I consider myself a tormented agnostic with Christian leanings. While I am troubled by the notion of inerrant scripture as analyzed by Bart Ehrman (Jesus, Interrupted) the Old Testament tribal God chronicled by Dan Barker (God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction), and the notion of eternal damnation discussed by too many to list, I have at the same time been influenced by Christ’s life as chronicled in the New Testament, and how Christianity explains the human condition by the French philosopher and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal. Pascal’s apologetics have been brilliantly written about in orthodox Catholic Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans and evangelical Christian Thomas V. Morris’ Making Sense of It All.
So I come to Baker’s Razing Hell wanting to be transformed and be “like Christ” but not wanting the baggage of eternal hell. In other words, I am, in the spirit of full disclosure, a biased reader, rooting for Baker to be right, and that can be problematic. But nevertheless I will try my best to review her points and see how convincing they are.
Sharon Baker, a theology professor, takes the role of Virgin in Dante’s Purgatorio, helping three students, Eric, Brooke, and Lisa, who are struggling with the doctrine of eternal hell. One has an unsaved grandmother who is dying and she is tormented that her grandmother will suffer in eternal flames.
Through a series of conversations with her students, some at a sushi bar, Baker explains to them, and us the readers, how the hell doctrine creates inconsistencies with God’s love. Baker asks, “Are we stuck with it?” And if we make hell temporal, a place of purification like purgatory, are we “selling out to a feel-good theology?”
Her goal in this book is to convince us that eternal hell does not fit with Gods’ love and forgiveness while at the same time argue that without hell we can still worship a God who demands justice.
While I wanted to believe her and while I sympathized with her objectives, I found that some of her points needed more support so that after reading this book I did not have some teary-eyed epiphany and grand assurance about living in a universe where eternal hell does not exist. Nevertheless, she makes some compelling points.
One compelling point is that when we believe in a Hell God, we take on his wrathful personality. We may be called to love, but we also share God’s Jungian Shadow for anger and judgment.
Another compelling point is that a loving God makes us repent more than the Hell Monster. In what is my favorite passage in Baker’s book, “Forgiveness doesn’t come after repentance; it leads to repentance.” God is so loving, Baker argues, that our hearts melt from his unconditional love and his reaching out to us. In contrast, the Hell God loses our trust and causes our hearts to harden because the Hell God, who will eternally torture about 666 billion people in Baker’s estimation, is a debased God unworthy of our worship.
This is a huge contrast from orthodox Christian writer Thor Ramsey who in his book The Most Encouraging Book on Hell Ever argues that eternal hell honors and glorifies God. Without eternal hell, Ramsey argues, God is a lame Santa Claus figure with no authority.
Less compelling in Baker’s book are her speculations about the “eternal fire” mentioned in the Bible. She creates a hypothetical figure, an evil doer named Otto who enters the fire as an unrepentant sinner after he dies and in the fire he experiences the purity of God’s love and agonizes over his life of sin until his heart melts and he can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
I found a lot of Baker’s reinterpretations of hell fire to be creative and more the result of wishful thinking than rigorous argument. Additionally, her study of the words for eternal, “olam” and “aion,” needed more development because orthodox writer Ramsey in the aforementioned book discussed eternal in the New Testament with a convincing sense that it means forever and ever.
To Baker’s defense, however, Dale Allison, a very rigorous Christian scholar, does elaborate on the word eternal in the Bible as meaning an indefinite period of time and not forever and ever in fifth chapter of his book Night Comes.
Another point that needed more development is Baker’s argument that the Cross is not a tit for tat sacrifice in which an angry God demands a “pound of flesh” for a pound of sin but a metaphor for our purification.
Baker selects passages from Proverbs and Isaiah which show a God who no longer wants our sacrifices; instead he wants our pure hearts and holy lives. The Cross in other words is about our purification, not our need for a blood sacrifice. This seemed like a very selective interpretation.
I’d like to see Baker revisit the notion of eternity and the meaning of the Cross, but all in all I sympathize with Baker and her three students. Many of us, including Dale Allison, try as much as we can to follow step with the orthodox doctrine of eternal hell but such a doctrine drives us into a deep depression. Even pious believers who embrace orthodoxy, such as the 15th Century Japanese converts described in Francis Xavier’s letters grieved with tears after realizing their lost family members were being tortured in hell for all eternity. As Dale Allison writes, “The good news Francis proclaimed was mixed with some awfully bad news.”
I agree with Sharon Baker that this bad news does not glorify God, as Thor Ramsey proclaims. But I think she should expand some of her chapters to make some of her arguments more airtight. Still, I find Baker a sympathetic narrator and a good writer, and I recommend her book in what is one of life’s biggest debates.
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