3 posts tagged “apologetics”

Raphaelite cherubs

In the previous post I said that we can’t jettison the idea of hell from evangelical theology, because it is – par excellence - the doctrine that guarantees human freedom.  If you have freedom to reject God, you’re pretty darn free.  Even if nobody does actually end up rejecting God, the option has to be there; otherwise God’s plan to open up eternal paradise to folk like you and me is mechanistic.  To the extent that something chugs towards inevitable conclusions, it is, or is part of, a machine.  The possibility of hell is terrifying and disturbing; but it is also the guarantee that we are neither machines, nor part of a machine.

There is something charmingly naïve about Christianity’s claim that God’s plan is to get us into a spacious paradise where we will be happy ever after.  It seems naïve and charming because it reminds us of fairy stories and folk tales; in other words, it reminds us of the enduring dreams and hopes of humankind.  But the great drama of being human resides in a particular twist in our fairy tale: we are not fit to enter paradise, and must pass through some momentous change, a change that involves death and reawakening. 

When I say that we are not fit to enter paradise, I don’t mean that we’re disgusting sinners too worthless to merit God’s favour, or such unpleasantness.  I mean that if God took us as we are and dressed us in imperishable bodies and let us into the heaven he has prepared for us, we wouldn’t enjoy it.  It is possible we would hate it.  An eternity of trying to be maximally good and loving and worshipful would be hell, even if the backdrop to one’s efforts was the New Jerusalem.  And yet an eternity of goodness, love and worship is what God knows would make us happiest, though you wouldn’t know it to look at Raphael’s bored cherubs. 

If such a heaven doesn’t sound to your tastes… then welcome to the reason why we’re not naturally fit for paradise.

The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition makes us an offer we can refuse.  He offers to make us new, to give us a new spirit, to place a new heart at the centre of our being, so that we are spontaneously moved to be effortlessly and joyously good, loving and worshipful.  On the plus side, we will enjoy eternal bliss.  On the minus side: we will have to give ourselves up and be remade.  Our old self will diminish, and the new self will grow; the two natures will run side-by-side in this lifetime, like relay runners during the passing of the baton; we will pass the baton of our personality from the old nature to the new (though Lord knows our old nature doesn’t want to let go) - which is to say that we will stop identifying with the old, and start identifying with the new.  The old nature will slow to a halt, and the new nature will run towards the prize. 

All well and good: we are not expected to run into heaven on the spiritual feet with which we were born; we are given a new nature whose feet are fleeter, to whom we must pass the baton of our personalities.  Indeed, we are told by the apostle Paul to count the old self as ‘dead’ – to recognise that its race is run – and to identify with the homuncular new sprinter that has been planted in us, and who is growing imperceptibly with the Holy Spirit's nursing.  But relinquishing oneself, giving oneself up, is not easy; and the doctrine of hell tells us that it is not mandatory. 

Buddhism recognises that one’s attachment to the illusory, transient self (not to mention all the ‘stuff’ that this self enjoys) keeps one chained, life after life, incarnation after incarnation, to a universe of pain.  Christianity sees the personality as a real thing and not an illusion – it as something that God, the complex unity that is the Trinity, himself possesses.  How much harder it is to give up a self that is as real as God!  We should not think it certain that everyone will want to do it, even if the alternative is banishment from paradise.

I’ll return in the next post to the question of whether anyone actually would prefer to cling to their old self for eternity rather than be made anew, even if their clinging is performed in the ‘outer darkness’.  But I’d like to quickly address the question of why - if some people might, in theory, cling to their old selves and refuse heaven - God can’t or won’t simply blot those who reject him out of existence, rather than sentence them to an eternity of alienation from him.  In other words, why do we need to even ask whether anyone would prefer hell over relinquishment of self?  Would it not be more moral of God to make us choose between heaven and annihilation?

Well, I don’t believe that Christians can adopt annihilationism.  It all comes back to the terrible freedom that belongs to creatures created in God’s image.  What if it is we who choose to exist eternally?  I simply can’t discount that possibility.  Maybe the damned choose perpetual existence - and God honours their choice.  If hell is the consequence of my refusal to relinquish my old self, then why would I, having been alienated from God, relinquish the self for love of which I’d rejected paradise?   And if God would allow me to choose not to surrender my old self to heaven, why wouldn’t he allow me to refuse to be snuffed out?  Christianity insists that we need to pass through a sort of ‘annihilation’ just to get to heaven – as Paul says in his second letter to Corinth, ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old is gone, the new has come.’   If I’d choose not to surrender my old self to gain eternal joy, why in hell would I surrender it to annihilation?  If I’d surrender myself to annihilation, I’d might as well surrender myself to paradise.

Maybe, when God calls us back from death to face judgement and live eternally, it will be because that’s what we all want: existence over nothingness, at any cost.  One might argue that some people would choose nothingness over existence - but I'll say it again: if they are willing to relinquish themselves to nothingness, why would they not relinquish themselves to the rebirth that would fit them for paradise?

C.S. Lewis suggested – I think it was in The Great Divorce – that the gates of hell are ‘locked on the inside’.  Its residents can leave whenever they want to.  But given that leaving hell would mean relinquishing the self they love and cling to, they might of course just as easily spend eternity putting off their departure till tomorrow – or the day after, or the day after...  After all, once one opens hell’s door and abandons the outer darkness, one’s beloved old self will vanish forever.  Why not embrace it for just one more moment, one more week (if there be weeks in hell)?  Better to be me in hell than some new creation in heaven…  And so it goes. 

Recently I was speaking to someone who has been promising for many years to write a novel as soon as circumstances permit.  She has many wonderful ideas for this novel.  But the thing is, circumstances never seem to permit; the goalposts always move.  Here’s what she said to me recently: ‘I’ve been acting like I’ve been putting off writing a book, but lately I’ve discovered something: I’ve already decided I’ll never do it.’  Because it always seemed to her that tomorrow might bring circumstances in which she’d write her book, she thought that the question of her writing a novel was an open one.  But it wasn’t.  In the back of her mind she’d already closed it.

I thought this was very honest of her, and that her admission evinced an admirable level of self-understanding.  I also thought: how many of us think we are putting things off, when really we have decided we will never do them?  How many eternal decisions have I made, without knowing it?

How many of us might have already made the decision never to relinquish who we are?  Oh, we’d never admit that we have made an eternal decision one way or another; we think we’re keeping our options open.  But perhaps we don’t even know we’ve made the decision.  There’s only one way to be absolutely sure that we haven't made it, and that is to hold up our selves, right now, before a God we may or may not believe in, and say to him: If you’re real and the Prophet Ezekiel is right and you can give me a new spirit to replace my old one, a self that you can one day usher into paradise, and no money has to change hands, then look, I’ll take it.  If these Christians are right and you want to phase me out until I’m nothing, and phase in a new me, a me who wouldn’t find heaven an interminable chore, then I’m up for it.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, or if you find yourself unable to frame the prayer, or if you find all this pushy and offensive, fine.  As long as you realise that you may have already made an eternal choice.  Who knows?

We can’t discount the possibility.

Coming up: a very short and amateurish play.

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?

Peekaboo atheist

Some time around the publication of Richard Dawkin’s bestselling The God Delusion, it became impossible to go to the pub without a heathen friend launching into an argument about how demonstrably wicked religion is.  I used to argue back, but now I don’t.  I’ve come to the conclusion that those heathens have a point.