Jerry Walls is not the first to observe that the doctrine of hell seems to have slipped from contemporary Christian consciousness. Among theologians, the slide towards annihilationism or universalism (in one form or another) has not been confined to the liberals¹. And in the culture at large, ‘genuine concern about hell seems to be lost in our past, along with powdered wigs and witch trials’.

A detailed account of how this has happened is beyond the scope of Walls’ study. But the question of why belief in eternal punishment has been increasingly abandoned among the more orthodox has a fairly simple answer: the doctrine of hell is ‘widely regarded to be morally indefensible’. In fact, the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell had no qualms about finding fault with Jesus Christ Himself on this point, since nobody, Russell argued, “who is profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment”. For James Mill, a God who sent people to hell represented ‘the most perfect conception of wickedness’.

In the face of high-powered criticism, and with its negative impact upon an already difficult ‘problem of evil’, it is not surprising that many have been tempted to drop belief in eternal hell as a stumbling block that is inconsistent with a Christian conception of a loving God, and an intellectual encumbrance on the gospel.

Nevertheless, for many conservatives, the attractive reinterpretations of biblical teaching proffered by theologians rejecting this aspect of the Faith, whilst not without merit, are not entirely convincing. Walls for one believes that, on reflection, the doctrine of hell turns out to be more intimately interwoven with the heart of traditional Christian belief than may at first appear. If this is the case, he argues, then Christians face an unpleasant dilemma: if belief in hell is a basic part of Christianity, and if it is a moral defect to believe in hell, then one cannot be a Christian without being morally defective. In this book, Walls’ argues that the doctrine of eternal hell can be construed in ways that are neither immoral nor unintelligible. In what follows, I shall attempt to offer a brief synopsis of his argument.

1. Hell and Human Belief

Interestingly, as Walls relates, the actual phenomenon of belief in eternal hell has been used against the doctrine – and on both flanks. On the one side, it has been argued that Christians themselves do not really believe in it. And on the other, it has been observed that some Christians seem altogether too willing to believe in it! No one, of course, is claiming that hell’s existence is actually contingent upon the intentional state of people’s minds. The arguments from belief (or non-belief) are epistemological.

Some Christians have suggested that, when we honestly look into our hearts, we discover a universalist hope that cannot bear to think of anybody being lost, and that this presents us with a prima facie reason for thinking the traditional doctrine of hell to be untrue. People may accept the doctrine, but in their hearts they find they do not believe it, and the Christian heart is purportedly ‘shaped [in some measure] by the Spirit of God’. Further evidence that they do not believe it is that they do not act like it: we would immediately warn our unbelieving neighbour if his house was on fire, but we seem ‘strangely reconciled’ to his eternal fate. Walls takes these objections seriously, but ultimately rejects them. The burning house analogy, for instance, is flawed. ‘In the first place, if [our neighbour’s] house was on fire, he would certainly want to know about it. And second, he would surely consider it a real danger … However, these assumptions do not necessarily hold with respect to hell’. Nor can the seriousness of someone’s damnation be ‘instilled in a moment’. More troubling, however, is the thought that this sort of argument, if it went through, would place a good deal of Christian belief in question, besides the doctrine of hell. That few ‘seem to be appropriately moved… in the normal course of their daily routines’ by the extraordinary content of Christian teaching is interesting, and something we should reflect on, but not something we should accept as warrant for questioning the veracity of Christian doctrine. And there are shining counterexamples in the life and ministry of such saints as John Wesley. Regarding the evidence of Christian feelings, which ‘relies mainly on the testimony of contemporary Christians’, Walls contends that ‘the witness of the Christian heart is divided’. The same emotions may attend the state of ‘regretting the doctrine of eternal hell’ as well as the state of ‘hoping that is not true’, and Walls believes that many Christians fall in the former category. Moreover, ‘the compatibility of hoping for something while believing it is not very likely to happen blocks any direct argument from the existence of a widespread Christian hope that none will finally be lost to the conclusion that Christians “deep down” do not really believe in eternal hell’.

