18 The Question of an Eternal Hell
IIOne argument that I shall make in this book is that the very
notion that a rational agent in full possession of his or her
faculties could, in any meaningful sense, freely reject God
absolutely and forever is a logically incoherent one. Another
is that, for this and other reasons, a final state of eternal tor-
ment could be neither a just sentence pronounced upon nor
a just fate suffered by a finite being, no matter how depraved
that being might have become. Still another is that, even if that
fate were in some purely abstract sense "just," the God who
would permit it to become anyone's actual fate could never
be perfectly good-or, rather, as Christian metaphysical tradi-
tion obliges us to phrase it, could never be absolute Goodness
as such- but could be at most only a relative calculable good
in relation to other relative calculable goods. And yet another
is that the traditional doctrine of hell's perpetuity renders
other aspects of the tradition, such as orthodox Christology
or the eschatological claims of the Apostle Paul, ultimately
meaningless. If all of this seems obscure, which at this point
it should, I hope it will have become clear by the end of the
book. I cannot be certain that it will have done so, however, be-
cause Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their
thinking to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear
and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore
the idea must make perfect moral sense. They are in error on
both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough condi-
tioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the
most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome
of rational good sense. In fact, where the absurdity proves only
slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as
often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdi-