The doctrine of hell as eternal torturous existence for the unsaved poses “endless” problems which, I recognized many years ago, is foundational to a peculiarly bad theology. An eternally angry God unleashing wrath forever against finite creatures with limited capacities and opportunities depends upon a series of misunderstandings and outright heresies: the innate immortality of the soul, wrath as on a continuum in the divine nature coexisting forever with love, the Cross as an instrument of divine torture, missing hell and going to heaven as the focus of salvation. This sort of hell is the keystone to a Gnostic Christianity. Human rebellion and divine wrath become infinite categories and the Cross and redemption are absorbed into this skewed form of theology. In the words of one of my former professors, the Cross is the place Christ suffers eternal hell on our behalf. He explains, this suffering must be primarily “spiritual” so as to be infinite, which as I pointed out to him, would seem to relieve us of the necessity of the incarnation and the physical-historical necessity of the Cross. Christ could undergo this spiritual suffering in heaven. In other words, to follow this logic will land one just short of the anti-Christ position of denying that Christ came in the flesh – here he simply need not have come in the flesh. That there is not one Scripture that pictures the Cross as specifically addressing the category of hell or Gehenna in no way slows the momentum of this hellish logic. The doctrine of eternal conscious torture bears such weight as to skew the doctrines of God, man, and salvation, and it becomes the implicit frame for understanding the New Testament. Continue reading “Eternal Torturous Existence: The Foundation of Theology Gone Bad Or The Good News of Hell”