Why I believe in hell (and you do, too)

Tightrope

In my previous post, which was hideously long, I said that I didn’t believe the standard evangelical doctrine of hell, because it is impossible to believe it, even if you intellectually accept it.  In this freakishly long post I’m going to suggest that my most basic Christian beliefs entail a doctrine of hell that looks a lot like the standard evangelical version I’ve just called impossible to believe.  In other words, it’s impossible for me to believe in hell, and it’s impossible for me not to.  In the next post, which will be shortish (!), I’ll suggest some middling solutions.

I’m not dogmatic about any of what I’m about to write.  Criticise freely!  Wildly!  Savagely!

One day when I was a teenager I went to my room intent on deciding whether or not to believe in hell.  I wanted to figure out if I believed that all people on earth were presently wobbling on a tightrope suspended over the flaming chasm of hades.  Actually, the specific question that I wanted to answer was whether I believed that my mother, currently downstairs telling off the cat for tripping her up, was presently wobbling on a tightrope suspended over the flaming chasm of hades.  And that, though an astronomically smaller question, is an infinitely more pressing question.

I stared at this question, and for a brief morsel of time I actually took seriously the possibility that the great saints and theologians were right, that the hardest reading of the bible was the correct one, and that my mother was a rebel who spent her every minute in danger of being called to justice and sentenced to eternal punishment.  My own mother!  I took seriously the possibility that, were she (heaven forbid) to meet her end while I sat in my room, possibly in an accident involving the cat, she would never again have an opportunity to respond to the message of salvation that I had not bothered to share with her.  And I saw that I had never come remotely close to taking the possibility seriously before.

I thought of how, if I really did allow myself to believe this horrible doctrine, I would have to race downstairs and force my own mother to convert to a religion that she already felt had done me no good.  The unspeakably awful thing is, even if I decided to believe in hell, I didn’t want to do it.  I could not think what on earth I might say to persuade my mother to embrace salvation.  It was a failure of imagination – I could not imagine my mother ever standing in a church, or saying grace at mealtimes, or doing anything approximating worship.  To imagine my mother in church was to imagine a person who was not my mother, a person who had nothing in common with her.  A person she would go out of her way to avoid at a party.

The thing is, while I hated the idea of hell, this least favourite doctrine flowed logically from some of my favourite doctrines.  Or perhaps I might say, to employ a new metaphor, that the doctrine of hell was one of the fruits of a good tree, and so, as a matter of horticultural if not theological necessity, it could not itself be bad.

Two good foundational Christian ideas would have been enough to establish the rightness of the doctrine of hell in the back of my mind.  One was the idea that God made us in his image.  The other was that God made us to be eternally happy.  I would like to take those ideas in turn.

As a child I was seldom scared of things that went bump in the night, for the only thing that went bump in the night in our house was Rufus, our dog, clumsy, who would wander over to his water bowl in the dark and trip over it.  My night terrors, even at an early age, were metaphysical – and probably very common, although I have never plucked up the courage to ask anyone if they shared my fears.  In particular, I feared perpetual existence.

The idea that I would exist for eternity seemed monstrous to me.  There is no prison quite as claustrophobic as infinity.  I am tempted to try to explain or rationalise this fear but I recoil from the task.  Let’s just say that if you have felt this fear, you will understand what I am talking about.  If you haven’t, then eternality will probably strike you as an odd thing to be spooked by.  ‘It would indeed be strange, existing forever,’ you might think, ‘but it’s something I could live with.’  But that’s exactly what frightened me: having to live, and live, and live.  On more than one occasion I asked God if he could be so good as to limit the duration of my dragging-on.  And on more than one occasion I felt convinced that this wish could not be granted.  Christian orthodoxy taught me the reason why: we are made in God’s image, and everything that God makes in his own image endures forever in some sense, and its existence cannot be revoked.  We have our being ‘in him’.  His name is I AM.  Being is his nature, and so (I believed, trembling) it is ours.

