Allison argues that hell has been “humbled” over recent years. The reasons are “modern pluralism,” moral relativism, the Industrial Age, modern travel. Christians are meeting more and more non-Christians, Allison points out, who seem so similar to them in their likes, dislikes, moral behavior, and decency that the need to believe that non-believers go to hell has been diminished.
Having sympathy for diverse people negates a lot of the “us vs. them” mentality reinforced by Council of Florence in 1442, which states that “neither the heathens nor the Jews nor the heretics and schismatics will have a share in eternal life, but will enter the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels, if they do not join the church before their death.”
Allison observes that for many the hell “doctrine’s bifurcation of the human race doesn’t illuminate our experience but rather collides with it.” When Allison’s children were little, they had a babysitting service of a Hindu family and he was uncomfortable with the implication that this Hindu family was going to hell when he taught his children that God is love.
Another challenge Allison has with hell is the notion of punishment and its purpose. Does hell entertain the saved? As Allison writes: “God could stuff all the damned into a gigantic air-conditioned sports arena and let them watch the Jumbotron for eternity. As long as the doors are locked, they wouldn’t trouble the rest of the universe.”
Hell should not be an entertainment or a gratuitous form of torture. Hell should be “remedial,” Allison argues. But traditional hell is “eternal life without parole.”
Allison seems to be suggesting that hell as eternal retribution reflects an un-evolved, barbaric society. A more evolved society that shuns retributive prison sentences and focuses on rehabilitation and eschews torture is a society that does not welcome traditional doctrine of hell. Allison
The traditional hell has no interest in “effective repentance.” It is born from a culture that advocated torture and this includes the torture-laden culture of Augustine. “All this matters for us because the traditional hell flourished when opponent of torture were harder to find.”
A belief in eternal hell complemented an Inquisition that burned and tortured “heretics” and non-believers. As Allison writes, “Legalized torture had its eschatological corollary. If you assumed that everyday courts could justly inflict physical torture, then it wasn’t so hard to imagine that the divine court could do the same. Indeed, the eschatological future was prophesied in a figure when, in the castle above, the privileged ate and drank while the brutalized, underfoot in the dungeon below, were suspended by chains and stretched out on the rack.”
The above quote reminds me of Dan Barker’s critique of hell as a God who lets you hang out with him while others are tortured in God’s basement. Barker is a former preacher and now an atheist.
Artists images of hell in the Middle Ages parallel conceptions of eternal hell. But things changed: “when the West began to have second thoughts about torture, it began to have second thoughts about hell. If God is just, and if torture is unjust, then how can God practice it? Doesn’t the old hell have to go? Growing opposition to torture roughly coincided with growing opposition to hell, and as instruments began to retire from the European scene, they also began to disappear from theological accounts of the infernal environs.”
Burning heretics at the stake was influenced by a belief in hell flames as just punishment for sinners.
Scripture instructed burning criminals. God himself sent fire to sinful towns. But now that’s changed. Allison points to Luke 9:51-56 where Jesus rebukes James and John who want to burn “unfriendly Samaritan villagers.”
However, Allison says he now wants to address the many biblical texts about hell, which we shall look at in Part 6.
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