Subtitle: What does Hell mean to me?
(Note: I know. I usually try to post something more uplifting on a Sunday. A part of a series on Hell doesn't seem so uplifting. I think, when all is said and done, it is, so bear with me.)
Of course, since God is the Judge of All the Earth and we've managed to strip God of that attribute, I think we would need to look at Justice further.
Back in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant wrote Critique of Pure Reason in which he appeared to argue that there is no God. In truth, he was arguing that you can't prove the existence of God, not that there is no God. While Kant was closing the front door on God, he was opening the back window when he argued about the necessity for the existence of God. Kant said that there must be a God or morality had no basis. For there to be any basis for morality, there must be justice. This justice would require a Judge. And the characteristics of this Judge just happen to match the characteristics of God. It's called the Kantian Moral Argument, and it makes sense. It doesn't prove the existence of God, but it certainly begs for it. You see, if there is no Hell, Kant's argument goes away. Without eternal punishment for an eternal crime, there is no justice. Without a judgment in the afterlife, there is no justice. If everyone gets saved and no one gets punished, there is no justice. You've heard and likely even felt, "You'll get yours someday" when someone seems to get away with some bad thing. Well, if no Hell, don't count on it. There is no justice. And, if no justice, neither is there any rational basis for morality. Consider that for a moment.
Now, having stripped off justice in God and justice in general, followed by morality, that would have to bring sin into question, wouldn't it?
Did you ever see the movie, The Bad Seed? It's a 1956 movie about a concept. The concept was a question then, but almost an assumed certainty today. The idea was that bad people inherent their "bad". In the movie, cute little 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark turns out to be a vicious killer. She murders a schoolmate for a penmanship trophy she thought should have been hers. She murders a handyman who threatens to turn her in. Her mother tries to end the evil by giving her daughter an overdose of sleeping pills, then kills herself ... but Rhoda survives. What was the source of such awful darkness? Well, it must have been her maternal grandmother who was a serial killer. You see, "sin" isn't really our fault at all. Today it's a mistake, a chemical imbalance, a genetic deficiency, a product of a bad environment. It's "the bad things we do" and it's mostly excusable to some degree. Really, it's not so bad at all. So while Scripture describes sin as pernicious and pervasive, we're moving it out of the realm of an assault against God -- Cosmic Treason -- and moving it toward the magnitude of a social faux pas. If there is no Hell, how bad can sin be?
And we're not done, yet.
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