I thought about heaven a good deal, especially after reading, and being tremendously excited by, Betty Malz’s (allegedly fraudulent, but who knows?) My Glimpse of Eternity, which provided a first person account of a near-death-experience.  I wondered not only what heaven would be like, but what I would be like in heaven.  Would people ever argue in heaven?  Would people take advantage of each other or annoy each other or steal each other’s girlfriends?  What would happen if we tried to hit someone?  I was fine with the idea that heaven would be luxurious and beautiful: but would we all wander around cocooned in our own happiness, or would we have real relationships with each other?  And if the latter, were we free to be bad to one another?  Or would we all be naturally, automatically, unfailingly, indefatigably good?

Now, I was not naturally, automatically, indefatigably good.  The kind of goodness that Jesus demands – a goodness that gives to all who ask, and compels one to love one’s neighbours as oneself – was not something I could ever manage; for all my spurs to goodness were selfish.  My goodness was everything that Nietzsche accused it of being.  Whatever slight progress I made in developing certain virtues was accomplished by making compacts with certain vices.  I diminished my lust for a girl by making myself find her annoying.  I aroused compassion in myself by stimulating my fear of God’s wrath, or my desire for human approval.  I was not always, or often, conscious of making these trade-offs; but I was aware, and still am aware, that they go on daily, in dusty boardrooms in my soul.

I had at least as much difficulty imagining myself living in heaven as I did imagining my mother singing How Great Thou Art with her hands in the air.  For me to be naturally, automatically, indefatigably good, and get along with people perfectly and effortlessly, I would have to be a different person to the one I was – not just a better version of me, but not really me at all.  My unfitness for heaven was tangled up with who I was; if you tried to excise it, my personality would not survive the operation. 

In my early days as a Christian I’d assumed, hazily, that heaven as an abode would be so lovely that everyone who went there would automatically become nice, me included.  But at some point I gave up that view; or it left me without my noticing it, the way hiccups leave you.  In later years I found it downright creepy to imagine a place so beautiful that it could stop me from thinking a bad thought about anyone; for I knew myself well enough to know that if I was not thinking bad thoughts about people, it was a sure sign that I was not thinking about them.  If an environment could be so nice that everyone in it would get along all the time, one might suspect the environment of being rather too beautiful – because its beauty would be distracting us from engaging in the kind of genuine interaction that usually puts humans at risk of falling out with one another.

Christianity denies that one’s morality is determined by one’s environment or circumstances, and I concurred.  I was a petty, spiteful and greedy person, and if I was placed in heaven I would turn it into hell eventually, no matter how green the meadows were.  I would be the pinch of yeast that leavened the batch.  But here’s the thing: if I thought about the kind of person I would have to be in order to live in paradise and not turn it into hell, I found I could not put myself in that person’s shoes, or sandals, or whatever.  Perhaps you can imagine being such a person – I could not.

The me that I imagined living in heaven was so far removed from the me currently living in Reading that I could not imagine the process whereby I might become that person; since all my moral progress, as I’ve said, depended on my arranging bank-loans from the devil.  Even given an infinite amount of time, I would never become someone who could be completely at home in paradise.  For a transition to take place - a transformation from the bad old person to the heavenly new person - the old person would need to be deleted; and so it would not be a transition at all, but a sundering, or rather a death.

Now, my religion purported to remedy the problem by means of an interesting but admittedly bizarre operation, involving a voluntary relinquishment of the old person (which is what repentance is), followed by the death of said person, then the grafting-on of a new person (those steps constitute conversion), and a period – one’s post-conversion mortal life - where the old person is phased out and the new, heaven-bound guy begins to grow.  Thus you get destroyed, which is necessary if you are to be rid of everything that bars you from heaven; but you continue to exist, which is necessary because you are made in God’s image. 

Of course, the new creation might not grow very much in this lifetime, and might enter heaven a baby; but the grafting together of old and new creates a continuity of personality, so that the person who enters eternal life is still you.  Your willing participation in this process is the solder that holds your two selves together, the thing that both your earthly self and your heavenly self have in common.  Jesus of course is the model of this peculiar process, by which God’s image can be destroyed and yet continue to live; I liked to think that he, in effect, underwent a trial-run on our behalf.

