The Existence of Hell and the Question of Eternity
"For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10)
Introduction
There are objections to hell that come from anger. Some
objections come from wounded experience. And then some objections come from
love, from a refusal to believe that the God revealed in Christ could eternally
abandon His creatures. It is the last of these that deserves the most careful
listening.
Understanding the suffering of hell as a freely chosen
separation from God, rather than a divinely imposed torture, has made the
doctrine morally intelligible for many Christians. It aligns with the Father
who runs to meet the prodigal, who entreats the elder brother, who desires not
the death of the sinner but that he turn and live.
Yet the difficulty remains. Why must such separation be
eternal? Why would freedom be "locked in" at death? Why would the
Father ever cease to entreat?
What the Church Teaches
The Catholic Church teaches that hell is real, that it is
eternal, and that it consists in definitive self-exclusion from communion with
God. Not divine torture, nor an arbitrary abandonment, but the final
consequence of a freedom exercised against the God who is Love [1].
The medieval Councils, such as the Fourth Lateran Council
[2] and the Council of Florence [3], speak in solemn, juridical language,
affirming eternal punishment and the objective reality of judgement. The modern
Catechism of the Catholic Church does not retract this and retains both the
reality and the eternity of hell. Yet it articulates its nature in a more
personal register. The Catechism interprets these conciliar definitions within
the Church's ongoing theological development, expressing the same doctrine
through a deeper reflection on freedom, responsibility, and the relational
character of divine love.
Two things are worth noting. First, the Church has never
declared any particular person to be in hell. The possibility is real; the
census is unknown. Second, in the twentieth century, Hans Urs von Balthasar
argued that while hell must be affirmed as a real possibility, Christians may
legitimately hope that all may be saved [4]. Hope is not presumption; it is a
refusal to place limits on divine mercy. But hope is not dogma. The Church does
not teach universal salvation, and the tension between those positions is real,
not a defect to be resolved.
The Scriptural Difficulty
It is worth acknowledging what scripture does and does not
settle. Those who press the universalist case are not simply being sentimental.
David Bentley Hart's recent translation of the New Testament deliberately
renders aionios (typically translated "eternal" or
"everlasting") as "of the age," arguing this is
philologically more accurate [5]. This is a serious scholarly intervention. The
eternity of hell does not rest on a single unambiguous proof-text but on the
Church's sustained reading of Scripture, developed in conciliar definition and
theological reasoning. Acknowledging this development openly does not weaken
the doctrine; it clarifies what has been revealed and what kind of claims are
being made.
The Eastern Witness
Eastern Christian theology frames this issue differently and
illuminatingly. Heaven and hell are not two separate realms but two ways of
experiencing the same divine presence. God is unchanging love. For those open
to Him, that love is joy. For those closed against Him, that same love is
experienced as torment. This insight, found powerfully in Isaac of Nineveh,
preserves something important [6]. God does not switch modes. He does not
become punitive and cruel. The tragedy of hell, on this account, is not that
God stops loving but that love itself becomes unbearable to the one who has
refused it.
The Catholic and Orthodox traditions differ in their
metaphysical framing (the East's emphasis on theosis and the healing of
human nature versus the West's juridical categories of merit and satisfaction).
They converge on this: hell is relational, not simply penal.
The Self-Exclusion of the Garmentless Man
The parable of the Great Banquet offers the clearest
scriptural image supportive of Catholic theology on self-exclusion [7]. A king
hosts a wedding feast and sends servants to the highways and byways. This is
radical, unmerited inclusion. In the culture of the time, it is claimed that
kings provided wedding garments for guests who could not afford appropriate
attire. The garment was offered at the door, freely, to everyone.
One man is found without it. The king asks how he got in
without a wedding robe. The man is speechless and cast out.
That silence is the key. There is no explanation for
refusing what was freely available. He is not cast out for lacking something
unobtainable. He’s cast out because he declined the offer. His silence is the
image of a freedom that has closed itself against grace it could have accepted
and can find no justification for having done so.
This is what the Church means by hell: not a penalty for
failing a transaction (as in Pascal's famous wager [8]), but the condition of a
person who has refused a gift.
Grace Before Any Refusal
Before the question of resistance, there is grace. No one
awakens to repentance unaided [9]. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the
moment of clarity in the far country, the painful capacity to see his situation
without illusion, is itself a gift [10]. The Father's love was already reaching
him, making it possible for him to want what he could not want before.
If there is a final refusal, it’s not the refusal of a God
who tried briefly and withdrew. It would be the refusal of grace that had
sought, stirred, invited and enabled, again and again. The tragedy, if it
exists, lies not in divine parsimony but in the mysterious capacity of a creature
to resist what it most deeply needs.
Direction matters more than distance. The struggling sinner
who keeps turning back, however haltingly, however repeatedly, is not moving
towards damnation. Hell, if real, would not be the destiny of the weak or the
doubting, but of the definitively and finally closed.
Why Eternity? The Metaphysical Claim
The "locked in at death" objection is the sharpest
one, and it deserves an answer.
