Hell: Created for Devil and His Angels

The phrase, hell was created for Satan/Lucifer and his fallen angels, is one that I often hear when I raise objections about the injustice of eternal punishment. The idea comes from passages like Matt 25:41 which says that hell was "prepared for the devil and his angels". Ignoring the question of the existence of the Christian god or the hell he supposedly created, I have asked but yet to hear an explanation as to why that claim would matter if it were true. Eternal punishment is still unjust even if the torture chamber was created for another purpose. And on top of that, suggesting that the Christian god created a place for one use, but has decided to re-purpose it for something else has uncomfortable theological/doctrinal implications for Christian orthodoxy.

Did Yahweh create hell unaware that he was going to use it to torture human beings? The statement that hell was created for that purpose seems to suggest that the use for punishing non-believers was

an afterthought. This implies a change in Yahweh's thinking which doesn't sit well with orthodox theology which holds that Yahweh is unchanging. Or another possible meaning might be that Yahweh created hell for the devil and his angels, and that mankind was added to the list of occupants after "the fall". Perhaps it wasn't a change of intention, but more like humans, by choosing to sin, pushed the door to hell open themselves. The problem with this explanation is that it implies that Yahweh didn't have the foreknowledge to anticipate "the fall". Was he surprised that Adam and Eve sinned?

And even if a believer is willing to say that Yahweh did change his mind and that it wasn't his intention, that does little to correct the problem of torturing people for eternity. If Yahweh didn't intend for it to be that way, what prevents him from stopping it all together? As I pointed out in this previous post Yahweh's Conflicting Desires, Yahweh seems to both desire to burn people for eternity, and to not want to do this. If he's omnipotent, there shouldn't be anything that could oppose his will. He must either approve of using hell to torture people forever, or there is some other power or agent to which Yahweh is subject.

So why do people offer this explanation as a counter to criticisms of hell. I suspect this statement is something that pastors have uttered when talking about hell. In a church setting, surrounded by friends and family and fellow believers, all of whom have a vested interest in preserving their Christian beliefs, people are not inclined to question an apologetic answer offered by the pastor. The subtle message seems to be that Yahweh didn't want to use hell for humans. His intention was to punish his rebellious angels. In a group setting like that, questioning is often discouraged and the problems this idea poses for their theology probably doesn't occur to them. People rely on intuitions and a sense that something is true because it fits with what they already believe. I think there is probably an intuitive sense that this solves the problem of hell as a punishment for people; that somehow if Yahweh created hell to punish Satan, that torturing people by burning them for eternity wasn't what he wanted. See? He's nice. He accidentally sentences the majority of mankind to eternal torture.