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No Hell Below Us

To preach long, loud, and Damnation, is the way to be cried up. We love a man that damns us, and we run after him again to save us.

John Selden (1584-1654), Table Talk, “Damnation” (1686)

I’ve been enjoying (and GSharing at least some of) Fred Clark’s blog posts on Rob Bell, Bell’s new book Love Wins, and the apoplexy of what Clark calls “Team Hell,” which insists that Bell’s neo-Universalism is heresy of the highest order because it denies the ultimate punishment of eternal, conscious, torment of sinners.

In his latest post, Clark discusses the “Missiological Argument” for Hell. Rather than argue theology, or logic, or philosophy, this argument says that Hell is useful, because, essentially, it scares people into sticking to the straight and narrow, going to church, seeking forgiveness, and thus being  saved. For example, he cites Russell Moore, dean of the school of theology at Southern Seminary, who was recently reported as saying:

Bell’s view of salvation, Moore said, is wrong biblically but also flawed practically and will lead to empty church pews. If the pastor says there is no judgment and everyone will end up in heaven, then people have little motivation to follow Christ, Moore and the other panelists said.

Clark summarizes:

Moore says the church will collapse without the threat of judgment. And, to be clear, “judgment” must mean nothing less than the vast majority of humankind suffering consciously for eternity in the Hell that Moore, et. al., imagine (magical fire, merciless God, “holy” as synonym for “sadistic,” etc.). Without that threat, Moore says, there can be no revival, no evangelism, no missionary outreach, no church growth. Without Hell, the church will shrink and shrivel and fade away.

Clark’s post is a great dismemberment of Moore’s argument, and well worth reading on its own, but it led me to my own Universalist considerations.

To consider a triumph of God’s love over obstinate sin to be “no judgment” is telling — it’s a “you’re either for us or against us, now and forever” kind of nearsightedness.  Misdeeds and ignorance carry consequences, in this world and the next, I should think.  The question is whether those consequences are eternal, or are fitting to the circumstance. Is God’s grace a limited time offer?  Why would it be?

The Missiological Argument is not unique to modern Christian orthodoxy.  Ironically, in some ways it’s one of the reasons why there’s often such confusion over whether this country’s Founders were good, religious Christians.  Many of them, privately, were not — or, rather, many of them believed in a variety of unorthox positions, heresies, or were Deists or atheists.

But both publicly and privately they’d assert that they thought religion in general, and thus the majority’s Christianity in particular, were useful, because it provided a social regulation on the hoi polloi.

I understand what they say there. And there are times when I recognize how my own good behavior is driven less by a desire to be nice and beneficent than to avoid shame or feared punishment.

Still … I would say my own deeper belief is along the lines of Sir Thomas Brown, in Religio Medici (1643)

I can hardly think there was ever any scared into Heaven; they go the fairest way to Heaven that would serve God without a Hell.

Or, more emotionally, by Rabi’ah of Basra in the 8th Century:

O God! If I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!

Or, put in more secular terms by Einstein:

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.

Indeed, in that same 1930 article, Einstein wrote:

The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples’ lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

That’s a great way of putting it — religion of fear vs a religion of morality.  A religion that uses fear of the outside world, and fear of the anger of the gods, as its goad, vs. a religion that seeks to improve how we treat one another.

I am a Universalist, by personal theology.  I believe that, ultimately, all will find their way to God.  I don’t say that with the arrogance that says, “You’ll all figure out how you were wrong and I was right.”  I figure I’m as far from God, relatively speaking, as anyone else.

But I don’t believe that God, a loving God that went to the effort of creating us, is willing to discard any of that creation — especially because, as fallible humans, we’re bound to get something wrong.  Most things wrong, most likely.

Much less do I think that, like Team Hell does, God will send the humans crafted (if you believe the Bible) “in His image” to a eternal, conscious, inescapable torment. That would be hard enough to stomach for even the most vile of miscreants — your Hitlers and Stalins and Pol Pots and Idi Amins — let alone for some of the fine, upstanding, even saintly folks out there who had the misfortune to belong to the wrong (or no) church, or believe in a doctrine that happened to be incorrect.

