I see
scant reason to think that hell ever acted as a deterrent but perhaps
as a stiffener that assisted the well inclined to stay the course.
Yet if we we accept the reality of the spiritual aspect of human
existence as a human managed construct then the reality of hell
follows quite naturally from simple denial.
It is
worth understanding hell. Swedenborg so far has done the best job of
confronting the problem. It is less about judgement so much as
about self judgement. Human spirits that reject goodness flee
to their own kind and that last as long as they are unable to change.
Yet the possibility of change is never withheld That
perhaps is the reason Swedenborg reports that the final
judgement has already come and gone and those souls never to
participate have been dissolved..
Unfortunately that
leaves ample room for evil and it is enough to observe a steady
global reformation under way that is capturing the spirit of
the positive doctrines. More and more are simply taking the
first opportunity to reject evil when they can.
Hell-bent
Younger
Christians may be ditching doctrines of fire and brimstone – but
will Christianity ever get rid of hell entirely?
by Kathryn Gin
Lum
http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/why-has-the-idea-of-hell-survived-so-long/
Landscape with Charon
Crossing the Styx by Joachim Patinir, c. 1515–1524. Museo del
Prado, Madrid. Photo courtesy Wikimedia
Kathryn Gin
Lum teaches American religious history at Stanford University.
She is the author of Damned Nation: Hell in America from the
Revolution to Reconstruction (due in August 2014).
In December 2013, a hoax began circulating on the internet claiming that Pope Francis had called a Third Vatican Council that, among other things, purged a literal hell from Catholic doctrine. ‘This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God,’ Francis purportedly said. ‘God seeks not to condemn but only to embrace… Hell is merely a metaphor for the isolated soul, which like all souls ultimately will be united in love with God.’ The piece quickly went viral on Facebook and other social media platforms – minus the element of parody. The remarks did not seem too out of line with the new Pope’s own attitude of embrace over condemnation.
This January, an
article in the US online magazine Religion Dispatches offered some
clues as to why the story took off so dramatically. ‘Millennials
Invent New Religion: No Hell, No Priests, No Punishment’ went the
title. The author, the Rev Candace Chellew-Hodge, described how her
students at a community college in Columbia, South Carolina, when
tasked with inventing a new religion, uniformly avoided ‘a concept
of hell, or any form of punishment for not following the
prescriptions of the religion’. When asked why they had avoided
hell, one student replied that ‘Religion today is so ...
judgmental.’ Chellew-Hodge took this to mean that her students
lacked a ‘full-featured understanding of religion’, and so
overlooked ‘the core ideas of human suffering, the concept of
discipline, and the very real threat of punishment’.
Chellew-Hodge’s
understanding that punishment is an essential feature of religion,
and her students’ confidence that it need not be, might seem to
represent a simple generational divide. That so many young people in
the US identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ at least partly
results from their impression of organised religion – particularly
the Protestantism that has long dominated the US religious landscape
– as judgmental, exclusive, and punishing. This longing for a
feel-good faith with a friendly deity might help to explain why so
many fell for the Pope Francis parody and why they were so
disappointed that it was untrue. But the longing for a hell-less
faith cannot be attributed to a contemporary generational shift
alone. Time and again in the history of western Christianity, this
longing has surfaced, only to be subdued and hell reaffirmed as not
just scripturally but also morally necessary.
Christian ideas about
the afterlife drew from and expanded on ancient traditions that
conceived of the afterlife as a single, neutral zone where everyone
ended up, regardless of their behaviour in this life. The ancient
Jews had no concept of ‘heaven’ as a place of rewards, or ‘hell’
as a place of punishment, but instead held that all humans went to a
shadowy and monotonous afterlife after death: Sheol. Rewards
and punishments accrued to people in this life, not in the life to
come. Similarly, the ancient Greeks believed that everyone went to
the lethargic and gloomy underworld of Hades.
