The following is an excerpt from my book LIVE! (Meditations and prayers on 22 Big Questions!

In several Bible colleges I have asked the students to answer, without too much time to think, this question: ‘Does God love the devil?’ Invariably the responses are equally divided between ‘Yes’ ‘No’ and ‘Don’t know.’

Of course, God is love. There is no situation where he cannot be loving. Our dilemma is to relate his love to his justice.

Here’s a pot pourri of quotes on this theme. You decide!

I never heard my father threaten sinners, whose who could not stop, though he knew God’s laws commanded them to stop. He knew the flesh was for many stronger than the fear of hell. But he never warned those who could not stop that they would go to hell. He never reminded them that there was no escape from, or amelioration of, the torments of hell… I think he liked to believe, as I also like to believe, that God is more forgiving than men, certainly more forgiving than women, indeed that God ought to forgive everyone.

Manning Clark, The Puzzles of Childhood, Ringwood, Australia: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 40.

Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but that person (though others may help), and the person may refuse. I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully ‘All will be saved’. But my reason retorts, ‘Without their will or with it?’ If I say ‘without their will’ I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say ‘With their will’, my reason replies ‘How if they will not give in?’

C.S.Lewis, The Problem of Pain, London: Fontana, 1957, pp. 106-107.

I believe in a literal Hell – not a metaphoric Hell, but a literal place. The scriptures aren’t clear where that is, but it is a place where God is not. That’s what makes Hell hell. And the Devil is a literal person – the Darth Vader of scripture. Hell will not be lined with TV sets, there’ll be no bars to go to and have a drink with your mates, no dope and no orgies. It will be a place of loneliness, not a nice place.

Tom Rawls, Assembly of God pastor, quoted in The Bulletin, ‘Hell’, May 24, 1988, p. 43.

Hell, whatever else it means, is separation from God. If you are out of Christ and away from God now, in many ways you are in hell; for hell is separation from God. Now extend your sense of guilt, your frustration, your self-inflicted burdens into eternity – and that is hell. In eternity, the gulf between you and God will widen, the darkness will become more intense and the associations more repugnant.

Billy Graham, ‘Hell’, Hour of Decision broadcast, 1957, p. 10.

As a child, Robert Ingersoll heard a preacher proclaim the doctrine that God subjects sinners to unending torment in hell. Ingersoll decided that if God was like that, then he hated Him. Later he wrote of his belief that it ‘makes [humans] eternal victims and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror… Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go.’

Cited in Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1983, p.300.

Hell is a terrible possibility for a human being who fully resists God’s will… I am not sure anyone is in hell… For all we know even people at odds with God’s will could ‘change lanes’ in their final moments of consciousness.

Father Walbert Buhlmann, Roman Catholic Swiss theologian, in an interview with The Age, Melbourne, 22 August, 1986, page unknown.

Neither the Hindu concept of reincarnation nor the Western suggestion that unbelievers will be given a second chance to believe or a way to be purified after death has any biblical foundation… Passage after passage in the Bible that speaks of ultimate hope also warns of final judgment… John 5:28-29 speaks of the ‘resurrection of damnation’. John 3:16, the familiar Sunday school memory verse that tells how much God loved the world, warns about ‘perishing’ – being eternally lost… But universalism, based on human speculation, sentiment, and hope, is not the last word. Scripture tells us something more reliable: ‘God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance’ (2 Peter 3:9).

Harold O.J.Brown, ‘Will Everyone Be Saved?’ Pastoral Renewal, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Volume 11 No. 11, June 1987, p. 15.

For there to be joy, there has to be freedom. If there is a basis for hell, it is right here – not in God’s dissatisfaction with humankind, but in our dissatisfaction with him and the shape of the gift of existence he is giving us. Hell is a human and not a Divine creation… The biblical witness from the beginning to the end is that it is not his will that any should perish, but that all come to his joy… The image of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem is far closer to the Divine reaction to sin than anger or torture…

None of the many images of hell in the Bible were meant to be literal descriptions of what actually happens in the life beyond… The point is that the biblical writers used many different images and symbols to declare one thing – that it is possible for any one of us to miss the whole point for which we were created…

This is an eternal punishment, but not an eternal punishing. No humane person… would hold one in existence and torture that one for no purpose. Certainly God would not do such a thing…

But even a God cannot do it all by himself. The response of joy is the part I play out of my freedom, and if I will not finally affirm life and the One who generously gives it, he cannot make me do so.

John Claypool, ‘Divine Tenacity and Human Freedom’, unpublished sermon preached at Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, Mississippi, September 14, 1980.

In one thing I would go beyond strict orthodoxy – I am a convinced universalist. I believe in the end all will be gathered into the love of God. In the early days Origen… believed that some would have to go to heaven via hell… He did not believe in eternal punishment, but he did see the possibility of eternal penalty.

Jesus said, ‘When I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all to myself’ (John 12:32). Paul writes: ‘God has consigned all to disobedience that he may have mercy on all’ (Romans 11:32). ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinthians 15:28)… Matthew 25:46 says the rejected go away to eternal punishment and the righteous to eternal life. The Greek word for punishment is kolasis… [which] originally meant the pruning of trees to make them grow better. It is never used of anything but remedial punishment. The word for eternal is aionios, which cannot be used properly of anyone but God. Eternal punishment is then literally that kind of remedial punishment which it befits God to give and which only God can give…

I believe it is impossible to set limits to the grace of God… I believe that the grace of God is as wide as the universe. [And] I believe in the ultimate and complete triumph of God, when all things will be subject to him, and when God will be everything to everyone (1 Corinthians 15:24-28).

William Barclay, Testament of Faith, Mowbrays, pp. 58 – 60.

Not famine, not pestilence, not war will bring back seriousness. It is not until the eternal punishments of hell regain their reality that [humans] will turn serious.

Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in Time, January 27, 1961, p.50.

At that moment [Jesus’ resurrection after his ‘descent into hell’] a kingdom has appeared for all in the midst of hell, a kingdom of peace and joy and laughter. Hell is broken and mastered in Jesus. No longer is it horror without end, for he is the beginning of the end of all horrors. The sufferings of hell are no longer eternal nor are they the final word. Death has been triumphantly destroyed. ‘Where, death, is your sting?’ are the words Paul uses… to taunt death. Hell is open. Man and woman are free to pass through it. And this is not true only of this hell but of all hells on earth… the glimmer of dawn has begun to break above the fields of death and the places of murder, and also above the little hells of everyday life.

Jurgen Moltmann, in Gerhard Rein et. al., A New Look at the Apostles’ Creed, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969, p.41.

When confronted with God’s revelation of the awesome reality of hell, we cannot help sharing the feelings expressed by Teilhard de Chardin: ‘Of the mysteries which we have to believe, O Lord, there is none, without a doubt, which so affronts our human views as that of damnation. And the more human we become… the most lost we feel at the thought of hell… You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to hold with absolute certainty that any single person has been damned…’ To put the mystery precisely, we must believe two doctrines: (1) the almighty power of God who wants all people to be saved, and (2) the possibility of eternal perdition for those living and dying without love and friendship with God. We must accept these two doctrines without fully understanding how they can be reconciled.

Rev. Leo Watt O.F.M., Hell: A Modern Approach, Melbourne: A.C.T.S. Publications, Sept. 10, 1967, pp. 27,28.