Is Hell’s door locked from the inside?

I often hear hopeful universalists quote C.S. Lewis that, “the doors of Hell are locked on the inside.” In other words, individuals only remain in Hell because of their own choice and not because of a divine decree from a vengeful god. This seems to imply that people are not sent to Hell but instead choose it over an eternity with God. God offers the possibility of restoration, yet because God is love and love requires free will, God allows people to reject God’s freely given grace.

I’m sympathetic to the position of hopeful universalists who believe that God must allow this kind of free will, but ultimately, I reject the idea that somehow free will justifies eternal conscious torment. As a simple thought exercise, do you think that the salvation and restoration of all of God’s creation is the best possible outcome? Isn’t it better if all are saved than if even one is lost? If you think this, do you not think that ultimately God will work toward the restoration of all things? I think that there are logical and scriptural arguments that a truly free decision could not include eternal conscious torment.

Genuine free will must also include the ability to repent, change, learn and heal. It is hard for me to accept the idea that free will can include a state of knowing and willed self-destruction. That doesn’t seem like freedom in any morally meaningful sense. It is instead a kind of slavery to psychosis. What else could explain an eternal decision to live separate from the source of all love? When someone has descended into a state of irreversible psychosis, we do not accept their decisions as sound or made with real moral agency. An individual cannot ascent to a binding legal contract unless they are shown to have adequate mental capacity.

If your final state is one of endless hatred, delusion and psychosis, are you truly able to freely choose? I find it hard to believe that no matter how broken, angry and stubborn someone is that they would continue to choose Hell over God’s love, especially when confronted with the reality of both. There is so much sin and suffering in this world that I think it leads many to defensibly choose atheism. How can a God exist that allows child cancers, tsunamis and genocide? If that God exists, it would be natural to hate that God. But once you cross to the other side of that veil, and you face to face with eternal love, choosing Hell seems to be some compulsion not a free choice. The hopeful universalist might say that the compulsion comes from their free will, yet I would argue that deliberately choosing evil comes from a lack of understanding and a separation that God wants to heal. Worse, if they are compelled by God to an eternity in Hell, then we only have free will for a limited time here on Earth which considerably undermines its relevance. If free will only exists for 70 years against an eternity of a compulsory sentence in Hell, is that free will at all?

Choosing to live in Hell for all eternity is completely irrational and I think God will wait out irrationality like a loving parent. True love seeks the best for the beloved, like a loving parent does for their child. Before embarking on the parental metaphor, I realize that actual human parenting is also broken and many children choose not to reconcile with an abusive parent in this lifetime. It may be difficult for us to imagine a parent of perfect love. But I can tell you that there is nothing one of my sons could do that would keep me from seeking restoration with them. I would always choose to reconcile than to abandon them. How much more so for our perfect God?

Continuous rejection of God is fundamentally irrational. Who knowingly chooses misery over joy? Therefore, an ultimately loving God would not treat such an irrational decision as the final criteria for where we spend eternity. A loving parent will always offer help, healing and restoration toward a rational decision. If a person commits a crime on drugs, they must face the consequences of their actions. But the loving parent will always try to get that child into recovery no matter what. Yet a decision to opt for eternal Hell is beyond an impaired decision and indicates a kind of insanity or brokenness that needs even greater healing.

There are many places in scripture where our final state is linked with moral growth, repentance and transformation, not eternal conscious torment. Now, I also realize that a handful of verses seem to support eternity in Hell as well. But on balance, it seems to me that a loving God has a purpose in restoring all of creation. I believe that many of the endless torment parts in scripture that discuss things like an “unquenchable fire,” or the “undying worm,” are metaphorical and apocalyptic imagery. They are symbols of an end to evil, not eternal torment in Hell. Why would you take metaphorical imagery as the final word, when you have something so clear as you find in the following passages. How can “all,” not truly mean, “all,” in these parts of scripture?

Colossians 1:19-20

For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

1 Corinthians 15:21-22

For since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human, for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.

One particular area I most sympathize with the hopeful universalists is that one of the best responses to the problem of suffering – why would a loving and all-powerful God allow such an enormous amount of suffering in creation – is the free will defense. If God allows free will to such a degree that humans can choose suffering and sin, wouldn’t that free will extend to all eternity? But if God values human freedom so much that They would allow an everlasting and torturous Hell, that would indicate that God permits infinite suffering for finite sins. An eternity of punishment for a single lifetime of sin. That seems completely asymmetrical and thus, incompatible with divine justice that is driven through pure love. God must have another purpose in mind. If God respects freedom to the point of allowing infinite self-destruction without the correction and removal of obvious psychological incapacity, then God is not good.

What about near-death experiences? Don’t some of them report visiting Hell? Yes. And you should know that I take near death experiences very seriously because I take actual death experiences very seriously. I and other friends and family believe we’ve been visited by loved ones who have died. I have close friends who themselves have experienced near death and out-of-body experiences. The reports of Hellish NDEs typically involve an oppressive darkness and malevolent entities. They are rare, but they do stand out compared to the many other peaceful NDEs where people report being surrounded by love. My purpose here is not to argue for various physical factors than can shape NDE experiences such as low oxygen, drugs, seizures or other trauma. I do in fact believe that NDEs are real so even if there are temporary physical components to the experience, they don’t define the ultimate nature of an NDE. I do think, however, that previous psychological factors such as guilt, trauma and cultural expectations can shape your perception of an NDE. For example, if you have a deeply held belief that Hell is real and you experience an out-of-body experience that involves darkness and strange faces, when you are resuscitated, you may interpret that as Hell. Maybe that darkness was part of the transition and the person describing Hell didn’t have time to experience anything but the initial phases of their NDE. We will never know with certainty what is going on in the other side until we get there ourselves. But I trust God in life, so I trust God in death.

But what about Putin? I too, desire Putin to suffer for all eternity. That is because I am not an all-loving God. It’s easy to point to these exceptions to the rule. Jesus does it to when He described the good shepherd going after the one and leaving the 99 behind. You see, none of us deserve God’s grace, not Putin, not me, not you. How does God knowingly create a Putin with the understanding that Putin is going to be so evil he will have to burn in Hell forever? Wouldn’t it be better that Putin was never born? God has some purposes we cannot understand in this promised restoration, or I think creation itself must be meaningless. Choosing evil – especially the level of evil toward which a Putin figure aspires – is utterly irrational. It’s a trapped consciousness. Divine justice and mercy will wait it out toward ultimate restoration.

And what about the fact that I never asked to be born? How is that a free choice? I will have to take that up another day because the real complexities of free will go far beyond the scope of this article. Is a square free to be a circle? I’m coming from a place of belief in a triune revelation of God as much from my own personal experiences as from logic. Since I’m starting with certain assumptions, mainly that God exists and is the God of love as revealed in Jesus Christ, I’m basing the rest of my logic off of that starting place. I trust in that love, that love is everlasting and I trust that our purpose is union in God.