A while ago, Dr Sam Wells wrote this article for the Church Times in which he explores the implications of a Christianity without belief in hell.

Wells begins with the words of Jesus in Jn 10:10 – “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  This, he says, supplies an excellent mission statement for the church:

‘Jesus is our model of abundant life; his life, death and resurrection chart the transformation from the scarcity of sin and death to the ab­un­dance of healing and resur­rection; he longs to bring all humankind into reconciled and flourishing relationship with God, one another, themselves, and all creation.’

Discipleship, says Wells, is inhabiting that life.  Ministry is building the church up in that life.  Mission is the sharing and discovering of that life.

At this point in his article, Wells changes gear and remarks that around 1860, ‘people started to stop believing in hell’.  They did so because it seemed to them that even the worst sins did not merit everlasting torment.  And they did so because the horrors of hells seemed impossible to reconcile with the love of God.

With another crunch of gears, Wells leaves this point dangling (as if ‘people started to stop believing in hell’ equates to ‘hell doesn’t exist’).  He moves on to announce that this disbelief in hell means that we must re-define salvation:

‘Salvation is not fundamentally to be conceived as enabling people to escape from the labours of life and the horrors of hell to the halcyon joys of heaven. Jesus did not funda­mentally come to redirect us from judgement and oblivion to safety and sublime bliss.’

Now, I tend to be a bit sceptical when I see a polarised ‘not this, but that’ theological argument coming.  But Wells doesn’t seem to share that hesitation:

‘Instead, God always purposed to be in relationship with us and foster our relationship with one another and creation. Jesus came to embody that purpose, to encounter and chal­lenge all that inhibits it, to withstand and demonstrate the overcoming of those obstructions, and to restore that purpose in perpetual promise.’

But Wells is right in suggesting that there would be important implications for an evading-eternal-hell model of church, if true.

First, the mission of the church is no longer to reconcile people to God (presumably, because they were never alienated from God in the first place):

‘Church can no longer be principally a mechan­ism for delivering people from the perils of damnation to the joys of the Elysian Fields. God is no longer an instrument for conveying us up­­stairs rather than downstairs. God is not fundamentally a means to the end of securing our eternal survival and bliss. God is an end: “If I love thee for thyself alone, then give me thyself alone.”

‘The central purpose of the Church is no longer to reconcile people to God, so that their eternal salvation will no longer be in jeop­ardy: it is to invite people to enjoy God just as God enjoys them. God embraces them for their own sake, not for some ulterior purpose: evan­gelism means inviting people to em­­brace God likewise.’

Note again the false dichotomy: we are to love God for himself and not for what he can save us from.  Why not both?

But reconciliation with God is a central (possibly the most central) aspect of the Christian doctrine of salvation.  The apostolic conviction was that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor 5.19)?  To jettison this is to abandon all pretence at Christian faith.

Second, the no-eternal-hell model of church prompts us to adopt a different attitude towards the world.  No longer will the world be seen as a place where the flesh and the devil are to be escaped, avoided, and protected against.

But now, under this hell-less view,

‘the world has a validity of its own. All has not been lost in the Fall. The Holy Spirit is doing surprising, ex­­uberant, and plentiful things in the world.’

But who claimed that ‘all had been lost in the Fall’?  As Ian Paul notes

‘if Christians have read the NT eschatological outlook as saying that all in the world is bad and all in the Church is good, then they have not been reading carefully enough. The world is God’s creation, though fallen, and as Wells says “all has not been lost”. But a good deal has.’

As for the subject of judgement, then a moment’s reflection will show that it is deeply proper, and deeply human, to long for the time when all wrongs will be put right.  But that won’t happen if those wrongs go unjudged.

When Wells writes…

‘the Church is called not simply to guide people’s escape from the world, but to celebrate creation, en­­joy culture, and share in flourishing life’ (my emphasis)

…he means, as the rest of the article shows, that ‘the Church is called not at all to guide people’s escape from the world’.

