How can a loving God send people to hell?
The Straight Answer
Most serious Christian thinking frames hell less as God actively throwing someone in, and more as the natural, final result of a person permanently rejecting the only source of life and love there is.
Love And Justice Together
A God who is only loving and never just would have to overlook real evil forever, which most people would recognize as a failure of love toward the victims of that evil, not an act of love.
God's Own Stated Preference
2 Peter 3:9 says God is not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
Three Real Views, Not Equally Held
Eternal conscious separation is the majority, historic position across nearly all of Christian history. Matthew 25:46 uses the same Greek word for eternal to describe both eternal life and eternal punishment in one sentence. Annihilationism, the idea that the unsaved are ultimately destroyed rather than consciously suffering forever, is a real minority position held by some serious evangelical scholars including John Stott. Christian universalism, that everyone is eventually reconciled to God, is a smaller minority view still, historically treated with real suspicion by mainstream orthodoxy.
Word Study
Say it: ai-OH-nee-os
Translated eternal in Matthew 25:46, used for both destinies in the same verse. Most of the disagreement above comes down to how this one word should be read, not a disagreement about different verses entirely.
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