For centuries, this was the default position for both Catholics and Protestants. In traditional Christian doctrine, hell was conceived as a place, generally beneath the earth, where the wicked would be punished for eternity. There would be both psychological torment — at our knowing we had lost the opportunity for salvation — and physical ones inflicted by the Devil and his demons.
There were gnawing worms and unquenchable fires. No escape from hell or mitigation of eternal torment was possible. God would laugh at the sufferings of the damned, said the English puritan Richard Baxter. The decision as to whether we went to heaven or hell was made by God at the time of our deaths.
Read more: Friday essay: what might heaven be like? Still, Christianity has never quite worked out whether heaven or hell is the consequence of righteous or wicked lives, or whether God is completely arbitrary in his decision making about our final destination. The Australian Christian Lobby, however, follows the conservative Protestant tradition: so infected are we with the original sin of Adam and Eve, we are all doomed to hell from the moment of our birth and only Jesus can save us from it.
Amidst the gloom, there was one bright spot in the traditional Christian doctrine of hell. Our punishment there would be proportionate to our sins just as our rewards in heaven would be proportionate to our virtues.
This sense of proportionality led around the year CE to the invention of another place between heaven and hell — a place of purification of our sins. It arose from the recognition that while most of us were not sufficiently meritorious to deserve heaven instantly after death, most of us were also not sufficiently wicked to deserve eternal punishment.
Purgatory was the place where those who were judged worthy of heaven eventually were purged, purified and punished for their sins before going on to their heavenly reward. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars.
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No matter how exclusive we imagine the criteria for membership in the society of the damned to be, nothing can make the idea morally coherent. If your conscience is a healthy one, you will find it impossible to do so. Or so I would have thought. I have to confess, however, that since my book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation first appeared, I have discovered dimensions of religious psychology of which I had formerly been blithely ignorant, or at most only obscurely conscious.
This has been, if not necessarily edifying, at least instructive. I knew that I had undertaken to write on a controversial subject, but I had done that in the past, and knew already that to attempt to rouse a true believer in anything from what one sees as a dogmatic slumber is to risk waking a sleeping giant instead.
But nothing quite prepared me for the passion and, in many instances, vehemence that this text has provoked, at least from its detractors.
I suppose I do have to plead guilty to a certain breach of etiquette. I knew before setting out that there are some fairly inflexible rules about how one is allowed to discuss the topic of hell, and I chose to ignore them.
No one has ever written them down, of course, but everyone is tacitly expected to observe them, and anyone so tactless as to violate them — to raise serious questions in the wrong way about the logical and moral coherence of the concept of a state of perpetual conscious torment visited upon rational creatures by a God of infinite love and justice, or about its scriptural or historical authenticity — risks the sort of censure that can scour a social calendar clean. These rules tell us that one might think the concept of an eternal hell truly obscene, or that it makes existence itself seem like a cruel burden visited on us by a merciless omnipotence, but one must never be so indiscreet as to say so.
We must not scandalise the faithful, after all. This, alas, I cannot do. Really, as far as I can see, these rules have nothing to do with good manners and everything to do with uneasy consciences. Somewhere deep down, even the most convinced defender of the conventional picture realises that it is morally absurd, and fears that this absurdity, if frankly confronted, menaces the entire structure of belief.
This is why it is, I imagine, that the understanding of eternal damnation openly espoused in Christian culture has grown gradually but constantly more emollient over the centuries.
At one time, in very late antiquity, Western Christians could speak with firm if dour certitude of a place of real physical and mental agony to which the vast majority of the race would be consigned at the end of days, and to which even babies would be sent forever and ever if they were so thoughtless as to die unbaptised. Today only a relatively tiny if obstinate remnant of believers finds that notion tolerable. And since then, even in regard to unrepentant adult souls, Christians have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the thought that God actively wills eternal suffering, and many have come to adopt the idea that, although hell is eternal, its doors are locked only from the inside to use C.
Needless to say, in this view the fire and brimstone have been quietly replaced by various states of existential unrest and resentfully guarded self-love. But it also demonstrates that many Christians know that something is incorrigibly amiss in the very concept of eternal torment, for otherwise they would not feel the need to absolve God of any direct responsibility for its imposition.
Anyway, it is well past time Christians abandoned the etiquette of hell. It has never been anything more than a strategy for sparing themselves the unpleasant task of confronting the real implications of the beliefs they profess.
The reason that this topic, more than any other in Christian tradition, has an almost magical power to provoke ungovernable emotions, I am convinced, is that most Christians do not really believe what they believe they believe. Readers who feel that its argument impeaches them for some moral deficiency are in all likelihood merely subliminally accusing themselves and then reacting to the sting of their own consciences by accusing the book of unjustly accusing them.
