As someone who really worries very little about hell (maybe not enough, I don’t know), it is bewildering to see how often it comes up in theological discourse online. This discourse inverts the lens by which it views pretty standard Christian events or teachings, making them something they are not. Worse yet, the fairly established “goods” in Christianity of Jesus and heaven are rebranded. God’s grace, literally an unfathomably precious and transforming gift, becomes some sort of manipulation tactic.
Thanks a Lot, Jesus
Take the Incarnation for example. You may read or hear comments questioning God’s goodness in sending his Son into the world because this created an ultimatum for anyone who has the “misfortune” to hear the message that Jesus (or faith) is necessary for salvation. Now you have to choose Jesus, or you are condemned for all eternity. Could not God have kept us blissful in our ignorance? Surely everything was going fine in human history. We did not need Jesus installing an eternal sword of Damocles above humanity’s head.
So we have the gospel, meaning literally “good news,” being turned into some strong-arming by God.
First, to presume that everything in human interaction was just going along fine before Jesus is shockingly naïve. Even on a purely natural level, the Incarnation changed the trajectory of human history for the better. To assume that any of the progress, even if we admit very little, made toward justice would have happened anyway is highly speculative at best. At the least, humanity now had a model for love, understanding, and self-sacrifice.
However, for most who heard this, the most life-changing element was the eternal implication of following Christ. Yet now even this heavenly offer is looked on with suspicion.
“But I Could Never Be Happy Without [Loved One] in Heaven”
Another example upends the offer of eternal union with God. It takes the prospect of heaven and, similar to the Incarnation example above, turns it into an opportunity to cut us off from loved ones. This forces us to either consider ourselves the chosen, uncaring elite or reject God ourselves in favor of accompanying our earthly loved into their own darkness. (We will ignore those inconvenient commands of Jesus in Luke 14:26 to follow him even at the expense of “father” and “mother.”)
Although this mindset appears to promote a love for others, one of the two great commandments, in expressing the role that unique person and our relationship with him has in our happiness, it misplaces the Source of that love and happiness in the first place. For Christians, “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and the efficient cause of all being (Exod. 3:14, ST I. Q 2. A 3), including the love we have for our friends and family. It does not follow that we love less when united perfectly to the source of love, which is what union with God in heaven is, especially if the reason is the absence of someone who has rejected that source of love.
If heaven became less heavenly because something other than God is not there, then it was never heaven in the first place.
Also, the whole point of grace is that no one deserves or earns heaven in the first place, so to imply that God is being unfair to either the person not getting to go to heaven or to me for not getting to be with that person in heaven misconstrues Christianity in a big way.
God Is Not a Good Thing
These objections either fail to recognize or abjectly ignore the fundamental, philosophical reality of God as the ground of being and efficient cause of Goodness. God is not just another good thing that coexists alongside me. The whole premise that God is God means that God is not just another good, or loving, or happy-producing thing like our hobbies, friends, or family. God is the source and standard of goodness, love, and happiness in reality.
This means that being happy without God is an ontological contradiction. This is true for anyone who holds to a classical theist model, including the pre-Christian pagan philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. It is not condemning anyone to say rejecting the source of goodness would be bad; it is built right into the definitions of goodness and rejection.
Give God More Credit
Finally, even if one is not a Christian himself, it is at least good form to recognize for the sake of argument some premises when discussing a Christian teaching. It is taken as a given that Christians believe that God is all-knowing (and therefore perfectly just) and all-loving (and therefore perfectly merciful). Even if somebody personally struggling to square this paradox (join the club—really, I mean it!), does not a good-faith conversation require us to consider that this is what a serious Christian is trying to do?
The Catholic Church has made great strides in developing the doctrines of the unique salvation necessary in Christ and the limited, though real, participation in Christ recognized in non-Catholic and non-Christian peoples. Even for people struggling to reconcile, make sense of, or accept these developments, it seems disingenuous to dismiss or ignore them.
Consider the Alternatives
Perhaps it is worth considering the alternatives to the above objections about grace and hell. If it is really unfair for God to send his Son into the world to reconcile it because it means some may miss out on this reconciliation, then it is certainly worse that no reconciliation occur. If you are going to assume no reconciliation between God and humanity is necessary for anyone, that may be an even harder hill to climb than proving the Incarnation. Even if a Christian were to admit that the partial exclusivity of God is imperfect, it should be obvious that full exclusivity is worse.
The second alternative is like it. If we cannot imagine being happy in heaven because we know that a friend or family member is not in heaven, too, then forcing that friend or family member to be in heaven would have to be worse. Could you be happy knowing you were being forced into a relationship you did not want? Or that a friend or family member was being forced into that relationship? If God forced heaven onto those who do not want it, then heaven would feel like hell to those people.
We are supposed to assume good faith in our interlocutor until proven otherwise. This remains true even if the interlocutor in question is God or, more specifically, the Church. It is hard to shake ourselves loose from a paradigm of power. This is how humanity, prior to Christ, saw reality then. It is also how humanity, divorced from Christ, sees reality now. However, changing this paradigm of power to one of sacrificial love is exactly what God, in his grace, through his Son Jesus Christ and his Church, sought to do.