Does the gospel require eternal punishment?

My reading for this week was the first portion of King Benjamin's address (Mosiah 1-3). In chapter 2, he exhorts his people to commit themselves to the service of God—which means the service of their fellow beings—in gratitude for the unrepayable gift of life. In chapter 3, he proclaims the gospel—"the glad tidings of great joy" (3:3)—as it was taught to him by an angel. The highlights of that proclamation are as follows:

• Jesus Christ is the Creator God come down among human beings to dwell with us in a tabernacle of clay.
  
• Christ's ministry is to bring wholeness to body and spirit—i.e., to heal disease and disability and to cast out evil from people's hearts.
  
• Christ suffers temptation and pain—the normal pains of the body, plus anguish for human wickedness, the suffering that human beings inflict on one another.
  
• Christ is rejected and crucified but rises from the dead to become our judge. (My emphasis when I read that is on the idea that our eternal judge is the empathetic, suffering Christ.)
  
• Through Christ's atonement, yielding to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, we can become saints, i.e., holy people: humble, full of love, trusting God's parental nurture.

Next week, I'll focus my reflection on what King Benjamin's address and his people's response teach about how Christians should live out the glad tidings. This week, I feel moved to focus on a not so obviously joyful theme that recurs through chapters 2-3: eternal punishment.

Throughout the Book of Mormon, we encounter a conventional dualistic understanding of divine judgment: the righteous will be lifted up to be with God in his heavenly kingdom at the last day, while the wicked will be dragged down to hell, cast into everlasting fire, etc. At the same time, we find evidence of an impulse to soften or step back somewhat from hellfire rhetoric. The Book of Mormon clearly rejects universalism (salvation for all), but it also clearly rejects doctrines of damnation for unbaptized children or unevangelized adults. This is to say that in the context of 19th-century America, the Book of Mormon dissented from doctrines that were orthodox for Calvinists, who constituted a significant segment of the American elite. On these doctrines, at least, the Book of Mormon participated in a liberalizing trend among 19th-century Americans repelled by teachings about infant damnation: Harriet Beecher Stowe lost her faith in Calvinism in large part because of such teachings, and Mark Twain made it the target of trenchant satire. Damnation for the heathen doesn't seem to have aroused quite as much outrage and incredulity among 19th-century American Protestants as the damnation of infants did; but in the late 19th century especially, liberal trends in theology did pave the way for a stronger retreat in the 20th century from the idea that unevangelized people are without salvation (which, pushed farther, led to a retreat from Christian exclusivism altogether).

The Mormon retreat from these doctrines can be seen in Mosiah 3. In verses 16 and 18, we're told that Christ's blood atones for little children, so that "the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy." Little children are blameless before God (3:20); in fact, little children are the model of the holy life to which Christians should aspire (3:18-19). We're also told in this chapter that Christ's blood atones for people "who have died not knowing the will of God concerning them, or who have ignorantly sinned" (3:11).

In addition, King Benjamin's address pulls back from a literal reading of fire-and-brimstone rhetoric and from the image of a God who actively consigns the wicked to eternal suffering. In 2:38-39 and then again in 3:24-27, Benjamin says that at the judgment day, the wicked will be awakened to a sense of their own guilt, which will cause them to "shrink from the presence of the Lord" into a state of misery and spiritual anguish which is described as being like unquenchable fire. Note that two adjustments are being made here in conventional language about hell. First, in this account, the wicked are not cast away from God's presence; they separate themselves from God out of a recognition of their guilt. In other words, this account pulls back from a notion of hell as the consequence of divine fiat, as a punishment imposed on people. Second, this account retreats from images of people literally burning in fire forever: hell is interiorized as a state of mind and thus, in a certain sense, becomes a relatively "kinder, gentler" hell.

Later, certain strands in LDS scripture and tradition will pull back even farther from orthodox ideas about hell and damnation. D&C 19—a revelation penned right around the time the Book of Mormon went on sale—contains an esoteric teaching (esoteric because it was supposed to be reserved for insiders) which states that "eternal" or "endless" punishment does not mean punishment with no end, strongly implying that punishment for sin will have an end. I have a hunch that this teaching was supposed to be esoteric because it's moving in the direction of universalism, which the Book of Mormon repudiates. Another cautious move toward universalism—at least opening up the possibility for a universalistic vision of all people eventually being redeemed—is D&C 29:27-30, where the Lord says that while he has never declared that the wicked can return from everlasting fire, he also hasn't spoken his final word. Similarly, D&C 76:44-48 says that it is unknown whether the suffering of the sons of perdition will have an end.

The whole concept of the three degrees of glory has a strong universalist thrust, because it restricts "eternal punishment" to the sons of perdition while granting "salvation" in a kingdom of glory to everyone else. That includes "liars," "adulterers," and other such wrongdoers, who are "cast down to hell . . . until the fulness of times, when Christ shall have . . . perfected his work," at which point they shall be redeemed from hell (76:88, 103-106; cf. 76:38-39). In this vision, then, hell ends for all except the sons of perdition—and even for them, the text doesn't foreclose the possibility of eventual redemption. Regarding the unevangelized, or those who accept the gospel after death, D&C 76:72-75 places them in the terrestrial kingdom. That teaching is superseded by Joseph Smith's later teachings about vicarious work for the dead, which makes the blessings of exaltation available alike to those who accept the gospel in this life and those who accept it afterward. This isn't universalism, strictly speaking. But extrapolating from the doctrines of the three degrees of glory and salvation for the dead, some Latter-day Saints will later argue for the possibility of advancement from one degree of glory to the next, which does allow for a Mormon version of universalism. Of course, there are other LDS teachers who reject this possibility.

My point is this: Within the Mormon tradition, there are multiple impulses pulling against one another around questions of hell and damnation. Historically, Latter-day Saints have wanted to maintain a belief in hell—that is, a belief that people will suffer or otherwise be penalized in the afterlife for wrongdoing—as an expression of principles of agency, accountability, eternal moral laws, and an exclusivist understanding of the way to salvation (i.e., only Jesus Christ can redeem us from damnation). At the same time, though, Latter-day Saints have been impelled to retreat from literal visions of hellfire, to reject emphatically damnation for infants and the unevangelized, and to insist on possibilities for salvation after death. The latter set of impulses, I believe, are the Spirit blowing through our faith community, and I'd like to see us let ourselves be blown further in that direction. We don't need to have exclusive claims to salvation or doctrines of eternal punishment in order to affirm accountability, moral judgments, or a commitment to a Christ-centered life. I don't see how the gospel can be called "glad tidings of great joy" as long as there is embedded in that message a vision of a God who mandates, or even is reconciled to, endless suffering. Our bad choices carry enough harmful natural consequences—even devastating or lethal consequences—that people don't need to have the threat of suffering in the afterlife hung over their heads, the way King Benjamin's discourse does, and the way the Book of Mormon in general does. (I'm reminded of Brigham Young's remark that "you can put into a gnat's eye all the souls of the children of men that are driven into heaven by preaching hell-fire.") Christ's work is deliverance from suffering: it's also, as we're about to see in Mosiah 4, deliverance from fear and guilt. A holy life as described in Mosiah 2-3—a life lived out of gratitude, love for God and our fellow beings, and trust in God's parental nurture—is not motivated by fear of divine punishment or of choosing the wrong path to salvation.