Wednesday, August 18, 2004
(6:28 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Theological Thought Experiment: Hell
A lot of people don't believe in hell anymore. In fact, I have trouble believing in it, since most of the preachers seem to be obsessed with the many nice people who will be there. How many of us have heard the line, "There will be a lot of 'good people' in hell?" My parents didn't force-feed me a lot of theology at home, but that was one point that came across -- "good person" was essentially a pejorative term. So, growing up and coming to think that that view is stupid, I wondered if maybe we should all be universalists. It seemed self-evident to me that we should.But then 9/11 happens. Do I think that the hijackers will be in heaven? No, I don't, frankly. And then there's the run-up to the Iraq War. I know that George W. Bush is a good Christian man, but I frankly think he's going to be in hell. I know it's such an awful thing to say, but if I were placing bets, I'd say that that man deserves damnation -- I know that I will be judged with the measure that I judge with, and I'm comfortable with that, because I'm fairly confident that I haven't systematically lied to an entire nation for years in pursuing a corrupt agenda that has resulted in the loss of thousands of lives. I'd say that the soldiers who tortured in Abu Grahib, the officers who looked the other way, the people who wrote the CIA manuals about how to torture, the lawyers who provided the rationales for how torture is cool and the president has infinite power -- those people are on their way to hell. People like Dick Cheney, who profit from war? They are going to hell. Ken Lay? Same deal: going to hell. And yes, even though I opposed the Iraq War -- Saddam Hussein is going to hell, too, along with "Chemical Ali" and all his other buddies. General Pinochet is going to hell, along with all those who tortured. People who profit from when people lose their livelihoods are going to hell. People who get on the radio and lie and lie and lie for three hours a day are going to hell.
Jesus talks a lot about hell, and that's the kind of thing he's thinking of. Let's look at the example of people who go to hell in Jesus' discourse -- those who neglect the poor, the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the prisoner; the rich man who refused to give a poor man even the scraps under the table. Revelation is full of vengefulness for the "Whore of Babylon" -- Rome, the central power of its day. (If we want to play little games as to how Revelation applies today, the only possible answer is that America is the Whore of Babylon.)
Yes, doctrines of hell have been horribly abused by those in power. They have been used to blackmail people into spending all their energy worrying about petty, private things -- what is this I feel when I look at that person of my same gender? am I masturbating too much? do I "believe" this set of sentences hard enough? -- and that is horrible. The answer, however, is not necessarily to give up on the doctrine altogether. Maybe we need some fire-and-brimstone preachers. Maybe we need some Christians who view those in power as their enemies and who sincerely pray for them -- not so that they make "wise decisions" (they already know how to do that, pretty much), but because they are damned to hell unless something happens to radically change them. We should also pray for those among us who are in the armed forces -- that they will lay down their weapons and start living for Christ instead of serving the idol of the state, that they will stop killing and enter into solidarity with those who are being killed.
This is serious stuff! Bland liberal tolerance is definitely more civil and pleasant than militancy, but bland tolerance -- the "jump to the middle" -- is just a pleasant front for the same old power relationships that existed before. In response to the privilege of being the mother of God, Mary did not say that God was in the process of helping everyone to come to a harmonious, understanding lifestyle of tolerance for difference. She said this:
He has shown the strength of his arm; he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.I daresay that the Blessed Mother knew something that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson don't.
I am sick of being forced to choose between right-wing fundamentalism and tepid, generic liberalism as the only two possible faces of Christianity. There is a scriptural warrant for a militant leftist Christianity. This is not to say that that's the only kind of Christianity that there is such a warrant for, but just to say that that potential is there, and it is not being tapped into. We apparently need atheist, Marxist philosophers to point it out to us, but it really is there. The academic "church in exile" -- people like John Howard Yoder, Walter Bruggemann, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, etc., etc., etc. -- whatever their often considerable faults, have been providing us with the intellectual resources for a militant leftist Christianity for quite some time now. It might be worth a try.
But before we try it, we need to be clear: even if we are to be pacifists, God is not. The message of God is not only a message of yes, but also a message of no. We need to be very careful in our proclamation where we put that yes and where we put that no, but we can't pretend that we serve a God who wants more than anything to give us a big hug and be allowed to sob in our arms. The God of the Bible is a God of wrath and vengeance, too. If we weren't so blinded by ideology, we could see very clearly who will bear the brunt of that wrath and vengeance. I think it's good that so many intelligent young Christians realize that the preaching they were brought up with was putting that wrath in the wrong place, but a generic universalism simply doesn't go far enough in the end. The concepts of sin and hell are actually in the Bible and in the tradition. They aren't the final word, but they are a significant part of it. If Christians don't feel comfortable with them or don't want to employ them to positive, transformative ends, then maybe they should reassess whether what they are doing is really Christianity.
