catapult magazine

In two weeks I’m lecturing at my church with the following question: "what will happen to unbelievers in the afterlife?" For some of you I realize this is not a hard and grueling question. Please understand that some of us have unbelieving family, and that it is an agonizing topic.

looking for advice from anyone on how to approach this lecture[/u:064c259301][/b:064c259301], and how to address it to a group of adults in their 30’s to 60’s. We are a mainline church that has some varying opinions on just what exactly hell is. We also will likely have both extreme positions represented in the audience; meaning some will downplay hell to near non-existence while others will take traditional stances of conscience eternal torment in a literal lake of fire.

Keep us updated. It would be interesting to see an issue on this topic at some point at *cino even.

Grant, have you any wisdom to share on the topic at hand?

From our friend Larry Farris, who writes for us often but doesn’t do much blogging/posting:

my take on it is that eternal life can begin either at our baptism or after death for the unbaptized. while i think the former generally preferable, especially since it renders death a doorway, i also am granted hope in believing this way. i do not believe in hell for the simple reason that if god had to condemn people to hell, it would mean there are people god is incapable of redeeming, and i find that a difficult god to believe it (and not the god of scripture). i believe god can redeem people after death, and will do so for all (yes, even hitler who may be perfectly happy scrubby jews’ toilets for eternity). the point is to know and live in relationship to god, and that can begin now or later. the object is not to avoid hell; if it were, let’s do more deathbed baptisms! hope that’s germane.

I don’t believe in either heaven or hell, but my two cents worth is that you can’t talk about one without talking about the other. If you believe in a literal lake of fire, your understanding of heaven must similarly literal in terms of streets of gold and such. Eternal pain must have its opposite: eternal bliss. To me, being human involves both pain and bliss and if you take either one of those away you take away our humanity. Think about what it’s like when you’re sick to your stomach and it’s so horrible you just want to die. Then you throw up and experience an amazing sense of relief and well-being. I think that kind of contrast is essential to what it means to being human. In my mind, someone in a lake of fire who has no way of experience anything good or pleasurable, like the person who is in heaven and doesn’t know pain, isn’t human anymore.

similarly, ‘eternal life’ seems to signify an absence of time. in my mind a human being who suddenly finds herself in a context where nothing happens, isn’t human anymore. i also think that no more than 10 angels can dance on the head of a pin at any given time. there just isn’t room for 11.

Your description of what it means to be human is fairly unimaginative, dan. Yes, it’s true that we experience both pain and pleasure, both of which inform our understanding of the other. But is it out of the question to imagine a world where we don’t need pain to find true delight in pleasure? To imagine a world in which pain and suffering is not part of what it means to be human? That, in fact, this is a distortion of what being human is?

Maybe I lack imagination. A more positive way to look at it would be that I’ve learned to be satisfied with what is, content with the life I’ve been given. I don’t long for eternal life or eternal bliss and lack of pain. I think we’ve been conditioned to want these things and I see it as greed.

Oh, I might add that longing for eternal life is not necessarily something that makes us human. There are plenty of examples of societies were people did not want this, at least not until missionaries encouraged them to add this to their repertoire of wants.

It might be a reduction of the concept of heaven to say that it’s a place free of pain. Jesus pretty much promises suffering will be a part of life on earth if you follow Jesus but there is rest for the weary at the end of that struggle. I don’t think pain and pleasure is what Jesus is talking about when he promises the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

What makes heaven heaven is that it is where God dwells. The thrust of Jesus’ argument is that if the kingdom of heaven continues to grow from the small mustard seed to the victorious enduring kingdom, then God’s dwelling will ultimately be on earth, just like before the Fall when God walked and talked intimately with us among the creation. And that’s what we want, not an unearthly paradise, but a very earthly one, here and now.

If heaven is the kingdom where God dwells, then hell is a separation from God’s dwelling. Those who aren’t interested in contributing to the kingdom of God are contributing to other kingdoms which do not endure because they are not grounded in the transcendent creator of life. So, in effect, they are willfully outside the gates of Christ’s kingdom, or as Jesus says in Matt 18:9. , are thrown into Gehenna, literally the place outside the gates of Jerusalem (God’s city of shalom) where infants were once sacrificed, a place of death, separation, destruction.

