The Comforting Doctrine of Hell

The Four Last Things have been reduced to two. Modern Christians don’t deny Death, although they don’t like to think about it, and if they believe in an afterlife, they look forward to a pleasant Heaven. However, the other certainty, Judgment, and the other possibility, Hell, have vanished from the minds of Christians. Surely God is non-judgmental, as non-judgmentalism is one of the few virtues that receive public tribute. And surely no one goes to hell, if it exists. The strong universalist strain in modern Christianity has many variations, ranging from the hope that all will be saved, held by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Richard John Neuhaus, and perhaps by John Paul II (and with which I feel the deepest sympathy), to a total rejection of the doctrine of hell as a patriarchal trick that thwarts self-liberation.

However, the traditional teaching on hell is in fact a sign of the genuineness of Christianity, and it is therefore a cause for hope. Liberal Christianity is largely a human construct; it is what happens to a revealed religion after human beings finish redecorating it to modern tastes. H. Richard Niebuhr summarized the liberal gospel: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross." However, the darker parts of the Gospels are a sign of their genuineness, because they are not what we would have made up if we were inventing a religion to satisfy our desires. Promises of comfort on this earth, yes; promises of eternal bliss, yes; even viewing earthly troubles (whose existence can scarcely be denied) as an educational tool to discipline us and to make us grow spiritually, yes; but threats of eternal punishment, fires that are not quenched, and worms that do not die—no, no, no.

The fires and worms have been eliminated to make Christianity less dark, but the darkness guarantees that the Faith is a divine Word, and not a human construct. The gospel is good news, evangelion, like the imperial proclamations, not because it makes us comfortable but because it is an announcement from the innermost heart of a reality that is itself beyond our comprehension, a message we could never have dreamed of ourselves, even though creation contains hints and foreboding and dark promises.

As to who goes to hell . . . Jesus was asked, "Are there many who will be saved?" He does not answer the question directly but uses it to make his point: He is the only way, and there are few who find it. Whether he finds those who do not find him, he does not say. Saints and theologians differ on this, and I am neither. But I will venture a few of my reflections.

Perhaps human decisions sometimes do deter-mine our identity, insofar as we have committed so much of ourselves to them that if an outside force changed our decision, we, as individual persons, would be destroyed. That is, if God forced a person to repent, he would not really be the same person. God still loves the person even when that person rejects him; he therefore will not force the person to repent, because he would no longer be the same person.

Judgment, then, is inescapable, because it is simply the truth revealed. The utter clarity of the uncreated Light reveals to us the truth about ourselves, but it will not be comfortable for us when we no longer see in a glass darkly but face to face. We all know some of our faults—if we are married, our spouses will be happy to enlighten us about others—but there are some, probably the most serious, that are unknown except to God. Even an orthodox Christian who tries to observe the moral law perhaps has hidden pride of which he is unaware. Others, who do not have such light, do terrible things in a good conscience: abort children, gas Jews, fly passenger planes into skyscrapers. When we finally see ourselves fully in the Divine Light, the experience will be very painful for all of us, even for the just, and excruciatingly painful for us sinners. Catholics call it purgatory; Orthodox and some Protestants do not give it a name but admit the reality.

What of those who see their sin for what it is, a rejection of God, and still embrace it? Can God force them to reject sin and accept his mercy, without making them different persons? That may be a logical contradiction, like a squared circle or a thing better than God.

God allows this final rejection of him, if the person in full knowledge still embraces the sin, because he loves even the damned. He could annihilate the demons and the damned, but he chooses not to, because he still loves them. To them, that love is a terrible fire; to the repentant, it is at first a purging fire and then endless light. Even the damned are not punished as much as they deserve; an Orthodox prayer (Akathist for the Departed) claims that even the pagans in Hades are comforted by our prayers. Therefore, those Christians who pray for the dead (and whatever abuses it may lead to, it is a deeply human impulse) exclude none from their prayers. While we are uncertain of their fate, our love, like God’s, should extend to all.

God can be nothing else than Love, even if that creating and sustaining love becomes unendurable to those who reject it. Hell is not something we would put in a universe we constructed according to our human desires, but that is only because our understanding and our love are both weak. We do not see the depths of the human soul and the mysteries of love that endures beyond all rejection. The revelation of salvation and damnation does not have the sentimental sweetness of human wish-fulfillment, but the astringent and sobering taste of reality.

Imagine there's no heaven,

It's easy if you try,

No hell below us,

Above us only sky,

Imagine all the people

living for today...

Because we know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, we should be alarmed at the soft-pedaling of communism's history and the parallel move to grant the global elite more authority over our lives – perhaps under a new name.

Imagine there's no countries,

It isnt hard to do,

Nothing to kill or die for,

No religion too,

Imagine all the people

living life in peace...

About 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners" in this century, writes University of Hawaii professor R.J. Rummel in his book "Death By Government."

Most of that death toll came in the 20th century – and most at the hands of communist governments.

Without question, socialist regimes – communist governments – those that monopolize power in government, have been by far the deadliest culprits. Since 1949, for instance, one in every 20 Chinese citizens has been murdered, starved or killed by their own government. More than 50 million civilians wiped out in "peacetime."

During the last century, four civilians died for every soldier killed fighting in wars.

