The Justice and Goodness of Hell

Hell is a place where, after death, the souls of unrepentant sinners are eternally tormented by the unmediated presence of God, manifested in his wrath. This claim is confirmed through (i) an exegetical study of the words used to indicate “hell” in the Bible, (ii) a biblical-theological overview of the presence of God manifest in either blessing or cursing throughout the Scriptures, and (iii) a consideration of matters componential to a proper systematic theology of hell.

A Theological Critique Submitted to Liberty Theological Seminary in partial fulfillment of the requirements for completion of the course, THEO 525 SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY I

Heaven and Philosophy, ed. Simon Cushing, 2018

Much recent academic literature on the afterlife has been focused on the justice of eternity and whether a good God could allow a person to experience eternal suffering in Hell. Two primary escapes are typically suggested to justify never-ending punishment for sinners: the traditional view focuses the blame for an individual’s condemnation away from God onto the sinner’s freely chosen actions; the universalist position denies the eternality of the punishment on the grounds that God’s inescapable love and eventual victory over evil will bring all souls into His presence. I propose a third option that hinges on the possibility of Heaven itself being experienced as eternal punishment to demonstrate that if God’s presence is both the blessedness of Heaven for some and the agony of Hell for others, then the biblical affirmation of the universal restoration of all with the eternal punishment of some need not remain paradoxical.

12th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop, 2023

For some time now, the traditional doctrine of hell has been ‘under fire’. Traditionalists maintain that an everlasting hell, a place of both self-imposed exile and retributive punishment, is consistent with God’s perfect goodness. They thereby face the charge that evil, in the form of both punitive suffering and moral rebellion, will also be eternal. This is a challenge recently reiterated by James Spiegel, for whom a perpetual hell would be in contradiction to God’s ultimate reconciliation of all things to himself through Christ (see Col.1:20). A revisiting of Thomas Aquinas’ defence of the traditional doctrine can go some way towards meeting Spiegel’s objection. For Aquinas, both the suffering and disobedience of the perpetually defiant are permissible because of the place hell will have in the final age, when all parts, even bad ones, will be divinely ordered towards the perfected whole. Both the endless affliction and sin in hell, though evil in themselves, will be oriented to the justice God ensures for his new creation.

1999

Justice That Transforms: Restorative Justice – "Not Enough!" , 2024

The doctrine of hell necessarily arises in the context of a Christian consideration of violence. For a theological discussion of violence inevitably brings one to the most extreme instance of violence in God, if the traditional, most dominant, Western doctrine of hell is indeed “biblical” — namely, eternal conscious punishment of the unbeliever. This paper, inclusion of which also is in large part is in Volume Three of this series: "WAR AND HELL – and Exception-Clause Footnote Theology."

2003

It is the conviction of the writer of this paper that the evidence presented from both the New Testament and its conservative scholar’s exhibits that the doctrine of the eternal conscious punishment of the wicked held by orthodox Christians for over 2000 years is the only option for a conservative Bible-believing Christian. Some may mock at the idea that humans often need contrasts to learn and to be grateful for the blessing they have received. Nevertheless, often it is only when one sees that someone else did not receive a blessing which he has received is he able to view things from a perspective of thankfulness. When Scripture has its proper place as the final authority for faith and practice, many issues can be resolved. Likewise, how the Holy Spirit assisted orthodox exegetes to interpret texts over the last 2,000 years can also assist Bible students in not wandering into the error of many American based cults.

Religious Studies, 2009

Escapism, a theory of hell proposed by Andrei Buckareff and Allen Plug, explicitly relies on claims about divine reasons for action. However, they say surprisingly little about the general account of reasons for action that would justify the inferences in the argument for escapism. I provide a couple of plausible interpretations of such an account and argue that they help revive the ' Job objection' to escapism that Buckareff and Plug had dismissed.

2015

This problem of hell is a specific form of the problem of evil. The possibility that perhaps a great number of people will end up in an eternal hell is a problem for the Christian who also confesses faith in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. In this paper, I shall introduce issuantist views of hell and show that the basic formulations of this perspective do not provide an adequate answer to the problem of hell. Issuantist scholars themselves, however, recognize this weakness and add a wide range of possible supplements to their basic perspective. Some of these supplemented versions succeed in presenting reasonable answers to the problem of hell. One of the key reasons for the shift in interpretations of hell is a perceived failure on the part of other interpretations of hell to give adequate answers to the problem of hell. It is my conclusion, however, that with the addition of some of the same supplements, versions of annihilationism/ conditionalism and hell as ete...