Hell does not belong in Christianity

National Post September 9, 2010

Many people found it surprising when a poll released last week showed that while just over half of Canadians believe in heaven, less than a third believe that there is a hell. But author Diana Spencer argues that the concept of  ¢â‚¬Å“hell ¢â‚¬  was a mistake that crept into Christianity in its very early years and was not part of the original Gospel message.

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The idea of hell as a place of punishment for the wicked was widespread in the world long before the Christian era. However it became assimilated into the official teaching of the Church very early on, in spite of the fact it conflicts with both Bible teaching and the inherited liturgies; and this contradiction has continued over the centuries.

 ¢â‚¬Å“The Faith of Damasus, ¢â‚¬  an early Church document originating from about the fifth century, states the expectation that we shall receive from God,  ¢â‚¬Å“eternal life, the reward of good merit, or else  ¢â‚¬ ¦ the penalty of eternal punishment for sin. ¢â‚¬  Likewise, the Athanasian Creed (of an early but unknown date) refers to  ¢â‚¬Å“perishing eternally, ¢â‚¬ which has been understood for centuries to mean  ¢â‚¬Å“being punished ¢â‚¬  eternally, but  ¢â‚¬Å“perishing ¢â‚¬  and  ¢â‚¬Å“being punished ¢â‚¬  are not the same thing.

Many examples, from both the New Testament and the liturgies inherited from the past contradict the idea of the soul existing for ever in its own right, with or without God. In fact, funeral services for two thousand years have quoted Jesus saying  ¢â‚¬Å“I am the resurrection and the life ¢â‚¬  (John 11:25), without anyone apparently picking up on the documented contradiction between the conflicting beliefs on the subject of surviving forever in hell.

Almost from the beginning, Biblical texts were misunderstood, often taken literally when they should not have been. For example, the Epistle to the Hebrews refers to God as  ¢â‚¬Å“a consuming fire ¢â‚¬  (Hebrews 12:29), and this may refer metaphorically to the holiness and righteousness of God one day consuming and destroying all that is evil. Other texts tell us that the nature of God is Love, and so that description in Hebrews cannot stand alone.

There is a passage in Matthew ¢â‚¬â„¢s Gospel contrasting eternal life with eternal punishment (Matthew 25:46), but  ¢â‚¬Å“punishment ¢â‚¬  is not the opposite of  ¢â‚¬Å“life. ¢â‚¬  The opposite of  ¢â‚¬Å“eternal life ¢â‚¬  would surely be  ¢â‚¬Å“eternal death, ¢â‚¬  which incidentally is still referred to in the Anglican prayer books (e.g., the catechism which refers to  ¢â‚¬Å“everlasting death, ¢â‚¬  and the funeral services which refer to being raised from  ¢â‚¬Å“the death of sin to the life of righteousness ¢â‚¬ ) without anyone querying this over the centuries.

 ¢â‚¬Å“Perishing ¢â‚¬  as being the opposite of life is referred to in many places in the New Testament, including the Synoptic Gospels themselves (Matthew, Mark and Luke, which were based on people ¢â‚¬â„¢s memories of what Jesus said and did) which at the same time contained parable stories that mentioned  ¢â‚¬Å“hell ¢â‚¬ , which would appear to have reinforced the popular perceptions of the time about eternal punishment in hell.

It was left to the author of John ¢â‚¬â„¢s Gospel to try to correct these misapprehensions some decades later by saying unequivocally that God is Love, and that eternal life is  ¢â‚¬Å“in His Son, ¢â‚¬  i.e., in the God of Love and nowhere else. Modern theology now dismisses the idea of hell being flames of fire and talks in terms of  ¢â‚¬Å“separation from God, ¢â‚¬  but for the intrinsically wicked, separation from God would not bother them as they are already separated from Him! So it would not be  ¢â‚¬Å“hell ¢â‚¬  for them.

There was a controversy in the nineteenth century which led to theologian F.D. Maurice being deprived from office at King ¢â‚¬â„¢s College, London,  ¢â‚¬Å“for alleged disbelief in hell, ¢â‚¬  only he used philosophical terms about dimensions of time, rather than the plain sense of the contradictions in the written word of the inherited texts quoted in my book.

Similarly, various heretical speculations on the subject of the human soul being immortal in its own right (the so-called  ¢â‚¬Å“Christian doctrine of man, ¢â‚¬  although it is not specifically a Christian doctrine) were condemned at the Fifth Lateran Council of the Roman Catholic Church in 1513, which led to them being discredited.

This was only four years before Martin Luther started the Reformation, a time when the Church of the day was already much in need of reform and was hardly qualified to make major theological decisions about the traditions it had inherited from the past. The work of the Reformation was never finished, because the various factions involved split apart from each other without finding any common resolution to the problems facing the medieval Church, of which the debate about  ¢â‚¬Å“hell ¢â‚¬  is one.

The time has come for all denominations to think again about anomalies and inconsistencies in the inherited faith, which have led many people to come to disregard the Christian religion altogether, without realizing that what they are rejecting is not the faith itself but distortions of it that should indeed rightly be challenged.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity has been misunderstood as being belief in three gods, but it is belief in One God, who has been described as being made up of three entities, between whom love flows, The Lover, the Beloved, and Love itself.

Thinking about the true nature of God, accepting that God is Love, and putting the demands of that Love first and our ideas about  ¢â‚¬Å“religion ¢â‚¬  second, would surely have huge ramifications for the future peace of the world.

A God of Love does not send people to hell!

– Rev. Diana Spencer, a retired Anglican priest living in Victoria, B.C., is the author of  ¢â‚¬Å“God is not like that, Making sense of Christianity, A new look at an old faith. ¢â‚¬ 

Read more: http://life.nationalpost.com/2010/09/09/opinion-hell-has-no-place-in-christianity/#ixzz0zYG5qkZI