George W. Sarris. Heaven’s Doors. Trumbull CT: GWS, 2017. Print.
- “…why not kill the Devil now, not great ago?”
“You might as well ask me,” said I, “why God does not kill you and I, when we do wicked things here that offend him. We are preserved to repent and be pardoned.”
He muses awhile at this. “Well, well,” says he, mighty affectionately,”that well; so you, I, Devil, all wicked, all preserve, repent, God pardon all.”
Here I was run down again by him to the last degree, and it was a testimony to me how the mere notions of nature, though they will guide reasonable creatures to a knowledge of God, and of a worship or homage due to the supreme being of God, as the consequence of our nature; yet nothing but Divine revelation can form the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of a redemption purchased for us, of a Mediator of a new covenant, and of an Intercessor at the footstool of God’s throne…
Heaven’s Doors is subtitled Wider than You Ever Believed! (exclamation point in the title). The book makes an interesting case for a distinct kind of universalism. The common form of universalism as was seen in the Universalist and Unitarian-Universalist churches of the nineteenth century simply rejected the concept of hell and promoted the idea that “God loves everyone and saves everyone.” In most such cases, Jesus was not seen as divine—after all, Unitarian means “not Trinitarian”—so at best Jesus was a good teacher whose death was a tragedy and whose resurrection is a myth.
The author of Heaven’s Doors is not like that. He is a graduate of a highly-esteemed evangelical seminary. He has long been active in Christian causes. I used to hear him regularly on the local Christian radio station. One of his children served as a missionary in one of the most difficult countries on earth—difficult for both its hostility to the Gospel and its political extremism. The book’s blurb contains brief testimonies (most of them qualified) from respected Christian leaders.
The basic premise of the book is that when Jesus died on the cross, he provided a way so that eventually everyone gets saved. Sarris calls it “ultimate salvation.” In other words, people who go to hell still have a chance to repent later in the afterlife, so eventually every human being will ultimately be saved. (For a different take on this, read C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce).
One could say, then, that in this view hell is a kind of purgatory. For some hardened sinners it may take a long time, but John 3:16 does say, “God so loved the world.” That includes everyone in it.
I confess I was almost immediately made skeptical because the first few chapters try to show that the early church did not believe in an eternal hell. My reaction was “that’s what they all say” whenever someone challenges received orthodoxy: the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Unitarians, the Adventists, the Muslims, Isaac Newton (a Bible scholar but an Arian), Hitler, etc. It always seems to be “we are doing it the way it should have been done.” Simply because there may not be too many direct references to an eternal hell in Ante-Nicene writing does not mean that it was not taught. Why does it seem that both testaments of the Bible and early church confessions speak so much of judgment?
It is possible that the author gives himself away when he lauds the early church in Alexandria, Egypt. While there were no doubt many orthodox disciples of Matthew there, it was also the home of Arius. That may be a fallacy, but it does make me wonder.
Still, Heaven’s Doors mostly uses the Bible to make its point. One major point in the book is that the Old Testament does not speak of an eternal hell. That does not seem especially persuasive. As I was reading this book, I was also reading the Psalms, and some of those Psalms are pretty rough on the enemies of God:
“Let them be confounded and troubled forever.” (Psalm 83:17)
“When the wicked spring as the grass and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is they that shall be destroyed for ever.” (Psalm 92:7)
“The wicked shall see it and be grieved; he shall gnash his teeth and melt away.” (Psalm 112:11)
There are many others. Ezekiel 32 describes the heathen as going to the “nether parts” and the pit. The last verse of Isaiah says of the transgressors: “Their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched.” (Isaiah 66:24)
That verse might suggest Gehenna, the Jerusalem dump, a word used in the Gospels as a synonym for eternal hell. Heaven’s Doors takes any reference to Gehenna in the most literal sense that it simply refers to the dump. It is a disgraceful place to get rid of a dead body instead of giving it a proper burial, but there is nothing eternal about it.
The book tries to emphasize that the Greek word in the New Testament translated eternal or everlasting does not mean either of those things. The word is aion or one of its cognates, where we get the English word eon. It does sometimes mean a long period of time or an age. However, it is often understood to mean eternity as well.
