Larry Dixon, Wheaton: BridgePoint, 1992, 216 pp.
Reviewed by Wayne Northey
I knew I would eventually review this book… But it took me seven years
after its publication to do so. I will explain why below. But first a
description of the book.
There
is a “Foreword” by Dr. J. I. Packer of Regent College; an
“Introduction” by the author; then six Chapters under the following
headings: “Must We Even Discuss the Other Side?” (1); “The Other Side:
Will It Have Any Occupants?” (2); “The Other Side: Will It Have Any
Permanent Occupants ?” (3); “The Other Side: Will It Have Any
Redeemable Occupants?” (4); “The Other Side According to Jesus” (5);
“Must We Decide about The Other Side?” (6). There are finally Notes,
Scripture Index, and Subject Index sections.
The central conclusion of the book in the author’s words is that there
is an “adequacy [in] the traditional view of hell… and that
alternative views do not adequately reflect the scriptural data
concerning hell… Pointing out the weaknesses in the three alternative
positions to hell does not in itself prove the truth of the traditional
eternal conscious punishment view (pp. 172 & 173, emphasis added).”
Dixon continues at that point to “set out four areas in which the
traditional position enjoys biblical, as well as rational, support.”,
after allowing that the traditional view “might also be erroneous (p.
173).” I shall return to that possibility.
Widely read evangelical author J. I. Packer in the Foreword underscores
the author’s conclusions: “To believe what the Bible appears to say
about human destiny apart from the grace of God is a bitter pill
indeed, and no one should wonder that attempts are made to explore
alternative understandings of God’s revelation on this topic. It is
suggested that the Bible is unclear, or incoherent, or inconsistent, or
untrustworthy, when it speaks of the outcome of judgment after death,
or alternatively that virtually the whole church has for two thousand
years misunderstood the texts. I do not think so, nor does Dr. Dixon…
For one I am grateful for his work, and commend it to all who are
willing to be biblically rational on this sombre subject (p. 7).” The
implication is clear throughout the book and from Dr. Packer’s words:
one is simply unbiblical to deny the traditional view that hell is
eternal conscious punishment for all unbelievers who fail to accept
Jesus Christ as personal Saviour this side of death. As the author says
at the end of the Introduction: “May we be ready to pay [the] price to
bring lost people to Christ so that they won’t spend eternity on The
Other Side of the Good News (p. 14).”
Dixon spends the bulk of the book refuting three alternative views so
designated by him. In his words: “Some today suggest that all without
exception will be saved, whether they want to be or not (universalism,
discussed in chapter 2). Others argue that hell is God’s consuming of
the wicked (annihilationism, addressed in chapter 3), not His eternally
tormenting them. Still others hold forth the hope that death is not the
end of opportunity for redemption, but perhaps a door to future chances
for salvation (post-mortem conversion, the subject of chapter 4) (p.
13).”
The author does not wince at taking on theological heavywieghts such as
Karl Barth, C. H. Dodd, and Nels Ferré (all described by Dixon as
outside evangelical orthodoxy). He also challenges evangelical
heavyweight theologians such as Clark Pinnock, John Stott, and Donald
Bloesch. Dixon in particular bemoans the erosion of evangelical
theology as seen in these and other evangelical leaders’ views of the
traditional doctrine of hell. He writes: “The evangelical Christian,
who can’t forget hell, often seems, in boxing terms, to be up against
the ropes.” He describes the buffeting such an evangelical Christian
endures from the cults who scorn hell, and says, “He then returns to
his corner for some encouragement and promptly receives several left
hooks from his own manager…. One is hardly surprised that some young
fighters for the faith seem ready to throw in the towel (p. 149).” His
plea is poignant; one can feel his pain as a “fighter for the faith” at
this sense of betrayal. Throughout much of the final chapter, he
critiques in particular Clark Pinnock, whom Dixon quotes on p. 149:
“[E]verlasting torment is intolerable from a moral point of view
because it makes God into a bloodthirsty monster who maintains an
everlasting Auschwitz for victims whom He does not even allow to die.”
Dixon’s dilemma is clearly stated: “Obviously, no follower of Christ
wants to be guilty of presenting God as one more heinous than Hitler.
However, if the Bible is clear on this issue, the Christian must not
throw in the towel (pp. 149 & 150).” And the author proceeds to
present God in his holy hatred of sinners precisely in those terms: as
one more heinous than Hitler.
The crucial conditional fulcrum for the entire thesis is Dixon’s
statement: “if the Bible is clear on this issue”. Dixon and Packer, and
indeed a host of Christian voices throughout the ages (though with
significant exceptions in every age – some of whom are adduced by
Dixon), say the Bible contains indeed precisely such clarity about hell
as a place of eternal conscious punishment.
Before offering a critique, I would agree with Clark Pinnock’s comments
on the back cover: “Dixon’s book is well-written and researched,
colorful and interesting, concerned and passionate.” Dixon is in the
pulpit, and his polemical preaching style is arresting. No boring
academic read is this!
I nonetheless feel a personal sadness in critiquing Dixon’s
conclusions. On p. 178, he writes: “A former missionary friend, who has
since moved away from the traditional doctrine of hell, said to me that
‘God’s penultimate word is wrath, but His ultimate word is love.’” I am
that “former missionary friend”. We served together doing evangelism in
West Berlin from 1972 to 1974. The author’s rejoinder to my statement
was: “We would have to disagree (p. 178)”. “We” did disagree at the
time he was writing his book when I visited him; we disagreed after he
gave me Chapter Five to read in manuscript form; we still disagreed in
subsequent (one-sided) correspondence from me. Though I am left-handed,
I did not intend giving Larry any “left hooks”. That he stopped
dialoguing with me is my greatest sadness. The “former” in his
description of me seems regrettably to define equally both “missionary”
and “friend”.
I am compelled to respond to Larry’s work because of my own vocation:
since 1974 I have ministered in criminal justice, and have wrestled
from the outset with thinking biblically God’s justice thoughts after
him, in particular with reference to judgment and punishment, including
the doctrine of hell. I have become convinced over the years that
“God’s justice is predominantly, and normatively, redemptive or
restorative in intention (Chris Marshall, “Judgment and Justice: Some
Brief Observations”, presented at a postgraduate seminar at the Bible
College of New Zealand, May 3, 1999., p. 1.”) l knew one day I would
review Larry’s book. I do so dutifully but with no joy.
How can one presume to fault this book’s conclusions shared, as Packer
rightly indicates, by majority Christians throughout church history?
How can I presume to do so in just a few lines, when really a long
paper or full-length book is needed? Nonetheless this is my attempt. I
do so aware of the danger that my critique in part can be turned on me
too. We are all inclined to wrongly “handle the word of truth”. (See II
Tim. 2:15.)
I used two analogies in my dialogue with Larry years ago, which are
pertinent, and address the “if the Bible is clear on this issue”
question Larry begs above.
First, I suggested to Larry that the Bible is like a gigantic jig saw
puzzle with identically cut square pieces. It is hopeless to put the
puzzle together theologically without the proper picture of God on the
box to direct one. This is what academics call the question of
hermeneutics: how one interprets the biblical texts. That “portrait of
God” we are told in John 1 and Hebrews 1 is the face of Jesus, on whom
we are to gaze steadfastly (Heb. 3:1; 12:2). Jesus is the hermeneutical
key. But which “Jesus” (or box cover)?
I told Larry that I remembered as a teen a photograph being circulated
around our church with the story at the bottom told of a photographer
who captured the image after a pristine snowfall. It was, we were told,
the face of Jesus as seen in traditional artists’ depictions. But all
any could see initially were dark blotches on white. Then suddenly, the
face of Jesus leapt out! Then try as one might, one could never miss
the face again from any angle or direction. But many never could see
other than dark blotches. I suggested to Larry, respectfully I hope,
that he was looking at a “dark blotches” violently punitive picture of
Jesus on a box cover that was the wrong choice (a heresy in its
original Greek meaning), a failure to “see” the real face right before
his eyes. I said I believed that differed, in the end profoundly, from
the picture of Jesus who exemplified and said: “But love your enemies,
do good to them… Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons
of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be
merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:35-36, emphasis
added).” (Interestingly, Larry does not once in his book refer to this
clarion call of Jesus based upon this “box cover” portrait of who God
fundamentally is: love.)
Larry says: “One’s doctrine of the final judgment of the wicked is a
direct reflection of one’s doctrine of God (p. 165).” Indeed. And one’s
doctrine or picture of God – the box cover – is ultimately seen in
Jesus (John 1 and Hebrews 1).
Gandhi said of Christians and nonviolence generally, “The only people
on earth who do not see Christ and his teachings as nonviolent are
Christians (1).” Richard Hays, in his massive, authoritative study, The
Moral Vision of the New Testament (Harper, 1996) says: “This is the
place where New Testament ethics confronts a profound methodoligical
challenge on the question of violence, because the tension is so severe
between the unambiguous witness [for total nonviolence] of the New
Testament canon and the apparently countervailing forces of tradition,
reason, and experience (p. 341).” It is possible for “virtually the
whole church” (Packer) to be wrong. With all due respect, and with
profound sadness, it has been wrong about Christian nonviolence.
Dixon’s “traditional doctrine of hell” is a special category of that
same majority Christendom error. The picture on the box of God in
Christ for Dixon is sadly one of ultimate violence. I suggest that only
if “Jesus” is a “dark blotches” box cover can one agree with Dixon’s
assertion: “Jesus is our primary source for the [traditional] doctrine
of hell (p. 147)” The nub of the issue is our picture or vision of God
in Christ.
One evangelical New Testament theologian, in an outstanding draft
manuscript on hell, writes: “Jesus shows that those who think of God in
terms of strict distributive or retributive justice fundamentally
misunderstand God (Matt. 20:1 – 16) (Chris Marshall, “Judgment and
Justice: Some Brief Observations”, presented at a postgraduate seminar
at the Bible College of New Zealand, May 3, 1999, emphasis added. He
has further addressed this issue in Beyond Retribution: A New Testament
Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment, William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2001).” Yet, I suggest, this is the central “dark
blotches” misunderstanding of the picture on the puzzle cover of God in
the book under review. God is depicted as ultimately violently
retributive towards the wicked. On the contrary, Marshall, in surveying
the biblical evidence, writes in the conclusion of his paper: “For our
purposes the point to notice is that God’s final word is not
retribution but restoration, the re-creation of heaven and earth so
that sin, suffering, sickness and death are no more.” God’s ultimate
word biblically is, indeed, nonviolent, all-inclusive (Greek teleios in
Matt. 5:48) love, which subsumes all biblical categories of wrath,
judgment and punishment! I submit gently, but firmly that, to miss that
is to miss, simply, the Good News.
The second analogy I mentioned to Larry is of a document written in
Roman script so that an English speaker can read the letters, but the
reader does not know a word of the language. (We were at one time both
this way with the German language.) It is crucial nonetheless that the
reader understand the message in the document. So she phones a friend
who speaks the language fluently and reads the document out loud over
the phone, seeking an accurate translation. The native language speaker
in exasperation finally says that she can barely understand anything at
all, for all the accents seem to fall on the wrong syllables! (Any
English reader who knows German can relate!) In reading Larry’s fifth
chapter years ago, and later the entire book, I respectfully submit
that he consistently puts the accents on mainly the wrong biblical
syllables.
One example suffices: Larry’s central, I believe, misuse in Chapter
Five of the story of the rich man and Lazarus to discern explicit
details about the nature of eternal punishment for the wicked. He
quotes approvingly one author who says: “while it was not Jesus’
primary intent here to teach us about the nature of the intermediate
state, it is unlikely that He would mislead us on this subject (p.
133).” Really? One could likewise say (and some amazingly do!) that
Jesus’ teaching in Luke 14:31 endorses war despite his repeated
nonviolent call to “love your enemies”, or his words to the disciples
in the Garden of Gethsemane about two swords being enough (Luke 22:38)
was a call for disciples to take up arms despite Matt. 26:52 where
Jesus tells Peter to sheathe his sword (thereby disarming the church
forever, commented Church Father Tertullian!)
Repeatedly, in this reviewer’s estimation, Larry (and yes, most
Christians throughout the ages!) puts the accents in the Scriptures he
adduces in mostly the wrong places.
