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by Peter Kreeft From a lecture series given in 2006, transcribed 2020 It may seem very strange for anyone but a fundamentalist to spend a whole lecture in the philosophy of religion on the concept of hell. Here's my justification for doing that. First, for most people, it's the strongest objection to the traditional theistic view of life after death, the hardest religious doctrine to swallow, and the first one to be abandoned. Bertrand Russell, one of the most famous and intelligent atheistic philosophers of the twentieth century, saw hell as the most obvious reason for disbelief in Christianity, in his famous essay, "Why I am not a Christian." Second, it qualifies as what William James called a "live option:" an idea that's worth thinking about because it makes a great difference to our lives, whether we decide to accept it or reject it. Not only is there an infinite difference between the idea of heaven and the idea of hell, but there is a great difference between the idea of both and the idea of neither; that is, between a life that's headed for that razor-edge choice, and one that isn't. If there's no hell, life's choices make only a finite, temporal difference. If there's hell they make an infinite and eternal difference, and there's an infinite difference between a finite difference and an infinite difference. Believing in hell may be irrational, neurotic, or immoral, but it's certainly interesting. It gives life that razor edge and maximum drama, so there are existential reasons for examining it. Third, there are logical reasons for examining it. It's part and parcel of all three theistic religions. So to reject hell logically presupposes that whatever religious authority teaches the reality of hell — scripture, tradition, Jesus, the Koran — is not infallible, and that seems to undermine the source of religious authority for everything else in the religion, including the nice stuff like God's love and mercy, which is just as surprising and just as hard to prove by logic or empirical experience alone. Let's look at the logic here for a moment. Why does anyone believe that God loves them? Is there a syllogism that proves that? Is it logically self-evident that the Being who has no needs loves these superfluous creatures? That the Being who is perfectly just goes beyond justice and loves us more than we justly deserve? Or is there some observation in nature that proves divine love, "nature red in tooth and claw?" Or some scientific experiment? Or history, which Hegel calls "the great slaughter bench?" Even moral conscience doesn't show that God loves us. Conscience is hard as nails. It tells us we are absolutely obligated to do right and not wrong, but it doesn't tell us whether we're forgiven. No, there is only one reason that anyone ever came to the conclusion that God is merciful and compassionate, and that's religious faith, belief in some divine revelation, in the character of God as revealed in the Torah, in the Gospels, or in the Koran, and that's the very same reason for believing in hell. Logically, you either accept both ideas on the grounds of that authority, or you reject both, for they both stand on that same ground. If the authority can be wrong about hell, it can be wrong about anything else. And if you say, you believe in one of those three religions but you don't believe in hell, that means you're presupposing the principle that you can change whatever religious teachings you find unacceptable, which is perfectly right in philosophy, where everything has to come under the bar of human reason, but if you extend that principle to religion, then you don't have revealed religion anymore; you don't have faith as distinct from reason. If there is a divine revelation, as these three religions claim, then that divine revelation must tell us some things that we couldn't discover or prove by our own reason — otherwise it makes no sense to call those things divine revelation. If at the other extreme those ideas that are supposed to be divine revelations are so irrational that they contradict reason, really contradict reason — logically not just psychologically and emotionally — if there are logical proofs that they're false, well then no honest intelligent person can believe them anymore because reason has refuted them. So, it's essential to the concept of religious faith that we can't prove it all by reason, and also that we can't disprove any of it. And of all the teachings within religious faith, hell seems to most people the one that we can disprove the most easily. So this is a critical "test case" for the philosophy of religion, not some flaky weird obsession. One more reason for examining this unpopular idea is that two other very popular ideas are closely connected with it: free will, and a real distinction between good and evil. Now certainly many people believe in free will and the distinction between good and evil without believing in hell, but the defenders of hell argue that it is illogical to do that. If there is no hell, then ultimately there is no free will, and ultimately no distinction between good and evil. So these concepts are involved in the argument. They're two premises for one of the arguments for hell. By contrast in eastern pantheism there is ultimately no hell and no free will and no ultimate dualism between good and evil; whereas, in western religions there is. Here are eighteen objections to the idea of hell — eighteen arguments against the concept. [Ed. note: I believe he meant ten here, not eighteen. I am not sure why he said eighteen.] The first one is very simple. It's the thing most intelligent people will say if you ask them whether they believe in hell: you've