They are aware, at some level they rarely plumb within themselves, that they have acquiesced to an irrational and wicked tenet of the creed. They think themselves bound by faith to defend a picture of reality that could not be true, morally or logically, in any possible world, and so naturally they take exception to being made to do so explicitly, rather than implicitly, silently, without any close examination of its contents, or of the degrading compromise of conscience it requires of them.
I cannot help that. And, let us be honest here: does not the burden of proof — and of a certain seemly reticence — fall quite on the other side of this debate? After all, why should anyone feel the need to apologise for condemning an idea that looks fairly monstrous from any angle, and whose principal use down the centuries has been the psychological abuse and terrorisation of children? Who, after all, is saying something more objectively atrocious, or more aggressively perverse?
The person who claims that every newborn infant enters the world justly under the threat of eternal torment, and that a good God imposes or permits the imposition of a state of perpetual agony on finite, created rational beings as part of the mystery of his love or sovereignty or justice or whatever else? Or the person who frankly observes that such ideas are cruel and barbarous and depraved? Which of these two should really be, if not ashamed of his or her words, at least hesitant, ambivalent, and even a little penitent in uttering them?
And which has a better right to moral outrage at what the other has said? And, really, do these questions not answer themselves? A belief does not merit unconditional reverence just because it is old or because its proponents claim a divine authority for it that they cannot prove; neither should it be immune to being challenged in terms commensurate to the scandal it poses.
And the belief that a God of infinite intellect, justice, love, and power would condemn rational beings to a state of endless suffering, or would allow them to condemn themselves on account of their own delusion, pain, and anger, is probably worse than merely scandalous. It may be the single most horrid notion the religious imagination has ever entertained, and the most irrational and spiritually corrosive picture of existence possible. And anyone who thinks such language too strong or caustic, while at the same time finding the traditional picture of a hell unobjectionable, needs to think again.
If anything, my rhetoric in my book is probably far, far too mild. Which brings me back to the story with which I began. Since That All Shall Be Saved first appeared, I have in a variety of venues stated that to my mind its argument is irrefutable, and that anyone who remains unpersuaded by it has simply failed to understand it. Obviously an assertion meant to provoke, and one that probably reflects a certain temperamental fatigue on my part. But I also happen to believe that it is true.
I am not, however, claiming that the book is a unique work of genius, even if I do take a certain pride in the construction of its argument. Rather, I believe that many of the truths it points out are fairly obvious. In truth, the notion of eternal torment it is so unquestionably, resplendently warped and irrational that every defence of it ever made, throughout the whole of Christian history, has been a bad one. Even many otherwise competent philosophers have, under the impulse of faith, convinced themselves and others of the solvency of arguments that, viewed dispassionately, scarcely rise to the level of pious gibberish.
It has always all been a mirage. If, however, one can make oneself retract that initial surrender to the abysmally ludicrous, for only a moment, one will discover that all apologetics for the infernalist orthodoxy consist in claims that no truly rational person should take seriously.
Every one of them is an exercise in self-delusion, self-hypnosis, pacification of the conscience, stupefaction of the moral intelligence — and nothing else. I think that all of us, with a few lamentable pathological exceptions, are aware of the preposterousness of the idea of an eternal hell, and that most of us have realised as much at various times in our lives, in moments when we have inadvertently allowed our moral imaginations to slip free from their tethers of pious dread.
In those instants, the doubts come flowing in like a tidal wave. We suddenly realise that, were the dominant tradition true, all of existence would be a kind of horror story, like a tale of guests at a party at a splendid estate enjoying themselves in perfect ease of mind while far below, down in the deepest basement of the house, there lies a torture-chamber filled with victims who cannot escape and whose cries never reach the rooms overhead.
But then, devout and obedient souls that we are, we regain control of our thoughts, drive those doubts away, and try to forget as quickly as possible what our consciences are telling us lest God overhear them and damn us forever.
Still, it is obvious. There is an argument against the coherence of the doctrine of eternal perdition that is simpler than any other and that is incontrovertibly true and that I think all of us know without realising we know it.
And, while most infernalists would dismiss it as trivial or impressionistic or sentimental, its logic is devastating for anyone willing to set his or her heart to contemplate it. It is this: The irresoluble contradiction at the very core of the now dominant understanding of Christian confession is that the faith commands us to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbours as ourselves, while also enjoining us to believe in the reality of an eternal hell; we cannot possibly do both of these things at once.
I say this not just because I think it emotionally impossible fully to love a God capable of consigning any creature to everlasting suffering though in fact I do think this. I say it, rather, because absolute love of neighbour and a perfectly convinced belief in hell are antithetical to one another in principle , and because all our language of Christian love is rendered vacuous to the precise degree that we truly believe in eternal perdition.
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