Hell No. Love Wins.
You have been calling on God your whole life.
You may not have been aware of it. But from the first moment you drew breath to the last moment you ever will, something in you has been reaching—unconsciously, ceaselessly—toward the One who made you.
I think this is more than metaphor. It may be biology opened up as theology.
Every breath is gift, not mere mechanism. A gift offered moment by moment by a God who has not stopped creating, who has not stopped holding us in being.
Creation. A Dream Come True.
God still creates.
The sentence is present tense because we tend to speak of creation as a past event—something God did once, long ago, before history got underway. But the God of scripture is not a watchmaker who wound the clock and stepped back. God is perpetually, continuously, joyfully creating.
And you and I are the result of that.
We are recent creations. Dreams of God come true.
We are not just products of biology—we are, but not just that. We are a longing, fulfilled.
The thing we know as our soul is not a spiritual ghost haunting a biological machine. It is something more mysterious and more beautiful—it is breath and flesh woven together by the Spirit. An incarnation of sorts.
We are ensouled bodies.
Genesis tells us that God breathed into the dust and the human became a living being. Breath and clay together—that is what we are.
The soul loves the body. Body and soul are not adversaries. They are partners.
The Name Hidden in Plain Sight
And here’s something most of us didn’t hear in Sunday School.
The ancient Hebrew name for God — YHWH — is formed from letters that sound, to many ears, almost like breath itself. They resist ordinary pronunciation. They are less spoken than breathed—like aspirated consonants. The letters YHWH are transliterated as follows:
Yod (rhymes with “rode”). Heh (like “say”). Vav (like “lava”). Heh (like “say”).
When pronounced without vowels, YH sounds like an inhale, and WH sounds like an exhale.
I do not want to press this too far as linguistics. But as theology, it is provocative.
Some think breathing is what gives praise to God.
There is a psalm that declares: “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.” I have always thought of it as a command or an invitation to praise God.
But what if it isn’t? What if it is just a simple declaration of fact, and not a call to obedience?
This would mean that every human being who ever lived has been praising—we are part of the everything that hath breath that has been praising God. Because all humans carry the divine image (imago dei), perhaps our lungs always carry the divine name.
Why else would sacred text claim the first cry of an infant is praise?
“From the mouths of children and babies come songs of praise to you. They sing of your power to silence your enemies.” Ps 8:2
This suggests that humans call on God even when they do not know they are doing so. This would mean we reach for God before we have language, before we have doctrine, before we have belief.
Every breath is a reaching.
Every breath is a cry.
Every breath is a call to YHWH.
And the promise is that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.
How this Ends
Our breath-cry continues until God takes our breath away. Clement of Rome wrote back in the 1st century, “His breath is in us; and when he pleases, he will take it away.” (1st Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, XXI, 94–95.)
Death is when God’s name is finally taken from our lungs and we are gently received into God.
The body—-which was always of the earth—returns to the earth. Dust to dust, as the old liturgy says. And the soul (the result of God’s createive breath) returns to God.
This is my hope: all persons go back to God.
Safely.
This is a larger claim than it first appears.
This includes everyone. Not just the devout. Not just the baptized. Not just those who got the theology right or showed up to the right church. Every breath-bearer. Every one who has spoken YHWH with their lungs—which is every human who has ever lived.
This is not a cheap comfort.
I do not mean that nothing matters, or that all roads are equally beautiful, or that the soul can become anything it wishes without consequence.
There are things in us that need healing.
There are things that need to be surrendered.
There are things that need to be burned away.
Even after our breath is taken away.
The Unfinished Work
Soul work is hard, and for most of us it is unfinished.
Holiness is not mainly about religious performance. It is the slow and often painful work of ego-surrender—the letting go of the small, anxious sovereignty we have spent our lives constructing.
I think most arrive at death somewhere in the middle of this work.
That is not a comfortable thing to acknowledge, but it is an honest one.
We carry love, but also fear.
We carry beauty, but also wounds.
We carry the image of God, but also all the ways we have resisted becoming fully human.
And yet, the beings who bear the image of God—the beings God dreamed into existence, loved into life, and sustained by breath—are not abandoned.
Whatever refining remains is the refining God will lead us through.
God will use a fire that purifies, but it will not be one that consumes.
It will heal.
The Locked Room
This is where the conversation about hell matters—and where I think we have often gotten it badly wrong.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, offers what may be the most truthful definition of hell ever written:
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
Not fire.
Not brimstone.
Not a punitive dungeon administered by a God who is ready to punish rebellion.
Hell is the condition of a heart turned in on itself. It is the suffocating contraction of a self that cannot give or receive love. It is the soul reduced to self-protection, self-justification, and isolation.
C.S. Lewis named the same reality when he suggested “the gates of hell are locked from the inside.”
Hell is not God’s desire for anyone. It is the ultimate tragedy of refusing love—humans bricking themselves into a small, airless, inhuman room and refusing every invitation to come out.
I resist the very notion of it, but I do think that the possibility is real. The freedom God gives us is genuine, and genuine freedom logically includes the terrible capacity to resist love.
But I don’t think that human resistance is greater than God’s love.
Talk of eternal torment—of a God who finally abandons any human being God made and loved—has never seemed to me like the deepest truth of the gospel. Scripture is plain that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to eternal life.
I just don’t think the love of God exhausts itself over our resistance.
It presses on.
It searches.
It descends.
It waits outside every locked room.
It never gives up. Never fails.
And in the end, I believe love wins.
We need not fear.
You Were With Me When I Was Not With You
Augustine, after years of wandering, restlessness, and active resistance, finally arrived at an openness to God. And what he said in that moment of arrival is one of the most astonishing sentences in Christian history:
“You were with me when I was not with you.”
God was present in the wandering.
God was present in the not-knowing.
God was present in the turning-away.
Conversion came after this understanding, after the realization that God was always there, that the seeking and the being-found were both, somehow, beyond human work.
The truth underneath that truth is that every human being is born with God’s name already in their lips.
YHWH.
Every breath, every one, is a cry to the One who made us.
And when the final breath leaves—when the last YHWH has been breathed by a human body—we do not extinguish into nothingness.
We fall into God.
The One who was with us when we were not with her.
The One who was always already there.
So do not fear.
All of us are moving toward the light.