I recall a great conversation with a friend of mine, who ran a finance firm: he noted that a loving God would not provide a place called Hell. Why bother, he would ask, with a place of punishment when all the cards are in His hand? He didn’t have to make it that way, he would complain. I have no innovation of thought from what I told him then, nearly 12 years ago now. If the God-world relationship is primarily deterministic (or Calvinistic), there is great value to his objection. If, however, the God-world relationship involves genuine freedom, then the objection (in my opinion) losses most of its potency. Before I get into this, however, there is another important feature we should discuss, one which I discussed with him at the time as well.

The realm of life: where is it? The realm of nothingness: how should this be understood? When Jesus brought Lazarus (John 10) back to life, Jesus corrects an erroneous thought that gets spoken in His presence: “Lazarus will be resurrected” near the end time, on the day of Judgement. Jesus notes that He is the Resurrection and the Life, in response. This is nothing new; clearly the Spirit of God is the Agent who is directly responsible for the life of humanity according to Genesis. We should be careful that we do not affirm panentheism or pantheism, that God is in all things (or the ground of all things) as being identical with those things. Elsewhere in Scripture (Colossians 3), we learn that all things subsist in the Christ. The point we want to pull out here is that all life abides in the Life or owing to the influence of the Life. The realm of life is really the realm of Life; there is no other “place” to find life but in God Himself. There is not a place or a way, in the final assessment of the matter, that life can abide without direct dependence on God. To tie this in with our larger objection levied in the opening paragraph, there is not a framework in which life is somehow independent of God. If this is true, however, that Jesus is the Life, then there is no place in which life can exist perpetually with the influence of evil allowed to continued. Evil, recall, is the depravation of good; it is parasitic. If evil is allowed to persist into the realm of Life, then Life would become corrupted. Life is God. If God is corrupted, how would heaven not become hell? Not just any hell either, but hell of the worse sort, a place in the presence of a Being (God) who does not die, has eternal power, and cannot be out maneuvered, resides. No, the moral purity of God must continue to be so if He is going to continue to be the Life. Life corrupted, after all, becomes much like our living, current experience: a realm often visited by horror, sorrow, and disappointment.

There ultimate end, then, of the realm of Life is that it is one in which no evil can be allowed to occupy. The realm of evil is really the realm of nothingness, for the ultimate end of evil is destruction, and what is ultimate destruction than nothingness? The point I made to my friend the finance CEO was that there is no neutral ground in which life can reside that permits any admixture of evil and good. Hell, as a consequence for evil, is the logical conclusion of what it would take to preserve life as Life. Any concession towards allowing evil into the Life turns the Life into a living hell.

We can turn now back to the point about calvinism (determinism) and genuine love. Even without the forgoing discussion about the realm of life vs. the realm of nothingness (which is a misnomer, I know), we can address the objection by drawing out the importance of love. Few, I believe, would say that coerced or forced love is really love. The prison population would testify to this along with their sexual crimes. If freedom of choice is required for love to be real love, then God setting the stage to allow for freedom (and therefore love) to obtain answers the objection. Few, again, would say that love is just not worth it. Don’t take my word on it, but let’s let the huge amount of dollars, fan-fare, and attention, put into the music industry around the importance, desirability, and achievability of forming genuine loving relationships do that speaking for me. I believe this data-set would silence any minority that thinks love isn’t worth the risk. If that doesn’t do it for you, bring in the movie industry and its huge focus on love-movies, or, for that matter, horror or crime movies involving forced, so-called, love (rape, and other crimes, etc). Humans and not just God-minded people understand how important love it. It is not a Christian thing or opinion. All of human creation attests otherwise.

Dr. Scalise