J. P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit’s Power (Zondervan, 2007), 237 pages, ISBN 9780310274322.

I want to foment a revolution in Evangelical life… My purpose is to mobilize, inspire, envision, and instruct an army of men and women for a revolution on behalf of the cause of Christ.

If I could pick out for you a few of the most formative books in my own intellectual development, as a believing Christian, J.P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind would be jostling at the top. I wish I could thrust a copy of it into the hands of every Christian student, pastor and teacher. I can at least commend it to you as essential reading—after C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, of course. But before you read either, I believe you should read Kingdom Triangle. And I think if you do read it carefully, cover to cover, you might just forgive me for putting J.P before Jack.[1]

Kingdom Triangle is a biblically grounded vision of Christian discipleship, uniting J.P Moreland’s concern for the Christian mind with his pursuit of the spiritual disciplines, and calling for the whole Church to rediscover the power of the Holy Spirit. Taking the parts in isolation, it doesn’t appear to be saying anything radically ‘new’. As Moreland himself admits, the first point of the triangle will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his writings; J.P is well-known among evangelicals as a philosopher and apologist, and Love Your God with All Your Mind was but one incarnation of his characteristic emphasis on a more tough-minded Christianity. It is a concern shared by many writers besides J.P. The ‘spiritual disciplines’ also have a well-established literary corpus and a number of contemporary advocates. And the charismatic stress on the manifest power of the Spirit is something many of the readers of this article probably share. What is rather unusual—and exciting—is to see all three of these emphases united together, without one being played off against the other.[2]

The first part of the book is decidedly philosophical. J.P offers us a penetrating expose of the cultural milieu of the West. In the discussion that follows, Moreland identifies naturalism, postmodernism, and Christian theism as the three major worldviews vying for our allegiance, and concerns himself with expounding both naturalism and postmodernism in some detail. Both are exposed as pervasive, pernicious, false—but also dangerously ‘thin’ worldviews, lacking the resources to ground objective value, purpose and meaning, and ultimately destructive of the good life, plunging us into a shallow and sensate culture. ‘Under the influence of naturalist and postmodern ideas, many people no longer believe that there is any ultimate meaning to life that can be known. These folks—and they are legion—have given up on seeking that meaning and instead are living for happiness. Today, the good life is a life of happiness’. And the drive for happiness – construed as ‘pleasurable satisfaction’—has produced a culture of ‘empty selves’.

J.P however believes ‘we are wired for more than happiness. We are made to live for God’s honour by learning how to become spiritually competent, mature members of his Kingdom and to make that Kingdom our primary concern’. Claiming the supremacy of the Christian worldview, Moreland exhorts believers to recognise the superior spiritual and intellectual resources available to them in Christ, and to start taking their faith seriously, heart and mind. ‘We were made for greatness’, he argues, but our present culture ‘undermines both its intelligibility and achievement’. ‘The only way we are going to move from our boring lives to lives filled with the drama of the Greatest story is for those who embrace mere Christianity to set aside the shallowness of their thought and the weakness of their spiritual practices, and corporately to enter afresh into the Kingdom forms of life and thought worthy of the name of Christ’.

Garrett J. DeWeese and J.P. Moreland, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult: A Beginner’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions (InterVarsity Press, 2005), 170 pages.

Over the last two centuries the confidence of Christians in the reasonableness and credibility of their faith has met significant challenges from a number of quarters. With the almost wholesale acceptance of a naturalistic account of the origin of our species, and a growing conviction that science can explain everything about the world without the need to invoke the “spooky” supernatural, the floodwaters of unbelief have been rising about the Church on all sides, greedily devouring the grounds for faith and certainty. All the evidence, we are told, points to the non-existence of a benevolent God, the obsolescence of religion, and the absence of any justifiable grounds for the Christian hope of the resurrection.

