As anyone who deals with near-death experiences knows, their reality is often seen less in their description than in their effects on people’s lives. The same is true of any beliefs, for what happens in the world is driven by what we believe to be true. Regular readers here know my conviction that belief in hell has consequences in the world of everyday life.
Into this reality comes a powerful blog post by Frank Schaeffer, who is as big a Name as there is in the circle of writers whose viewpoint began with but has profoundly changed from a fundamentalist or neo-conservative Evangelical Christian background. Here, posted with his permission, is why, beyond religious discussions, the “hell issue” is so important to the entire world.
There Is NO Hell — God Just Couldn’t Be Meaner Than We Are
December 6, 2012, By Frank Schaeffer
Is it any coincidence that the latest war of religion that started on September 11, 2001, is being fought primarily between the United States and the Islamic world? It just so happens that no two groups of humanity are more ingrained with the doctrine of literal fundamentalist religion — including a retributive view of God best expressed by a belief in a Hell — than conservative Muslims and conservative Christians. American fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists deserve each other.
And nowhere on earth have conservative Christians been closer to controlling foreign policy than here in the United States and/or the Islamic cleric-controlled strict conservative countries like Saudi Arabia– home to so much worldwide funding of terror groups. Nowhere on earth have conservative Muslims been more dominant than in the countries from which the 9/11 extremists originated – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
What ties the fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist American Christians together? A literal belief in a judgmental angry God who desires to punish unbelievers for eternity. If we serve an angry killer “god” why not imitate him and kill each other? Why not “punish” each other for wrong beliefs as W Bush did attacking Iraq for no reason and bin Laden did in attacking us on 9/11? After all bin Laden is mild and kind compared to a god who would send anyone to Hell for believing wrong. Bin Laden only killed people once, not for eternity.
What a pair George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden made. On the one hand, an American president who was a born-again evangelical with a special “heart” for the state of Israel and its importance to the so-called end times, and on the other hand a terrorist leader who believed that he was serving God by ridding the Arabian Peninsula of an American presence and cleansing the “defiled” land of Palestine of what he believed were “invader Jews.”
So whether you’re an atheist or not, the issue of who’s going to Hell or not matters because there are a lot of folks on this planet – many of them extraordinarily well-armed – from born-again American military personnel to Muslim fanatics, who seriously believe that God smiles upon them when they send their enemies to Hell.
And so my view of “Hell” encompasses two things: First, the theological question about whether a land of eternal suffering exists as God’s “great plan” for most of humanity.
Second, the question of the political implications of having a huge chunk of humanity believe in damnation for those who disagree with their theology, politics and culture, as if somehow simply killing one’s enemies is not enough.
What most people don’t know is that there’s another thread running through both Christianity and Islam that is far more merciful than the fundamentalists’ take on salvation, judgment and damnation.
Paradise, which Muslims believe is the final destination of the society of God’s choice, is referred to in the Quran as “the home of peace”
“Our God,” Muslims are asked to recite, “You are peace, and peace is from You.”
Since Christianity is my tradition, I can say more about it. One view of God – the more fundamentalist view – is of a retributive God just itching to punish those who “stray.” In that view Jesus’ death was all about satisfying an angry “god” who needed a blood offering to make him change his mind about damning everyone and entice him to save a few the “elect.”
The other equally ancient view, going right back into the New Testament era, is of an all-forgiving God who in the person of Jesus Christ ended the era of scapegoat sacrifice, retribution and punishment forever.
As Jesus said on the cross: “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
That redemptive view holds that far from God being a retributive God seeking justice, God is a merciful father who loves all his children equally. This is the less-known view today because fundamentalists – through televangelists and others – have been so loud and dominant in North American culture.
But for all that, this redemptive view is no less real.
Why does our view of Hell matter? Because believers in Hell believe in revenge. And according to brain chemistry studies, taking revenge and nurturing resentment is a major source of life-destroying stress.
