Some would answer with "yes" - followed by "and He is justified in doing so" or "because they earned it" or by the conclusion that God is unjust.
Others would answer with "no" - explained as "God doesn't send anyone to Hell" or "He doesn't send them, they get there on their own effort."
In the long history of detailed academic debate about this question, various nuanced positions have been developed, explained, attacked, and defended. These competing explanations, of course, are one source of the divisions which have given rise to competing churches, denominations, and schools of Christian theology.
In America, with its penchant for oversimplifying questions, one is familiar with seeing questionnaires which pose questions about religion. If one answers yes to the question "Christian?" then one is usually next confronted with the query, "Protestant or Catholic?" Although it is part of common knowledge that there are a great variety of Protestant churches, the simplification of the question to "Protestant or Catholic?" does justice to nobody, not even the Roman Catholics, who also know well that not all non-Catholic denominations can be lumped into one basket.
Merely because a Christian is not Roman Catholic is no reason to apply the label "Protestant" to her or him. On a global level, we are aware of Coptic Christians in Egypt and Syriac Christians in other Arabic countries, whose roots are more ancient than either the Roman Catholics or the Protestants. Even in Europe, the label 'Protestant' applies perhaps most accurately to some Calvinistic or 'Reformed' churches. Many serious and educated Lutherans respond to the question "Protestant or Catholic" with "neither," seeing themselves belonging to a third category. Theologian Joseph Stump writes:
Protestantism split into two great branches, the Lutheran and the Reformed. For Lutheranism the determining principle was faith; for the Reformed or Calvinistic branch it was the absolute sovereignty of God. This principle of Calvin and the rationalizing principle of Zwingli, who sought to banish all mystery and to make every doctrine completely intelligible, explain the course taken by Reformed theology.
The Zwinglian hyper-rationalist tendency to create a logical explanation for any bit of dogma leads some Reformed churches to intellectually contorted positions.
Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism agree in maintaining the Formal and Material Principles of the Reformation; namely, the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures, and the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The Lutheran Church is conservative and permits the retention of those traditions which are not contrary to the Scriptures; while the Reformed Church is inclined to reject all traditions which are not actually commanded in the Bible. Zwinglianism, being averse to the acceptance of mysteries and insisting on comprehending the doctrines of Scripture, seeks to explain away what it does not understand. Lutheranism, on the other hand, accepts the teachings of Holy Writ, even which it cannot comprehend them. Calvinism, basing all on the absolute sovereignty of God, lands in arbitrary divine predestination, and thus restricts the scope of the Gospel and efficacy of the Means of Grace. Reformed and Lutheran Protestantism differ more or less widely on the doctrine of the Word of God, Predestination, the Person of Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper.
Attempting to cure Reformed thought of its tortured postures, some rejected predestination, but landed in another odd position, having rejected the efficacy of pure grace along with predestination. The Arminians, then, arrive at a naked works-righteousness.
Some of the Reformed Churches have, however, rejected the Calvinistic position, e.g. the Arminians.
Pure grace, taken as a principle, is God's inclination, translated into God's actions, of giving to humans something better than what they deserve. Grace is a feature of God's personality. Humans are passive, God is active. If faith saves, that faith was inserted into the believer by the Holy Spirit, with no effort or cooperation on the part of the believer.
The Reformed Churches separate the working of God from the Means of Grace, and conceive of God as working directly, or as adding His working to the Means - a thing which He is supposed to do, however, only in the case of the elect. The Lutheran Church, on the other hand, regards the Means of Grace as never disjoined or separated from the power of God, but as always accompanied by it, and as the means employed by God for the accomplishment of His gracious purposes.
Calvin, by contrast, sees humans as passive, not in salvation, but in damnation. God alone is active in decreeing eternal torment for some humans.
Calvin says (Institutes, Book III, Ch. 21, Sec. 5): "Eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others. Every man, therefore, being created for the one or the other of these ends, we say he is predestined either to life or death." Calvin distinguishes (Book III, Ch. 24, Sec. 8) between the merely external call which God intends for the non-elect as "a savor of death and an occasion of heavier condemnation" and the special call through which "by inward illumination of His Spirit He causes the Word preached to sink into the hearts of the elect." In the case of the sons of Eli (Book III, Ch. 24, Sec. 14) Calvin declares that “though the Lord was able to soften their hearts, yet they were left in their obstinacy because His immutable decree had predestinated them to destruction.”
While Lutherans cling to God's grace, which drags them into Heaven despite themselves, Calvin sees God's wrath as damning others preemptively. The will of the human is bound in either case. For Lutherans, the will is incapable of free choice, or morally right choice, until it is justified and sanctified; the Lutheran will cannot get itself into Heaven, but it can always get itself into Hell. Calvin's will, like the Lutheran will, cannot get itself into Heaven, but unlike the Lutheran will, it can't even get itself into Hell.