However, the authors of Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult are convinced that the real nature of the challenge that faces us today “is not really scientific or theological or anthropological, but philosophical.” It is how modern man thinks about science and the universe that skews his view of the Christian faith as something irrelevant and outmoded. We wrestle not against evidence from laboratories, but against materialism, against scientism, against the naturalistic worldview of the West, against doctrines and ideas that have become entrenched in the modern mind chiefly through the Church’s neglect of the intellectual life.

Moreland and DeWeese seek to redress this problem by making philosophy more accessible to laymen, and by providing the outlines of a Christian perspective on a number of important philosophical issues, including ethics, metaphysics, the mind-body problem, philosophy of science and epistemology—all that in a mere 170 pages! As one who is still very much a beginner in these things, I am, perhaps, reasonably well positioned to make some sort of judgement as to whether or not they have succeeded in opening up these areas of inquiry to non-experts.

There are, I think, at least two sorts of pits into which a project of this sort may stray. On the one hand, in its efforts to achieve accessibility it may produce something so superficial that it is basically of no help to anybody; its contents are grasped easily enough because it avoids saying anything very important. On the other hand, in its attempts to attain conciseness, clarity and simplicity may be dispensed with altogether; the writers dash from one difficult problem to the next, without ever really explaining to anybody’s satisfaction what exactly it is they are talking about.

Perhaps it is inevitable that such a project as this one should gravitate towards one or the other of these two extremes. Philosophy is a difficult subject, and a genuine grasp of even the basics is not something to be had in a weekend’s read. In my estimation, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult attempts to bite off more than can be chewed in a single paperback of these proportions, producing an uneven volume that varies noticeably in perspicuity and in its level of difficulty across the different chapters. Whilst some sections should be quite comprehensible for the beginner (for example, the chapter on philosophy of science), other parts prove much less digestible (such as the discussion of the mind-body problem) without a prior acquaintance with the subject matter. This is rather frustrating for the beginner, who might have walked away with a better understanding of some of the issues, had the authors contented themselves with saying a little more about a little less.

The introduction of this review essay appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Pneuma Review.

Phillip Duce and Daniel Strange, eds., Keeping the Balance: Approaching Theological And Religious Studies (Intervarsity Press, 2001), 238 pages, 9780851114828.

Approaching theological and religious studies at university-level can present Christians with some special challenges. Cherished beliefs will probably be called into question and deeply held convictions challenged in an intellectual environment that may prove ambivalent, or even rather hostile, to a biblically orthodox faith. In Keeping the Balance, seven substantial essays by seven Christian academics examine a number of issues that will be relevant to the Christian student—whether he or she is still thinking about taking his or her Christian studies to the university, or is already engaged in a degree.

The first thing to get clear from the outset is that Keeping your Balance isn’t a piece of scaremongery written to put people off taking theology! The authors are quick to affirm that theological study is a great adventure that offers some very real rewards—both to the individual who engages in it and the Church as a whole that benefits from an educated body of theologians in its ranks. It’s also an essential part of preparation for a solid Christian ministry. But we must be realistic: it’s a sceptical world out there, and many of the scholars that believers will brush up against in the book room, the lecture hall, and the tutorial, will approach the Bible and the Christian faith with a different set of presuppositions—and perhaps a pair of mean scissors in both hands! An unreflective, ill-prepared study of academic theology could undermine, rather than strengthen, the beliefs that form the very basis for Christian ministry, perhaps leaving students spiritually disorientated and incapable of fulfilling their originally intended vocation.

But the authors, whilst firmly countenancing these unpleasant facts, maintain that a “theological education, properly approached, need not have such undesirable results”. With some careful thinking about how students should deal with theological problems, maintain their devotional lives, and make use of all the information they are cramming into their heads every week, in practical and relevant ways, “keeping the balance” and successfully navigating the theological minefield is, in fact, quite possible. One of the recurring emphases throughout the book is the need for integrating one’s theological studies with one’s personal spiritual life, rather than holding them as far apart as possible. Whilst it may initially look like a “a recipe for disaster”, the authors are convinced that a healthy Christian life must be lived as an organic whole, not in a “Jekyll-and-Hyde” dichotomy! And that Christian devotional life, the Christian life of worship, and the Christian life of service, on the personal and the corporate levels, are all vital components of a sound Christian spirituality that must be kept up if students are to survive the course and emerge stronger and better equipped to reach the world.

