I am a person of faith. I love that I can have some kind of relationship with the mind that made the cosmos. When you say it that way, it really helps you realize why Paul said that "now we see through a glass, darkly"! I believe with all my heart in eternal life, but the few times in my life I actually thought I was facing death, I was surprised at how terrified I was. And when family members were facing death, I was even more surprised at the still, small voice that prompted me: "You should study Hell."
Wait, what now?! Who wants to think about Hell?
First, every single person I've ever talked to who has lost a loved one, no matter what beliefs they professed about life, the universe and everything, reported some sense of that person's continued presence in their lives after death. So there's that.
Second, I've never talked to a person of faith who believed in "eternal conscious torment" (aka "Hell" as commonly understood), who wasn't beset by a nagging sense that it wasn't actually a very great idea.
So, reluctantly, I actually started looking hard at what the Bible says about the afterlife. I read a couple of books, including the excellent Four Views on Hell (Dewey 236.25). This fine review beautifully summarizes the structure and purpose of the book in detail.
I also read all four Gospels, marking everything Jesus said that might possibly refer to dire punishments waiting after death. I even watched some movies about preachers and teachers struggling with the same issue. I highly recommend Hell and Mr. Fudge, but you might also enjoy Come Sunday.
Thanks to Four Views and another, denser book called Hope Beyond Hell, which advocates in great detail for a Biblically rigorous form of Universalism, I went deep down rabbit holes involving Hebrew and Greek verb tense sequence, the cultural significance of the location called "Gehenna," and how long an eon is, exactly. (A great overview of some of these issues , to whet your appetite for a whole book on them, can be found in a 3-part series from Brazen Church blog.)
My conclusion: faithful and reasonable people can differ about what exactly the Bible teaches about life after death, and we really won't know every exact detail until we get there!
While I dived deep, though, I also pulled back to the big picture: Why did the idea of eternal conscious torment bother me, anyway? Why was it that even when I tried to imagine Hell as inhabited only by demons and Hitler, it seemed like an eternity of it was, for lack of a better word, overkill?
I applied the reasoning Jesus taught us: "If you, being evil, give good things to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give?" If I, a deeply flawed human being, don't really need even Hitler to suffer eternally, why should God? Even though I grew up in a punitive culture that views justice in terms of making the perpetrator pay for suffering with his own suffering, could there be another kind of justice-- restitutional justice focused on returning to the victim what was lost, and reconciling the perpetrator to the community?
I came to believe that the Bible is NOT clear that after we die, God will send some of us to Heaven to sit on clouds and play harps and others to Hell to burn forever without ever being consumed. What the Bible IS clear about includes the following:
Actions have consequences. Sorting out those actions and consequences is the work of a lifetime. I think a relationship with God and the stories He told helps.
God made us out of love, so we could be with Him. Heaven and Earth were meant to be one, and we are all meant to be with God.
Humans make this world a Hell at times, and woe betide us when we contribute to that.
Meanwhile, God through His Spirit is constantly working to expand His Kingdom on earth -- His dwelling place and the one intended for us from the beginning. We are expected to work with God in this project.
When suffering and death entered the world, so did God, and, in the person of Jesus, volunteered to live in one of the most barbaric ages of history. He was born and raised in poverty and even refugee status, He was routinely harassed, and ultimately He was tortured to death. He didn't put us through anything He Himself didn't experience.
This is what God does about evil: He gets right in the middle of it and lets it destroy Him.
And then He rises from the dead, and eternal life-- life after death with God-- becomes available to everybody.
I have a lot of theories about how all of this *might* work out, but the bottom line is that God loves ALL, ALL have sinned, and Christ died for ALL. That is why nowadays, when I talk about people who have died, I often say they are "with God." I don't know exactly what they may be experiencing, but I do feel confident that they are in God's hands, experiencing His love as best they are able. They are doing just fine. They are with God, and God is love, and everything is going to be all right in the end!
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