So, here we are. As promised in my post on Heaven, I am now giving you the flip side of the coin. I said in the earlier post that you can’t teach satisfactorily about heaven unless you teach about hell and the same is true the other way around. As much as heaven, and you may say more so, hell is burdened with layers of misconception and bad theology so thick it has rendered the actual idea useless to the vast majority of people. Useless at the least if not deeply harmful. Once again, as with heaven, the popular imagery of hell renders it unbelievable to some, while ignorance of its nuances renders it dangerously literal to others. To some there is a horror that cannot exist in a universe bound by the laws of nature they believe fundamental. To others there is a quick and easy answer to the unknown that delivers them from the responsibility of three-dimensional thought. Either mindset is false and, in the end, an instrument of hell itself.
Of the many misconceptions of hell, I will address the largest four which I believe serve as the root of most other misconceptions. Unlike heaven there are two opposing sides of misconceptions with regard to hell that are equally false. One is the typical image of a endless lake of fire filled with screaming souls, plunged to their fate by a strict God whose sense of justice in inexorable. The other image is one of a metaphorical lesson that uses the language of ignorant and superstitious people to communicate a second and inevitable process of redemption. One is an image of terrifying revenge, the other is of a coerced universalism. Neither image is biblical.
Though hell is not a metaphor John's vision of the lake of fire is.
The thing many well meaning Christians forget is that the one person in all of scripture who talks the most about hell is Jesus Himself. Jesus believed very literally in hell, and though He says He came to save all, He also says some will not be saved.
Christ does not agree.
So let’s take a hard look at some of these ideas and bounce them off the orthodox theology of hell. As with the heaven post I’ll include some numbered links to relevant scripture passages. Again this is not an attempt at proof-texting, but rather a guide for your own reflection and study.
What hell is not…
When they think of hell many people envision John’s lake of fire from Revelation.1 This is the iconic lake burning with sulfur into which the beast, false prophet, devil, and reprobate are all cast. The meaning of John’s vision is clear, in that there will be a day of reckoning when all deeds and secrets are laid bare, and God will set all things right, which includes once and for all putting the devil and his servants in their place. This is all very true, but the difficulty with many people, Christian and unbeliever alike, is that they hardly ever read whole passages of the bible let alone entire books. As such people often pluck passages out of their context and half-ass an explanation which turns out to be unhelpful and unfaithful to the text. If you read the whole book of Revelation you will find that John isn’t having a literal vision of future events. Rather he is given a dream in which he is commanded to try and write what he sees. The things he is shown are often beyond the power of human speech to describe and so he often uses this formula which is common to apocalyptic literature, such-and-such a thing “was like” such-and-such another thing. His vision is about the past, present, and future of God’s church and the imagery he uses is designed to make sense to the people of his time as well as to attempt to describe things which he saw that he doesn’t have vocabulary for. All this is to say that John’s point is very clearly communicated when he speaks of the lake of fire, but the actual lake should be taken no more literally than the scroll with seven seals which no man can open.2
Along with the lake of fire, we need to ditch the idea that God is a super-cosmic force of hate just waiting for the end of time so he can unleash billions of years of sadistic creative thinking on unworthy humans. But in our eagerness to reject this idea many Christians have gone too far. Again and again I hear people saying things like, “a God of love cannot put people in hell or he is not a God of love,” or “God’s love surpasses all understanding, I can understand a heaven with everyone in it, so God must have a heaven at least that nice.” Implicit in these statements is, first, that somehow God is beholden to our fallen conceptions of goodness and justice, and second, that we are willing to immediately replace God with an imaginary god the second we don’t like or understand Him. The God Christian universalists worship does not in fact exist. They have taken the parts of God they like and combined them the traits they associate with goodness to create an idol, upon which they have written “God.” 2 Timothy 4 says all this in a great nutshell, “1 I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: 2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. 3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, 4 and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. 5 But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”
What hell is…
God is absolutely holy, and implicit in that statement is absolute love and absolute justice. God endures our sinfulness while we are separate from Him, but as he draws near to us His holiness drives away anything that is not also holy. To be holy means that unholy things cannot exist in your presence.3 This is why God sent His son Christ to satisfy the requirements of justice and to clothe us in His holiness. As such, if we are willing to put on the holiness of Christ we become just as holy as He is and may be with God.4 & 4b So you see that God is not bent on destroying “wrong-doers” or smashing “sinners.” God sent His son to satisfy justice in our place and to give us a one way ticket into His kingdom of love. If we don’t want the ticket the train leaves without us.
As I said in the post on heaven, heaven works backwards into our lives and our pasts literally transforming past darkness into light. This transformation is not coercive though, and as such hell works backwards too. As heaven moves back, redeeming the past and creating a new reality, it drives out the dark reality. Heaven is not coercive and God will not force your hand. This new reality opens the door for aggressors and persecutors to be redeemed into friends and companions, but if they are unwilling to live in a such a reality the new reality of heaven simply pushes them aside. The “aside” into which they are pushed is one where the bad things of the past not only exist but exist with no hope of being any different than they are. This reality is hell. Hell does not exist to teach you a lesson until at last you break and accept grace. Such a view of hell reduces salvation to a gift one must be tortured into accepting. Anyone humble enough to be willing to give themselves and their pasts to God, that is willing to have any part of them or their identity be changed into what God sees them as being will be embraced by the advance of heaven. God is not cruel because there will be people in hell. A doctor is not cruel if a patient rejects their cure and dies. God is not cruel for creating a beautiful healing reality that some have no wish to be part of.