Catholic theology distinguishes between two different
things: the mode of existence of a creature in time, and the mode of existence
that death opens onto. In earthly life, we are creatures of becoming,
deliberation, repentance, reconsideration, and growth. Our loves are unstable,
divided, and often contradictory. This is the condition of temporal freedom in
a broken world.
Death is not simply more time. The tradition, drawing on
Aquinas's account of angelic choice, holds that non-temporal intellects choose
with a single, total act, not because they are rushed, but because their mode
of existence is different from ours [11]. Death is understood to bring the soul
into something analogous: not an arbitrary cut-off, but the moment at which a
freedom that has been becoming finally, irrevocably, stands as what it has
chosen to be.
This does not mean God ceases to love or to seek. It means
the soul's capacity to be drawn, which grace had been sustaining throughout
life, reaches its final state. The Father does not abandon us at death, but
death may be the moment at which our response to his running finally
crystallises into something that can no longer be reversed.
The Purgatory Objection
If post-mortem change is possible at all, why is post-mortem
conversion impossible? Purgatory implies the former.
The distinction being drawn is between purification and
reorientation. Purgatory heals and perfects a will already oriented toward God;
it does not, and cannot, reverse a fundamental closing of the will against Him
[12]. Think of it as physiotherapy after surgery: it can restore and strengthen
what the patient desires to recover, but it cannot create that desire in
someone who has refused treatment entirely. The healing presupposes the
turning; it does not replace it.
A single proof-text does not resolve this. It belongs to the
Church's living theological tradition, her discernment of Scripture, and her
sustained reflection on freedom, grace, and the nature of the soul, and coheres
with what she has received and defined.
The Universalist Challenge
The objection that a God who is both omnipotent and
perfectly loving cannot be finally frustrated by finite wills is weighty. It is
the serious philosophical argument Hart makes in That All Shall Be Saved
[13], and it was anticipated by Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great theologians
of the Eastern tradition, whose universalism (apokatastasis) appears in
his On the Soul and the Resurrection and other writings [14].
The tradition has trodden carefully here. Origen's more
systematic vision of universal restoration, which included the pre-existence of
souls and the eventual restoration of all rational beings, even demons, was
condemned, most explicitly at the Second Council of Constantinople [15]. Gregory
of Nyssa's more hopeful universalism, by contrast, was not embedded in the same
speculative cosmology and was neither condemned nor defined as dogma. The
universalist intuition thus has deep roots in Christian thought and reflects
both the theological breadth and the limits of the patristic tradition.
The Catholic response is not to dismiss this but to insist
on something the universalist position tends to dissolve: the reality of
freedom. A love that cannot finally be refused is not love received but love
imposed. An omnipotence that guarantees every will's eventual compliance does
not ultimately preserve freedom; it renders it provisional. The terrible
dignity of the creature is precisely that it can refuse, permanently, what it
most needs.
This does not resolve the tension. It locates it honestly:
between a Love that will not coerce and a freedom that can refuse. The Catholic
Church holds both without collapsing either.
The Elder Brother and the Open Door
The parable of the Prodigal Son ends with an image that
bears directly on all of this. The elder brother stands outside the feast. The
Father goes out to him and entreats him. The door stands open. The parable ends
without telling us whether he enters.
Notice what the Father does not do. He does not slam the
door and tell his son it’s too late. He entreats. He reasons. He appeals. The
tone throughout is one of patience and love.
But notice also what the Father does not do on the other
side: he does not drag his son into the feast. The elder brother must lay down
his grievances. He must accept that the feast is a celebration of mercy, not
earned merit. He must enter on the feast's terms, not his own.
C.S. Lewis famously described hell as "the doors
locked on the inside," an image that captures the self-chosen quality
of this exclusion [16]. The elder brother in the parable gives that abstraction
a human face.
His danger is not rebellion but hardened resentment, a
refusal to celebrate the Father's mercy that has calcified into something that
finds the feast intolerable. He has worked faithfully in his father's fields, but
along the way, he forgot whose fields they were. What began as service had
become a claim. And here is the gravest danger: the insistence on being the
source of one's own goodness, clinging to virtue as possession rather than
gift. Pride experiences grace as an affront. The very gift that could save
becomes unbearable to a heart determined to possess rather than receive.
This is perhaps the most illuminating image of hell
available to us: not dramatic damnation, but a freedom that has finally made
itself unable to enter a joy it has spent too long resisting and resenting.
The parable's silence is not evasive. It is honest about
what freedom means.
The Cross as the Measure
None of this is abstract. It turns on the Cross.
Catholic theology understands Christ's descent into the
realm of the dead as a real entry into the furthest reaches of human
alienation. The Apostles' Creed professes that He descended into hell; He does
not remain at a safe distance from separation but undergoes it [17]. He cries
out from within it [18]. No human darkness lies beyond His solidarity, not even
the experience of God forsakenness.
And yet the crucified Christ does not compel. He invites the
thief; He does not override him. The Cross reveals a God who persuades unto
death, who gives Himself without reserve, who refuses to annihilate the freedom
of the beloved precisely because love cannot operate that way.
If eternal separation is possible, it’s not because God
ceases to love, nor because the Cross was insufficient. It would be because
love, by its very nature, cannot finally coerce what it most desires to receive
freely.
Two Objections, Two Temptations
Before the conclusion, it’s worth pausing to name two
objections this account will provoke. Neither is foolish. Each presses on
something real. And each, if pushed too far, risks distorting the very doctrine
it seeks to protect.
The first objection comes from those who feel this account
is too soft. Scripture speaks of judgement with urgency, not ambiguity.
Christ's warnings are not gentle therapeutic observations but stark calls to
repentance. Hell is not merely the subjective discomfort of a wounded soul; it
is real, it is eternal, and it is bound up with divine justice as much as
divine mercy. The medieval councils did not speak in the language of
self-exclusion and relational tragedy; they spoke of punishment, of the reprobate,
of eternal fire.
From this perspective, framing hell primarily as a freely
chosen separation, encouraging hope that all may be saved, and insisting that
no particular person has been declared damned risks muting what the Gospel
states plainly. If hell begins to feel hypothetical, the urgency of conversion
quietly drains away. The fear, the awe of the Lord, which Scripture calls the
beginning of wisdom, loses its edge. And mercy, invoked too readily, can end up
evacuating judgement of its force.
This objection is not wrong to insist that God's justice is
real and that the Church must speak with clarity. The danger it names is not
cruelty; it is complacency.
The second objection comes from those who feel this account
does not go far enough. If God is both perfectly loving and omnipotent, how
could His purposes be eternally frustrated by finite, wounded creatures? Every
sin is bound up with ignorance, distortion, and disordered desire. How could
any will, once fully healed and standing before the God it was made for,
continue forever to refuse Him? A freedom that chooses eternal misery begins to
look less like dignity and more like pathology. It may be that no one chooses
evil as evil. Instead, the will may fasten itself to some limited or distorted
good, to autonomy, vindication, self-possession, and in clinging to it refuses
the greater Good for which it was made.
From this perspective, the claim that freedom can finally
and irrevocably close itself against God seems not only harsh but incoherent.
If divine love is truly victorious, if the Cross really goes to the uttermost,
then grace must eventually reach even the most resistant soul, not by force,
but by patient, inexhaustible love. Eternal separation then looks less like
respect for freedom and more like a failure of the God who is Love.
This objection is not wrong to insist that God's mercy is
creative, not simply reactive, and that the Cross reveals a love that never
gives up. The danger it names is not sentimentality; it is the quiet reduction
of freedom to a stage in a process whose outcome was never really in doubt.
Healing may remove blindness, but it does not automatically remove pride. It
remains possible that a creature might still prefer self-ownership to
dependence and, in so doing, close itself against the joy offered to it.
What is at stake? These are not abstract disputes. They
press on the deepest questions about who God is and what it means to be human.
Press the first objection too hard, and God risks becoming a
warden whose justice finally eclipses His mercy. Press the second too far, and
human freedom risks becoming provisional, its refusals ultimately meaningless,
its choices ultimately overridden.
Catholic theology stands between these temptations, not
because it has solved the mystery, but because it refuses to simplify it.
Conclusion
The Catholic position holds two things in permanent tension:
a Love that will not give up, and a freedom that can finally refuse. Neither
can be dissolved without losing something essential. Deny eternal hell entirely,
and freedom becomes theatre; assert it crudely, and the face of God becomes
unrecognisable.
The Church prays for all. She canonises saints but damns no
one by name. She holds before us both warning and hope, and perhaps that
tension is not a defect but a guardrail.
She does not resolve this tension by choosing one instinct
against the other, but by kneeling before the mystery where justice and mercy
meet.
Whatever eternity holds, it will not be less loving than
Calvary. And if hell exists, it is not a doctrine to wield triumphantly but one
to weep over.
Footnotes
1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1033–1037:
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_one/section_two/chapter_three/article_12/iv_hell.html
2. Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Constitutiones, cap. 1
(Firmiter credimus):
https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1215,_Fourth_Lateran_Council,_Constitutiones_(Firmiter_Credimus).html
3. Council of Florence (1439), Laetentur Caeli:
https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/01p/1439,_Concilium_Florentinum,_Sessio_VI-VIII,_Laetentur_Caeli.html
4. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be
Saved”? (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). Publisher page (verify product
URL): https://www.ignatius.com/Dare-We-Hope-That-All-Men-Be-Saved-P4011.aspx
5. David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), Introduction and notes on aionios:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300247364/new-testament/
6. Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Homilies, esp. Homily 27:
Prefer print edition — The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, Holy
Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1984.
7. Matthew 22:1–14 (USCCB online Bible):
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/22
8. Blaise Pascal,
Pensées, fragment 233 (Lafuma 418) — the Wager (public domain):
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm
9. John 6:44 (USCCB online Bible):
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/john/6
10. Luke 15:11–32 (USCCB online Bible):
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/luke/15
11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 63, a. 5; I, q.
64, a. 2: Prefer authoritative online text — https://www.newadvent.org/summa/
12. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1030–1032
(Purgatory):
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_one/section_two/chapter_three/article_12/iii_purgatory.html
13. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven,
Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019):
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300229564/that-all-shall-be-saved/
14. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection
(public domain): https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf219.xvii.html
15. Second Council of Constantinople (553), Anathemas
against Origen: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3812.htm
16. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles,
1940), ch. 8; The Great Divorce (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945).
