This morning I was reading Peter Wehner’s The Atlantic article “The Moral Universe of Timothy Keller,” described as “one of the most consequential figures in American Christianity,” and I found myself ( in spite of reading many books skeptical of religion, notably books that argued that Paul was a fraud, a mountebank, and a self-serving “adventurer”) to be an evangelist with appeal. Keller seemed smart, decent and experienced in the nuances of religion, a pastor who gave his life in rural and urban communities. He also struck me as someone who after much arduous struggle became grounded and whole in his faith.
Because one of my stumbling blocks of the Christian faith is the doctrine of eternal hell, I did a Google search: “Timothy Keller eternal hell,” and I came across one of Keller’s essays, “The Importance of Hell” in which Keller gives these following defenses of this controversial doctrine:
One, Jesus warned us of hell over and over, and he described hell as the greatest catastrophe that could happen. Hell was separation from God’s love, and this separation was our own choosing. In this version of hell, we are not so much judged as we are victims of our own love of sin and our stubborn refusal to repent of our sins.
Two, Keller asserts that understanding hell helps us understand our dependence on God. To disappear into hell is to stubbornly refuse that such dependence exists.
Three, hell teaches us the psychology of self-feeding blindness and self-feeding evil. The more we turn from God, the worse it gets. Separation from God is not a stagnant condition. It is progressive, or degenerative.
Four, through hell we can understand the depth of Jesus’ love for us.
As I read the essay, I felt condemned because in my heart I know I treasure living for myself. To illustrate what I mean by this, I need to refer to a beloved song from my teen years. It is the famous “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. I was sixteen when I first heard this song, and like many I was struck my beauty and melancholy of it. And like many, I identified with the sad sack narrator, a lonesome depressive who slithers through the streets in despair but consoles himself with his musical ability. As an amateur pianist, I was smitten with the Deacon Blues Credo: “I can’t make sense of this shitty world, so I’ll just be my own person, live my life with narcissistic indifference to the world’s problems, and glean whatever beauty I can from melancholy, sensuality, self-pity, and any other trinkets life has to offer.” We could categorize the narrator as a Sensual Nihilist, and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit this orientation has a certain appeal to me. But let us bear in mind that according to a Wall Street Journal interview the writers, the narrator was not a hero of any kind, but a mediocrity imagining himself to be a tormented artist. Secondly, a selfish sensualist who abstains from responsibility will for a time feel like he is being “true to himself” and take comfort in his isolated routine, but over time, I have to imagine this person will rot into a state of depression and confront what Viktor Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.”
My guess is that the sensual nihilist carves out what feels like his own personal paradise in the beginning, but that over time this paradise degenerates into a kind of hell.
On a more general level, the idea of hell as being an accurate depiction of people’s moral and spiritual dissolution speaks to me. I see people all the time succumb to greed, self-aggrandizement, lust, and other addictions. I see this in myself with my own idolatry: wristwatches, gadgets, status, comfort, etc.
I must say I have had dreams about my own spiritual dissolution and a withdrawal into my worst behaviors that have painted me as a man isolated inside my own hell.
I can think of two dreams to be precise. One, which I had about five years ago, showed me looking at myself in the mirror. I barely recognized my face, a joyless, tired visage with lifeless eyes. I get like this after prying myself from my computer screen.
A second dream, which I had about two years ago, was more explicit: I was in the depths of hell and trying to climb upward along a steep jagged gulley. It was dark, and I was holding a tablet, part primordial stone and part electronic iPad. One side of the tablet was a screen depiction of all my most depraved sins. The other side of the tablet was the face of Christ. If I focused on the Jesus side, I could climb out of the chasm.
You don’t have to convince me that hell exists as both a metaphor and as a way of describing a damned psychological state.
Where the hell doctrine gets tricky is when we talk about the following:
One. Hell as judgement from God, a sentence imposed upon us against our will.
Two. Hell as eternal with no hope of redemption.
Three. Hell as a place that gives the saved fodder for their entertainment, an infamous notion popularized by Thomas Aquinas.
Christian Universalists reject such notions of hell. I have read Christian universalist polemics by Bradley Jersak (Her Gates Will Never Be Shut), Sharon L. Baker (Razing Hell), David Bentley (That All Shall be Saved), and Jens Reuter (My Hope in Hell).
There are two other books that I need to mention that tackle the doctrine of hell. I am somewhat obsessed with them. One is by Jerry L. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in which Walls lays out four types of Christian positions on hell:
One. Calvinism, predestination of a limited elect.
Two. Arminianism, free will with a limited number of saved and many who by their free will must go to eternal hell.
Three. “Arminianism Plus,” a term I give to Jerry Walls' book: free will but the possibility of postmortem conversion and salvation evidencing God's more bountiful love and grace than evidenced in the two forms above.
Four. Universalism, the belief that God's love makes it inevitable that all will be saved either in this world or the world to come. While Universalism is the most desirable, it is no panacea as many will feel nothing is at stake if they're going to be eventually to be saved "no matter what" and this can lead to problems as we can see in this City of God post about a pastor who ran into huge problems when he preached universalism.
I went back to a blog post about my reading of Wall’s book, and I wrote the following, including a reference to “Deacon Blues.” I’ll include it here with some added headings:
Hell is a hardened heart, more than a judgment:
Walls suggests that we can acclimate to our self-made hell from our ever-hardening hearts.
Walls rejects the “penal substitutionary” theory of atonement:
Like Talbott, Bradley Jersak, Sharon Baker, and C.S. Lewis, Walls seems to reject the “penal substitutionary” theory of atonement, which I have always found so primitive and odious. As Walls explains it: “This is the view that Christ was punished in our place and thereby satisfied the justice and wrath of God, allowing us to be forgiven.”
The Death on the Cross, for C.S. Lewis, is more of a radical response to the human race’s propensity for digging a hole and going their own way. I’m thinking of the Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues” in which the narrator romanticizes a life of hedonism, drinking, depression, and nihilism( how I love that song).
But to be in the presence of God requires spiritual perfection:
For Lewis, only a perfect person like Christ could repent perfectly and this perfect repentance is what we need to unite with God. We can only go through the perfect surrender to God if God becomes a man.
This is a fascinating if not creative interpretation of the Death on the Cross. I’m sympathetic to it though it doesn’t cancel my understanding that the Cross is about a sacrifice to sacrifice a God who is compelled to burn us forever otherwise. But such imprinting inside me maybe, tragically, a Straw Man-God. I really struggle with this.
The other book that I am obsessed with Dale C. Allison’s Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and The Last Things. Here is a blog post I wrote a few years ago about my reading of Night Comes (new headings):
Struggling with Hell Doctrine
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 separation. 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 rot.
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 with 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 that 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, and 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 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 Night Comes, by Dale Allison.
Timothy Keller’s words challenge us:
But I’m back to Timothy Keller’s defense of hell. The process of “going to hell” is accurate as Jesus says. I’ve seen it in my life. I’ve seen it in my dreams.
The struggle continues.
