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?
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