Hell

William Buckley once said something like, "Hell is an address, like Main Street," meaning that it is real. I hope not, but it could be. I know it is also metaphorical because, like many people, at times in my life I have felt like hell, and had the sense that God delivered me from that hell.

Personally, I've always had trouble with reconciling the doctrine of hell with a God who is Love and with a God who is victorious over Satan.

God is Love

I've heard born again Christians say, "God loves us so much that he demands the absolute highest standards from us, and we all fall short of that; hence the need for the redemption of Jesus." This explanation has never been satisfactory to me:

No human father or mother (well some bad ones) would take the same tack with their children--i.e, create impossible standards and provide dire consequences for failure. Good human fathers and mothers expect imperfection from their children and allow them to learn from a combination of feedback from reality (natural consequences) and from punishments that fit the crime. It's hard for me to believe that God is less loving than an ordinary human father and mother.

Jesus sometimes chided the Pharisees when they brought up certain harsh elements of the Law to condemn either him or others by saying, "God only told people that because of the hardness of their hearts." In other words, they wouldn't have believed a gentler doctrine. I believe that the doctrine of hell is a situation like this. People in Biblical days led harsh lives in a harsh, desert, nomad culture that demanded things like stoning women (not men) for adultery. To have told them at that point in their history to change these things would not have flown because of the hardness of their hearts. Maybe it's time we soften our stony hearts!

God is Victorious Over Satan

How can we say that God is victorious over Satan if we believe that a relative handful ("true Christians") make it to heaven, but the tens of billions of other souls who have lived and died on Earth are all going to hell and burn (metaphorically or literally) for eternity. It seems like Satan pretty much ruined God's creation and got most of the souls. Also, this vision seems like a mass-murdering God to me (worse--a mass torturer.)

Many of the born again Christians I have known are troubled by this doctrine of hell--certainly as a barrier to their initial conversion that they manage to overcome, or afterward, when they reveal their true feelings by disclaiming personal responsibility for the doctrine and saying, "The Bible says it, not me." Few will say to a sinner, “I believe you deserve to go to hell and burn forever if you don't believe the Bible (believe me) and accept Jesus.”

Hell is also a Catholic doctrine, and I am a Catholic. One of my spiritual directors made a neat legalism with "Catholic doctrine demands that there be a hell, but it doesn't say that anyone is in it." (Maybe Jesus saves everybody.) I've never found this explanation satisfying either. I'm not a Catholic fundamentalist, and my conscience rejects this doctrine of hell; however, I recognize it may be true.

In any case, I believe that God loves me unconditionally and rely on that faith and his goodness in this life and later.

I realize this essay is very controversial and is written from an individual, not institutional, viewpoint, but I'm very interested in other people's thoughts on the doctrine of hell from their own religious or personal point of view.