Universalism, in its various flavors, is not new.  It’s been considered a legitimate, if minority, branch of Christian belief for centuries.  Madeleine L’Engle put it as follows:

I know a number of highly sensitive and intelligent people in my own communion who consider as a heresy my faith that God’s loving concern for his creation will outlast all our willfulness and pride. No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his look of love with a joyful response of love […] Some people feel it to be heresy because it appears to deny man his freedom to refuse to love God. But this, it seems to me, denies God his freedom to go on loving us beyond all our willfulness and pride. If the Word of God is the light of the world, and this light cannot be put out, ultimately it will brighten all the dark corners of our hearts and we will be able to see, and seeing, will be given the grace to respond with love — and of our own free will.

Unfortunately, it’s also considered heretical for too many, not because it denies the freedom of will, but because it denies the inevitability of deserved and ultimate judgment among a certain brand of Christian, the “pious sadists” as Isaac Asimov called them.  As Steve Allen observed:

To those who wish to punish others — or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters into their own hands — the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort.

Or, in Bertrand Russell‘s words:

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

(By the way, I’m not quote-dropping to impress by authority.  These folks are just using the words to express my thoughts better than I can. And since I have their quotes collected, I might as well link back for folks to look up the sources.)

This sort of perpetual punishment — a final judgment that can come at any time, before education, illumination, inspiration, or sheer chance can lead one to the “acceptable” path, that can strike with a car accident, a lightning bolt, an overdose, or just old age — makes no sense to me. It puts a time limit on both Man and God to be reconciled, and an arbitrary and capricious time limit at that.  Those who vigorously hold to it, ultimately, strike me as the older sibling in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, ticked off that his “lost” brother has been found and brought back into the fold.  The unfairness of it all seems to choke them.

The doctrine of Hell was perhaps most soundly criticized by the 19th Century freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll. He reviled it not so much for it being a myth, but for the effect it had on the living, and for what it said about the God that Christians claimed to worship.

While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for the hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this discord will result a perfect harmony; that every evil will in some mysterious way become a good, and that above and over all there is a being who, in some way, will reclaim and glorify every one of the children of men; but for those who heartlessly try to prove that salvation is almost impossible; that damnation is almost certain; that the highway of the universe leads to hell; who fill life with fear and death with horror; who curse the cradle and mock the tomb, it is impossible to entertain other than feelings of pity, contempt and scorn. (1876)

Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of Hell? Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To worship an eternal gaoler hardens, debases, and pollutes even the vilest soul. While there is one sad and breaking heart in the universe, no good being can be perfectly happy. … I want no part in any heaven in which the saved, the ransomed and redeemed will drown with shouts of joy the cries and sobs of hell — in which happiness will forget misery, where the tears of the lost only increase laughter and double bliss. (18 81)

I attack the doctrine of eternal pain. I hold it in infinite and utter abhorrence. And if there be a God in this universe who made a hell; if there be a God in this universe who denies to any human being the right of reformation, then that God is not good, that God is not just, and the future of man is infinitely dark. I despise that doctrine, and I have done what little I could to get that horror from the cradle, that horror from the hearts of mothers, that horror from the hearts of husbands and fathers, and sons, and brothers, and sisters. It is a doctrine that turns to ashes all the humanities of life and all the hopes of mankind. I despise it. (1882)

For my money, Ingersoll expresses my beliefs here more fully than Russell Moore.  The Religion of Fear not only makes out God to be the “eternal gaoler,” but turns those who follow Him into trustees, trying to get in good with the screws in order to get some privileges, or in desperate hope of a kind word at the parole hearing.  It makes the world into Us vs Them, the Saved vs the Damned, and promotes either a smug self-righteousness in being part of the inner circle, or a perpetually wearying pain of seeing so many souls lost.

To promulgate such doctrines theologically is dubious — to do so out of a desire to fill church pews is, honestly, despicable.