got to be kidding. It's simply ridiculous. Argument isn't necessary, common sense finds a literal hell intolerable and incredible. So the wisest thing to say about hell is, "to hell with hell." Even if the defender of hell finds some clever ways to explain away the self-evident absurdity of the idea by making some theological or philosophical distinctions, those answers won't be convincing. They're like sandcastles but the objection is like a big wave. But the only way to answer arguments is with things like distinctions. The objector is making any answer impossible by calling logical distinctions mere "sandcastles," and that would be substituting name-calling for argument. Our instinctive denial of hell doesn't prove anything anymore than our instinctive denial of death does. If you go to the doctor today feeling fine and you're told you have only a few weeks to live, your instinctive reaction would be denial, but you're not the doctor. Perhaps our instinctive refusal to believe this doctrine comes partly from confusing the doctrine with the imagery, which is silly if interpreted literally. The same is true of heaven. The doctrine is not tied to the images of golden streets or fluffy clouds. So, let's state the obvious objection to hell: it makes nonsense of the idea that God is love. Belief in hell is not only illogical but wicked. It makes God a cosmic hypocrite. In Christianity especially, but also in Hasidic Judiasm and Sufi Islam, God is pure love, and we're supposed to be god-like and loving, even to our enemies, and forgiving and merciful and compassionate even to those who don't deserve it. And yet, God sends people to hell.1 Doesn't matter how many — one is quite enough — because he is also a God of wrath. Wrath means hate, and hate is the opposite of love, and it's simply a contradiction to say that God is pure love if he is also a God of hate.2 The only possible answer to this objection is to deny the premise that God has literal wrath, and that's what the saints and mystics usually do. They say God's love is literally true, and God's wrath is not — it's a projection of our own wrath. Julian of Norwich was deeply disturbed by the idea of God's wrath so she asked God to show her his wrath and he did, and she wrote, "I saw no wrath but on man's part." The defender [of hell] could also say that God really has wrath, but it's directed only to sins and not to sinners, and it's directed to sins precisely because of his love for sinners, as you hate the cancer that is killing somebody that you love, and the more you love the victim the more you hate the cancer, and according to the believer's religion that's exactly what we're supposed to do — love sinners more and therefore hate sin more, just like God. So you at least have consistency. Whether God exists or not, the concept of God is not the concept of a cosmic hypocrite but a God who practices what he preaches. But if God's wrath is not objectively real, does that mean that hell is also not objectively real? Couldn't all the language about hell be interpreted non-literally? Language about God is inevitably non-literal since God can't be seen, so we should be able to do the same with hell since that also is not visible. So the fires of hell should be interpreted just as non-literally as the wrath of God is. Well, it certainly seems reasonable to interpret the language about the nature of any invisible thing non-literally, whether that thing is God or hell or heaven, but you can't interpret language about the existence of something non-literally, whether it's God or hell or heaven. And it seems pretty clear from the Bible and the Koran that whatever the nature of hell consists of its existence is real — so how is that compatible with a God of love? One bold answer from many of the saints and mystics is that the fires of hell are made of the love of God; that it is the very love of God for the sinner that tortures him in hell, because the sinner is in hell only because he's made himself the enemy of love, and God's love tortures his egotism, but God can't turn off his love anymore than the sun can turn off its light. The sinner is like a small child in a fit of rage. He hates his parents and wishes they'd fight with him so he could feel self-righteous but instead they forgive him and hug him and kiss him and tell him they love him, and that's torture to the kid. Or take an adult example — the very beauty of a great piece of music may be torture to someone who is blindly jealous of the composer. Here is a third objection to belief in hell. No one would want to go to hell, so those who go there must go there against their will. But that contradicts the doctrine of free will. If we're thrown into hell by God against our will, that would mean God overrides our free will, even if that were just, and we'll argue in a later argument that it couldn't be just. If on the other hand we choose hell by our own free will, we would have to be insane to prefer eternal misery to eternal joy. It's difficult to believe human beings could be that insane. And if they are that insane they shouldn't be held responsible for their insane choices. They're sick and in need of therapy, not hell. So we have this dilemma: if hell is involuntary, it's unfair to our free choice and we're back with the picture of a sadistic, evil God; and if it's voluntary, it's also unfair because it punishes the insane with eternal hopeless torture, and again we have the picture of a sadistic God. The first possibility seems impossible: God rewarding people's choice of heaven with a condemnation to hell, so the only answer must be the second one, that hell is our free choice. So the question then becomes how could we be that insane? That's a hard question