3 posts tagged “belief”

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?

Swim challenge

This is a long post, but I hope you'll stay with me.  It's an important subject.

When I was twelve I went to the local baths for a swim – it might have been with school, I don’t remember – and as I arrived I encountered a group of young children filing out of the building.  They had been there for a special fun day of some sort.  The sign outside the sports centre indicated that all children who completed a Swim Challenge would get a free certificate and badge!  You could tell that the challenge was not much of a challenge because the child in the photograph was wearing armbands and holding onto a polystyrene float.  He was no Olympian.  But one boy leaving the building was wearing an expression I recognized: he was trying not to cry.   When he saw his mother waiting in her car he stopped and shook his head.  I couldn’t see his face by that point, but I could see his mother’s face.  I assumed that her son was the only child who hadn’t been able to succeed at the Swim Challenge.  The mum looked confused: passing the challenge was supposed to be a given.  She looked like she wanted to get out of the car and run over to him, but she didn’t want to make a scene and embarrass him further.  She was in agony, and I caught some of it.  I remember thinking: the world is horrible.

I was thinking of this event one Wednesday evening two years later.  My mentors from church, Mark and Roland, as well as some guy called Rob, were standing with me in my lounge after one of our hebdomadal bible studies, waiting for Rob’s brother to pick him up.  My heathen friend Wayne was there too.  Mark and Wayne thought he came along to our meetings because he was hungry for salvation, but I knew that he was just plain hungry; his parents went out on Wednesday evenings and left a barren fridge, and my parents kept our cupboards stocked with bags of fun-sized chocolate bars.  We were watching a programme on television about aqua-aerobics as we waited for Rob's brother, which is what had made me think of the boy and the Swim Challenge.  I grew sad, and had one of my occasional moments of grandiose compassion for the human race. 

The programme featured a very large woman bobbing around to generic dance music in a pool, and then the programme cut to an interview with the woman.  She was telling the interviewer that after so many years of restricted mobility owing to her weight, the freedom she experienced during her aqua-aerobics classes was like a miracle.  She was so happy she started crying.  And then Rob chuckled darkly and said, ‘Doesn’t matter, love, you’re still going to hell.’

Until Rob made that comment in my living room about the aqua-aerobics woman, I’d been happy to leave the eternal fate of humanity in God’s hands, trusting that he’d work out some kind of Julian-of-Norwich-style surprise happy ending.  Now it occurred to me that my particular flavour of Christianity might not permit such fuzzy optimism.  No – people like me were required to believe that this aqua-aerobics enthusiast, and that little boy who couldn’t get a swimming badge, and the child’s mother who had to see her son so horribly ashamed, not to mention the thousands of mothers who, according to my Tony Campolo books, were at that very moment watching their malnourished children die in their arms in desperate parts of the world, and the thousands of children dying in those arms – I was supposed to believe that every one of these people, if they died without accepting Jesus Christ as their lord and saviour, would pass automatically from the pointless cruelty of this life into a useless eternity of torment!

Roland and Mark were visibly embarrassed by Rob’s jibe.  For a moment I thought Mark was going to say something.  I momentarily dared to hope that he would offer a less hideous reading of the aqua-aerobics woman’s situation.  But he didn’t.  And his silence confirmed to me that Rob had indeed vocalised what evangelicals were supposed to accept as dogma: that this woman was, if unsaved, going to suffer unending torment for her unpardonable and unavoidable offences against God, and the memories of her pathetic moments of buoyancy, as commemorated in the television programme we were watching, would not console her much when she was bobbing forever in the lake of fire. 

Only Wayne commented.  He said to Rob, ‘You don’t need to sound so f***ing glad about it.’

The following week, Mark tried to settle the matter of hell with us, mainly for Wayne’s benefit.  He said that although God loves us, he is so holy and righteous that he cannot simply let sin go unpunished.  And given that all sin places an insurmountable barrier between us and God (who, Mark added, is totally pure), we are all doomed to suffer eternal separation from God, unless we are lucky or sensible enough to get converted. 

