toothless hell, part 1

Gummy devil

When I was a teenager, I went into my bedroom one day with the intention of sitting on my bed with a bible and a notebook and figuring out what I really believed about hell.  It was a matter that I was supposed to have an opinion on, given that I was a young and rabid evangelical.  But I had started to learn that the doctrine was dangerous; it had teeth, and no matter how you handled it, you were liable to get bit.

History and fiction, as you know, overflow with characters who at some crucial juncture of life go into caves, bathtubs, prison cells, unused ovens, barrels, telephone boxes and other enclosures and come out different creatures.  The change isn’t always for the better; humans are versatile, and can just as readily enter a chrysalis a butterfly and emerge a caterpillar as do it the other way round.  Anyway, you are aware of the phenomenon - and you will agree that it is more dramatic to imagine someone going into a cave for a spell and coming out a new (probably thinner) person, than to imagine someone changing gradually over the course of some years spent in and around the Reading area.  Changes in caves trump changes in Caversham.  That is why I am tempted to say that I went into my bedroom that day, shut my door, and came out in time for dinner in possession of a fully-orbed belief.  It is sort of the truth; and it is also the opposite of the case.

Now, I really did go into my bedroom one day with the intention of deciding what I would believe in.  But it would be a lie – though a mildly picturesque one – to say that I emerged having accomplished that goal.  No, I went into my room and what happened was this: I found my beliefs about hell both unbelievable and impossible to discard.  I found that could not believe in hell in any form without leaving my room not so much transfigured as disfigured.  Nor could I have discarded the doctrine, I realised – for I found (to my horror) that I did not want to discard it.  In other words, I went into my cave of contemplation and found I could not, figuratively speaking, leave it at all, either changed or unchanged; I could only take it with me, perhaps carrying it like a tortoise-shell.  The monster I met in my room that day was, I realised, also waiting outside the door; indeed, it was everywhere.

In my last two posts (1, 2), I described for you the horns of the dilemma I found myself facing regarding the doctrine of hell.  It is a dilemma whose horns seemed to have grown sharper the longer I’ve stared at it.  I wanted to write a third post looking at ways to grab the horns and pull the doctrine safely to the ground; but the post was massive, and dragged me and at least one reader to the ground...  So at the risk of dragging this series about hell on forever (as it were), I’ve broken it up.  In this post, I want to briefly outline the first thing that I think we should believe about hell.  It’s an old point, but I think it’s true.  It’s this: the doctrine of hell is the dreadful but necessary corollary of the most beautiful and positive doctrines of Christianity.  It is their shadow.

Let’s look once more at the first horn of the hell-dilemma that I first faced as a young and rabid evangelical.  The first horn is this: if I accepted the Standard Evangelical Doctrine of hell, as taught by my church, I would face a moral duty too great to bear. 

The Standard Doctrine of hell says that those who don’t respond to the gospel and accept Christ as saviour in this lifetime don’t get a second chance after death, but spend eternity in torment, with no chance of reprieve.  And given that, as Paul points out to the Romans, nobody can respond to the gospel message if they haven’t heard it, and given that making sure they’ve heard it is our job, it followed I was part of what stood between the unsaved of the earth and the pit of hell.  The enormity of the peril faced by the ‘unsaved’ meant that nothing I could do at any given time would be more important than sharing the gospel.  If I claimed to accept the Standard Doctrine of hell, I would be duty-bound to spend every moment of my life evangelising.

Twenty years later, I haven’t changed my mind on this.  If I claim to believe the Standard Doctrine as outlined above, then there is nothing I could be doing at this moment that would be more important than evangelising.  Given that I’m not evangelising right now, you can safely assume that one of the following is the case:

1.      I do accept the Standard Doctrine of hell, and I know about my moral duty to evangelise, but have decided to do other things with my time, like write this, watch TV, and eat scotch eggs.  This might not play out too well on Judgement Day, when my unspeakable selfishness is cited as proof that I did not have the love of God in me.

2.      I think I accept the Standard Doctrine of hell, but in fact I don’t really believe it.  So I don’t fully register my moral duty.  The problem with this is that if I think I accept the doctrine of hell but really don’t, then it’s also probable that although I think I accept the gospel, I really don’t.  Again: Judgement Day problems.

3.      I have rejected the Standard Doctrine of hell that my mainstream evangelical church taught me.

The answer is 3.  What’s more, I think that everyone should reject the standard form of this doctrine.  It’s too big to accept.

