Saturday, April 24, 2021

Sinning In Hell: A Failed Rescue Device For Standard Eternal Conscious Torment

Perhaps the only reason why someone is likely to think that the unsaved consistently sin in hell is if they realize, at least on some level, that there is an enormous disparity between a limited number of sins committed in a finite duration, and default eternal conscious torment for every sinful being.  Yet this is exactly what certain evangelicals support or hypothesize.  Why else would someone seriously consider something so foreign to clear Biblical statements about hell and ultimate punishment except as an extra-Biblical way to make it seem like an eternal, conscious existence in hell's torments is actually the just thing for God to impose?

After all, there is not only blatant and consistent confirmation that the Bible says the wicked are damned to eventual cosmic death (with the seeming exception of very specific subcategories of fallen beings [1]), but the Bible also emphasizes the finite and proportional nature of justice.  40 lashes and no more, the Bible says (Deuteronomy 25:1-3); eye for eye, the Bible says, speaking only of certain permanent injuries inflicted in specific kinds of non-sexual assaults [2]; seven years can a criminal work off their debt before they are released, the Bible says (Exodus 22:3 with 21:2).

Then there are the numerous acts the Bible prohibits, such as rape, kidnapping, and many severe tortures (again, see Deuteronomy 25:3) which are always condemned and punished because they are inherently evil on the Biblical worldview.  If 41 lashes are to never be inflicted on any man or woman no matter what they have done because such punishment is degrading and therefore unjust due to cruelty, how can suffering without any respite or ending point be just?  If no amount or kind of sin makes someone deserve to have an inherently sinful act like rape inflicted on them, and if proportionate punishments of the exact kinds prescribed in the Bible are just, how could God himself not contradict his own nature by subjecting all humans to endless torment?

It would not matter if someone never stopped sinning.  Injustice is still injustice.  However, why would anyone think it true or even likely true that all unsaved persons will continue to sin in hell?  People have their own motivations and desires, so even if some people were to sin endlessly in hell--and how improbable this seems if they are suffering the way some proponents of eternal conscious torment insist--it would not follow that other people will do the same.  Even so, the Bible already teaches that death of body and soul (Matthew 10:28, Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23) awaits unsaved humans, with God himself having to grant humans eternal life if they are not to perish forever (even a verse as commonly misapplied as John 3:16 says as much).

If constant sinning in hell would make eternal conscious torment just, then the Bible, in saying that an end of conscious life awaits the unsaved, would directly teach something from which it follows that there will be no such perpetual sinning in the lake of fire.  This notion is a faulty rescue device for the standard idea of eternal conscious torment for all beings.  It is nothing but a random notion invoked as a hypothetical justification for an unbiblical tradition.  Most evangelical and historical ideas about the Christian hell blatantly contradict the Bible, and never once does the Bible even suggest that every unsaved person will literally sin against God or others in hell without end.


[1].  See here:

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