Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Addendum 1: Lee Strobel and Problem of Hell



Part 16: My Conclusion

            Okay, so I know I said in my last post that I was done with this book, but not completely.  I’ve got two addendums I’m going to tack on here—one in this post, and then one in the next post.
            As I wrote in Part 1, this book review has undergone several incarnations in the course of its evolution.  Initially I had ambitions of tackling much more of the book before I  eventually decided to limit myself to only debunking Lee Strobel’s arguments about the Gospels being eyewitness accounts.
            The section below comes from an earlier draft of the book review, back when I thought I would tackle a wide range of other problems, including the problem of Hell. 
            Although I’ve since decided to narrow my focus, I had already written this section by that time.  Because it was already written anyway, I’m just going to tack it on here as an addendum, so it doesn’t go to waste.
            This section is also a good example of what complete nonsense the whole book is.  In fact it was after I had finished writing this section that I sat back and said to myself, “What am I doing even trying to make sense out of this gibberish? Why even bother trying to refute this when Lee Strobel clearly doesn’t even care if he’s making sense or not?”  It was after that revelation that I decided to drastically narrow the focus of my review.

What Does Lee Strobel Believe About Hell?
            Like everything else in the book, Lee Strobel’s thoughts on hell are an incoherent mess.  Again, it’s worth remembering here that if none of this makes sense, it’s not supposed to make sense.  This book is not meant to be picked over and analyzed by a hostile reviewer like me—it exists solely just to make money off of Christians who aren’t going to question it.  So it’s somewhat of a waste of time to try to make sense of it, but since I’ve chosen to draw attention to the issue I suppose I have to go through the motions anyway.

            Lee Strobel seems to believe there are some sort of eternal consequences for not believing in Jesus.  He never says what these are, so everything’s very vague, but taken in conjunction with traditional Church doctrine, it’s not hard to guess at what he’s implying.

            I do feel a strong obligation to urge you to make this a front-burner issue in your life. Don’t approach it casually or flippantly, because there’s a lot riding on your conclusion.  As Michael Murphy aptly put it, “We ourselves—and not merely the truth claims—are at stake in the investigation.” In other words, if my conclusion in the case for Christ is correct, your future and eternity hinge on how you respond to Christ. As Jesus declared, “If you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins” (John 8:24) (Lee Strobel p. 271).
           
            Okay, so he never says exactly what he means, but it’s not hard to guess.  When he says your “eternity hinges” on the conclusion, he’s not talking about God giving you really bad acne for all eternity, right?  He’s talking about heaven and hell here, right?
            This same kind of vague language is repeated all throughout the book. For example: “I hope you take it seriously, because there may be more than just idle curiosity hanging in the balance. If Jesus is to be believed…then nothing is more important than how you respond to him.” (p. 15)
            He’s obviously trying as hard as he can to imply something without saying anything concrete that someone could take him up on.  Much of the book is like that actually—he’s very skilled at using weasel language throughout the whole thing.  It’s extremely important that you believe in Jesus because….SOMETHING!  (And yet, somehow not quite important enough for him to bother explaining what that something is…)