‘In effect, though, God doesn’t really send anyone to hell, as such,’ Mark told us. ‘We send ourselves there, by our own free will.  By rejecting the gospel.’  Mark rounded off his discourse by pointing out that if you are ill and you refuse to take your prescribed medicine, then you can’t really blame the doctor if you never get well, can you?

Just in case Wayne wasn’t quite buying Mark’s arguments, Roland shared with us a classical theological formula, according to which the gravity of an offence increases in proportion to the majesty of the person offended.  In other words, an offence against, say, a king is more terrible than an offence against, say, an estate agent.  An offence against an infinitely majestic being would therefore be an infinite offence and would merit an infinite punishment.  So everyone who sins even once is automatically deserving of eternal hell!  If God chooses to graciously save even a few of us, then that’s more than anyone deserves.

Wayne, for some reason, appeared perfectly comfortable with these reasonings.  I, on the other hand, had no idea what Mark and Roland were playing at.  Mark’s ‘doctor and medicine’ analogy was about as appropriate as putting a snorkel on a cat – and I knew that that was inappropriate, because Wayne had tried it with my cat Pumpkin.  A more appropriate analogy, surely, would involve an invisible doctor, on behalf of whom a self-appointed medical representative tells you that you are ill and that you need to take some invisible medicine that he claims makes people well although you can see for yourself that it makes people go loopy and even though there are innumerable other medical representatives offering different medicines.  And you decide not to take it, and so the doctor decides you should get tortured in a fiery pit for all eternity!

I found it equally hard to take seriously Mark’s idea that people send themselves to hell.  Had I been reading the wrong bible?  As far as I knew, none of the bible’s visions of the Last Judgement depicted people saying to God, ‘I think I’ll take the Lake of Fire, thanks.’  No: Jesus paints a picture of the Day of Judgement in which lots of people who thought they were getting into paradise end up being locked out, where it is customary for them to wail and gnash their teeth, not congratulate themselves on having stuck to their convictions.

Worst of all was Roland’s idea about offences against God being infinite and thereby meriting infinite punishments.  Even I could see that according to this logic, one good deed done for God would earn you an infinite reward - which means that God will be forced to send all of us to both heaven and hell, a mediate state that is probably a lot like being on earth.  Roland might have countered that humans are too fundamentally sinful to do anything for God.  But Jesus said quite plainly that ‘Whatever you do for the least of my brethren, you do for me,’ which means that we most certainly can do things for God.  Moreover, it means that all of us do things for God quite often, without knowing it.

However, as Wayne seemed happy enough with the theories our mentors proffered, I decided not to drop a banana skin on his path to salvation by voicing my own concerns.  It wasn’t until school the next day, during a rainy lunchtime, that I learned why Wayne had refrained from challenging Mark and Roland over their views: he’d found these views so moronic that he’d decided to stop coming to my bible study meetings.  Intriguingly, he’d also decided that, henceforward, he’d spend his Wednesday evenings with our other Christian friends Gary and Percy, at Brookdale Church Youth Club.

‘But Gary and Percy believe the same things as Mark and Roland,’ I protested.

Wayne laughed loudly.  ‘Gary and Percy don’t believe any of that crap,’ he said. 

‘No, they do!’ I urged, worried by Wayne’s naivety.  ‘They believe all of that crap.’

Wayne ignored me.  ‘And neither do you.’  He slurped from his carton of Calypso orange squash and brushed aside his fringe so he could squint at some girls going past the dining hall window.  ‘If you believed that people who aren’t Christians all go to hell, with no chance of ever escaping, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating that beef burger.’

‘But I’d rather not be sitting here eating this beef burger,’ I pointed out.  ‘It’s got hair on it.’

Wayne ignored me.  ‘You’d be running wild-eyed through the streets grabbing people and begging them to convert.’  He removed his straw from his drained drink carton and tied a knot in it.  ‘Unless, of course, you don’t care whether people go to hell.  Or perhaps you want them to go to hell.  Like that Rob guy.  And Mark and Roland.’

‘Mark and Roland don’t want people to go to hell, you prat,’ I said.  (I wasn’t so sure about Rob.)

