In an age of over-publication filled with eye-grabbing book covers and intriguing yet vacuous book titles, Paul Dirk’s Is There Anything Good About Hell? enters the scene with honest simplicity. One does not need to guess at what the book is about. So, how does Dirks do in answering the question?

As you probably guessed, he answers the question which the title poses in the affirmative. There are indeed some things that are good about hell. The book is divided into ten chapters with the first four being groundwork for the last six. In the first four chapters, Dirks summarizes the traditional Christian doctrine of hell (ch. 1) and highlights various facets of it that make most people uncomfortable. Regarding this discomfort, Dirks discusses the revulsion humans have to the concept of eternal punishment (ch. 2), the legal-intellectual challenges posed by eternal retribution (ch. 3), and the difficulty in understanding why a good God would allow people who deserve hell into heaven (ch. 4).

It is not until the fifth chapter that Dirks begins to address the question at hand. In it, Dirks gives the first of six reasons why hell is a good thing, which will be enumerated hereafter. First, “hell is good because it is fearful; without the fear the masses go merrily to it” (p. 87). That is, hell prompts people to repent and experience heaven (ch. 5). Second, as punishment for harming other humans, hell “communicates to the victims of evil that their lives matter” (p. 102; ch. 6). Third, hell also communicates that God loves goodness (or, in Dirk’s words, “His love for love” p. 120) because without it, he would merely wink at the sin which tears apart the goodness of his creation (ch. 7). Fourth, sins against an infinite Being (i.e., God) justly deserve infinite punishment (appealing to Anselm’s argument in Cur Deus Homo). This parity of sin and punishment is good in eternity just like it is in our human courtrooms (ch. 8). Fifth, though hell will “send shivers up our spines [it will also] cause us to glorify the power of the King of kings” (p. 163). That is, hell glorifies God (ch. 9). Sixth, and finally, Dirks demonstrates that hell will be ultimate vindication not just for God, but for His people as well (ch. 10).

Dirks’s work is very good. Though he says that his aim “is not to defend hell” but is rather to “explore and explain the ‘good’ of hell” (p. x), it functions very well as a defense of the traditional doctrine of hell by refuting the oft-repeated claim that hell is gratuitous. This book is also commendable as a theological treatise on the doctrine of hell even for those (presumably very few) who do not have emotional or theological problems with this topic. Dirks makes cogent and thoroughly biblical arguments in defense of the traditional doctrine of hell. Each argument is rooted in Scripture and very well researched. Dirks ostensibly operates from a Reformed perspective while appealing to the church fathers as well. Admittedly, Dirks is not providing anything “that has not been previously argued by the likes of Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Brooks, Jonathan Edwards, and W. T. Shedd” (p. xi). What he does offer, however, is a compendium of some of the best articulations of hell that have been offered in the history of the church. For that, we should be thankful.

There is not much to gripe about in this work. I am personally not persuaded by the Eternal Subordination of the Son (ESS or EFS) and do not think Dirk’s use of the theory helps make his case (pp. 192–93). Perhaps Dirks is only speaking of Christ’s incarnational subordination (a point on which all Reformed Christians agree) but this is not clear, especially as he prefaces his remarks by speaking of the Father’s “primacy within the Godhead” (p. 192, emphasis mine). This is related to a second point. Dirks could make his points a little more economically. It’s not clear to me, for example, that we need to discuss Jesus’s subordination to the Father in order to understand that God will reign over hell and vindicate his people (ch. 10). Some chapters in the book could be trimmed or even combined (chs. 6–7 as well as chs. 9–10 could conceivably be combined for a punchier final product). One might like to see a discussion about how Dirks’s point in the last chapter (that the eternal punishment of unbelievers is actually a good thing) squares with our (fallible) perception of many unbelievers as “good people.” Dirks discusses this point at the beginning of the book in chapter 3 (p. 45), but there are only a few paragraphs dedicated to the topic and his comments are not tied to the thesis of the last chapter.

These quibbles aside, it should be noted that Dirks has provided a gift to the church by articulating its doctrine of hell in a readable, digestible, and logical way, to the glory of God.

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