Heaven and Hell

At the lunch table a few days ago, some of the students at Olivet were making fun of the liberalism that runs rampant in the religion department here. For instance, some people in the religion department are reputed to believe that people don't go to hell, when if they simply "looked at a Bible," they would see that hell was clearly there. And they're absolutely correct. Certainly Dante and Milton did their share in augmenting our ideas of hell, but there are repeated references in the Bible to a place of torment, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. No one can deny that strain of scriptural thought. Similarly, no one can deny the grave seriousness of those who defend the existence of hell. Without the threat of hell, we would have no reason to avoid the wildest flights of moral degradation. We could kill with impunity; we could impregnate women and abandon the mother and the child; we could exploit child labor; and we'd be fine in the end, because we'd get into heaven no matter what. Beyond that, if eternity was not at stake, then why would Jesus bother to tell us to go and make disciples of all nations? Why, indeed, would Jesus even bother coming to earth at all?

As Niebuhr points out in his Christ and Culture, however, there is a strain of universalism in scripture that is every bit as strong as the condemnatory strain. I will not rally the proof texts here, but mainly give examples from the top of my head: "Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father", "For God desires that all should be saved", etc. This gives us an interpretive problem, such as often comes up in biblical studies. For instance, people who wish to believe that Genesis offers an historical account of creation are perplexed to learn that the creation is presented twice, with the events taking place in a different order. Which one do we pick? Usually the first creation account, the more poetic and familiar one, is picked as normative, even though the second provides the backdrop for the all-important Fall story.

The Bible is not self-interpreting. It is a book, a text, and it presents the same difficulties as any other text. We have to make choices, because even in the least contradictory text there are contradictions. It's the nature of the game.

We know why to choose the condemnatory strain in Scripture. No one wants a world full of unrestrained moral evil, although arguably we've managed to produce such a world even with the dogma of hell intact. We need to assume that those who would choose the universalist strain do not do so simply because they want to be able to do whatever they want. That would be every bit as unfair as to say that those who choose the condemnatory strain do so only to relish the idea of watching their enemies' eternal torment. We're adult people here, and we can look beyond such immature and reductive explanations.

People who accept both strains will agree that God did not have to create us or the world that sustains us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church begins with these words: "God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life" (par. 1). We recognize instinctively that people do not in fact participate in that blessed life. We have had before our eyes the work of a government that lies to its own people and allows innocents in other nations to starve in order to maintain a "balance of power." We have seen a group of educated, reasonable men sacrifice their lives in order to bring destruction and death to innocents. We have read of the Holocaust; we have read of the Inquisition; we have read of the witch trials. We vaguely realize that humankind has developed weapons that could snuff out all of human life in a matter of hours.

Why is this evil in the world? Why did humanity, freely created by a good God, turn out this way? And before we think that we have reached the pinnacle of evil in the last century, we need to realize that the great evils perpetrated then and now were not necessarily the result of greater corruption, but of greater manpower and ingenuity. Clearly something is terribly wrong. Every time we try to fix things, we inadvertantly make them worse. In the middle ages, Christians set up an entire civilization built upon the revelation of this good God and eventually needed to kill and expel certain elements in order to keep it running smoothly. The Puritans set out to create an entirely new nation in America that would avoid the mistakes of the Old World, and again they found themselves, almost before they realized it, pushing people away, killing undesirables. I have no doubt that the Puritans had the very best of intentions, but they missed the mark.

They failed. We fail. We take the world that God has freely given us, the lives that God has freely given us, and we try to repair our failures. We will get it right this time. We have learned our lesson. Never again. And we fail, every time. (For more along these lines, see Life is Over). No matter whether it's the result of a couple of stupid people eating an apple or whatever, there is something wrong with us. We can only vaguely recognize it, and when we do recognize it, we show that we still don't get it precisely by trying to fix the problem. We are the problem. We can't help but fail, especially in our attempts to root out all possibility of future failure, to save the next generation from our stupidity. The problem is too much a part of us for us to recognize it for what it is.

The problem is precisely that we think we can solve the problem. Whether through educational programs or religious zealotry or technological progress, we set about to solve the problem from the midst of the problem, gather up everything we can in order for us to solve the problem and finally really start living. The problem is that we fail to recognize God's gift, and when we try to recognize it, we still don't recognize it. When we mindlessly mouth the words and then think about what we can do about God's gift, we miss the point entirely.

We are absolutely stuck in the problem, or in sin, if you want to use that poor, abused word. We are mired down in sin. Only God can save us. The condemners recognize that as much as the universalists: only God can save us. God comes from the outside and gives us the gift of recognizing the gift we already have. And then what's the point of life? To enjoy the gift? Well, certainly. God's gift has to be good, since God is good. But wouldn't we want to give God something in return? Wouldn't we want to give him the gift and the world in return? Wouldn't we want to worship this God and to bring more and more people to worship him simply because he deserves it?

I don't know what happens when God saves us. I don't know if I'm saved or not or if I'm just mouthing the words. But I don't think that life is pointless without a hell. Much to the contrary, I wonder what kind of God would freely give us the gift and then leave some of us for all eternity as unsalvageable. Simply saying that a loving God sends people to hell for all of eternity, leaves them alone forever, casts aside the wonderful gift that he made and calls it useless -- simply saying that God does this and is somehow still loving does not accomplish much by way of explanation. Simply saying that corrupt human beings, so mired in sin as to be incapable of recognizing their sinfulness, are able freely to choose this God and thus somehow "deserve" hell for failing to do so does not solve the problem. In fact, in many ways the double-predestination God who creates people bound for both heaven and hell is more desirable, because at least in that system someone gets to go to heaven for sure. Hell is a problem for theology. Hell is every bit the outrage that Mark Twain and Fredrich Nietzsche thought it was. We need to look that in the face and choose.

Choosing hell is not inevitable. The Bible allows us to go either way. By the grace of God, I hope I am able to choose love over condemnation.