Is Vicarious Redemption Immoral?

In this video, Christopher Hitchens argues that the doctrine of vicarious redemption--which he calls human sacrifice--is immoral. He concedes that a person can pay the debt of another, but he doesn't believe that one person can relieve another of his or her responsibilities. However, he appears to agree with C. S. Lewis that it is morally acceptable for us to forgive offenses against ourselves.

He frames the discussion in the context of Lewis' argument that if Jesus was just a man and not God, it would be preposterous of Him to claim to be able to take our sins upon Himself and forgive offenses against others. Lewis explains that Jesus cannot be just a good moral teacher--He has to either be a lunatic, a devil from hell, or the Son of God. Hitchens says: "Lewis, who had argued so well up until then can't complete a syllogism. Poor guy, he never quite could do that. He said, 'Since I don't think He was a devil from hell, I have to conclude that He was the Son of God.'"

I find it ironic that Hitchens accuses Lewis of failing to complete a syllogism, since Hitchens himself does exactly that--in several different ways.

Hitchens very correctly states that human sacrifice is "revolting." God calls it "detestable" in the Old Testament, so the two of them are on the same page so far. However, the sacrifice of Christ has about as much in common with human sacrifice as a heroic act of self-sacrifice has in common with premeditated murder. Both involve death, but that is about it.

First, the sacrifice of Jesus was voluntary--He could have chosen not to go through with it (Matthew 26:53), and He denounced all violence against His aggressors (Matthew 26:52). Human sacrifice, on the other hand, is an act of violence against an unwilling victim. Second, God never commanded anyone to kill His Son; His executioners simply acted according to their evil inclinations, and God permitted it and used it for good. Human sacrifice, on the other hand, is ostensibly at the command of the gods. Third, the redemption was an act of self-sacrifice by God, while human sacrifice is the selfish taking of someone else's life.

Hitchens also failed to complete his syllogism with respect to the Lewis quote by concluding that the redemption is immoral without even addressing the point Lewis made about Jesus being God. He simply assumes throughout the video that even if Jesus existed, He was only a man, and therefore what He did was immoral.

If Jesus had in fact been just a man, even the Bible admits that He would have had no power to redeem someone else. "No man can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for him--the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough--that he should live on forever and not see decay" (Psalm 49:7-9). 

So Lewis and Hitchens are both in full agreement with the Bible up to this point. Then Hitchens claims that Lewis failed to complete his syllogism by concluding that Jesus was not a devil from hell and is therefore the Son of God. And Hitchens fails to complete his syllogism by never even addressing the issue of whether Jesus was the Son of God and simply concluding that Jesus was either evil or deluded. This is circular reasoning. "If Jesus was only a man, it would be immoral for Him to pay the penalty for someone else's sin. He was only a man. Therefore, His redemption was immoral."

If Hitchens wants to argue that Jesus never existed or that He was not God, that is one thing, but if he is going to argue that some aspect of Christian theology is immoral, he has to allow for the sake of argument that the claims of Christianity are true. Otherwise he cannot address the issue in a logical way.

Finally, Hitchens concedes too much upfront. He allows that one person can pay another's debt. He also concedes that we can forgive others for offenses against us. But he says that we all have to take responsibility for our own actions. However, if I forgive someone a wrong against me and also pay the person's debt, I have effectively absolved the person of responsibility. Hitchens has no problem with the first clause of that sentence, but he strongly objects to the second clause. Since the second clause follows logically from the first clause, Hitchens appears to have failed to think through his logic.

Still, he has a good point about taking responsibility, but the Bible never teaches that vicarious redemption absolves us of responsibility. Even though God has in Christ forgiven our sins, we still have to be reconciled to those we have wronged (Matthew 5:24). And even though we are saved by faith, good works are evidence of true faith (1 John 2:3).

So God has simply leveled the playing field by offering a fresh start and His enabling power to anyone, regardless of genetics, environment, or past sins. Only humility will give us an advantage. But ultimately He will judge us all impartially (1 Peter 1:17).

The Dying God

The aspect of the Moral Law that is most difficult to explain in naturalistic terms is the kind of altruism that makes a person willing to die for a stranger and even an enemy, or to suffer scorn and rejection for the well-being of others. In my previous post, we discussed possible natural explanations, like evolution or culture. Now we will discuss the possibility of a divine Lawgiver.

