Hell

This Easter time saw some interesting discussions on the media. Some of them concerned the Pope’s apparent denial that hell existed.

We were treated to the intriguing sight of one journalist asking another, 

“Do you believe in hell?"

The other was completely taken aback and brushed the question aside. He clearly did not spend much time thinking about that subject, as he most likely did not believe in anything spiritual anyway.

I am an unashamed believer in the existence of hell. Even atheists can identify something that they would refer to as hell. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote a book entitled, 

“Hell is other people”. 

It is many decades since I studied that book at uni, but I seem to remember it was about a group of incompatible people forced to keep each other company to all eternity and getting on one another’s nerves. The story certainly ended up being rather hellish.

Many others agree that you can have experiences which strike you then and later as hell on earth. A First World War poet wrote a piece which began, 

“I died in hell; they call it Passchendaele”. 

Life on the Western Front during those years was indeed a living hell for tens of thousands of troops who were fighting for the the various combatant countries.

After the television discussion it was conceded that the Pope probably did not deny the existence of hell. To do so would have been to overthrow 2000 years of church teaching and would amount to heresy. He may have said something to the effect that hell is nowhere in space-time, not “down below”, any more than heaven is “up above”. It would then be in another dimension outside of time. Whether he believes, like some fashionable thinkers, that it does not involve a literal eternal torment, I do not know.

There is no doubt that Jesus meant us to take hell seriously. By some calculations, He actually did more teaching about hell than about heaven. He seemed to be quoting the Old Testament when He referred to eternal torment. In Isaiah 66:24 God says of His people,

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh” (Isaiah 66:24 [ESV2011])

This imagery was eagerly seized on by preachers in the Middle Ages. They wanted to impress their congregations, often simple and uneducated folk, with lurid pictures of the consequences of not obeying God. There is, however, a way of looking at hell which may be more mature: hell is eternal separation from God. To enjoy eternity with God is bliss; if there is such a thing as time, you don’t notice it, because you are so absorbed in seeing the face of the Blessed One. To be removed from God’s presence for all eternity would give a sense of huge disappointment and loss.

The concept of hell certainly isn’t easy to fit into human logic (why would God allow such a distressing element in His creation to persist for all eternity?), but then God respects human choices. If humans are determined endlessly to reject Him, God honours their decision and allows them space to do precisely that.