To sum up, I felt certain that none of us could live in heaven – indeed, none of us would even enjoy heaven – as we are now.  And of course that included my dear mother, who would perhaps enjoy it less than most.  Yet my religion taught me that the only way to turn oneself into someone heavenly was to give one’s present self up, to let oneself be phased out, and to have the heavenly self grafted on – in other words, to submit to the Christian plan of salvation.  Which raised the question of whether giving oneself up was mandatory, or whether we are free to refuse.

Although one might draw an analogy with periodic replenishment of the cells in the body, I prefer to think of the above scheme as the ‘Jason’s Boat’ approach to the theology of salvation, after the old puzzle: If Jason (of Argonaut fame) keeps having to repair his boat on the open sea, replacing broken bits of timber with new bits, and somehow ends up arriving back at his destination with a ship possessed of none of its original planks, can we call it the same boat?  The Christian scheme argues that a person rebuilt on the open sea will arrive at the far shore the same person, although changed in every way.

One of the premonitions our race keeps having, generation after generation, is that, at some point in the (usually near) future, things are going to come to a head.  There will be an apocalypse, a purgation.  We cannot watch soap operas without expecting the bad characters to get their come-uppance eventually, and we cannot think of a universe that isn’t, at some point, going to be made better.  Apocalypticism isn’t limited to Christianity, of course.  You don’t need to believe in a deity to feel strongly that human history is heading towards an explosive end, whether through an environmental catastrophe where nature - or the earth, or if you like Gaia - is the agent of justice, or through a nuclear holocaust where our own stupidity wipes us out.  Whatever the details, the apocalyptic sentiment is the feeling that someone or something – whether within us or without us – will not tolerate our nonsense indefinitely.  At some point a line will be drawn.

The doctrine of hell asserts that God will not wait forever while we decide to give up our boats and allow ourselves to be rebuilt, as it were.  God can’t wait forever; forever never arrives.  Christianity is an apocalyptic religion in that it claims that at some point God will draw a line - for the simple reason that God’s plan is to establish heaven, and if he has to wait for his creatures to give themselves up and be saved, then his creatures are in a position to hold God – and other creatures, and the perfection of the whole universe – to ransom indefinitely.  In which case it is possible that the universe will never be perfected. 

No – at some point (the doctrine of hell claimed) God will consign the stragglers to what the bible refers to as ‘eternal destruction’, which is of course an oxymoron.  I grappled with this idea for years, and eventually settled for my charmingly stupid original supposition, which was this: as far as fates go, ‘eternal destruction’ is perhaps the only one appropriate for creatures who cannot be got rid of because they are made in God’s image, but who cannot be allowed to exist because all existence has been made good.  What this state will be, exactly, we don’t know.  But the biblical images – fire, darkness, rubbish tips - are sobering.

It had once struck me as ridiculous, the idea that people who don’t hear the gospel in this lifetime cannot get saved.  That would make a lottery out of God’s redemptive plan.  But as soon as I started to reason that nobody who is alive on earth ever really enters heaven (so to speak), that the transformation that must occur to make us fit for heaven in fact involves our destruction, this horrid sub-doctrine began grimly to make sense to me; in fact, it was inescapable.  Neither I nor my mother could enter paradise in our original state; but I was a ship being rebuilt on the open sea, and my mother wasn’t – that was the difference.  Her ship would sink before it reached the shore; mine wouldn’t, but only because it would not be the same ship.  My eternal self had been grafted onto my grubby earthly self, and so there would be a continuity of identity between the very earthly, flawed me who lived in Reading and the me who would one day swan around in the New Jerusalem.  But unless a new self was grafted onto my mother during her life here on earth, nothing earthly about her would continue to the afterlife; and even if ‘a deed was done’ (to quote Julian of Norwich) to preserve her from eternal torment, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that the person I’d meet in heaven would be the same person that I loved here on earth.

To conclude: I’m not saying that believing in heaven and the eternality of the person necessitates a belief in eternal hell.  But I do think that they bar us from simply rejecting the standard evangelical doctrine of hell.  In the next post I’ll look at some approaches to the doctrine of hell that are orthodox but not morally outrageous.  Please contribute your own ideas: I’m hoping (and suspecting) they’ll be better than mine.