Introduction:
I have to be honest. This essay was the hardest to write. It took me all of the week between the last post and this one to get this at all right. So let me be clear when I say I didn’t find it easy by any means. The first essay is far less controversial, because in it I say things that most people who believe in at least some version of God, however inaccurate or one-dimensional that perception of God really is, will usually agree with. We want to believe that God, assuming we believe there is one, is a God of love because as I said last time. Everyone loves love. We want to believe in a merciful God because we like to think that, whatever our foibles, such a god will let us off, that being mercy’s function in our thinking. Lastly, no one likes to disagree with the idea of God as a just God. We like to think of people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin getting “what’s coming to them” or “getting their just desserts.”
The third essay, the one that covers Hell itself,
is more controversial than the first because it states some are actually going
there. This makes people uneasy. Here again though, many would sit still for
that essay because however much we think we’re not going there, we’re perfectly
ready to consign child molesters and ax murderers and the aforementioned world
leaders to hell. So we often times agree to some vague idea that there is a
hell for those sorts of people who justly deserve it.
What makes this essay so hard is my knowing how
many will react to it. It is my job, before I can give anyone any good news, to
first convince you that all the bad news is actually true. I have to convince
you that no one on earth is actually good or actually deserves mercy. That
includes you. It also very much includes me. So know this: I am not excluding
myself from anything I say here. Just as in the last essay, I would remind the
reader that I am only talking about hell as being an objection to Christianity
in today’s America. I am not dealing with any other objections here. Lastly,
for everything I say, I will quote plenty of scripture (again from the New
International Version or NIV) so as to put everything into one place for the
Christian and the non-Christian alike.
For about two hundred years now, we’ve valued
kindness above all other virtues. This is at least partly understandable.
Kindness is magnificent. It has no perceptible downside. Over seventy years
ago, C. S. Lewis also noticed this preferential treatment of kindness, and in The
Problem of Pain he suggests that we actually mix up the ideas of love and
kindness. We think that love and kindness are the same thing, so as long as a
person can say that “his heart’s in the right place,” it is well enough and we
should leave the situation alone.
There are two problems
with our notion of love equaling kindness as this idea relates to God. The
first is that when it comes to God, we drop the aspect of love that involves
discipline or correction. If you are a parent, do you discipline your child or
do you allow them to do as they like. If you’re a parent who loves your child
and wants them to get as far in life as they can, you discipline. You teach
them right from wrong, you praise them for doing what is good and honorable and
you punish them for doing what is wrong and hateful. In saying this, I don’t
even mean particularly Christian parents. I think it likely that most parents
everywhere at most times throughout history would agree readily enough that
letting children do whatever they please just so long as the children are happy
and the parents are thought of as loving and kind makes for a terrible outcome.
In today’s America we would call such parents enablers, and we would say that
in displaying such kindness, they are neglecting their parental duties. So my
question becomes this: if we have this more complex view of parental love, one
involving discipline and correction, why then do we have such a simplistic view
of God’s love, such that we think—when we give it any thought at all—that God’s
love should (or at least that it ought to) boil down essentially to kindness?
Indeed, the more we actually care about our children, the more unwilling we are
to let discipline go for the sake of just being agreeable or nice or kind. I
don’t mean to imply that all loving parents are harsh disciplinarians. Indeed,
that would be the other extreme. Discipline without love and grace is cruel,
but to say that love consists only of kindness is simply untrue. If it is true
of human parental love that it requires discipline and correction to enforce
right behavior, why wouldn’t it be equally true of God’s love and for much the
same reasons?
The second major problem
with our view of kindness involves something we forget about its nature.
Namely, kindness is learned. Again using children as an example, what happens
if a parent never steps in to correct a child’s behavior? We have to teach
children to share or not to hit, and we have to make them understand that not
everything around them is “mine” all the time. If you think I’m being overly
harsh, think about what happened the last time you saw a toddler who was never
taught these limits on behavior, the kind that screams and throws stuff around
the isles at Wallmart because mommy and daddy won’t get that toy or trinket.
Pretty bad, isn’t it? This isn’t to say that children are at fault when they
don’t learn these things; the parents are the ones we single out and rightly
so. But the fact remains: children have to be taught civilized behavior.
Otherwise, their normal unchecked impulses, which are the same natural
inclinations all of us have in full measure, would tend towards selfishness and
savage behavior. Ours would too, the only difference being a greater cognitive
capacity. My question is, if all of that is true, and if it is as true of
adults as it is of children, what does that say about our true natures versus
the behaviors that we learn? Are we inherently good? Is goodness inborn? If it
is true that good behavior and kindness are learned skills, then the evidence
suggests that we are not inherently good and that goodness is not just
naturally found within us.
