First, many hopeful eschatologies believe in hell. So to claim otherwise is to traffic in bad faith arguments or outright lies. Going forward, I'm focusing on hopeful eschatologies that believe in hell.
Second, these beliefs in hell are often grievous visions. Sparing people this suffering is compassionate, the very same compassion that motivates all evangelistic urgency.
Third, the fact that the sufferings and harms are finite does not undermine our compassionate urgency to intervene. The examples abound here. Consider the passion of a climate change activist or a social justice warrior. Given how these perceive the grievousness of these harms, to the environment or to oppressed persons, they are filled with an evangelistic fervor. The same goes for when we witness self-destructive behaviors in our loved ones. If we see a friend slowly destroying their marriage and family, we act to intervene. If we see a drinking problem develop, we don’t sit on our hands until they kill someone in a drunk driving accident. If we see a bad habit developing in our child, we head that off at the pass. This is natural and compassionate human behavior.
As I shared in the last post, the pressing issue here concerns hamartiology rather than eschatology. Conservatives often say that progressive Christians “don’t believe in sin” or are “soft on sin.” Really? Progressive Christians don’t believe in sin? Being a progressive, Christian or not, means being obsessed with sin. As everyone knows, progressivism and Wokeism are very moralized worldviews. And because of this, as I pointed out above, progressivism and Wokeism are driven by an evangelistic passion. The contrast here with conservatives and evangelicals concerns the nature of sin. As I said, the issue is hamartiological. With different visions of sin, we have different evangelistic expressions. So the simplistic “no sin, no evangelism” frame just doesn’t apply. Both groups—conservative and progressive—believe in sin, and both groups are characterized by evangelistic urgency. Their disagreement isn’t fundamentally about eschatology, about whether there is a hell. They disagree about who is going to hell.
So what’s all this noise that conservatives make about progressive Christians not believing in hell?
When conservatives lament progressives not believing in hell what they are really going on about is the progressive Christian vision of sin. There are folks conservatives want progressives to say are going to hell. Progressive Christians, for their part, think different sorts of people are going to hell. Once again, the debate isn’t about hell but about a theology of sin.
My point here isn’t to adjudicate between these groups. To do so would wade into the culture wars. My goal here is to simply draw attention to how, in these debates, the issue isn’t really about hell at all but about competing visions of sin and God’s judgment. The claim that progressives think that “no one is going to hell” isn’t true. Just ask them. They have a list.