The Problem of Pain:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-problem-of-pain-cs-lewis
The Great Divorce:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-great-divorce-cs-lewis
17. Apostles' Creed; Catechism of the Catholic Church,
§§632–637:
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_one/section_two/chapter_two/art3.html
18. Mark 15:34 (USCCB online Bible):
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/mark/15
While I broadly agree that hell is relational rather than punitive, all arguments for an eternal hell (rather than a therapeutic hell), from whatever tradition, presuppose that no change in the soul is possible post-mortem. I often see this asserted, but I have never seen it explained: why does death cement us into a particular choice that puts us forever beyond the reach of an omnipotent and ever-loving God, with no opportunity to change our minds?
ReplyDeleteThe Father does not abandon us at death, but death may be the moment at which our response to his running finally crystallises into something that can no longer be reversed.
Why? God has power over life and death. It's argued that God honours our choice at death, but this seems arbitrary. Why can't he check in with us again in a hundred years? It hardly seems reasonable that God pursues us 'with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy' for threescore years and ten, and then leaves us alone for eternity. Even less reasonable if we hold hell to be relational.
Purgatory heals and perfects a will already oriented toward God; it does not, and cannot, reverse a fundamental closing of the will against Him.
While this may be true of Purgatory, it still demonstrates that post-mortem change is possible. The worship of the angels and the fall of Lucifer also shows that non-temporal states are not 'frozen'. If a soul can move from Purgatory to Paradise, why can't a soul move from hell to Purgatory? This doesn't answer the objection, it only resituates it.
Whatever eternity holds, it will not be less loving than Calvary. And if hell exists, it is not a doctrine to wield triumphantly but one to weep over.
Calvary occurred because God so loved 'the world'. There is no qualifier here (unless Calvin is correct). If part (or, as some would have it, most) of that world languishes in torment eternal, then eternity is necessarily less loving than Calvary. If an eternal hell exists, then the Gospel itself is something to weep over and the euangélion is a tragic misnomer. No Christian could enjoy a feast knowing people were suffering in the next room. How much more so if this were an eternal arrangement?
The fact that Christians have children seems to indicate that we either do not entirely really believe in an eternal hell that would put our children forever beyond redemption on a place of endless suffering; or that we don't take the doctrine as seriously as it we should. I do not see how we can, in good conscience, hold to both an eternal hell and a command to 'go forth and multiply.'
Part I
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughtful response. Your objections press on the deepest tensions in the doctrine, and I don't claim to be able resolve them, only to articulate what I understand the Catholic tradition asserts and why.
<>i>"All arguments for an eternal hell presuppose that no change in the soul is possible post-mortem… why does death cement us into a particular choice?"
The tradition's claim isn't that God withdraws, nor that He lacks power to continue offering grace. It's that death marks a change in the creature's mode of existence. In this life, we deliberate over time, we reconsider, mature, waver, and revise. The classical view holds that beyond death, the human will no longer unfold discursively but stands in the clarity of what it has become. The finality is not imposed externally; it's the unveiling of a freedom that has reached its settled form.
This raises a fair question: why should that be the mode beyond death? The tradition draws on two things: first, the analogy with angelic choice (which I mention in the essay), non-temporal intellects are understood to choose with totality, not because they're rushed but because succession itself belongs to our creaturely condition. Second, and fundamentally, the claim that a will in full clarity would not waver endlessly. If you stood, finally undeceived, before the God who is Love itself, and you still refused, that refusal would not be an accident of timing but the fullest expression of what you had become.
"Why can't God check in with us again in a hundred years?"
The difficulty here may be our continued imagining of post-mortem life as stretched along a timeline. If there is no longer a temporal "later," then the language of checking in again misdescribes the condition. The question isn't whether God stops offering grace, the tradition insists He doesn't, but whether a will, once it stands in the unmediated presence of what it was made for, can continue indefinitely to refuse it without that refusal itself being definitive. The concern is not that God lacks patience, but that endless vacillation in the face of the unclouded Good would render freedom incoherent.
"Purgatory demonstrates that post-mortem change is possible."
Yes, but it’s a particular kind of change. Purgatory perfects a will already oriented toward God; it heals what is disordered within a “Yes”. It doesn’t reverse a fundamental “No”. You're right that this resituates rather than resolves the question. The deeper issue is this: the tradition holds that a will fundamentally turned toward God can be purified because the orientation itself is already grace-enabled and cooperative. But a will fundamentally turned away from God would require not purification but a new act of creation, and that would be imposed rather than free. This may not satisfy, but it's where the tradition draws the line: healing presupposes turning; it doesn't replace it.
"If eternity includes eternal torment, then it is less loving than Calvary."
