Fake News on Hell

By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo)

There are people even Christians who claim that there is really no Hell or if there is one, it will be emptied because in the end, God in His goodness will forgive those who violated His commandments, and bring everyone to the paradise of Heaven.  I even heard of a popular TV personality here in the Philippines saying “All of our loved ones who died are in a good place because God is good”, thus, denying the existence of Hell (God is good but He is also just, and people will not be in a good place called Heaven just because they are our loved ones. The basis is the state of their souls.  They are not judged on how they are related to us, but by how they relate to God upon death.).  But if Hell does not exist or if it will be emptied eventually, then Christ would have been lying when he said in the Gospels, “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”  (Matthew 25:41) Our Lord Jesus speaks of “eternal fire”, or punishment that lasts forever (Thus, it is not a temporary punishment where everyone will just be forgiven later on).  If this is not true then Christ is lying.  On the contrary, Jesus repeated many times Hell in the Gospels, to warn us of this place.

This belief that Hell would be emptied at the end of time because God will forgive everyone, even forgiving the devils is the heresy or false teaching that is old, and was first taught by Origen in the Third Century and is known as the belief on Universal Salvation.  Origen made an error for lack of knowledge because the doctrine of Hell was not yet fully defined at that time.  But many picked up from his ideas and propagate them nowadays.

Hell is not a punishment imposed on a person after death but is a consequence of that person’s choice much like the choice of playing with a knife and getting a cut is natural consequence for choosing to play with a knife.  Those who die of mortal sins or big sins unrepentant will go to Hell as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘Hell.’” (CCC 1033) God is the source of all joy, and if a person chooses to live without God in this world through a life of sin, and would not repent of his sins after the many invitations of God through that person’s conscience and events of his life, then that person will be in a place without God and without joy which is Hell.  Hell is a place where a person identifies himself with his sin or saying “This is who I am with my sin.”

Justice demands punishment for evil. Justice means moral discrimination between good and evil, reward and punishment. Justice is not a human creation, and thus we cannot destroy it. It is as unchangeable as mathematics, because it is an attribute of God. Divine justice does not prevent God from forgiving, but it prevents him from treating final impenitence or unrepentance as if it were repentance. Mercy may go infinitely beyond justice, but it cannot destroy it or contradict it.

Justice must discriminate between the repentant and the unrepentant, between those who accept the gift of mercy and those who do not, between those who freely choose Heaven and those who do not. Not to do so would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Hitler. God cannot tell such lies.

The only premise we need to prove the conclusion that Hell is supremely painful is the premise that the supreme joy is love, and thus the supreme pain is not to love or lovelessness. Dostoyevsky says that “Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.” There can be no greater pain than that because there is no greater joy than loving.  In fact, if God were to transfer all the damned souls in Hell to Heaven at the end of time as the Universal Salvation teaches, the damned souls would not be able to live in Heaven because they don’t have love for others in their hearts, but only love for themselves.  It would then be a worse Hell for them and they would rather go back to their original place of residence.

Hell is turning down God, not the turning down of joy because everybody wants joy.  People in Hell are only sorry because they have no joy, but are not sorry because they are not with God.  Hell is a teaching that is hard to accept emotionally but a truth to be accepted intellectually and wholeheartedly because reality exist regardless of how we feel about it.  Punishment or pain due to punishment does not go against our freedom but rather helps us to use well our freedom, in the same way that warning a person that he could fall off a cliff if he walks at the edge of it is actually loving that person so that he will not injure or kill himself.  “If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.”  (Matthew 18:8)