Reponses to: How Can Eternal Damnation Be Justified?

FAITH & BELIEFS

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theponderer

Uploaded on 02/22/2008

People live for a finite period of time. No matter how badly they behave during their lifetime, how can infinite punishment be deemed appropriate by anyone but a raging, hate-filled entity? Take Adolf Hitler for example. He was a bad guy, responsible for the deaths of millions. If anybody deserves some serious retribution, it's him. But think about it: if he had to spend a century in the torturous lake of fire described in the Bible for each individual who died because of his actions, that would come out to somewhere around a billion years of agony. And yet, as measured against eternity, his punishment would have only begun. It doesn't sound like justice to me. It sounds like revenge on a monumental scale, and I can't fathom the level of malevolence that represents. Could a loving God really be that cruel? So how about us regular sinners? We get the same punishment as Hitler? It just doesnt seem reasonable.

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Eternal Damnation a different perspective

tiak

ThePonderer is concerned about proportionality in punishment when considering the idea of eternal damnation. I just want to throw out an idea from Augustine on the subject. Augustine was heavily influenced by the neo-Platonists so if you recognize the pattern of thought, this is probably why. By the way, Augustine was not consistent in his thought, and at some points writes about the suffering of those in hell with such passion it seems personal (like he has particular people in mind he would like to see in such torture).

God is the ground of being. To move toward God is to be more. to move away from God is to be less. This is what good and evil are. Good is God and being. Evil is not-God and nonbeing.

In this view, Agustine tries to show that theodicy is not real (by denial that evil exists, not a very satisfactory answer). He also tries to define hell in a way that does not make it seem unjust.

The consequense of his view is that God does not send anyone to hell. People choose hell. The suffering of hell is not, strictly speaking, punishment, but the result of complete separation from God.

You can see that though modern Christianity has for the most part abandoned the majority of this thinking, there are strains of it in pop religion. I offer this, not as a solution, but as a part of the historical conversation on damnation.

Re: How Can Eternal Damnation Be Justified?

tiak

theponderer's question sparked a different one in me.

How precise do we intend the language when we say something like "eternal damnation?" The general take on it that I have seen (and the way that it was interpreted in the original question) is to interpret 'eternal' to mean an infinite amount of time. But 'eternity' is a concept that, when aplied precisely, is completly seperate from time (McKim, p. 94).

I know that we like to sing "when we've been there ten thousand years" and such, but does this sort of imposition of time measurement on the idea of an eternal afterlife have any validity? Have we used an incorrect term for Christian ideas about afterlife, or do we incorrectly place upon something truly eternal the quality of duration?

Bibliography

McKim, Donald K. Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.

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