Calvary reveals the extremity of divine self-gift, not the inevitability of its acceptance. The Cross does go to "the world", universally, without qualification, but its efficacy depends on reception, not imposition. Love that guarantees universal compliance by overriding freedom would not be the love displayed there. If hell exists, it would not signal a failure of love but the terrible possibility that love can be rejected without being withdrawn. That doesn't make hell less grievous; it remains a tragedy to weep over, but the tragedy lies in refusal, not in God's unwillingness to give. The question isn't whether God loves the whole world (He does), but whether that love can finally be rejected by creatures genuinely free.
Part II
Delete"How can we bring children into a world where such an end is possible?"
This is perhaps the sharpest form of the objection, and I don't think it has an easy answer. But consider: to refuse life because freedom carries the risk of damnation would imply that non-existence is preferable to the possibility of love. The Christian claim has always been that existence itself is a gift, and that the same freedom which makes rejection conceivable also makes communion possible. Without that freedom, there would be no real love at all.
Every parent who brings a child into the world does so knowing they cannot ultimately control what that child becomes. That's terrifying. But the alternative, refusing to give life because love cannot be guaranteed, would be worse, because it would treat freedom as a defect rather than as the condition of a genuine relationship. I don't say this lightly. The thought of anyone, let alone one's own child, definitively refusing God is almost unbearable. But the tradition holds that the risk of love is still preferable to the certainty of its absence.
None of these responses dissolves the emotional weight of your objections. Nor should they. If eternal hell is real, it's not a doctrine to hold lightly or defend triumphantly. It remains something to contemplate with trembling.
Your objections press on the deepest tension in the doctrine, and I don't claim to have resolved them, only to have tried to articulate what the tradition is actually asserting, and why. But the tradition's insistence on finality is not meant to portray a God who ceases to love; it is meant to take seriously a freedom that, if it is real, must be capable of becoming what it chooses.
Thank you for the detailed and reasoned reply. I'm sorry for a correspondingly long reply, but this is what you get when you write on a controversial subject!
DeleteI had meant to include, but forgot in a maple-syrup fuelled fugue, that the fact that the early patristic witness isn't unanimous on this suggests that the meaning of aionios in NT and secular Greek is not as unambiguously clear as its English translation suggests.
This raises a fair question: why should that be the mode beyond death?
I think the flaw with the angelic analogy is that we aren't angels. As I understand it, the argument against fallen angels repenting is that, as spiritual beings of pure intellect/will they are unable to do so (which doesn't seem to explain how beings created good can choose to be evil but not reverse their choice). But the Resurrection indicates that we don't become purely spiritual beings: the Incarnation redeems the whole person: we are changed, but not into something of another nature.
If you stood, finally undeceived, before the God who is Love itself, and you still refused, that refusal would not be an accident of timing but the fullest expression of what you had become.
True. But if our choices are 'locked in' at the moment of death, we are denied this opportunity. The problem here is that our finite, temporal minds cannot fully comprehend God - si comprehendus, non est Deus - thus our earthly choices in relation to God cannot be said to be fully informed, and it would be unjust to suffer eternal consequences as a result. On the other hand (if we are made in the image of God and find our fullness in him, and if Calvin is wrong and there isn't a subclass of people created as 'vessels of wrath prepared for destruction') then I find it implausible - actually, I find it impossible - that any soul that does face God 'finally undeceived', would reject him.
The question isn't whether God stops offering grace ... The concern is not that God lacks patience, but that endless vacillation in the face of the unclouded Good would render freedom incoherent.
But if there is no temporal 'later', then we cannot speak of indefinite refusal or vacillation either. 'Eternal' also loses any meaning. Language falls apart here, so, like the scriptures, we have to carefully rely on analogues. But we do know that there are occurrences that precede and succeed others outside of temporal time. Again, the fall of the angels and Purgatory show this, as well as the descriptions of actions in Revelation.
But a will fundamentally turned away from God would require not purification but a new act of creation, and that would be imposed rather than free.
This would be true if a soul were capable of fundamentally turning away from God, but that would require both that a creature made in the image of God could, with a perfect knowledge of God, reject him (and, as 'deep calls to deep', I find this unlikely); and that the human will is reduced to a binary switch that, once set, can never be changed. When the rain drop falls into the river, it does not reject the river. Nor would we say that becoming one with the river is an imposition - it is simply the rain's telos.
The question isn't whether God loves the whole world (He does), but whether that love can finally be rejected by creatures genuinely free.
DeleteThis again hinges on the malleability of the post-mortem state. If it effectively stasis, then suffering or bliss have no meaning. If not, then love would keep the door open forever. It costs God nothing to do so. It also seems to me that it serves no purpose to keep souls in hell forever (however either of these terms are understood). If that were the case, then annihilationism (as Anon mentions below), is considerably more merciful.
... to refuse life because freedom carries the risk of damnation would imply that non-existence is preferable to the possibility of love.
Non-existence is infinitely preferable to eternal suffering, just as going to sleep is infinitely better than staying awake with a migraine. If 'narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it', then having children is a dangerous gamble. I am not a mother, but I doubt that any parent would put their child on a bus if they were told that the bus had a one in ten chance of making it to its destination without bursting into flames, or give them a bowl of cereal if one in ten - even one in a thousand - boxes had arsenic in them. And those are finite outcomes, not eternal ones.
