How Can a Loving God Send Someone to Hell?

Two People Asking the Same Question

Picture a compound in Ibadan on the evening after a burial. The plastic chairs are being stacked, the generator has finally been switched off, and a young woman is sitting near the gate with her cousin. The man they buried had not been inside a church for twenty years, and nobody knows what, if anything, he said at the end. She asks it very quietly. “So how could God send a person like that to hell?” This is a scene, not a memory, but anyone who has attended a Nigerian burial will recognise the hour and the voice.

Now picture a second person. A lecture hall, or a WhatsApp group that has gone on too long. The same sentence arrives with its arms folded. It is not asking for anything. It is the conclusion, delivered as a question. A loving God would not do this, so there is no such God, or at least no such hell, and the whole religious machine has been frightening people into pews for centuries.

The words are identical and the two people are not. One needs a hand on the shoulder and the other needs an argument, and a lazy answer fails both. Here is the objection at its strongest, as the second person would be happy to put it. If God is good, he is better than I am. I would never lock my child out of the house for ever, however badly she behaved. If God will do what I would never do, then either he is less loving than I am, or hell cannot be what you say it is.

That deserves a real reply, and a real reply takes time.

What the Word Love Has to Carry

Most people who ask the question mean something very particular by love. They mean approval. A loving God, on that picture, would be a pleasant presence who never makes anyone uncomfortable, and who would no more judge a man than a good host would throw out a guest.

Ordinary life doesn’t work like that, and we know it. A father who watches his son wreck his life and says nothing, because he doesn’t want to spoil the mood, isn’t being loving. Ask anyone who has queued at a bank for a pension that never arrived whether the person who took the money should face nothing at all. They won’t tell you that a kind judge forgives the thief and sends everyone home. They will tell you that a judge who looks away from the theft has betrayed the pensioners. We want justice precisely because we love the people who were hurt.

So love and judgement are not strangers. Still, I don’t want to get away that cheaply, because the Bible says something stronger than “God is loving”. It says this.

“God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

— 1 John 4:16 (ESV)

If that is true, then hell can’t be something God does with relish. And the Bible says it isn’t. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God puts it in the first person.

“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, O house of Israel?”

— Ezekiel 33:11 (ESV)

Hear the pleading in “turn back, turn back”. Whatever hell is, it is not the outcome God is working toward. Any account of it that makes him eager is wrong before it begins.

Who Does the Sending

Look again at the verb in the question. When you send a child to the shop for groundnuts, you are the one acting and the child is the one acted upon. The letter has no say in whether it reaches Lagos. If hell works like that, with God choosing names and posting people to it, the outrage is justified, and I’d share it.

John’s Gospel describes something else.

“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. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

— John 3:17 to 18 (ESV)

The word that matters is “already”. The picture is of people already moving in a direction, and of someone coming into the road to stop them. Paul, in Romans 1, gives the same diagnosis from the other side. He says that what can be known about God “is plain to them, because God has shown it to them”, and he ends with the verdict that “they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19, 20, ESV). Elsewhere in that passage he says people “suppress the truth”. The verb he uses can mean to hold something down, the way you hold a lid on a pot that wants to boil over.

Is that fair to everyone who doesn’t believe? Of course not. Plenty of people have left the faith because of what a church did to them, or because nobody gave them an honest answer in the one year they were asking. But some unbelief is a decision before it is a conclusion. The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, of New York University, admitted as much in The Last Word. “I want atheism to be true”, he wrote, and a few lines later he added, “I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” That is a man telling the truth about his motives, and I respect him for it. It also shows that wanting God out of the room can be a real reason, not just a result.

Lewis builds on exactly this in The Great Divorce. It is a dream vision in which the dead of a grey town take a bus ride to the edge of heaven and are offered the chance to stay. In chapter nine, the character of George MacDonald says what you read at the top of this page, that those in hell choose it. Tim Keller, writing in The Reason for God, develops the idea in his chapter on hell as the direction of a life turned in on itself, carried on and on. As I read it, his point is that God doesn’t invent a new punishment to drop on that person at the end. He lets the life reach its destination.

I find that picture true to much of what I have seen of human nature. I also think it leaves a lot unsaid. Choice is a big word to use of someone who was damaged as a child, or lied to by a preacher, or who died at nineteen before he had really thought about any of it. Someone who says “he chose it” at a burial has gone beyond what Scripture lets us say. Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it.

What Christians Have Said Hell Is

Here I owe you something the original argument too often skips. Believers who love Scripture do not all agree about what hell is, and there are three positions worth stating fairly.

The first, and the oldest and most widely held, is that hell is endless conscious punishment. Its strongest text is a single sentence of Jesus.

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

— Matthew 25:46 (ESV)

The same Greek word, “eternal”, is used for both halves. If the life lasts for ever, the argument goes, so does the punishment. Augustine defended this view in The City of God, and he argued against Christians of his day who hoped the punishment might end. A 2000 report from the Evangelical Alliance in Britain calls it “the classic, mainstream evangelical position”. Its difficulty is the one the young woman at the gate feels in her stomach. How can endless suffering be the right response to a finite life?

The second view is conditional immortality, sometimes called annihilationism. It holds that the wicked are finally destroyed, and that only those who receive life in Christ live for ever. Its supporters point to how often Scripture talks about destruction and perishing, as when Jesus says to fear the one who can “destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28, ESV). The American author Edward Fudge made the case at book length in The Fire That Consumes, first published in 1982 with a foreword by F. F. Bruce. John Stott, one of the most respected evangelical leaders of the last century, said in 1988 that “emotionally, I find the concept intolerable”, and that he held the alternative “tentatively”. That same Evangelical Alliance report called it “a significant minority evangelical view”. People who hold it aren’t dodging Scripture. They are reading it hard, and I would be uneasy with anyone who wrote them out of the family.

The third is universalism, the belief that in the end all will be saved. Origen held a version of it, and Gregory of Nyssa after him. The philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart argued it forcefully in That All Shall Be Saved in 2019. Its best texts are about God’s wish for everyone, such as this one.

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill 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 (ESV)

If God wishes it and God is able, the argument runs, why would anyone be lost? Augustine had an answer, and it was blunt. As I read him in The City of God, he said that the Church had rightly condemned Origen for the idea, and that mercy which overrides judgement for every human being has no principled reason to stop at humanity. The Evangelical Alliance report says flatly, “We also reject the teaching of universalism.” My own difficulty with it is simpler. I can’t make it fit the warnings of Jesus himself, who warned about judgement in some of the plainest words in the whole Bible, and I can’t make his urgency fit a story where everyone gets there in the end.

So where do I stand? I hold the first view, with a looser grip than I used to. I think the second is a serious reading of the text and a live option for a believer. The third I can’t reach from Scripture, though I don’t doubt that those who hold it are moved by love.

Notice what all three share. God takes no pleasure in anyone’s ruin. The cross is the measure of how far he went to prevent it. And judgement is real, which is why none of the three views is allowed to make light of it. For Nigerian readers this changes the question. A survey by the Pew Research Center in 2010, the most recent of its kind I could find, reported that in Nigeria belief in heaven was nearly unanimous, at 97 per cent or more, and that in every sub Saharan country it surveyed six in ten people or more believed in hell. For most Nigerians, then, the question isn’t whether hell exists. It is whether the God who runs it is just. That is a better question, and Scripture answers it.

Justice and a Debt Already Paid

The Bible’s answer begins with seriousness about the debt. Paul writes.

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

— Romans 6:23 (ESV)

Wages are earned, and a gift is given. The Christian claim is that the cross is where the wages were paid by someone else. A payment made for you, though, can still be refused. You can walk past the office every day insisting you owe nothing, and the account will go on standing as it did. Faith is the plain business of receiving what has been paid. Hell, in this picture, is a tragedy and not a triumph, and the tragedy is that the refusal was real and the alternative was on the table all along.

I should say honestly that this explains the shape of the thing better than it settles every case. Which brings me to the part I would rather not write.

What I Cannot Tell You About the Dead

I don’t know where that man in the compound went. Neither does his cousin, and neither does anyone who stands up at the thanksgiving service and tells the family what they hope to hear. A person’s last hours are known to God and almost never to us. The thief beside Jesus asked only to be remembered, and was told, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42, 43, ESV). I’m not offering that as a rule to build on. I mention it because nobody is in a position to read a stranger’s final moments from the outside.

