The Christian religion is a religion of revelation. It teaches that God has to reveal things to us and since God is so intelligent and knows everything, some of these revelations will seem strange to us. One of these strange revelations is that if you die estranged from God by serious sin, you will have to pay for it for all eternity in the torments of Hell and there will be no relief or release.
According to the Church, there are degrees of punishment in Hell. Not all the souls there are punished to the same extent. The person who died in the most sin will suffer more intensely than the one who dies in less sin.
That is all the Church says. Perhaps the best person in Hell suffers a tiny bit less than the Devil meaning that practically speaking there is no real difference. It means the Christian has no right to protest if one sees Hell as extreme or near-extreme torment for everybody for the Church says you are only bound to believe what God has revealed and he has revealed nothing about the severity of the punishment.
Christians protest against
the notion that Hell is as cruel as God can possibly make it and claim that no
one is punished more than they deserve.
The absurdity in this is that you do deserve a Hell of extreme and unending torment if you sin. Sin means that you submit to disorder and therefore to what is uncontrollable. You can’t want just some evil. To want evil at all is try to open a Pandora’s box. If so, it is your right to receive Hell at its worst because that is what you have deserved or obligated yourself to pay for. God would be contravening your rights and degrading you if he does not punish as much as possible. Religion has a God who cares about virtue more than people when he sends people to Hell so that makes him most likely to care more about your rights than you.
The people in Hell are supposed to have chosen it and turn their backs on God and so have everlasting torment inflicted on themselves. If they are to blame for this endless evil then they must deserve extreme torment. They must get it too for Hell is where you go when you have to face your just reward.
The differences in punishment levels cannot be believed because Jesus said the greatest sin was failing to love God. So even if a sin seems to be small, the lack of love it expresses is very seriously wrong. So sin is very grave. The damned must suffer for the lack of love of God rather than for the rules they broke. There can't be much difference in their torment.
The worst thing about Hell
is how it’s everlasting. Cooling the
fires of Hell as modern theologians try to do isn’t going to do much good. God is the supreme good not people. Therefore the worst part of Hell for
Christians is the everlasting offence against God that the damned
maintain. They must see that as extremely
bad so that it hardly makes sense to worry about the pain and try to persuade
people that Hell isn’t extreme torture.
If it is a
fact that if the souls in Hell don’t endure the same agony then some souls
aren’t as hateful or cruel as others. Christianity teaches that it is
possible to be kind and sin in that kindness.
For example, when the homosexual has sex with his lover to help console his
lover over a bereavement. So the souls might not be totally hateful but
they are totally sinful. If they are not
totally sinful then that implies that they cannot sin anymore because their
wills are fixed in unrepentance for the sin they had when they died which
destined them for Hell. They cannot sin
afresh by deliberate unrepentance or new sins.
If they were free they could sin as much as is logically possible simply
by approving of all the sins that ever happened or could have happened. They would do that if there were no hope for
they hate God above all things.
If the souls in Hell really
hate God so much that they sin just to offend him then they automatically
approve of every sin and wish that nobody ever did anything else then they are
totally depraved and are literally capable of anything. They are totally hateful. They are all equally evil and they are all
punished the same. If they are free then
there are no degrees of punishment for they are equally bad. Sin is infinitely bad so even if God prevents
some souls from sinning any more it will not make them any better. You cannot make what is infinitely bad any better
or worse.
The doctrine of degrees of
punishment presupposes that to sin is not automatically to sanction all
possible sin all the sin that could ever be committed.
But to sin IS to approve of
every other sin that has ever taken place or will happen. You can’t seriously disapprove of the sins of
others if you commit murder. You can
feel disgusted but that is not disapproval.
Disapproval, like approval, is intellectual. If you sin you are blessing evil for it could
lead to anything so all sin is seriously irresponsible. To sin is to will evil to happen and if you
will evil to happen you will that others sin so sinners condemning sinners is
always hypocrisy. The so-called light
sinner embraces total evil as much as the heavy sinner.
If a soul would suffer in
Hell forever and sin forever to spite God how could it be any more evil? The damned must all be equally evil if they
want to be confined to Hell. If the soul
hates itself that much that it will not enter Heaven then it will hurt itself
to the extreme. So if God does not
torment it that much it will torment itself.
