The Friday edition of The Wall Street Journal features an essay series, “Houses of Worship,” written by a different specialist each week on a topic of interest related to religion. On Friday, March 8, 2024, p. A13, Lance Morrow presented his article entitled “How We Think About Hell.” It seems every unpleasantry imaginable occupies our thoughts about hell, if we think of hell at all, although the plethora of concepts tend to marginalize the truth from God’s Word. Pope Francis, when asked what he thought about hell, said, “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty. I hope it is.”

Mr. Morrow went through a vivid list of observations by writers and thinkers on the topic of hell. Pope Francis described hell as “eternal solitude.” Jean Paul Sartre, the existentialist “pontiff,” commented that “hell is other people.” Great writers published their own particular twist on hell. Dante’s Inferno “set the standard,” says Morrow. Milton wrote a tortuously lengthy tome, Paradise Lost, putting words in Lucifer’s mouth: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” James Joyce’s novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, apalls the senses with the smell of rotting flesh and boiling blood of sinners, even as the fire “gives off no light.”

Then we are given a glimpse of hell on earth, such as World War I’s Battle of the Somme, which introduced mass insanity of 300,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries in a barrage of shelling, destruction of human life and limb the likes of which had never been seen before. Survivors were prone to take decades to speak of it, if at all. The butchery continued through wars and terrorism throughout the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first. Of course, Hitler teed up a nuance to hell on earth, delivering genocidal annihialtion to his Holocaust victims in the dehumanizing of human life as ghoulish as the hated Nineveh of the ancient Assyrian Empire.

Nowadays it seems that relativism takes the front seat of people’s concept of laying blame for sin, which is the reason for hell in the first place. But has sin become dependent on the situation? Are we no longer responsible for our actions if our psyche is the product of our genetic and social circumstances? Consequently, Morrow raised a pointed question: “Has the old idea, fire and brimstone through all eternity, gone out of business?” After all, who is responsible in Twenty-first Century thinking? Artificial Intelligence raises new possibilities of transferring blame away from a potentially punishable culprit. Do you blame the “occupant” of a self-driving vehicle when a computer glitch causes the death of a hapless pedestrian? Nevertheless, the author concludes that there is somehow a basic truth to be ferreted from human nature and our sense of justice. I would say that therein lies the problem – the finding of justice by human standards rather than God’s.

I would add that the groundwork for such dubious ideas of justice began long ago. Novels and speeches and articles over the modern era laid the foundations of relativism. Dostoevsky, Hardy, Dreiser, and Steinbeck – each contributed to the idea of the extenuating circumstance and the perpetrator as victim. Today we see this in the news as criminals are given a pass. If the criminal is a victim, then how can you punish him? Is not society itself responsible? As far back as Thomas More’s Utopia, first published in 1516, and in English in 1551, the foundation for such warped thinking had been laid.

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?” -Thomas More, Utopia

The book had a lengthy Latin name with various English translations that could be simplified to this: On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia. We best recognize the book, of course, as Utopia, and its rather loose treatment of crime became woven into Western culture in popular works, including the motion picture, Ever After (1998). In the movie, Drew Barrymore directly quoted the above English rendition of Thomas More’s indictment of punishing thieves.

Sin as sin can only be, at its core, a simple concept that – without grace from above – predicates the inexorable conclusion: judgment. Therefore, hell becomes crystal clear in the moral code of God’s Holy Word, the Bible. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the Eighteenth Century evangelist and author of the famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” ignited the proper fear of the Lord God in thousands of Americans’ hearts and helped bring about the Great Awakening, the great Christian revival in Colonial America. His basic examples from Scripture atested to the reality of hell, a real place of torment for those who have earned the wrath of God, not the least of which results from intransigent rebellion against the evidence of God’s existence, beginning with unbelief in the miracle of His creation (Romans 1:20) and extending to unbelief in the miraculous, incarnate Son of God (John 3:18).

We have the Biblical illustration from one of Jesus’ parables, “The Rich Man and Lazarus,” in which poor Lazarus dies and goes to heaven, resting on Abraham’s bosom, while the wicked rich man is tortured in the eternal fires of hell (Luke 16:19-31). Now hell was originally reserved for the devil and his angels, the fiery eternal place where Satan would be locked up as he justly deserves (Matthew 25:41). However, mankind, who is made in God’s image, was not intended for such a fate until after the Fall, when the sin of man came into being. What do we have now? We have an alternative: either to enjoy God’s grace as we look to “the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2, KJV) or to face an eternity in hell. Its description leaves no doubt of its physical reality. Isaiah 66:24 describes the scorched bodies of the wicked who are the objects of God’s wrath in a place where the worms consuming them never die and the fire is never quenched; and Jesus relates this illustration from Isaiah as the place of hell, emphasizing the worms and unquenchable fire three times (Mark 9:42-48).

As mentioned, there lies before us God’s boundless grace and his unmitigated holy wrath; the choice is yours. “As for me and my house,” as Joshua said in Joshua 24:15, “we will serve the Lord.” We will turn to God’s grace freely offered, not due to our own merit, but because we look to Him in faith (Ephesians 2:8-9).