If there is such a thing as an objective Moral Law, this Lawgiver would have to epitomize it. The imprint of the Law on the human heart would have to match His nature in every way, like Cinderella's glass slipper fit her foot.

A few weeks ago, a non-Christian asked me why Jesus had to die on the cross. He couldn't see why an omnipotent God, who presumably had an unlimited number of options at His disposal, would choose such a barbaric method. There are a number of important reasons, but for the sake of this discussion I will focus on Jesus having to fulfill the Moral Law on our behalf.

Although God is certainly omnipotent, He cannot do that which is logically impossible. That is, He cannot be holy and not holy at the same time. And if He is holy, He cannot be capricious; He has to have integrity. Because God epitomizes moral perfection, there are certain things He cannot do and still be true to His nature. This does not diminish His omnipotence, because, as C. S. Lewis says, "omnipotence means the power to do all that is intrinsically possible." That does not include making 2 + 2 = 5 or being both holy and not holy. If something is logically impossible, then being able to do it is not omnipotence, it is nonsense.

The Bible says that God is holy, and in order to determine whether this is true, we should compare His nature to the Moral Law within us. But we do not look at the nature of God in the Old Testament, where He was the Head and Commander in Chief of a political system (a theocracy) that functioned in an Ancient Near East culture. Like any political system, this theocracy had to take into account practicality and culture. As Jesus explained, the Law of Moses made allowances for human nature and the hardness of unredeemed hearts (Matthew 19:8). Instead, we have to look to Christ, in whom "all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). Christ is God, and as such He perfectly represents God's nature (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3).

Jesus came to "fulfill all righteousness" (Matthew 3:15), so a look at His life, as manifested in the Gospels, will give us the Christian standard for righteousness. Jesus condemned religious hypocrisy more than any other type of sin (Matthew 23:27-28, Luke 11:44); and the religious hypocrites--His chief enemies--ultimately crucified Him. He befriended sinners, but transformed them rather than learning their ways (Matthew 11:19). He broke through social barriers by treating women and foreigners with respect (John 4:1-26). He valued marriage (Matthew 19:8) and sexual purity (Matthew 5:28). He taught peaceful resistance (Matthew 26:52) and respect for government authority (Matthew 17:27), but He also had the courage to speak truth to power (Luke 11:45-46). He combined justice (John 12:48) and mercy (Luke 18:13-14).

But most of all, His message was one of altruistic love, including love for our enemies (Luke 6:35). And the greatest act of love is to lay down our lives for our friends (John 15:13), so in order to fulfill all righteousness, Jesus had to do that. But He went beyond that--laying down His life for His enemies. When His enemies slapped, mocked, and scourged Him, pushing a crown of thorns into his head and nailing his hands and feet to a cross, his blood covered every sin that has ever been and will ever be committed.

He died on the Preparation Day of the Passover, when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered. And when He breathed His last, the heavy veil of the temple tore in two from top to bottom, granting sinners free access to the inner sanctuary of God.

Skin Stories by Becky Fox

Skin Stories from Becky Fox on Vimeo.

A stop motion of approx 1,500 photos by my talented blogging friend, Becky.

Verses on skin:

"All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made." - John 1:3

"Creation was subject to futility." - Romans 8:20

"My grace is sufficient for you; for my power is made perfect in weakness." - 2 Cor 12:9

"We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us." - 2 Cor 4:7

"Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." - 2 Cor 4:16

"Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength, they will rise up with wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not grow faint." - Isaiah 40:31

"Freedom for captives." - Isaiah 61:1

"I am making all things new." - Rev 21:5

Tune: The John Slaughter Blues Band

The Moral Law

An atheist told me that in order to seriously consider Christianity, he would have to believe or assume certain things:

1. There is a non-material element of each human being, the soul, which is created at conception and continues to exist after the death of the individual.

2. There exists two places, heaven and hell, that are or will be eternal repositories for souls rejoined with their physical bodies at some point in the future.