to answer rationally, but perhaps there are clues. If we're honest, perhaps we must admit that we often are insane. We do prefer misery to joy. We know, not by religious faith but by repeated experience and human reason, that whenever we're good and honest and loving and unselfish and above all forgiving, that makes us happy. And whenever we're wicked and dishonest and hateful and selfish and unforgiving that makes us miserable. It doesn't take a religious authority or even a great philosopher like Plato to convince us that justice is always more profitable than injustice. We know saints are happy and yet we're not saints. What makes this credible is not so much a clearer definition but a clearer self-understanding. Sometimes, challenging fiction can give us that. For instance, I recommend C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, which is a witty updating of Dante's Divine Comedy that shows us the psychology of damnation through a fantasy about a bus trip from hell to heaven — a heaven that proves surprisingly uncomfortable. A fourth objection is how any good and loving person could ever be happy in heaven if they knew any of their friends that they love are in hell. It's a very difficult question to answer. Logically it seems there are only three possibilities: Either they don't know there is anyone in hell, but then their happiness is based on a lie; or else they do know this, and they're happy about it, but then they're selfish unfeeling stinkers who shouldn't be in heaven; or else they know it and they're not happy about it, in which case heaven is not perfect because its inhabitants are unhappy. The only two answers I could imagine to this objection are to deny that there are any people in hell that ought to be pitied, or else to deny that the people in heaven ought to pity them. If there are souls in hell, they might not be persons anymore, but only ex-persons who have lost their personality, their "I", their very ability to say "I." When a great painting falls into the fireplace and burns, it's no longer a great painting, but ashes. So perhaps in hell you make an ash of yourself, an ex-person. But it's still right for us to mourn over the loss of something precious, like a burned painting, so why wouldn't heaven mourn over hell? Perhaps because their time experience would be so different from ours, because they'd live in the present all the time, and not in the dead past to be mourned over. Regret, after all, presupposes the kind of this-worldly time which is relative to matter and space. So we probably shouldn't think of heaven and hell as parallel places in the same time, like Golden Gate park and Alcatraz. There may be other kinds of time. Even in this world, time is surprisingly multi-dimensional and relative. It would be irrational to believe that one damned soul in hell could eternally blackmail all the loving souls in heaven and destroy their joy. But it's difficult to imagine how this could be. Of course, our inability to imagine it doesn't mean it can't happen, unless our imagination is the criterion for what can be, but we need some hint or clue at least. Perhaps that's the distinction between passive love, which can be blackmailed, and active love which can't. When someone we love does something self-destructive, like getting hooked on drugs or attempting suicide, we say to them, "how could you do this?" I think we're really saying two things there. How could you do that to yourself, and also, how could you do that to me. Our active will to their good says the first thing, but our passive love, our own emotional hurt, says the second thing. Perhaps in heaven our active will would still will their good, but our emotions would not be passive and vulnerable and blackmailable — just a suggestion; no one can know. A fifth objection is that if there is a hell it must be just, but it's not merciful, so justice would trump mercy. But God's mercy is supposed to be more prominent than his justice in the scriptures of all three religions. For instance the most repeated name for Allah in the Koran is, "The Compassionate, the Merciful." This objection about justice and mercy may make us rethink the relation between those two virtues. We usually think of mercy as a relaxation of justice, a compromising of justice, even a contradiction to justice. But if both are divine attributes, then justice can no more be compromised or contradicted than mercy can. Justice wouldn't prevent God from extending mercy and forgiveness, but it would prevent him from treating the refusal of that mercy in the same way as the acceptance of it. Justice has to be honest. It has to discriminate between those who accept mercy and those who don't. If it didn't do that, that would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Stalin. God couldn't tell such lies. God could forgive, but forgiving doesn't mean condoning. Condoning means pretending it's not as bad as it is. Forgiveness neither condones nor condemns. But forgiveness is a gift: it's freely given, and it has to be freely accepted — if not, you don't have it. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures say that hell is punishment. But there are two kinds of punishment, because there are two kinds of law: there's positive law, and natural law. Positive law is law that is posited or willed by some will, human or divine, some will that chose to make that law, but could have chosen differently. Natural laws are not willed and they couldn't be different. They're necessary because they're laws of the nature of a thing, whether a physical thing or a spiritual thing. "Don't drive on the left" is a positive law in America but not England; "if you jump off a cliff you'll break your bones" is a natural law. "Remember to think about your tax return each year" is a positive law; "those who think have curiosity" is a natural law. "If you steal that cookie I'll send you to bed without supper" is a positive law; "if you eat too many cookies you'll get a stomach ache" is a natural law. Now, punishments for violating positive laws are changeable and negotiable, like going to bed without supper because you stole cookies, and mercy can change those laws and those punishments. But the punishments for violating natural laws are unchangeable and necessary. Mercy can't change them. If you jump off a cliff gravity can't be merciful to you. So, hell would seem to contract God's mercy if it were his positive law, but not if it were the natural and necessary punishment for being a "contrary-to-God" kind of person. C.S. Lewis puts it this way. He writes We are at liberty to think of the bad man's perdition not as a sentence imposed upon him, but as the mere fact of being himself. Our egotist has turned everything into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the other, that is the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him, except insofar as his body still draws him into some contact with the outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his wish, to live wholly in himself, and to make the best of what he finds there, and what he finds there is hell.I think what Lewis is saying in that quotation is that hell is not an added punishment for being evil, but the very state of being evil come to fruition and eternalized, and that heaven is not an added reward for being good but the very state of being good made perfect and eternalized. So that the saying, "virtue is its own reward and vice is its own punishment" would then be true not only in time but also in eternity. The objector may say that this rather sophisticated and psychological kind of hell doesn't seem too bad, not nearly as bad as the popular image of torture chambers full of gleeful demons inserting hot pitchforks into unrepentant posteriors. But the believer might reply it's far worse if spiritual joys are greater than physical joys, for then spiritual sufferings would be worse than physical sufferings. It seems that our souls can both enjoy and suffer in deeper and subtler ways than our bodies. Evidence for this, that internal pain can be worse than external pain, seems to be the fact that when we have deep internal pain, spiritual pain so deep as to be despair, we often do two very stupid-seeming things. We hit our head against the wall and we pull out our hair. Why do we do that? Why in the world would we add physical pain to the spiritual pain? Probably because it's not as bad as the spiritual pain and it distracts us from that worse pain. Dostoevsky says that "hell is the suffering of being unable to love." If love is the greatest joy, than lovelessness would be the greatest suffering. In other words it would be exactly the opposite of Sartre's vision in "No Exit," that hell is other people. A sixth objection to the idea of hell could come from the idea of predestination. If God knows everything, including all futures, he predestines everyone. In fact the word "predestination" is in the Bible. But if God predestines some people to hell before they're born, then we're back with the moral monster, the cosmic sadist who wills some people to be damned for all eternity. The answer to that objection I think has to be some redefintion of predestination. It can't literally be "pre"-anything because God is not in time. We made that point in an earlier lecture. And I don't think there can be a double predestination, two equal predestinations of some to heaven and others to hell, because a good God would not will anyone's damnation. In fact, that's what the Bible says. In the New Testament God does not will any to perish but for all to come to salvation. So heaven would fulfill God's will and hell would not. But that would lead to a seventh objection: if God willed everyone to be saved, and not all are, then God doesn't get what he wills, and in that case he is not omnipotent. The answer to this has to go back to what we said about the problem of evil: that God's omnipotence can't meaningfully extend to self-contradictions, and to force people to freely choose heaven would be a self-contradiction. That seems logical. A second part of the answer might seem paradoxical, that it would take greater power, not less, for God to create free children rather than puppets or robots. So the answer could be that when a human soul chooses hell God's will is indeed defeated, but to quote C.S. Lewis again ...what you call defeat I call miracle. For to make things which are not itself and thus to become in a sense capable of being resisted by its own handiwork is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.And if the objector replies that's not what he means by omnipotence, the believer could answer that that's what God means by omnipotence. Or to put his point more fairly, the objector's model of omnipotence is really that of a control freak rather than a parent. A related objection concerning God's omnipotence might be this: if God is all-good and all-powerful then he must have chosen to create the best of all possible worlds. To prefer a worse world to a better one would be to not be as good as he could be. But it would have been better for God to have created a world in which there is no hell, or a world in which no one chooses hell, so this is not the best of all possible worlds. The answer should be to examine the concept of the best of all possible worlds. Is this a consistent concept? Or is there a self-contradiction in it — like the concept of the highest finite number. There can be