The contingent
realities of human existence – that the righteous can suffer and
the wicked can prosper – spurred the emergence of rewards and
punishments from the undifferentiated Sheol and Hades. The concepts
of heaven and hell recognised moral gradations between individuals
and promised the righting of wrongs in a future life. In other words,
while some today think of hell as a morally unsophisticated,
pre-modern doctrine that has survived long past its prime, the
emergence of hell could be seen as offering, rather than obstructing,
ethical nuance.
Despite purgatory’s
problems, the notion that the living could assist the dead offered a
modicum of comfort
And yet the idea of
hell did not go uncontested. People argued over its duration, with
some advocating a temporary instead of eternal hell. They debated the
purpose of its punishments, whether corrective and purifying, or
vengeful and vindictive. And they have bickered over its nature, with
some arguing for hell as a metaphorical mental state as opposed to a
physical and literal place.
As early as the second
to the third centuries AD, at a time when the Church’s doctrines
were still being hotly debated, the scholar Origen of Alexandria (c
185-254 AD) argued against a concept of eternal hell in favour
of apokatastasis, or ‘restoration’. Origen taught that God
creates everything in love and, through that love, ultimately brings
all of creation back to him. In Origen’s scheme, eternal souls
would be punished for wrongdoings, but punishment would occur as the
soul inhabited successive bodies – whether demonic, human, or
angelic – instead of in a permanent and everlasting hell of fire
and brimstone. ‘For if… souls had no pre-existence,’ Origen
asked in On First Principles, ‘why do we find some new-born babes
to be blind, when they have committed no sin, while others are born
with no defect at all?’ Over time, souls would learn from their
mistakes and eventually be reunited with their perfect creator.
Some have wondered
whether Origen might have been influenced by the concept of
reincarnation in Eastern traditions. The idea of karma explains the
status of every being – divinity, human, animal, ghost, or
inhabitant of hell – as a consequence of its own earlier actions.
As in the ancient Mediterranean, so in India, the concept of hell, as
a region to which the wicked could be reborn, emerged to offer
ethical nuance. Karma once referred primarily to a sacrificial
system. The living could offer sacrifices to benefit the dead, who
all went to the same netherworld, presided over by Yama, king of the
deceased. Under the influence of ascetics who emphasized ethical
behavior, the netherworld evolved into regions of reward and
punishment, and Yama became king of hell. But unlike the Christian
God, Yama did not condemn people to hell: they were reborn there as a
result of their own bad karma, and could be reborn out of hell as
well. In the Buddhist tradition, textual discussions of hell as
punishment have been dated to at least the third century BC, if not
earlier, predating Origen's views by centuries.
Origen’s views did
not prevail as Christian doctrine became standardised. Instead, the
ideas of another early church father, Augustine of Hippo
(354-430 AD), carried the day. In contrast to Origen’s dynamic
afterlife where souls could rise and fall until they eventually
reached their creator, Augustine said that humans had only one life,
and only in that life could they choose their actions and beliefs. On
the basis of their choices, humans’ eternal status would be decided
at the moment of death, when they were swept up into heaven’s
endless bliss or hell’s ceaseless suffering.
In addition to
offering what would become accepted orthodoxy on the fixed nature of
heaven and hell, Augustine also introduced elements that eventually
coalesced into the doctrine of purgatory. For Augustine, the flames
of purgatory were not intended to punish or save those who’d
already made bad choices on earth. Instead, their purpose was to
purify those already destined for the perfection of heaven.
Over time, the
Catholic Church warmed to the idea that purgatory was an actual
place, akin to heaven and hell. Just as the bifurcation of the
afterlife seemed to offer more moral nuance than a single shadowy
underworld where everyone ended up, so the emergence of purgatory
seemed to offer more moral gradation than the stark either/or of
heaven and hell. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, most
people assumed that they would end up in purgatory after death, since
few were good enough for immediate entry to heaven or bad enough for
automatic consignment to hell. People’s fates were still decided at
the moment of death, but at least they had time to make amends for
earthly transgressions if death struck prematurely. Despite
purgatory’s problems – the allegation that the rich could afford
more masses and alms to shorten their stay – the notion that the
living could assist the dead nevertheless offered a modicum of
comfort.