3. There exists a single set of immutable rules governing all human activity, morals. 

4. Transgressions against these morals, sins, are punishable by eternal extreme torture in hell. 



5. Mitigation of this punishment and attainment of heaven is only available through belief in and practice of a particular religious doctrine.

In my first post, "A Skeptic's Guide to Faith," I set forth what I consider to be the best conceptual framework for deciding whether Christianity is true. Mathematical or scientific proof is not possible for reasons we have already discussed. This means that we are left with the legal standards of proof: "the preponderance of the evidence" (civil) or "beyond a reasonable doubt" (criminal), or we can see if the Bible is consistent with the evidence. According to Denis Alexander, this is the standard often used by scientists: "Scientists habitually use that little phrase 'consistent with' in the discussion sections of our scientific papers. We don't 'prove things' in biology, but we do gather data that can count for or against a theory." 

I decided to go with the latter standard. If the Bible is the true inspired word of God, it will be consistent with reality, and it will be the best explanation for reality. But if it's just the best explanation for a few aspects of reality, then it fails. The Bible, properly understood, has to be the best explanation for every aspect of reality.  

Next, I discussed what the Bible says about an "immortal soul" and eternal punishment. My approach was to put aside cultural assumptions and study everything the Bible says about the soul and hell. Although we have no way of proving whether or not this is true, we can determine whether the Bible is internally consistent, including whether its teaching about hell is consistent with its teaching that the Moral Law is written on our hearts. That is, is the Bible's teaching about hell moral? I reached the conclusion that, properly understood, it is. In a future blog post, where I will discuss God's solution to the problem of evil, I will also argue that it is necessary.   

In this post, I will address the issue of Moral Law and examine whether evolutionary or cultural factors provide a better explanation than the existence of a divine Lawgiver. Again, the question is which explanation fits best. One might argue that a sense of right and wrong is a by-product of evolution, since animals also exhibit care for members of their group. But what about altruism? Why do humans almost universally agree that it is right to risk one's life in order to save or protect someone else? And why do we feel particularly inclined to protect the vulnerable or disabled? These things are universally considered morally right—not simply wise or expedient. Altruism is by its very nature the unselfish giving of oneself for the benefit of someone else. 

When our oldest daughter Chelsea was about nine and Ingrid was seven, we took the family out to the California coast for a day trip. Rick had the boys elsewhere on the beach and Chelsea, Ingrid, and I waded into the water (but it was too cold for swimsuits, so we just rolled up our pants). Ingrid is disabled and could not walk without support at the time, so I held her hand, and Chelsea was a few feet away. When a large wave suddenly pulled the sand out from under our feet, Ingrid and Chelsea both started to lose their footing. Although I was able to quickly stabilize Ingrid, a man standing nearby grabbed her other hand as Chelsea fell into the water and got soaked.

Well, Chelsea was very indignant on the drive home because she could not see the logic behind this man's actions. "Why did he grab Ingrid's hand and not mine when you had her other hand? She wasn't going to fall anyway." We tried to explain that it was because he could see that Ingrid was disabled and he just reacted instinctively—if he had had time to think about it, he probably would have grabbed Chelsea's hand. (Chelsea only reluctantly gave me permission to use this story because it made her "seem obnoxious," so I want to make sure that everyone knows that she is a very nice girl who isn't the slightest bit obnoxious. This attitude was cold- and wetness-induced. Also, it was years ago.)

This was just a normal human reaction to seeing a vulnerable person in danger, but some will risk everything, including their lives, for other people. And even if we are not capable of that kind of altruism, we admire those who are. Is Darwinian evolution responsible for the instinct to protect a stranger even at the cost of one's own life? How could the "selfish gene" have evolved in such a way? Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project says:

One proposal is that repeated altruistic behavior of the individual is recognized as a positive attribute in mate selection. But this hypothesis is in direct conflict with observations in nonhuman primates that often reveal just the opposite--such as the practice of infanticide by a newly dominant male monkey, in order to clear the way for his own future offspring. Another argument is that there are indirect reciprocal benefits from altruism that have provided advantages to the practitioner over evolutionary time; but this explanation cannot account for human motivation to practice small acts of conscience that no one else knows about.

