There are different approaches that people can take to Hell. On the right, we have hard-hearted individuals who have no problem with it because their attitude is, bad people are just plain bad and should just go to Hell. They shouldn’t be given a chance to be forgiven. They see being “born again” as a cop out. If you’ve been bad, you can’t just say I’m gonna turn around. It’s too late, what you’ve done is done, and you’re going to Hell whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, severely left-minded individuals will usually object to Hell altogether. They will say that everybody should eventually get to heaven and that a loving God would never send anyone to Hell.
So on the right, we have hard-headed individuals with hard hearts, and on the left we have soft-hearted individuals with soft heads. Authentic Catholicism is neither on the right or the left but in the center. It has the hard head of the right and the soft heart of the left.
The problem with the right position is that there is no room for mercy. But alas, without the Christian solution, we might just conclude it couldn’t be any other way. This is because what the right-positioned person is right about is that serious sin can never be atoned for by the one who has committed it, except by everlasting punishment. The person has an infinite debt. Take the following example.
Some time ago, I was reading an article about teenage girls who had lost their virginity and were regretting it. One of the girls told her story. She was at a party and was alone in one of the upstairs bedrooms, depressed that she was still a virgin. Well, in comes Paul, a guy she knows from school. He proceeds to get on top of her and have sex with her. The girl explains that she was so tired and depressed of being a virgin that she decided to just allow him to proceed. As the event unfolded, she began to hurt physically very bad from it and tried to tell him to stop, but he didn’t seem to care. He just continued, ignoring her. Once he had finished, he just got up and left.
Later, she learned that she was just one of several pit stops. Paul had been going from girl to girl that night, looking to shed the virginity of as many girls as he could. He was just out to “prove his manhood” and get some pleasure.
Now most people in this apostate culture in which we live think that it makes sense to go to Hell for things like killing or stealing, but they find it ridiculous to say that you could go to Hell for sexual sins. The reality of the situation is that this Paul had, most likely, incurred an infinite debt that night because he evidently regarded these priceless creatures as mere ends to prove his power and use for gratification. God creates every human person for the potential of everlasting love, to exist for all eternity in a state of total love, being loved by God and the saints and loving them back forever without end, and it is for this reason that every human person’s worth is immeasurable. And so if you decide to regard any such creature merely as some finite means to some selfish end, you commit an infinite insult and thereby acquire an infinite debt.
And so the person on the right correctly understands that the person guilty of serious sin has no way of paying the debt except by suffering without end. Therefore, even if God said, I’ll forgive you, who will pay the infinite debt? If the person must, then he has to go to Hell anyway, and the mercy is impractical.
However, the good news of the Gospel is that God’s love does not know any bounds, and hence His desire to have mercy knows no bounds. And the unbelievable news of the Gospel is that God has found a way to forgive serious sin and still balance the scales with justice: He pays the debt Himself! How? By becoming a man and suffering for us as a man. He creates a human body and soul and fully unites His Divine Essence with it, so that the tortures, both physical and psychological, done to Him on the cross are actually being done to Him, the infinite God, and hence have infinite worth. And so since Christ’s death on the cross has infinite merit, it atones for any number of serious sins (because infinity plus any number of infinities is still just infinity), and of course, it also atones for any number of minor sins (sins that only merit temporal punishment).
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