While purgatory’s
punishments – both in pain and in duration – could be daunting,
they were also different from hell’s in that they were only
temporary (even if they lasted for thousands of years) and ultimately
purifying (even if excruciating). Purgatory addressed some of the
questions surrounding the western Christian hell by reserving its
terrifying eternity for the worst of the worst alone.
‘It would be more
pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the
atrocious attributes of Calvin’
Some scholars have
suggested that the biggest impact of the Reformation for ordinary
people was the ‘death of purgatory’. Once reformers had pared
back the afterlife to the two destinations of heaven and hell,
Protestant laypeople were back to the terrifying prospect of eternal
damnation on the basis of this life alone, without the ability to
atone after death and without the possibility of assistance from the
living. Protestants, of course, argued that purgatory was an
unscriptural concept that placed a burdensome and impossible
responsibility on the sinner alone to atone for sins. Only Christ’s
sacrifice was sufficient to save, they said, and in any case this
switch should lighten, not increase, the burden. As long as people
repented and accepted Christ as their saviour, they could rest
assured that they would end up in heaven.
But this was easier
said than done. The agonising uncertainty of whether they were truly
saved haunted the Puritans, who in the early 17th century left their
native England for America due to concerns that it wasn’t reformed
enough. The Puritans’ God was an absolute sovereign so perfect that
even one sin was sufficiently odious as to merit eternal torment. But
this God also became an easy target for Enlightenment intellectuals
who increasingly emphasised human ability and perfectibility over
innate depravity. A God who could consign his own creatures to
eternal torture for seemingly minor misdeeds struck them as despotic
and unjust.
By the time of the
American Revolution in the late 18th century, colonists were
arguing not just over the wisdom of waging war against England, but
also over the justness of eternal punishment. Attracted by
Enlightenment ideas, some members of the founding generation
critiqued the British monarchy and the Calvinist God as tyrannical
dictators both. As Jefferson put it: ‘It would be more pardonable
to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious
attributes of Calvin.’ Some freethinkers departed from the concept
of hell as literal and eternal fire and brimstone in favour of a
temporary hell where individuals would be punished in proportion to
their crimes before being admitted to heaven. Others abandoned hell
entirely, arguing that a loving and merciful God would save all of
creation for heavenly bliss.
And yet, a hell of
fire and brimstone still had staunch defenders, who brought back the
ghost of purgatory to accuse critics of being closet Catholics. A
temporary hell, they argued, was nothing but purgatory all over
again. It made Christ’s sacrifice meaningless, putting the onus
squarely on humans to redeem themselves through suffering after
death. Those in favour of universal salvation were nothing more than
‘Origenists’, a denunciation that, by the 18th century, denoted
dangerous heresy.
More importantly in
the new, monarchless US, defenders of hell argued that the threat of
eternal punishment was necessary to ensure the morality of citizens.
Even a temporary hell, they claimed, would give humans leave to
commit socially harmful transgressions, from lying to cheating to
murder, since they would still eventually end up in heaven after
paying for their crimes. Indeed, the social argument in favour of
eternal hell anticipated the arguments we hear today in favour of the
death penalty. Both are supposed to serve as ultimate deterrents
against crime.
Even European
intellectuals, who had been questioning hell since at least the
17th century, recognised its social utility for the masses.
Voltaire, favourite of American rationalists and bane of
evangelicals, acknowledged in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
that: ‘We are obliged to hold intercourse and transact business,
and mix up in life with … vast numbers of persons addicted to
brutality, intoxication, and rapine. You may, if you please, preach
to them that there is no hell, and that the soul of man is mortal. As
for myself, I will be sure to thunder in their ears, that if they rob
me they will inevitably be damned.’
