Let me try to follow your logic and show that it leads us to nowhere. Genesis 4 please:
1. God could and did reach Cain.
2. He did not violate free will.
3. However, God did care, he is not evil, he does exist and he does love.
4. Nevertheless, Abel died the next day.
Having said this,
@CryptoLutheran might call point 4 abhorrent, because Cain seemed to have been stronger than God, he might say? I stay with it though...
By the time we've reached the story of Cain and Abel the world is already fallen. Adam and Eve have been exiled from Eden, and now must labor on the earth.
So I have no idea how the events described would lead to the idea that Cain overpowered God.
Rather, my issue is that when all is said and done, if the unrepentant were brought into God's presence in the Age to Come then somehow that would spoil that future age; as though God were somehow helpless against the corruptibility of the unrepentant.
But I must confess that I don't think the argument that "hell" is a separation from God to be compelling. After all, the Psalmist writes, "How can I escape from Your Presence? ... If I make my bed in She'ol, You are there". The idea that there could be a way to escape God's Presence does not comport with the biblical, and historically Christian, understanding of God's utter immanence--that He is everywhere and fills all things. We read, for example, the Apostle St. Paul say that we have one "God and Father of all, over all, through all, and in all" (Ephesians 4:6), or what the Apostle says elsewhere speaking of the consummation of all things that "God will be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28), or even in the Apocalypse where we read that light of God will fill all creation (Revelation 21:23).
That the Uncreated Light of God will illuminate all is one of the reasons why some in the ancient Church wondered if it were not possible that the point of Hell is purgative, rather than punitive. St. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, says that the fires of hell are a "purgatorial flame" comparing them to the refiner's fire that consumes the dross and in the process purifies silver and gold. Origen saw in the statement that God will be "all in all" to wonder how this could be unless, truly, in the end, there is a full and total restoration of all things. Now, I'm not arguing in the positive for ultimate reconciliation/universalism. I'm merely offering some counter-ideas here.
One thing to be mindful of is that in the West we have a long tradition of emphasizing judicial language when talking about the overarching relationships between God, creation, sin, salvation, etc. Thus the framework usually boils down to speaking about hell as a form of justice against the lawless. We violated the law, we are condemned by the law, and without pardon the law sentences us to hell. I'm not saying the entirety of that framework is wrong, but it is doubtlessly heavy-handed and lacking much in the nuance and other forms of language which not only Scripture, but Christianity on the whole, has used. Hence the value of the Eastern tradition. The reason why sin is a problem isn't chiefly in that it is a violation of legal code, but that it interrupts the communion which man has with God; righteousness is less about a legal system but being in relationship and communion with God. The deprivation of righteousness by sin has estranged us from God, and thus like branch cut off from the root it weakens, withers, dies. Salvation becomes less about addressing a cosmically large legal problem, and instead about restoring the communion between God and man, revivifying human beings, healing the wound, the balm of salvation healing what is wounded and sick, mending what is broken, and restoring what was broken. This is the language St. Paul uses when talking about Christ as the second Adam; that where Adam brought death, Christ brings life;
what was broken in Adam is healed in Christ.
Note, again, I'm not arguing against judicial language. As a Lutheran that judicial language is baked into Lutheran theology, and I believe it is biblical. But I think we miss the bigger picture when we leave it just like that, we are missing the big picture ways in which God, by the Incarnation, is restoring, healing, reconciling, and mending the world.
And that can then get us back to the idea of hell. Since the whole paradigm, even of this thread itself, is by seeking to find the best argument by which to say, "Hell is just and it is about justice". Perhaps that is, itself, the completely wrong way to even think about the subject. Especially since it seems like there are bigger questions that should be asked, such as, "What is hell?" I mean that in the bigger sense too, what is hell in the context of the over-arching narrative of Redemption as we encounter it in Scripture, and more importantly, as it is alive to us through the Gospel and the reality of Jesus Christ Himself?
What
is hell?
-CryptoLutheran
