Firstly, I want to stress that if you’re not an infernalist, if you don’t believe that all unrepentant sinners are subject to infinite punishment after death, I’m not criticising you. But this certainly is a belief that some Christian traditions teach. For example, from the (Presbyterian) Westminster Confession of Faith (§15.4):
As there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation; so there is no sin so great that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent.
Various other denominations have similar statements. And they also assert that this repentance is only enabled by Jesus’ sacrifice, an event that happened at a particular historical time. Yet the obvious logical consequence of this, that all the unevangelized will be infinitely punished, is debated among theologians in the face of its glaring unfairness. Some bite this bullet, others concoct various devices to avoid it.
“Hell is just separation from God”
This seems to be a relatively recent development in Protestant theology, the notion that it isn’t God actively casting you into Hell, it is instead your own sinful choices that separate yourself from God.
I think this can be a helpful interpretation of the course of a sinful life: some people really do seem to end up in a “hell of their own making”, while still alive. But you cannot bridge the gap from there to infinite punishment after death for every unrepentant person.
And of course, “you did it yourself” is just the sort of thing Narcissistic God would say.
I’d like to speak up for those I call the “median heathen” here, someone who has no interest in or perhaps even knowledge of Christian or any Abrahamic teaching, who is neither notably worthy nor especially wicked — not least because I think of myself that way.
I think the median heathen, and indeed most people generally, are basically good. They love and care for people. They make mistakes. They have flaws. They improve the world sometimes and they damage the world sometimes. But overall each one is typically of benefit to the world: it is a good thing that they exist, not just in principle, or according to God’s intent, but given how they actually ended up living their lives. These people have not separated themselves from love, from goodness, from joy. They (we!) do not deserve infinite punishment.
“How can you, as an imperfect human, presume to question the infinite wisdom of God?”
OK, this is 100% something Narcissistic God would say.
My purpose is to show that Narcissistic God leads to utter moral horror by any human moral sense. That’s the most I can do. I may succeed at this or I may fail.
But I cannot prove that human moral sense isn’t utterly wrong. Perhaps it is. But then we are left entirely adrift — even if God tells us the truth, we would never listen.
“God has a plan that sinners corrupt”
Narcissistic God had a plan for Creation. But that plan didn’t work out, and Narcissistic God is in a narcissistic rage about it. God is omnipotent and omniscient, so all blame for this failure, and indeed for anything and everything, can only lie with Narcissistic God. But of course Narcissistic God will blame anyone but Himself, so He blames the very beings that He deliberately made imperfect.
I imagine Narcissistic God, with an infinite sucking void in place of a capacity to love, and desperate to fill it with the “narcissistic supply” of adoration, wondering, ah, but what if I created imperfect beings, would they still perfectly love Me and perfectly obey Me?
Loving God, by contrast, loves the world as it actually is, and finds it good overall as it actually turned out, and wants it to be even better.
“Sin actually does infinite worldly damage”
I did not anticipate this objection as it seems obviously wrong to me. I think it’s just a fundamental difference in belief in the nature of sin’s effect on the world.
The world is constantly changing, constantly becoming better and becoming worse in different ways. Some of this is due to deliberate human action, and some to mere accident, or some other cause. Sin damages the world, and natural disasters also damage the world. Any of it might be greater or lesser in degree, or last for a shorter or longer time, or have less or more knock-on effects.
It is true that human actions, human sin, human malice, can do a particular kind of emotional damage that natural disasters generally do not. This damage can sometimes be very grave, and very long-lasting, and have secondary effects. But all this too eventually passes.
Eventually, the damaging consequences of a sin or an event fade away into the constant change of the world. Everything changes. People die and new people are born. The world moves on. And of course the cosmologists tell us that all matter and all energy will eventually decay into elementary particles, leaving nothing of moral consequence.
This does not mean the damage never happened. It does not mean the damage is ever retroactively undone, simply that it is ultimately finite.
Billions of people have lived before us and were (inevitably) sinful. If all sin had perpetual damaging consequences, under that cumulative weight this world would be nothing but suffering and pain for all people.
I think those who see the worldly consequences of sin as infinite see it as involving a special kind of pollution, that somehow is never supplied by accident or natural disaster, that somehow lasts forever. This makes no sense to me. Perhaps they feel suffused with persistent guilt.
Why are people like that?
Why would anyone be infernalist? I think some people are horrified by the possibility of a world where bad people go unpunished. For them, the only way for good and evil to be objectively real is for a certain kind of God to exist. And this God must impose consequences for the morality of our actions. And it seems that in Christian theology, everything about God is either zero or infinity, so these consequences must also be infinite. Without all of this to nail it down, good and evil might evaporate into a meaninglessly amoral world. I can only assume that, at some level, this horrifies them more than the prospect of infinite eternal suffering of almost all souls.
I probably can’t move these people, but perhaps I can move those caught up in moral horror of what they have been taught.
— Ashley Yakeley