So I scouted for alternatives to the doctrine.

The JWs said that the unsaved would be annihilated.  The universalists said that everyone would go to heaven eventually.  Sergei Bulgakov suggested that the line dividing the sheep of the parable from the goats of the parable is not a line that divides one set of humans from another, but a line that cuts across each person, cleaving the saved portion of every person from the damned.  Some made the claim, based on writings of the apostle Peter, that Christ continues to preach the gospel to humans after their judgement and even after their consignment to hell.  Some Orthodox theologians and at least one great Catholic mystic informed me that hell is the love of God, which burns those who reject it – and presumably, although this burning love endures forever, the burning ceases to be painful the moment a sinner accepts it. 

Then there was Anglican-priest-turned-Taoist Alan Watts’s zany but well-argued theory that the damned, suffering God’s eternal punishment but being enlightened as to its infinite rectitude, will find themselves compelled to praise God for their damnation, and will experience it as bliss.  And there is Mother Julian, the most famous of Norwich’s no doubt numerous anchoresses, to whom God had promised that ‘a deed will be done’ that would, in the end, mean that ‘all will be well’. 

Like Mother Julian, I could not bring myself to turn any of these weird vaporous ideas into dogmas.  Yes, I was open to the idea that, even if hell is the inevitable fate of most humans, some ‘deed’ might be done which, rooted in and proceeding from the accomplishments of Jesus, would sort everything out.  But although I hovered at the threshold of turning this possibility into a theology, thereby exchanging the Standard Doctrine for some form of Hell Lite - some formalised alternative I would have to spend my life defending - I couldn’t go any further.  

Why did I feel the need to take hell seriously?  I think I sensed that if I took eternal hell out of the picture, I’d end up throwing away positive elements of the biblical message.  And if I did that, I’d might as well throw away the whole message and turn Taoist.  For Christianity tells an outrageous story: of a God who created us in his image, forming eternal persons with freedoms and wills and dreadful dignity.  A God who wants us to go freely into paradise.  A God who wants to remake us, because we are not constitutionally adapted to dwell in the paradise he has prepared for us, but who grants us the freedom to cling to our old selves, perhaps indefinitely, if that’s what we want.  As I’ll suggest in the next post, it’s not inconceivable that a person might want to cling eternally to existence even in hell; the doctrine of eternal hell simply affirms that God never snatches away a human’s awful and wonderful power of choice.  It affirms that God did not make us to be toys, but persons.

Christianity teaches that God can and will make us fit for heaven if we relinquish our old selves and accept the gift of a new self, a new spirit grafted onto the old flesh.  Christianity proposes a divine procedure by which the mortal self is phased out and the heavenly self allowed to grow, until, in the next aeon, we will find ourselves entirely new beings, though marvellously the same.  I can’t imagine not wanting to accept the offer of heaven.  But here is the crucial thing: if I was not free to refuse it, then it would not be a real offer at all, and I would not be an autonomous person but a person-shaped automaton. 

Perhaps it is really unthinkable that anyone will, in actuality, go to hell.  But if you drop the possibility of hell because it's outrageous, you're on an irresistibly slippery slope to a mechanistic view of God’s universe.  Hell is the hideous and glorious denial that we are parts of a machine.  By raising the possibility that humans might choose what no human would choose, the doctrine of hell raises the banner of freedom to unthinkable heights.

The Christian God is one whose will cannot ultimately be thwarted, and who will one day make all things new - yet who gave us the autonomy to say no to him.  Such a mad, quizzical scheme – not a system, like the Buddhist wheel of Samsara, but a story (as Chesterton put it) - must have a dark flip-side; its elements are too volatile for there not to be at least a risk of combustion.  There must exist the real, if unspeakable, possibility of our final refusal of heaven, the possibility that when the gates of that kingdom for which we were all created are thrown open, some will still be saying no.   The possibility of wanting to cling to our old selves and refuse both renewal and extinction.  For the Christian God is someone who will one day make things perfect whether we’re ready or not; ours is not a deity who we can hold to ransom.

This, then, is the first, foundational thing that I think evangelicals ought to believe about hell: even if (as per the vision that God granted Mother Julian) hell will ultimately be empty, God would have us enter his heaven freely; and so the possibility of perdition must be real.

Next in this rather morbid series: Is hell forever?