As promised, this blog will now explore the doctrine of damnation, the logic of perdition, the terrifying and much-maligned notion of hell. Bart seems to have interpreted scripture along the lines of meticulous providence, which understandably and invariably encountered insuperable difficulties in the context of brutal human experience. He admits that his theology before losing his faith was not much different from that of Shonda’s Sunday School teacher, which is a sad commentary about the quality of his theological sophistication at that stage. For someone with his strong ethical sensibilities and soft heart, he was, in retrospect, eminently ripe for walking away from his faith.

He had believed that “anyone who didn’t accept Jesus in this life was going to hell afterward,” and this would include one like Shonda unless she changed her mind about Jesus. He writes, “To me it was absurd to think that an all-powerful, all-loving God would willingly fail to protect an innocent little girl in this life, and then, when she couldn’t trust Jesus as a result, doom her to eternal damnation in the life to come. So absurd, in fact, that I decided to think otherwise.”

After rejecting meticulous providence (mistakenly taking this to involve eschewing divine sovereignty), Bart then “decided there must be some kind of back door to heaven reserved for good people who didn’t manage to come to Jesus before they died.” Once more Bart effected this maneuver with at least a tacit sense that doing so constituted a departure from orthodoxy—simply a decision he was undertaking on his own, a deviation from biblical teaching.

Again, there are two issues at play here. Prior to asking whether the Bible’s teaching on this matter is accurate, the question is whether or not Bart’s interpretation was right. If it wasn’t, the question of whether such an interpretation is accurate does not arise. Bart’s confidence in his biblical interpretation is strong—far too strong—and in light of his moral sensibilities and personal experience, he simply thought he needed to reject biblical inspiration and adopt views at variance with biblical teaching.

A far preferable methodology, to my thinking, would have been to subject to much greater critical scrutiny some of his narrow biblical interpretations. But as we have seen, he equated such an effort with theological accommodation. Surely this is a danger; indeed, I have suggested that Tony’s change of mind on the issue of homosexuality is a paradigmatic example, which seems to be Bart’s view as well. But there is a distinction between principled theological adjustment and unprincipled accommodation, a distinction often seemed lost on Bart because of his failure to subject to adequate scrutiny his biblical exegesis.

So there seemed to form in Bart’s worldview a perfect storm: the conjunction of treating his biblical interpretations as sacrosanct, interpretations often predicated on ultra-Calvinism and meticulous providence, a failure to distinguish between principled and unprincipled theological adjustments, and his largely laudable moral sensibilities. Frankly what would have been surprising is if he didn’t end up losing his faith given this cacophonous cocktail.

As time went on, Bart says that, by a certain point, belief in hell was “long gone.” But what was his doctrine of hell, exactly? It was not simply based on the notion that salvation is ultimately only available because of Christ, but something like that conviction conjoined with a host of add-ons. Not only must one accept Christ to avoid hell, for example, one must accept Christ in this life, without exception. Bart could have rejected, or at least questioned, the latter without rejecting the former. For example, what happens to the unevangelized subsequent to their death? Even Billy Graham admitted he wasn’t sure, and not because he harbored doubts that salvation was only through Christ.

Moreover, by Bart’s admission, he began looking for a back door to heaven reserved for good people who didn’t manage to come to Jesus before they died. I’m not entirely sure what Bart means by “good people,” especially if all of us as human beings are sinful and in need of salvation. If he means people who haven’t definitively rejected Christ in this lifetime, but who for one reason or another didn’t explicitly accept him, I’m eminently open to such a possibility. I think many Christians are. It seems to be an arguable entailment of God’s love. This is no “back door,” or unprincipled theological accommodation. It is, though, a rejection of an ultra-fundamentalist epistemology, a Calvinist paradigm of soteriology, a meticulous providence view of divine sovereignty, and presumptuous theological add-ons.

Not every view with which we have been raised needs to be treated as a sacred cow, a nonnegotiable, sacrosanct tenet. There is a huge distinction between a hermeneutical commitment to the reliability of scripture, on the one hand, and a treatment of each of one’s own biblical interpretations as inerrant, on the other. The latter bespeaks a profound lack of epistemic humility.

Belief in biblical inspiration means that its truly nonnegotiable and crystal clear teachings are to be accepted as altogether reliable. But it assuredly does not entail that we assume as beyond criticism our biblical interpretations on every ancillary, peripheral, or secondary question that might arise. The Bible makes clear that salvation is ultimately only through Christ; this is properly treated as a nonnegotiable piece of orthodoxy. Various presumptuous and fine-grained conjectural add-ons are not.

C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce offers a way to understand hell that doesn’t depict it as simply the ultimate torture chamber for those who unluckily failed to accept Christ in this life or who happen to rejected a garbled, twisted, or degraded picture of Christianity. It is rather a morally robust picture of damnation as the tragic consequence of a clear-eyed rejection of every last overture of God’s love, where, as in Dante, one’s sufferings are intrinsically connected to those sins one refuses to let go of until the bitter end. I mention thinkers like these not to treat their fictional pictures as gospel truth, but to showcase intriguing possibilities for how to think maturely about substantive matters of theology.

In his Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf reflects on the apparent tension between a God who loves us enough to die for us and a God who would relegate us to hell. Among his many insights is this one: “God will judge not because God gives people what they deserve, but because some people refuse to receive what no one deserves; if evildoers experience God’s terror, it will not be because they have done evil, but because they have resisted to the end the powerful lure of the open arms of the crucified Messiah.”           

David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.