But if God is good and wants to grant us eternal life, why does the biblical narrative advocate the destruction of some human beings? It’s because the Jewish people were persecuted mercilessly from one empire to the next and they needed words of comfort, a promise that those who were doing evil things, who seemed to be rewarded for their deeds on earth, would not avoid judgment in the end. Contemporary readers of Scripture often take these words of condemnation out of context, thus making it seem like God’s people wanted to send everyone to Hell. No, they wanted justice in an evil world! We don’t blame African-American slaves for making songs that demand judgment on their white slave owners. We understand that African American slaves have suffered injustice and we therefore read their narratives as a justifiable call for the tyrants to be held accountable for their evil deeds.

I believe we should hold onto the biblical concept of hell because it affirms God’s stance against injustice. All human cultures have a way of measuring right and wrong behavior, of determining who are the good and who are the bad ones.* If they don’t have a hell, they replace it with something else: prison, reincarnation into a lower being, relegation to the "unpopular crowd", relegation to historical obscurity, reparations, capital punishment, military defeat etc. We should understand the biblical notion of hell in this context, not in the pagan-influenced underworld that has taken over our imaginations.

*The Judeo-Christian tradition acknowledges that we all are the bad ones and the only one who doesn’t deserve to be cut off from God’s presence, to die, to go to Hell, is Christ because he is righteousness. So it makes sense that Christ would be a good judge. And because Christ loves us, he shows mercy on our sin. Having experienced Christ’s mercy, we must not turn around and condemn others to hell. We must also show mercy as fellow sinners. Hell has to be understood in this context, otherwise it doesn’t make sense.

That vision of heaven and hell I think I can live with. But what about eternal life, grant? do you as an individual get to live for ever because you have experienced God’s grace? or does eternal life mean that a just society lives forever, a society where people live and die in the way God intended them to?

I’ve heard a number of interesting ideas, though I’m unsure exactly what is correct. I figure even if I have the the details wrong right now, God will still get them right. :wink:

I’ve grown up with the understanding similar to Grant, that Hell is a place without God’s presence, since God is the source of all that is good. A few years ago, a Greek Orthodox friend of mine explained that as far as their teaching, hell is the opposite, that God cannot NOT be everywhere (because of his omnipresent nature), and that the same intense glory of God revealed fully to Christians in heaven will be revealed just as fully to those in hell, except that because they are rebellious in their stubborn opposition to God, the same holy glory of God seems unbearable to them instea dof beautiful.

I can’t think of any verses either to prove either point. Either way, I’m pretty sure that hell is less than pleasant and that heaven is more joyous than we could every presently comprehend. That much seems to be clear.

A second idea that I think the scriptures make clear and yet doesn’t seem to be taught a lot is that hell was not intended for people but was rather created for satan and his fallen angels. As I see it, some people do end up there, but it wasn’t God’s original desire (as God is "not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance").

This is slightly off topic, becuase it deals with Heaven, but another odd thing I’ve heard recently, and it does seem to be biblical, is related to how New Jerusalem comes down from heaven and lands on the New Earth. If this is a literal city (which it may or may not be), it seems to imply that Heaven will literally be on Earth, and that people will live primarily on the New Earth. If so, the idea of people living in the clouds with harps, rainbows, etc. could be very off-base scripturally.

Also, that New Jerusalem is a city and not a cloud, temple, garden, etc. seems to imply that civilization and culture are likely to continue and grow. Our time, then, might be spent not simply worshipping God as we face him at his throne (a typical image of the "Heaven" stereotype) but rather woshipping God through the human lives we continue to lead with unlimited potential as we fulfill our original designs intended by God when he first created us. We might continue to build cities and culture and technology and arts and everything good that we do now, but better because we’re not limited by our sin and its pervasive effects like death.

The only good things that seem clearly excluded from "heaven" is that there’s no marriage (as Jesus plainly tells the Saducees) and many if not all spiritual gifts will be rendered obsolete and unneccessary if my reading of 1 Cor. 13 is correct. What would be the point of prophecy, for example, if God speaks for himself face to face with no need to ever send a messenger? What would be the point of healing as Jesus and the Apostles did when there is no death or pain? Even the fruits of the spirit Faith and Hope are obsolete in this realm, since seeing God need not be hoped for and requires no faith, but "the greatest of these is Love", since it is eternal.

So anyway, those are some thoughts that have interested me on this topic in the last few years. Of course, like many things regarding the future, it’s hard to tell what’s literal and what’s symbolic. God is forever an Artist.