It would also have been exceedingly hard for me not to notice how viciously vindictive the creator of such a hell would have had to be to have devised so exquisitely malicious a form of torture and then to have made it eternal, and how unjust in condemning men and women to unending torment for the “sin” of not knowing him even though he had never revealed himself to them, or for some formally imputed guilt supposedly attaching to them on account of some distant ancestor’s transgression.
There is the sum total of the universalist’s argument and it is built on a flawed understanding of hell. Hell is not the punishment for rejecting Christ. Hell is the fulfillment of a requirement of justice demanded by a God who loves those upon which the injustice was imposed. If you are loved of God and someone commits an injustice against you in which you cry out to God for justice isn’t a good and loving God required to impose that justice? Hell is the default end because we have all committed injustice upon that which a good and just God loves. Mercy is that there is any way to escape at all.