But the tradition holds that the risk of love is still preferable to the certainty of its absence.
These aren't comparable, though. The Church anathematised the pre-existence of souls, so there is nothing to non-exist or to experience the absence of love. There is nothing to deprive of existence by not having a child. Once brought into existence, however, the odds are heavily against the soul and although, as you correctly say, the parent is not ultimately responsible for the fate of the child, I honestly don't believe that a parent who would do everything in their power not to put their child in harm's way on earth would take such a monumental metaphysical risk.
I also don't believe that any parent could enjoy eternal paradise knowing that their child wasn't. I also don't see how it is possible for anyone to enjoy paradise so long as anyone is excluded. Our relationship to others is part of our makeup as people: unless we are changed so much that we lose our personhood in any meaningful sense (which would seem to go against the scriptural witness), the absence of those we love from paradise would be unbearable. The idea of being in paradise while others are eternally suffering, and being either ignorant of that fact or too blissed-out to care is something I actually find quite sinister.
I don't think that my objections are simply emotional. An eternal hell doesn't make sense to me logically, either. Even with my pitiful amount of love for my fellow human beings, I would not want anyone (not even my neighbour with the modified exhaust who woke me up at 3am) to suffer eternally without hope that that suffering would redeem them. I presume that this love is good. If God is good, then his goodness must be the same as my goodness, but raised to the power of infinity (God's goodness cannot mean something different to human goodness, only something greater, or to speak of God as good is meaningless). Therefore, God's desire that 'none may perish' must be greater than mine and allowing eternal non-therapeutic suffering is illogical. And, purely rationally, as I've already said, it serves no purpose. If hell doesn't redeem and it doesn't punish, then what is it for?
Part I
DeleteLain, you are right to press the ambiguity of aionios. The early witness is not uniform, and the Church has never spoken about these matters with the precision we might wish. That alone should make all of us cautious.
On the angelic analogy: I take your point. We’re not angels, and the Resurrection does not dissolve our humanity into pure intellect. If the analogy is pressed too hard, it distorts. I don't mean to suggest that we become non-human at death, or that our mode of willing simply mirrors that of angelic beings. The analogy is only meant to gesture toward the possibility that clarity changes the nature of choice.
But you raise something deeper: if no one has yet stood "finally undeceived," how can their earthly refusal be definitive? That is the strongest version of the objection, and I find myself genuinely hesitating before it. Perhaps in the ‘moment’ between life and death, we’re given the final choice.
The tradition doesn't teach that death locks in a decision made in ignorance. It teaches that death unveils the truth of what we have been freely becoming. The question isn’t whether we have perfect conceptual comprehension of God, but whether love itself can be refused when encountered not as an abstraction but as personal presence.
You say you find it impossible that a soul, finally undeceived, would reject God. I hope you’re right. Truly. But the tradition's concern is that freedom must include the possibility that the self can become so curved inward that even Love is experienced as intrusion, not because Love is unlovely, but because the self has made itself incapable of surrender.
Your image of the raindrop returning to the river is beautiful, and it expresses something genuinely true about the creature's orientation toward its Source. But an orientation isn’t an inevitability. A rational creature is not water following gravity. The very dignity of personhood means that the movement toward the Source is responsive rather than automatic. To say that consent will infallibly occur is to say that freedom finally yields to nature. To say that it might not is to insist that personhood is not reducible to metaphysical drift, however beautiful that drift might be.
You are also right that once we leave temporal categories, our language begins to fray. "Eternal," "indefinite," "stasis," "process" are all analogies reaching toward something they cannot quite hold. When we speak of finality, we’re not imagining an endlessly ticking clock of refusal. We’re trying to name something more like a completed orientation, not a process continuing forever, but a will that has come to rest in what it has chosen. The absence of temporal "later" does not erase the possibility of decisiveness; if anything, it intensifies it.
Part II
DeleteOn annihilation: I understand why it seems more merciful. If hell neither heals nor instructs, what is it for? The classical answer is genuinely unsettling: it is not for anything. It is what remains when communion is refused — not a tool in God's hand, nor a pedagogical device, nor a spectacle of wrath, but the condition of a self excluded from the life that is offered. Some find annihilation a cleaner solution. Others hesitate before the thought that the One who raises the dead would finally unsay His own creative word. I confess I am among the hesitators, without claiming certainty.
Your reflections on parenthood are perhaps the most piercing thing you have written, and I don't want to deflect them too quickly. But I wonder whether the analogy finally holds. Earthly risks are imposed from outside; freedom is not. To create a person is not to place them on a bus with a defective engine — it is to call into being a subject capable of love. And love without the possibility of refusal is not love but choreography. If the odds were truly one in ten for damnation, I would share your horror entirely. But the tradition has never quantified those odds. It proclaims both the narrow gate and the wideness of divine mercy, and leaves the arithmetic in God's hands.
As for the unbearable thought of paradise while others suffer — I share that instinct, and I think you are right that any heaven requiring moral amnesia would be sinister rather than blessed. The tradition's answer is not that we cease to love those who are lost, but that in the vision of God we come to see justice and mercy together in ways we cannot now imagine. That is not a satisfying explanation. It is a confession of epistemic humility, and I offer it as such.
