I’ve outlined elsewhere that even Plato thought the idea of hell was necessary for society to stably function. To summarize this, if hell is not, neither is justice. It is profoundly obvious that a mass murderer, say a war criminal that has millions of deaths on his ledger, who is convicted in a human court at the age of 65, will not be punished sufficiently so that the victims have justice. We could take the 2014 case of the Cleveland woman/child kidnapper and raper, Castro, who kidnapped, impregnated, and otherwise robbed 4 women of the best years of their lives, enslaving them for a decade. The judge, passing judgement, gave Castro multiple life terms: of course, Castro was in his mid-sixties, and no more than 6 months later committed suicide. If there is not an after-life punishment, then justice for these women most certainly is not.
What do all evil-doers have in common: that the evil they commit had a limited duration capped by them dying. There is an objection to the justice and logic of hell that goes like this: if the evil she did was limited to 70 years, why does she have to suffer for eternity? Implied in this objection is that God is unjust. Although we could answer this by taking the position of an annihilationist–the belief that hell is limited, and those who go there will ultimately be no more, annihilated (a good biblical case can be made for this position)–I want to tackle this from a hell is eternal view with what I hope is a new contribution.
The often-repeated way of answering this is that hell is eternal because the One offended, God Himself, is eternal. To dishonor Him who is infinite is to put in place an endless blackhole which forever sucks in this infinite honor that cannot be drained. The overlooked point about “sinning against” or “offending” or “transgressing” is that the entire transaction is intersubjective. To sin already implies two parties, the one who set the target to be hit and the one who misses that target. To transgress already implies a border set and a violation of that border by another. To offend already implies an “I-Thou,” already implies reciprocity between two parties. CS Lewis added to this conversation by arguing that perhaps humans in hell continue to sin, and therefore they accrue addition punishment time by their ongoing rebellion. This paints both sides of the picture: there is God whose infinite honor is dishonored and there is the rebellious human whose sin multiplies endlessly (if we accept CS Lewis’ thought).
The picture is more complex than this, and we take our pointer on this matter from a Trinitarian influence on our thinking. “Sinning against” is intersubjective, but it is not only between God and the sinner. A person who sins almost always has at least three parties involved: (1) God who is sinned against, (2) the sinner who does the evil, and (3) other eternal beings, called humans, who are directly or indirectly affected by the sinner’s evil. Someone can be said to be eternal if he had a starting point but no ending point. This is how humans are eternal. God’s eternality is different because it has no starting point or ending point.
For clarity, it is God who remains Judge in this complex-intersujectivity, but the key takeaway is that the “evil performed” by the sinner is not only against the Eternal God but also against a litany of eternal beings called humans. Thus, sin is not only a vacating of God’s infinite honor; it is also dishonoring and materially harming eternal beings (humans). Humorously, the legal system understands this complexity with its system of multiple plaintiffs, verdicts, punitive damages, and multi-trial proceedings. Class-action lawsuits make the case in point: 1 person/entity must suffer for the damage it caused to an entire class of people. We then end-up with a fairly sophisticated calculation when we think about the logic and justice of hell:
Just punishment = God’s honor dishonored + the severity of the evil done + the injury on other eternal beings + the dishonor to other eternal beings
The calculation could be even more challenging, but this gets the point across. The nature of “sin” is not simply “someone did evil for 70 years therefore only 70 years of punishment is just.” This is not a theologian’s bias, mind you, because the entire judicial system is utterly littered with long terms of punishment for evils performed in a far smaller time-frame. I have no idea how we would run the equation above, but what I do know is that we are going to end up with some astronomical “punishment terms in hell.” The equation might even suggest that the only just recompense is an eternal one.
Someone might object and say, “Even if we end up with punishment terms in hell in the billions of years, this is relativized and trivialized by the shear endless immensity of “eternal.”” I do not disagree. There are good reasons–Scripture, logic, scientific–to suppose that the context of hell will be one qualified by an endless march towards absolute entropy. After all, if the Spirit of God is the Life/Energy-Giver, His ongoing absence/influence would suggest utter life-deprivation. As we know, limits in Calculus point to the reality that we can endlessly approach a point without ever reaching it (if you haven’t taken Calculus, this might not make sense, apologies). Sheol in the OT–how the OT thought and talked about afterlife in many places–is described as a shadowy realm framed by lack of lively abilities. My point in all of this is that hell could be eternal while the punishment segues at some point from intense pain/torture to a near unconsciousness and lack of any activity, as the Bible rightly says, “the wicked are no more.” If quantum physics has taught us anything, it is that humans can have meaningful and full lives and not even know or believe that the quantum realm exists at all (most of human history was this way). Those saints in heaven could have the fulness of heaven, and those in hell could be so close to absolute entropy that they are effectively no more.
Dr. Scalise