The doctrine of hell is no doubt a major reason why some people are hesitant or wary about Christianity. After all, how could an all-good, all-loving God create hell and send people there to be tortured for all eternity? Doesn’t that seem a little cruel, dictatorial, and just plain sadistic? Due to discomfort at the idea of an eternal hell, many Christians hold on to ideas contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church. Some of the main contenders include universalism, hopeful universalism, and annihilationism. In this post, we’ll specifically focus on universalism, and then show why an eternal hell makes more sense when comparing the two positions.
Universalism is the belief that every person will ultimately go to heaven. Whether that involves some type of purgative punishment before being admitted into heaven is debated among universalists. While some believe that hell doesn’t really exist and that all people go to heaven immediately after dying, others hold to a view called apocatastasis, where the “damned” are punished in hell for a finite amount of time, and then are released into the Kingdom of God. Defenders of universalism usually argue that God couldn’t possibly be so cruel as to either permit or directly inflict excruciating pain for all eternity onto those He created and loves. To them it seems incompatible with 1 John 4:8, which says that “God is love.” Therefore, either hell does not exist or hell is only a temporary, corrective punishment like purgatory.
There are two major problems with universalism, however. The first one is the problem of God's concern for our moral choices, and the second is the misunderstanding of what hell really is. The first issue deals with both forms of universalism mentioned above, and the second one only concerns the view of apocatastasis.
Let’s tackle the first issue first. Presumably, all Christians can agree that God cares about moral goodness and moral evil. In other words, He genuinely cares about whether we choose to do good or bad. As 1 Timothy 2:4 says, God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Practically the whole point of Jesus coming down to earth, announcing the Kingdom of God, and establishing a church was to bring human beings to close friendship with God, Who is goodness itself. In fact, the entire biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation is God’s plan to rescue humanity from evil (i.e. sin) and to restore the relationship between God and man. It’s why God made the covenants with Abraham, Moses, and David. It’s why Jesus sacrificed His body and blood on the cross. It’s why Jesus commanded His disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:20). God clearly desires the salvation of souls, which entails that we choose the morally good.
However, universalism in both of its forms undercuts God’s concern for moral goodness. Think about it: If God allowed all people to enter heaven, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest how we behave on earth. I could be the worst rapist, mass murderer, or genocidal dictator in history, but God would still admit me into eternal blessedness alongside great heroes of the faith, like Mother Teresa, Sts. Peter and Paul, and St. John the Baptist. Intuitively, it just seems off, and it should, because it implicitly asserts that God is a relativist when it comes to how our earthly lives are lived and how closely we align our wills to His holy will.
This leads me to my next point: Not only is this a complete contradiction of God’s infinite goodness, but it also shows a lack of understanding of what heaven is. Heaven isn’t some eternal resort where everything is full of pleasure and nobody does anything wrong. Rather, heaven is eternal happiness, the fulfillment of our free choice to love and serve God and to submit our will to His. Such a life is strengthened through His Church, which administers the seven sacraments that serve as channels of grace, through which we are spiritually strengthened. Heaven also is the beatific vision, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The beatific vision, in which God opens himself in an inexhaustible way to the elect, will be the ever-flowing well-spring of happiness, peace, and mutual communion” (CCC 1045). In a poetic sense, those who are saved will see and experience God face-to-face, of which we will never tire, since God is infinite.
Heaven is eternal blessedness, which all men desire. We all want to be happy, not just for a short time, but forever. But we can never find eternal happiness in this life. Therefore, heaven is man’s ultimate end, his ultimate fulfillment, which we can either attain or fail to attain. When we align our will to God’s will, we feel a sense of satisfaction and completion, as if that’s who we are truly meant to be. This is a small taste of heaven, since only those who are close to God in this life can be close to Him in the next.
What is hell, then? I actually like the description “eternal separation from God,” but it is important to clarify what this means. In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas writes that in one sense nothing can be separated from God, for He sustains all things in being. This would include the damned in hell. However, in another sense, things can be separated from Him “by the unlikeness to Him in nature or grace.” People who turn their whole lives to God speak this way. They usually say that before their conversion, they were distant from God. Are they referring to literal distance? Of course not! They’re describing how far away from God’s grace they were. This is an accurate description of hell. Hell is eternal separation from God in the sense that the damned have chosen to live far removed from His will and His grace, which logically results in their eternal wager for separation from Him. It wouldn’t make sense for God to admit the damned into heaven when they have freely chosen not to be close to Him.
Those who believe in apocatastasis, however, would have to say that God overrides our free decision to reject Him. Why on earth would an all-good God drag us kicking and screaming into heaven when throughout our lives we have chosen to live distantly from Him? In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis illustrates this point: even if a busload of people from hell were to take a trip to heaven for a day, they would be miserable in heaven, since their souls were never trained on earth to open up to selfless love and grace. They are souls of selfishness and self-will, the exact opposite of heaven. Furthermore, if hell is more like purgatory, as defenders of apocatastasis argue, then that means God purifies those souls from evil, even though they freely chose evil. Essentially, the souls of the damned would be stripped of all sin and would thereby be forced to be good, which would be an oppressive and dictatorial act from God. So much for free will, if that’s the case. No matter how you slice it, universalism rejects the notion of free will’s role in the afterlife, thereby arguing that God forces us to choose Him no matter what we do here on earth.
Though this nowhere near exhausts the Catholic position of an eternal hell, it at least gives dissenters something to think about. The idea of an eternal hell can neither be reduced to a scare tactic to keep people in line nor to a place created by God for His sadistic pleasure. Informed by the Catholic conception of hell, we can make better sense of the verses in Scripture like 2 Thessalonians 1:9, which says “These will pay the penalty of eternal ruin, separated from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power,” as well as Revelation 14:11: “The smoke of the fire that torments them will rise forever and ever, and there will be no relief day or night for those who worship the beast or its image or accept the mark of its name.” In the next post, I will continue with this topic and contrast the Catholic view of hell with another somewhat popular view called annihilationism.
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