What Presbyterians Believe...2000 Series

Whatever Happened to Hell?

[March 2000]

It isn't the burning issue it used to be, but it is an undeniable part of Christian tradition

By Alexa Smith

Growing up, I was the only kid on my street with a mother who was damned. You
couldn't tell it by looking at her, but everyone knew. It was a small town and everybody
knew everything about everyone.

She never smoked and didn't drink, except for an occasional Tom Collins. She did
dance; I know because I've seen old black-and-white photographs of her in high heels
and dark lipstick, with dresses belted around her tiny waist. That was in the days when
she and my father, as they say, "went out." My mother got damned (the polite term is
excommunicated) for marrying my father, not for dancing with him. He was a
non-Catholic who wouldn't raise his children Catholic. This was back in 1957, when
that was enough to do it. This meant not only that she was barred from confession, from
Communion and from the "true church," for all time and eternity, but also that she
couldn't go home.

I knew Mom's excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church hurt her. And it
worried me.
Sometimes Scriptures depict hell as separation from God, which is intolerable in and of itself.
At other times hell is seen as dire punishment.

Her father, my grandfather-- who let her come home when I was born, a year
later--kept a bound copy of Dante's Divine Comedy on his living room coffee table,
full of verse, which I couldn't read, but also full of lithographs, which I didn't need to
read to understand how awful it was in hell. There were legs jutting out of smoky pits,
vats of tar. There were contorted bodies writhing in flames, twisted into tree limbs or
frozen in hell's deepest depths. There were hopeless eyes watching the poet Virgil on
his long descent; and there was terror on the poet's face as he, in some prints, tiptoed
past anguish so deep he couldn't bear to look.

But hell isn't the burning issue it used to be. It is examined more in movie theaters than
in mainline churches, where nowadays it is barely mentioned. Whatever understanding
most churchgoers have about hell comes from the perspective of Renaissance poets,
not preachers or church school teachers.

Unpleasant as it may be, however, hell is an undeniable part of Christian tradition and
cannot just be ignored. So what have we done with hell? Where did it go?

With the advent of space telescopes and moon landings, most folks gave up the once
popular idea that hell is geographically located beneath the earth, with heaven above it.
Further, the notion of hell as literal terrain full of fire, smoke and whatever brimstone
may be, has fallen on hard times. The church's confessions devote few words to hell.
The Westminster Confession--once the arbiter of all things Presbyterian--says the
"souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter
darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day." It also promises "everlasting
destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power."

The Larger Catechism goes on to consign sinners to the "most grievous torments in soul
and body, without intermission, in hellfire forever," which, needless to say, includes
"everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God."

But most preachers, who much prefer thinking of themselves as tellers of good news,
hardly speak of hell. In a 1996 Presbyterian Panel survey only 51 percent of members
and 46 percent of pastors said they believed in hell.

Why?

Hell has always been theologically troublesome, because it goes straight to the
question of who God is: How do grace and judgment, or love and justice, mix in the
divine mind? Are unrepentant sinners ultimately separated from God, the source of all
life and hope, which is torment enough, or are they, literally, tortured for eternity? It is
hard to talk about hell because this is hard stuff to talk about, but also because the
Scriptures are not clear.

"It's a theological problem," says Brian Blount, associate professor of New Testament
at Princeton Theological Seminary. "God is all-forgiving and all-loving, but might cast
some people into a lake of fire. Theologians have been working on this for a long time."

While poets may write about a hell chock-full of fallen angels and hopelessly wicked
sinners who are scheduled for unimaginable and endless torment, the Biblical narrative
is more ambiguous. Jews had no concept of the soul until encountering Persian
influences in their Babylonian exile and the Greeks' highly evolved mythology.
Zoroastrian tales of the cosmic clash in which goodness and light ultimately overwhelm
evil and darkness were integrated into Jewish tradition as a way of offering relief to
people living in captivity. The Hebrew underworld, Sheol, was seen much like the
Greek Hades, where the dead rested after life, although admittedly tyrants rested less
well there.

There are only two clear references in the Hebrew Bible to punishment for the wicked.
Isaiah 30 condemns tyrants to "a burning place" and Daniel 12 condemns the sinful to
"shame and everlasting contempt," without further details.

Anticipation of an accountable afterlife does not appear common until the period
between the Old and New Testaments. New Testament writers picked up images like
fiery lakes and winnowing forks from the later Jewish writings to make the point that it
matters how people live.

