6 posts tagged “hell”

Rubbish!

Here is a short play.

Dramatis Personae:

A

B

An office. 

B: Hello!  I'm researching Christianity, with a view to either embracing or rejecting eternal salvation.  Can you tell me what this religion has to offer me?

A: Well, ultimately, God wants you to go to heaven.

B: Great!  [Gets up to leave.]  I'll see you there!

A: Wait!  He'll have to make you a new person first, one who can be happy in heaven.

B: Wouldn't I be happy in heaven without being having been made a new person?

A: Frankly, no.  You'd get sick of trying to be nice to everyone.  God wants to turn you into a person who is spontaneously nice to everyone.

B: God wants to give me hard drugs?

A+B: Ha ha ha!

A: No. 

B: Some kind of lobotomy? Ha ha ha.

A: Stop it now.  No - it's a painless procedure, by which you can be transformed into an entirely new person while still remaining yourself!  God will graft a new personality onto you, and gently phase out your present personality, so that you slowly become a new person, and this new person will go on to live in boundless paradise but will nonetheless still be you.

B: Wait a moment here.  Can you prove any of this?

A: If I could prove to you that God wants to graft a new personality onto you, and gently phase out the old personality, so that you gradually become a new person, and this new person will go on to live in boundless paradise but will nonetheless still be you - would you allow him to do it?  This moment?

B: [Slaps thigh.] Sir, I would!  But I don't see how you could possibly prove it.

A: Neither can I.

B: Oh!  Never mind, eh? [Gets up to leave.]

A: Wait!  You could ask God to do it anyway. 

B: Why would I do that?

A: If he’s real, he’ll do it, and you’ll have your proof.  If not, you’ve lost nothing.  You want to do that now?

B: [Looking at watch.]  Not right now.  Maybe when I get home.

A: If you don’t want to be made new now, what makes you think you’ll want it when you get home?  What makes you think you’ll ever want it?

B: Hey, I think that if I find myself standing before the fires of hell, I’ll want it!

A: But that will be the one time when you won’t be able to want it!

B: What?

A: If you’re faced with the fires of hell, the only thing you’ll be able to want is to avoid the fires of hell.

B: Really?

A: You won’t be capable of wanting anything else!  In other words, the moment you’re given an absolute reason to choose heaven, you won’t be able to freely choose anything.

B: Um -

FIN.

Coming up: exactly the same play, but in the style of a restoration comedy.

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?

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.

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).

Yipes

OSAS – ‘once saved, always saved’, or the idea that not even televangelists can lose their salvation - was a bedrock dogma of the evangelicalism I grew up with.   It wasn’t until I became an adult that I discovered just how many Christians reject it, and on perfectly biblical grounds.  I might have rejected it, too, if I’d had a choice.  If anyone wants to try to convince me to reject it, please feel free: I don’t doubt that you’ll wipe the theological floor with me.  But please know that if you succeed, I’ll be throwing away my extensive fish lapel pin collection and checking out Pure Land Buddhism.

When I was a teenager, I went through a long crisis about not knowing how to evangelise without making people want to become satanists.  So when, one day, I spotted a real live teenage evangelist in town, I lingered near him with an air of ‘Hi - I’m damned, but I’m open-minded,’ in the hope that I’d get a one-on-one lesson in how to approach people on the Lord’s behalf.

It worked.  He gave me a pamphlet and treated my claim to already be a Christian with scepticism.  He persuaded me to meet the leader of the regional branch of his church – a giant church whose denomination is well-known around the globe.  I agreed, and we went to the leader’s house later that week.

The leader asked me about my conversion experience, and I made the mistake of saying that I thought maybe God had set up all my ropy pre-conversion experiences with witchcraft and yoga to lead me to salvation.  The leader stopped me.  ‘If one thing is clear from the bible,’ he said, ‘it’s that when you are a sinner, God wants nothing to do with you.’

I almost pointed out what I’d learned from the bible so far: that sinners were the only people Jesus wanted anything to do with.  So if this church leader believed in the divinity of Christ, it followed that he was mistaken.  But I held my tongue.  The church leader took me on a tour of the bible, pointing out various lists of things that I should not do unless I wanted to lose my salvation and go to hell.  They were mainly to do with personal purity.  He was keen to tell me, in front of his teen acolyte and within earshot of his wife, that he had masturbated only twice in the last twenty years.  Perhaps thinking that my squirming was owing to guilt and not to intense social discomfort, he told me that I needed to be part of a church that supported my drive towards holiness, lest I end up writhing for eternity in the abyss.

                I whined feebly that I thought that the whole point of Christianity was that you get to go to heaven free of charge, and the leader slapped his forehead and sighed loudly and then showed me more bible verses indicating the opposite.  Half an hour later, he let me go, having obtained from me a promise to attend his church as soon as possible.  I left his house thinking that his gospel was completely pointless, and wondering whether he was right.

According to the gigantic New International Version Study Bible (with concordance) that I’d saved up for, the guy was right.  Apparently it was possible to lose your salvation.  More than that, it was amazingly easy to lose it.  If you continued sinning after your conversion, you were basically doomed, unless you kept confessing your sins to God and requesting forgiveness.

Well, fine, I thought.  I’ll just have to keep confessing and repenting and getting forgiven.  Daily, if not hourly.  The trouble was that I was sinning so much that I barely had time for all the repentance I required.  I constantly tried, of course, to curb my wickedness.  But when temptation to do wrong overtook me, I found that I suddenly did not care about my holiness; I only cared about it afterwards.  When, during Maths lessons, I lapsed into daydreams about girls beckoning me into hot-tubs, the thought of abandoning the fantasy and returning to trigonometry would strike me as literally insane.  And by the time I’d started to feel sullied and had decided to repent, I’d have to catch up on my maths by copying someone else’s work, which was also a sin.  Wickedness came naturally to me, but it was also surprisingly hard work.

For many weeks I grappled with the idea of abandoning my satanically liberal church and joining the other one.  As part of my grappling, I read my bible like never before.  And I developed three beliefs that caused me to stay put.

Actually, one of the beliefs was passed on to me by Andrew, an older mentor from church, in whom I’d confided my doubts about the durability of my salvation.  He said that if we think we need to meet some moral standard in order to keep our salvation, we are denying the whole basis of our faith, which is that salvation cannot be earned.  Such a denial would count as apostasy, which (according to the book of Hebrews) is akin to re-crucifying Christ.  Andrew said that gratitude for my salvation, as well as a God-implanted desire to be good for its own sake, should spur me on to seek goodness.  Fear and selfishness are not noble motives - 'your will be done on earth as it is in heaven' almost certainly doesn't mean 'your will be done on earth as it would be done in a boot camp'.  It may be that salvation can be lost – the question will always be a vexed one – but even if that is the case (Andrew argued), we surely do not forfeit our salvation by sinning against a God who supposedly came ‘to save the people from their sins’; we are more likely to forfeit it by ceasing to believe in our salvation.

Moreover, becoming sinless is impossible, whereas keeping one’s faith is possible – so take your pick.  Personally, I thought that if we need to maintain sinlessness to maintain salvation, then we must view Jesus’s admonition ‘Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ as a rather nasty joke.

             Andrew said that if you truly believe in your salvation and in free grace, it is impossible for you to respond by using your liberty to launch into a life of wanton wickedness.  Of course, history is full of groups of people who use (or invent) ideas and theologies that legitimise debauchery.  Those people who exploit Christian ideas of freedom and salvation to launch into lives of wanton wickedness can safely be said not to truly believe in salvation, or they would not (Andrew said) be so ungrateful to Jesus, who was crucified to procure it for them.

These latter people, who believe and accept the liberating message of the gospel but use it as a licence to throw crazy orgies, seem to be the ones Paul talks about when he says that flagrant sinners will not inherit the kingdom of God.  To those who genuinely want to be rid of their sins, who ‘set their minds on the things of the Spirit’, Paul promises: ‘There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’

Second, my reading of the bible made it clear that God’s standards were never less than infinitely high.  His requirements went way beyond not masturbating more than once a decade.  ‘Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it,’ writes James in his epistle.  These standards included loving one’s neighbour as oneself, and loving God with one’s whole being.  This being the case, it was doubtful that I could keep my name in the Book of Life by means of good behaviour; and I don’t believe that the church leader I’d spoken to was managing it either, despite his laudable record with regards to self-abuse.  Grace and mercy really were my only hope.

Finally, it occurred to me that within the matrix of Jesus’s teachings, moral terms don’t apply only to actions.  A sin is never just an act: it is a point of convergence, where a certain outward act meets a certain inward intention.  Jesus himself is emphatic on this point; he describes his self-righteous opponents as ‘whitewashed tombs’ – respectable-looking on the outside, but dead on the inside.  Their whole problem is that they see immorality as skin deep.  But it is deeper than that; we might say it is sin deep.  And that was precisely the problem with the teachings of that church leader I met.

The wanton sinners who deliberately use their gospel liberty to get drunk and hold orgies have a different kind of sinfulness from those who live with a feeling of shame for their misdeeds, sometimes struggling against them, other times feeling wholly at their mercy, and who find themselves going miserably but compulsively to the orgies when they’ve told their spouse that they are just popping out to buy cat-food.  The actions are the same but the motives are antipodal.  The second kind of sinner is precisely the kind of hopeless case that Jesus came to save.  The first kind, conversely, doesn’t really want salvation; s/he wants carte blanche.  Again, Paul believes that people of the first kind will not inherit the kingdom of heaven.  And why should they?  They never wanted it in the first place.

I decided to throw in my lot with those people who feel crushed by selfishness and pettiness and destructive urges, yet who despise these parts of their characters and want to be more loving and pure-hearted.  I knew that I wasn’t using my religion as an excuse to be bad; I wanted desperately to be good.  I decided that folks like me must always cling to our salvation.  My alternative was to believe that, having been saved from hell, to which I had been condemned for not keeping the whole law of God, I now had to keep the whole of the law of God in order to keep myself from going to hell.  Even if I managed it, which I manifestly wouldn’t, my motive (a sweaty desperation to avoid going to hell) would be selfish, and so by Jesus’s own standards my good deeds would count for nothing.  When I thought about it, I didn’t really have a choice.

I never did learn to evangelise well.  But I did decide that whatever my gospel I ended up propagating, it would be a gospel of pure grace, scandalously free, the kind of gospel that was consistent with Jesus’s command not to worry about the morrow.  It would not ask anyone to buy their way into the kingdom of God, or to pay moral rent to stay there.  And it’s the hardest gospel to accept; or it would be, if accepting the other gospels weren’t impossible.