In this respect, Chris Marshall says: “But it is crucial to
recognize… the figurative, parabolic nature of the language used to
describe realities which, ex hypothesi [by their very nature], lie
outside human experience (p. 14).” He then quotes one writer who says:
“Such language is ‘figurative and connotative rather than denotative
and literalistic’…. To imagine some kind of cosmic torture-chamber
where the lost suffer endless or prolonged retribution is to miss the
figurative, apocalyptic nature of these utterances, as well as the
paraenetic or pastoral intention behind them (p. 14).” I contend that
Larry sustains just such a profound misreading of biblical texts
throughout his entire book.
So Marshall urges with reference to specific details about the fate of
those who reject God that “Perhaps a humble agnosticism is the wisest
option…” Neither Jesus nor Paul supply specifics about the fate of
the wicked, concludes Stephen Travis in Christ and the Judgment of God
(Pickering, 1986). Neither should we. And therefore I will not
speculate further in this review. I do not have an alternative view.
God knows, and that is enough! That Larry presses the biblical texts
beyond what they were meant to bear seems a singularly consistent fault
of his hermeneutic. It is so often what non-Christian cults do –
ironically enough given his critique of the cults’ critique of
traditional Christian teachings on hell!
But Larry will have none of this, and writes an entire treatise based
upon a consistent misreading of the founding texts. How can this be? A
book-length treatment of precisely this issue with reference to
misguided Christian retributive views in criminal justice is Timothy
Gorringe’s God’s Just Vengeance (Cambridge University Press, 1996). At
one point Gorringe asks, with reference to a pervasive and lengthy
Christian tradition of retributive views towards “criminals”: “How is
it that the question whether the law might be wrong, or even wicked,
does not arise for these good Christian people (p. 5)?” Likewise,
Father George Zabelka, Chaplain to the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki
atomic bomb squadrons, upon repentance for blessing the murder of
hundreds of thousands in an instant, wrote that the just war theory is
“something that Christ never taught nor hinted at.” Yet almost all
Christians have embraced just war and retributive justice theories
throughout much of the Christian era. Why, when it is biblically so
unfounded?
Similarly, while we both acknowledge that we follow the same Lord and
equally take seriously the Bible, I could wish that Larry would ponder
more what he allows is at least possible, that biblically the
traditional view of hell “might also be erroneous (p. 173).” In Jesus’
direct allusions to hell, not once are “unbelievers” in view, but
always the religiously self-righteous. Disturbingly, Douglas Frank, an
evangelical author, in Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered
the Twentieth Century (Eerdmans, 1986), characterizes evangelicalism as
centrally prone towards being pharisaical. “We are the Pharisees of our
time, if anyone is.”, he writes (p. 229). A Baptist pastor friend puts
it: “Every Sunday in the pulpit I stand in danger of leading my flock
to hell!”
In this reviewer’s estimation, what is lacking in Dixon’s reading of
the biblical texts is a Gospel imagination overwhelmed by grace, which
leads to a consequent theology of the subversion of all retribution and
violence in God and humans. In short: Christian conversion is wanted.
Like the White Witch in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the
Wardrobe, Dixon seems unaware of the “deeper (James called it “royal” –
James 2:8) law” of love on which “hang all the Law and the Prophets
(Matt. 22:34 – 40).” We sing after all “Amazing Grace”, not “Amazing
Justice”, Debbie Morris points out at the end of her gripping story,
Forgiving the Dead Man Walking (Zondervan, 1998). She gets it, Larry
does not. It is apparently that stark. This is what Jesus often spoke
of such as in Matt. 13:13ff (and elsewhere): “This is why I speak to
them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they
do not hear or understand.’”.
In Dixon’s reading, grace seems to have been arrested mid-stream in
favour of a horrible retributive justice for the wicked – which is
exactly mercy’s inversion. The author in interpreting Scripture on hell
looks like the man in Matt. 18 who was forgiven an overwhelming debt,
yet doesn’t get it at all, and withholds forgiveness at the first
opportunity! In reality, the text shows that the “forgiven” man
apparently didn’t really experience forgiveness, or he would have been
forgiving towards even the “ungrateful and wicked (Luke 6:35)”. Again,
Dixon presents like Jonah who becomes furious at God for showing mercy
to Ninevah. Yet, Jesus taught, a “greater [in mercy] than Jonah is here
{Matt. 12:41)!” Or the author sounds like the elder brother in the
“Prodigal Father” story (Luke 15:11ff) who just cannot fathom the
Father’s unconditional mercy towards the wicked son.
