Fear of Hell--
Effective Tool of Evangelism?
Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards
delivered a sermon in Massachusetts in 1741 that reportedly had
people fainting in the pews.
The God that holds you over the
pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome
insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.
His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as
worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of
purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten
thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful
venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely
more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is
nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire
every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did
not go to hell the last night - that you were suffered to awake
again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And
there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped
into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand
has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you
have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of
God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of
attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is
to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop
down into hell.
O sinner! Consider the fearful
danger you are in: it is 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. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine
wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and
burn it asunder. And you have no interest in any Mediator, and
nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the
flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have
done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one
moment.
The word Gospel means "good
news." If Jonathan Edwards was a "preacher of the Gospel," it
would seem that his definition of Good News is different from
that of many others! Records indicate that his "Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God" sermon wasn't a special message for a
very special situation. He spoke on topics related to the wrath
of God and the horrors of Hell regularly.
What is puzzling is that these
messages weren't given to the town drunk or the local "Scarlet
Women." They were given to the regular congregation at his own
Puritan church! And they were given at other churches in his
area where he was invited to speak, to their congregations. If
this is the warning message he felt compelled to offer to people
who were at least in name "Christian," imagine the how much
hotter he would have needed to preach Hell to the unsaved!
Many preachers and theologians
over the centuries have absolutely insisted that such "hellfire
and brimstone" messages needed to be the centerpiece of efforts
at evangelizing. And if they were effective and brought unsaved
sinners to repentance and church membership, they needed to be
repeated regularly so that the congregation would be constantly
reminded to stay on the straight and narrow.
Does God really want to draw
people to Himself and into His family by terrifying them with
explicit descriptions of scenes of the tortures of an
ever-burning Hell? Is a healthy spiritual relationship with God
as His child built on regularly reminding people with vivid,
garish descriptions of the horrors of Hell that they need to
embrace God to escape that fate?
And speaking
of the "child" of God ... Edwards did not in the slightest
confine his dire threats to addressing the adults in his
congregation, some of whom might reasonably have been suspected
of adultery or gluttony or greed. Children were also threatened
with the same never-ending torments. Perhaps a child of five who
heard the following words was terrified that any minor
infraction in his life, perhaps disobeying an order from a
parent or envying a new toy that a neighbor child had, might
very well earn him the same never-ending torment in the flames
of Hell.
And let
every one that is yet out of Christ, and hanging over the pit of
hell, whether they be old men and women, or middle aged, or
young people, or little children, now hearken to the
loud calls of God's word and providence.
Now, almost 300 years later, there
are many teachers and preachers who are still convinced that it
is absolutely necessary to have the ever-burning Hell doctrine
as a major constituent of their arsenal of methods of evangelism
and discipleship.
In a 1996 book from Zondervan
Publishing titled Four Views on Hell, four
different writers offered their varying perspectives on the
nature of Hell. Each wrote a chapter of his own, carefully
explaining and supporting his point of view. After each such
chapter, the other three authors took turns critiquing the
content of the chapter. Popular evangelical writer and
theologian John Walvoord presented his view that the standard
doctrine of an ever-burning Hell was the only view that is
supported by scripture. Near the end of his chapter, he
emphasized the value of this doctrine for evangelism:
Eternal punishment is an
unrelenting doctrine that faces very human being as the
alternative to grace and salvation in Jesus Christ. As such,
it is a spur to preaching the gospel, to witnessing for
Christ, to praying for the unsaved, and to showing
compassion on those who need to be snatched as brands from
the burning. (p.28)
Evangelical theologian and author
Clark H. Pinnock then offered a critique of Walvoord's main
points. Regarding the value of using the horrors of Hell as a
tool of evangelism, Pinnock wrote:
... Walvoord sidesteps a
grotesque moral problem. He actually asks us to believe that
the God who wills the salvation of the world plans to
torture people endlessly in physical fire if they decline
his offer of salvation. Questions leap to mind. Who would
want to accept salvation from a God like that? Has Walvoord
visited the burn unit in his local hospital recently? Is he
not conscious of the sadism he is attributing to God's
actions? I am baffled, knowing that John is a kindly man,
how he can accept a view of God that makes him out to be
morally worse than Hitler. ... he claims that belief in hell
as literal fire provides us with a spur to evangelism. This
just confirms my suspicious that people hold to this
teaching about hell for pragmatic and not biblical
reasons--hell is the ultimate big stick to threaten people
with. I would turn it around the other way: It is more
likely that this monstrous belief will cause many people to
turn away from Christianity, that it will hurt and not help
our evangelism. (p.38-39)
(For more excerpts from this book,
see the article Jumping to Conclusions.)
If the Bible truly presents a clear
teaching that unending torture in an ever-burning Hell is the
fate of all of the unsaved of mankind, including children--and
people who have never even heard the name of Jesus or read the
Bible--then Christians must indeed include this doctrine in
their preaching of the Gospel. But if it is not in the Bible,
then the efforts to "make excuses" for God and explain why this
doctrine does not make Him the moral equivalent of Hitler
are almost blasphemous.
Did Jesus and the Apostles,
including Paul, use fear of Hell as one of their primary methods
of bringing the Gospel to the masses? No. There is only one
passage in the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles of the New
Testament that could even vaguely be considered a description of
something like the common doctrine of Hell. It is Jesus' parable
of Lazarus and the Rich Man. For a detailed examination of the
elements and significance of this parable, see the article
Lazarus and the Rich Man.
Whatever its significance, however, it was not an evangelistic
tool. It was spoken to some of the Pharisees, religious leaders
who were criticized by Jesus for being hypocrites!
No one in the New Testament is
described as delivering a public message in which they drew a
shockingly terrifying picture of the tortures of an ever-burning
Hell and warning people that they had better accept salvation
through the blood of Jesus so that they could escape that
horrific fate.
As is documented in other articles
on this website, the fiendish descriptions of Hell used by
Edwards and others throughout the centuries to "scare the Hell"
out of people have not come at all from the Bible. They were
concocted from the twisted imaginations of men and women, who
evidently felt that they were doing God a favor. Perhaps they
were disappointed God hadn't seen fit to equip the Church for
evangelism by providing it with excruciatingly graphic horrors
that could be used to "motivate" people to love Him. So they
stepped in to fill the need.
If God really did want fear of
unending tortures of the damned to be used to bring people to
Christ, He was perfectly capable of including the necessary
details in the Bible. He did not. The logical conclusion should
be that since He did not, He never intended such tactics to be a
method used to spread the Gospel.
For details on the origin of much of
the Hell imagery
used by "Fire and Brimstone Evangelists,"
see the article Dante's Hell.