The actual words hell or Hades appear only about 25 times, and they offer different
views of what goes on there. Sometimes hell is a place where those who oppose God
reside, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth--depicting separation from God as
intolerable in and of itself. At other times hell is seen as more dire, and definitely penal.
There are angels in chains in 2 Peter, and the lake of fire in Revelation, where sinners
may either writhe in flames forever or be destroyed by the fire itself. Scholars still argue
about the texts that can be read either way: hell as punishment or as destruction.

Paul is not much help either. While he is clear about there being behaviors that keep
people out of the Kingdom, he is not very precise about what happens next. He talks
much more about the life of the blessed than any kind of punishment--teetering, his
critics say, on a kind of universalism that calls for the reconciliation of all things.

"It's just not there in the Scriptures," says Eugene March, longtime professor of Old
Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, speaking of a Dante-esque
hell ruled by Satan to punish the wicked. He argues that contemporary readers often
impose concepts on Biblical texts. "A hell in the sense that we talk about hell is a
concept of the Middle Ages. Once you have that notion of hell, you may read about the
'lake of fire' or Gehenna (a garbage dump outside Jerusalem that burned perpetually)
and say, "Oh, that is what hell is.' But the text does not support it.

"What you begin to get is a notion of some form of punishment for the sake of justice."
March believes the Biblical writers were looking for ultimate divine justice as a
response to their own history of injustice and suffering.

But when Augustine systematized these theories in the 400s, he created a view of hell
that became the standard for the Roman Catholic Church and just about everyone
else--a penal hell, where sinners are justly punished, not destroyed, and where
repentance no longer does any good. There was also a literal heaven and a purgatory,
where sins may be expiated through penance.

Calvin and Luther both adhered to a strong view of hell, but Calvin at least was no
literalist. He wrote: "Many persons . . . have entered into ingenious debates about the
eternal fire by which the wicked will be tormented after judgment. But we may
conclude from many passages of Scripture that it is a metaphorical expression. . . . Let
us lay aside the speculations, by which foolish men weary themselves to no purpose,
and satisfy ourselves with believing that these forms of speech denote, in a manner
suited to our feeble capacity, a dreadful torment, which no man can now comprehend
and no language can express."

"In The Institutes Calvin takes these things as metaphors, as poetic images," says
Mark Achtemeier, assistant professor of systematic theology at Dubuque Theological
Seminary, who dismisses medieval talk of primordial and sadistic dungeons. "Calvin
takes pains to point out that this is not intended to soften the point. These powerful
metaphors, if not literal, express something that is every bit as awful as they depict."

The one consistent theme tucked inside all these centuries of theories and Scriptural
metaphors is that hell is separation from God, whether you think of it as an actual place
or as a state of being. This is how Pope John Paul II recently interpreted the Roman
Catholic Church's catechism, to much controversy. Foremost, hell is estrangement and
alienation of the worst kind.

Whether you believe that hell is a fiery pit ready-made for unrelenting torture or not, the
point is, sin is dangerous. But what happens in hell, whatever or wherever hell may be?
Based on his study of Scripture, Blount says, "Though fire is a consistent image, there's
no telling what goes on."

The New Testament witness was to proclaim the good news, not the bad. "The
apostles," Achtemeier is clear, "didn't go out preaching, *You'll burn in hell unless you
repent.' That is not what came first in the Biblical witness.

"And we moved away from hellfire preaching." But perhaps we moved too far,
Achtemeier suggests, so that we lost a sense of God's majesty, which Calvin never did.
The consequence, he believes, is the creation of a God who never says no.

Theologian William Placher, who teaches at Wabash College in Crawfordsville,
Indiana, worries that people today do not take seriously the idea of either hell or sin.
"We've fallen into the modern heresy," he says, "that we're all basically pretty good
people who don't need comeuppance. If we really thought more about our sin--if we
really thought about people starving around the world while we're living in the midst of
plenty--we'd worry more about God's grace to forgive us."

The only official Presbyterian statement that includes any comment on hell since the
1930s is a 1974 paper on universalism adopted by the General Assembly of the
Presbyterian Church in the United States. It warns of judgment and promises hope,
acknowledging that these two ideas seem to be "in tension or even in paradox." In the
end, the statement concedes, how God works redemption and judgment is a mystery.

The Bible does not give clear and detailed answers to our questions about what
happens after death. What we can know for certain is that God's grace is as real as
God's judgment--and just as incomprehensible. If we can say at least this much with
conviction, then maybe scared little girls who wonder about hell won't have to look just
to Dante for help.

Alexa Smith, associate for the Presbyterian News Service in Louisville, Ky., is
supply pastor of Valley City Church in Central, Indiana.