When we cut hell out of the conversation

Over the last few years, some of the best-selling religious books have been about heaven.

Write one about how you died for a few minutes while experiencing a momentary jolt of nirvana beyond anything you ever imagined and publishers will line up outside your door ready to buy your story. They know the book-buying public is eager to get a glimpse through that scary curtain called death…so long as what’s on the other side meets with their preconceptions.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times. A few years back he wrote a column titled “Hell’s grip on religious imagination weakens.”  He said, Even in our supposedly disenchanted age, large majorities of Americans believe in God and heaven, miracles and prayer. But belief in hell lags well behind, and the fear of damnation seems to have evaporated.

Douthat says near-death stores are quick to sell. “The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven” tells of a child’s return from paradise. However, “you’ll search in vain for ‘The Investment Banker Who Came Back From Hell.”

Douthat blames this disenchantment, this unbelief, regarding hell on what he calls “growing pluralism.”

What does that mean? Simply that people of all religions and persuasions live on our block, go to our schools, shop in our stores, and are no longer abstractions. So, when we consider the question whether those-who-do-not-believe-in-Jesus go to hell, we are asking about some very real people we know personally and not the impersonal heathen of some dark continent.

Bible-believers need to come to grips with the subject of hell, even though no one is saying it’s fun to study or debate. No one wants there to be a hell.

Well, almost no one.

We all remember when a SWAT team from the United States Navy dropped in to a compound just outside Islamabad, Pakistan, and took out Osama bin Laden. They shot him twice, then gave him a prompt at-sea burial to prevent his body from becoming a relic of worship or his death a martyrdom to the Islamic world.

Americans were quick to react, almost all enthusiastically endorsing his dispatching. Religious leaders chimed in. Hardly a Facebooker resisted the temptation to say something about bin Laden’s execution. I said a couple of things about it myself.

–Scripture says God takes no delight in the death of the wicked. Maybe not, but I’m betting He came mighty close this time.

That was simply my attempt at humor while registering my own pleasure that this evil man, this mass murderer, was living and breathing on this planet no more.

–Those who say they do not believe in hell may be having second thoughts now. After all, bin Laden’s one death cannot begin to pay for all the hundreds of deaths he has accounted for. Without a hell, there is no justice in the universe.

I believe that strongly.  And you can substitute bin Laden’s name with any number of other tyrants: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, the list is almost endless.

Douthat says liberal preachers dismiss hell as an antiquity, as something religion has outgrown. “Doing away with hell…is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.”

Say what?  Stay with us.  This man has something we need to hear.

If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise, then none of our no’s have any real meaning either.

Douthat is referring to the universalism that says a good God will take everyone to heaven, period.  That is one of the key components of liberal theology, by the way.

But not so fast, he writes.

If we are automatically sentenced to heaven–there being no possibility of hell–he writes, (That’s) like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score. 

In other words: pointless.

So there is no incentive to do right. And therefore, no moral order in the universe.

Douthat writes, It makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

So, now, he makes his case for the doctrine of hell. I find this fascinating.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and that we are the choices we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

He likes what Anthony Esolen wrote in the introduction to his translation to Dante’s Inferno.  The idea of hell is essential to Western humanism. It’s a way of saying “things have meaning.” That earthly life is more than just one trivial thing after another, and that the “use of man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death…salvation or damnation.”

All of this reminds me of what a pastor friend in Southern Mississippi said.  “The police chief in our town says he never sends anyone to prison.  He gives them a free ride based on choices they have made.”

The bottom line is this: If there is no hell–if Osama bin Laden and his kind of mass murderers are in heaven–then nothing has meaning, there is no justice in the universe, and we are fooling only ourselves with all our religious talk.

This does not mean we have to like hell. We hate hell. But it’s a necessary element in a moral universe.

Now, we followers of Jesus have to do two things:

–encourage our people to quit speaking of hell as though we ourselves are the gatekeepers and able to determine who goes there.  In funerals, pastors should never consign anyone to hell, no matter how firmly we believe an individual may have deserved it.

–have our hearts broken by the very idea that some people we know will be residents of that place of eternal torment forever.

Let us not threaten lost people with hell. The temptation to do that must be avoided at all costs. I don’t see in Scripture anywhere that God speaks of hell to the unsaved. Instead, it seems to be the religious bunch who gets that warning.  (Pause and reflect on that a moment.)

You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell? (Matthew 23:33)  (See also Matthew 3:7.)

That little broadside was aimed at the Pharisees, we remind ourselves. And those Pharisees were the keepers of orthodoxy, the most conservative-minded defenders of God and morality on the horizon at the time.

Enough to make us shiver.  According to our Lord–who should have known if anyone does!–those who were in danger of hellfire.

5 thoughts on “When we cut hell out of the conversation

  1. “Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God”, one of the most riveting sermons I’ve ever read on hell, by American Christian theologian Jonathan Edwards almost 300 years ago.
    BTW: a small point; Osama bin Laden was eliminated in Pakistan by a US Navy SEAL team, not a police SWAT team.

      • “We all remember when a SWAT team from the United States Navy dropped in to a compound just outside Islamabad, Pakistan, and took out Osama bin Laden.”

        Copy/paste from your post. Read it before criticizing your critics.

  2. My apologies…I see what you’re saying now. You did say SWAT team, but not ‘police SWAT team’ which is what your criticizer said that you said.

    I’ll shut up now. 🙂

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