If there is a Hell, then couching it in terms of Team Hell’s lake of fire and Dante-esque sadism parlor seems nonsensical to me.  I’d be closer to the ideas C.S. Lewis talked of in The Great Divorce (1945) — not a rejecting punishment by God toward Man, but a rejection by Man of God.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

Lewis’ Hell is a vast and spiritually empty realm, a “grey town” full of ghosts, “joyless, friendless, and uncomfortable.”  Those who are there are there by choice, unwilling to face the deeper reality of Heaven for a variety of reasons. “There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy.” Any punishment is passive, self-inflicted — a turning from the frightening shock of transformative bliss to superficially more comfortable cul-de-sac of self-deception. It is, in its own way, as horrifying as a lake of fire and gibbering demons with pitchforks — but less personally cruel.

Lewis’ allegory states that any in Hell can decide upon Heaven when they choose — but the implication is that some don’t, or won’t.  And, in the end, that’s where I have to part ways. If The Great Divorce is willing to have any of those lost souls, dwindled to infinitesimal points, remain lost for eternity, irredeemable — even in a Hell where the doors are “locked on the inside” — I am not.  Nor, I believe, is God.

To quote Madeleine L’Engle one more time:

I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.

I find that a greater comfort, and a sounder doctrine, than Team Hell. Amen.

(The various illustrations in this post are by Gustave Dore, who in 1861 released a series of illustrations from Dante’s Inferno.  They’ve become iconic representations of the tortures of Hell.  More info on Dore and  his various pictures from Dante’s 14th Century works here.)

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11 thoughts on “No Hell Below Us”

  1. Which Afterlife?

    In his new book “Love Wins” Rob Bell seems to say that loving and compassionate people, regardless of their faith, will not be condemned to eternal hell just because they do not accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.

    Concepts of an afterlife vary between religions and among divisions of each faith. Here are three quotes from “the greatest achievement in life,” my ebook on comparative mysticism:

    (46) Few people have been so good that they have earned eternal paradise; fewer want to go to a place where they must receive punishments for their sins. Those who do believe in resurrection of their body hope that it will be not be in its final form. Few people really want to continue to be born again and live more human lives; fewer want to be reborn in a non-human form. If you are not quite certain you want to seek divine union, consider the alternatives.

    (59) Mysticism is the great quest for the ultimate ground of existence, the absolute nature of being itself. True mystics transcend apparent manifestations of the theatrical production called “this life.” Theirs is not simply a search for meaning, but discovery of what is, i.e. the Real underlying the seeming realities. Their objective is not heaven, gardens, paradise, or other celestial places. It is not being where the divine lives, but to be what the divine essence is here and now.

    (80) [referring to many non-mystics] Depending on their religious convictions, or personal beliefs, they may be born again to seek elusive perfection, go to a purgatory to work out their sins or, perhaps, pass on into oblivion. Lives are different; why not afterlives? Beliefs might become true.

    Rob Bell asks us to reexamine the Christian Gospel. People of all faiths should look beyond the letter of their sacred scriptures to their spiritual message. As one of my mentors wrote “In God we all meet.”

    1. Well, I suspect fluffly clouds, white robes, and harps aren’t the most likely scenario.

      I really have no idea of what the afterlife is like. I expect a less filtered/distracted relationship with God, plus other paradisaical bennies, but anything selling a specific vision is either just crafting a yarn or trying to sell you something.

      I do strongly suspect that we don’t just have “three-score years and ten” to do all the temporal growth and discovery that we need to do.

  2. Dave,

    My initial comment was primarily about alternate views of an afterlife. Rob Bell has never claimed to be a mystic, but is open to contemplative prayer and meditation. While not a Universalist, he does respect people of other religions.

    Even within Christianity there are differing views of afterlife between Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Mormons, etc. In any discussion between people, there will be varying personal opinions and interpretations of scriptures. Most mystics, of any faith, would agree with Jesus: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.” If you want to find Hell just read, watch or listen to the daily news or study the unkind history of humankind.

