How can a loving God send anyone to hell?

This is the doctrine most modern people find intolerable, and Christians should not pretend to find it easy either. Anyone who discusses hell comfortably has misunderstood something.

But most objections are aimed at a picture that is not actually the Christian one.

It cannot be blamed on anyone but Jesus

The first thing to establish is who taught it.

Gehenna — the word usually translated hell — appears twelve times in the New Testament. Eleven are in the Gospels, and all eleven are spoken by Jesus.

He speaks of final judgement more than Paul, more than Revelation, more than the whole of the Old Testament. The sheep and the goats (Matthew 25), the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16), the weeds and the wheat (Matthew 13), the warnings about the hand and the eye (Mark 9).

This matters for the conversation. People frequently want to keep Jesus the compassionate teacher and discard hell as a later, harsher accretion. That option does not exist. If you remove hell you are not removing Paul or Augustine or Dante. You are removing Jesus.

What Scripture actually says, and does not

Gehenna was a real place — the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where children had been sacrificed to Molech in Israel's worst period (2 Kings 23:10, Jeremiah 7:31) and which later became a rubbish dump. Jesus used a location his hearers knew as a byword for defilement and waste.

The images are deliberately incompatible. Fire (Matthew 25:41) and outer darkness (Matthew 8:12). Something cannot be simultaneously burning and pitch dark, which strongly indicates that the language is symbolic rather than descriptive. Also used: destruction (2 Thessalonians 1:9), a worm that does not die (Mark 9:48), weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:42), the second death (Revelation 20:14).

What is not in the Bible: pitchforks, red demons, cauldrons, Satan ruling hell as its master. That imagery is Dante, Milton and medieval art. Scripture presents Satan as a prisoner of judgement, not its administrator (Revelation 20:10).

The central meaning is separation. "They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord" (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Whatever else the images convey, this is the substance: the absence of God, who is the source of every good thing anyone has ever enjoyed.

The three views held by orthodox Christians

Eternal conscious torment. The traditional and majority view. The lost exist forever, consciously separated from God. Support: Matthew 25:46 uses the same adjective, aiōnios, for both eternal punishment and eternal life, which makes it hard to limit one without limiting the other; and Revelation 20:10 speaks of torment "day and night forever and ever."

Conditional immortality (annihilationism). The lost are finally destroyed and cease to exist. Immortality is a gift given in Christ, not an inherent property of the soul. Support: the recurring language of destruction and perishing (John 3:16, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Matthew 10:28 — "destroy both soul and body"), and the argument that fire in Scripture consumes rather than preserves. Held by John Stott, F. F. Bruce, John Wenham and others whose orthodoxy is not in question.

Christian universalism. All are finally reconciled, possibly after purgative judgement. Support: 1 Timothy 2:4, Colossians 1:20, 1 Corinthians 15:22. Held by some in the early church, notably Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and by some today. Its central difficulty remains Matthew 25:46.

Doors locked from the inside

The picture Scripture gives is not of people dragged protesting into judgement. It is of a settled direction ratified.

"This is the judgement: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil" (John 3:19). The judgement is the confirmation of a preference.

In Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), the rich man in torment is remarkable for what he does not say. He never asks to leave. He asks for water, then for a warning to be sent to his brothers. He still treats Lazarus as a servant to be dispatched on errands. Even there, nothing has changed in him.

Revelation's final vision has the same note: "Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy" (Revelation 22:11). Continuation, not reversal.

Lewis put it in the sentence that has done more than any argument:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.— C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

And in The Problem of Pain: the doors of hell are locked on the inside.

This does not dissolve every difficulty. It does change the picture from a God imposing punishment on people who want him, to a God finally granting people the separation they have insisted on.

What God's disposition actually is

The caricature is a God eager to condemn. The text says the opposite, repeatedly.

"As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die?" (Ezekiel 33:11).

"The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

And Jesus, weeping over the city that was about to reject him: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem... How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" (Matthew 23:37).

That is the same chapter as the fiercest warnings in the Gospels. Warning and weeping, together, from the same person. Any presentation of hell that lacks the weeping has misrepresented it.

What the doctrine actually secures

Two things, neither obvious.

Justice is real. Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian who watched the Balkan wars, wrote that his belief in divine judgement was what made non-violence possible for him — because if there were no ultimate reckoning, the only way to see justice done would be to do it yourself. A universe with no final accounting is not a kinder universe. It is one where the torturer who dies comfortably in old age has simply won.

Human choice is real. A God who overrode the will of everyone who did not want him would not be respecting persons. Hell is the appalling dignity of being taken seriously.

And the practical consequence

If any of this is true, indifference about other people is not an option.

Spurgeon said that if sinners are to be damned, at least let them leap to it over our bodies, and if they will perish, let them perish with our arms around their knees — that no one should go there unwarned and unprayed for.

The doctrine is not a weapon to threaten anyone with. It is the reason the message is urgent, and it is the reason Christ came.

"For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" (John 3:17).

The whole of Christianity is that God did not leave it as it stood.