The first two columns I ever published on my page on Network Norwich and Norfolk were about Heaven and Hell, and although my views haven’t changed very much, where they have altered slightly is more in the direction of a better hell than is so often perceived. Of course, I might be wrong, but this is the only way I reconcile it with an all-loving supremely benevolent God – the God we see in Jesus Christ. Couple that with the fact that those who preach the worst kinds of hell are mostly those with the most hellish personality and I can quite happily stick with my view. Moreover I think history clearly shows that the idea of this eternal torment with literal pain and flame-fuelled suffering occurred when pagan religions became mixed into Christian cultures, and clearly draining this swamp has proved pretty difficult, particularly when so many power hungry control freaks try to keep it in for their own horrible personal gain.
But clearly, this is why Christ was so against religion, and His warnings so prescient, because God is love, and it is through a RELATIONSHIP with Him that this love blesses and develops, and it is through RELIGION that this blessing is retarded and disfigured. God is love, He is not the God of man's religion, the scriptures are very clear in speaking about all the apostasy of religion, because religion is modeled after man's disfigured perception of God used for their own ways, whereas relationship is modeled after God’s own heart for His people – those who have seen God in Christ have seen the real nature of the Father, not as some megalomaniac tyrant, but as a God of supreme love and grace – a God who would become what we are so that we could become like Christ.
I think hell, that is, the real reality of hell, will have nothing to do with flames and torture (that’s just a silly interpretation) the real pain of hell will be, I presume, rather like human heartbreak but on the grandest scale of all – a place absent of God, where one has chosen to live away from Him – a state of privation; a place where the true and real absence of God is fully realised, and where a person's creaturely position - that of being created to know God and to enjoy heavenly bliss - is made known. When it comes to fear of hell, I abhor all this scare-talk. I suppose the only thing I could say that would constitute a justification for some kind of warning would be that if God didn’t make it known what awesome potential we have with Him we would have no urgency to come to Him and perhaps even no tangible reason to think about our eternal destination. We do not have a docile Sky-Uncle who one can lock away under the stairs when the Christmas party starts, rather we have a supremely powerful Father God who has great things for us should we choose to accept them.
And presumably, the torment of Hell can only be quantified as a comparison to the glory of Heaven, just as the feeling of not being in love is only felt in its fullness when the absence of that love is most tangible. Only when the heart is broken does the absence of love become unbearable, and I presume the torment of hell will be of that kind.
Although the Bible clearly intimates that Hell will be an awful place, clearly only a foolish Christian would on the one hand think the God he worships is all-loving (as seen in the person of Jesus) and then go on to contradict himself by saying that such a God could subject finite humans to eternal torture. I’m amazed that so few Christians can see the contradiction here, particularly as so many atheists can see it quite clearly.
My view of what hell is like is the only way I believe the two can be reconciled; that is, how a God full of grace can send any of us to an eternal place that is wholly disconnected from Himself. Some ascetic Christians might claim that the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) belies my claim, but I do not think that it does. Firstly, while there are several messages of edification in the parable, a description of Hell is not one of them. In this parable, the NIV translation 'Hell' is a little misleading - 'Hades' is more accurate. That the Rich Man's fate was a fixity of torment, we cannot doubt. But I strongly suspect that this is not the same description of the Hell that men and women will experience after mankind's final judgement, for in this situation, the Rich Man's despair was still, in one sense, a despair which involves the process of forward thinking (V.27). What the parable is saying is that those versed in OT scripture observing God’s activity throughout history leading towards Jesus should have enough to understand how to live in a manner worthy of God, and that those who didn’t act this way (including in this case the rich man who didn’t even know how to treat Lazarus, his fellow human) wouldn’t know God’s truth even if they saw the resurrection.
Look at God’s people from Exodus onwards – the amount of times He performed miracles to rescue them or help them in battle, yet how quickly they forgot about Him and hardened their hearts. The didactic lesson isn’t so much about snapping one’s fingers and hoping to see a miracle, it is how our own hearts are in relation to God, and whether we are humble. This, as we all know, is played out in earthly terms too – for we all know that the biggest hell on earth for us occurs when we’ve behaved contrary to what we know is true or good or decent or charitable or loving, or when we see others behaving that way – that is the closest thing to hell on earth that we perceive, so it’s little wonder that God seems so unclear to those who can’t face this or who have been led astray by horrible men and women.
