Shades of Sin: Underscoring God’s Love by Understanding Hell’s Fire

By William Hofer

Traditionalists postulate an all-loving, all-powerful God who has revealed Himself in His inspired, inerrant Word. Since His Word speaks of hell, questions about hell in the final analysis are not philosophical but hermeneutical. Bible interpretation, properly done, provides ready answers for such life-and-death debates. We should not practice eisegesis, reading into the text what our philosophical penchant may be, but exegesis, getting out of the biblical text what the original author put in. Understanding the following elements will allay any fears of God being unjust when consigning unrepentant sinners to hell:

1. the duration of life
2. the definition of death
3. the description of hell

Non-traditionalists claim God is neither just nor loving if He tortures everyone in hell forever regardless of the life they lived. They are offended by such an idea and believe God is too. Rather than jettison the doctrine of eternal punishment at the expense of biblical fidelity the author inserts into the debate an idea that undergirds God’s justice while maintaining the traditional doctrine of hell. Hofer rejects the notion victims at Auschwitz suffer the same fate as the madman who dispatched them there. That is offensive to God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664223967

William Hofer

William Hofer has taught in the local church scene for over 40 years and brings formal training in the disciplines of theology, bibliology and history to bear on this emotionally charged and sometimes confusing topic. He and wife Julie have been married 44 years, raised six children, and have eight grandchildre

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WestBow Press rev. date: 03/03/2021

To Professor John Lawrence, Multnomah Bible College from 1973 to 1995. While suffering from cancer, he taught theology classes up until ten days before the Lord called him home. It was he who first encouraged me to pursue my ideas presented here and where I first heard the admonition, Never preach on hell without tears flowing down your cheeks.

CONTENTS

PART I

Chapter 1 Universalism

Chapter 2 Conditionalism (A.K.A. Annihilationism)

Chapter 3 Traditionalism

Chapter 4 Retribution on Earth and Rewards in Heaven as Parallels

Chapter 5 Retributive Justice and Distributive Justice as Opposites

PART II

Chapter 6 The Peril of Pride

Chapter 7 The Peril of Proclamation

Chapter 8 The Peril of Position

Chapter 9 The Peril of Preaching

Chapter 10 The Peril of Parenthood

Chapter 11 The Peril of Porneia

Chapter 12 The Peril of Potential

PART III

Appendix A The Unpardonable Sin (Unbelievers)

Appendix B The Sin unto Death (Believers)

Appendix C The Sin of Suicide (Unbelievers and Believers)

INTRODUCTION

Recently, I read a blog post entitled, If There’s No Hell, What Are Christians Supposed to Do?¹ Because of my interest in the topic, it caught my eye as perhaps a defense of the traditional doctrine of hell. Alas, such was not the case. In fairness, the author did not pretend to be a theologian.

She was a self-described millennial, Christian, exvangelical and storm chaser. Exvangelicals are those who typically grew up in evangelical churches but moved away from the traditional Bible teachings associated with such congregations or denominations. Getting to her point, she claims, For centuries Christians have accepted that everyone goes to hell unless they’re committed to Jesus. She offers the populist argument appealing to human emotions and numerical superiority over traditionalists who teach, she continued, that all the people who died in Auschwitz still ended up tortured for all eternity … If your grandmother accepts Jesus with dementia she might still go to hell, too. Obviously, Emma has been heavily influenced by Rob Bell of Love Wins fame. His runaway best seller of that name reignited a hot debate on hell in 2011. Bell took the position of universalism, one of the views explored in this book, that every human who has ever lived will be eternally reconciled with God, and hell, if it exists, is temporary.

After serving as a teaching elder for forty years in a Bible-believing evangelical church, the last quarter century as senior pastor, I have a horse in this race. I do not know many Christians in the circles I run who believe everyone goes to hell unless they’re committed to Jesus. With careful biblical understanding, it should be patently obvious that all people living between the creation of the First Adam and the sacrifice of the Second had no opportunity to be committed to Jesus (1 Cor. 15:45–58). And what level of commitment is sufficient anyway?

The God I know will not send people to hell, even today, for rejecting His Son, Jesus, of whom they have never heard. That will take some explaining, so please read on. Nor are the millions of abortion victims sent to hell because they were not committed to Jesus.

