Wow! I have to say that I am profoundly impressed with Clayton Pearson’s new view of hell. Who the heck is Clayton Pearson, you may be asking? Well, CP was a one-time pentecostal (Oral Roberts endorsed) preacher with a massive following in Tulsa, OK, no doubt a big notch on the American Bible belt. Pearson, like many other Bible-thumping men of the cloth, preached his share of hell-fire sermons warning the masses that if they failed to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, they’d end up with burnt asses down below. Ouch!!!
Well all of this changed one day for CP as he was watching the boob tube (a rather wide screen one at that) one day while sitting in his king-sized mansion, eating a king-sized meal. He was watching a news show about starving Africans and it dawned on him, “What the heck am I doing? I’m sitting here in the lap of luxury, eating more food than I need, in a huge mansion………a preacher of the Gospel! You mean I’m supposed to believe that these poor Africans, most of whom are probably Muslims, are all going to go to hell when they die? Aren’t they already in hell?” Now I must give CP credit for at least waking up from his dogmatic slumbers (to steal a phrase from Kant) and asking a most profound question. His question makes sense, regardless of what all the theological obscurantists have to say (in pathetic self-righteous judgement I might add) about the hell awaiting ALL who fail to say the sinner’s prayer. The obscurantists (or many of them) love to hide behind the notion that “The Bible says people will go to hell without Christ.” My question , however, is whether or not this same God will look into the hearts of men (and women) to see what’s really inside of them.
I remember asking my Sunday School teacher (I was in 5th grade) why God is sending to hell, all those who don’t ask Jesus to save them, but still suffer horrible things on earth. My teacher said something to the effect of, “You can’t do any kind of works to get into heaven, you have to pray and ask Jesus into your heart.” I don’t remember much more of the exchange, but I think I asked a follow up question about John 3:16…………………………………..for God so loved the world. I still can’t get past the notion that God loved THE WORLD. My fundygelical indoctrination had taught me that only the elect (those who begged Jesus to save their butts from hell) would have their bacon saved from the fires of hell. So let me get this straight. God allowed millions of Jews to got through the Holocaust, and then after death, into eternal hell fire. That being said, however, we have millions of spoiled Catholic and evangelical Christians who have hardly ever suffered (give or take a disease, death of a loved one, etc.) are going to spend eternity in heaven. I don’t freeging understand this kind of God. The American God has evolved into an angry, vengeful being who is tantamount to the kind of God that primitives appease by throwing virgins into volcanoes.
Do I pretend to know how God will deal out Justice one day? Heck no, but I find it difficult to accept the notion of a God, described as compassionate and all-loving, who will also torment people for all eternity. That, my friends, is just a whole lot of nuthin (to quote the great Bill Monroe).
Do I believe in the Gospel of Jesus? Absolutely, but not the schizophrenic God of American and Catholic fundamentalism.
Timeobserver's Weblog 
hughvic said,
November 10, 2007 at 4:08 am
TimeDave,
Greetings from the 12th Century and all centuries intervening. I stand today, in your time, among your countrymen in the Atlantan place. Yes, from Gregorian to Georgian! The Prior ordered me here to report on the enthusiasms of the Englishman Wesley in this place, and so I set sail from France, only to arrive, alas, more than a century and a half too late. It seems that only his brother’s vulgar tunes remain, and those I have committed to memory whole, so that I may sing them to my brothers upon my return. I shall perform them whilst strumming a small ukelele, a gift from a Kanaka shipmate, who’d been given it by a Portugee bosun’s mate in trade for a bare-bosomed Polynesian girl. I pray that God, and the Prior, will grant me this trifling codicil to my vow of poverty. It is but a humble instrument, though its music is as sweet as the laughter of children at play.
Will France still stand with the Lamb Victorious when I return? God only knows.
In eight centuries I have learned, I am proud to say, nothing real of Hell. Excepting from the accounts of our Lord’s sojourn there, I know it only as a concatenation of the most injurious rumors. Much of what you of your time think you know of Hell had not yet been contemplated in my time, much less in the times of the Nazarene and His Davidic ancestors. It is all Bosch, much of it the fault of Milton and Dante, whose musings were mere poetry and not the work of a true mystic and instrument of the Holy Spirit. Hell is in part a construct of power, as for example the power necessary to maintain order through the many generations of the European wars of religion. Your land has not been immune to this abuse of power, either. The hot-gospelers who followed the smouldering trail left by Wesley’s brushfire of the spirit also besmirched Hell as though the Father had never intended to permit it.
I could in the manner of that tedious pedant Bernard recite for you our scholastic understanding of the meaning of “gehenna”, “sheol” or “hades”, as those words were used in the days of the inspired Scriptural authors. But suffice it to say that each is a metaphor, a word with a previous referent. They have in common a reference to fire, and so one is led, as many of my patristic forbears, my contemporaries and my successors were led, to a contemplation of the meaning of fire to desert-dwelling Hebrews and their increasingly urban progeny.
You may have noticed–or, I pray, even felt–that each of the Triune Persons is a textual type of one or more of the classical elements, earth, air, water and fire. So that the Father is a burning bush, the Spirit the wind, the wind that shakes the leaves and breathes life into our pneumatic souls, and also the divine fire, the fire that ignites us from within. The Second Person is the water that slakes the spiritual thirst, the One who commands the waters; and the Son also is the earth, in the metaphorical form of the stone that the builder rejected from the stone foundation of the world, the cornerstone and perfectly completing touch of the Father’s creation. Thus the water does not war against the earth, nor the earth against the water, nor either against the fire; rather, they are all very God. This is important in answering your question because it shows that God has given His Word that fire as we know it can be Godly. Therefore “fire”, as a metaphor of Hell, does not need to imply a place of everlasting pain and suffering.
Fire also gives warmth–something of vital importance to a desert people. It also purifies. And obliterates. So we are left with four metaphorical alternatives: purification, warmth, pain, obliteration. Since Hell occurs in Scripture only in a negative context, we can rule out purification and warmth, since neither is negative. That leaves us with pain and obliteration. My friend, let us take obliteration–shall we?–and blandly ignore the obscene notion of a benign and purposeful Creator who would consign his children to everlasting pain. That is to say, fuck Dante.
If we do say such a thing, then what does it mean for the Father to countenance or even cause our obliteration? Why would He do such a thing, as a retreating army might burn its maps? Is God also sometimes bowed in defeat? Recall that He says that He is, sometimes. He actually tries to explain this, if you’d please recall it–because that is what He is trying to do: to recall you, and Clayton, and me to His flock. He loves his little white fuzzballs because they are to Him His adorable children, even the dirty stray ones who don’t heed his voice and have lying faces only an Abba could love. He knows of course that we know not which way is up, much less could we find our way without following the sound of his call, or at least of the sheepdogs he sends to tend to us. When do not know our way to Him, He searches for us. When we search for Him, we find Him. Even when we hide from Him He calls to us and sends His tenders. It is when we refuse him again and again, when we are determined to stay lost and to pretend to ourselves that we know which way is up–only then do we break His heart. We can never know His mind in this life, but we can know His heart because we feel it; as it were, the devout Miss Keller knowing the world by feeling it. Because we feel His love, we can share it abundantly. And if we, in His image, can love Him and ourselves and others and His creation abundantly, then He must love us with an abundance beyond our ken. How then must His heart break when His dirty little delinquent fuzzballs scorn and spurn Him as though they were wolves; when they commit “acedia”, the willful suicide of the God-given soul! My God, man!
Were you a father and your beloved, adorable daughter did such things to you year after year, though you warned her of the harm she was in fact doing to herself, I suspect that after she’d cut you off altogether you’d not be able to stand, emotionally, the pain of having her photographs around you, much less of playing old videos of your own little fuzzball as you’d remember her in her happy innocence and childlike fidelity. The Father says that He puts away the excruciating reminders of us when we make ourselves lost to Him forever. He erases us from His memory banks, his Book of Life, and girds Himself against the pain as though we had never lived. He abandons us to ourselves. We are obliterated entirely, an obliteration so complete that it can be represented in human experience only by fire.
Is this Hell? It is hellish enough for me just to contemplate. For me it is all the more hellish because my faith is very simple. I’m a monk, after all. I don’t know how these Americans came up with the quaint term “God-fearing”, as I see nothing to fear. On the contrary, He’s my Dad, just as He was the Naz’s “Abba”, his Pop. I’ve never doubted Him, and He’s always looked out for me. I’m a bleating fool and He’s the strong and silent type. Just what you’d expect from a shepherd. Works out nicely. It’s a thing we have, and it goes way back with us. I don’t know what I’d do without Him. But I know that I’d be in Hell.
I don’t know whether Hell is also a place. The Naz’s horrible visit there suggests strongly that it is a place to which one can be consigned, or some state that one can experience. I doubt that it is a place in Africa, in your day. I rather suspect that it is a place or a state of everlasting separation from Dad, which candidly is to me now the worst, most dibilitating thought imaginable.
Do the burning children of Auschwitz reside in Hell? Did they reside there in the 1940s? What a question, TimeDave! What are you implying about my Dad? Wanna fight?
Yes, yes I know that my rabbinical elders have been locked in a theodical crisis over these godawful conundrums since 1945, and a lot of Lutherans and some Catholics as well. Even some Presbyterians who normally eschew serious matters. Jews at least come by these torments of doubt honestly, but Hell? Was it not they who first distinguished natural evil from moral, or anthropogenic, evil? Are not they the only ones who need not find their Way, because they already are with the Father from their birth? And what of the gentiles murdered in the death camps, the Roma and the Communists, the Slavs and the steadfast clerics, the intellectuals and the homosexuals and the freedom-loving rebels and the infirm? From the frying pan into the fire? Why would that be? It is absurd.
And what of their murderers? In Hell, I feel sure. How can a loving Creator bear the memory of a darling dimpled blue-eyed Jewish fuzzball like young Addie growing into a stalking Nietschean beast of prey, setting himself up as the Messiah and pissing on the criminal King of the Jews, that “pitiful Jewish weakling” (Hitler’s words) nailed to the cross and left to die, broken and bleeding and soiling his loincloth in front of God and everybody?
Perhaps not the kind of video God would keep. Maybe not the name to preserve in the guest register. Better that it be as though he never belonged to the flock in the first place. To Hell with him. Let Satan bury his dead.
That, I think, leaves the suicides. If suicide of the soul is my Brother Thomas’s idea of the unforgiveable sin (I believe that the Naz said otherwise, but in this instance I’ll defer to the Doctor of the Church to reconcile the two versions, as conceptual reconciliation is Thomas’s bag), then what about suicide of the body? Well, this very afternoon I counseled a countrywoman of yours who woke up last week overwhelmed with the urge to kill herself. Like so many in this life vicissitudinous, she’d had enough. Two years ago her beautiful 15 year-old son, unable to withstand his first jilting, took his life. Shortly thereafter the boy’s father, unable to withstand his son’s grief and suicide, followed suit. The widow felt that she had no choice but to stand strong for her two surviving children, both then teenagers themselves. Consequently the mother did not permit herself to grieve, lest she lose all control and, as a result, her remaining children. The shock and unspeakable pain of it all erupted, of course, usually at times of fatigue or stress, when she was least able to cope with it. (It’s often said that God is in the details, and so He is; it’s less often noted that Satan is also.) She took to drink. What happened last week? First, she attended a wedding together with her daughter, now an outstanding college sophomore and faculty-styled Wiccan who, like the annihiliated annihilating nihilist Hitler, prides herself on her ability to make the Bible foolish. (Not us foolish clerics, mind you; the Word.) Her mother had to usher the girl from the sanctuary, as the insufferable sophomore–I’m guessing Columbia–would not quit mumbling the kind of snide late-night ironies that pass in her generation for wit, nor would she refrain during the nuptials from hissing, a self-agrandizement embraced of late, as you may have noticed, by half-lettered feminists, professed neo-Pagans, and postmod hipsters who reverence rudeness as though it were revealed wisdom. The mother was deeply ashamed, even though she was well aware that her pathetic daughter is locked in a theodical crisis of her own, unable to reconcile the death of her little brother with the existence of a loving and attentive Creator. Then, two days later, the mother accidentally came upon emails from her daughter and her living son containing the most hurtful and fanciful imaginable slanders, mixed with some truth, about their mother. These messages were composed and transmitted over the course of more than a year, not to each other, but to two long mailing lists of recipents. Suicide loomed large.
As it happened, she got on the telephone and poured out her dismay and grief to a friend, who took her to a place where people do not hiss at other people’s sadness anymore than someone would hiss at another’s nuptial happiness. A place where people are fortunate enough still to have a loving Dad to love. A place where, when faced with a broken person, they do what they are given to believe He would have them do.
What did I first say to her? What could I say, except that a fatherless friar living a life of singleness cannot comprehend how a mother could survive such sorrows, that God only, knows. That, and that she is prayed for, quite unnecessarily but quite lavishly. And one more thing: that our friend Gil Chesterton once remarked that “suicide is the coward’s way in.” I think that’s just right.
I did not say this to her, but I will say it to you because you’re impertinent enough to ask it of the airwaves and, with only a frock and a ukelele to my name, I’ve nothing to lose. When we are lost, even if we have been hungry and filthy and wretched our whole short lives and never have heard that we are herd, He never stops looking for us until He has found us. Even if all He finds is a dead sheep, or the remains of a boy who’s eaten his father’s pistol. He can still gather us to Him if He chooses, or erase us if we’ve taken the pistol after having bitten on the cyanide capsule in a forlorn underground bunker.
You know very well that the Naz was in no hurry to raise His friend Laz. The folks didn’t like it, but then they didn’t know which way was up from the tomb. But the Naz did. He took His own sweet time. Just like playing Bluegrass.
Hell, Dave?
Hell no.
Pax Christi,
Hugo