What’s worse, there are some Christians who seem to take pride in the fact that those who reject God must face up to it with punishment, they quickly become indignant, and I have a suspicion that it is often because they like to think in the back of their minds that those who reject God on earth are fully deserving of their destiny, but needless to say, I hate this kind of viewpoint. Knowing as I do a God of supreme love and grace (that obviously far far far outweighs our own), I freely suspect that the lost are, in one sense, thriving outcasts, somehow content in their own existence; that their eternal fixity will be an adapted condition, just as an incarcerated criminal is able to make some sort of life for himself on the inside while still lamenting the loss of his freedom on the outside - or perhaps even better, in the case of many, just as a man who is consigned to his hospital bed for a lengthy duration adapts to his surroundings yet still longs for his good health and freedom.
In fact, I do not mean that the spiritually damned may not wish to come out of Hell, in the blurry, nebulous fashion wherein a jealous man 'desires' to be self-secure or an uncaring man desires to be more concerned about his fellow human - but once the world has ended they surely do not desire any form of escape from the position they have chosen for themselves. In that sense, despite being shut out from God, they will, I think, have found a way in which they are able to accept their eternal position with some degree of comfort. They enjoy forever the eternal experiences of being the creature that they themselves had chosen to be while still on earth. But just as those who know Christ will become free in His presence, those who rejected Him will remain self-yoked, forever on the outside of paradise.
One thing I ought to say, there are many people who demand that all this unfair, that in fact, God could wipe everybody's slate clean at the end - that He could have created a situation where all of us have the chance of a fresh beginning. But to this I can only remind you that He has done so already. The moment He carried His cross and died for us was the moment that all this happened. The second chance is here with us already. And others who know about it have the opportunity to have a fresh start - a new beginning where Christ’s spirit comes to live inside them.
But clearly, this is why Christ was so against religion, and His warnings so prescient, because God is love, and it is through a RELATIONSHIP with Him that this love blesses and develops, and it is through RELIGION that this blessing is retarded and disfigured. God is love, He is not the God of man's religion, the scriptures are very clear in speaking about all the apostasy of religion, because religion is modeled after man's disfigured perception of God used for their own ways, whereas relationship is modeled after God’s own heart for His people – those who have seen God in Christ have seen the real nature of the Father, not as some megalomaniac tyrant, but as a God of supreme love and grace – a God who would become what we are so that we could become like Christ.
I think hell, that is, the real reality of hell, will have nothing to do with flames and torture (that’s just a silly interpretation) the real pain of hell will be, I presume, rather like human heartbreak but on the grandest scale of all – a place absent of God, where one has chosen to live away from Him – a state of privation; a place where the true and real absence of God is fully realised, and where a person's creaturely position - that of being created to know God and to enjoy heavenly bliss - is made known. When it comes to fear of hell, I abhor all this scare-talk. I suppose the only thing I could say that would constitute a justification for some kind of warning would be that if God didn’t make it known what awesome potential we have with Him we would have no urgency to come to Him and perhaps even no tangible reason to think about our eternal destination. We do not have a docile Sky-Uncle who one can lock away under the stairs when the Christmas party starts, rather we have a supremely powerful Father God who has great things for us should we choose to accept them.
And presumably, the torment of Hell can only be quantified as a comparison to the glory of Heaven, just as the feeling of not being in love is only felt in its fullness when the absence of that love is most tangible. Only when the heart is broken does the absence of love become unbearable, and I presume the torment of hell will be of that kind.
Although the Bible clearly intimates that Hell will be an awful place, clearly only a foolish Christian would on the one hand think the God he worships is all-loving (as seen in the person of Jesus) and then go on to contradict himself by saying that such a God could subject finite humans to eternal torture. I’m amazed that so few Christians can see the contradiction here, particularly as so many atheists can see it quite clearly.