But maybe the Moral Law has nothing to do with evolution; perhaps it's just cultural. People almost universally agree that integrity, justice, and courage are admirable qualities. But why do people choose to act in this way? Is it for social approval? No, it goes far beyond that, because we admire those qualities even more when someone does the right thing in the face of persecution. In the movie A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More had been imprisoned awaiting execution for refusing to swear an oath supporting the divorce and remarriage of King Henry VIII. When his family came to visit in order to convince him to swear the oath, his daughter Meg accused him of playing the hero, and he said:

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose to be human at all . . . why then perhaps we must stand fast a little—even at the risk of being heroes.

The Moral Law calls us to act with courage and integrity even when nobody approves. It means staying on the path of truth and justice when it leads to social rejection and even death. And although we can watch the movie about Sir Thomas More and admire his actions, his peers (those whose approval matters most) stripped him of his title of Lord Chancellor and executed him. 

In the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, attorney Atticus Finch defended an African American man who had been wrongly accused of raping a white woman. His decision to promote justice made him a pariah in his small, racially bigoted southern town and even put his children in danger. He lost the trial due to the lies of the prosecuting witness and the corruption of the jury. When he packed up his briefcase and left the empty courtroom, all the African Americans who sat crowded together up in the balcony stood up as he passed. But the most powerful part of that scene is that he never looked up and saw it. 

The Moral Law at its purest calls for this kind of selfless dedication to doing what is right regardless of consequences. Few are willing to make the sacrifice when following it becomes hard. It doesn't promise popularity, power, or wealth. But as much as we may try to squash it, every human heart bears its imprint. Why is this? C. S. Lewis says:

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?  

The Sign of Jonah

In my last post, I discussed what the Bible says about hell, and I would like to continue that subject by addressing one traditional view that holds that Jesus went down to hell and that it is in the center of the earth. This is based in large part on Matthew 12:40, which says, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

There are two major Scriptural problems with this view. First, Jesus died on the day before the Sabbath, or Friday at the ninth hour, and He rose again on Sunday morning. That is not even close to three days and three nights. Second, nowhere in the Bible does it say that the dead go down to the heart of the earth. The Old Testament says that the dead go down to Sheol, and the New Testament calls it Hades, but the context indicates that the Bible is referring to the grave. 

The Lord’s Prayer says, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,” (KJV) so the earth is not synonymous with the grave. Other than Matthew 12:40, the only times the Bible ever mentions the "heart of the earth" in any translation are Isaiah 19:24 and Isaiah 24:13, and each time it pertains to something happening to the living on the earth. 

However, John 14:30 gives us a hint at what Matthew 12:40 means, where Jesus calls Satan the ruler of this world and says that he had no power over Him. Jesus was able to walk right through hostile crowds and nobody could harm Him until Thursday in the Garden of Gethsemane. Until then, Satan, the ruler of the world, could do nothing to Jesus because He was without sin. It is sin that gives Satan power over us. 

But on Thursday Jesus became sin for us. "For He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor 5:21). That is when Judas betrayed Him with a kiss, and the flogging began. Like Jonah was inside a whale, Jesus was at the mercy (or rather lack thereof) of Satan, who gave Him his absolute worst. Satan reigned for three days and three nights, which is the amount of time that the redemption took. The flogging was an important part of it: “He was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5). So when Jesus was in the heart of the earth He was under the power of Satan, the ruler of the earth. 

Whenever Jesus prophesied about His redemption, He always included the rejection, betrayal, being delivered into the hands of men, the suffering, etc., that which led up to His death. He never mentioned His death in isolation. (Matthew 16:21, Matthew 17:22,  Matthew 20:18, Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:34, Luke 9:22, Luke 18:31, Luke 24:7.) So His full redemption took three days and three nights, but He died and rose again on the third day.

The redemption of Christ was also prophesied through typology in the creation story. The text says that God finished His work of creation on the sixth day and He rested on the seventh day. St. Augustine says about the creation account, "On the seventh day God’s rest is emphasized as something conveying a mystic meaning." Exodus 20:11 ties this rest to the Sabbath: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." 

Holy week is the week when God did His work of re-creating. “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). On Friday (the sixth day), He declared, “It is finished!” He rested in the grave throughout the Sabbath, and He rose again before dawn on the first day of the week. This symbolizes a new beginning that will culminate in new heavens and a new earth where death and evil will forever be a thing of the past.