  3. You quoted Einstein as saying:
    A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.

    Exactly. I agree with this completely. Admittedly, I rather like rewards for my good behavior in this life, even as I must take the punishments/consequences of my less wonderful behavior now as well.

  4. Ron Krumpos said:
    Rob Bell asks us to reexamine the Christian Gospel. People of all faiths should look beyond the letter of their sacred scriptures to their spiritual message. As one of my mentors wrote “In God we all meet.”

    As someone whose religion does NOT have sacred scriptures, I’m not sure where that leaves me. I would have altered your mentor’s words to “In Deity we all meet”, as the word encompasses those polytheistic faiths and others who do not refer to their deity as God. I think of Deity as an infinite/of unknown size polygon of which we can each see but a few aspects, as we are taught or believe, and is a superset of all the deities believed in.

  5. @Marina: Like Rabi’ah quoted above, I try not to let my behavior be driven out of fear of punishment or desire for reward (though I too often fail at each).

    That said, yes I have to take responsibility for my failings and their consequences (to me and others), and similarly I would expect some sort of positive consequences for what I do well. (Heck, I’ll settle for getting three questions answered before moving on to my next assignment, whatever that may be.)

  6. @Ron: Jesus clearly meant the Kingdom of Heaven to be established within each heart, vs. some sort of Kingdom of Earth recreating the realm of David and Solomon (which is what most of the Jews expected). That’s why his focus in the Greatest Commandments is on love of God and Neighbor.

  7. @Marina: Well, if you don’t have sacred scripture, then, in once sense, you may be a leg up in the game, since while you lose that reference and pedagogical instrument, you gain in not being bound to the words like a fly in amber (something too many Christians suffer from).

    Mohammed Naguib wrote, “Religion is a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always the same.” See also the old tale of the blind men and the elephant.

  8. God is not good

    If God is the ultimate being, then that God cannot be good. When we are saying that God is good, we are passing some judgment on God, we are saying that He is good. But by what standard of goodness are we judging him good? From where has it originated? As believers say that their God is the all-thing and everything that was there, therefore this standard of goodness could have originated from God only, and not from any other source, because except that God there was no other source from which it could have originated. So we are judging God good by His own standard of goodness. But this is a dangerous principle. Because if this principle is being followed in other cases also, then there will be complete chaos. Then everybody will start claiming that he should be judged for his action by his own standard only, and not by the standard of other people, society, or state. And he can legitimately claim this, because he will say that God has made man in His own image. So the principle that is followed in case of God should also be followed in case of each and every single human being. Why should there be any deviation from that principle in case of man? Is he not created in God’s own image? So, after killing six million Jews Hitler will claim that he is innocent, because he thought it absolutely necessary to efface their race from the surface of earth, in order to save mankind from future disasters. Therefore by his own standard of goodness and badness he has done nothing wrong.
    Therefore the above principle will have to be abandoned and we will have to seek for some other principle. In that case if we say that God is good, then we will have to admit that the standard by means of which we judge God good has not originated from Him, but from some other source. Here there are two possibilities:
    1) This standard is prior to God,
    2) It is coeternal with, but not originated from, God.
    In none of the two cases above, God is the all-thing and everything that can be there. So believers cannot claim that their God is the all-thing and everything that is there, and at the same time claim that He is good.
    Bertrand Russell, although an atheist, has already shown that God cannot be good, for the simple reason that if God is good, then there is a standard of goodness which is independent of God’s will. Here Russell is also admitting that if God is to be judged good at all, then He will have to be so judged by a standard that should not, and must not, have originated from God. In Hindu mythology, Brahma (Supreme Being) is said to be beyond good and evil. He is neither good, nor evil. But both good as well as evil have originated from Him, who is neither good nor evil.
    The main problem is that most of the believers are irrational people. They attribute to God many properties that cannot be attributed to Him legitimately. A God who is one cannot love, cannot hate, cannot be cruel, cannot be merciful, cannot be benevolent, cannot be all-loving, cannot be just, etc. If we say God is love, then before creation whom did He love? So if we say that God is love, then it can only be self-love. If we say that God is cruel, then we will have to admit that He is cruel to Himself. If we say that God is all-loving, then we will have to admit that this all is coeternal with God, and that therefore He has not created us at all. So we should not revere Him, for the simple reason that he is not our creator! Perhaps due to their fear of eternal hell-fire after death some people try to appease God by repeatedly saying that He is Good, whereas in reality He is not good. But does that mean that God is evil? No, not at all. Einstein has said just the right thing here: Subtle is His way, but He is not malicious!
    In one sense it can be said that the creation of the universe was God’s greatest wrongdoing. It was His biggest blunder. Because with this creation came hunger, misery, death, suffering, sorrow, slavery, murder, rape, treason, torture, and what not! Now we cannot undo what God has already done, because it is not in our power to destroy the entire universe. But we can at least destroy the earth; science has given us that much power. So it is up to us to decide what we should do. But if we do not destroy the earth, then in a sense we also become responsible for all the future evils on earth. We do not destroy the earth because we love life, thus allowing evil to run its course as before.
    The principle that God is to be judged good by His own standard of goodness is intrinsically a bad principle. Because in that case we are giving unlimited license to God to decide what is good for Him. And He can arbitrarily choose any act as good for Him that is abhorrent to others. Here believers will say that God is of such a nature He can never act badly. By saying so believers are admitting that God’s acts are good not because those are God’s acts, but because God always acts conforming to some moral code. So Russell is correct in saying that there is a standard of goodness that is independent of God’s will.
    Another reason can be given as to why God cannot be good. If God is good then the question “who created God?” cannot be answered properly and there will be an infinite regression. Believers are very clever people indeed. When this question is raised, knowing very well that they have no answer to this, they cunningly place their God outside the causal space-time universe, and then claim that causal rule does not apply there. But when the question comes as to whether God is good or evil, they blissfully forget that they themselves have placed their God outside the causal universe where not only the causal chain, but also none of the other categories of the created world would apply: goodness/badness, love/hate, justice/injustice, beauty/ugliness, compassion/cruelty, benevolence/malevolence, big/small, high/low, etc. & etc. And they will take no time to declare that their God is pure goodness itself, thus showing their utter inability to think consistently.