The problem is (claims Wells),

‘our churches are still set up to achieve the goal of evading hell. We still take people out of the world for an in­­tense hour or two a week to be transported to heaven, and thus to be restored, or fuelled, or inspired to face the challenges of their lives.’

So what should our churches be doing?

Firstly, they should be ‘modelling and making possible forms of social relationship not found elsewhere.’

Secondly,

‘there needs to be a re­­formation in how the Church uses its buildings…These church buildings should never have come to be seen simply as set-apart places of retreat to facilitate the once-weekly eleva­tion of the soul of the few to the throne of heaven. They must be regarded as places of encounter for the whole neighbourhood, with a mission to be a blessing to anyone and everyone who resides or spends time there.’

Conclusion

I realise that not everything that needs to be said can be said in one short article.  But even a brief paper, written for a non-academic readership, should have some logic and coherence about it.  Dr Wells’ article is seriously lacking in both departments.

(a) He has failed to explain how, and in what ways, churches nowadays are preoccupied with preaching about hell.  Where are these churches?  What are their preachers and teachers saying?  Is it not the case that the vast majority of churches (including evangelical churches) avoid the subject, or, at least, skate over it rather quickly and superficially?

(b) He has failed to explain why the doctrine of hell needs to be abandoned.  The only reasons given are that ‘people started to give up belief in hell a long time ago’ (which proves nothing), and that the ‘math’ doesn’t add up (where would be the justice in an everlasting punishment for sins committed during this brief life?)  This second objection is infantile, and, in any case, fails to acknowledge that (as Ian Paul points out) there a significant numbers of evangelicals who embrace a doctrine of annihilationism.  Whatever problems there may be with the doctrine of hell, it cannot be abandoned with a wave of the hand.

In denying a place in the Christian message for judgement, hell and punishment, Wells is in defiance of Jesus’ predessor, John the Baptist, Jesus’ successor, the apostle Paul, and Jesus himself.  As Ian Paul comments:

‘Jesus’ predecessor, John the Baptist, castigated his listeners: ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’ (Matt 3.7). Jesus’ follower Peter, in his Pentecost speech ‘with many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”’ (Acts 2.40). Can it be that Sam Wells’ gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was like neither his predecessor or his follower and avoided all talk of judgement? What, then, are we to make of the centrality in Jesus’ teaching of the call to ‘repent and believe, for the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1.15 and elsewhere)? What do we do with Jesus’ repeated language of ‘the darkness outside, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matt 8.12, 13.42, 13.50, 22.13, 24.51, 25.30, Luke 13.28)?’

And this is to say nothing of the best-known verse in the New Testament – John 3:16 – which is framed in terms which condemn those who prefer darkness to light, who fail to believe in the one sent by God.

(c) In jettisoning the fear of hell, he has also abandoned the hope of heaven.  But, as someone once said, ‘if this life only we have hoped in Christ, then we are of all people most to be pitied.’

(d) He has failed to explain why he thinks that a robust doctrine of the afterlife is inconsistent with a healthy attitude towards the pleasures and challenges of this life.  His is the old, naive, and discredited worry about being ‘too heavenly-minded to be any earthly good.’  The claim of C.S. Lewis, that it is precisely those Christians who believe most strongly in the next world who are most use in the present world, has yet to be rebutted.  Wells seems unaware of the very significant work done by evangelical and charismatic congregations.  To turn to Ian’s Paul’s response again:

‘Where I live it is those churches which believe in the things that Wells wants us to rethink who are actually making most use of their buildings during the week. Trent Vineyard, who believe in all this eschatological kingdom stuff probably more than any Anglican church, run Nottingham’s largest programme of support for the homeless. It turns out that, contrary to expectations, believing in heaven actually transforms how you live on earth.’

What Dr Wells is advocating is no new proposal.  It is just the old, discredited liberalism which was described by in 1934 by H. Richard Niebuhr as:

‘A God without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.’