Hell: Punishment?

Hell is often refered to by well-meaning believers as eternal punishment and God as a father who punishes.  I am not convinced that this is an aproach that works when we consider the scriptures on Hell.  There are two main reasons this argument seems inconsistant to me.  The first is my definition of punishment.  So far as I am aware, punishment is best defined as unpleasent treatment of an individual with the ultimate goal of correcting that individual's behavior.  Hell cannot be viewed as correctional because of it's finality.  There is no redeeming yourself in hell, because there is no return from hell.

Secondly, I would say that the relationship of God with a person who is already in hell cannot be defined as one of a father to a child, so that the father analogy falls flat.  While that same person is still alive, we could apply the father/child analogy to them, because while they are alive God is presumably presenting them with every opportunity to reconcile with Himself.  You could recall the image of the father of the prodigal son who goes out every day hoping to see his son return to him.

But again, because of its finality, hell seems to represent the enstrangement or disowning of any claims to sonship on the part of the condemned person. 

 

So if hell is not punishment, then what is it?  One of the keys to apologetics, I feel, is to keep in mind that EVERYTHING that exists outside of God exists for the purpose of glorifying God.  So in some way, Hell must glorify God.  This hardly seems likely given that God is the greatest imaginable good and hell is the worst thing imaginable. 

In one of his parables, Jesus tells the story of a wedding feast.  All the people on the invite list to the feast turn down their opportunity to attend, begging off for trivial matters.  At the end of the story, we are told that these people are "cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth."  In its way, I think this story is very revealing about both the nature and purpose of hell.  So far as I can tell from the scriptures, Hell is a place where God has completely removed his presence from those who exist there.  It stands as an eternal testament to what God isn't.  Those who exist there made the conscious decision to reject God and God obligingly removed Himself eternally from them.  They are getting exactly what they asked for.  In so doing, it glorifies God in the same way that darkness glorifies light: by contrast. 

Consider: if God had never created anything outside himself, there are aspects of His nature that would never have been made manifest: His creative power and his servanthood, for instance (he sustains and maintains all that he has created).  When man rebelled, it revealed even more about God's nature: his justice, his wrath, his patience, his grace, his longsuffering, and the love that was revealed through Jesus' sacrifice.

I am not arguing that God created with the intention of having man rebel, just that even through the worst of circumstances, God's nature shines all the brighter.

And just as the consiquence of choosing to accept God's forgiveness through Christ is eternal, so the consiquence of choosing to deny this forgiveness MUST be eternal.  Anything less trivializes Christ's sacrifice and consiquently cheapens God's nature.