Some say that God makes the
souls suffer to prevent them committing any more sins so that Hell must be
terrible. But God does not need to hurt
to force a person to stay the way she or he is.
When sin is infinite evil it makes no difference to him how much a
person sins. It might on earth where
quantity does damage to others but not in Hell.
If God uses pain to restrict the sins of the damned then they still want
to commit them and still would commit them if it were not the pain so he can’t
really restrict sin.
Jesus said that the
conscience torments you in Hell and that you feel despair there (Matthew 8:12,
13; Mark 9:47, 48; Luke 16:23, 28; Revelation 14:10; 21:8). There would be no reason for people to gnash
their teeth and cry unless they were stuck there for good and beyond
salvation. Hell is a horrible place and
there is no hint of it being mild in Jesus’ doctrine at all. When sin deserves infinite loss it deserves
the sinner regretting it so much that his whole being is racked in emotional
agony.
God alone matters if God
exists and we are told to love God and to love our neighbour for the sake of
God so the damned will be punished solely for rejecting God. It is not their malice against their victims
that God is worried about but himself.
To punish them for anything else would be to reward their sin against
God. God will make them feel the full
force of the pain of losing God. The
commandment Jesus and Moses gave to love God with all our powers and strength
saying it was the greatest commandment implies that if we do not consecrate our
entire selves to God and give him the present and our eternal future then we
deserve to rot in Hell racked in extreme pain and suffering forever for we
deprive God of so much and offer him only contempt though we may not always see
it as contempt.
Serious sin is supposed to deserve infinite torment in Hell because it is turning away from infinite good which is God. The damned then have rejected all good and so must suffer to the extreme.
Hell is supposed to consist
chiefly of the pain of the loss of God.
When we lose our dearest friend we feel more pain than we would if it
was just a few pence that we lost. To be
with God is to have incredible happiness for it is to have the supreme good,
the supremely valuable thing. To be
without God then must mean incredible unhappiness. To be without him forever must be the worst
of suffering, it must bring one down to the very depths of despair. So, if all the souls in Hell have lost God
they must all feel the same amount of pain for their loss is the same, one has
lost as much as the other. Hell must be
dreadful and its horror beyond our imagination.
The doctrine of Hell implies that the loss of God is painful. God will not put souls in Hell to make them
more distressed about losing happiness than him. The loss of God does not need to be painful
at all. Those who are alive and who hate
God do not find their loss of God unbearable or bothersome at all. God is forcing the damned to suffer the pain
of losing him. He is going out of his
way to do it. He is pumping the
loneliness into them.
The souls in Hell regret
their sins only because they make them suffer now and not because they want to
be restored to the friendship of God. The
memory of their sins brings them so much torment for they lost so much for so
little. They threw away everlasting
happiness for a trifle or trifles. The
person who has lost God for one sin will suffer more than the person who has
lost him for many. God can miraculously
make them feel the same amount of pain.
But he might not. He can be as
cruel as he likes for justice permits it.
Whether he punishes one a little once every billion years forever or has
one crying out for mercy forever it is still just for it is still paying the
debt of everlasting agony.
Suffering for a second every
million years forever and ever would still add up to infinite punishment. This is merciful – not in the sense that the
punishment is reduced but is more humane than it could be - so the damned must
suffer terribly all the time. A fine
paid by ten pence a week is nothing but one being paid in full on the spot
isn’t very nice. It hurts. God will exact the price to the extreme when
he puts our happiness second to punishing us for sin for Jesus said Hell was
terrible. Hell is about revenge not
justice.
Hell implies that revenge is right for revenge is not for reforming or determining and proves that mercy is immoral. There is no reforming in Hell. Even if retribution is right it should be done to make the person pay for the sin primarily and secondarily to reform him and deter others. Or perhaps it is better to make the person pay for the sin as much as to try and reform him with the suffering.
Christians want to pretend that we make our own Hell and God has nothing to do with it. It's a little stupid fad of theirs. If that is true then why do they believe in the resurrection of the damned? Surely then God is making bodies just for the sake of tormenting them physically?