Ms. Copper writes, That’s why the ‘us vs them’ tension is so important. Our focus, our boiling-pot of emotions, has all been geared around conversion. It is unfortunately true that many calling themselves Christian have exuded the vibe of us versus them. The church stands indicted as too often viewing non-Christians as the enemy instead of targets of the enemy. No Christians who remember what they were before conversion should take such a stance. No Christians with any degree of Christ’s compassion should view the lost with coldhearted contempt. And no Christians should ever make the claim that all the people in Auschwitz went to hell. Only God has such knowledge.

The exvangelical, millennial storm chaser, following her heart, possibly burdened with compassion for non-Christians, takes solace in a friend telling her about universal salvation. Universalism, the belief that eventually every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord and all offenses against His Holiness will be forgiven, is a comforting thought. But not a biblical one.

Universalism has been popularized recently by the above mentioned Rob Bell and has gained traction among exvangelicals. The deceased J. I. Packer believed universalism is the dominant view in Christianity today:² God will forgive everyone and no one will be punished for eternity. If only that were true.

I felt light. I felt euphoria … that sounded like a Jesus who made sense 100% of the time. A Jesus who died literally for everyone, she gushed. Wishful thinking does not establish truth. The well-known song Imagine, by John Lennon, appears to argue otherwise.

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

—Imagine by John Lennon, 1971

Lennon’s living for today is a secular version of the prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen, famous for his live your best life now mantra.

During the darkest days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln chided his cabinet with the question, How many legs would a sheep have if you called the tail a leg? Sensing a trap, none dared respond. Four, he said, answering his own question, because merely calling a tail a leg does not make it so.

Robert Brow, along with Clark Pinnock, has taken on many traditional evangelical beliefs and turned them on their head. Pinnock, in particular, after producing Set Forth Your Case, used by one of my professors of apologetics in the late seventies, has since rejected doctrines as the substitutionary atonement, forensic justification, biblical inerrancy, and God’s foreknowledge, preferring Open Theism.³ Robert Brow said, The transformation of evangelical theology is inevitable … our hearts are changing our minds.⁴ Wishful thinking, lyrical imagination, and creative nomenclature can never establish truth.

The good news is, yes, Jesus did die for everyone when He carried the sins of the world on His shoulders. But tragically, there will be many who remain lost. Jesus taught there would be many more who miss heaven than make it there (Mt 7:14). I share Francis Chan’s conflicted feelings over defending the scriptures on one hand and the emotions of human suffering on the other. I would love to erase hell from the Scriptures, but I can’t.⁵ Similarly, C. S. Lewis said it even earlier, There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than [hell] if it lay within my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom … I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully, ‘All will be saved.’⁶

Packer shares the sentiments of Chan and Lewis and millions of others. No evangelical, I think, need hesitate to admit that in his heart of hearts he would like Universalism to be true. Who can take pleasure in the thought of people being eternally lost? If you want to see people [consigned to hell] there is something wrong with you.⁷ Sounds a lot like preaching on hell with tears …

Feelings should not drive this debate. Some attacking the traditional view of everlasting torment use personal attacks on those holding it. Adjectives such as monstrous, dreadful, sadistic, and intolerable have no use in such discussion.

Coauthors Dr. R. Douglas Geivett and Holly Pivec express the need for respect well. [Guidelines] undergird our desire to establish and maintain a cordial spirit of theological reflection and ministerial practice. We write with calm assurance that knowledge of God’s truth is possible and that wisdom is attainable. An alarmist reaction to competing views is a disservice to the church.⁸ They quote Dr. Dallas Willard in that place, It is not knowledge, but nervous uncertainty, that makes people dogmatic, close-minded, and hostile—which spokespeople for Christ must never be.

The risk of being wrong is too high to rely on emotions and name-calling. The eternal destiny of multiple billions of people hangs in the balance. Christians should have compassion for all, but we must think critically, and our thinking must be informed by careful exegesis of the Bible. On this, I am in good company. Dr. John R. W. Stott, himself rejecting the traditional view of hell before his passing, said this:

Emotionally, I find the concept [of eternal

conscious torment] intolerable and do not

understand how people can live with it

without either cauterizing their feelings or

cracking under the strain. But our emotions

are a fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth

and must not be exalted to the place of

supreme authority in determining it … my

question must be—and is—not what does

my heart tell me, but what does God’s word

say? ⁹

These days, theology, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows. Not long ago, evangelicals the world over recoiled when Adventist groups and pseudo-Christian cults preached annihilationism. Now not a few are adopting such ideas. They each reject the idea of everlasting torment in a place called hell. They are unable to reconcile a loving God with the doctrine of eternal punishment. The traditional teaching that describes hell as a place of conscious, eternal punishment offends them. And they believe it offends our God too.