‘Sin’ is another of those
church words like ‘holy’ or ‘righteous.’ Its meaning is one that people usually
misunderstand. When I talk to people about sin, they usually like to list
actions.
“Well,” people tell me
all the time, “I know I’m no sinner. I don’t steal or cheat on my wife or
refuse to pay my taxes, and I’ve never killed anybody. So where do you get off
calling me a sinner?”
This perception of sin is
right up to a certain point. The person is right when they associate all those
actions with sin or as being sinful. Having said that, if you are doing those
things and you feel you shouldn’t, by all means stop doing them. Still, just as
the note on a sheet of music is not, in and of itself, that music, neither too
are all those things the whole of what we mean when we say sin. TO be sure,
they are sins in every way, but if sin was limited to just a list of things I
should and shouldn’t do, imagine the consequences. We would be perfectly free
to compare ourselves to each other and to say things like, “Well I’m certainly
no better or worse than A, and I’m a whole lot better than B over there.” As
things stand, I say don’t be so sure. Why did you choose to compare yourself to
A, and are you so sure you’re so much better than B?
This act of comparison
is, in fact, often what we slip into when we talk about sin, because it is the
definition of sin that has come down to us in our culture. To the average
person in America today, sin equals bad things, and if my list is shorter than
most people’s lists of bad things, I must be doing alright and who is Brad
Blair to say different? The trouble is, Brad Blair didn’t invent it.
On one level, part of me
wouldn’t mind if the universe was run along those lines and if sin could be
defined like that. However, it is clear to me that I don’t live in such a
universe and that the bible has something very different to say about sin, what
it is and who does it. And if I at all want to find my way to God, I had better
wrestle with what He Himself says about sin. So let’s examine what the bible
says, shall we?
Let’s start with
something easy. We can agree with Isaiah when he says of some people: “Their
deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands. Their feet rush
into sin; they are swift to shed innocent blood. They pursue evil schemes; acts
of violence mark their ways. The way of peace they do not know; there is no
justice in their paths” (Isaiah 59:6-8). There are many passages like these
describing evildoers throughout the old and new testaments, so let’s take that
one as representative. There are people out there who are reprehensible by
almost any definition. No question that such people are sinners. Are they the
only ones that the bible talks about when it speaks of sins and sinners?
If those people in Isaiah are the only ones the bible means, and if our definitions of ‘sin’ and ‘sinner’ today are correspondingly true, then what should we make of Paul’s comments in his letter to the church in Rome: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)? Earlier in that same chapter of Romans, Paul quotes the writer of Ecclesiastes. Solomon writes: “Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). The prophet Isaiah adds this in a later century: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away” (Isaiah 64:6).
There are many more passages like these as well. What are we to make of them? The bible makes it abundantly clear that on our own, every one of us is trapped in sin. We will inevitably do what is wrong, because sin is not just what we do, it’s natural. It’s who we are. Sin is both our immoral actions and the environment into which we were born. That’s what Christians mean when they talk about children being born into sin. They don’t mean that babies are evil and sinning. What they do mean is that the world into which we are born is itself twisted out of shape by sin. That is not to say that God made us to be sinners or that he made the world to be an environment of sin. Not by any means. But that raises a whole other discussion that we haven’t got time for in this more focused post. We don’t have time, for example, to go into the fall of Man and the entrĂ©e of sin into the world. Though I must add that the bible is quite clear on these points too. The key thing to remember right now is this: the Christian world view sees the world as one in which sin separates us from God, not only because of things we do once we’re able to choose right from wrong, but also because of our innate natures and the world into which we are born and in which we live.
To take it a step further, our economy of sin is
also wholly different from God’s economy of sin. Our laws classify
transgression. We have misdemeanors, felonies and first, second and third
degrees of this and that. We have to, because as humans, we must differentiate
between degrees of guilt. None of us is holy and pure in deed and truth, so we
distinguish and we assign relative degrees of guilt. Now then, isn’t it
reasonable to suppose that God, being completely holy and just as we said in the
last post, might see things differently? Isn’t it even likely that to a God who
is utterly without sin, all sin is equally bad? And if he is the ultimate
dispenser of both mercy and justice, wouldn’t it be wise to conform to his
standards? Once we have even started trying to conform to those standards (and
we will never come even close to true conformity here on Earth), we have to
acknowledge that however good and upright and moral we think we are, we don’t
even come close to being as upright and moral as God.
