Chris Date continues our dialogue on the duration of hell by responding to Jerry Shepherd's initial post, which argued for eternal conscious torment. 

My thanks to Preston Sprinkle for inviting me to participate in this exchange with Chris Date. And also my thanks to Chris for his expressed desire, which is mine as well, to have a very amicable discussion. This should actually not be hard, inasmuch as I have already gotten to know the heart of my brother through our communications the past few days. And besides, he’s Reformed. How could we not get along?!

The following post is written by my friend Joshua Ryan Butler and it's the second of three that he'll write this week. (His first one is HERE.)  Josh has written a killer book titled The Skeletons in God's Closet: The Mercy of Hell, the Surprise of Judgment, and the Hope of Holy War. In this second blog, Josh looks at God's judgment through a different lens.

Many people fear hell is a skeleton in God’s closet, an underground torture chamber that makes God look like a sadistic torturer. But I’ve found many people have a caricature of what’s actually happening in the biblical story.

We wrapped up the previous post with a question: “What role do works play in our future justification?” We’ll get to that question below, but first, let’s throw the whole Piper/Wright debate on the table.