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| Hans Memling Last Judgment Triptych (Detail), 1471 |
Part Four: Hell
In twenty years of ordained ministry, I must admit that I’ve very seldom preached on hell. But then, I’m an Episcopalian. And few things are as damning to a priest’s reputation as the report that he preaches sermons on damnation. So, the traditional course of Advent sermons on the Four Last Things – Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell – is a good discipline for me as well as for you, because it compels us to examine together topics that we might otherwise prefer to avoid.
The most common objection raised by believers and nonbelievers alike to the idea of hell is that it contradicts God’s nature. How could a good, loving, and forgiving God condemn anyone to eternal punishment simply for not believing in him or for not being a Christian? It seems so unfair, so unjust. By the way, during my teenage agnostic years, this was my principal argument against Christianity.
Of course, that objection proceeds from some unfounded assumptions about what Christianity teaches. The Catholic tradition has always affirmed that non-Christians and nonbelievers can be saved. But it also affirms that hell is a very real possibility for any of us.
Part of the reason is that the Bible witnesses clearly to the existence of hell, particularly in the New Testament, and particularly in the teachings of Jesus himself. It’s a popular fallacy that Jesus spoke only comforting words of love and forgiveness, in contrast to, say, the fiery prophets of the Old Testament, or those who came after him like the Apostle Paul. When we read the Gospels, we discover that Jesus preached his share of fire and brimstone sermons too.
Boston College professor Peter Kreeft argues that the doctrine of hell follows logically from two prior doctrines: namely heaven and free will: “If there is a heaven,” he writes, “there can be a not-heaven. And if there is free will, we can act on it and abuse it. Those who deny hell must also deny either heaven (as does Western secularism) or free will (as does Eastern pantheism).”
Here we encounter the paradox that the existence of hell, rather than denying God’s love, instead manifests God’s love. True love never seeks to force itself on the beloved. It always respects the freedom of the beloved to respond in love or not. So it is with God. He loves us, but if we reject his love, he will respect our choice and not force us to love him against our wills. So in his love for us, God gives us the option to reject his love and spend eternity living in that rejection. C.S. Lewis says somewhere that, in the end, there are only two categories of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done;” and those to whom God says, “Very well, then, thy will be done.”
I once explained this to a friend of mine years ago, who was fascinated with the idea that hell is somewhere people might actually choose to go. If it’s not really a place of punishment, burning in eternal flames and being poked by pitchfork-wielding devils, he mused, then it might not be such a bad place after all.
But that is to miss the point entirely. Hell is nowhere we ever want to be. The images for hell in Scripture are horrible and frightening, but they’re symbolic depictions of a spiritual reality that is even worse. The pain of loss – of losing God who is the source of all human happiness and joy – is infinitely worse than any torture. C.S. Lewis writes: “All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it—or else that it was within your grasp and you have lost it forever.”
What is hell like? Peter Kreeft offers the fascinating speculation that heaven and hell may represent the same objective reality, namely God’s love, experienced oppositely by opposite souls, just as two people sitting next to each other at the same symphony or rock concert may be having two completely opposite experiences: heavenly ecstasy for the one and a hellish nightmare for the other. Just so, Kreeft writes:
The fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, experienced as torture by those who hate him: the very light of God’s truth, hated and fled from in vain by those who love darkness. Imagine a man in hell—no, a ghost—endlessly chasing his own shadow, and the light of God shines endlessly behind him. If he would only turn and face the light, he would be saved. But he refuses to—forever.
What that quotation makes clear is that hell is not so much a place where God sends us as a state that we choose for ourselves, either explicitly or implicitly, by turning away from God and rejecting his love. There is no hell but that of our own making.
The practical question, then, is how to avoid hell. The theological term is salvation. It means being saved from hell, and for heaven. And the answer is that we cannot save ourselves. Jesus is the Savior. He’s the only one who can rescue us from hell and bring us safely home.
We receive his salvation by believing in him, and by living in him so that we can be renewed and transformed by his life in us. And he gives us the normative means to do this in the corporate life, worship, and sacraments of his Church.
Again, this is not to say that non-Christians and non-believers cannot be saved. Faith in Christ can be implicit as well as explicit. Christ can offer the grace of his salvation to whomever he pleases. And there are many anonymous Christians out there who will discover that even though they did not know Christ in their earthly lives, nonetheless he is the one who sums up and embodies all that they ever regarded as good, beautiful, and true. In the end they, too, will recognize him as the one who saved them.
On the other hand, those of us who call ourselves Christians need to recognize that even for us hell remains a possibility. We cannot take our salvation for granted; and we need continually to renew our faith in Christ and to make use of the Church’s appointed means of grace to increase his life in us.
Here, then, is the deepest significance of our celebrations of the Lord’s Nativity tomorrow evening and Tuesday morning. Christmas celebrates the birth into this world of the one who comes to save us from death and hell. We greet him as our Savior now, so that in the Last Day we shall not be afraid to meet him as our Judge.
Source cited: Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988. pp. 162-4.
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