Dixon seemingly has no categories for a consistent hermeneutic of
grace. In his theology, God’s grace is for a moment, but his wrath
endures forever, to invert Psalm 30:5. Sadly, he, and many interpreters
like him, appear, like Saul, to have “given approval (Acts 8:1)” to the
same sacrificial violence that Jesus castigated in Matt. 23:33 – 35,
and fell victim to! (The work of René Girard, especially in The
Scapegoat (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) and Things Hidden
Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford University Press, 1987)
gives a sustained biblical critique of this form of sacrificial
violence. The Girard Reader (Crossroad, 1996), edited by James
Williams, is the best introduction to Girard’s thought.)
As Marshall says: “Throughout Christian history, the fear of being
consigned to hell by a truly merciless God has fuelled and justified
all manner of horrific violence (p. 6).”
Dixon writes, in apparent approval of one such instance of “horrific
violence”, the Gulf War: “A brave journalist who was in Baghdad when
the bombs landed, cried out in his television report, ‘I have been in
hell!” As horrible as war is we would have to say to him, ‘No, you
haven’t. If we understand Jesus correctly, war is only a small
foreshadowing of that final condition of the forsaken (p. 14).”
The grand and joyous paradox of the Gospel, for those with eyes to see
the wildly liberating “picture on the box cover” is: God’s final
judgment is his mercy! – just as the doctrine of original sin is a
post-resurrection Christian doctrine of grace and forgiveness. (See
James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes
(Crossroad, 1998) for a brilliant biblical reading of original sin in
this light.)
No contemporary biblical theologian this reviewer has read captures
this eschatological insight better in fact than James Alison in Raising
Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (Crossroad, 1996).
The book is a sustained call for Christians through conversion to
acquire an “eschatological imagination” that subverts ultimately an
unchristian “apocalyptic imagination” such that “The percpetion that
God is love has a specific content which is absolutely incompatible
with any perception of God as involved in violence, separation, anger,
or exclusion (p. 48).” Therefore, “The commonly held understanding of
hell remains strictly within the apocalyptic imagination, that is, it
is the result of a violent separation between the good and the evil
worked by a vengeful god. It seems to me that if hell is understood
thus, we have quite simply not understood the Christian faith; and the
Christian story, instead of being the creative rupture in the system of
this world, has come to be nothing less than its sacralization. That
is, the good news which Jesus brought has been quite simply lost (p.
175).”
In the end, the greatest critique of Dixon’s thesis is simply this:
there is biblically no “other side of the good news”! There is Good
News, period! Hell too is embraced by God’s love. Dixon presents a
“gospel” without good news that reads, à la Four Spiritual Laws, thus:
“God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life… But if you
don’t buy in before death, God hates you, and has a horrible plan for
your after-life!” No genuine love affair human or divine is imaginable
with that kind of time-limited vicious threat hanging over one’s head.
I could wish Dixon on this issue would return to Scripture with eyes to
see and ears to hear – and recover a truly Gospel-soaked
“eschatological imagination”. Chris Marshall, in personal comment to me
wrote similarly: “I did have a look at Dixon’s book …. What a
depressing piece!! It illustrates the problems in pulling out a single
theme for analysis in isolation from the larger context of the biblical
story (May 9, 1999, E-mail correspondence).”
There is ultimately no room for Dixon’s thesis in the biblical Good
News that is shot through with God’s “Amazing Grace” – how sweet the
sound! Dixon consistently gives grace a terribly sour note! I suggest
he is not compelled to his view by biblical evidence but by a misguided
hermeneutic: the wrong “box cover”. Biblically, God’s love is the
ultimate word, and judgment and redemption equally are subsumed under
that love. In the end, “mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13)!” in
an amazing paradox of grace whereby God is both “just and justifier”
(Rom. 3:26). For, as Jesus said repeatedly (Matt. 9:13 and 12:7): “I
desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
I call on Dixon, Packer, and all who hold to an ostensibly
sub-Christian, though longstanding “traditional doctrine of hell”: “Go
and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ (Matt.
9:13).” Such a call is above all a call to conversion.
(1) quoted in Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and
Resistance in a World of Domination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992,
p. 216.