Your objections are not merely emotional — I believe you when you say so. They are philosophical and moral, pressing on whether eternal non-therapeutic suffering is compatible with divine goodness. I don't claim to have resolved that tension. What I am trying to defend is something narrower: that love, if it is truly love, must include the possibility of irrevocable refusal; and that freedom, if it is real, cannot finally be reduced to an endlessly reversible preference. Whether that possibility is ever actualised, and what it finally means, I entrust to a mercy greater than my reasoning.
Perhaps the most honest place we meet is this: neither of us wishes anyone to be lost. Neither of us can imagine taking pleasure in such a thing. If that instinct is even a dim participation in divine goodness, then we can agree that whatever eternity holds will not be less merciful than the One revealed at Calvary.
And if we err, may it be on the side of hope.
Interesting. Yes, thanks to Lain - and to HJ - for thoughtful responses. But the alternative view of conditional immortality of the soul - a.k.a. "annihilationism" - is not mentioned. Although generally a minority position through church history, this has been a strand of theology held within many church traditions, including by some church fathers. Scripture repeatedly says that the alternatives after our body gives up the ghost are either eternal life with God or death. Death can be a process but it generally has an endpoint; and terms like "capital punishment" indicate that the punishment is indeed eternal even after annihilation of the person has occurred. There's an awful lot to say about all of this!
ReplyDeleteAnnihilationism has a serious pedigree, not just among some of the Fathers but in modern evangelical theology too,. The scriptural instinct behind it is sound: the wages of sin is death, not eternal torment, and the contrast throughout the New Testament is between life and perishing rather than between two modes of endless existence.
DeleteFor a Catholic account, however, it sits outside what the tradition permits. The consistent affirmation of particular judgement leading to heaven, purgatory, or hell presupposes that the soul persists; there is simply no space in that framework for its extinction. The live tension in Catholic theology is between eternal hell and universal hope; that question remains genuinely open. This one, for Catholics at least, is effectively settled.
It is worth acknowledging what annihilationism gets right: it at least dissolves what troubles Lain most: no eternal non-therapeutic suffering, no paradise shadowed by awareness of others' endless torment. Whether it fully honours the scriptural witness, and whether it requires the Creator to finally unsay His own gift of existence, are questions its proponents continue to debate.
Perhaps the most honest conclusion is simply that these questions are larger than any of us, and meet the same counsel from whatever angle they are approached: entrust what you cannot resolve to a mercy larger than your reasoning.
Whatever different churches, or even different religions, have taught in the past or are teaching now about the afterlife, it seems to me that, logically, there can only be exactly seven possibilities:
ReplyDelete1, 2, 3, heaven, purgatory, hell
4 Sheol (Hebrew) or Hades (Greek): a desegregated afterlife in which the souls of the good and the wicked are all sharing one and the same abode
5 Soul sleep: no conscious survival after death until an indefinite date in the future when everyone will be resurrected all at once. “Soul sleep” is the term used by Seventh Day Adventists but it seems to be very similar to what I believe is the mainstream view in present-day rabbinical Judaism.
6 Annihilation. There is no such thing as an “immortal soul”.
7 Reincarnation.
This raises two questions, which I would request everyone here who has any interest in this to suggest an answer.
1 Can there, logically, be any kind of afterlife other than the seven listed here?
2 To what extent, if at all, might an individual’s personal beliefs determine what kind of afterlife he or she will get, when the time comes? In the case of Nos. 1, 2, and 3 — heaven, purgatory, and hell — I can see that it would almost certainly make a difference, but not in any of the other four cases.
However, that‘s just my personal view. What’s yours?
Thank you both; I am grateful for the seriousness of these responses.
DeleteOn the “seven possibilities”
The list is a helpful way of laying out the landscape. I wonder, though, whether the boundaries between these categories are not more porous than they first appear. “Heaven, purgatory, and hell,” for instance, are not three unrelated destinies so much as distinctions within a single claim: that personal identity endures beyond death, and that our orientation toward God is significant. Likewise, Sheol or Hades in their biblical contexts often name a shadowed condition rather than a definitive end.
Perhaps beneath the various models lie quieter, more fundamental questions: Does consciousness endure? Is that endurance intrinsic or gifted? Does the direction of one’s love ultimately matter? Different traditions answer these differently, and from those answers, the larger structures emerge.
On annihilationism (conditional immortality)
You’re right to note that conditional immortality has never entirely disappeared from Christian reflection. It affirms resurrection and judgment, yet denies that the soul is indestructible. Eternal life is a gift; apart from that gift, there is only death.
There is moral seriousness in that view. It takes the language of Scripture about “death” with full weight and seeks to avoid imagining God as the sustainer of endless torment. At the same time, it raises another question: whether the final refusal of God ends in extinction or in a continued, self-enclosed existence. If existence itself is a gift, does God withdraw that gift when it’s rejected? Or does He sustain even the rebel in being? That’s one of the deeper fault lines in this conversation.