no such thing as the highest finite number. You can always add one more to every finite number, no matter how high it is. So you could always make a better finite world no matter how good it is. For instance, as one writer said, God could have created a world with a better berry than the strawberry, but he didn't. Or the believer might, remembering that a good offense is the best defense, try to answer the charge by going on the attack and asking the unbeliever what God could have done better — how could he make a better world. By not making a hell? But he didn't make it; we make it, if it's interpreted symbolically not as a place but as a condition of soul, a negative relationship to God. And then the only way God could destroy hell would be by destroying the possibility of our making it and that means destroying free will. Or more simply, the answer to why God didn't create a world without a hell could be simply that he did, but we messed it up and created hell. The fact that it's obviously not the best of all possible worlds is our fault, not God's. An eighth objection is that hell seems contrary to not only love and mercy but also to justice. The punishment does not seem to fit the crime — quantitatively, infinite and eternal punishments for finite and temporal crimes. Let's divide the objection into three parts: First we have to look at the time and eternity problem again. If eternity means "not time" rather than "more time" or even "endless time" then the concept of eternity is not a quantitative concept. It means another dimension than time. If that's what we enter at death, the quantitative problem is irrelevant. To use a crude image, if we've made squares of ourselves in time, eternity wouldn't make us bigger squares, but it would make us cubes. If we made ourselves triangles in time, eternity would reveal us as pyramids. In other words the relation between earthly choices and eternal rewards and punishments would not be like the relation between crime and the length of prison sentences, but more like the relation between a foundation and a building. The person after death would be the same person as the person before death but with another dimension. Somewhat as the person after birth is the same person as before birth but with more dimensions. So if eternity is not quantitative we can't calculate the quantity of eternal punishment. But the second objection says it's unjust to have infinite punishments for finite crimes. So hell's punishments would have to be finite rather than infinite. The formula for justice is, "the punishment fits the crime," and that implies that both the crime and the punishment are finite because "fits the crime" means proportionate to the crime and all proportion is finite. Only God is infinite. So justice would have to entail something like this: if one saint in heaven has a soul that is more large and loving than another, then that soul would be able to contain more of God or reflect more of God's joy than another. So in a parallel way one soul in hell would be more deep set in pride and despair and hate than another, and therefore more miserable, and that would be just. Again, it's a natural law justice rather than a positive law justice. Third, the defender of hell might answer the objection that hell's punishments are too intense for their crimes by saying that this is imagery. Intense images like fire are meant to suggest, not to define. Hell is unimaginable, and that doesn't mean it's milder; it's probably more awful than our literal misinterpretation of those images. We've made that point already in contrasting physical pain and spiritual pain. But the objection still stands despite those distinctions: the punishment seems far worse than the crime. The only answer to that has to be that the punishment is the crime itself come to fruition. Remember that C.S. Lewis quote about the complete egotist who has no taste for the other. Or the believer might reply that if you understood the meaning of just two terms, you wouldn't see hell's punishment as not fitting to sin's crime. The two terms are God and sin. Sin doesn't mean the same thing as evil. It's a religious word. It's a relational word — it designates not just the violation of a rule or a law but a negative relationship to God — a kind of deliberate divorce from God, a God who by definition is the only game in town, the one and only first cause and last end and the source of all good and joy and love. So the believer would say that if you object to hell as too severe a punishment for sin, you don't understand what sin is, you probably look at it externally, sociologically, as behaving badly, but that's only its visible dimension. The real badness of it is its invisible dimension. The visible relationship to other people and their behavior is only the manifestation, the symptom of the disease. And the more beautiful God is, the more ugly sin would be by definition. A ninth objection might be that hell is ridiculously overpopulated. Most Jews, Christians and Muslims have traditionally believed that more people will go to hell than to heaven. Jesus even seems to teach that when he says that the way to hell is wide and that many find it, but the way to heaven is narrow and only few find it. But that would be a divine defeat — more souls for Satan than for God, more losses than wins. The simplest answer to that is no one knows the population statistics. When Jesus' disciples asked him the question, "Lord will many be saved?" he answered neither yes nor no but strive to enter in. But what about what he said about the narrow way and the few that find it? Well, look at the context, look at your data. What did Jesus call God? Was it statistician or demographer, or was it