Hell

The doctrine of hell repulses me. It ought to repulse anyone who has half a conscience. After all, some rather unsympathetic types in this world support putting human beings to death for certain crimes, but almost no one would support the idea of relentlessly and unceasingly torturing an individual human being for years and years on end. Most people wouldn't wish that on even Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden. But hell, it is taught, is precisely this torment except that it never ends.

Why, then, does a good God cast people into hell? How does this fit with the picture of a loving, patient, redeeming God who is even willing to suffer for the sake of his children? I would like to try to answer that question briefly -- and to offer the only satisfactory account of hell that I can accept.

1) The metaphors used in the Scriptures to describe hell are exactly that -- metaphors. I do not think we can literally believe in a "lake of fire." These were images used by the authors of the Bible to poetically teach us about the nature of hell; it is a place of suffering. That is, You don't want to go there! Moving beyond this moral exhortation into physically mapping out the contours of hell goes beyond the agenda of Scripture.

2) Hell is rooted in the doctrine of free will. If we believe that free, autonomous moral agents can truly make a choice between good and evil, then hell must be a possibility. In other words, hell is that place where free humans perpetually say "no" to good and God and perpetually say "yes" to their own evil impulses. God allows us the freedom here on earth to choose the way of the cross and self-sacrificial love or to choose to make ourselves God. Hell is that place where each individual is his/her own God and the result of this is chaos and an inability to relate to one another in peace. For many, hell begins before death.

3) C. S. Lewis paints this picture. Imagine a man who benefits from the suffering of others for the duration of his life. He revels in his power, feels no sympathy for those he has ruined in order to attain it, and mocks standard moral norms as being merely the 'opiate of the masses.' Sudanese President Bashir comes to mind. In a world in which a loving and just God wishes to redeem all of creation in such a way that man, nature, and God exist in perfect harmony with one another such a tyrant like Bashir simply cannot continue to be what he is and "fit" in heaven. Either he must change to conform to the rules of heaven or be an outcast. For such a man, "what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him? Can you really desire that such a man remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness -- should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side?" And so the decision is his. He can change his ways ("repent") and become compatible with heaven or remain as he is and be incompatible with heaven. Which leads me to my next (and maybe most controversial) point...

4) Ultimately God does not cast people into hell. Rather, God says to individuals after years and years of rebellion, "So be it. I will give you what you want. You want to be your own God. I will give you a place where you can be your own God." To paraphrase my favorite book (The Great Divorce), heaven is where we say to God "Thy will be done" and hell is where God says to us "Thy will be done." Thus, in one sense God DOES cast people into hell because He gives the free moral agents what they have been asking for all along. But in another sense, people choose to send themselves to hell.

5) But, someone might object, "Why would anyone choose to go to hell?" To this I answer: "People do it all the time right in front of our eyes." People choose to fly into a rage at their spouse even though they know this will make them into hellish creatures. People choose to medicate their ills with heroine even though they know it will eventually destroy them. People choose to harbor hatred and envy in their hearts for others even though they know that it is incompatible with the law of love. In short, people choose evil over good because there is an element of pleasure involved. If evil weren't fun, no one would ever do it. And so hell is a place where there will be a slight amount of pleasure. But it will be a pathetic, weak, fleeting pleasure that does not satisfy. Heaven, of course, is the opposite -- it offers full, robust, exhilarating pleasure, a pleasure of intimacy with the Trinity which Christians have always called "joy." It is the difference between the young man who looks at porn for a brief moment of sexual ecstasy and the young man who drinks of the depths and wonders of love making with a partner who intimately knows him. Both offer a sort of pleasure, but one will last and the other is a thin veneer of pleasure which will soon lose its appeal.

6) My understanding of hell is contingent upon my understanding of heaven. I believe heaven is this: perfect, harmonious relationship between the Creator and all that he has created. As anyone who has ever been in a deep relationship of any kind knows, relating requires a certain amount of selflessness. Peace and harmony cannot exist otherwise. This is written into the eternal laws of the universe. Thus, if we are all to become inhabitants of a land of perfect harmony, then we must conform to the mold of selflessness. Hell, on the other hand, is a place where relationship becomes impossible because each individual folds in upon themselves. In his book Flatlanders, Sir Edwin Abbot describes a "point" which believes that itself is all that exists. It does not comprehend relationship. This is the ultimate destiny of those who refuse to relate -- they will be left alone, completely and utterly alone forever.

Does this view of hell satisfy me? No, not entirely. I still find the doctrine of hell detestable. But it does, at least in my mind, preserve the goodness and justice of God. I picture a God who woos and pursues humans unceasingly, but ultimately will not force himself on anyone. Hell is, in my mind, a fact that must exist due to the very nature of free will. Humans have fashioned hell for themselves and the "doors of hell are locked from the inside."