The opposite mistake is just as quick. It is the preacher who announces a verdict on a man he barely knew, as though he sat on the bench. Scripture doesn’t give us that seat.

What it does give us is Abraham. Standing before the Lord and hearing that Sodom was to be judged, he did not stay silent. He asked.

“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

— Genesis 18:25 (ESV)

He asked it, as the chapter goes on, from fifty righteous down to ten, and God did not rebuke him once. Abraham was not accusing God. He was taking for granted that God would turn out to be just, and he wanted to be near while it happened. That is a better posture than the arms folded on one side or the confident verdict on the other. It admits that we are not the Judge, and it still insists that the Judge is good.

There are questions this leaves open, such as those who never heard the gospel, and children, and people whose minds were not their own. Christians have answered these in different ways, and I won’t pretend a paragraph settles them. The only thing I’d say with confidence is that the Judge of all the earth will be just, and that anyone who thinks they care more about justice than he does should be ready to be surprised.

An Invitation for Either Kind of Asker

If you are the young woman at the gate, don’t hurry yourself. Ask the question aloud, to someone who won’t flinch, and keep asking it. God can take it, and so can a pastor worth his salary.

If you are the one with the folded arms, I have a smaller request. Before you decide what sort of God sends people to hell, read the Gospel of John from the first page to the last, in one sitting, with your question in your pocket. Watch what the man who spoke most seriously about judgement actually does with his time, and who he spends it with, and where he ends up. Then come back and tell me whether the God you were accusing looks like the one in the book.

References

Biblical References

Genesis 18:25 (ESV). Abraham’s question to God over Sodom, used as a model of how to ask about judgement without accusing or presuming.
Ezekiel 33:11 (ESV). God’s own statement that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, used to show that hell is not the outcome he is working toward.
Matthew 10:28 (ESV). Cited as a leading text for the conditional immortality view, which reads “destroy” literally.
Matthew 25:46 (ESV). The principal text for the conventional view, with one word, “eternal”, used for both punishment and life.
Luke 23:42 to 43 (ESV). The repentant criminal beside Jesus, cited to show that nobody can read another person’s last moments from outside.
John 3:17 to 18 (ESV). Used to show that condemnation is the existing condition and Christ’s coming is the interruption of it.
Romans 1:19 to 20 (ESV). Used for the claim that God has made himself known and that people are without excuse, along with the language of suppressing the truth in verse 18.
Romans 6:23 (ESV). The contrast of wages and gift, used for the justice of the debt and the freedom of the gift.
1 John 4:16 (ESV). God is love, the starting point for taking the question seriously.
2 Peter 3:9 (ESV). God’s wish that none perish, set out as the strongest text for the universalist case.

Other Sources

Augustine. (n.d.). The city of God (M. Dods, Trans.), Book 21, Chapter 17. Logos Library. https://logoslibrary.org/augustine/city/2117.html
Edwards, D. L., & Stott, J. (1988). Essentials: A liberal evangelical dialogue. Hodder and Stoughton.
Evangelical Alliance Commission on Unity and Truth among Evangelicals. (2000). The nature of hell. Paternoster Press. https://www.eauk.org/church/resources/theological-articles/upload/The-Nature-of-Hell-2.pdf
Fudge, E. W. (2011). The fire that consumes: A biblical and historical study of the doctrine of final punishment (3rd ed.). Cascade Books. (Original work published 1982)
Hart, D. B. (2019). That all shall be saved: Heaven, hell, and universal salvation. Yale University Press.
Keller, T. (2008). The reason for God: Belief in an age of skepticism. Dutton.
Lewis, C. S. (1945). The great divorce. Geoffrey Bles.
Nagel, T. (1997). The last word. Oxford University Press.
Pew Research Center. (2010, April 15). Tolerance and tension: Islam and Christianity in sub Saharan Africa, Chapter 2: Commitment to Christianity and Islam. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2010/04/15/commitment-to-christianity-and-islam-islam-and-christianity-in-sub-saharan-africa/

Translation Notices

ESV: Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.