The other day, I noticed this sign on the bathroom wall at work. Theologians can find theology in just about anything and this sign is a great example. I’m going to talk about the sign in a minute, but first I want to talk about sin and punishment. There are two popular basic views when thinking about punishment. We can call them the active punishment view and the passive consequence view.
When it comes to hell, the active punishment view is probably the most common view. It is the view that says in hell God actively punishes individuals for their sins, meting out suffering upon them which is appropriate to and commensurate with the depth and gravity of their sin.
This view is so common in some circles that many people don’t even realize that there is another view, but there is. According to the passive consequence view, hell is not an external punishment imposed on human beings, but rather God withdrawing his protection and allowing them to experience the impact of their own choices in acquiescence to their own distorted desires. As C.S. Lewis famously quipped, the gates of hell are locked on the inside. That view of hell as a self-imposed exile fits closely with the nature of the punishment in hell as a passive consequence for our destructive actions.
There are several places in Scripture where we see examples of this kind of withdrawing action, though arguably the most famous occurs in Romans 1:
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.
Paul then says that men and women engaged in various sexually licentious acts and they experience “the due penalty for their error.” (1:27)
As you probably know, Romans 1:24-27 is arguably the most controversial, significant, and heavily debated biblical text when it comes to the question of the ethics of same-sex relationships. But my concern here is not to enter into that debate. I simply want to highlight that the passage portrays God withdrawing by “giving over” people to their self-destructive actions (whatever those actions may be) so they can then experience “the due penalty for their error.” Romans 1 describes that penalty in time but hell discusses a penalty in eternity. And on the passive consequence view, it is the penalty that results from God having given us over to our self-destructive trajectories.
This brings us at long last back to the bathroom sign. As I read it, I made myself laugh. You see, while one could (and indeed should) read the sign as a warning that a plugged drain is a result (read: the passive consequence) of putting paper towels in the toilet, one could also interpret the sign as describing an active punishment: that is, you better not put paper towels in the toilet or we’ll retaliate by plugging the drain!
The active punishment interpretation made me laugh not only because it is obviously what was not intended, but also because plugging the drain as retaliation for that act would seem to be a ham-fisted, unnecessary punitive response to a foolish act.
But that response to the active punishment view of those who put paper towels in the toilet also describes the response to many people who think of hell as God meting out various punishments to make people suffer in retaliation for their sinful actions. To those who are skeptical of the notion of God inflicting suffering on people in punitive response to the gravity of their sin, the passive consequence view of hell, one in which God simply withdraws and allows people to experience the consequences of their own sinful choices and the misery that results, is a far more plausible view.