Jesus agreed with the degrees
of punishment doctrine (Matthew 11:22, 24; Luke 12:47, 48; 20:47). He said that the depravity of the damned
spirits was not all at the same level, “When the unclean spirit has gone out of
a man, it roams through dry [arid] places in search of rest, but it does not
find any. Then it says, I will go back
to my house from which I came out. And
when it arrives, it finds the place unoccupied, swept, put in order, and
decorated. Then it goes and brings with
it seven spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and make their home
there. And the last condition of that
man becomes worse than the first. So
also shall it be with this wicked generation” (Matthew 12:43-45). When he said the generation was influenced by
demons and their miracles it does not give us much confidence in what a tiny
number of that generation said about him and his miracles and in his Hell
dogma.
Jesus said that the
religious hypocrites would have the heaviest penalty to pay, “They will receive
the greater condemnation (the heavier sentence, the severer punishment)” (Luke
20:47). Those who have heard the gospel
or lived where it was taught will face the worst punishment as will those
unsaved people who lived a long time without God (page 22-23, Hell – what the
Bible Says About It). So when Christians
preach the gospel most people will refuse to listen so what they are doing is
making sure their Hell will be worse than that for those who have never heard.
Jesus was not a reliable
witness to the existence of Hell when he erred concerning the degrees of
punishment. Thank goodness! People tend to believe in Hell just in case
it exists. Obviously, Hell is made
slightly more attractive by the doctrine of the degrees of punishment. But what if there are two gods – a bad one
and a good one with the bad one torturing people to the extreme in Hell
forever? That would mean we should
believe that Hell is totally bad and Jesus is a fanatic for trying to persuade
us that its fires are cooler at least for some.
The fanaticism is more serious that it looks because even a pin-prick of
pain is very serious if it is going to last forever. It adds up to an incalculable measure of
pain.
The degrees of punishment doctrine in Hell is not much comfort. If there is a God and a Hell, it is a torture chamber filled with unimaginable horror.
FURTHER
APOLOGETICS AND CATHOLIC
DOCTRINE, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, M H Gill & Son,
APOLOGETICS FOR THE PULPIT,
Aloysius Roche, Burns Oates & Washbourne LTD,
ENCHIRIDION SYMBOLORUM ET
DEFINITIONUM, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A Schonmetzer,
‘GOD, THAT’S NOT FAIR!’ Dick Dowsett, [OMF Books, Overseas Missionary
Fellowship,
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN
APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli, Monarch,
HAVE WE TO FEAR A
DEVIL? Fred Pearce, The Christadelphian
Office,
HEAVEN AND HELL Dudley
Fifield, Christadelphian Publishing Office,
HELL – WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS
ABOUT IT, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord,
JEHOVAH OF THE WATCH-TOWER,
Walter Martin and Norman Klann, Bethany House,
LIFE IN CHRIST, PART 3,
Fergal McGrath SJ, MH Gill and Son Ltd,
RADIO REPLIES VOL 1, Frs
Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press,
REASON AND BELIEF, Bland
Blanschard, George Allen & and Unwin Ltd,
THE BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B
Kuiper, The Banner of Truth Trust,
THE DEVIL, THE GREAT
DECEIVER Peter Watkins, The Christadelphian Birmingham, 1992
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF BIBLE
DIFFICULTIES, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan,
THE FOUR MAJOR CULTS, AA
Hoekema, Paternoster Press,
THE KINDNESS OF GOD, EJ
Cuskelly MSC, Mercier Press,
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING,
THE REAL DEVIL, Alan
Hayward, Christadelphian Bible
THE REALITY OF HELL, St
Alphonsus Liguori, Augustine Publishing Company,
THE SERMONS OF ST ALPHONSUS
LIGOURI, St Alphonsus Ligouri, TAN,
THE TRUTH ABOUT HELL, Dawn
Bible Students, East
WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY
ABOUT HELL? Radio Bible Class,
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
HEAVEN?, Dave Hunt, Harvest House,
WHEN CRITICS ASK, Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, Victor Books, Illinois ,1992
WHY DOES GOD? Domenico
Grasso SJ,
THE WEB
The Bible Vs the Traditional
View of Hell by Babu Ranganathan www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/5862/hell2.html This page argues that the wicked will suffer
agony for a while in punishment for their sins for a while after their death
and then be put out of existence. It
says that Matthew 10:28 promises that the wicked will be destroyed body and
soul in Gehenna meaning be destroyed entirely. Then it points to Isaiah 34 where