Earlier this year, Justin Dillehay, pastor of a Baptist Church in Tennessee and a contributing editor to the Gospel Coalition, published an article on the Coalition’s website titled “Hell is More than a Choice.” In it, he takes issue with claims, like those of C. S. Lewis, that hell is what unbelievers want. He demonstrates, quite clearly, I think, that the Bible does not teach that—that, while people want to enjoy sin, they certainly do not want the penalty that sin invites. Nobody in hell will breathe a sigh of relief and thank the Lord for giving them what they want.
He further demonstrates that hell is more than a passive receipt of what we deserve. Hell is not an expression of God’s passive wrath, but a demonstration of his active wrath against sin. People in hell will be there because God will cast them there (Matthew 13:41–42), not only because that is where sin naturally leads.
I appreciate Dillehay’s careful thought and clear scriptural demonstration that hell is the active infliction of God’s wrath on sin. And yet he makes mention, almost in passing, of something that strikes me as odd.
Given that he is writing for the Gospel Coalition, it is safe to assume that Dillehay is a traditionalist when it comes to his understanding of hell. His church website states simply the church’s belief (which I assume he shares) that “wicked and unbelieving will be consigned to eternal punishment,” but a note is given that the reader should consult the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith for a fuller expression of what the church believes. The 1689 LBC is a definitively traditionalist document.
Given his traditionalist leanings, the conclusion of Dillehay’s article is interesting. He appeals for us to be “preaching hell like Jesus” and challenges us to “ask ourselves why we often prefer to avoid the kind of language Jesus so deliberately uses.” He calls for us to “give the Bible functional authority over all our statements, especially on offensive subjects like hell” and to “not be afraid to preach hell like the One who came to rescue us from it.”
I affirm everything that Dillehay calls for here, and yet I wonder if he sees the irony in it. To be fair, he does not himself go into much detail about the nature of hell in the article itself, but I wonder how much thought he gave to the truly traditional teaching on hell when he made those statements.
Was Jonathan Edwards “preaching hell like Jesus” when he preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”? He spoke of “unconverted men walk[ing] over the pit of hell on a rotten covering” and of “innumerable places in this covering so weak that they won’t bear their weight.” Where did Jesus preach hell like that? In what way was he giving the Bible functional authority over his language of hell when he spoke of God dangling sinners over hell like a loathsome spider?
Or what functional authority did Spurgeon give to the Bible when he used this language to describe sinners being cast into hell?
The angel, binding you hand and foot, holds you one single moment over the mouth of the chasm. He bids you look down—down—down. There is no bottom; and you hear coming up from the abyss, sullen moans, and hollow groans, and screams of tortured ghosts. You quiver, your bones melt like wax, and your marrow quakes within you. Where is now thy might? and where thy boasting and bragging? Ye shriek and cry, ye beg for mercy; but the angel, with one tremendous grasp, seizes you fast, and then hurls you down, with the cry, “Away, away!” And down you go to the pit that is bottomless, and roll for ever downward—downward—downward—ne’er to find a resting-place for the soles of your feet.
Where did Jesus, or any of the biblical writers, use such imagery to describe the horrors of hell?
Does traditionalism not undermine the Bible’s functional authority on its statements of hell by redefining clear biblical terms like “perish” or “consume” or “destruction”? If we deny that “perish” actually means perish, or that the “consuming” fire of God’s wrath will actually consume sinners, or that the “destruction” with which God destroys sinners will actually destroy them, are we not failing to give the Bible functional authority in our statements of hell? When we affirm that the wages of sin is death and that the lake of fire is the second death, and yet affirm in the same breath that sinners will live forever in the lake of fire, are we not going beyond the language that the Bible actually uses in its teaching on hell?
Of course, Dillehay is not himself guilty of the imaginative kind of language employed by Edwards, Spurgeon, and others when it comes to hell—at least not in the article referenced above—nor does he specifically, in the article, redefine biblical words to support eternal conscious torment in hell, but, as a traditionalist, he stands in a long line of those who have done so and would do well to recognize it.
If we are going to truly give the Bible functional authority on our statements on hell, surely we must speak of the wages of sin being death, destruction, consumption, and perishing. And surely we must allow these terms to speak for themselves rather than immediately trying to redefine them in order to fit with our particular theology. If we do so, I suspect we might find ourselves less persuaded of a traditional understanding of hell and more inclined to speak of hell in the destructive terms that Jesus and his Bible-writing followers used.
Recent Comments