Am I saved from Hell of God?
SAVED FROM WHAT?
Christians speak of "being saved," but all too often don't follow the phrase to its logical reply: "Saved from what?" How do we answer this question when we share the gospel with others? Far from being a matter of semantics, the issue holds critical importance for believers and non-believers alike.
Is it really sufficient to say that we are saved from our sins?
The question should be saved from whom?" The answer: God himself. God, in righteous wrath, stands against us in our sin. Paul affirms this in 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10: “You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.”
But the glory of the gospel is that the one from whom we need to be saved is the very one who saves us. It is when we truly grasp the significance of Christ's redeeming work that we begin to understand the serious demands and joys of repentance
DELIVERED FROM THE WRATH TO COME: GOD’S JUDGEMENT & HELL ITSELF
For people in this postmodern world, the biblical doctrine of hell has become simply unthinkable.
• Have postmodern westerners just decided that hell is no more?
• Can we really just think the doctrine away?
Today choice is a value in itself, even a priority. Many are addicted to choice and change. Change becomes the very essence of life. The personal choice becomes the urgency. Today theology is under pressure to be transformed by the culture of choice. For many today, truth is a matter of personal choice–not divine revelation. Clearly, people have chosen for hell not to exist.
This process of change is often invisible to those experiencing it, and denied by those promoting it.
As David F. Wells comments, “The stream of historic theology that once watered the evangelical soul is now dammed by a worldliness that many fail to recognize as worldliness because of the cultural innocence with which it presents itself. Our theology was never infallible, and it had blemishes, but I not persuaded that the emancipation from its theological core that much of evangelicalism is effecting has resulted in greater biblical fidelity. In fact, the result is just the opposite. We now have less biblical fidelity, less interest in truth, less seriousness, less depth, and less capacity to speak the Word of God to our own generation in a way that offers an alternative to what it already thinks.”
THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL WORLDVIEW UPON CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.
A secular worldview that denies supernatural revelation must reject Christianity as a system and truth-claim. At the same time, it seeks to transform all religious truth-claims into matters of personal choice and opinion. Christianity, stripped of its offensive theology, is reduced to one spirituality among others.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HELL?
We now find some who claim to be evangelicals promoting and teaching concepts such as universalism, inclusivism, postmortem evangelism, conditional immortality, and annihilationism–when those known as evangelicals in former times were known for opposing those very proposals?
Many evangelicals seek to find any way out of the biblical doctrine of hell because of awkwardness and embarrassment because hell as a place of everlasting punishment (and other doctrines) are especially odious and repulsive to the modern and postmodern mind.
The doctrine is offensive to modern sensibilities and an embarrassment to many who consider themselves to be Christians. Some have modified their theological systems to remove this offense and you will not hear a threatening “fire and brimstone” sermon in those churches.
How is it that so many evangelicals now reject the traditional doctrine of hell in favour of annihilationism or some other option? The answer must surely come down to the challenge to defend God’s goodness against modern indictments.
Modern secularism demands that anyone who would speak for God must now defend Him. The challenge is to defend God against the problem of evil. People now demand that God redefine himself according to their dictates.
WHAT HAPPENED TO EVANGELICAL CONVICTIONS ABOUT HELL?
The first issue is a changed view of God. The biblical vision of God has been rejected by the culture as too restrictive of human freedom and offensive to human sensibilities. God’s love has been redefined so that it is no longer holy. God’s sovereignty has been reconceived so that human autonomy is undisturbed.
Some promote an understanding of divine love that is never coercive and would disallow any thought that God would send impenitent sinners to eternal punishment in the fires of hell. They are seeking to rescue God from the bad reputation He picked up by associating with theologians who for centuries taught the traditional doctrine. God is just not like that, they reassure. He would never sentence anyone–however guilty–to eternal torment and anguish.
Many today abstract the love of God from His other attributes. While God’s love is revealed to be His fundamental attribute, it is defined by His other attributes as well. It is quite possible to overemphasize this one side of truth as to bring into neglect other exceedingly important principles and demands of Christianity. This would lead to a loss of theological balance. In the specific case of the love of God, it often leads to unscriptural sentimentalism whereby God’s love becomes a form of indulgence incompatible with His hatred of sin. Hence we no longer sing onward Christian soldiers but sentimental love songs.
Evangelical revisionists point out that unless the portrait of God is compelling and attractive, the credibility of belief in God is bound to decline. It is easier to invite people to find fulfilment in a dynamic, personal God than it would be to ask them to find it in a deity who is immutable, vindictive, cruel who relegates sinners to hell. When God send peoples to an eternal hell, He is acting more like Satan than like God!
It would be easier to persuade secular persons to believe in a God who would never judge anyone deserving of eternal punishment than it would to persuade them to believe in the God outlined in both testaments.
Is evangelical theology about marketing God to our contemporary culture, or is it our task to stand in continuity with orthodox biblical conviction–whatever the cost? Postmodern persons demand that God must be a humanitarian, and He is held to human standards of righteousness and love.
Our responsibility in evangelism is to present the truth of the Christian message with boldness, clarity, and courage–and defending the biblical doctrine in these times will require all three of these virtues. Hell is an assured reality, just as it is presented so clearly in the Bible.