My view of what hell is like is the only way I believe the two can be reconciled; that is, how a God full of grace can send any of us to an eternal place that is wholly disconnected from Himself. Some ascetic Christians might claim that the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) belies my claim, but I do not think that it does. Firstly, while there are several messages of edification in the parable, a description of Hell is not one of them. In this parable, the NIV translation 'Hell' is a little misleading - 'Hades' is more accurate. That the Rich Man's fate was a fixity of torment, we cannot doubt. But I strongly suspect that this is not the same description of the Hell that men and women will experience after mankind's final judgement, for in this situation, the Rich Man's despair was still, in one sense, a despair which involves the process of forward thinking (V.27). What the parable is saying is that those versed in OT scripture observing God’s activity throughout history leading towards Jesus should have enough to understand how to live in a manner worthy of God, and that those who didn’t act this way (including in this case the rich man who didn’t even know how to treat Lazarus, his fellow human) wouldn’t know God’s truth even if they saw the resurrection.
Look at God’s people from Exodus onwards – the amount of times He performed miracles to rescue them or help them in battle, yet how quickly they forgot about Him and hardened their hearts. The didactic lesson isn’t so much about snapping one’s fingers and hoping to see a miracle, it is how our own hearts are in relation to God, and whether we are humble. This, as we all know, is played out in earthly terms too – for we all know that the biggest hell on earth for us occurs when we’ve behaved contrary to what we know is true or good or decent or charitable or loving, or when we see others behaving that way – that is the closest thing to hell on earth that we perceive, so it’s little wonder that God seems so unclear to those who can’t face this or who have been led astray by horrible men and women.
What’s worse, there are some Christians who seem to take pride in the fact that those who reject God must face up to it with punishment, they quickly become indignant, and I have a suspicion that it is often because they like to think in the back of their minds that those who reject God on earth are fully deserving of their destiny, but needless to say, I hate this kind of viewpoint. Knowing as I do a God of supreme love and grace (that obviously far far far outweighs our own), I freely suspect that the lost are, in one sense, thriving outcasts, somehow content in their own existence; that their eternal fixity will be an adapted condition, just as an incarcerated criminal is able to make some sort of life for himself on the inside while still lamenting the loss of his freedom on the outside - or perhaps even better, in the case of many, just as a man who is consigned to his hospital bed for a lengthy duration adapts to his surroundings yet still longs for his good health and freedom.
In fact, I do not mean that the spiritually damned may not wish to come out of Hell, in the blurry, nebulous fashion wherein a jealous man 'desires' to be self-secure or an uncaring man desires to be more concerned about his fellow human - but once the world has ended they surely do not desire any form of escape from the position they have chosen for themselves. In that sense, despite being shut out from God, they will, I think, have found a way in which they are able to accept their eternal position with some degree of comfort. They enjoy forever the eternal experiences of being the creature that they themselves had chosen to be while still on earth. But just as those who know Christ will become free in His presence, those who rejected Him will remain self-yoked, forever on the outside of paradise.
One thing I ought to say, there are many people who demand that all this unfair, that in fact, God could wipe everybody's slate clean at the end - that He could have created a situation where all of us have the chance of a fresh beginning. But to this I can only remind you that He has done so already. The moment He carried His cross and died for us was the moment that all this happened. The second chance is here with us already. And others who know about it have the opportunity to have a fresh start - a new beginning where Christ’s spirit comes to live inside them.
St Paul says that we will only be judged on what we know, not that which is unknown to us. There are many people who will live on earth and never hear or read one word about Christ, and the God we see in Christ will not condemn them because of that. But any who have heard the name Christ, know that their sins are wiped out, and therefore know that a second chance is already in their grasp. In that sense, those who object to hell usually look past their own personal obligation to accept the glorious thing which Christ did for them. A corporate objection is not going to be enough to wipe the slate clean, for if our Lord created Heaven in order that we might share in His glory, there must, I presume, also be an eternal place for those who have rejected Him – but I do not think God SENDS anyone to the bad place - I believe those who are there will have freely chosen to be there (see 1 Corinthians 15:22 in Christ ALL will be made alive if they so wish – see also the parable of the Wedding Banquet – all are invited but those that do not make it are the ones that choose to stay away).
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