Dan Barker on The problem of hell
Barker, a former evangelical preacher, argues that hell is the clearest example of how the Christian God fails ordinary standards of justice.
Dan Barker spent nineteen years as an evangelical minister before deconverting, and his treatment of hell carries the specificity of someone who once preached the doctrine. In Godless (2008) and in innumerable debates for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, he argues that the problem of hell was a significant step in his own loss of faith: the more seriously he took the doctrine, the less it cohered with the loving God he had been taught to preach.
Barker's central objection is proportionality. No finite wrong, committed by a finite creature over a finite lifetime, can reasonably be punished by infinite suffering. He argues that if a human court handed down such a sentence, Christians would rightly describe the judge as insane or evil — and that the same moral reasoning ought to apply when the judge is described as God. Relocating the injustice to a supernatural context does not neutralise it.
He is also pointed about the evangelistic use of hell. As a former preacher, Barker describes hell as the single most effective rhetorical lever in revival-style Christianity: not persuasion, not evidence, but fear. He treats this as telling — a religion that depends on threat to retain adherents is displaying something important about the quality of its case.
“The doctrine of hell is the ultimate failure of Christian theology. You cannot threaten people with eternal torture and then describe the threatener as love itself.”