To run from this truth, to reduce the sting of sin and the threat of hell, is to pervert the Gospel and to feed on lies. Hell is not up for a vote or open for revision. Will we surrender this truth to modern sceptics?
DIFFERENT VIEWS ON RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE (HELL)
The doctrine of hell has recently come under vicious attack, both from secularists and even from some evangelicals. The assault has been a covert one. Like a slowly encroaching tide, a whole complex of interrelated cultural, theological, and philosophical changes have conspired to undermine the traditional understanding of hell.
A second issue that has contributed to the modern denial of hell is a changed view of justice.
Retributive justice has been the hallmark of human law since pre-modern times. This concept assumes that punishment is a natural and necessary component of justice. Nevertheless, retributive justice has been under assault for many years in western cultures, and this has led to modifications in the doctrine of hell.
Some modern philosophers have argued that retribution is an unacceptable form of justice. Rejecting clear and absolute moral norms, they argued that justice demands restoration rather than retribution. Criminals were no longer seen as evil and deserving of punishment but were seen as persons in need of correction.
The goal for all sinners was restoration and rehabilitation. The shift from the prison to the penitentiary was supposed to be a shift from a place of punishment to a place of penance. Penal reforms followed, public executions ceased, and the public accepted the changes in the name of humanitarianism.
The undercurrent of this shift came about by the increasing inter-human identification. Namely, we began to sympathize with the criminal, often thinking of ourselves in the criminal’s place. But this is an assault upon the very concept of justice. We demand a cure for sinners in prison not whether it is just but whether it succeeds.
When we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; we now have a patient.
The disbelief in the existence of retributive justice is now so widely spread, that it causes Christians who used to believe that God saved us from his wrath now see God as a vindictive, lawless autocrat, as cruel and heathenish.
This concept of justice and deterrence has also given way to justice by popular opinion and cultural custom. At various times, the death penalty has been constitutionally permitted and forbidden, and in one recent decision, a judge writing the majority opinion actually cited data from opinion polls.
The transformations of legal practice and culture have redefined justice for many modern persons. Retribution is out, and rehabilitation is put in its place.
Some theologians have simply incorporated this new theory of justice into their doctrines of hell. For the Roman Catholics, the doctrine of purgatory functions as the penitentiary. For some evangelicals, a period of time in hell — but not an eternity in hell — is the remedy. Some theologians have questioned the moral integrity of eternal punishment by arguing that an infinite punishment is an unjust penalty for finite sins.
Or, eternal torment is no fitting punishment for temporal sins. The traditional doctrine of hell argues that an infinite penalty is just punishment for sin against the infinite holiness of God. This explains why all sinners are equally deserving of hell, but for salvation through faith in Christ.
THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY
Human behaviour has been redefined by the impact of humanistic psychologies that deny or reduce personal responsibility for wrongdoing. Various theories place the blame on external influences, biological factors, behavioural determinism, genetic predispositions, and the influence of the subconscious — and these variant theories barely scratch the surface.
Various crimes are excused as growth experiences or ‘personal issues.’ Shame and guilt are banned from public discussion and dismissed as repressive. In such a culture, the finality of God’s sentencing of impenitent sinners to hell is just unthinkable.
THE CHANGE IN THE IDEA OF SALVATION
The vast majority of men and women throughout the centuries of western civilization have awakened in the morning and gone to sleep at night with the fear of hell never far from consciousness — until now. Sin has been redefined as a lack of self-esteem rather than as an insult to the glory of God.
Salvation has been reconceived as liberation from oppression, internal or external. The gospel becomes a means of release from bondage to bad habits rather than rescue from a sentence of eternity in hell.
When evangelicals limit salvation to those who come to conscious faith in Christ during their earthly lives to the modern mind, this seems absolutely unfair and scandalously discriminatory. Some evangelicals have thus modified the doctrine of salvation accordingly. This means that hell is either evacuated or minimized.
GOD IS BEING CHALLENGED
The traditional doctrine is just too out of step with the contemporary mind — too harsh and eternally fixed. In virtually every aspect, the modern mind is offended by the biblical concept of hell preserved in the traditional doctrine. For some who call themselves evangelicals, this is simply too much to bear.
We should note that compromise on the doctrine of hell is not limited to those who reject the traditional formulation. The reality is that few references to hell are likely to be heard even in conservative churches that would never deny the doctrine. Once again, the cultural environment is a major influence.
In seeker sensitive churches, today’s cultural pluralism fosters an under-emphasis on the ‘hard sell’ of Hell while contributing to an overemphasis on the ’soft sell’ of personal satisfaction through Jesus Christ. The problem is more than the theological rejection of hell–it also includes the avoidance of the issue in the face of cultural pressure.
The rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell comes at a great cost. The entire system of theology is modified by effect, even if some revisionists refuse to take their revisions to their logical conclusions.
Essentially, our very concepts of God and the gospel are at stake. The temptation to revise the doctrine of hell — to remove the sting and scandal of everlasting conscious punishment — is understandable. But it is also a major test of evangelical conviction. Hell demands our attention in the present, confronting evangelicals with a critical test of theological and biblical integrity. Hell may be denied, but it will not disappear.
