From Timothy Keller’s book, ‘The Reason for God’:
“Ah, you may say, “fighting evil and injustice in the world is one thing, but sending people to hell is another. The Bible speaks of eternal punishment. How does that fit in with the love of God? I cannot reconcile even the idea of hell with a loving God.” How do we address this understandable recoiling?
Modern people inevitably think that hell works like this: God gives us time but if we haven’t made the right choices by the end of our lives, he casts our souls into hell for eternity. As the poor soul falls through space, they cry our for mercy, but God says “Too late! You had your chance! Now you will suffer!” This caricature misunderstands the very nature of evil. The Biblical picture is that sin separates us from the presence of God, which is the source of all joy and indeed all love, wisdom, of good things of any sort. Since we were originally created for God’s immediate presence, only before his face will we thrive, flourish and achieve our highest potential. If we were to lose his presence totally, that would be hell—the loss of our capability for giving or receiving love or joy.
A common image of hell in the Bible is that of fire.[x] Fire disintegrates. Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now ask the question: “What if when we die we don’t end, but spiritually our life extends into eternity?” Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.
Jesus’s parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man in Luke 16 supports the view of hell we are presenting here. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. They both die and Lazarus goes to heaven and the rich man goes to hell. There he looks up and sees Lazarus in heaven “in Abraham’s bosom”:
So he called to him, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.” But Abraham replied, “Son, remember in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.” He answered, “Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.” Abraham replied, they have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.” “No father Abraham,” he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:24-31).
What is astonishing is that though their statuses have now been reversed, the rich man seems to be blind to what has happened. He still expects Lazarus to be his servant and treats him as a water boy. He does not ask to get out of hell, yet strongly implies that God never gave him enough information about the afterlife. Commentators have noted the astonishing amount of denial, blame shifting, and spiritual blindness in this soul in hell. They have also noted that the rich man, unlike Lazarus, is never given a personal name. He is only called a “Rich Man,” strongly hinting that since he had built his identity on his wealth rather than on God, once he lost his wealth he lost any sense of self.
In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart form God on a trajectory into infinity. We see this process “writ small” in addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and pornography. First, there is disintegration, because as time goes on you need more and more of the addictive substance to get an equal kick, which leads to less and less satisfaction. Second there is the isolation, as increasingly you blame others and circumstances in order to justify your behavior. “No one understands! Everyone is against me!” is muttered in greater and greater self-pity and self-absorption. When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing—though a good thing—becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy. Personal disintegration happens on a broader scale. In eternity, this disintegration goes on forever. There is increasing isolation, denial, delusion, and self-absorption. When you lose all humility you are out of touch with reality. No one ever asks to leave hell. The very idea of heaven seems to them a sham.~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York, NY: Penquin Books, 2008,2016), 78-81 (continued. . . A Loving God Would Not Allow Hell II)
Timothy Keller is a well known and founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