Consider a limited analogy. If I’m taking a German class and writing an essay for it, I can compare my essay with all the others in the class. Maybe mine has plenty of mistakes, but surely not as many as John’s or Jill’s, right? I could end up feeling pretty good about it on these terms. So maybe the teacher should give me an A+ on it and have done with it, given all my hard work. Then supposing the teacher gives me a B, what do I do now? I have a couple of options. I can curse the teacher for being such a hard taskmaster and being so unfair, for failing to take my frailties into account. And who is he to give me a B? German is easy for him! He needs to cut me some slack! This is the option many of us take with God. The other option, the harder one by far, is to admit that our essay wasn’t as good as we had supposed and to take the teacher’s corrective measures into account. In the case of a German teacher, that means improving the writing. In God’s case, it means acknowledging who and what we really are and going on from there. Only when we have acknowledged this fact, that we are bad, that we will always be bad if left to ourselves, and that there’s nothing we can do to remake ourselves as good, can the cure be introduced. More on the cure in the final post.
Just after midnight at the Washington State Penitentiary, a man approaches the gallows. He has confessed to multiple child molestations and murders. He is, so far as the viewer can tell, a perfect example of Isaiah 59 above. He is a violent killer, a defiler of children who would do it again if let go as he admits. His hanging will be the first in U.S. history since 1965, and if anyone deserves death, we naturally think, it is this man. We hope and pray there won’t be any last minute stays of execution, no phone call from the governor, no clemency. When he drops through the trap, we feel that justice has been served and that the man has gotten “what he deserves.” And if there is a hell, we’re quite sure that he’s there enduring every possible torment, and glad we are of it.
The man I’m talking about is Westley Allan Dodd, executed on January 5, 1993. If I said no more on the subject, we could sit back and nod, and even those of us least willing to admit to a hell’s existence might allow that if there was one, he’s surely in it. The trouble with that picture is this: it seems that at some point during his final imprisonment, Westley Allan Dodd became a Christian. I know there are many who would say at this point that he naturally claimed to have become a Christian in hopes of having his sentence commuted or something to that effect. I will only say that I am in no position to say anything about the authenticity of his (or anyone else’s) conversion with any degree of certainty. That is between him and God. If he became a Christian and no one on Earth had believed it, he would still be in heaven. If everyone believed him a Christian and he actually was not, then he is not in heaven. So for our purposes, let’s take him at face value. His final words from the gallows were: “I was once asked by somebody, I don’t remember who, if there was any way sex offenders could be stopped. I said ‘no.’ I was wrong. I was wrong when I said there was no hope, no peace. There is hope. There is peace. I found both in the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to the Lord, and you will find peace.”
Our contradictory attitude about hell lies in the fact that we want to both deny its existence at some times and to hope it’s there for certain especially bad people at other times. If we allow for a God, we think he certainly ought not to send us there, but that he ought to send Westley Dodd there. Lastly, again if we allow the possibility of a God, we can’t possibly understand a God who allows us to wind up in Hell, but who, most incomprehensibly of all, allows Westley Allan Dodd into heaven. The problem with the attitude (and hence with us) rests on our failure to understand sin. In human terms, none of us is as guilty as Dodd and none of us deserves what we do. We see the distance between ourselves and Dodd as being a distance of miles, of light years even. God, who sees things as they are, sees us as much in our own sin as Dodd was in his, and he reckons the real distance as being measured in millimeters. One of my favorite authors once wrote of this case and said that we ought to be careful when wishing upon someone exactly what they deserve, because we should then be ready, in our turn, to accept just what we deserve. There’s a word for that. Hell.
It isn’t just because of hell that Christianity is accused of being so negative. It’s because of the outlook on the world that it espouses. It’s popular these days to think of people as being mainly good. That people can do right and behave admirably, Christianity would not deny. Where Christianity is attacked is this idea of the basic goodness of all people. Again, we are not talking about politeness or good cheer or even kindly dispositions here. We mean the human being in his entirety, as he is or as he would be if only he could get away with it. If we were half so good as we like to think ourselves to be, we would have far fewer laws. Of that I’m quite sure. As things stand, we are desperately ill, and we either do not know it, or we are in the deepest denial about it. In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis, a man trained in the classic writings of antiquity, described the problem like this. He said the men and women of old new themselves to be worthy of the divine punishment. They knew themselves to be bad, and the good news of the gospel came and was often received as though it were a cure for a desperate illness, and that, of course, was just what it was. Today, Christianity must first convince people that they are ill with sin, itself very bad news, before it can win a hearing for the cure.
There is a cure though, and that cure is God’s plan of salvation. I’m not going to lay it out step by step in this or the last post, because it deserves its own separate discussion. But if you are curious, seek out a bible study or a local church. My very specific focus has been to discuss hell as an objection to the Christian faith and that alone. Heaven warrants its own separate discourse.
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