I’ve been afraid of hell since 1979. Part of my struggle, as someone who fears hell, is reconciling the God of unconditional love with the God of eternal wrath. Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert, whom I admire very much, defines hell as eternal separation from God’s unconditional love.
My problem is that I see God doing the separating. He gives us a chance to come to Him in this world, as orthodox Christianity tells us, and when we choose to go our own way, we choose the hell of our own aloneness. In this regard, hell isn’t the eternal blowtorch singing flesh for eternity as depicted in Medieval art, but a form of self-induced solipsism: We’re left alone inside our head, our Kingdom of the Self, and such a kingdom is in a constant state of rotting.
In Chapter Five of Dale Allison’s Night Comes, he tackles the question of hell and his struggle to reconcile a belief in hell with a loving God. As I wrote in Part I, Allison is part of a growing number of liberal Christians who have an undying “antipathy” against the doctrine of eternal damnation.
One of the most devastating passages in Chapter 5 is how the hell doctrine upturned the lives of fifteenth century Japanese converts to Christianity. These pious Japanese Christians, who converted at the hands of Jesuit missionaries, lived the rest of their lives obedient to Christ, but not in a state of joy; rather, they lived in torment and anguish over the belief that their relatives had perished in the bowels of hell. Their despair was recorded by Saint Francis Xavier. As Allison quotes:
“One of the things that most pains and torments these Japanese is, that we teach them that the prison of hell is irrevocably shut, so that there is no egress therefrom. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, of their parents and relatives, and they often show their grief by their tears. So they ask us if there is any hope, any way to free them by prayer from that eternal misery, and I am obliged to answer that there is absolutely none. Their grief at this affects and torments them wonderfully; they almost pine away with sorrow. But there is this good thing about their trouble—it makes one hope that they will all be the more laborious for their own salvation, lest they, like their forefathers, should be condemned to everlasting punishment. They often ask if God cannot take their fathers out of hell, and why their punishment must never have an end. We gave them a satisfactory answer, but they did not cease to grieve over the misfortune of their relatives; and I can hardly restrain my tears sometimes at seeing men so dear to my heart suffer such intense pain about a thing which is already done with and can never be undone.”
Perhaps more than anything I’ve ever read, these words by St. Francis, quoted in Chapter 5 of Dale Allison’s Night Comes, explain my sorrow and despair at learning about Christianity at 17, converting, and then grieving over my Jewish grandmother who had recently passed away of leukemia. You will read numerous such accounts of Christians in such despair, chronicled in universalist Christian Sharon Baker’s book Razing Hell (reviewed here) or orthodox Christian and comedian Thor Ramsey’s The Most Encouraging Book on Hell Ever. In the latter book, Ramsey explains he doesn’t know if his deceased mother made it to heaven or not, but regardless the doctrine of eternal hell is essential for honoring and glorifying God.
I struggle to find any glory or honor here. Reading about those pious Japanese converts forever grieving, I see no joy in Christianity, no good news. The only purpose in life is to escape hell. All the good things to be said about Christianity get eclipsed by the horrors of perdition, and I share the sadness of those Japanese converts. This sadness is so great in magnitude the only word I can think of is anhedonia, the name in this blog.
Christ calls us to preach the gospel to the ends of the Earth. In obedience, I could preach, but there would be no joy to share, only sorrow for living in a universe created by the God who does the things described in Xavier Francis’ letter quoted above.
As a college student, I joined Campus Crusade for Christ and shared biblical tracts with other students, but I had no joy in me. I was miserable, and my misery made me feel guilty. I grieved too much like those Japanese converts.
For me the crisis of faith behind this grieving is the crisis of trust. We are called to trust in God. But this grief is accompanied by intense distrust. As I read on a liberal Christian's blog many months ago, the relationship between a believer and the Hell God is too often like that of an abused child and an abusive parent. One can be submissive in these circumstances, but there is no trust, there is no love.
What is left is a term I learned reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning when you feel trapped and boxed in. The word is meetzrayim. My biggest prayer is to experience God not as the entity who traps me and boxes me in, not as the oppressor, but as the liberator. I long to experience God the way Viktor Frankl did. As he writes after being liberated from the concentration camp and watching some of his comrades succumb to nihilism:
"One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the larks' jubilation and freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky--and then I went down on the my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world--I had but one sentence in mind--always the same: 'I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.'
How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until again became a human being."
Frankl does not lament, like those Japanese converts, that his wife and family who perished in the Holocaust were in eternal hell. Such a scenario does not exist in his theology. Frankl experiences God without that noose of hell around his God's neck.
This is my struggle. This is my impetus for reading books such as the brilliant one, Night Comes, by Dale Allison.
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