  9. I think I see where you’re driving toward, Paul, but while I think anyone can claim they were “just following (divine) orders,” the chaos that would create if it trumped all other arguments means that two things get in the way.

    First, they must be persuasive as to their argument, either drawing from established religious teachings or presenting an argument with something more persuasive than “a voice told me to.”

    Second, they must fit into earthly justice. This is not — and cannot be, for just the reasons you note — the same as moral good, if only because it must be somewhat more objective than divine noodging. For those who feel they are truly doing the divine will (or what they feel is truly right), that’s not an obstacle — they do what they need to do, and take the civil consequences.

    But that begs the issue of whether God is Good. The literalist says that this is so, and therefore whatever we understand God to be saying is, in fact, what is Good — no matter what is so claimed. And you point out the flaw, which is that this assumes some sort of absolute, standard, orthodox understanding of what God is saying, a common and obvious and unquestionable presentation of (since this is usually a Christian thing) what the Bible says. The literalist claims it’s obvious that God says X, Y, and Z in the Bible, but that someone who claims that it’s obvious that God says X, Y, and W is clearly deluded, heretical, malicious, evil, etc. The Biblical literalist knows what is obviously correct, and anything that counters (even from someone similarly convinced) is simply and sinfully wrong.

    For my part, I’d claim that our understanding of God’s will — “Good” — is far fuzzier, or that the evidence presented is far less clear and far more muddled by human frailty than the literalist would accept. The conquest of the Holy Land by Israel does not match my sense of what is “Good,” so, upon consideration, I tend to reject the literalist justifications of it. (I may be equally deluded, to be sure, but hopefully with less malicious results.)

    So I would agree with the Biblical Literalist that God is Good — but I would disagree with him or her that we understand fully what that means, or that everything attributed to God in Scripture is therefore Good.

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