            The only place where Lee Strobel directly addresses the problem of Hell is on page 164-166 when talking to D.A. Carson and again it’s very difficult for me to figure out in concrete terms what they’re talking about, and I suspect that’s deliberate.  I’ll quote the whole exchange first, and then I’ll go through and try to make sense of it.
            The Bible says that the Father is loving.  The New Testament affirms the same about Jesus.  But can they really be loving while at the same time sending people to hell?  After all, Jesus teaches more about hell than anyone in the entire Bible. Doesn’t that contradict his supposed gentle and compassionate character?
            In posing this question to Carson, I quoted the hard-edged words of agnostic Charles Templeton: “How could a loving Heavenly Father create an endless hell and, over the centuries, consign millions of people to it because they do not or cannot or will not accept certain religious beliefs.”
            That question, though tweaked for maximum impact, didn’t raise Carson’s ire.  He began with a clarification.  “First of all,” he said, “I’m not sure that God simply casts people into hell because they don’t accept certain beliefs.”
            He thought for a moment, then backed up to take a run at a more thorough answer by discussing a subject that many modern people consider a quaint anachronism: sin.
            “Picture God in the beginning of creation with a man and woman made in his image,” Carson said. “They wake up in the morning and think about God.  They love him truly. They delight to do what he wants; it’s their whole pleasure. They’re rightly related to him and they’re rightly related to each other.
            “Then, with the entrance of sin and rebellion into the world, these image bearers begin to think that they are at the center of the universe. Not literally, but that’s the way they think.  And that’s the way we think.  All the things we call ‘social pathologies’—war, rape, bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes—are bound up in the first instance with the fact that we’re not rightly related to God.  The consequence is that people get hurt.
            “From God’s perspective, that is shockingly disgusting. So what should God do about if? If he says, “Well, I don’t give a rip,” he’s saying that evil doesn’t matter to him.  It’s a bit like saying, “Oh yeah, the Holocaust—I don’t care.” Wouldn’t we be shocked if we thought God didn’t have the moral judgments on such matters?
            “But in principle, if he’s the sort of God who has moral judgments on these matters, he’s got to have moral judgments on this huge matter of all these divine image bearers shaking their puny fists at his face and singing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way.” That’s the real nature of sin.
            “Having said that, hell is not a place where people are consigned because they were pretty good blokes but just didn’t believe the right stuff.  They’re consigned there, first and foremost, because they defy their Maker and want to be at the center of the universe.  Hell is not filled with people who have already repented, only God isn’t gentle enough or good enough to let them out.  It’s filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in their God-defying rebellion.
            “What is God to do? If he says it doesn’t matter to him, God is no longer a God to be admired.  He’s either amoral or positively creepy. For him to act in any other way in the face of such blatant defiance would be to reduce God himself.”
            I interjected, “Yes, but what seems to bother people the most is the idea that God will torment people for eternity.  That seems vicious, doesn’t it?”
            Replied Carson, “In the first place, the Bible says that there are different degrees of punishment, so I’m not sure that it’s the same level of intensity for all people.
            “In the second place, if God took his hands off this fallen world so that there were no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell.  Thus, if you allow a whole lot of sinners to live somewhere in a confined place where they’re not doing damage to anyone but themselves, what do you get but hell?  There’s a sense in which they’re doing it to themselves, and it’s what they want because they still don’t repent.”
            I thought Carson was finished with his answer, because he hesitated for a moment.  However, he had one more crucial point.  “One of the things that the Bible does insist is that in the end not only will justice be done, but justice will be seen to be done, so that every mouth will be stopped.”
            I grabbed ahold of that last statement. “In other words,” I said, “at the time of judgment, there is nobody in the world who will walk away from that experience saying that they have been treated unfairly by God.  Everyone will recognize the fundamental justice in the way God judges them and the world.”
            “That’s right,” Carson said firmly.  “Justice is not always done in this world; we see that every day.  But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see.  And no one will be able to complain by saying, “This isn’t fair.”  (p.164-165)
           
            Okay, I’ve got to be honest—I don’t really understand what they’re talking about, which makes it difficult for me to respond to it.  (This is a problem I frequently encounter when reading this book.)
            On the surface of it, Carson appears to be rejecting traditional Christian doctrine that we are saved by faith: “I’m not sure that God simply casts people into hell because they don’t accept certain beliefs.  But at the same time he firmly believes in the necessity of a hell because evil must be answered. 
            He frontlines his argument for the necessity of hell with horrific acts of human evil: the Holocaust, war, rape.  (“It’s a bit like saying, “Oh yeah, the Holocaust—I don’t care.” Wouldn't we be shocked if we thought God didn’t have moral judgments on such matters?”)  But then he quickly slides into a whole list of thought crimes—bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes.  By including all of these on the same list, Carson appears to think that the thought crimes are morally equivalent to the holocaust, war and rape.  And although Carson uses the actual physical atrocities like the Holocaust to justify the existence of Hell, it appears to be the thought crimes (the failure to repent foremost among them) that land people into hell.  In other words, according to Carson, God needs to establish a Hell to show he cares about the Holocaust, but that doesn’t mean that Hell is necessarily filled only with Nazis and War criminals—it also includes people who indulged in: bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes.