The Soviet government was the second biggest butcher regime, not only in the last 100 years, but throughout history. Many of the civilian deaths, such as those who died of starvation in Josef Stalin's Ukrainian terror famine, were murdered by government-dictated quotas. In sheer numbers, the Chinese and Soviet holocausts made Hitler's look trifling by comparison.

More recently, from 1975 through 1979, more than 2 million Cambodians, or 31 percent of the population, were destroyed by government edict inspired by utopian pipedreams. That belief in power as a tool of changing societies, combined with government's superior firepower, is the standard operating procedure this century, says Rummel.

Imagine no possesions,

I wonder if you can,

No need for greed or hunger,

A brotherhood of man,

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world...

That's what the EU is all about. That's what the New World Order is. That's what all the great global institutions are. They are creations of an elite determined to trample individual rights, destroy national sovereignty and undermine accountability.

You may say Im a dreamer,

but Im not the only one,

I hope some day you'll join us,

And the world will live as one.

Question: In 2001, after the horrors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and a hundred other communist tyrants, why is it that anti-communism is still a dirty word? Is 'Anti-Communist' a Dirty Word?

John Lennon, former Beatle, singer, writer and composer, was shot dead in New York on December 8 1980.

MORALITY - Can we have morality without God?

Even someone like Nietzsche, the German philosopher who is credited with giving a major boost to the elimination of God from Western culture, never tired of pointing out that Christianity is a whole and that one cannot give up faith in God and keep Christian morality. He said:

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. The morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.

Is the picture given in Romans 1 really an exaggeration of the way things actually happen? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered much under an atheistic system, doesn't think so, and he speaks from personal experience. In his 1983 Templeton Address, Men Have Forgotten God, he said:

The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.

Now, when a society turns from God, what we have described above may take a few generations to be fully worked out. We may cope for a while on the spiritual and moral heritage of our forebears. But if we don't make that heritage our own, then we will be in trouble. The Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner, put it like this:

The feeling for the personal and the human which is the fruit of faith may outlive for a time the death of the roots from which it has grown. But this cannot last very long. As a rule the decay of religion works out in the second generation as moral rigidity and in the third generation as the breakdown of all morality. Humanity without religion has never been a historical force capable of resistance.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741

3. They are already under a sentence of condemnation to hell. They do not only justly deserve to be cast down thither, but the sentence of the law of God, that eternal and immutable rule of righteousness that God has fixed between him and mankind, is gone out against them, and stands against them; so that they are bound over already to hell. John iii. 18. "He that believeth not is condemned already." So that every unconverted man properly belongs to hell; that is his place; from thence he is, John viii. 23. "Ye are from beneath." And thither be is bound; it is the place that justice, and God's word, and the sentence of his unchangeable law assign to him.

What the Bible Says About Hell

The Mystery of the Cross

Four Views on Hell discusses the literal, metaphorical, purgatorial, and conditional views of hell. Each view is presented by a proponent and then critiqued by the proponents of the other three views.

John Walvoord defends the literal view of hell and presents relevant word studies on the issues involved in eternal punishment. His presentation of the word eternal was particularly well done. He shows that in the NT aio„nios is only used to mean endless. This word is used several times in reference to the punishment of the wicked.

William Crockett complements John Walvoord, as he has a particularly strong refutation of annihilationism. He points out that the view of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day was one of eternal, conscious punishment. When Jesus spoke of hell this is what would have come to mind in His audience. The early church fathers also held to eternal, conscious punishment. Crockett disagrees with Walvoord on the issue of whether the flames and darkness are literal, contending that they only convey torment, but are not to be taken literally.

Zachary Hayes’s presentation of purgatory is somewhat misplaced, as the rest of the book deals with the nature of hell. It is also misplaced because Hayes clearly holds to works salvation and appeals to tradition and fellow priests to defend his view.

Clark Pinnock presents the annihilationist view, namely that those who do not believe are exterminated in the lake of fire and no longer exist. Eternal destruction would then mean extinction that lasts forever. However, he does not explain the full range of the words used on this subject, nor Rev 14:11 and 20:10 adequately.

"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and
labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."

The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis - HarperCollins Originally published in The Guardian from May 2 to November 28, 1941, Lewis conceived of The Screwtape Letters in the summer of 1940. On the evening of July 20th, he heard a broadcast speech by Hitler and later wrote to his brother, Warnie: "I don't know if I am weaker than other people, but it is a positive revelation to me that while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little."

STENBERG v. CARHART :Justice Scalia, dissenting. The method of killing a human child-one cannot even accurately say an entirely unborn human child-proscribed by this statute is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion....The notion that the Constitution of the United States, designed, among other things, "to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," prohibits the States from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd.

The Abortion Holocaust During the height of the killing season at Auchwitz living children were tossed directly into the fires of crematorium furnaces or flaming pits. Their screams could be heard throughout the camp compound....

Between Two Holocausts There is no argument that the Nazis used a variety of methods to thwart resistance to their goal, the annihilation of every Jew in Europe. However, even with our democratic government, we do not really have freedom to choose freely. System-regulated propaganda is so pervasive that individuals who initially support certain causes can eventually fall victim to the lies built within, with devastating consequences (Norma McCorvey is one example; she was deceived by the feminist pro-abortion propaganda machine. Let's not forget the many women who, seduced by "choice," opt for abortion and suffer from post abortion syndrome later on).

The dehumanization of unborn children did not occur in a vacuum.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.