Hell

Some thoughts penned by Lance Morrow on the topic of hell appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required). Here's his lede:

Pope Francis was asked earlier this year what he thinks about hell. “It’s difficult to imagine it,” he replied. “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty. I hope it is.”

It was a pastoral pleasantry, kindly meant but theologically sloppy. It raised interesting questions: Has the traditional hell—fire and brimstone through all eternity—gone out of business, either because, as the pope hopes, there are no longer enough customers, or because hell has become an atavism: medieval, lurid, and not credible to the 21st-century mind? Is the eternal fire a metaphor? If so, what does it mean? Is hell a physical place or a state of mind? Is there such a thing as eternal life—and if God’s verdict goes against you, does that mean a life of everlasting torment? Is it possible to believe in hell if you don’t believe in God, or is hell the terrible solitude of living without God?

Pope Francis himself has defined hell as “eternal solitude.” By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pontiff of existentialism, wrote that “hell is other people.” Which is it?

Morrow says more, but I'd like to focus this post on the questions he asks above. Does hell exist and, if so, what is it like?

If one accepts that a personal God exists and if one believes that God is both perfectly good and completely just, then there must be a hell or something very much like it. If justice will ultimately prevail then there has to be accountability for how people have treated other people in this life. Otherwise, human life is incomprehensibly absurd.

So, if the God of Christian theism exists then there must be a hell, but what is it like? The writer C.S. Lewis maintains that hell is an existence that people actually choose for themselves. He writes that,

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.

He also says this:

Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.

In his novel, The Great Divorce, from which the above quotes were taken, Lewis pictures matters somewhat like this:

Ultimately every person must stand before God, and God will ask them just one question - 'Do you love me.' Each person's whole life will stand as his or her answer. There will be some whose hearts are so blackened by evil and hardened by hate that the prospect of spending an eternity with the source of all goodness and love would be nauseating and repugnant.

They no more wish to be in the presence of God than a person sick with a stomach virus wishes to sit down to a delicious feast. They wish to be delivered from the presence of God and thus God grants their wish.

He forces no one to love Him or to desire to be with Him. They find themselves separated from God. They find themselves isolated from all that's good, an existence devoid of love, only hate, devoid of pleasure, only boredom and pain, devoid of beauty, only ugliness.

And being so depraved and corrupt they actually prefer this to the existence they rejected.

Is this hell eternal? Is there no way out? Maybe the safest response is to say that as long as the individual chooses it they'll remain in it. Whether God's love and grace extends even to the depths of hell and that repentance is possible even there, I can't say.

I can only say that I wouldn't want to put any limitations on God's love and grace.