On whether belief determines the afterlife
Here, I would tread gently. Christian thought has not suggested that eternity becomes whatever one happens to expect, as though the afterlife were psychologically self-generated. (There’s a Netflix based on that premise.) Rather, belief shapes the soul, not as wish-fulfilment, but as formation. It’s not that heaven or hell is assigned according to preference; it’s that our response to the living God shapes our participation in what is real.
Broader Comment
If I may add one broader reflection: most debates about hell finally circle two intertwined questions. Who is God, and what does freedom mean? Whether one leans toward eternal conscious existence, conditional immortality, or universal restoration, the question beneath them all remains the same: Can love be finally refused?
My essay is less an attempt to catalogue every eschatological model than to take that possibility seriously, and to acknowledge that, if it is true, it is something to contemplate not with triumph but with trembling.
Thank you, Jack, for your very full and carefully considered reply. Needless to say, I’m in full agreement with every point you make. I listed heaven, purgatory, and hell as three separate possibilities because the conditions experienced by a soul now in heaven are (to put it mildly) not the same as the conditions experienced by a soul now in hell.
DeleteAnd annihilation, “There is no such thing as an immortal soul,” because atheism is, after all, still a logical possibility
Good questions, Ray. I'm enjoying the responses to this post.
DeleteI think the fundamental distinction here is whether or not the soul survives the body, and everything else is a subcategory of those two states. A few observations on your options:
(1-3) the idea of a place of eternal reward/punishment is relatively universal. I'm not sure if Purgatory has exact equivalents outside of Catholic Christianity - perhaps some ancient ideas of trials after death come close. Purgatory differs in that it isn't traditionally an eternal state.
Valhalla is a quasi-paradise but, unlike the Christian version of heaven, does not endure eternally as everything is destroyed at Ragnarok and history starts again.
(4) In the non-biblical use of Hades, I think that the Greek underworld was more complex. Most souls ended up in the Asphodel Meadows, which I think is more closely analogous with Sheol, except that at least some could leave. Some good (or favoured) individuals ended up in the paradisiacal Elysium, and the most wicked were eternally punished in Tartarus. The shades of some of the dead could reincarnate after drinking the waters of the River Lethe, which washed away their memories (I once tried a cocktail that had the same name and the same effect).
The Norse Hel seems similar to Sheol.
(5) Annihilation could encompass two states: either the extinguishing of a soul as punishment; or that the soil doesn't survive the body because we're just organic computers and it's all over when the power goes off.
(6) I think soul sleep is more of an intermediate state between life and 1-3 (although I presume that proponents of soul sleep wouldn't hold with the existence of purgatory).
(7) Reincarnation is more of a continuation of life in an endless cycle of death and rebirth than an afterlife in the sense of the other options.
(Q1) I might suggest something similar to the mediaeval idea of Limbo as an eighth possibility: souls that cannot enter the fullness of heaven and don't receive the punishments of hell. Unlike Sheol, they don't cohabit with evil souls but, unlike purgatory, it's a final destination.
(Q2) It depends what we mean by belief determining what kind of afterlife we experience. In one sense, it makes no difference: if I fervently believe in heaven, but the truth is that we are either reincarnated or there's no such thing as an immortal soul, then my belief won't change that. If we mean belief as a shorthand for 'believing in X and living life accordingly (avoiding debates about salvation through faith alone), then it effects 1-3 (although many saints would say that we experience heaven and hell on earth, and not just in the afterlife, which blurs the boundaries somewhat). Much Eastern cosmology holds that our beliefs and karmic actions determine the state into which we are reincarnated and whether we escape the cycle of birth and death altogether, so I'd say they also make a difference to (7).
I got my numbers mixed up and meant soul rather than soil under annihilation. Hopefully it's all still clear!
Delete雲水,
DeleteRegarding your point (5), I think that the scripture-believing annihilationist would take your first option there, and might also add the limited-time punishment of the fire (which needs to be eternal for the 3 beings listed in Rev 20:10), whether actual or metaphorical, until final annihilation.
Ray,
DeleteI don't think that the human soul can be denied immortality only on atheism - God is surely capable to both grant and deny immortality to his creation.
@Gadjo, yes, annihilation (as in God extinguish the soul) can either by immediate or following a period of punishment.
DeleteIn ancient Egyptian mythology, those judged unworthy to enter A'aru (the heavenly Field of Reeds), had their hearts (representing their souls) either burned by the god Khonsu or, in later texts, consumed by the crocodile-headed demon Ammit. The deceased could not proceed through the world of the dead with no soul, and so was trapped in Duat, a shadowy underworld. This was not a place of torment, but failure to attain immortality was seen as the gravest divine punishment of all. This is an interesting amalgam of several of Ray's categories: annihilation, hell and Sheol.
Lain, on an earlier thread you said the Orthodox Lent begins on February 23 this year. That’s next Monday. Please forgive my curiosity, but what is the explanation for that? The Western Lent, when it was first introduced apparently some time in the 320s, began on Quadragesima Sunday, which this year falls on February 22. The rationale was that Lent lasts exactly forty days, ending on the Thursday evening before Good Friday. Is that also when it ends in the Orthodox Churches?
DeleteThanks for your help!