The Word of God is clear in many places at this point regarding the destiny of the lost, as I will demonstrate. Universalists and annihilationists claim God is neither just nor loving if He tortures everyone in hell forever, regardless of the life they lived.¹⁰ I wholeheartedly agree. However, rather than jettison the doctrine of eternal punishment as a conscious torment that is everlasting, at the expense of biblical fidelity, I prefer to insert into the argument an idea that undergirds God’s love while maintaining the traditional doctrine of hell. I do not believe that victims at Auschwitz suffer the same fate as the madman who dispatched them there. That is offensive to God.

I will operate under the following guidelines:

1. Biblical revelation is inerrant in statements of fact.

2. Theological conclusions must be based on proper exegesis.

3. Prophecy is interpreted by a literal hermeneutic.

Universalists or annihilationists do not necessarily reject these guidelines. But in order to have meaningful exchange of ideas, people must lay a foundation of trust, and terms must be defined. Christians can speak for themselves, and I do not want to misrepresent any opponents. I do not question their allegiance to Christ. I do not question their motives. I will, however, challenge their biblical exegesis and logical analysis.

Let the following condensed definitions of the three views considered in this book serve as an introduction to them:

• Universalism. Everyone lives forever, as evil is annihilated by healing those afflicted with it. All unbelievers are refined and restored to God eternally. Hell, if it exists, is temporary.

• Conditionalism. Unbelievers are resurrected but do not possess immortality. Evil is annihilated by permanently punishing those infected with it by annihilation after any finite, conscious torment in hell.

• Traditionalism. Everyone lives forever. The unbeliever will suffer everlasting, conscious torment, and evil will be held in perfect balance as unrepentant sinners receive proportional retributive punishment in a permanent hell.

If traditionalists (Hart calls us infernalists,)¹¹ postulate an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God who has revealed Himself to be such in His inspired, inerrant Word, and, further, His Word speaks of hell, then the questions in the final analysis are not primarily philosophical but hermeneutical. The art and science of Bible interpretation (i.e., hermeneutics), when done properly, will provide ready answers needed in such a life-and-death debate. We should not practice eisegesis, reading into the text what our philosophical penchant may be, but exegesis, getting out of the biblical text what the original author under inspiration put in. In fact, understanding three elements will allay fears of God being unjust when consigning unrepentant sinners to hell forever:

1. The duration of life

2. The definition of death

3. The description of hell

That Jesus Christ consistently interpreted the Bible quite literally through accepting a plain reading of the text is demonstrable. He took at face value the following:

• the creation account of Adam and Eve (Mt 13:35; 25:34; Mk 10:6) ¹²

• the universal flood and Noah’s ark (Mt 24:38, 39; Lk 17:26, 27)

• the account of Jonah and the great fish (Mt 12:39–41)

• the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah (Mt 10:15)

• the experience of Lot and his wife (Lk 17:28, 29)

The Old Testament prophets interpreted the Bible literally. One case among many is the understanding of a literal seventy-year captivity predicted by Jeremiah and so interpreted by Daniel. The apostles as well, in their writing ministries, appealed to a literal interpretation of God’s Word.

Admittedly, literal hermeneutics is no easy task in some cases. It is my contention that if we fully embraced the literal method of interpretation, we would see a dramatic disappearance of 99 percent of the denominational diversity, spiritual schisms, and apparent distrust of scripture so evident today. This is a basic reason many are rejecting Christ and His church.

Ask yourself, How can God’s Word be unclear on such fundamental questions as …?

• unitarian versus Trinitarian Godhead

• conditional versus unconditional election

• salvation as a process based on good works versus salvation as an event based on God’s grace

• Spirit baptism at conversion versus Spirit baptism subsequent to conversion

• baptism of infants versus baptism of believers

• probationary salvation versus eternal security

• covenant theology versus dispensational theology

• eternal damnation versus universalism or conditionalism

These antithetical pairs, the final one the subject of this book, cannot each be true. My opinion matters little. In the final analysis, what really matters is What does God’s Word say?

Unique Contribution

I hope to contribute to the debate by suggesting hell is different from what most Bible students have entertained or the casual observer has assumed. Further, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of hell that has led to much confusion. Hell is a place of degrees but not yet populated.

