A Christian pastor wrote dismissively of the belief that God would annihilate the wicked. His held to the more common belief that God would torment the wicked forever. His fundamental opposition to annihilation was that every argument he had heard for it was based on emotion.
I don’t doubt this pastor observed strong emotions in those arguing against everlasting torment. What seems very strange is his assumption that a person’s thinking is caused by emotions. If my face is full of tears, are the tears making me sad? Are they making me happy? Are they causing me frustration? Are they causing me pain? Are they making me slice up an onion? What should be obvious is that emotional expressions do not cause our thoughts but are caused by our thoughts or, as in the case of the onion, are merely physiological reactions.
After dismissing emotion-based thinking, this pastor proceeded to defend everlasting torment through biblical prooftexts. His exegeses of those texts was standard fare but, nevertheless, highly suspect. Still, armed with the majority opinion and his own emotional restraint, he was quite sure of himself. Of course, there is nothing particularly logical in assuming that truth is determined by majority vote, or that it is best understood without emotional engagement.
The pastor seemed to have forgotten that Jesus, in a fit of rage, turned over the money tables in the temple. He seemed to have forgotten Zephaniah’s revelation that God rejoices over his people with singing. He seemed to have forgotten that Jesus, in anguish, sweated blood. He seemed to have forgotten that the first commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and that the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Are these two commandments strictly about emotion? No. Do they demand the exercise of emotion? Yes, certainly.
What does it mean to think emotionally, anyway? When people accuse others of emotional thinking what they mean is that the person, overwhelmed by emotion, has stopped thinking clearly. But is this true? Sweating blood is an expression that is as emotional as an expression can be. So was Jesus not thinking clearly in Gethsemane? The text is clear: Jesus, however conflicted he may have been in his thinking, ended his internal debate by saying to the Father, “Not my will, but yours be done”. His emotional outpouring came in the context of perfect decision-making.
Ah, well, you say, Jesus may be able to control his emotions but none of the rest of us can. Really? Those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. (Romans 8.29). Being like Christ is difficult, but it is for this purpose that God made us in the first place. We may be unable to perfectly manage our emotions but we don’t perfectly manage much of anything. That’s no excuse. Tossing our emotions away makes no more sense than staying in bed all day, or burying our talents out of fear. The solution is not that we abandon emotions; rather, we are to be filled with wisdom and, out of that wisdom, allow our emotions to flow.
For some reason—perhaps the encroachment of systematics and/or casuistry— theologians have tended to confuse stoicism with clarity of thought. But emotional divestiture does not lead to clarity of thought; it leads to dehumanized thought, which is degraded thought. All important questions are deeply personal. The fact that they are deeply personal is what makes them important. And if they are deeply personal they must also well up within us and spill out through emotional expression.
Emotional expressions can only mean that we have ideas in our heads that are disturbing us in some way, whether good or bad, or, good and bad. If our emotions seem to be causing us to lose control, we must face the fact that we are actually losing control of our thoughts. We may be exaggerating the facts in our heads. We may be imagining it is important to defend our pride and honor. How many times has a stupid decision by a politician had us concluding the country was on the brink of collapse? For some of us the sky is always falling. We may think of this as being emotional but it is really just about being stupid. When our thinking is stupid, our emotions make a display of it.
Perhaps we will have difficulty in unraveling the meaning(s) of our emotions but, even so, the effort to understand ourselves is an important and usually fruitful work. In any case, we must embrace the fact that our emotions are revelations of our thoughts. Are our thoughts irrational sometimes? Of course they are, but our emotions are also brilliantly true sometimes. When emotions are locked into the truth, the truth becomes more knowable.
If the pastor hears someone emoting against God tormenting persons forever, it’s ridiculous to dismiss those emotions as if they were mindlessness. Logic demands only that we consider the thinking those emotions represent.
We might, in this case, ask whether God is good. Christians are nearly unanimous in saying “yes,” to this question, insisting that it is a fact of crucial importance. We might ask whether torture is good practice. Again, overwhelmingly, Christians would answer, “no, torture is bad practice”. There might be some hedging on the question for, as an example, if soldiers held a prisoner they believed knew the location of a time-bomb. In this case they might accept that torture could be employed to save lives. But the rare exception does not disprove the rule. We might also ask whether God’s acts are purposeful and wise. Christians would say, “Certainly so.” And we might also ask, “Is there any purpose in torturing someone forever?” Most Christians would reply, “No,” though some would reply, “yes, for the sake of justice.” The next question would then be: “In the practice of justice, do we aim to assign punishments that are commensurate with the crime?” In other words, does it make sense to hang a man for stealing a loaf of bread, or does it make sense to punish a murderer with a $5 fine? And the people would answer, “Yes, justice does call for punishments that correlate with crimes”. And the next question might then be, “What evil can a person possibly do in a lifetime that would earn him a sentence of everlasting torment?” As an example, let us assume that Adolph Hitler was responsible for 20 million deaths. Perhaps it would seem fair to give him a punishment of 20 million lifetimes, even up to 2 billion years. But does that make 2 billion years of torture just? Does it make everlasting torture just?
All this is cold reasoning. This is because people with emotional arguments for annihilation are thinking reasonable thoughts.
There are other questions and reasons to debate the nature of everlasting punishment, of course. This essay does not satisfy the breadth of the debate. But the pastor who parroted the failed exegesis of his seminary? Well, he lacked both emotion and good sense. It is not his rightful place to be dismissive of emotion. Rather, he and the rest of us, should be embracing emotions, as it is only logical that we do so.
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