Go to Hell

Martyn Percy (Editorial, Modern Believing, Volume 44:3, July 2003)

A thermodynamics professor once wrote an exam for his graduate students. It had one question: 'Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Support your answer with proof.' Most of the students wrote accounts of their beliefs and faith. One student, however, wrote the following: 'First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing over time. So, we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As so many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase.

I. 'Now we need to look at the rate of change in the volume in Hell, because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell must expand as souls are added. This gives two possibilities: (1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. (2) Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increasing number of souls entering Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it? If we accept the remark given to me by a fellow female first year student, Ms Theresa Banyan during my first year at college: "It'll be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then (2) cannot be true, and so Hell must be Exothermic.' This student got the only A.

II. The story about Hell is amusing enough. And of course, you will be well aware that it is easy enough to theorise about Hell, either in disciplines such as philosophy or divinity, or even in Physics come to that. Hell is not a subject that we talk about very much anymore. The novelist David Lodge notes that 'Hell disappeared in the 1960s, and nobody noticed.' A discussion about the reality of Hell can, at times, seem to belong to the same kind of discussion as pondering the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead.

III. But discussions about Hell can still be useful. Ask anyone who lived during the last War. For millions of men and women, the years from 1939 to 1945 contain snippets of Hell, foretastes of terrible suffering, unimaginable evil, tragedy and darkness. Hell is something that many people in the 20th century have actually lived through, whether it's in the death camps of Eastern Europe, or in ethnic cleansing, or in the sheer brutality of an ordinary war. Hell is a real enough place for many people - a bombed market in Basra during the second Gulf War; a village in Rwanda, Bosnia or Palestine; or the numb silence of shock that abuse and torture brings. For its victims, judgement and apocalypse have come early - salvation is both a time and situation that was longed for. Faced with annihilation ('your name blotted out' is how Revelation 3:5 puts it), is a reality for some.

IV. Perhaps like me, you struggle with the more apocalyptic images the Bible gives us. Penitence in preparation for Christmas or Easter is fine. It is arguably not difficult to conceive of there being a judgement if God is just; nor is it problematic to ponder good works for our neighbours if we want to be counted amongst the righteous. The problem is the threats present within the imagery - eternal punishment, eternal rewards - it as almost as though we are being offered hope in the one hand, with the fear of God fisted in the other. What are we to make of all this?

V. The early Christians expected their hope and deliverance to be tinged with apocalypse. Indeed, many Christian groups throughout the ages have taken comfort (yes, comfort) from the doom-laden prophecies that pepper the Bible. I am not just thinking of David Koresh, or of Levellers and Shakers. Even the most orthodox Christians can be prone to setting their watches by the Book of Revelation rather than the Greenwich Mean Time signal. In From the Holy Mountain , [1] a young William Dalrymple encounters Father Theophanes, a Greek Orthodox priest who lives in the Monastery of Mar Saba. The conversation, in 1994, goes something like this. Dalrymple is admiring the red rocks of the desert, pitted with the cells and oratories of long-dead hermits, overlooking a valley outside Jerusalem, in the evening light:

'It's very beautiful,' I said.
'Beautiful?' said Fr Theophanes, rustling his robes in horror. 'Beautiful? See down there at the bottom? The river? Nowadays it is just sewage from Jerusalem. But on Judgement Day that's where the river of blood is going to flow. It's going to be full of Freemasons . . . heretics, Protestants, Catholics . . .[then] . . . More Ouzo?' [More Ouzo is poured, and Fr Theophanes continues] . . .'At the head of the damned will be a troop composed of all the Popes of Rome, followed by their deputies, the vice-presidents of the Freemasons. . . .'
'You're saying the Pope is a Freemason?'
'Of course . . . he is the President of the Freemasons - everyone knows this. Each morning he worships the Devil in the form of a naked woman with the head of a goat.'
'Actually' [replies Dalrymple], 'I'm a Catholic.'
'Then' said Fr Theophanes, 'unless you convert to Orthodoxy, you too will follow your Pope down that valley, through the scorching fire. We will watch you from this balcony . . . but it will be too late to save you. . . .[You will go] down, down to the Mouth of Hell.'
'Is that nearby?' [asks Dalrymple].
'Certainly' said Theophanes, stroking his beard, . . . 'the Mouth of Hell will open up near the Red Sea.'
'Is that in the Bible?' [queries Dalrymple].
'Of course' said Theophanes, 'everything I am telling you is true.'

As any travel writer might be, Dalrymple is exasperated by this literalism. The ease with which Fr Theophanes translates the dark mutterings of New Testament prophecies onto the late 20th century world - and in Jerusalem - is the stuff of apocalypse. Here is a religion written with blood, scorched in the sand.

But what has this to do with us? We live in a strange age. On one level, no less apocalyptic and literalistic at the time of Fr Theophanes than as at the time of Christ. But strange because words have lost their value: the currency of meaning has been devalued. It used to be fashionable to blame liberalism for this. Then secularism or Marxism. And finally postmodernism or post-foundationalism. In truth, though, we have been moving in a steady cultural stream for centuries that is familiar with linguistic fluidity and relativity but unable to resist it. In this respect, Western society is overdosed with its own prescription of freedom. Words have always had a pharmacological quality to them: they are medicine and poison. The difference between the two often lies in the dosage and the application. We are now at complete and commendable liberty to read and interpret texts as we would want: yet wisdom is replaced by cunning and truth by opinion. And yet the Christian scriptures exhort us to 'keep the word' - but we now know it has more than one meaning, so one person's 'patient endurance' is another's laziness. Exactly which word do we keep, and how?

This might make the foundations of Christianity now seem rather shaky. If Christ never wrote a creed, never baptised anyone and never wrote a book - is there any secure basis for faith? Yet Christianity is a religion of people, and it is a changing faith that matures us as we mature ourselves. God is given in flesh precisely because he has moved on with creation, opting out of writing in tablets of stone, or primitive and literal demonstrations of power in fire and earthquakes. Instead, in Christianity, God comes to humanity in a far more subtle manner - in a body. Flesh is flexible. It is responsive. It communicates, but it also feels. And in the face of Jesus Christ, as Paul wrote in II Corinthians, we see God.

The revelation of God in a face is no accident. Our faces are what mark us out as people, and distinguish us from others. Faces are unique: they smile, wince, cry and laugh. Faces are marked by time, and they change according to mood and circumstance. The Christian hope, astonishingly, is a revelation of God in the face of a human being. God coming to us as a vulnerable human, but like any baby, looking for love - to give and receive - and a relationship. The face grows in wisdom and stature, but it begins at a birth. This is partly why Christ has so much regard for the weak, and why the Christian faith must be about, in part, looking after those who cannot take care of themselves. Christ is not just in the baby, but in the beggar, the prisoner and the starving: when we turn away from them, we turn away from him. This applies not just to individuals, but as Revelation and Isaiah remind us, to nations as well as churches.

The call to put word into flesh, and see that flesh lends itself to words is both an individual and corporate mandate. 'Flesh made Word' ultimately makes us responsive, not absolute - the very opposite of being literal. When we see this, our light will already have come, and our gates will be open continually. But more than this, the Christian call is sometimes not simply to remain static - to be, as it were, the eternal city to which all must come. Christian discipleship is not about standing apart from the suffering and evils of society, waiting for immigrants and asylum seekers. It is also about going to hell - harrowing it, challenging it, and rescuing those who are trapped. Ultimately, the flesh made word and word made flesh invites the Church into a loving-but-critical relationship with society. Unafraid to speak and act; but unafraid to love.

Modern Believing, MCU, October Vol. 44, No. 3, July 2003