For a profound exploration of the madness caused by embracing the “justice” of “godly” revenge and retribution, watch the film “Hellbound?” The film shows how the “Hell” of revenge thinking, and the resulting unhinging of some people’s brains through their denial of human empathy, leads them to relish the violent future of suffering that they predict awaits the “lost” in Hell. Do we really want to go back to a time of literal religion. Wasn’t 9/11 enough of an argument against retributive religion?
We need a concept of “Hell” like a hole in the head. It’s time for the alternative of empathetic merciful religion to be understood.
~ ~ ~
To read the comments to the original of Schaeffer’s post and link to the Hellbound? trailer, click here.
What? If Schaeffer is right, then that means all those good Christians and Muslims who have been killing people and sending them to hell in the name of God must’ve had the wrong religion all along!
Which means they’re also gonna burn in hell for eternity.
Which means everybody goes to hell for eternity.
Which means nobody goes to Heaven.
Uh-oh! God needs to come up with a plan!
I get so confused… 😀
At least you know you’re not alone in the confusion!
Have we come so far as to say that “Hell does not EXIST”? Or are we just speaking of the “Hell” of our “Fathers”?
Stay tuned. That’s what we’re exploring. Schaeffer is obviously speaking about the traditional views of hell.
Hell is something you create for yourself. Either to give yourself a hard time, or as a weapon you can use to beat someone, or something else to death with. Either way one can feel righteous or vindicated in the act. “They deserved it”.
Negative energy within someone, created by whatever circumstances is the cause of this. You could have also brought it with you when you came. This is just looking for an excuse to vent itself. Therefore it will latch on to any concept and twist it in order to justify itself.
Let’s face it, not everyone (spirit) who comes through into this earth school has evolved to the same level of inner realization when they first arrive. We are spiritually unequal, but trying to evolve. This makes sense if you believe that you keep coming back to school until you get it right.
Some can be spiritually unaware, and some can be spiritually completely aware. Christ would be an example of completely aware. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to who isn’t. These people will take any concept and twist it into a club to beat someone else to death with. Especially if it results in personal gain.
I have an adopted niece who was horribly unbelievably abused as a child. Those who did it served time in prison for what they did. She is a wonderful caring good hearted person, and yet, because of the psychological damage, creates a hell for herself every day. No matter how hard, or how many times I try to lift her out of it, she turns around and dives right back in. I’ll never stop trying. At least she gets relief for a few minutes.
I have another boy in prison. In a fight with his girl friend, she stabbed him with a knife. He grabbed it away from her, and stabbed her back. She died. He’s doing 25 years for manslaughter. He found a spiritual teacher in prison. This person though an inmate himself, transfers himself from prison to prison, teaching as he goes. He’s non denominational. My boy meditates every day, I send him every book on spirituality that he asks for. He is happy and spiritually evolving, and says prison is what you make of it. He’s found Heaven within Hell.
A bit off topic, but relevant to this blog:
http://www.livescience.com/25091-greek-hades-cave-burial.html
Fascinating! The cave’s settlement is enough earlier than late Bronze Age that it could conceivably have served as the basis of the Hades belief. Not that it has to, as the idea of an underworld place of the dead is geographically widespread. Still, how interesting!
Hi Nancy, and to all of you in here. I am a Hell-NDExperiencer. And with that and the Bible, I can tell you all that Hell IS real! It DOES exist.
As to the question of whether or not a loving God would send people to Hell, no matter how horrible their crime, I can certainly answer it. For I am equipped to answer it better than most people.
ANSWER (summed up):
Yes and No.
To understand teh answer, one must see God as the Trinity.
NO, in the sense that the loving Jesus (God the Son) doesn’t really send people there. But people still go to Hell thru their OWN faults. In other words, people send themselves to Hell. Its like the laws of nature. If you jump off of a cliff, what happens? You fall. Did Mother Nature “make” you fall to your death?
Its just the way things are. And so for the case of Hell, we’re dealing with the laws of the spirit.
YES, in the sense that God the Father is Omni. He IS everything, therefore He is/created Hell. He IS the law of nature, spirit, etc. He dicated them. So in that sense, yes…He “sends” people to Hell.
