Temporary pains?

Kirk Cameron made waves last week when he and his son James released a podcast arguing against Christianity’s traditional doctrine of hell. To be clear, they weren’t making a case against hell per se but against what has been the overwhelming testimony of the church over its entire 2,000-year history—that hell is a place of eternal conscious torment for the damned.

Cameron argues that this doctrine fails both biblically and practically. Biblically speaking, the damned aren’t consigned to eternal conscious torment but to ultimate destruction. Instead of God condemning the unrepentant to suffer for all eternity, they are actually consigned to a temporary period of hellish suffering after which they pass out of existence. Cameron understands the punishment to be eternal because the damned will always be separated from God, but their suffering is nevertheless temporary because the damned will eventually cease to exist—a view known as annihilationism.

Practically speaking, Cameron argues that the traditional view alienates unbelievers who might otherwise come to Christ. Many of them will never convert to Christianity if the price of admission includes following a God who would create and sustain such a dreadful place. After all, how is it just for God to punish sins that are temporary in their duration with torment that is eternal in its duration? Who wants to worship a God that is hellbent on such a sadistic perversion of justice?

These are understandable questions, but they also have seriously flawed premises. At the end of the day, Christian doctrines cannot be adjudicated on the basis of fallen attitudes about the way God ought to behave. We didn’t make Him. He made us. Which means that we must reckon with God as He is, not with a god who is the product of our own fallen imagination. This means that we must press into how God has revealed Himself to us in Scripture.

The Camerons argue that the Bible’s various references to hell and final judgment have been widely misunderstood. For example, when Jesus says “fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28), that indicates that hell will annihilate people (i.e., erase them from existence). But this misunderstands the biblical language of “destruction,” which does not mean “erase from existence” but “ruin.” When a car is “destroyed” by a collision with another car, we don’t mean that the car was erased from existence. We mean that it was utterly and finally ruined and will never again be what it was designed to be. That is how the Bible’s language of “destruction” works as well, and the Camerons sadly miss this.

But perhaps more significantly, the Camerons don’t seem to appreciate what makes human sin liable to such dreadful punishments. We cannot calculate the gravity of sin against God based on how much time it takes to commit the sin. The seriousness of a sin is not measured by the deed itself or its duration but by the one whom it is committed against.

If you happen by someone pulling the legs off of a grasshopper, you might think it weird, but you are going to move on and forget about it. If you happen by a person trying to pull the legs off a baby, you are going to move heaven and earth to save that baby. You will risk your life to rescue that baby. Why? The deed is the same—pulling the legs off. The only difference is the one the deed is committed against. Everyone knows that a baby’s dignity and worth far exceed that of a grasshopper. Thus, to harm that baby is a far greater offense than harming a grasshopper.

And so it is with God. God is an infinitely good and noble and praiseworthy being, and thus to sin against Him is an infinitely heinous and condemnable offense that can only be answered by a punishment of infinite conscious duration (Revelation 14:11). This is the calculation of Scripture and the ancient faith of the church.

At the end of his podcast, Kirk Cameron says that he is still open for people to persuade him from Scripture that the traditional view of hell is the correct one. So I offer this rebuttal in that spirit—a desire for iron to sharpen iron by an appeal to Scripture. Scripture teaches that the majesty of God is so great that to sin against Him is worthy of an infinitely horrific punishment. While a sincere Christian may be in error on this point, the error is far more than a trifle because it implicates the majesty and holiness of God. For that reason, I hope and pray Cameron will reconsider. The issue is too important.