Would a Loving God Really Torture Someone Forever?

For many Christians, there are certain beliefs you can question and still feel relatively safe. You can question how a church is run, disagree with a pastor, change denomination, or even change your understanding of parts of the Bible. You may move from one church to another and discover that something you were once told was essential is apparently not quite so essential in the church down the road. Anyone who has spent enough time in Christianity knows that we can disagree about an impressive number of things and still all arrive on Sunday morning convinced that we are following the same Jesus.

But then there are beliefs that are much harder to touch. They seem to sit behind an invisible spiritual red line, and hell is certainly one of them. You may wonder what hell is like, who goes there, whether the fire is literal or symbolic, and still remain safely inside the conversation. But to seriously ask whether eternal hell exists at all can feel very different, because the question hardly has time to form before fear joins the conversation: What if I am wrong?

Hell has quite an advantage as a belief because it contains its own warning against questioning it. If I change my mind about some theological idea and later discover I was wrong, I can change my mind again. Perhaps buy another theology book and start over. But if I decide there is no hell and eventually discover there is one, according to what I was taught, I may have made a mistake with rather permanent consequences.

So perhaps it is understandable that many of us don’t look too closely. I didn’t for many years.

I did not come to this question as somebody standing outside Christianity and throwing stones at it. I grew up within Christianity, studied theology, and became a pastor. I preached, taught, prayed with people and spent years sincerely searching for God and trying to help others know God. Christianity was not something I observed from a distance; I lived inside it. I knew its language, its scriptures, its beautiful parts, its difficult parts, its answers and also its fears.

And I believed it. That is important to me, because I don’t want to rewrite my past as though I was secretly a yogi sitting behind the pulpit waiting for an opportunity to escape. I wasn’t. My Christian journey was real. My love for God was real. My desire to know truth was real, and much of what I experienced during those years remains deeply meaningful to me.

There were questions, of course. There had always been questions. But like many Christians, I became quite good at finding an answer that allowed all the pieces to remain where they were. Theology can sometimes be very helpful in this way. When something doesn’t quite fit, there is usually another book explaining why it actually does.

Then, in 2020, after becoming seriously ill, I ended up in hospital for emergency surgery, and something happened that changed the direction of my life.

Some people may describe what happened to me as a near-death experience. I don’t know if I need to give it a name. What mattered was what I experienced, because it changed something in me that theology had never been able to change.

There was an overwhelming experience of love and peace, but it was not simply the feeling that I was being loved by God. It went much deeper than that. For a moment, the separation between me and what I had always called God was simply not there.

There was no fear, no judgement and no condemnation. There was only this extraordinary sense of oneness, of being completely held within Life, while at the same time knowing that I was not separate from it. It is difficult to explain because our language immediately creates two things: the one having the experience and the thing being experienced. Yet that was precisely what seemed to be absent.

I was not Gerhard standing somewhere in the presence of Love thinking, Wow, God really loves me. Somehow, in a way I could not explain then and still struggle to put completely into words now, I knew that I was that Love.

At that stage of my life I naturally called what I experienced God, because that was the language available to me. Today I often use the words the Divine, not because I have developed a problem with the word God or because changing the vocabulary automatically makes us more spiritual, but because the word God can arrive carrying a great deal of luggage.

For me it carried images and ideas I had collected since childhood: God above, me below; God watching, me being watched; God holy, me sinful; God deciding, me hoping I had understood the rules correctly. What I experienced did not fit comfortably into that picture. It felt much greater, much nearer and strangely less separate than anything I had known how to describe before.

I did not leave hospital with a new religion or a neat list of corrected beliefs. In fact, I probably came out with more questions than answers, which is not always the most convenient thing when your occupation involves standing in front of people every Sunday and giving them answers.

But certain things I had previously accepted had become very difficult to say with the same confidence.

Hell was one of them.

The First Sunday Back

The first Sunday I was out of hospital, I stood in front of my congregation and preached that there is no hell.

It was not exactly the ideal sermon if I had intended to increase church attendance.

Many of the people did not return after that.

At the time it hurt, but looking back I understand why. I had touched something much bigger than one doctrine. Once hell begins to move, other questions naturally begin appearing, but I don’t want to answer all of those questions here. They deserve their own space.

For now, there was one question I could no longer get around: How could I continue saying that God is Love while also believing that this same God would allow someone to suffer forever?

For my whole Christian life I had been taught that God is love. I had preached it myself. We said that God knows us completely, understands every part of our lives, sees every wound and every weakness, and loves us beyond anything human beings can understand.

Yet alongside that beautiful statement I had somehow carried another belief: a person could live a short human life, die without believing the right thing, and then suffer forever.

When you have heard those two ideas together for long enough, they can sit surprisingly comfortably next to each other. You stop noticing how strange the relationship is.

Until you actually look at it.

Take an ordinary human life of perhaps seventy or eighty years. Imagine someone born into a Hindu family in India. From childhood they are taught to understand the Divine through the tradition of their parents in much the same way that I was taught to understand God through Christianity. They grow up, make mistakes, love people, hurt people, get hurt themselves, learn a few things, misunderstand many things, and perhaps spend their life sincerely searching for the Divine.

Then they die without becoming a Christian.

According to the understanding of hell I had inherited, the consequence could be eternal suffering. A thousand years could pass, and nothing would have changed. A million years could pass and eternity would still not be any closer to ending. There would never come a point at which enough was enough, never a moment when healing or restoration became possible, never a point at which Love finally said, Come home.

When I stopped trying to explain that theologically and simply allowed myself to hear what I was saying, I began wondering how I had managed for so long to place God is Love and eternal suffering inside the same understanding without feeling the enormous tension between them.

And perhaps the answer is simply that I had been taught both.

When Beliefs Become Part of the Furniture

This is one of the strange things about inherited beliefs. When an idea is given to us early enough and repeated often enough, we don’t experience it as an idea anymore. It simply becomes part of the furniture of reality.

If everyone around you believes in heaven and hell, then heaven and hell don’t really feel like beliefs. They feel like facts, in much the same way that Johannesburg is in Gauteng. Nobody wakes up at three in the morning worried that Johannesburg may secretly have moved to the Western Cape.

Hell was simply part of the map.

And when something is part of the map, you use it to understand everything else. You don’t normally stop and ask who drew the map.

I knew all the answers that came when somebody questioned hell because I had studied them, heard them, and sometimes used them myself. God doesn’t send people to hell; people choose hell. God is loving, but God is also just. Sin must be punished. We cannot understand God’s ways.

For a long time those answers worked for me because I was asking the questions from inside the same framework that produced the answers. Then I began asking much simpler questions.

If my son did something terribly wrong, there may be consequences. Love does not mean pretending that our actions don’t matter. But if I punished him today, tomorrow, next year, for the next fifty years, then for a thousand years, then for a million, while refusing every possibility of restoration, I don’t think anybody would look at the situation and admire my extraordinary sense of justice.

At some point we would know that something had gone terribly wrong.

I didn’t need a new theological argument to recognise that. Something much simpler in me could see it.

And that began to make me wonder whether the problem had never been with the Divine at all. Perhaps the problem was with the picture of God I had inherited.

The Question of Separation

There was something else I could no longer ignore after my experience in hospital.

The hell I had believed in required separation. There had to be God on one side and humanity on the other. God was somewhere beyond me, and I was here trying to reach Him. If I believed correctly, I could eventually be with God; if I did not, I could be separated from God forever.

For most of my Christian life that picture seemed completely normal to me. I had never really thought to question the separation itself.

But what I experienced in hospital was completely different. There wasn’t Gerhard on one side and God on the other. I didn’t experience myself travelling somewhere and finally reaching God, and I didn’t experience God as someone coming from somewhere else to meet me.

The separation itself was gone. There was Life, there was this overwhelming Love, there was an extraordinary sense of oneness, and I knew that I was not separate from any of it.

Later, as my journey took me into meditation, yoga and Advaita Vedanta, I began finding language for something I had already experienced before I knew what to call it. Teachers helped me explore something that was no longer merely a philosophical question for me: perhaps the separation we experience between ourselves and the Divine is not as real as we think it is.

That created a rather obvious problem for my old understanding of hell.

If the Divine is not somewhere outside of Life, where exactly can someone be sent where the Divine is not?

For years I had tried to understand how God could eternally separate someone from Himself without ever stopping to question the assumption underneath the whole idea — that we were truly separate in the first place.

I don’t want to take that question much further here, because oneness deserves its own exploration and there is a danger of trying to fit the entire spiritual journey into one article about hell. But my experience of oneness matters to this story because it was the place from which the old belief began to look so different.

I was no longer only asking whether a loving God would send someone to hell. I was beginning to see that my whole understanding of God over there and us over here might need to be examined.