See whoever has done bad with others has to go to hell like taken money from others but never written, cheated someone killed someone and soon on has to go to hell he is been judged in hell what punishment he has to be given, and very Important people no one has seen god we all are humans and the religion and the cast is been made by man itself, be good with others love people and forgive people, there are people who try to convert people in to religion forcefully to show their religion will all go in hell I have seen people getting converted in to Christians and Muslims by religious people.
I respectfully take issue with a number of Frank Schaeffer’s points.
1) Religion is a primary cause of violence.
Vox Day demolishes this argument in this book, “The Irrational Atheist.” Of 489 military conflicts in recorded history, only 53—10.8 percent—having anything to do with religion. Even in “religious” conflicts like Palestine, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, and the Crusades, religion played a smaller role than ethnic or political factors. Throughout history, the thousands of people killed over religion are “a statistically insignificant fraction of the billions of human beings who have been killed for reasons wholly unrelated to religion.”
The War on Terror is not a “war of religion.” Osama bin Laden was clear that his motivation for 9/11 was to end U.S. intervention in the Middle East (support for Israel, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and foreign aid for corrupt dictators). The driving forces behind those interventions are the Israel Lobby and the military-industrial complex. Evangelical Christians are “useful idiots” who support Israel for theological reasons, but they are not in the driver’s seat. The invasion of Iraq was perpetrated by secular neoconservatives who wanted to democratize the Middle East, not religious fundamentalists who wanted to Christianize the Middle East. Religion adds fuel to the fire, but the heart of the conflict is traditional geopolitical concerns like money, power, and ideology.
2) Fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam are two sides of the same coin.
There is a world of difference between opposing abortion or gay marriage and wanting the death penalty for blasphemers. Throughout the Muslim world, many people favor the death penalty for people who leave Islam. In Saudi Arabia, it is ILLEGAL to practice a religion other than Islam. That kind of thing would never fly in America no matter how much liberals want to believe that well-armed, bible-thumping Creationists would “impose” their beliefs on them.
Like most liberals, Schaeffer pretends to be a lone progressive voice in a country mired in fundamentalist Christianity. Again, that is delusional thinking. The West is thoroughly secularized. We are living in a post-Christian age. Most Americans still identify as “Christians,” but very few of them live their day-to-day lives with any real concern for what happens to them when they die. Increasingly, the only God in America is the God of Mammon—money and consumerism.
3) Orthodox Christianity preaches that a vengeful God “itches” to send people to hell.
This is a caricature. Part of the problem is that, since the Protestant Reformation, Christianity has fractured into thousands of denominations all claiming to have the correct interpretation of divine revelation. Perhaps some of those denominations conform to your caricature, but allow me to explain the concept of Hell from a Catholic perspective:
God desires that all men be saved. However, he also respects our dignity by giving us the freedom to accept or reject his love. God expects us to meet him halfway, to seek his truth, and to cooperate in his grace. Therefore, hell must exist as a consequence of free will—as a possibility for those who reject God’s love. God does not really send anyone to hell. People send themselves to hell through their moral choices in this life. When they die, God simply allows them an eternity of what they chose on Earth: separation from His love.
Furthermore, believing in hell does not mean “relishing” the prospect of nonbelievers going there. That is another caricature and, quite frankly, a smear against orthodox Christians. Certainly some Christians succumb to that temptation, but the Church preaches against it. Every Sunday at Mass we pray that all men are saved.
CONCLUSION
The entire purpose of this blog is for writers to reassure themselves and their readers that nothing bad happens to anyone when they die. Toward that end, they are constantly explaining away the concept of hell. Negative NDE’s? Explain it away. Scripture? Explain it away. Christian tradition? Explain it away.
The writer of this blog could use a dose of what she prescribes for fundamentalist Christians: Humility. Just as some Christians arrogantly claim with absolute certainty that nonbelievers go to Hell, this blog asserts with more-or-less absolute certainty that NOBODY goes to hell. Based on what? NDE’s? That strikes me as a shaky foundation on which to build a theology. Her creative reinterpretation of scripture and tradition is a stretch, to say the least. The Bible is the most read and dissected book in human history. Theologians have been debating these questions for thousands of years. If you’re a Christian and you believe that God has been guiding the Christian faith, it’s hard to believe that He would allow so many people to reach the wrong conclusion about something as fundamental as Hell. Even most secular experts would dismiss the idea that Hell was just a Giant Misunderstanding.
