by John H. Gerstner

It has been characteristic of the sects to deny future punishment. Unitarianism emerged in this country basically as a protest against vindictive justice. It is true that this was not always in the foreground of the controversy, but it is probable that it was always in the background. In the debate over depravity, sacrifice, and salvation, the great anxiety and offense was traceable not so much to these doctrines as to the fact that they led to vindictive and irremediable punishment. Universalism was explicitly and undoubtedly devoted to an attack on the particularism of New England doctrine.

Most of the major present-day sects are opposed to future punishment. Some, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, teach annihilation (so do some modern evangelicals, as I point out in my book Repent or Perish). The Mormons do not advocate annihilation, but most of their teaching either minimizes future punishment or says that only a handful of persons will undergo it. Christian Science, Theosophy, and other pantheistic groups know of no punishment that is not either ameliorative or illusory.

Although traditional churches have tended to be silent about endless punishment while Neo-orthodoxy has gone universalistic and the sects annihilationist, there seems to be a movement back to a reaffirmation of faith in this doctrine in our time. Carl F. H. Henry's statement that Jonathan Edwards' God is "angry still" is being recognized by many as true. Marcellus Kik found the subject important enough to write a book on, Voices from Heaven and Hell, as has Harry Buis in his Doctrine of Eternal Punishment.

Perhaps Dr. Bonnell's Heaven and Hell is more symptomatic of our time, and more indicative about the general trend. While repudiating what he feels are the excessive statements of Thomas Aquinas and Jonathan Edwards, there is a genuine appreciation by Bonnell of what he considers the neglected truth in this doctrine. While his book does not, in my judgment, do full justice to certain grim-but-undeniable realities, it is indicative of a far more candid evaluation of biblical eschatology than the naive optimism of a decadent liberalism.

In this chapter I will restrict myself to a brief discussion of one point, namely the fixity of the gulf between the two future worlds. There is an impassable gulf between these two worlds. If so, this is the death of any hopes of universal salvation.

My thoughts turn immediately to Christ's telling of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31. Here the impassability of this gulf is stressed by Jesus. Describing the rich man Dives in hell, and the poor beggar Lazarus in heaven, Christ tells us that Dives is so miserable that he asks Lazarus (whom he sees in "Abraham's bosom," another word for heaven) to wet the tip of his tongue. But this is impossible because as Abraham explains, "between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence."

I believe that this is a parable, though many of the Puritans did not. But regardless of whether this scene is utterly metaphorical, whether it is taken to be an anticipation of the future and final state of the two worlds, or whether it is a description in bodily terms of the present spiritual anguish of those in the evil world to come, the one point with which we are concerned remains the same in all instances: namely that there is a wall of separation between these two worlds, and it is impossible to go from one world to the other, even temporarily.

Consider Revelation 22:11: "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still." Here the statement is made that the filthy shall be filthy still. This tells us plainly that there is to be no change in the evil world which is to come. We know that there is hope in this present world while there is still life. So long as a man lives and the gospel is extended to him, he may believe and be saved. Now is the day of salvation. But, in very dismal contrast to that, the future world affords no such opportunity. There is no such possibility of a person entering into the life that is everlasting. Just the opposite--if a man departs this world in sin, he shall remain in sin forever without hope of change.

Consider Hebrews 9:27: "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. I admit that this passage would allow a probation after this judgment; that is, the words themselves do not rule out such a possibility. However they certainly do not assert such a thing, nor do they imply such a thing. Furthermore, we find no support elsewhere in Scripture for the notion. So we are constrained to believe that the bluntness and the apparent solemnity and finality of this stark statement, "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment," means to rule out later probation. That is the commonsense handling of this verse, and in the absence of any information which would modify such a commonsense interpretation, it seems that we are shut up to such a construction.

Now if there is such a judgment which comes immediately at death and fixes the eternal states of those judged, then surely the two groups are eternally separated from each other, as least as far as intercommunication or interfellowship or transmigration is concerned. One world may be conscious of another; the heavenly world may be conscious of the hellish world, and that consciousness may contribute to its blessedness in some manner. Likewise the hellish world may be conscious of the heavenly world, and that consciousness may contribute to its misery in some manner. But there is no going back and forth from one world to the other, nor any fellowship between the two groups of inhabitants.

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This is part twenty-nine of John H. Gerstner's small book entitled Theology for Everyman, originally published in 1965 (Moody Press, Chicago). That book was subsequently republished in 1991. It has since fallen out of print and we thought it would be good to revisit this book here on the blog. Over the past weeks, we've been working our way through the book. Here is where we've been so far: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6 Chapter 7, Chapter 8 and Chapter 9.