‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’

Written over the entrance of Dante ¢â‚¬â„¢s Hell

Still Thinking  ¢â‚¬“ Hell

Last Thursday an article appeared in Time Magazine that has caused a major stir among American Evangelicals.   A month ago Pastor Rob Bell the founder of the Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids Michigan, published a book titled Love Wins, in which he suggests that there may not be an actual place called Hell, rather, because of God ¢â‚¬â„¢s reconciling love everyone gets to Heaven, whatever that is, says Bell.

There is of course nothing new in that statement.   In theological circles it ¢â‚¬â„¢s called Universalism and it was eloquently argued in the early 20^th century by Harry Emerson Fosdick a champion of the pulpit and theological liberalism.   But what is new and what is causing consternation among the theologically conservative is that Bell has a conservative theological pedigree and is the pastor of a 10,000 member church with a median age of 30.   Some have suggested that this may be the largest generational shift in American Christianity since the 1950s. Bell himself says,  ¢â‚¬Å“I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian ¢â‚¬ ¦something new is in the air. ¢â‚¬ 

Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is furious with Bell.   He wrote in his weekly blog after the book was released, “when you adopt universalism and erase the distinction between the church and the world, then you don’t need the church, and you don’t need Christ, and you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t need the cross.   This is the tragedy of non-judgmental mainline liberalism…. we dare not retreat from all the Bible says about hell.” Mohler is particularly upset because in his view, if you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t believe every word of the Bible literally, then you can ¢â‚¬â„¢t believe any of it.   Bell on the other hand, like most contemporary scholars, recognizes that much of the Bible, both New and Old Testaments is best understood as narrative, poetics, metaphor and wisdom as well as history and factual reporting.

It is not just that hell is unpalatable to a modern audience, it is rather that we have through the 20^th and 21^st centuries experienced such a cosmic shift in our consciousness that the concept of a real place where human beings are eternally tortured and punished for being born Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Secularist, or maybe even Catholic or Protestant is at best ridiculous and at worst obnoxious.

Albert Mohler does have a point that when one part of the edifice of fundamentalism begins to crumble it won ¢â‚¬â„¢t be long before the whole house will come tumbling down.   Where he is wrong though is that it is not Christianity – the living, breathing faith – that will be destroyed, but rather the slender version of it to which he subscribes.   The idea of hell we find in the gospels and in other New and Old Testament writings is fundamental to our understanding of being human and Christian in our world.   But it is a concept and not a place; it is an image of the darkest experience a person can imagine, not the actual abode of demons and devils. In fact, many of our images of hell don ¢â‚¬â„¢t even come for the Bible they are literary constructions drawn from Dante ¢â‚¬â„¢s Inferno in his book The Divine Comedy or the writings and drawings of the 18th century mystic William Blake.

My friend in California, Jim Burklo says it well.    ¢â‚¬Å“If belief in hell is what keeps the church alive, that would be bad news for Christianity.   But it isn’t true.   Left out of Mohler’s calculus is the fastest growing religious demographic category in America: the religiously unaffiliated, many of them disgusted by preaching about eternal damnation. If we can get hell out of the church, there will be room in the pews for people who have been turned off from Christianity in the past. ¢â‚¬  (www.tcpc.blogs.com/musings)

Christopher Page