father? Well, follow out that image. If you're the father of ten kids and one dies tragically, that's one too many, and the nine left are one too few. The objection that hell is overpopulated seems to assume the premise that life is a game played by God and the Devil and the one who ends up with the most souls wins. That premise is not part of the religious hypothesis that's in question. And how could we judge when hell is overpopulated? By what standard? Where's the line to be drawn? By whom? It's like the problem of evil. How much evil is too much to be compatible with the goodness of God? Logically the only two possible answers are either any at all, or none at all; either that any evil and any damned soul refutes God, or that no amount of evil and no amount of damned souls does. We naturally feel that at some finite point it just becomes too much. But this is a feeling that we can't really translate into reason. We can't give a reason for drawing a line anywhere. A tenth and final objection to hell is practical. What are the results of believing it? "By their fruits you shall know them." If we apply this principle to beliefs as well as persons, we should be very suspicious of hell. Hell has produced such fear and hate and despair and oppression that it fairly cries out that it was made in fear and hate and despair and the desire to oppress and control people. The defender might first question the objector's implicit assumption that those who believe in hell want it to exist, as if doctrines were not objective facts but subjective personal choices. It's certainly true that the doctrine has been used to oppress and control people, but any idea, true or false, can be misused. That does not prove it is false. The abuse does not take away the proper use. But the objector can fairly demand to know what this proper use is, and the answer would have to be the same as the proper use of ideas like death or thin ice — the fear saves lives and saves happiness. And if the idea of hell were true we would have to compare the harm that has often come from believing in it with the harm that has come from not believing in it. So the objection really presupposes that the idea is not true, and the defender is really presupposing that it is, so neither side has proved its case without presuppositions. But the objector might argue that the result is not a joy in this case, that his case is stronger than the believer's because the main result of believing in hell is fear and fear is harmful. But the defender could reply when there are real dangers a lack of fear is more harmful than fear. On a battlefield it is right to feel afraid and not secure. So both sides' arguments still depend on their presuppositions. The fact that hell produces fear could even be used by the defender as an argument for the existence of hell, an argument parallel to the argument from desire for the existence of heaven. The argument from the fear of hell to the existence of hell, and the argument for the desire for heaven to the existence of heaven, both use the same premise: that any innate natural desire always corresponds to a real object. Since fear is co-relative to desire, since we fear to lose whatever we desire to have, and desire to lose whatever we fear to have, the same premise could be used substituting fear for desire. And then if you add the minor premise that we have a natural fear of hell parallel to a natural desire for heaven, the conclusion would be that both would have to be real. But is this minor premise true? Is there an innate fear of hell? That's hard to prove. We do seem to find that fear expressed in many different cultures and religions and places and times, so it seems pretty universal and innate, but do we find it in ourselves? At this point, as with the argument about heaven, I think we can only appeal to our own honesty and ask ourselves this question: isn't the deepest reason we fear death, isn't the thing we fear the most in death, the possibility of hell? Are we absolutely certain that it does not exist and that we cannot possibly go there? But you must answer that question for yourself. These arguments did not intend to answer the question for you but I hope this lecture is at least a tool for you to do just that. 1 Does God really send anyone to hell? I argue that he doesn't send people to hell, we send ourselves there, and Professor Kreeft seems to approach to this idea when he quotes C.S. Lewis: We are at liberty to think of the bad man's perdition not as a sentence imposed upon him, but as the mere fact of being himself. Our egotist has turned everything into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the other, that is the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him, except insofar as his body still draws him into some contact with the outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his wish, to live wholly in himself, and to make the best of what he finds there, and what he finds there is hell.2 I disagree — wrath doesn't mean hate. It means "fierce anger." But that anger can be righteous. For example, God's wrath against the evil-doer. When we say that "God is a God of wrath," wrath doesn't have to be hatred, although it can, e.g. the hatred of evil (Psalms 97:10). Yes, God is "pure love," but is God many things, and love can coexist with anger: the father who is angry that his child made a bad choice. The father is angry because he loves his child; if he didn't love his child, he wouldn't be angry — instead, he simply wouldn't care. If wrath isn't necessarily hate, but (righteous) anger, then there is no objection to God's being a God of wrath — certainly we would not prefer a God of apathy in the face of evil! |
 Professor Kreeft |