            Furthermore, traditional Christian doctrine is that once you’re in Hell, you’re in for all eternity.  However Carson’s verb tenses imply that he thinks someone’s time duration in Hell is directly correlated to their status of repentance, and he appears to be implying that the unrepentant can get out of Hell at any time by simply repenting.  Hell is not filled with people who have already repented, only God isn’t gentle enough or good enough to let them out.  It’s filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in their God-defying rebellion.
            But if that’s the implication, then Lee Strobel is not getting it, because Lee Strobel responds by asking a question about the problem of damnation for eternity.  “Yes, but what seems to bother people the most is the idea that God will torment people for eternity.
            Carson hears this question about the time duration of damnation, completely ignores it, and instead responds with a statement about the intensity of damnation.  In the first place, the Bible says that there are different degrees of punishment, so I’m not sure that it’s the same level of intensity for all people. 
            But this idea of a Hell with carefully orchestrated levels of punishment is immediately contradicted by his very next sentence, in which he talks of a laissez-faire type Hell, in which God simply removes his presence, and leaves sinners to their own devices. “In the second place, if God took his hands off this fallen world so that there were no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell.  Thus if you allow a whole lot of sinners to live somewhere in a confined place where they’re not doing damage to anyone but themselves, what do you get but hell?”

            By the way, note that second conditional verb tense: if God took his hands off this fallen world so that there were no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell.  They are clearly implying that this is not the way things are currently.  In other words, they believe that in the present world, God is restraining human wickedness.  I’ve noted the problems with this in a previous blog post when discussing World War II.  If God is currently restraining human wickedness, how do you explain most of human history?  I mean really, how much worse could things get?  What could we possibly do to each other that we haven’t already done?  Where, for example, was God’s hand restraining human wickedness when babies were getting their heads smashed against trees in the killing fields of Cambodia?
           Furthermore, this sentence directly contradicts the one before it about the “different degrees of punishment” doctrine.  Most of the damage human wickedness causes is not harm done to ourselves, but harm done to others.  You could argue that the murder, thief and rapist are hurting themselves in an indirect intangible psychological way, I suppose, but you’d have to be especially thick not to notice that they are doing the majority of harm to their victims.  If God simply allowed no restraint on human wickedness, this would not mean that the most wicked would suffer the most, it would mean that the most wicked would inflict the most suffering.
            (By the way, it’s not at all clear what Carson imagines is going on in Hell.  Given that everyone is immortal in hell, I’m imagining sort of a scene like Prometheus chained to the rock—where the eagles come down and eat his liver every day, but then it regrows again because the gods are immortal.  In other words, I’m guessing he’s envisioning a hell where humans can still inflict physical pain and harm on each other even though we will have immortal bodies.  But notice that this is not at all clear in his own explanation, and he doesn’t seem to have thought out the details of what he is saying.)

            And then at the end comes the truly bizarre part—Lee Strobel and Carson believe that on the day of judgment, everyone will believe that God’s judgment is fair.  So they believe there will be a group of people in Hell, who believe that it’s absolutely completely fair that God put them in Hell, but who are still refusing to repent?  I have a hard time reconciling Carson’s belief that the people in Hell are in permanent rebellion against God with his belief that the people in Hell think it’s totally fair God put them there.  Wouldn’t it have to be one or the other?  If they acknowledge the justness of God’s judgment, isn’t that really in essence the same as repenting?
             According to Carson’s vision, we would have to imagine a Hell filled with people who are saying to themselves, “Boy it really sucks here.  And I would love to be in heaven.  And it was totally just for God to put me here, because I absolutely deserved it.  But I’m still not going to repent.”

            Right, so what to make of all this gibberish?  He’s going on about something about sin and defiance of God and repentance, and he clearly believes in a Hell and he believes that there are some people going there, but more than that I can’t logically work out.
            I’ve got two guesses as to what he’s talking about: either he’s defending traditional Church doctrine, or he’s not.
            Firstly, I’ll posit a guess that he might be defending Church doctrine.  Having grown up in the church, I’m aware that they like to use a certain amount of semantic shifting to get around difficult theological issues.  In other words, Christians believe people go to heaven or hell based on their religious beliefs, but they don’t like to phrase it in exactly those words.  They prefer to place the emphasis on the idea that people are going to hell because of sin, and that only those who repent (through Christ) can be saved.  So the Christians are still going to Heaven, and everyone else is still going to Hell, but for those being damned the emphasis has been moved from a failure to believe to the doctrine of sin.  (The fact that everyone is born into sin, and that escape from sin only comes through belief, is regulated to a minor detail.)  
            I somewhat suspect that’s what he’s doing here with—just trying to change the wording of the doctrine, but not its essence.  The “failure to repent” part could be interpreted as synonymous with “failure to believe in Jesus.”
            So that’s guess number one. 

            But if that’s not what’s going on, then it sounds like he is advancing the idea that people are still given a chance to repent after they die, and anyone can get out of hell anytime by just repenting.  Is that what he’s talking about?
            Actually, some religions, like Mormonism believe that after they die heretics will be visited by an angel and still given a chance to repent and avoid hell.  This isn’t Christian doctrine, but it sounds like Carson is stealing this idea anyway.
            Well, if so, it’s an interesting idea, but remember this is a book that is supposed to prove the truth of Christianity.  And where is the proof for any of this?  It’s not in the Bible, it’s not traditionally church doctrine—he appears to be just making stuff up as he goes along. 
           
            Look, you can either accept Church doctrine as divine revelation received from God, and take or leave the whole package.  Or you can just admit that no one knows what happens when we die, and become an agnostic.  What you can’t do is just start making up random stuff out of thin air, and then tell everyone you know what God is going to do or what God isn’t going to do.  It may sound good. It might be what you want God to do, or what you would do in God’s place.  But there’s no proof.  This is nothing more than wishful thinking at its purest, without even the shell of divine revelation to fall back on at this point.
            The Bible is not a short book.  God clearly wasn’t operating on some sort of word limit.  If you believe God inspired the Bible, and you think this is the view of Hell that God wanted us to believe in, then I can’t understand why God didn’t just say this in the Bible.

            Not to mention, the whole thing doesn’t really make a lot of sense.  Given this liberal state of affairs, why does he believe there will still be people in hell who are refusing to repent?
            And, if you can repent and get out of Hell at anytime, then doesn’t this undercut Lee Strobel’s assertion that “your future and your eternity hinge on how you respond to Christ.
            [Also, while I’m nitpicking, Carson’s whole idea about sin entering the world appears to rest on a literal version of a creation account—in the beginning before sin entered the world, there was one man and one woman and everything was perfect.  Unless you take a hard core creationist view of the world and deny all the science, this view has long since been discredited.  Nature was filled with death and destruction long before humans evolved.]
           
            But I’m wasting my time trying to make logical sense of this mess.  As with everything else in the book, Lee Strobel is simply trying to play both arguments at once.  If the threat of your eternal damnation motivates you to become a Christian, then he’ll imply it.  If Hell is a theological problem for you, then you don’t need to worry about Hell—no one is going to Hell who doesn’t want to go, apparently.

            But if there’s no advantage to belief, and no penalty for disbelief, then Lee Strobel’s book doesn’t really make sense.  The whole thing is predicated on the idea that it’s extremely important for you to get to the truth of Christ (…for some vague reason he’s afraid of saying clearly).
            Indeed, not only Lee Strobel’s book, but all of Christianity seems predicated on the idea that belief in Jesus is advantageous, and not believing in Jesus is disadvantageous.  The entire New Testament is emphasizing over and over again the importance of believing in Christ.  (For example Mark 16:16—“Ye that believeth shall be saved and ye that believeth not shall be damned.”)  Traditionally, the church has interpreted the emphasis on belief in Christ as meaning that this was because believers were saved, and unbelievers were damned.  But if you take this away, it’s not clear to me what the Bible is talking about.  And while theologians continue to pretend to know who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell, I wonder why, if God had something he wanted to communicate about all of this, he couldn’t have just said it.
            But as long as you’re operating under the assumption that belief does have some sort of advantage, and unbelievers are at some sort of disadvantage (whatever this happens to be) then the same criticisms of belief can be made—why is it morally virtuous to believe in something without evidence? Why are some people geographically disadvantaged?  And why doesn’t God just come down and tell us what he wants us to believe, instead of leaving us to sort out ourselves what religion is true?

No comments: