What about Hell?
Image: Dante and Virgil by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1850. Wikimedia Commons license.
There seems to be a fierce theological debate on Christian Twitter right now. It was started with a comment chastising pastors for not mentioning Hell —and the consequences of sin—enough in mainline Protestantism and Catholicism.
As someone who likes to visit a variety of churches—recently Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Lakeview and Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church in Milwaukee—I realized that I don’t recall having heard a recent sermon or homily condemning me to Hell.
Alexa Smith of the Presbyterian Mission Agency explains:
Hell has always been theologically troublesome, because it goes straight to the question of who God is: How do grace and judgment, or love and justice, mix in the divine mind? Are unrepentant sinners ultimately separated from God, the source of all life and hope, which is torment enough, or are they, literally, tortured for eternity? It is hard to talk about hell because this is hard stuff to talk about, but also because the Scriptures are not clear.
She also explains that when we delve into the Hebrew Scriptures, there are only two clear expressions of Hell—in Isaiah 30 and Daniel 12.
The New Testament is where we see expressions of eternal damnation—but even there it doesn't clearly point to a place we can call Hell.
Alexa notes that Paul the Apostle—whose letters make an important part of Christian Scripture—doesn’t either.
Augustine, the Church Doctor, is where we get our traditional view of Hell as a prison-like place for punishment. His theories of Hell are part of a portfolio that explains what Heaven and Purgatory might be like, too.
Alexa talked to theologian Dr. Mark Achtemeier, formerly of Dubuque Theological Seminary. He studied at Duke, Harvard, and Union Presbyterian Seminary.
It might surprise a lot of people that John Calvin, an origin of Presbyterianism, didn’t think much of Hell as an actual physical place where souls go to be damned, according to Dr. Achtemeier. Calvin spoke of Hell as real, but exists in a poetic, metaphorical place.
Oh, it certainly is a bad place to be! But it is bigger than what we are imagining, according to Calvin.
While Hell is still a very much debatable theological topic not completely pinned down by the mainstream Churches, there is agreement that “Hell is separation from God, whether you think of it as an actual place or as a state of being,” Alexa says.
Like I’ve personally preached in the past on controversies over the idea of predestination, even Hell is something that will remain a mystery to us—one of God’s many mysteries of faith.
We just need to have faith that God’s mercy is there when we come to the end of our earthly journey—and some of those mysteries becomes clearer.