An article in Christianity Today, Three Models of Hell, February 2007, stated that just sentences for sin are both proportional and prorated. Alas, the article stopped too soon. How is it proportional? What is meant by prorated? Hell Under Fire,¹³ with general editors Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson, and Four Views on Hell,¹⁴ edited by Stanley N. Gundry and William Crockett, both by Zondervan, and Two Views of Hell,¹⁵ by Edward W. Fudge and Robert A. Peterson (Intervarsity Press), present the traditional view among others in a point/counterpoint format. Those traditionalists above have provided masterful arguments on why God is just. However, they fall short of describing hell as a place of degrees.

Generally, those defending the traditional view of hell have not adequately answered the nontraditionalist’s objections about God’s injustice for punishing people eternally for sins they committed temporally. Traditionalists have defended His holiness and justice but often ignore God’s accounting.

Does the fact that God opens ledgers at the final judgment help us understand His judgments are perfect (Rv 20:11–15)? What is in those books anyway? What of the differences, for example, between using His holy name in vain and murdering someone created in His image? Is there a standard? Is there some gradation that would help make sense of hell? Is there a way to escape the conclusion that God’s judgments, while wise and just, somehow remain arbitrary? (Rom 2:5, 16) My book as a theodicy will argue God punishes people eternally and by degrees, based on the shades of sin committed in this life.

Structure

Shades of Sin is divided into three parts.

Part I contains brief analysis of alternative views and a defense of the traditional view of hell. It will be brief, as many others have done this before. A few are listed above, and I will cite others as we progress. I will also offer two comparisons that help us understand sin and punishment: the parallels with retribution on earth and rewards in heaven. The contemporary debate among Christians regarding critical theory and intersectionalism will be addressed, too, as having to do with principles of justice and human values.

Part II, beginning with chapter 6, will be the unique contribution of Shades of Sin and the debate before us. It is an attempt to describe the how of God’s just punishment of the unrepentant. I will provide a sort of matrix, a yardstick that God has revealed in His Word for punishment that fits the crime. Even among traditionalists, this may be unfamiliar territory. For centuries, they have preached, Sin is sin, and all sin leads to death. They may even insist that Jesus taught, Lust in the heart is committing adultery, and hate in the heart is like murder. Well … that’s not exactly what He said.

As Cornelius Plantinga put it, All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.¹⁶ I am not talking about degrees of guilt. When it comes to guilt, like pregnancy, you either are or you’re not. And we are all guilty! All sin separates the unrepentant from God, and we have all sinned (Rom 6:23). But it does not follow that all punishment is the same. Indeed, such an assumption is demonstrably false.

Part III will close out the book with appendices dealing with often misunderstood special cases:

PART I

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1

UNIVERSALISM

Universalism: Everyone lives forever, as evil is annihilated by healing those afflicted with it through reconciliation to God. All unbelievers are refined and restored to God eternally. Hell, if it exists, is temporary.

At the outset in this chapter about universalism, let’s get a definition from one of its own:

Christian Universalists are (mostly) orthodox,

Trinitarian, Christ-centered, gospel-focused,

Bible-affirming, missional Christians. What

makes them Universalists is that they believe

that God loves all people, wants to save all

people, sent Christ to redeem all people, and

will achieve that goal. In a nutshell, it is the

view that, in the end, God will redeem all

people through Christ. Christian Universalists

believe that the destiny of humanity is written

in the body of the risen Jesus and, as such,

the story of humanity will not end with a tomb.¹⁷ (emphasis provided)

I disagree with the view that God will redeem all people, but at least I understand where Parry is going. The italicized portion sets universalism apart from all other views. In fact, it sets it apart from evangelicalism, too, in spite of the title of his article. Parry’s article lists these common myths in his experience often perpetrated by traditionalists:¹⁸

1. Universalists don’t believe in hell.

2. Universalists don’t believe the Bible.

3. Universalists don’t think sin is very bad.

4. Universalists believe in God’s love but forget His justice and wrath.

5. Universalists think that all roads lead to God.

6. Universalism undermines evangelism.

7. Universalism undermines holy living.

For the sake of discussion, I accept Parry’s contention that traditionalists misrepresent universalists in these seven ways. I want desperately to avoid doing the same. But I must ask at the outset, If universalists believe in hell, what purpose is served? If everyone is eventually saved, but billions will ‘do time’ in hell, are universalists tacitly claiming people are paying for their own sins? Further, if people can pay for their own sins, tell me again, why did Jesus die?

Contrary to myth 2 above,