to put it bluntly, i just can't believe that sending sinners to eternal torment in hell amounts to justice, no matter what the crime. it defies every principle of justice and punishment fitting the crime that we hold to as humans, and, as george macdonald says, if we don't think something is fair or right, it's tantamount to blasphemy to attribute it to god. god's sense of fairness must be at least as strong as ours, or else he's not the holy and just god we believe he is. on the other side of the coin, we also need to beware of attributing to god our human sense of revenge and wanting to get even. god's righteousness would mean nothing to us without his infinite capacity to forgive.
compounding the issue is the fact that we sin in ignorance: no child knows or understands before they start sinning that they will be forever damned for their actions. still further, even if we did understand the consequences, it wouldn't make a difference because of the innate sinful nature we inherit as descendents of adam. so we are in a catch-22 situation: we cannot help sinning but we are forever damned for it. how is that just?
this of course is an argument that has been made many times. i do not deny that we have been gifted (or burdened?) with free will, so we must take responsibility for our actions, but at the same time i do not believe god looks at us with a demanding, legalistic attitude, just waiting for us to slip up so he can get the rod out. i do not do this with my daughter, who i love more than my life, but instead expect her to be independent and (increasingly) rebellious, wanting to go her own way and do what she wants. in the same way, i believe god understands our rebellious natures and treats us with immeasurable forbearance, going so far as to give his son to provide a way out of our bondage to sin and into a new life of true freedom.
george macdonald put forward another argument against the eternal punishment doctrine which i find, if anything, even more compelling. if even one soul is separated from god for eternity, with no possible means of return, it means that satan has won a victory against god, and that is unthinkable. god must have the final, complete victory, but it would not be, could not be, an absolute victory if satan has succeeded in capturing any souls forever. when he died, jesus descended to hell and opened the gates, rendering it no longer an inescapable prison. if anyone chooses, they may simply walk out, and the eternal father is forever on the lookout to welcome each one with great celebration. since jesus' death, it is only our will that keeps us from god, but the way back will never be closed off. never ever.
obviously the implications of a universalist stance are many, going right to the heart of how we are to live as believers in this world. most importantly, i think, it puts a big question over many missionary and proselytising efforts. to my mind, that's not such a bad thing, because these kinds of endeavours have often had disturbing overtones of manipulation and coercion, if not downright convert-buying. at the more mundane level, i've always been at least a little uncomfortable with exhortations to befriend people in the hope of 'winning them to christ', because it smacks of false pretenses. don't we befriend people because they are fellow human beings who we can share our lives with and whose outlook and experience can teach and inform our own lives?
so why tell anyone about the good news of jesus, and why bother believing it and living it ourselves if it doesn't really make a difference for whether or not we go to heaven? after all, it's a lot easier and a lot more fun to ignore god and do our own thing...
well, no doubt it'd be easier, but since when was that the point? since adam and eve ate the forbidden fruit it's always been easier to follow our own desires, but that doesn't mean it's the better way to live. on the contrary, the bible makes it abundantly clear that the best way to live is according to god's law. as michael casey says in his book toward god:
"The ultimate truth of human life is that all our searching leads to God. In Saint Augustine's timeless words, 'You have made us for yourself [O God] and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' This is something we know about every human being. He or she is made for God; there will always be an incompleteness until a person arrives at God.just before he slipped away, jesus gave his disciples 'the great commission':
...
"We were created with an orientation toward God, and so actions that direct us toward God accord with the imperatives of our nature. When we try to live moral lives after the example of Christ, and open our minds and hearts to prayer, we are not simply doing something 'religious'; we are fulfilling the most fundamental requirement of our humanity. By God's gift we can turn away from the intangible and immediate, transcend the attractions of sense and image, and stretch forth into the infinite sea of eternity. We can add a new dimension to our human experience." (p.3)
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." (matthew 28: 18-20, niv)jesus knew what people need, how their lives can be lived to the full, and he taught this to his disciples, then told them to go tell it to the ends of the earth. there is nothing here about telling people that if they don't believe they'll go to hell for eternity, and neither was such a message part of the "everything I have commanded you" he told the disciples to pass on. it's true, especially towards the end of his ministry, jesus said a lot about the consequences of not following his teachings, but those words were all directed at the believers. in the parable of the sheep and goats, it is to the ones who claim to know jesus, who call out, "lord, lord," that he says, "depart from me, i never knew you." the others, who put their faith into practice, didn't even realise they were doing it for jesus, and he welcomes them into his rest.
which brings me to the second reason we should be following jesus and encouraging others to do the same: what we do has consequences, both here and after we die. i don't subscribe to the view that we'll all just stroll into heaven the minute we leave this mortal coil. such a view makes a mockery of god, and isn't in any way consistent with the bible's teaching. god is holy, and demands holiness from us. but while purity is a state (that disappears quickly!), holiness is a life. we cannot be declared holy, we can only learn to be holy through repentance. even jesus needed to be proved holy by his life, as it says in hebrews 5:8-9:
"Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him." (niv)this doesn't mean jesus wasn't perfect through his life, but his perfection, his holiness, wasn't complete until he'd finished his work. we tend, i think, not to apply this to ourselves, but it doesn't make sense to me how i can be, for example, hateful to my neighbor one minute and holy the next, just because i died in between. being holy means learning how to love my neighbor, and i won't be holy until i've done that. and we will never enter the holy city of god, our final destination where all our desires will be completely fulfilled, until we are holy, until all unholiness has been purged from our lives, which can only be achieved by a long process of repentance, turning from our pride and selfishness and choosing to love.
george macdonald frequently made the point that jesus saves us from our sin, but not the consequences of our sin. i don't fully understand what he meant by this, but one of the obvious examples is our inevitable human death. the promise to adam and eve was that if they ate of the tree they would die, and as children of adam we inherit that promise, and hence we will all die as a consequence of our sin. but that's not the end of the story, as romans 6:23 says:
"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (niv)this verse has most popularly been used to support the eternal punishment doctrine, but it doesn't seem inherent to me that the second part cancels out the first. instead, i think it makes sense to see it as saying that, yes, we die, but then god gives us eternal life as a gift, completely gratuitous and unearned. and this gift, this act of grace on god's part, is meaningless unless it is also universal, given freely and in equal measure to all.
finally (and maybe ironically having spent so much time on the subject), i don't actually get the impression from reading the bible that what happens to us after we die is an issue god wants us to be concerned about to a great extent. i believe that saving is god's work, and our task is to live as true followers of christ. the commandment of jesus was for us to love each other as he taught and modelled, and thus the world will know we are his disciples. to me this means that the primary mode of evangelism is believers living in community, demonstrating to the world the kingdom life which is love and service to each other. of course, this doesn't mean we ignore non-believers and stay in our holy huddles, but that we go and live the life of following jesus out in the open, in the view of all, and especially where there is no witness of this kind. and by being salt and light in the dark places, we will be used by god to draw all people to himself.