Let’s face it: since Reinhold Niebuhr, public theologians have been pretty bad at making people give a hoot about theology. Cornel West is probably the closest thing we’ve had in a good long while to a strong public theologian who manages to keep people talking and thinking about theology. But Damon Linker isn’t doing a bad job, either, and just because I disagree with a particular piece of theology doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the work that is done when Christian theology gets a little time in the spotlight.

Damon’s article in The Week — “What Christians Get Wrong About Hell” — was pretty controversial. His argument is a straightforward Platonist point:

“But Socrates implies that this view makes no sense. Doing the morally right thing must be good, intrinsically, for the moral person himself. (Otherwise, in what sense would it be good?) But that means that the opposite must be true as well: The person who fails to do the morally right thing suffers intrinsically by virtue of missing out on the good that comes from doing the right thing…All of this follows of necessity from the logic of morality itself. What makes no moral sense at all is the popular view of punishment embodied in the vision of hell as a place for the infliction of external torments. To say that an immoral person deserves to suffer for his sins is like insisting that a man with cancer deserves to have his legs broken. It’s a prescription of additional suffering for someone who’s already suffering.“

The analogy of pathology should tip you off to why this doesn’t jive with orthodox Christian views on sin. Sin is not something that happens to you, that is, it is not merely a matter of ignorance and bumbling, and it is not a feature of lowly materiality tugging at the pure and typically righteous soul. Sin rather invokes a certain degree of malice aforethought, or at the very least willed evil. To be very clear: in this view of sin, God was morally wrong for casting Adam and Eve out of the Garden, for they had surely already suffered for their sin by the mere commission of it. If that’s your view of scripture, you’re part of a heretical Gnostic breakaway sect, and probably a big fan of Hermann Hesse. Damon and I talked this through on twitter, here.

It is the willed evil inherent in turning away from God that makes the retributive aspect of hell just and legitimate. Linker and the Platonists would have all punishment be purgatorial and remedial, e.g. aimed at causing a person to discover that their sin was wrong: but Christianity presumes ‘already knew it was wrong’ to be rolled into the very concept of sin (cf. Adam and Eve knowing they were commanded not to do what they were doing, thus their lying about it.) So if one is already aware that their sin was wrong, there is no use in causing them to see what they already know. However, hell is and can be remedial in the sense that the knowledge of hell helps to educate the conscience.

God does show mercy, but mercy by its very nature is undeserved, and underscores the legitimacy of the penalty mercifully put aside. (It’s only through mercy any of us are ever allowed to repent whatsoever; our recompense is sorry compared to our crime. Time is what we get: the opportunity to make a good act of contrition and to love our savior. This is no different than the time God gave Nineveh to repent for their wickedness — he never promised them or us unconditional release from penalty.)

What’s turned us off of hell? Probably a large scale turn away from retribution in punishment in general. As Avery Cardinal Dulles writes on the death penalty,

“When death came to be understood as the ultimate evil rather than as a stage on the way to eternal life, utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham found it easy to dismiss capital punishment as “useless annihilation.” … While this change may be viewed as moral progress, it is probably due, in part, to the evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice, all of which are essential to biblical religion and Catholic faith. The abolition of the death penalty in formerly Christian countries may owe more to secular humanism than to deeper penetration into the gospel.”

To moralize hell right out of Christianity — that is, to attempt to fix the moral logic of Christianity — is to have already come to the decision that Christianity needs to be tried by some moral standard other than its own. This is the incursion of secular humanism into Christianity, and it’s this standard that has caused anti-hell folk to believe that what the Gospel tells us about God’s justice can’t really be true, and must be re-formulated to be a bit more palatable. (I’ll also note that God’s vengeance is different than human vengeance; Jesus specifically warns us against vengeance, but our vengeance is imperfect and disorderly, while God’s is perfect. As the banishment narrative of Genesis reports, we’re fit to take up the offices God gives us, not the offices God himself occupies.)

But of course, this is all theological, academic. I know it’s not very convincing. Damon wasn’t convinced. I don’t blame him. How do we look at our God of love and mercy and not feel a little put off that he would inflict upon us eternal torment?

That is, of course, precisely how the guilty think. “What, me? Come on, really? Me? Maybe other people are that bad, but me? Don’t you love me?” The guilty are always able to expect greater moral strength of others than they expect of themselves, and the wishing of hell away is an example of guilty humanity wanting greater latitude for our iniquity than that which we’re already given! To pretend as though hell is some out-of-the-left-field overreactive retribution is to forget the many, many, many stages of intervention and attempted reconciliation that come between the birth of a person and their eventual destiny in hell. It is also to downplay the enormity of sin. Here’s Augustine (City of God XXI):

“But eternal punishment seems hard and unjust to human perceptions, because in the weakness of our mortal condition there is wanting tat highest and purest wisdom by which it can be perceived how great a wickedness was committed in that first transgression. The more enjoyment man found in God, the greater was is wickedness in abandoning Him; and he who destroyed in himself a good which might have been eternal, became worthy of eternal evil. “

To reject the infinitely good is to earn the infinitely bad: it’s due proportion. But humanity is still offered mercy, still offered reconciliation — such is the abundance of goodness in God.

It is useful, I think, to remember that God’s rod and his staff comfort us (cf Psalm 23). Sin is not only active against God, that is, it does not only offend God, but also the self and the community. When people sin, they harm you: they break down the community of love that originally existed not only between man and God but between man and man, and they make isolated and destructive what was originally giving and loving. Therefore hell is not only a part of a system of justice that vindicates God, but also mankind: those who are harmed by the sin of others are equally vindicated by hell. Our good shepherd not only guides his sheep, but destroys the wolves. This, too, is an act of love.

I understand this is still probably not satisfying, that it may still read as too academic. In that case my last try is a narrative approach. Jesus is the bridegroom of the church, and we Christians love him. We do not love him in an abstract and distant way: he doesn’t love us generically either, but rather calls each of us by name. So many times in my life I’ve been in such pain, I’ve been diagnosed with epilepsy and had seizures and broken teeth and felt so lonely and desperate and all those times, when I’ve cried to Jesus, he has soothed and comforted me. Christ understands pain, he knows frailty — he lived it. He felt betrayal, loneliness, desperation, abandonment, hurt. Nonetheless, despite all his love and generosity, humanity tortured and abused him, humiliated him, murdered him. When it’s put this way — that hell is the final recourse when, after so many offers have been refused and hopes extinguished, when Christ’s sacrifice is imagined not as an abstract mechanism of atonement but as the genuine and heartfelt self-giving of the person who has dried your tears and picked up your broken body and held your hand in the hospital bed — then I think the retributive aspect of God’s justice is easier to understand. Hell is for those who have spit on Christ’s loving mercy at every turn, even unto the end, and in doing so have broken his heart and crucified him afresh.

Now, I don’t pretend to know who goes to hell and who doesn’t. I’m glad it’s not my call to make. I trust God’s mercy and judgment equally. But I don’t try to replace it with the standard of justice I myself would dream up, and I understand the doctrine of hell to have been handed down quite transparently by Christ himself. And praise be to God for that.