11th December 2012

One modern idea of Hell is of a condition of of chaos and relentless material suffering, seen in the most serious disasters, conflicts and societal breakdown. There's no need to describe a mythological or symbolic place that reflects current social structures, as Dante did. The focus now is on personal experience, not only of physical suffering, but also being trapped and isolated in despair without meaning.

More people than ever in history live in cities. The majority cope well enough in crowded conditions, whether by choice or necessity. Sartre's 'Hell is other people' reflects an experience of breakdown and non-communication in relationship, unable to share any understanding of what is going on, and unable to escape a sense of isolation in close proximity.

This applies in interpersonal communication. It also applies to individuals who admit they don't fit in society, who can't find a place or a community to identify with or belong to. This also applies between a person and God. The isolated individual fails to grasp how to pray, how to reach out and commune with the author of life. Or if they do, they experience the silence of God as utter non-response. They don't know if God exists, or if God ignores them. If so, why?

The ancient poetry of the Psalms voices the experience of isolation, chaos and suffering as part of the journey into faith, but the modern experience of alienation and anomie witnessed to is of a different order. General consensus about any authoritative world view that can give a basis on which meaning in life can be interpreted is not evident.

Science observes, analyses and describes the world but doesn't interpret anything outside its own  disciplines. Ideologically competitive science denys, even denounces the necessity and value of finding a higher meaning to existence. Modern creative art follows its own impulses, striving to contribute something of beauty, truth and goodness to the world, experimenting, but often in a chaotic and individualistic way, rarely contributing to making sense of the whole.

Both attempt to get us to perceive everything in a fresh way and wonder at it, but rarely offers a greater description of reality from which a highest sense of meaning can be derived. A coherent pattern is missing, yet the inter-relatedness and interdependence of everything is devoutly proclaimed as a key understanding of the modern world.

If Hell exists in human experience, is Satan/the Devil the author of it? Does either exist? Questions no longer troubling this age as they once did. It makes the task of accounting for evil more complex. If the Gospel message is taken at face value, Satan/the Devil is a problem. A problem dealt with. Faith recognises the material and spiritual reality of evil and suffering, and invites trust in the victory of Christ over Hell and Satan/the Devil.
 

10th December 2012

In creating humankind, Christians believe God made possible evolution of discernment between what builds up and what destroys, what's healthy and what's harmful for well-being. This discernment, our moral sense, works at a collective and personal level. It can be distilled into reasoned argument, but is more complex than this. It touches on every aspect of relatedness between self, others and God. So far the word sin has not been used. It belongs at the highest level of thought about human relatedness.

Sin is identified with mistakes or decisions causing needless suffering and chaos in life. It is rooted in self-centred motivation or attitude - putting self before others and before God, if God is acknowledged at all. The Genesis stories see suffering and misfortune, guilt, shame and blame emerge from an original human disregard and rebellion against God. Sin is about refusal to relate to God and respond to One who is source of all existence. 

Sin happens because humans are free, not prevented from doing what isn't good for them. Learning is part and parcel of human destiny. We come to understand what sin is by the damage it does. Experience teaches us which actions and attitudes do us no good. We discover through the passage of life that disquieting inner longing for God is better acknowledged and explored than it is ignored.

Scripture regards sin not merely as transgression against divine order, attracting punishment for the offence, it also regards sin as a spiritual ailment to be cured if we are to 'have life and have it in abundance'. With Christianity historically a cultural force in civilisation and nation building, it was inevitable that understanding sin in terms of crime and punishment would dominate.

Different generations and cultures have imagined Hell as a place of punishment, varied in relation to what kind of retribution people fear suffering most. Dante's classic portrayal of people in Hell reflected existing hierarchical social order. Measures of punishment were meted out to different ranks of people, according to the extent they abused their abilities, power and responsibility, or else surrendering themselves to passions that betrayed their humanity. 

The seven strata of Dante's hell are named after seven deadly sins - lust, greed, pride, vanity, anger, slander, avarice - each containing the appropriate corrective, applied eternally to all refusing to recognise their faults and failings. This status quo somewhat reflects the Gospel story of Dives and Lazarus, but doesn't equate with the Petrine idea of Christ rising from the dead evangelising spirits imprisoned in Sheol.

All ultimately face judgement, evaluation of their lives and consideration of their sin. The human face of God imagined by the church in the person of Jesus is one who enquires. "What have you done?" There's more in Scripture about Jesus as diagnostician and healer than about Jesus as judge.
 

2nd December 2012

The modern world is fascinated with how we die and telling the stories how victims have come to a violent end, no matter how much else there may be to tell of their lives. We joke about after-life, and paint imaginative pictures to console ourselves when confronted with the cold facts of mortality and the dissolution of the body. We know so much about the universe we inhabit, so little about ourselves. We don't know whether or not anything of ourselves survives death, apart from solid achievments and other peoples' memories of us we leave behind.

We know the universe began and will inevitably end. What then happens to any trace of our existence for others to recall? If death spells annihilation in the short or long term, what are we? What is the point and purpose of existing at all? Can life be lived to the full and to good purpose in the light of such profound unanswered, unanswerable questions? Faced only with what we think we know for sure, the facts, these are profound and disturbing issues confronting us individually and collectively.

Hell in every religion is an imaginary realm where the dead end up, punished for consequences of wrong actions when they were alive - but what constructive purpose does this imagery and mythology serve, apart from deterring evil-doing? The prospect of death as mere annihilation hasn't removed the notion of hell as punishment from the modern world view. It has identified and re-located the experience of hell in the midst of life itself. Hell is perceived wherever tragedy, disaster or brutal conflict imposes suffering on people. Humans are adept at causing each other suffering. "Hell is other people"

At least as long as we are alive there's a possibility of rescuing others from hell, by working on putting right relationships with one another. It's the most noble and significant way we have of making existence meaningful even if, in the end, life came to nothing.

Any experience of unrelieved torment and suffering can drive us to long for an end to existence. Yet, for the most part, we cling on to life for as long as we can cope with it. We want more than we get, we long to know if there's more to life than life itself.

Do I in any sense exist? Not just when my mind and body are failing and cease to function, but when it is reduced to its component elements? We long to know, but are confronted with not knowing, disturbed by by longing, immortal longing. Yet we have no means of imagining what we long for, what existence would be like beyond the realm of present knowledge, experience and understanding.

This longing is part of our consciousness of self, something which seems to distinguish us from other creatures. It's part of what being in in the divine image means for those who stake their existence on believing in God.