‘Verily, they want to see me rot in the pit of Hades,’ Wayne said darkly.  ‘They haven’t tried to convert me once.  But I know for a fact that if you really believed that I’d go to hell if I was hit by a bus on the way home from school tonight, you’d make me convert right now.  Even if you only ten-percent believed it, you’d try to convert me before taking another bite of that hairy lunch.’

It was a highly uncomfortable moment for both of us.  Because Wayne could see that I was considering putting down my fork and forcibly converting him there in the dining hall.  But I suppose his point was that if I really believed he was going to hell, I’d have tried to convert him already.

Before I could make my mind up whether to convert him, Wayne burped and said, ‘Actually, the whole hell thing is probably a test.’

‘A test?’

‘On the Day of Judgement, God will look at all these smug Christians, and he’ll ask them if they believe that he is going to send all non-Christians to hell for ever.  And when they say “Yes,” he’ll say, “So why didst thou not spend every waking moment of your cardigan-wearing lives trying to save them, thou selfish lumps of crap?  Thou art surely the most evil of all people!”  And then he’ll fling those Christians into hell and let the rest of us into heaven.’  He pointed at me dramatically.  ‘And you, my son – what will you say to the Lord?’

Flustered, I ordered Wayne to stop bothering me with theological questions.  Who did he think I was, the Archbishop of Canterbury?  But the truth was that he’d got me.

Wayne did not force me to concede that I was wrong to believe the things that I believed.  No, it was worse than that.  He forced me to concede that I did not believe the things that I believed I believed.  Although I mentally assented to all the orthodox doctrines about hell and damnation, I didn’t really believe them.  After all, if I really did believe them, why was I so little motivated to evangelise the people of the world?  I had been given a limited time on earth in which to help save as many people as possible from infinite torment - infinite -  and yet I spent more time watching television than anyone I knew.  Either I was fantastically evil, or I was failing to believe my own beliefs.

But I was not alone, of course.  I didn’t know of any Christians who acted as though they were living in a world full of people doomed to everlasting agony, other than one lone crazy evangelist in Reading town centre.  It might have comforted me to know that I was in the majority.  But given my new conviction that any hell-believing Christian who doesn’t act at least as crazily as that screaming guy in town must be either fantastically evil or a fake, I couldn’t help wondering why on earth God left the evangelisation of humanity to such consistently evil or fake creatures. 

If it was selfishness that was keeping me and my ilk from evangelising with the necessary vigour, then the Holy Spirit was clearly not doing a good enough job of transforming us into agents of salvations.  After all, Christ came ‘to save the people from their sins’, and presumably the sins in question included those that might prevent us from giving a damn about the damned.

On the other hand, if it is the case that most Christians don’t really believe in the eternal damnation of the unconverted, despite thinking that we do, then how can any of us know whether we really believe in any other article of our faith?  Most importantly, how can we know if we really believe in the articles of faith on which our salvation depend?  Do we really have saving faith, or do we just think we do?  Perhaps countless billions of us are mistaken in our belief that we believe in the gospel!  Perhaps we believe we are among the saved, and yet our faith is nothing but intellectual box-ticking, and we will end up joining the multitude of surprised, damned, wailing teeth-gnashers on Judgement Day.

I'm not arguing about whether the doctrine is right or wrong.  What I'm saying is this:

The truth is that I don’t really believe in hell, and the proof is that I’m writing this blog post.  If I really believed in hell, I’d feel that nothing could be more important than trying to help rescue as many people as possible from a fate that makes the most horrific earthly misery look negligible.

The truth is that you don’t believe in hell, either, and the proof is that you’re reading this blog post.  You're a decent person.  If you really believed in hell, you’d feel that nothing could be more important than trying to help rescue as many people as possible from a fate that makes the most horrific earthly misery look negligible.  Reading this is a waste of your time.

Feel free to leave a comment (or, alternatively, run outside and evangelise the unsaved, depending).  Though you might want to wait to read my next post first.

Next post: why I believe in hell (and you do too).