Believing In Hell
Scriptures: Romans 8:1-8, Matthew 10:26-34
Now, if you or I were to write such a book, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of a stir in theological circles. But Rob Bell is pastor of a mega-church, Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, MI, and a pillar of the evangelical community. Here he was challenging the core of the evangelical worldview – that when you open up salvation to, well, everyone “you don’t need the church, and you don’t need Christ, and you don’t need the cross,” as critic R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary put it. Most especially, you don’t need hell and judgment. In response to his critics Rob Bell says that “He believes that Jesus, the Son of God, was sacrificed for the sins of humanity and that the prospect of a place of eternal torment seems irreconcilable with the God of love.” Sound familiar? You’ve heard something very much like that a time or two from this pulpit.
So…..”Is Hell Dead?” No, that’s just a magazine’s sensationalizing title. But this article and Rob Bell’s book do make us want to take another look at what the idea of “hell” means to us – just as we looked at what the idea of “heaven” meant to us last week.
“Heaven” and “hell” seem on first blush to be all about judgment – or, if you want to be a little more inclusive about it: judgment and salvation. When these are the topics it usually means someone – some particular ones — are getting judged and being saved. The debate around Bell’s book centers on the fact that he doesn’t believe that any of us ought to be in the business of trying to decide who is judged and who is saved – that’s God’s business. And God is a God of all-encompassing love. Lutheran pastor Peter W. Marty also had an article about Rob Bell’s book in this week’s The Christian Century, and Marty makes this same point when he says: “Plenty of God’s faithful wonder why popular understandings of salvation often are uttered in the language of threat, especially given Jesus’ propensity to speak in the language of promise.” Marty goes on to comment:
“Much of Bell’s book wisely focuses on our perception of God. For example, why would God bait and switch in a moment’s notice on such fundamental matters as love and condemnation? If God is our friend, protector, counselor and merciful parent throughout life, it seems strange that our death would suddenly evoke a vicious God. What sort of theology has God loving us one moment and traumatizing us the next? Such behavior makes no divine sense. Says Bell: ‘If there was an earthly father who [acted like this]…we would call the authorities…we would contact child protection services immediately.’”
This approach – that God offers God’s love and salvation indiscriminately and unreservedly to all – is sometimes derided as “universalism”. The great theologian Karl Barth – not someone usually noted for wry witticisms – was once charged with being a universalist. He reportedly denied it at first, but then he quoted I John: “Christ died for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” Barth went on to comment, somewhat wryly, “If you are worried about universalism, you had better begin worrying about the Bible.”
OK, now, it’s time for full disclosure. The rest of this sermon is parts of one I’ve already preached here before (I feel that if networks can offer us re-runs of programs they thought were pretty good as we head into late spring and summer, why can’t a minister rerun a pretty good sermon every once in awhile?). So, if you were here on June 22, 2008, and remember what I said then, I invite you to check your Facebook or go on Twitter or get a head start on the rest of us with a cup of coffee.
What I want to suggest to you is that, despite our modern sensibilities and pooh-poohing of a “hellfire and brimstone” approach, hell is very real. Hell is not dead, despite that Time magazine headline. It is a reality that our faith needs to take seriously. It is a reality that impacts our lives. It is a reality that often motivates who we are and what we do.
Martin Marty, Peter Marty’s father, was once asked, “Do you believe in hell?” His response: “I’ve seen hell in our world of incessant warfare and killing, in the death of innocent children, in the fire and ice of alienation across generations and in marital breakups, and when seeking souls testify to their experience of the silence or absence of God.”
That phrase, “the silence or absence of God”, reminded me, as you might have expected, of my favorite film director, whom, as most of you know by now, is Ingmar Bergman. Bergman’s films, especially of the late 50s and 60s are consumed with the absence of God and therefore with the hells his characters tend to find themselves in. Bergman knew the European existentialist writers of the 1940s and especially Jean-Paul Sartre, who in his 1944 play, No Exit, famously said, “Hell is other people”. And so the characters in Bergman’s movies like The Naked Night, The Silence, Cries and Whispers, and The Rite provide forms of hell for one another. Among his later films perhaps especially From the Life of the Marionettes in 1981 comes closest to being Bergman’s No Exit where the main character says in the middle of that film, “All ways out are closed”, and then repeats at the end, “All roads are closed”. No matter what they do to one another the characters in these films seem to be creating a hell from which there is no exit.
But despite the fact that in many of his early movies Bergman depicts literal demons and has many images of hellfire, the idea of hell for him is less a place than a metaphor. He says at one point in response to an interviewer, echoing Sartre, “For me, hell has always been a most suggestive sort of place; but I’ve never regarded it as being located anywhere else than on earth. Hell is created by human beings – on earth!” So, hell for Bergman is not a “place” but a framework for attitudes and behavior. Yet, paradoxically, in his films Bergman offers images which refer to classical depictions of hell and which give it physical tangibility and place-setting.
But as we well know, while there may be some truth in the idea that “hell is other people”, so is heaven. That’s why the Christian church has come to be known as the “beloved community”, so that it could model how when people are together they can create a kind of heaven for one another. Not that the church is a paradise or a return to Eden, but that through acts of kindness and generosity and caring and offering of hope we can get a glimpse of what heaven is like.
