Extricating hell

Hell fascinates us.

It’s not the sort of thing we like to admit in good company, or even to ourselves. It’s a little bit like the public hangings of another time. Even while we’re repulsed by them, our eyes are drawn towards the gruesome scenes.

The coarser elements of society make no bones about their fascination with hell and its imagery. The Hell’s Angels is a notorious motorcycle club but the name and its implications extend deeply into popular culture. The “Highway to Hell” is a road with a touch of romance. Hell is surprisingly cool.

Popular media understands this. Judging by movie trailers on TV, the entire genre of horror movies might wither and fade away without hell and its supposed denizens.

And what’s behind the fascination? I believe it’s an acknowledgment, conflicted as it is, that there must be a place and time where the price is paid for evil. A public hanging is grotesque but it declares that those who break society’s codes must be seen to pay for the violation. Our instincts tell us that justice must be seen to be done. Hell is about ultimate justice.

But it’s not just the leering masses that are fascinated by hell. Proper society hides its fascination behind the veneer of culture.

Dante’s The Divine Comedy has three equal parts but it’s the “Inferno” that most people know. Milton wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained but it’s his vision of hell that dominates discussions. Goethe was a prolific writer and an acclaimed genius of the Enlightenment but it was his Faust that made him famous.

For most of us, it’s literary tradition and not the Bible that educates us about hell. So, as Christians, we face the problem of extricating the biblical hell from the hell of literary and popular culture. There are notable differences.

The Bible’s hell is not where we send our personal enemies. Dante carefully arranged his enemies in the nine layers of hell. The pagan poets he considered virtuous were in the outer rings while his personal enemies were in the deepest rings.

We have our own lists. We include Hitler and mass murderers in the rings reserved for those who inflict deep pain on people we love. That, however, is not the biblical hell. God – and God alone – sends one to heaven and the other to hell.

Hell isn’t the home of evil. Milton made hell the extravagant kingdom of his anti-hero, Satan; the place of rebellion against established order. (To his assembled minions, Satan proudly declared, “To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:/ Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”) It’s not a party palace, even a grim and foreboding one, populated by free spirits who found it too difficult to live by the standards of ordinary society. The home of evil is not hell, but the earth as we know it.

Satan doesn’t draw people into hell. Goethe used an ancient legend of a man named Faust who made a pact with Satan, exchanging success in life for eternal damnation, signed with blood; Satan’s prize was to own Faust’s soul when he died. This legend perpetuates a terrible myth.

Satan’s prize is not the souls of the dead, but the hearts of the living. It is God, not Satan, who judges the living and the dead. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that everyone may receive what is due them for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10).

Hell is an integral, not incidental, part of biblical cosmology. In fact, most New Testament teaching on hell is laid out by Jesus himself. From Jesus’ teachings we know that hell is a place of punishment, that it’s real, that there’s no escape, and that ensuring we don’t end up there is very wise.

For many years now it’s been fashionable to minimize hell and to scorn those who pursue salvation as a type of “fire insurance.” One would hope that those who find Jesus as “fire insurance” would also discover the blessings and joys of this heavenly relationship.

But if the danger of hell is real, then fire insurance is prudent, and hardly to be scorned.

James Toews is pastor at Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C. He has consented to write this column for a further year.