The doctrine of grace is closely connected with that of the free will. The Greek Church regards grace as meant to assist human freedom, and not to create a new spiritual life. Pelagius taught that we can live a holy life by the mere power of our own determination to do so, without the aid of the supernatural grace of the Holy Spirit. Augustine conceived of grace as a new creative principle, but taught an absolute predestination and the irresistibility of grace, thus doing violence to the universality of God's grace on the one hand and to the moral nature of man on the other. Semi-pelagianism regarded grace as the power which assists man's natural powers. The scholastics taught that grace is a superadded gift, which simply completes man's nature. Protestantism returned to the doctrine of Augustine. But while Calvin carried out Augustine's doctrine to its logical consequences, Lutheranism rejected his doctrine of absolute predestination and of irresistible grace. According to the Lutheran conception man can by his natural powers resist the grace of God, but he can and does accept that grace only by means of powers which grace itself bestows upon him. Roman Catholicism regards grace as being infused into the soul and producing an ability to do good, so that, as a consequence, justification is regarded as a making righteous, and not as a declaring righteous.
The process is powered by God's grace from start to finish: even after justification and the beginning of sanctification, it is still divine gifts, not human efforts, which do all good in the life of the believer:
The old dogmaticians, following the example of Augustine, distinguished between the following kinds of grace: Prevenient grace, which offers the benevolence of God and the merit of Christ through the Word, removes the natural incapacity, and invites, excites, impels and urges to repentance; Preparing grace, which restrains the natural resistance, imbues the mind with the letter of the Gospel and bruises the will through the law, so that it is more and more disposed to accept salvation by faith; Operating grace, which confers the power of believing and kindles justifying faith (regeneration, justification, mystical union); Cooperating grace, which concurs with the justified man in the promotion of sanctification and good works; Conserving grace, by which faith and holiness are conserved and confirmed.
From the outside, grace acts upon us. Even on the inside, our efforts at sanctification turn out to be alien things planted inside us by God.
Quenstedt distinguishes between assisting grace and indwelling grace. The former works on man from the outside, and includes incipient, preparing, exciting, operating, and perfecting grace. The latter is the grace which dwells in the believer, and which cooperates with him in his sanctification.
Even the intellect is powered by grace. Our knowledge of God, of Scripture, of doctrine, of good, of evil, etc., is created in us, not by our own power.
The activity of the Holy Spirit is described by the later dogmaticians as constituting four offices: the elenchtical, to awaken a knowledge of sin; the didactic, to give a knowledge of the way of salvation; the pedagogical, to convert the sinner; the paracletic, to console and strengthen the converted.
While Lutheranism stresses that God's grace is for everyone, Calvinism and Arminianism see grace as only for some. Michael Horton writes:
Everyone who takes the Bible seriously must believe in election in some sense; it is a prominent theme throughout Scripture. The real difference (especially between Arminianism and Calvinism) emerges over whether the elect are chosen unto faith or in view of their faith. In order words, is election unconditional or conditional? Does God choose who will be saved, apart from their decision and effort, or does he choose those whom he knows will trust and obey? Another view, called corporate election, holds that God has chosen the church as a whole rather than electing individuals to belong to it.
It is again Zwingli's hyper-rational demand for logical explanations, in place of acceptance of mysteries, which drives these churches to the inevitable conclusion of a God who actively yet arbitrarily damns. Roger Olson writes:
Many scholars consider the real founder of the Reformed tradition to be Ulrich Zwingli, who wrote a lengthy essay entitled On Providence. This essay came to be influential on Calvin and, through him, on the whole Reformed tradition (although many Reformed people, especially the ones I have labeled "revisionists," have come to reject much of it). Zwingli defined providence as God's "rule over and direction of all things in the universe. For if anything were guided by its own power or insight, just so far would the wisdom and power of our Deity be deficient." Zwingli continued his exposition by denying that anything in the world is "contingent, fortuitous or accidental" because God alone is the "sole cause" over everything, such that all other so-called causes are merely "instruments of the divine working."
The Zwinglian taste for rational explanation is so strong that it swallows even the idea of a God who chose and carried out, not only the random damnation of numerous individual humans, but also the fall of the entire human race:
Calvin sums up his whole doctrine of God's providence thus: “No wind ever arises or increases except by God's express command.” In other places, he argues that God's providential governing of history cannot be expressed by means of permission; God does not merely permit anything but ordains it and brings it about most certainly. For Calvin, this is seen most clearly in the fall of Adam, which was foreordained by God.
Zwingli demands rational explanations above all else. Calvin takes Zwingli's desire for reason and adds its overriding central focus on God's sovereignty; the mix of the two lands Calvin in the situation of absolute predestination - the "double predestination" in which God not only predestines some to Heaven, but He also predestines others to Hell. Luther, by contrast, understands God's personality to be essentially gracious - and by 'grace' Luther understands the agape or 'love' of the New Testament. Luther tells us that Jesus paid the price for all humans and offers eternal life to all humans. The Holy Spirit works to bring all humans to Jesus, because they cannot bring themselves. If individual humans find their way into Hell, it will be because they used the free will, given to them by the Holy Spirit, to resist the Holy Spirit. To the question 'how?' in all of this, the Lutheran accepts the concept of mystery, the concept that human reason cannot answer all questions.