No one has illustrated this better than C.S. Lewis in his little book, The Great Divorce, which I had the privilege to perform in as The Narrator one summer when I traveled with a Christian repertoire drama group called The Bishop’s Company. In a dream-like state The Narrator gets on a bus that is taking a group of denizens from hell to the outskirts of heaven so that the spirits of heaven can convince them to come with them further up into the hills of heaven. Those from hell are thin, wispy, ghost-like – having very little real substance. And for the most part they do not want to go with their friends or loved ones who are pleading with them to come. They don’t even realize that they are in hell. Lewis is suggesting here that people choose to remain in the hells they have made, and that the key element in that choice is selfishness. Lewis writes, “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”. They want to hold on to their grievances, their hurts, their ways of doing things. I still have this mental image of a wonderful old actress, Mina Caldwell, as a ghost-like mother who only wants to join her son who is in heaven if it can be on her terms, saying, “Oh, I forgive him as a Christian, of course, but there are some things you just can never forget.” Being in hell means not taking the next step toward compassion, toward generosity, toward forgiveness.
What I’m trying to suggest is that a shorthand way to describe the nature and therefore the reality of hell is that hell is separation from God and a sense that God has abandoned us. Duke Divinity professor Paul Griffiths puts it this way: “Hell, formally speaking, is that despairing condition in which separation from God seems to be final and unending; in it, there is no faith, no hope, no love – only the agony of abandonment, the edgeless desert of dissimilitude to which you know you do not belong but from which you can see no exit other than the attempt at self-destruction.”
Wow. That’s a pretty dismal picture, isn’t it? But then again hell is supposed to be about as dismal as it can get. I don’t know if any of us has felt the depths of what Paul Griffiths describes – “the agony of abandonment” in which there is “no faith, no hope, no love” – but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us have come pretty close to those feelings. And when we do, we are literally in hell. Just as our resurrection faith tells us that we are living in eternal life here and now, so also hell is a condition that haunts us in the now of our lives here on earth – not a place that we go to after death.
So, how are we to cope when hell becomes too real for us? The first, and most important, thing to say is that God has been there before us. In the Apostle’s Creed we say of Jesus the Christ: “He descended into hell”. God, through Jesus the Christ, knows what it means for us to experience “the agony of abandonment”. Because of Christ’s death on the cross we are saved from eternal separation from God, and by that death we are offered eternal communion with God. Those are really the twin poles of our reality: separation or communion. When we have met the Christ there in our own private hells and have heard the promise of communion with God, we stand ready to respond and to climb out of the hell we are in.
There’s one other point to make about separation: we often provide the circumstances of our own separations. Whenever we separate ourselves from “the Other” – by class or race or nationality or sexual orientation or religion – we are helping the Devil (the Evil One) to keep us in hell. Our human separations also keep us separated from God. That’s why we are an inclusive church and seek to foster that sense of inclusivity throughout society. To break down the barriers that separations cause is to move us toward communion with our God.
When Paul in Romans 8 talks about “the law of sin and of death” he is talking about the nature of hell. And when he goes on to say, “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh”, this is another way of saying what we have already said: that when self-interest, self-centeredness and separation define who we are we are living according to the flesh. To “set (our) mind(s) on the things of the Spirit” is not to live on some ethereal, un-real plane, but it is to focus on those things that bring us to heaven: on caring, on compassion, on community.
That final line in our text from Matthew is one that has troubled Christians down through the ages, when Jesus says, “’Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.’”
Imagine the Jesus we love walking the roads of Palestine packing a sword. But in many ways this image reflects our contemporary world – a world filled with violence and threats of violence and arguments about whether ordinary citizens should have guns in their homes to protect them. We are fed a steady diet of violence from television, movies, video games, and music. A phrase like “road rage” has become part of our common parlance – I’ve heard it said that the average driver honks their horn every two minutes. I think we know that such frequent use of a car horn is not part of an effort to avoid accidents. The driver is using the horn to say something, and what is being said reflects a level of anger that is scary. (My wife will tell you that I am hardly immune to this practice myself.) On the religious front there are concepts such as jihad and just war and the use of hymns like “Onward Christian Soldiers”. The anger and violent feelings reflected in a phrase like “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” is very real and resonates strongly with our modern world and our own lives. Violence is not something that is imposed on religious people; it is part of the very warp and woof of our own lives and homes and communities. (And by the way, the Institute for Economics and Peace has ranked Nevada as the third most violent state in the nation.)
Anger and violence, Jesus is telling us in this passage, is part of what it means to be in hell. Here, Jesus seems to be agreeing with the idea that “Hell is other people,” when he says just before this statement about not bringing peace but a sword: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” But he then goes on to say that his heavenly Parent values each and every one of us, even more “than many sparrows”.
God, through Jesus, has come into our hells and told us that there is no more to fear, there is no more need for anger and violence, there is no way that separation can have the last word. Hell may be real. But so is communion with our Lord – and it is the greater reality. “Abandon all hope, you who enter here?” No, hope has been given to us in great abundance – in fact, it is part and parcel of the abundant life we talked about last week — and we have – all of us — been welcomed into the gates of heaven.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCCLas Vegas, NV
May 22, 2011
