Edward Donnelly on the Nature of Endless Punishment

Hell is a place of punishment. Is any idea more unpopular today? Not all kinds of punishment, of course. Remedial punishment, designed to make the offender a better person, is just about acceptable. The forces of political correctness have not yet managed to persuade governments to remove from parents the right to discipline children. The purpose of discipline is to teach them not to do wrong. Our hope is that our children will learn from this unpleasant experience and that we will not have to punish them again.

The prison service follows the same philosophy, where the stated aim of imprisonment is the rehabilitation of the criminal. And some will admit a role for preventative pun-ishment, employing it as a deterrent to keep others from committing the same offence and thus suffering a similar penalty. Such action serves as a warning flag to the community, and the correction of the guilty few is meant to ensure the continued obedience of the law-abiding many. But the punishment that today’s world will not tolerate is that which is retributive—punishment inflicted simply as recompense for evil done because it is just that wrongdoers should suffer; punishment that marks abhorrence of wrong and commitment to right. Such punishment is regarded as barbaric and immoral. This is not because people have become more humane or civilized, but because they are frightened by a dark specter. The shadow of hell haunts them. Disturbing whispers of judgment to come echo on the fringes of their consciousness. These intimations of God’s wrath so terrify them that they will do all in their power to airbrush any idea of retributive punishment from our society…For punishment in hell is retributive. It is not remedial. It does not make anyone better. Purgatory,Purgatory, the idea that humans will be cleansed and improved through their sufferings after death, is a myth. The pains of hell are of absolutely no benefit to those who are being punished. Nor is such punishment preventative, except insofar as hearing of it now may turn people from sin to Christ. When God opens the judgment books and proclaims the final destiny of all, the punishment pronounced will be what people hate and fear above all: retributive punishment, imposed because wrong is wrong and God is against it…

Edward Donnelly, What is Hell?

Edward Donnelly on Who Hell is For

The devil will be in hell, “cast into the lake of fire and brimstone” (Rev 20:10). Accompanying him will be “his angels” (Mat 25:41), at present “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 1:6). These demons, already aware of their ultimate destiny when Jesus was on earth, cowered before the Savior’s power: “What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us?...And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep[18]” (Mar 1:24; Luk 8:31).

Hell is also for the notoriously wicked. “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone” (Rev 21:8). What a repellent rogues’ gallery! These are George Bernard Shaw’s “interesting people.”

But it is not only the blatantly evil who will find themselves in hell. The Apostle Paul identifies for us those on whom God will take vengeance “in flaming fire.” Who are they? What monsters of depravity can they be? The Hitlers? The Stalins? Yes. But also all “them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2Th 1:8). Outwardly upright, decent people, many of them. Good citizens, caring parents, reliable employees, friendly neighbors—but they never trusted Christ as Savior. They refused to “obey the gospel.”

Are you in that position? You may think of yourself as a reasonably good person. You may [think] that you are not guilty of any great crime, that you have never done anything of which you are really ashamed. But the Gospel says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,” and you have not obeyed that command. Even if you were never to commit another sin, God will take vengeance in flaming fire upon you if you do not obey His Gospel. Only those will escape hell who have trusted in Christ. “He that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (Joh 3:36). But “he that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (Joh 5:24).

Edward Donnelly Defines Hell

Hell is a real place. It is not a metaphor or a symbol, not a description of our inner desolation or our present sufferings, no matter how agonizing these may be. It is not a state of mind. It is a place with spatial dimensions.

Edward Donnelly (What is Hell?)

Christopher Love Defining Hell

“Hell is a place of torment ordained by God for devils and reprobate sinners wherein, by His justice, He confines them to everlasting punishment, tormenting them both in body and soul, being deprived of God’s favor, objects of His wrath under which they must lie to all eternity.”
 (Christopher Love, The Works of Christopher Love, Vol. 1, 565.)

SHEDD ON THE USE OF MYTHOLOGY IN INTERPRETATION

The tendency, of late, has been to forget that Divine Revelation is complete in itself and self interpreting, and therefore must first of all be examined in it's own light...Scripture must rectify mythology, not mythology scripture.

SHEDD ON MYTHOLOGICAL VS. BIBLICAL ESCATOLOGY

The mythological eschatology is a fanciful and picturesque conjecture respecting the unseen world. The Biblical eschatology is the sober unimaginative account of it by an eye-witness--namely, God speaking through prophets, apostles, and his Son Jesus Christ, who "came forth from the Father into the world, and, again, left the world, and went to the Father" (John 16:28).

SHEDD ON THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PREACHING ETERNAL PUNISHMENT

Neither Christian ministry, nor the Christian church, are responsible for the doctrine of Eternal Perdition. It is given in charge to the ministry, and to the church, by the Lord Christ himself, his last commission, as a truth to be preached to every creature.”

William G. T. Shedd
The Doctrine of Endless Punishment