Andrew Perriman, Faith, Health and Prosperity (UK: Paternoster, 2003 / USA: Gabriel Resources, 2004), 214 pages.

It is not difficult finding faults with the modern faith movement. For many people, in fact, it seems to have become something of an obsession. One does not need a theology degree to demonstrate how scriptures have been taken out of context, compromised or misconstrued in the effort to secure an absolute basis for the believer’s right to experience pleasant circumstances, prosperity and full bodily health (on this side of heaven!). What is required, I believe, is some Christian charity, a good deal of patience, and a willingness to understand rather than to condemn, if the rift between the faith movement and main-stream evangelicalism is to be healed (cf. 1Th. 5:19-21; 2Tim. 4:2-3).

Unfortunately, many of the so-called “pop-apologists” of our time seem to know only one word for classifying errors and excesses in their polemics—the singularly divisive and frequently misapplied appellation of “heresy.”¹ In addition to this, they are often caricaturists. Choosing a good piece of apologetic work over a bad one has itself become an exercise in discernment! My own exposure to Word of Faith teaching, however, has left me with a more ambivalent, less clear-cut impression of its spiritual health that will not submit to a ringing endorsement or a blanket condemnation. I am glad I am not alone in that. In a 316 page report entitled Faith, Health and Prosperity, Dr. Andrew Perriman provides a needed balance in the debate over the Word of Faith movement which will appeal to more conciliatory Christians who, though troubled by the faith movement’s mistakes, would want the option of affirming some of the good things that it has to say.

Faith teachers force us to look again at some of the traditional assumptions about poverty and piety; confront us with the radical possibilities of faith; and challenge us to expect much more from a generous and abundant Father-God, who made earth as well as heaven, body as well as soul, and is willing to bless us so that we can be a blessing to others. Nevertheless, in their enthusiasm for “the good things in life,” many would say that they have seriously distorted the fabric of Christian teaching, falling head over heels into an obviously “over-realised” eschatology that downplays the scriptural themes of suffering and hardship; promoting an individualistic doctrine of prosperity that disregards important differences in situation and calling; reducing the believers reliance on and relationship with God to the operation of a legalistic system of spiritual laws; and pushing biblical faith to an irrational and presumptuous fideism that radically disconnects our perception of God’s “truth” from “the facts,” encouraging believers to say “what they know ain’t so.”² And just what are we to do with some of the stranger bits of theology the faith movement has come up with—the “JDS” doctrine,³ or the “little gods” theory, for example, that have so upset evangelicals across the globe?

Andrew Perriman endeavours to sort through these issues, calmly disentangling “the rampant Russian ivy of error” from “the delicate wisteria of truth” (217), as well as challenging evangelicals with the possibility of a more balanced appropriation of some of the Word of Faith movement’s emphases. Written on behalf of the UK Evangelical Alliance and bringing substantial biblical scholarship to bear on the debate, Perriman’s report is an authoritative critique that seeks to praise as well as rebuke, encourage as well as criticise, and learn as well as teach, trailblazing “a path towards constructive dialogue and reconciliation” (15).

Reviewed by W. Simpson

Notes:

¹ I am not suggesting we should never call anything heresy. But when the word is used so often, and for things we need not disfellowship over, it becomes less meaningful—though it seems to retain its power to divide! A more sophisticated system of classification is required. eg. Bowman, Orthodoxy and Heresy: A Biblical Guide to Doctrinal Discernment.

² I am referring here to the faith movement’s practice of confessing as a present reality the thing being sought for by faith.

³ JDS stands for “Jesus died spiritually.” The acronym refers to the faith movement’s doctrine that Christ had to die spiritually as well as physically, go to hell and experience a spiritual rebirth in order to secure our redemption.