Will Lost Souls Be Tormented Forever in the Lake of Fire?

The two most prominent trees in the Garden of Eden were the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. God said to Adam and Eve, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17). A loving and generous God gave them everything freely except one thing.

Satan makes his first appearance in chapter three, giving us a picture of his modus operandi of maligning God and twisting His words. "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden?'' (Genesis 3:1). Was that what God said? No. Eve didn't fall for that. So Satan tried again: "You surely will not die!" (Genesis 3:4).

And Eve believed that lie, as have many other people. Most Christians will say that everybody lives forever; it's just a question of where. I believed that myself until recently when I studied what the Bible actually says. The Bible states very clearly that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), not eternal life in torture. God told Adam that if he sinned he would die. Psalm 37:20 says, "But the wicked will perish; and the enemies of the Lord will be like the glory of the pastures, they vanish--like smoke they vanish away." Malachi 4:3 talks about the Day of Judgment when it says, "'You will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing,' says the Lord of hosts." They will be completely destroyed--dead forever when God ushers in "the new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 13). No sin or evil can mar His perfect new creation where He will live among His people (Revelation 21:3).

After Adam and Eve sinned, God forced them out of the Garden of Eden so they would not eat from the tree of life and live forever. This was an act of mercy because to live forever in a sinful state would be eternal torment. So God specifically withheld eternal life from fallen humanity, until He could purchase our redemption with His blood. To His redeemed, He will grant access to the tree of life (Revelation 2:7), and they will live forever in a glorified state, crowned with glory and majesty (Psalm 8:5).

The idea of an inherently immortal soul was alien to the ancient Hebrews. They believed that the dead went down to Sheol, or the grave. Psalm 146:3-4 says, "Do not trust in princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation. His spirit departs, he returns to the earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." And Ecclesiastes 9:5 says, "For the living know they will die; but the dead do not know anything."

Did the New Testament change this perception? No. In Acts 2:29, Peter quoted Psalm 16:8-11, and explained that David was talking about Christ. “Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day.” And Acts 2:34: “For it was not David who ascended into heaven.” David is dead and buried and will rise again at the resurrection. John 3:13 states clearly, "No one has ascended into heaven, but He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man."

The Bible does not teach that disembodied souls live forever in heaven or hell, because a soul is not inherently immortal. The words "immortal" or "immortality" are only used in the context of God and the redeemed on the day of judgment (Romans 2:7, 1 Cor. 15:53-54, 1 Tim. 6:16-17, and 2 Tim. 1:10). The soul that sins will die (Ezekiel 18:20). 1 Timothy 6:16 says that God alone possesses immortality. If He alone possesses immortality, and the redeemed will receive immortality when Jesus comes again, then immortality is not something we all possess. It is a gift of God's Spirit.

Instead, the Bible teaches that Jesus will come in glory with the angels for the Great White Throne Judgment, and the dead will rise from their graves. 1 Thessalonians 4:16 says, "For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first." If they rise, they are in the graves. All the dead will rise and stand before Him. "Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment" (John 5:28-29).  Matthew 10:28 says that God is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. If the soul is destroyed, it ceases to exist. "Our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29). How does a fire consume? It destroys completely and leaves nothing except ashes, which is consistent with Malachi 4:3. 

Where then did this idea come from that souls are immortal and we will all live forever in eternal bliss or eternal torture? Greek mythology taught that the immortal souls of the dead go down to Hades, and when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated to Greek in the Septuagint, the word "Sheol" was translated "Hades." Also, the Greek philosophers like Plato heavily influenced a number of the church fathers. So hell came to mean conscious, unceasing punishment in a lake of fire. When we think of it that way, we read "death," "destruction," "perish, "consume," etc. to mean something other than what those words actually mean. They have become euphemisms for eternal torture.

Now, of course the idea of hell as eternal, conscious torture is the traditional view, and there are a couple of passages that have given me pause because they have convinced many that hell is conscious suffering, in spite of all the parts of the Bible that tell us the wages of sin is death. They are the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-30, and the account of Judgment Day in Matthew 25:31-46, where Jesus separates the sheep from the goats on the basis of what they did or didn't do for the least of His brothers.

Before I begin to analyze these passages, I would like make one general observation. In both of these passages, the lost souls were not terrible people by any stretch of the imagination. The "goats" may even have been professing Christians, because they called Jesus "Lord." (It's not much of a stretch to conclude that since Matthew 7:21 says that only those who do the will of God will enter the kingdom of heaven.) The text doesn't tell us one way or the other. The only thing we know about the rich man and the "goats" is that they lacked love. In other words, they failed to do God's will to love their neighbor as themselves (Matthew 22:37-40, Galatians 5:14, James 2:8). The rich man didn't kick Lazarus when he walked past him. He just ignored him. Likewise, we don't get a laundry list of the sins of the "goats"--all we know is that they didn't seem to care about those who suffer.

So if we want to ignore everything in the Bible that say that the wages of sin is death in order to focus exclusively on these two passages, we have to face the fact that lovelessness will put us squarely in the goat camp. If we don't feel tremendous relief at the idea that nobody will be eternally tortured, we should examine our hearts and ask ourselves whether our relationship to a God of love is what it should be.

This reminds me of the story of Solomon and the two women who fought over a baby because one the women's babies died. When Solomon suggested that they cut the baby in two and give one part to each of them, one woman readily agreed and the other one asked Solomon to give the first woman the baby instead of killing him. Solomon immediately knew that the baby belonged to the last woman because of her love for him.

Likewise, our love for other people (or its absence) should tell us if we really belong to Christ. If the idea of the vast majority of people suffering excruciating pain forever and ever with no relief doesn't trouble us deeply, we either don't really believe it, we don't want to think about it, or we know nothing of love. If it's the latter, Matthew 25 and Luke 16 give us no assurance that they are not describing us.

However, I think these two passages are consistent with the rest of the Bible, and do not teach unrelenting conscious torture for the lost. In Matthew 25:46, Jesus says, "These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." The same word for "eternal" is used in both instances, so the argument goes that if the righteous will live forever, the others will also be alive and punished forever. However, the word for "eternity" is "aion," which according to Strong’s Concordance means 1) for ever, an unbroken age, perpetuity of time, eternity 2) the worlds, universe 3) period of time, age. So it doesn't definitively mean forever and ever. In fact, the word "aion" is used in Hebrews 11:3: "By faith we understand that the worlds ("aion") were prepared by the word of God." And the Bible clearly states that this universe is not forever. 

A form of the word "aion" is also used in Jude 1:7 when it says that Sodom and Gomorrah were an "example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire." But Sodom and Gomorrah were completely annihilated. The inhabitants of these cities are not still being tortured in an unrelenting fire. If, as Jude said, these cities were an example for us, and the traditional view is correct, then we would expect to read about screaming ghosts in the fire after they died. But all we know is that the "smoke of the land ascended like the smoke of a furnace," and that "God destroyed the cities of the valley" (Genesis 19:28, 29). This is how the Bible illustrates what it means by destruction by eternal fire.

As for Luke 16:19-30, it is important to remember that since Jesus always taught in parables, this is also a parable. And that means that we have to think about what it means rather than taking everything at face value. All the parables contain symbolism. If we read this in the context of the rest of the Bible, we know that this does not represent something that has already happened. Why? Because nobody except the Son of Man has gone to heaven (John 3:13). This means that Lazarus is not a real person who went to heaven. But some say that "Abraham's bosom" is a pre-heaven for the redeemed, a place where they stay in a disembodied state until the resurrection. However, Hebrews 11:8, 13 tells us that Abraham was a great man of faith who has not yet received the promise. He is still awaiting its fulfillment, like all those who are symbolically in the bosom of Abraham, the man of great faith. Like David (Acts 2:34) and Daniel (Daniel 12:13), he is dead and buried--or rather "asleep" and awaiting the resurrection. Most likely this is a picture of Judgment Day, and the rich man would not be quite so loquacious in the real lake of fire, because, like all the examples in the Old Testament of death by divine fire, it would be sudden and complete (for example, Leviticus 10:2 and Numbers 16:35). There is no example of slow torture anywhere.