As a lesson in humility, I point to the Catholic Church. The Church has always taught, extra ecclesiam nulla salus (Latin for “outside the Church, there is no salvation”). This dogma has developed and been interpreted in different ways throughout the ages. The long-term trend, especially since Vatican II, has been to interpret this dogma in a more liberal, accommodating fashion. Although the Lord established the Church and instituted the sacraments as the ordinary means of salvation, it was possible that He could choose to bestow His grace in other ways. In other words, even the Catholic Church, which claims to be the “one true faith,” admits that God works in mysterious ways and could bring non-Catholics to heaven in ways that we can’t fully understand.
From a human perspective, it might seem unfair that anyone would be deserving of eternal punishment. But God has a different perspective. We have to pray for the humility to trust in God’s plan. Divine revelation tells us that all human beings will die, be judged, and enter into heaven or hell, forever. If that’s God’s plan, then we have to trust that he knows that he’s doing.
At the end of the day, the writer of this blog is basically inventing her own religion based on nothing more than her own wishful thinking. I hope that she is right and that everybody goes to heaven. Christians have reason to hope that all men are eventually saved. But it is dangerous and misleading to suggest that Hell does not exist. Reason, scripture, and tradition strongly suggest that hell is real and that God wants us to take it very seriously.
The best answer to this question was given by Jesus himself. When a villager asks him, “Will only a few be saved?” He does not give a direct answer. Instead he says, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.”
Strive to enter.
Peace.
Frank, my response will come in another day or so. Comments slowed with the holidays, so I haven’t been staying on top of things. You’ve said some important stuff, for which my thanks.
I can’t speak directly for Frank Schaeffer, Jr., but will make a few comments in reply.
First, although the underlying causes of war are likely to be, as you say, economic or territorial, it is religion that typically carries the battle flags. For instance, whatever the political motives behind the Crusades, it was religious zeal that sent the common soldiery into the march. And so on. Consider “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Once to Every Man and Nation” and countless other hymns with warlike imagery. Even when war is not the issue, religious passion and executions at the hands of the religio-political establishment have been too common to deny during the entire first millennium of the Common Era.
About Schaeffer and Christian fundamentalism, I wonder if you are aware of his family ties and personal background in the top leadership of the Moral Majority and other deeply conservative religious movements. Where you live, fundamentalism may not play a great part in the life of the community; however, for Schaeffer’s audience in the American South and Heartland, it remains a pervasive, powerful, and determinative force.
Third, you commented that “believing in hell does not mean ‘relishing’ the prospect of nonbelievers going there. That is another caricature and…a smear against orthodox Christians.” I have in print recognized the present position of the Roman Catholic Church about hell as the “state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church); however, you might want to take a look at its history from the early Church Fathers up through the 17th century and even beyond.
Building on scriptural quotes such as Revelation’s “They shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels” and other selected verses, Augustine himself accepted the concept that the blessed might relish witnessing the pangs of the damned as evidence of God’s justice (see The City of God, Book 20, Chapter 22, “What is Meant by the Good Going out to see the Punishment of the Wicked”). Further, it was Thomas Aquinas who observed, “That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly, they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell” (Summa Theologica, Suppl., q 94, art. 1). The “abominable fancy,” as it is called, is not a calumny but a concept which prevailed through most of the history of the Roman Church and marked the early years of Calvinism.
About your conclusions, I can only express my regret that you have read such an interpretation into my writings. This blog exists because I take the experience of hell very seriously indeed. However, I have never met an individual whose life was improved, or whose death was made easier, or whose love of God was enhanced, by a belief in hell as a place of eternal conscious physical torment. In decades of study, and from Origen to Hans Kung and countless others, I have found abundant scholarly theological testimony leading to what is now the belief expressed in Dancing Past the Dark.
Thank you for taking the time to express your views.