But some say, “what if I change my mind and accept the grace I once thought false?” There are two answers to that. First when the reality of heaven finally displaces that of this reality there will be a judgment in which all will be raised to new life, either for heaven or hell.5 Since the two realities of heaven and hell are so utterly distinct there is no communication or communion between the two, that is there is no bridge. You will only continue deeper into the one you’re in. Secondly, once a heart is hardened what exactly do you think it would take to soften it? Christ tells a story of a man who goes to hell and asks Abraham if a good man can visit his living relatives to warn them about his fate which they may share. Abraham responds that they would never believe the message to be real. They didn’t believe Moses or the prophets, so why would they believe a vision?6 The truth is that the gospel exists in all its glory among us and either a heart is open to it or closed. Now that being said no one but God can see and judge the heart. The populations of heaven and hell are a mystery to us until we’re there. We have no use or business knowing and ought to trust God with the souls of others. After all He says, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious. And I will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” Exodus 33:19.
Heaven is an oncoming reality in which you can trust that you will be perfected and live life more fully than you can imagine. It will drive out all the darkness and hurt that surrounds you. But if you cling to any piece of darkness or resist the coming of the Kingdom it will slowly push you aside. At some point, none can yet see, you will have allowed yourself to be pushed so far there is no coming back. That is hell. The good news is this, Christ has already paid your way into the Kingdom. If you are willing to allow His healing to begin you will be holy, absolutely sufficient to live in the company of your maker.
Peace in Christ
Great post, Mark. Just have one issue.. “As such, if we are willing to put on the holiness of Christ we become just as holy as He is and may be with God.”
At this point you reference Gal 3:26-29: “26 For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. 27 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.”
I am having trouble seeing how your claim that we may become just as holy as Christ is follows from that passage.
Cheers
Quinn
By: Quinn on October 13, 2011
at 6:19 pm
Good catch, I added a clearer text.
By: Theophilus on October 13, 2011
at 6:27 pm
I’m still not buying it. Just as holy as Christ? Surely Christ is infinitely holy, and even if we are sanctified more and more in Heaven, we will never reach infinite holiness.
To put on the holiness of Christ does not mean we become as holy as he is, but rather that we are *clothed* in His righteousness. We become holier and holier through God’s work in us so that what is underneath comes closer to matching the clothing. But for us to be just as holy as Christ? I don’t see how that can be.
By: Quinn on October 14, 2011
at 11:30 pm
“Willing to allow His healing?”
There are a few issues I see in this post, but that one is my deepest, and probably the heart of all of them. The human will, if truly or totally fallen, simply cannot will this. God’s action alone can do this. One cannot allow one’s own healing because the will simply rejects it, it stands for itself. And even if it does “accept” it, it turns said acceptance into a work, and the sinner says to him or herself “Look at what I have done by accepting this. Look at the gate that I have allowed to be open for me,” as opposed to saying “Look at the gate that I have been pulled through, by none of my own accord and indeed against much of my struggle, truly I am a sinner, but by the staff of my Good Shepherd I am saved.” Only the latter stands as Gospel. The will cannot allow for its own salvation, it can only be dragged in by God, and humbled into reverent praise.
To all this feels like torture, to have all of one’s perception of what is holy and pious lead to someone being killed upon the cross. Far greater when one realizes that that one being killed is the incarnation of holiness and piety itself. For the old creation to groan is indeed torturous. Justification is painful because there’s literally nothing you can do for it. It can only happen to you. Passive tense. An infant is not aware that it is being born, and a struggling and lost sheep is unaware that it is being led into green pastures, but it ends up there anyway. This is not of our doing, it is in spite of our doing, it is the gift of God.
We do not will it ourselves, we do not accept it on our own accord: we only, merely and meekly, after all else is wrested away, are given it as a gift, and accept it because there is nothing else, only a reality, a truth, and an eternal life far greater than our most pious mind could have imagined.
Hope all is well, brother! Peace and Grace
-Axel
By: Axel K. (@ASecludedHour) on October 14, 2011
at 7:44 pm
How’s it going Axel? I’m glad you’ve weighed in. The nuts and bolts of soteriology and the interface of divine and human agency is another post in itself. As with any post it can lead into fifty others. Here I only wish to disarm poor interpretations of hell and cement good ones.
By: Theophilus on October 15, 2011
at 12:52 pm
Things are going pretty well! Busy, but well! And you?
I don’t think you can take talk of heaven and hell without discussing soteriology, and more importantly the bondage of the will. Especially when you bring concepts of coercion and condemnation into the picture. These things are necessarily linked to what hell and heaven both are. Also, each of the points you make on good and bad views of hell are centered around the things you describe as making you go into each place by “willing” to be saved or “by not wanting” to live in the reality of heaven. These are soteriological statements that are framing what you are presenting as “good” views of hell and heaven, and I just don’t think they’re the right framework to begin the discussion.
By: Axel K. (@ASecludedHour) on October 15, 2011
at 2:42 pm
Quinn,
This idea is mysterious. I don’t mean that as a cop-out but as an acknowledgment of information we can only guess at. Exactly how holy we are is tough to say. This we do know, God’s absolute holiness obliterates anything unholy in His presence. The way we get around this is by sanctification in Christ. The principle of sanctification through the incarnation is actually a more central theology than the atonement for the Eastern Orthodox Church, which says quite a lot. Yet, we also know that over the course of eternity we will become more and more like God and yet never achieve sameness with Him.
Either way, we are made sufficiently holy to dwell in the immediate presence of God’s absolute holiness. But just how holy we are, or exactly what it means to be clothed with Christ’s holiness we don’t know. I’m simply taking the Eastern Orthodox bent on the subject, though there are other equally doctrinally correct nuances.
By: Theophilus on October 15, 2011
at 1:00 pm
[...] that transformation or live in it once it’s done, you’re basically saying you’d rather live in hell. God is clear to the point of redundancy about how we are to live holistically in this world and [...]
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at 2:21 pm