Speaking of Abraham, he said, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25). Most of us fallen creatures would not torture an animal for even a few seconds. Would the God of love, who is the source of the moral law written on our hearts, torture billions of people throughout all of eternity, just for failing to receive His gracious gift of eternal life? Job 4:17 says, "Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his maker?" The obvious answer is no.

This is the conclusion I have reached after studying for myself what the Bible has to say on the subject. But my objective is always to get you to think and never to indoctrinate. Although the word of God is infallible, I am not, and I invite you to study this subject for yourself. I welcome your thoughts, and any correction, in the comments.

A Skeptic's Guide to Faith

In the comic strip Bloom County, Oliver Wendell Jones was the child prodigy who would sit on his roof and ponder the cosmos when he wasn't busy hacking into computers. 

One night the stars suddenly formed the words, "REPENT OLIVER."

Oliver said to himself, "Bloody difficult being an agnostic these days."

Difficult, maybe . . . but not impossible.

A skeptic asked me to do a post about rational steps to faith, and the Bloom County comic reminded me of something not to do: If we start out with a philosophy that excludes the possibility of the supernatural, it is impossible to find evidence for God's existence. This may seem self-evident, but it's easy to lose sight of, and if we do we will commit the fallacy of begging the question without even realizing it.

We may decide that we will not believe without evidence, but whenever "evidence" comes along, we'll interpret it in light of a naturalistic philosophy (the belief that nature is all that exists). So if we start out with the conviction that nature is everything, we will always reach the conclusion that everything, no matter how vanishingly small the odds, has a natural explanation. The issue of whether God exists is a yes/no question, but if we operate from this conceptual framework, the answer will always be no, even if He does in fact exist. It is circular reasoning.

In our scientific age, this is a very easy mistake to make because we are used to explaining things by science, but its scope is limited to nature--it cannot tell us whether anything exists beyond nature. Science never gives "God" as an answer. It tells us how the world came into existence but not why we are here. So the dichotomy is never between theism and science, but between theism and atheism. Science is simply an explanation of how things are, but it doesn't tell us whether it happened by design or as a result of a cosmic accident. If we allow science to become synonymous with atheism in our minds, we posit a false dichotomy: science versus religion.  But the Creator of this universe would have used quarks, genomes, and the elements of the periodic table as His building blocks, leaving us with the task of discovering and naming it all. He has to be the Great Scientist. Everything around us would reflect His qualities, and the natural world and its laws would be one great miracle even though it operates in highly organized ways. 

This doesn't mean that we cannot look to science to make the determination whether the Bible is true, but we have to keep two things in mind: First, we may have a faulty image of God as a distant, alien deity who occasionally intervenes by breaking the laws of nature, and if we do, we will never find evidence of such a deity because he doesn't exist. The biblical God is always present in His creation and He never breaks the laws of nature; He only redeems nature and exercises dominion over it. In the Gospel accounts, He restored the brokenness in nature by healing the sick, and He exercised dominion over it by walking on water, turning water into wine, multiplying bread, and calming the storm. This was in keeping with His mission as Redeemer and as the Second Adam who would have full dominion over nature (Genesis 1:28). But He refused the suggestion of Satan that He turn rocks into bread (Matthew 4:3-4). That would have been a radical breach of the laws of nature. Still, the works of Jesus were true miracles by any definition; they superseded the laws of nature. So although God created nature and declared it "good," He is not limited by its laws.

Second, instead of looking for "evidence" without defining what we would consider evidence, we would be better off asking two thing: whether the Bible is logical and whether it is consistent with reality. This is a question that takes a while to answer because it means asking a lot of different questions within this framework. But this is the general approach I take when I comment on Atheist Central. In my opinion it is the only way to prove that the Bible is more likely true than not. We cannot conclusively prove that the Bible is true any more than we can conclusively prove a scientific theory. But we can determine whether the evidence fits.

Everything we can experience with our senses or test scientifically is within space and time, and the Bible tells us that God exists outside of that (1 Corinthians 2:7, Titus 1:2, Jude 1:25, 2 Timothy 1:9). So the universe is like the underside of a dome that contains all of nature, and all the rest of reality is outside of the dome--unknowable except through revelation. But never fear; since this blog post is about a rational approach to faith, we will examine the revelation of the Bible critically to see whether it lines up with science.