According to Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich’s A Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, even in some of the oldest classical writings like those of Plato, Demosthenes, or Hippocrates, it means eternity. Often when it is used to speak of the age to come or the afterlife, eternity is implied—that is true of both classical and Christian writings.
Vine’s An Expository Dictionary of the New Testament points out that in II Corinthians 4:18 the word eternal (aionios, the adjective form) contrasts with the temporary. This reader is not persuaded that an aion cannot be eternal.
Having said all this, Sarris does point out a difficulty for those who insist that anyone who dies without ever hearing the truth about Jesus automatically goes to hell. This problem is illustrated in “Believing in the American West” when its author writes:
And so the dilemma of the poor souls in Africa and Asia, living and dying and heading off to hell without the opportunity to hear the Christian gospel, weighed heavily on me. If God really had decided to let salvation hinge on the basis of the arbitrary facts of place of birth (a fact that He, in His omnipotence, had determined), then God seemed to be following rather questionable values Himself, showing a pretty tenuous understanding of the concept of fairness. (Limerick 511)
This reminded me of when I was a boy and a Catholic neighbor showed me a picture from her catechism of Limbo, the dark, scary border of hell full of naked, unbaptized babies floating around for eternity. It is not the babies’ fault that they were not baptized.
So when Ezekiel was challenged by some of the Jews over his prophecies, tells them, “You are saying God is not fair.” No, I do not presume to know how God will judge those who have not heard the Gospel, but there is precious little in the Scripture to say God is giving everyone a free pass.
How do we deal with the “God’s not fair” objection?
The first thing is simply that we need to be assured that God is fair. If anything, our interpretation is more likely not to be fair. I wrote recently of a friend who had a near death experience and was on his way to hell. He knew he deserved it, and that was that. Fortunately for him, the doctors revived him and he did eventually repent about a year later.
Jesus tells the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) which does suggest that the Lord may accept last-minute conversions. Heaven’s Doors dismisses the story of the rich man and Lazarus as a parable, so it is not anything to base doctrine upon. However, nowhere does the passage in Luke 16:19-31 say this story is a parable or that this is a comparison or analogy. Jesus says directly. “There was a certain rich man…And there was a beggar named Lazarus.” (Luke 16:19-20) It sounds like Jesus is telling a true story. This really happened, and the rich man is now being tormented in flame (Luke 16:24).
I suspect we people have a part to play in all this. Romans 2:1 and some of those passages in Ezekiel suggest we will be judged at least in part by our own standards. Jesus promised that we have the ability to remit and retain sins (see John 20:23). Just as Jesus said in Matthew 12:32 that all sins against Him will be be forgiven, so we have that ability, just as Stephen forgave those who murdered him (see Acts 7:60).
There is a lot we do not know about the afterlife, and God is not revealing some of it. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God.” (Deuteronomy 29:29)
Once I was in a Bible study group that one day was discussing what happens to people when they die. Different people in the group had read different interpretations and theories involving some of the same terms that Heaven’s Doors uses, among others: Sheol, Gehenna, Tartarus, Hades, the Bosom of Abraham, Paradise, Heaven, sleep, annihilation, etc. We decided to pray to see if the Holy Spirit would shed any light on the discussion. The Lord replied that he was not going to answer the question because it would cause more division than illumination among His people.
That may have inadvertently what Heaven’s Doors has done. Most Christians, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox do subscribe to a doctrine of eternal hell. Those like the Universalists of old who did not believe in hell or the deity of Christ would no doubt feel Sarris was giving Jesus too much credit. They probably would not like the idea of a temporary hell anyway.
The word essay in its original meaning simply means “attempt.” Heaven’s Doors is an attempt to address an uncomfortable subject. While I am skeptical of the extreme “all unbaptized babies go to Limbo,” this reviewer is equally skeptical of Heavens’ Doors ultimate conclusion in spite of a noble attempt to address a thorny issue.
Arndt, William F., F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Walter Bauer. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. Print.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “Believing in the American West.” The Dolphin Reader. Sixth ed. Ed. Douglas Hunt. Boston: Houghton, 2003: 510+. Print.
Vine, W. E. An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. Old Tappan NJ: Revell, 1966. Print.