This Other Ethical Problem with Eternal Hell
For most of our history, a vast majority of Christians have believed in eternal torment. Today, this doctrine is falling on hard times. The truly traditional view -- that Hell is a fiery place where God will eternally torture his enemies -- has mostly fallen out of fashion. Most thoughtful Christians have moved to the self-imposed C.S. Lewis Hell, which often turns out to be eternal mild unpleasantness. In some quarters, even quite conservative ones, it's increasingly acceptable to believe in annihilationism or universal salvation.
This trend is not very mysterious. It's hard to feel any affection for a God who's going to roast your friends forever. And, unless you're extremely angry1 or under immense social pressure to believe otherwise, it's blindingly obvious that nobody deserves such a fate. Perhaps, per retributivism, Himmler deserves to experience exactly what each of his millions of victims did. Yet even that frightful sentence is a speck when compared to eternal Hell.
But there is another, less appreciated problem with the doctrine. According to traditional Christian theology, it is not only the particularly wicked who deserve unending torment. Rather, everyone deserves eternal suffering.2 And this destroys our ability to condemn Earthly atrocities. If everyone deserves eternal Hell, the great crimes of history are -- at worst -- legal kerfuffles. They may be extrajudicial, but they are not undeserved. Without exception, the victims deserved something indescribably worse. Their fates may be regrettable, but they can never be tragic (just as it wouldn't be tragic if Hitler were crushed by a falling piano). I've heard a few people endorse this view (each of them an edgy teenage boy).3 But every decent and healthy person will recoil from it.
And I think this shows that no one believes the traditional view. When I was a teenager, everyone around me professed to believe that they deserved eternal suffering. But, if their boss chewed them out over nothing, they thought it was undeserved. If an acquaintance was maimed by a drunk driver, they thought that was undeserved. If a misanthropic Calvinist drew out the obvious implication of their words, they were horrified.4 For most of us, this position was an empty shibboleth. The only exceptions are people with religious OCD, for whom it becomes a very real, this-worldly Hell.
People often find themselves hoping an eternal Hell exists after they've been horribly wronged. To me, it seems obvious that this is why the doctrine exists in the first place. I don't think this impulse is virtuous, but it is wholly understandable, and I cannot judge anyone for it.↩
Often, exceptions are made for small children and intellectually disabled people. As adults with normal intelligence often experience undeserved suffering, this does not diffuse the problem.↩
If they are not literally a misanthropic teenage boy, they invariably remain one in a profound spiritual sense.↩
I remember this happening on two specific occasions. The first was in relation to R.C. Sproul's book, Classical Apologetics, where he says natural disasters are fine because their victims invariably deserved Hell. In the second case, his son applied the same reasoning to a specific case of horrific child abuse. I found his words genuinely upsetting, and I don't feel like reading them again. If you want to, you should be able to track them down on the internet (though I don't recommend it).↩