And in making this determination, it makes sense to start at the beginning and look at the greatest miracle of them all: creation (or if you prefer--the origin of the universe). And then we can examine the revelation of the Bible (the outside of the dome) and science (the inside) and see if they match up.

Genesis 1:1-3 says about creation, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light."

What, then, does creation look like from inside the dome, from a scientific perspective? When I said that scientists never give "God" for an answer, I might have lied. After the NASA satellite Cosmic Background Explorer confirmed the Big Bang theory in 1992, George Smoot, who led the thirty American astronomers who made the discovery, said, "What we have found is evidence of the birth of the universe. It's like looking at God." Geoffrey Burbridge, an atheistic member of the team, complained that all his colleagues were rushing off to join the "Church of Jesus Christ of the Big Bang." Psalm 19:1-2 says, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hand. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge." So it seems rather prophetic that astronomers are the ones flocking to the "Church of Jesus Christ of the Big Bang."

How does the biblical creation account line up with science? First, astronomer Robert Jastrow said that the universe began suddenly "in a flash of light and energy." So this fits with the biblical description of God saying, "Let there be light."

Second, most scientists believe that the Big Bang marked the beginning of time. Since God exists outside of time  and created the heavens and the earth "in the beginning," this is also consistent.

Third, cosmologists tell us that the universe emerged out of nothing, and Hebrews 11:3 says, "By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible." God created ex nihilo, or out of nothing.

Fourth, the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of the universe is such that it led astrophysicist Michael Turner to say, "The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bulls eye one millimeter in diameter on the other side." I discuss the Big Bang and fine-tuning in more detail here.

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who is most closely associated with the steady-state model of the universe (which posited that the universe had always existed), said: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." He was an atheist at the time of this statement but was "severely shaken" by the suggestion of a guiding hand, and abandoned his atheism.

And astronomer George Greenstein said, "The thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency--or rather Agency--must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being?"

Fifth, science tells us that the laws of physics break down at the Big Bang, so this ordered universe was born out of chaos. The split second after the Big Bang was a state of "lawlessness" which is inherently unpredictable. Anything could have emerged out of it. Some say that this evidence goes against the design argument. But does it? It certainly goes against the idea that the universe is wholly deterministic, but that is not the same thing.

In 1799, physicist Pierre Laplace gave copies of his Treatise on Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon Bonaparte, seeking to explain the universe purely in terms of natural gravitational forces. Napoleon asked him what role God played in his theory, and Laplace reportedly replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis."

Laplace believed that the universe was completely deterministic, an idea that has been overturned by quantum mechanics. Traditional physics said that the laws of nature are fixed, and therefore miracles are impossible. Quantum physics says that nothing is impossible--some things are just very, very improbable. There is a very small, non-zero chance that we can walk through walls. Danish physicist and father of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr has said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it." Physicist Alvaro de Rujula of Cern was asked whether there was a possibility that the Large Hadron Collider could produce a world-ending black hole. He replied that it was extremely unlikely but "the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons."

So the universe is not wholly predictable and the God hypothesis is back.

If we once again picture the universe as a self-contained dome where the underside represents science and the physical universe, and everything above is eternity, then that moment of "lawlessness" would correspond to God creating by fiat. And physicists hope to someday understand it better by using a combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics called quantum gravity. If quantum mechanics says that nothing is impossible, is it so farfetched to say that the lawlessness may represent the physical properties of the miracle of creation? Physicist Paul Davies said that the Big Bang "represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden, abrupt flash of lawlessness that allowed something to come out of nothing. It represents a true miracle--transcending physical principles."

So the revelation of the Bible tells us that the moment of creation was a divine miracle, and science reveals that the normal laws of physics break down at that moment. Something else was at work in that apparent chaos, but from it emerged a universe that still rests on a razor's edge of finely tuned laws and constants. And science would only be able to detect the lawlessness, but not the Guiding Hand.

The question of creation is of course fundamental, but we should evaluate all theological questions on the basis of whether the Bible is logical and whether it corresponds to reality. It is within this context that I will next discuss what the Bible says about the nature of a soul.