount to torture.

Nevertheless, some biblical texts do speak of divine judgment and punishment in terms of God directly inflicting the pain. For instance, humans sin so God sends the flood. However, before we rush to abandon this approach, consider the following: the classical Christian tradition has seen God as beyond human comprehension—God is timeless, spaceless, non-composite, impassible, immutable, absolute, etc. But God also wishes to communicate truth about himself to human beings. Consequently, according to the tradition, God accommodates his revelation to those to whom he is revealing himself so that they are better able to understand, even if that understanding is limited. Thus the Bible speaks about God in anthropomorphic ways, referring to his hands, his eyes, his ears, his back, and so forth, and the mainstream tradition has interpreted such language non-literally because God (as non-composite and non-corporeal) cannot have a literal body. Similarly it speaks about him changing his mind, which the tradition has similarly taken non-literally (because God, as conceived above, cannot literally change his mind).

Now, some in the classical tradition have handled the issue of divine wrath and punishment in precisely the same way. Paul Gavriluk explains how the early church fathers sought to distance God from the pagan gods of mythology. These gods could be angry in immoral ways and the fathers sought to say that God is not like that. Anger is, they recognized, a morally ambiguous emotion. So if we are to speak of divine anger, they said, we must do so with care.

If God is said to be angry in a qualified sense, how precisely does he experience anger? There was some diversity of opinion on this matter. Does God really feel anger? Some, like the Alexandrians, Clement and Origen, responded that although God himself did not feel anger, humans experienced the consequences of his judgment and punishment as if God were indeed angry. They explained that biblical authors ascribe anger, vengeance, and fury to God in order to instill pious fear in simple folk. The use of such language, according to Clement and Origen, is primarily pedagogical and metaphorical . . . Following the Alexandrian tradition, John Cassian held that God in his very being did not experience anger. It is the fear of divine punishment, Cassian proposed, that caused humans to experience divine kindness and justice as wrath and vehement anger. Augustine puts the matter in similar terms. For him, divine anger is a function of human reaction: “The wrath of God is an emotion which is produced in the soul which knows the law of God, when it sees the same law transgressed by sinners.”

The Bible speaks about God’s anger and his punishing people but this is simply to speak anthropomorphically—as if God were human—to aid understanding and to encourage godliness. The biblical language actually describes how divine judgment feels from the human perspective of the one afflicted by it. When humans position themselves out of synch with God then they are in a state of spiritual death. Hell is the climax of that state and can metaphorically be described as divine wrath and punishment.

That’s one possible approach that has roots in the Christian tradition. I am open to it—indeed sympathetic—but I only offer it as a tentative suggestion because the issues are big and complex and I have simply not thought through all the implications.Posting this primarily so I can reference this in a discussion I’m having on FaceBook but feel free to discuss it if you like, as it’s a fairly common question that comes up

[pog]

[taken from a post on another website]

C) Does God torture people into heaven?

1: Simple answer: No.

I cannot speak for all universalists as there is wide variety on this issue (along with the freewill issue), but my basic take is this:

First, whilst I agree that there is ethical and biblical warrant for some form of retributive justice, I strongly hold to the idea that some acts (especially some violent acts) are **intrinsically immoral **(which is true even within a retributivist paradigm) and therefore cannot be used at all, even for a greater good. Torture would be one of these. So traditional literalist hellist descriptions of hell as a place of hot irons, pouring molten metal and Middle-Age torture equipment is straight out the window. God won’t do that. The same applies to duration as well as degree and manner of methods of punishment; even within a retributivist framework the *lex talionis *sets outer limits of proportionality and appropriateness. Thus I also believe that no matter what harm a person caused to others, they couldn’t ethically be made to experience more suffering than they caused – and this as an outer, extreme limit (a just punishment could involve less suffering). It should also be borne in mind that a good case can be made for divine justice being seen in primarily non-violent, transformative, restorationist terms (see *Razing Hell *by Sharon Baker). Since I also see God’s final judgements as being always accompanied by His mercy, I fully expect that the suffering of those in hell will not at all be like the hellist descriptions of eternal torments and endless misery.

Second, the purpose of causing suffering is of major importance in determining its ethicality. This is a case MacDonald makes in a section dedicated to answering this question in The Evangelical Universalist. For example, if I love someone, and therefore want the best for someone, I could not inflict pain on them unless - and this is an important unless - that pain led to the maximisation of their flourishing and there was no other way. An analogy: I love my child. My child contracts a disease the only cure for which is a painful procedure. The procedure is guaranteed to succeed and will result in the maximising the child’s flourishing. It would be loving to promote the procedure if that painful procedure was the only way (if there was a painless alternative I would be morally obligated to choose that instead). Painful but beneficial physical cutting we often call ‘surgery’. Now, in comparison, if I chose to inflict the same amount of pain on my child but for no reason that benefitted the child, but instead only benefitted me or society, then we would call that procedure ‘torture’ and it would be morally wrong and incompatible with any meaningful idea of ‘love’.

Traditional hell, being unending, cannot be for the best interests of the damned. However, a temporary purgative or purifying, corrective and educative hell can be in the best interests of the one being punished – and therefore is compatible with love. God will only employ the minimum chastisement necessary to fulfil justice and restore shalom, as Novation says, God’s anger is ‘not out of vice, but for the sake of healing us’ (*De trinitate *5).

Third, drawing upon Eastern Orthodox ideas, I see the suffering of the damned in terms of the self-unfolding of the effect of sin more than the direct infliction of pain by God – ie being in the presence of the fire of God is heaven to some, hell to others, not by God’s direct choice, but by consequence of His presence. Similar to the ideas of many annihilationists, God Himself is the fire. MacDonald writes, ‘Hell could be understood not as the infliction of pain by God but as a condition in which God allows a person to experience the inherent consequences of their sin … a place where god stops shielding us and allows the corrosive power of sin to take its course.’

This suffering, then, is less physical than mental and emotional: it is the shame of exposed sin, the guilt and self-loathing of the truly penitent, the horrific realisation of what one has done, the sympathetic pain experienced by the truly empathic (think of how painful it is to watch ones child in agony – now consider the wicked damned being made empathic to that degree so that he now loves, and vicariously experiences, the abuse he once inflicted on others). For many ‘normal’ people then, I fully expect the correction of hell to be painful, but not torturous, and not protracted – though still sufficient to warrant a realistic warning of its seriousness.

Fourth, drawing upon Dostoyevsky, it is possible to see God’s forgiveness itself being the thing that inflicts the suffering. Consider how wretched one feels when one is forgiven by another – how the very act of forgiveness itself highlights one’s own guilt and sinfulness:

‘'But do you wish to punish him terribly, ferociously, with the most dreadful punishment that one may imagine, but with the purpose of saving and regenerating his soul for ever? If so, then crush him with your mercy! You will see, you will hear his soul shudder, show horror. “Am I to endure this mercy, am I to receive all this love, am I worthy of it?” - that is what he will exclaim! Oh, I know, I know this heart … It will bow down before your pious deed, it will thirst for a great act of love, it will burn aloft and be resurrected forever … Crush this soul with mercy, show it love, and it will curse its handiwork, for within it there are so many good beginnings. The soul will grow enlarged and will behold how merciful God is, how fair and just are men. He will be horrified and crushed by the repentance and the numberless debt that stands before him from this day … Justice is not the retribution merely, but also the salvation of the ruined man … Let other nations have the letter and the retribution, we have the spirit and the sense, the salvation and regeneration of the ruined’ (from The Brothers Karamazov).

Sharon Baker puts it this way, ‘ our alternative view of hell speaks of God’s love as the most gruelling judgement … when a person is brought face-to-face with his or her sins and experiences the unexpected grace of forgiveness rather than the expected retributive punishment, real repentance may occur … Peter Abelard believed that forgiveness wins a person over because of the act of love that motivates it … forgiveness calls the offender with love, summoning him or her to take responsibility for the offense, to give up the self-involvement, and to repent.’

And Gregory Macdonald in this way, ‘Such is the mercy of God that He will hold His children in the consuming fire of His distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son and the many brethren – rush inside the center of the life-giving fire whose outer circles burn.’

Fifth, because I am a preterist (partial to three-quarters), I see a lot of the dire warnings of suffering and pain in the NT as primarily being hyperbolic descriptions, framed in the ANE rhetorical convention of ascribing all events directly to God, of the earthly suffering that will inevitably come as a consequence of the Jewish rejection of the Messiah and the Kingdom programme by the hand of the Romans – not as descriptions of terrors actually inflicted directly by God post-mortem (though I allow for a secondary strata of interpretation in this light). In other words, all the terror passages in the Gospels and Revelation are more to do with Roman evil than God’s justice.

Sixth, one should not underestimate the difference between a neverending duration and a long, but temporary, one. Technically, there is infinite difference. There is therefore an infinitely wide moral chasm separating traditional hellism and purgatorial universalism.

Seventh, I do not think it at all plausible that people will be being corrected and persuaded by God for millions of years. God is a really good debater, He has all the answers, He has intimate knowledge of our psychology, He knows how to heal and restore the most deprived mind and soul in the quickest manner. I’m agnostic as to the exact lengths of time likely to be required to convince hardened sinners of the love of God, but I find it impossible to imagine anyone holding out against God for any seriously protracted length of time.

It is interesting to note that the very act of trying to imagine huge lengths of purgatorial time serves to highlight the utter absurdity of traditional hellism:

Dr Richard Beck notes, ‘There seems to be something about the notion of hell not lasting forever that trips people up and I’m not sure what that something is … First, let’s imagine hell as extreme conscious torment and pain. Basically, imagine hell as bad as any hellfire and brimstone Christian wants to make it. Second, let’s imagine two different visions regarding the duration of hell, the traditional vision where hell is eternal and another vision where hell is finite but very, very, very long … And yet, the number is finite. There would be a moment of ending … So here’s the question, what’s the difference–theologically speaking–between an eternal hell and a Googolplexian hell, a hell that lasts for a Googolplexian number of years? … When people debate about universalism it seems that a lot of people who endorse ECT worry that sinners (Hitler comes up a lot) might be getting off easy. But it seems to me that we could imagine some Googolplexian hell that would address that concern. That is, if you are worried about people getting off easy we can take care of that. We can dial up a Googolplexian hell of any size to satisfy that demand. In fact, we can double it, just to give us some wiggle room. We don’t want anyone getting off too easy… And yet, I wonder if all this talk about justice is really the issue. Doesn’t the notion of a Googolplexian hell expose this? Because if punishment and justice or getting off too easy is a worry we can posit some Googolplexian number where those questions start to seem, well, a bit silly. So there is something else going on. So I’m wondering: What might that something else be? What’s the scandal about someone, even a Hitler, getting free after a Googolplexian number of years (and if you want more we can add more, just ask) of conscious torment and pain, the worst pain we can imagine?’

2: Hot-topic of the problem of (the myth of) redemptive violence

God’s use of violence in punishing sin, and especially in hell/purgatory, is currently a big issue not only in universalist circles, but also in wider Evangelicalism (and beyond). Texts to consider: *Christ and the Judgement of God *by Stephen Travis; *Razing Hell *by Sharon Baker; *Violence Unveiled *by Gil Bailie; *Evil and the Justice of God *by N. T. Wright; *Shalom: the bible’s Word for Salvation, Justice and Peace *by Perry Yoder; *Changing Lenses *by Howard Zehr; *Must There Be Scapegoats *by Raymund Schwager; *Healing the Gospel *by Derek Flood; Justice that Heals by Arthur Boers; *Forgiveness and Reconciliation *by CFD Moule; and many, many others.