Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Timothy J. Keller (1950–2023) was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, cofounder of Redeemer City to City, and the author of numerous books, including The Reason for God, The Prodigal God, and The Meaning of Marriage. His thirty-one books have sold over six million copies and have been translated into twenty-nine languages.

R. Albert Mohler Jr. has been called "one of America's most influential evangelicals" (Economist) and the "reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement" (Time.com). The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he writes a popular blog and a regular commentary, available at AlbertMohler.com, and hosts two podcasts: The Briefing and Thinking in Public. He is the author of many books, including We Cannot Be Silent and The Prayer that Turns the World Upside Down, and has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and on programs such as NBC's Today, ABC's Good Morning America, and PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He and his wife, Mary, live in Louisville, Kentucky.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

IS HELL FOR REAL OR DOES EVERYONE GO TO HEAVEN?

Zondervan

Contents

Preface........................................................................71. IS HELL FOR REAL? R. Albert Mohler Jr......................................112. WHAT JESUS SAID ABOUT HELL Robert W. Yarbrough.............................233. THREE PICTURES OF HELL Christopher W. Morgan...............................374. THREE PERSPECTIVES ON HELL Robert A. Peterson..............................485. DOES EVERYONE GO TO HEAVEN? J. I. Packer...................................58Appendix: Preaching Hell in a Tolerant Age Timothy Keller.....................73Conclusion.....................................................................81Further Reading................................................................84Notes..........................................................................85Contributors...................................................................89

Chapter One

On the whole, the disappearance of Hell was a great relief, though it brought new problems. David Lodge, Souls and Bodies

The rejection of Christianity's historic teaching on hell has come swiftly in our culture. It is now routinely dismissed as an embarrassing artifact from an ancient age—a reminder of Christianity's outdated worldview.

Yet the disappearance of hell within the church's walls, at least in some circles, presents a kind of mystery. How did such a central doctrine come to suffer widespread abandonment among some Christians?

The answer lies in the history of Christianity in the modern world, and it warns of further possible compromises on the horizon. For as the church has often been reminded, no doctrine stands alone. Take away hell, and the entire shape of Christian theology may be altered.

HELL BEFORE THE MODERN WORLD

The church developed its teaching on hell during its very first centuries. Based on New Testament passages about eternal judgment and the afterlife, early preachers taught that hell was God's just judgment on sinners who did not put their faith in Christ. It was seen as real and eternal, characterized by fire and torment.

The first major challenge to this view came from a theologian named Origen, who taught that everyone and everything would ultimately be reconciled to God. He reasoned that God's victory could only be complete when nothing was left unredeemed, and that hell would not be eternal and punitive but rather temporary and purifying.

Origen's teaching was rejected by a church council held in Constantinople in AD 553, however, and the church's consensus on hell continued to be widely held for another thousand years. Rejections of hell during these years were limited to sects and heretics. Indeed, hell was such a fixture of the Christian mind that most persons understood all of life in terms of their ultimate destination. Men and women longed for heaven and feared hell.

The stark contrast between our modern distaste for hell and the premodern fascination with hell is evident in our sermons. A medieval Italian preacher warned his congregation against hell in this way:

Fire, fire! That is the recompense for your perversity, you hardened sinners. Fire, fire, the fires of hell! Fire in your eyes, fire in your mouth, fire in your guts, fire in your throat, fire in your nostrils, fire inside and fire outside, fire beneath and fire above, fire in every part. Ah, miserable folk! You will be like rags burning in the middle of this fire.

Jonathan Edwards, colonial America's great theologian and preacher, spoke similarly:

Consider that if once you get into hell, you'll never get out. If you should unexpectedly one of these days drop in there; [there] would be no remedy. They that go there return no more. Consider how dreadful it will be to suffer such an extremity forever. It is dreadful beyond expression to suffer it half an hour. O the misery, the tribulation and anguish that is endured!

Few congregations would hear such warnings today. A preacher who spoke so graphically about hell might be considered eccentric or worse. This change in churches' sermons and in the sensibilities underlying them began during the periods of Western history that historians call the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

QUESTIONS ABOUT HELL

During the seventeenth century, even as Europe continued to be a largely Christian continent, various streams of atheism and skepticism emerged.

The Socinians, for instance, taught that Jesus was not fully God and that his death was not needed for the forgiveness of sins. They also questioned the eternality of punishment in hell, teaching instead that the wicked would be destroyed in hell—a view that has come to be known as annihilationism. Eternal torment was an unjust penalty for a short human lifetime of sins, they reasoned.

Groups like the Socinians were far enough outside of the mainstream to have little influence on the larger church. However, their thinking resonated with the educated elite. Many came to doubt hell's existence, even if they felt it was a useful teaching to maintain social order.

As D. P. Walker has written in The Decline of Hell:

People who had doubts about the eternity of hell, or who had come to disbelieve in it, refrained from publishing their doubts not only because of the personal risk involved, but also because of genuine moral scruples. In the 17th century disbelief in eternal torment seldom reached the level of a firm conviction, but at the most was a conjecture, which one might wish to be true; it was therefore understandable that one should hesitate to plunge the world into moral anarchy for the sake of only conjectural truth.

In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment skepticism took center stage. Philosophers began arguing that hell should be viewed metaphorically, not literally. Alternately, Thomas Hobbes suggested in Leviathan that hell might be eternal, but the torments of the unsaved were not—another version of the Socinians' annihilationism. Voltaire and the other atheistic philosophers rejected Christianity entirely.

A CRISIS OF FAITH

These stirrings against Christian doctrine remained largely outside the church, however, until the Victorian era, a period of time in the nineteenth century often sentimentalized for its Christian vitality. Queen Victoria of England was an emblem of Christian devotion, and Christianity was part of the very fabric of the expanding British Empire. Attendance at churches both rural and urban reached an all-time high, with great churches such as Charles Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle drawing thousands.

Yet Spurgeon's traditional doctrines were not shared by all Victorians. Indeed, during a famous sermon at Oxford University in 1833, John Keble lamented the era as a "discouraged epoch, where the faith is completely dead or dying." Though many Britons of the nineteenth century maintained a robust faith, historian Jaroslav Pelikan has written that the age also produced "radical doubt" and "the negation of dogma."

Among many Victorians, hell became something of an obsession. A rejection of the church's traditional view extended throughout the leaders of society, including...