Actor Kirk Cameron stirred up debate earlier this month, arguing on his podcast that he no longer believes in hell as a place of “eternal conscious torment.”
“Jesus died so that we could have eternal life,” said Cameron, who is known for his role in Christian films like Left Behind and Fireproof. “But do the wicked have eternal life in hell?” He answered “No,” apparently affirming some form of “annihilationism”—according to which unbelievers ultimately cease to exist, rather than spending eternity in hell.
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, rightly countered Cameron’s new views in an article on WORLD Opinions, Dec. 11. “Hell is not a passage into non-existence,” he argues, “but the torment of the wicked. The truth is horrible, so the warnings are stark.”
Confirming Mohler’s statements about the biblical doctrine of hell, The Baptist Faith & Message 2000 says, “The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment.”
Mohler admits, however, that Cameron is “right about one thing—there certainly are evangelistic ramifications of our testimony about hell. The gospel call is to turn to Christ and be saved, and escape the fires of hell. The admonition to confess Christ or risk non-existence”—as Cameron does—“just doesn’t pass the New Testament test, and there is a good reason it doesn’t work in a sermon, either. The stakes are just too low, and the fires of hell hold no eternal consequence.”
As a matter of fact, Christians have long preached the stark biblical truth about an everlasting hell—and to good evangelistic effect. On July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached his classic sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” at a church in Enfield, Conn., sparking a revival that contributed to the First Great Awakening. He spoke with gravity and urgency about the dangers of hell.
“O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in,” Edwards declared in this sermon. “ ‘Tis a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell.”
Of course, the same evangelical preachers who proclaimed the terrible reality of hell also painted the glories of heaven in vivid colors—as Edwards did in “Heaven: A World of Love”:
In heaven, all is “lovely,” Edwards wrote. “No odious, or unlovely, or polluted person or thing is to be seen there. There is nothing there that is wicked or unholy. … That blessed world shall be perfectly bright, without any darkness; perfectly fair, without any spot; perfectly clear, without any cloud.”
Edwards continued, “Every gem which death rudely tears away from us here is a glorious jewel forever shining there; every Christian friend that goes before us from this world, is a ransomed spirit waiting to welcome us in heaven. There will be the infant of days that we have lost below, through grace to be found above; there the Christian father, and mother, and wife, and child and friend, with whom we shall renew the holy fellowship of the saints, which was interrupted by death here, but shall be commenced again in the upper sanctuary, and then shall never end.”
In heaven, most importantly, we’ll find life eternal in fellowship with the God of Love—for, as the Lord Jesus once prayed, “This is eternal life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent” (John 17:3). As such, Edwards wrote, “There, in heaven, this infinite fountain of love—this eternal Three in One—is set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it, as it flows forever.
“There this glorious God is manifested, and shines forth, in full glory, in beams of love. And there this glorious fountain forever flows forth in streams, yea, in rivers of love and delight, and these rivers swell, as it were, to an ocean of love, in which the souls of the ransomed may bathe with the sweetest enjoyment, and their hearts, as it were, be deluged with love!”
Edwards and other early evangelicals, who saw the horrors of hell so plainly, magnified the beauty and loveliness of heaven. Sadly, in an age where hell is often downgraded and dismissed, heaven’s brightness is also often dimmed and its glory treated as cliché.
During this Christmas season, it would do us well to declare both the terrors of hell and the wonders of heaven. After all, during this season, we celebrate the moment in history when heaven for a short time came down to earth, when God sent his Son, Immanuel—“God with Us”—so that “everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”