So… Who Goes to Hell?

Jimmy: “Hey Mr. Seals. Jews go to Hell, right?”

Me: “What? Dude, you’re supposed to be working on your divorce statistics project.”

Jimmy: “But they don’t, like, accept Jesus… so they go to Hell, right?”

Sam: “I mean they believe in God though, don’t they?”

Me: “Yes… they do. And…”

Alice: “Yeah, so even if someone never, like, knows about God and Jesus and stuff, they just go to Hell?

Jimmy: “Yeah, ‘cuz they didn’t accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.”

Me thinking: …

So, either A) I crack down on this group and tell them to refocus on their statistics group project or B) I surrender myself to this moment and the honest curiosity of the students about a serious topic even though they are supposed to be honing their PowerPoint and information literacy skills.

If I fully did option B it would take days of class time to comprehensively dive into this issue with the relevant Biblical texts, theological ideas, and nuance. And I’d be a jerk to do option A. So, I bastardized the two and tried to address the issue in 4 minutes, hoping that this would all trigger prior knowledge from either their Romans or Life of Christ classes in the past.

Christ’s Work on the Cross

With so many questions that I get in Bible class, it seems like the first place we need to look is Jesus. Instead of looking first at HOW to get into a desired eternal address change, it’s more important to understand WHY life with God is even possible both in the here and now, and in the hereafter. Original sin and total depravity aside, most students can own the fact that they have participated in rebellion against God, disrupting shalom in relationships, violating trust, or for the more religious term, sin. Through that sin, we have isolated and ostracized ourselves from a God that is Holy. But God is good, and through Christ’s self-sacrificial act of love, he absorbed the effects of that sin by taking them upon himself on the cross.

So even if it’s the eight billionth time that a student has heard this part of the Gospel message (the atonement), I’ve learned to not assume that they understood it the first 7,999,999,999 times.

3 Camps in Christianity

But to whom does Christ’s atoning work apply? That’s the big question. And instead of giving them my current favored position, I show them three options that honest, thinking, Jesus-loving people have proposed (I’ve heard that this is annoying to some students… but probably because I’m not making it easy for them to invoke my name in their post-class arguments). All three of these camps, or at least the orthodox manifestations of them, say that Jesus’ atonement is the only reason we can be reconciled to God.

Exclusivism: Students are familiar with exclusivism since the vast majority of the evangelical churches in America tend to communicate this way. So I usually start there. It states that a person needs to believe in Jesus to be saved. This is often claimed to be the only orthodox position. Scriptural support comes from many NT verses including the most famous of memory verses in Sunday School, AWANA, or Royal Rangers: John 3:16ff and John 14:6. “Whoever believes in Him should not perish” and “he who does not believe is condemned already.” And even Jesus himself states that He is “the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through” Him. Proponents of exclusivism have some of the strongest motivation to evangelize, since a failure to evangelize could mean the eternal damnation of both those who overtly reject the gospel and those who never heard it.

Universalism: For the sake of contrast, I usually then explain Universalism at the other end of the theological spectrum. When asked “Who is in Hell?” theologian Jurgen Moltmann, reportedly responded, “Christ.” Citing the Apostle’s Creed (an allusion in 1 Peter 4:6) Christ took our deserved punishment and death so that no other human needs to. An orthodox universalist would say that Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross has covered the sins of all of humanity so that no one is destined for eternal damnation and everyone will eventually be saved. Some may still hold to the condemned people temporarily being sent to Hell where they can then repent and turn to God. But after the passage of enough time, Universalists would say that everyone spends eternity with God. To show that all people will be saved, they could point to Philippians 2:10 that “Every knee will bow, and every tongue will acknowledge in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, that Jesus Christ is Lord.” They could also point to 1 Cor 15:22 “in Christ all will be made alive” or Colossians 1:19-20 where Christ will “reconcile to himself all things.” In all of these passages, they would draw attention to the literal translation of the words all and every.

It’s important to note that not all universalists will acknowledge the importance of Christ’s atonement… so I’ll warn students that they’ll need to buckle their seatbelts if they go to their church or parents and boldly proclaim “I’m a universalist.” 

Inclusivism: Everyone likes to claim having C.S. Lewis on their side… and many inclusivists invoke that claim. Inclusivists are somewhere in the middle ground between exclusivism and universalism. Not everyone is saved on inclusivism, but there are some who may be saved who never made a profession of faith, or who have never heard the name of Christ. This is the isolated-tribe-on-an-island caveat. You know, the hypothetical “what if there is a tribe on an island that never heard of Jesus.” Inclusivists could point to Romans 1 and say that these individuals could still find God through general revelation in nature. My friend’s mom used to pray and commune with “the biggest one in the sky” before leaving Cambodia. She later learned his name is Jesus. Inclusivists would say that their relationship started before she learned his name.

God’s Decision. God’s Character.

Fortunately, the decision of the eternal destiny of souls is not my decision or the students’ decision… it’s God’s. And while we may think that we are qualified to make such a decision, or at least wish we were, God is the only one with the authority and character to do it well. If we know that God is loving, just, merciful, gracious, and good, we can lean on Him to make the right choice. However, this trust in God’s goodness is not an excuse to shrug our shoulders and refuse to think deeply about this.

So Now What?

Anticipating that some may lean toward inclusivism or universalism, I try to end the conversation and remind the students that evangelism is still an imperative under all three views. While exclusivism has the most extreme consequences for failing to evangelize, it is still important for people to know Jesus under inclusivism and universalism. Even the atonement gives people access to relationship with God, how much deeper and robust that relationship could be if they knew His name, and knew what He did for them.

Me: “Now finish that statistics project!”