Debates over the
scriptural basis and social utility of hell would continue to fester
over the course of the 19th century, even as new voices entered the
conversation. New religious groups such as the Mormons, Spiritualists
and Adventists offered their own views on what hell might entail, if
it existed at all. Mormons offered a multi-tiered afterlife. Just as
the bifurcation of Sheol and Hades and the addition of purgatory
added moral nuance to the afterlife, so the Mormon conception of the
‘sons of perdition’ and the telestial, terrestrial and celestial
spheres offered shades of grey to accommodate circumstances ranging
from true evil, to those who ‘died without the law’, to the
righteous and the just.
These alternatives to
the either/or of eternal heaven and hell, as well as those of the
Spiritualists and Adventists, have remained vital. With time, the
challenges of Darwinism and the devastation of human violence –
from the American Civil War to the world wars to Vietnam – led some
away from hell entirely (along with any number of other scriptural
doctrines) and others toward the view that life on earth was hell
enough. In response, liberal theologians expanded on the ideas of
hell as metaphor, hell as temporary and proportional punishment, and
immortality as conditional.
But the orthodox hell
of literal, eternal punishment has continued to hold strong to this
day. So strong that when the US evangelical minister Rob Bell made an
argument much less radical than Origen’s and hardly even new in the
second millennium, he was met with an outcry of epic proportions. The
bespectacled and charismatic Bell, founder of the Michigan megachurch
Mars Hill, had begun to question the justness of an eternal hell and
a theology where even Gandhi would end up there. In his book
Love Wins (2011), Bell claimed that:
A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better . . . This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.
To judge by the
reactions to Bell’s book, it was as if no one had ever questioned
hell before or emphasised God’s love over his wrath. Many
evangelicals were appalled. The viral effects of social media
magnified the outcry, with supporters and opponents jumping in to
offer tweets of praise or condemnation. In the wake of the
controversy, Bell left the church he’d founded and in 2013 told The
Grand Rapids Press he would start a ‘spiritual talk show’ in
southern California. The book’s publication also led some
1,000 members to leave the church, according to a report in The
Christian Post in 2013.
Believers in hell
thrive on a sense of opposition and injustice – to affirm the stark
either/or of heaven or hell requires it
But Bell never
actually denied that there might be a hell after death, even as he
also affirmed that hell could begin now in the violence humans enact
against each other and the earth. In a video interview with The
Washington Post in 2011 he said: ‘I believe in hell now, I believe
in hell when you die. I believe God gives people the right to say no,
to resist, to refuse, to reject, to cling to their sins, to cling to
their version of their story.’ Still, Bell has been vague when
pressed to describe what kind of hell this might be, allowing his
opponents to read into it anything but the eternal hell of fire and
brimstone that many continue to espouse.
The outcry over Bell’s
book was perhaps all the more surprising given recent poll numbers in
the US. A 2013 Harris Poll found that while 74 per cent
of US adults believe in God and 68 per cent believe in
heaven, only 58 per cent believe in the devil and in hell,
down four percentage points from 2005. One might think that, with
supporters of hell on the decline, defenders of Bell might have
easily silenced the opposition. Yet only 25 per cent of US
adults polled actively do not believe in hell, while another
18 per cent are unsure.
And numbers can hardly
tell the whole story, anyhow. Believers in hell thrive on a sense of
opposition and injustice – to affirm the stark either/or of heaven
or hell requires it. Where Bell sees the violence humans enact
against each other on earth as already a kind of hell, those who
support eternal hell argue that it alone can make up for the world’s
violence and suffering, and act as a deterrent against future forms
of human-on-human brutality. Others say that there has to be a hell,
if only for Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Saddam, or Osama bin Laden.
These kinds of
arguments have sustained the idea of eternal punishment for
generations. Supporters of Hell have always claimed to have morality
and justice on their side, even as its opponents have said the same.
As much as some people might thirst for a hell-less faith and a
hell-denying Pope, others eagerly participate in hell and judgment
houses designed to frighten and convert attendees into belief. Poll
numbers might fluctuate, but one thing’s for certain: in the US,
hell isn’t going up in flames anytime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment