MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, the Reverend William Aitken, who was the
Presbyterian Minister of Newcastle, New Brunswick, from about 1860
to 1900, often preached sermons on the terrors of hell. One Sunday
morning he was warming to his familiar theme, advising his
congregation that in hell there would be “wailing and gnashing of
teeth.”
Sitting in the front pew was an infirm but rebellious old lady
who could stand it no longer. So through her toothless gums she
muttered in the direction of the pulpit: “Not for me. I haven’t got
any teeth.”
“Madam, in hell teeth will be provided,” retorted the
Minister.
This story may be apocryphal but it illustrates an attitude that
is increasingly familiar. Hell has become a bit of a joke. For most
people, including many good Christian people, do not believe in
hell anymore. All that eternal fire and everlasting damnation stuff
seems completely over the top. Liberal theologians ridicule it and
promote their view of universal salvation, while many religious
conservatives feel that the horrors of hell are largely symbolic. A
loving God, so the argument goes, could not possibly behave in the
cruel and punitive way those 19th-century Scottish preachers, not
to mention their equivalents in other denominations down the
centuries, used to assert.
The modern reluctance to think about hell comes from living in
an age of easy believism. Pastors like to be popular. Old-fashioned
subjects such as the day of judgment and the wrath of God don’t
fill the pews. Sermons on hell would empty them double quick.
Yet whatever the prevailing religious fashion, we cannot get rid
of hell by overlooking it, let alone joking about it. Although
virtually unmentioned in the Old Testament, hell is vividly and
specifically depicted in the Gospels. Jesus spoke many times about
hell. In the parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25: 31-46) he
portrays a frightening judgment scene in which God says to those
who have failed him: “Depart from me you cursed into the eternal
fire prepared for the devil and all his angels.”
These famous words, taken in conjunction with Jesus’ many other
references to the fate of the damned using metaphors such as outer
darkness, tormenting thirst, everlasting fire, a growing worm, and
gnashing teeth, have established a theological doctrine of hell
which is not easily gainsaid. Pope John Paul II in his book
Crossing the Threshold of Hope discusses the question of
whether a loving God can possibly condemn any human being to
eternal torment. But the Pope concludes: “Yet the words of Christ
are unequivocal. In Matthew’s Gospel he speaks clearly of those who
will go into eternal punishment.”
The clarity of Scripture on the doctrine of hell is a
considerable obstacle to the doubters and jokers. Yet there are
serious arguments in favor of ameliorating, if not totally
amending, the doctrine. Origen, the greatest theologian of the
early Church, held that the punishments of hell might not last
forever. Among other Church fathers, on the side of Origen were
Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nysaa, who spoke as though in
the end, all will be saved. This is known as the universalist view
and has become well supported by 20th-century theologians.
For example, the Jesuit Karl Rahner claims that no one ever goes
to hell. He regards Jesus’ words on this subject as admonitory
rather than predictive. While not ruling out the possibility of
eternal damnation for the worst of sinners, such as Judas, Rahner
prefers to believe in “the truth of the omnipotence of the
universal salvific will of God, the redemption of all by Christ,
the duty of men to hope for salvation.” From the Protestant corner,
the Church of England’s 1938 Doctrine Report stated that
“the love of God will at the last win penitence from all.” Even the
neo-orthodox Karl Barth can be read as universalist. Among modern
writers on religion and theology hell has become a hard sell.
THE OPTIMISTS’ DOCTRINE OF UNIVERSALISM is attractive, but is it
right? Those who believe in the supremacy of Scripture (who of
course have no truck with purgatory, which does not get a single
mention in the Bible) do not think so. Yet even the most hard-line
of Hades believers have a problem reconciling the God of love with
the God of hell. The most scholarly attempt to make such a
reconciliation has been put forward in an outstanding book Dare
We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? by Hans Urs von
Balthasar.
Balthasar rejects the idea that hell will be emptied at the end
of time and that the damned will be reconciled with God. He does
not assert that all will be saved. But he does suggest that
Christian believers have a right to hope and a duty to pray that
all sinners will be saved. For even the worst sinners may be moved
to repentance by God’s grace and granted salvation by God’s mercy.
The opposite is also possible, concedes Balthasar, since anyone can
use his free will to reject the grace of God. The question of who
may, or may not, go to hell is therefore an open one.
Cardinal Avery Dulles, in an article on hell published last year
in the magazine First Things, implied that in his view,
and in a recent change of view by the Pope, Balthasar is probably
right. As Dulles puts it:
The position of Balthasar seems to me to be the
orthodox. It does not contradict any ecumenical councils of
definitions of the faith. It can be reconciled with everything in
Scripture, at least if the statements of Jesus on hell are taken as
minatory rather than predictive. Balthasar’s position, moreover,
does not undermine a healthy fear of being lost. But the position
is at least adventurous. It runs against the obvious interpretation
of the words of Jesus in the New Testament and against the dominant
theological opinion down through the centuries, which maintains
that some, and in fact very many, are lost.
How many people will go to hell is another continuous issue.
Jesus’ words on the subject are somewhat ominous. Throughout his
time on earth he offered his hearers only two options after death.
Everlasting happiness for those chosen to dwell with God.
Everlasting misery for those who reject or are rejected by God.
“Many are called but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14), he declared,
repeating the point about the high failure rate with metaphoric
references to narrow gates and camels having difficulty in passing
through the eye of a needle. These statements were traditionally
interpreted to mean that the majority of those who die will be lost
and will go to hell.
My 19th-century ancestor the Rev. Aitken and his ilk would have
approved of the tradition and disapproved of the loss of it in the
21st century. But I agree with Avery Dulles when he wrote: “The
search for numbers in the demography of hell is futile… it is
good that God has left us without exact information. If we knew
that virtually everybody would be damned we would be tempted to
despair. If we knew that all or nearly all are saved, we might
become presumptuous. If we knew that some fixed percent, say fifty,
would be saved we would be caught in an unholy rivalry.”
Actually, there’s been plenty of holy rivalry on the subject of
hell. Yet despite all the fire and brimstone that’s been thrown
down from pulpits about it across the centuries, nobody has a clue
who will be going there. Even Judas may have repented in the nick
of time. We just don’t know.
My guess is that hell does exist and that its population will be
full of surprises. The only sure way of not having to find out more
about those surprises is to obey Jesus’ first words recorded in the
Gospels, “Repent and believe the good news.”
Jonathan Aitken, The American Spectator’s
“High Spirits” columnist, is the author of seven books,
including Nixon: A Life. This article appeared in the
March issue of The American Spectator.
