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18 December 2006
Why the Hell? (Sorry Scott Hahn.)
So if it looks like I blatantly plagiarized Scott Hahn, I probably did without knowing it. I guess we would both be citing the same ultimate source. And anything I say that he said, he probably said better, because he’s a real academic and uses things like grammar and spell check and logic. Whatever. Anyways, so everyone always asks ‘why would a loving God make hell?’ It is a good question, certainly. Here is my half-witted attempt to answer.
It is an old question, but really not that old. Humanity assumed that we all sucked for most of history. So the question of a bad end of all things had little to do with proving or disproving the divine. After all, the Titans were old-school crazy, and neither they nor the Olympians really cared much for people. The Earth was the trash heap of the universe. That the residents of that refuse pile should die at the whims of the gods wasn’t super surprising. Same with the Norse myths, the trolls and the giants kill everybody. Game over, ends bad. Baal and Asherah didn’t really care much for people, nor did Krishna or Shiva. That people should die because they were in a bad mood did little to undermine their credibility as objects of worship. In fact, in a certain way it enhanced their stock as gods. Most tribal religions include gods that kill people when they are displeased. After all, it is the gods’ prerogative to do whatever they want, and we get stuck dealing with it. Most of humanity over the course of history would have little problem imagining that a Supreme Being would send people, even arbitrarily, into tremendous suffering for disobeying Him. Of course, there were some fundamental assumptions that most of humanity over the course of history probably needs to revise about the divine.
We generally assumed that the gods are cruel and care little for people. But something changed. God showed up, and it turned out that not only was He not cruel, but He loved us more than we could imagine. And as more and more people kept telling us this, as more philosophers revised our assumptions of the divine, we started to believe that God actually did love us. So a thousand years go by, and we get comfortable with this. God was not some temperamental being that sat on the top of some mountain waiting to consume anyone who annoyed him with bolts of lightning. Instead, He loved us personally and cared for each of us deeply. We got used to His mercy. So used to it that we began to think that we deserved it. So a few centuries later, we have twisted our comfort with His mercy into an argument against His very existence. If God loves everyone so much, then how could He exercise the His divine prerogative to punish those who disobeyed? C.S.L. tells us in God in the Dock that for most of human history, mankind has seen themselves as on trial from the gods. One of the unique legacies of the Enlightenment is that the courtroom is reversed. We reserve the right to try God for His very existence, judging Him according to the standard of ‘if I were Him.’ Lewis expounds upon this far better than I could.
Nonetheless, it is a legitimate question, and one with a legitimate answer. So there is a tension. 1) God loves everyone. 2) God sends people to a place of eternal suffering if they reject Him. Both of these have to happen at once, and we have a hard time seeing how they can. If a person really, truly loved someone, he would not want to hurt that person if they rejected his advances, right? I mean that’s just basic decency. So if God’s so good, why can’t He behave to a standard as low as that? I mean, really.
Now, instead of our thwarted lover, let’s imagine a twenty-year old who still lives under his parents’ roof. He eats their food, drives their car, and pretty much has a decent living through little effort of his own. After all, he is not a responsible young man. On his own, he would completely destroy himself though his foolish choices. Yet, his parents save him over and over again from himself. His parents are not fools, though. As long as their son lives under their roof, he is bound by certain rules. They constrain his actions to limit the amount of destruction that he can call down upon himself and others. The parents go to the young man ever day, tell him that they love him, and ask him to love them back. Every day, he says ‘I hate all of your stupid rules. I hate you more than anything else in this world. There is nothing I would like more than to never see you again.’ They do everything they can to win his love. But his answer never changes. So one day, when all hope for change runs out, they will have to give him his wish. After all, he is a grown-up. They would love him less if they were to treat him as a child and make for him all the choices that end well. So they treat him as an adult, and they allow him a world where he will never see them again, nor anything that would remind him of them.
But the young man does not realize just what that entails. He thought he had a right to live under a roof and to eat good food just because of who he was. He did not realize that it all of those things were gifts of his parents. When he gets what he wanted, and removes all vestiges of his parents from his life, he no longer has any of the things that he enjoyed. Even worse, he no longer has any of the constraints that prevented him from destroying himself. He will bring punishment upon himself simply due to the consequences of his own choices. Justice finds him, but finds him through his own actions. And his parents will grieve, because they still love him. But what else could they do?
The fall of man changed more than we realize, I think. Humanity was designed to reflect God’s power. I believe that after the fall, He tied our hands in many ways. We became constrained. We call it the curse. But just because it is a curse, does not mean that it is hateful. Parents will ground a child to keep him from hanging out with troublemaking friends. The child is constrained in his actions, and will likely view those constraints as unpleasant. The parents do it out of love, though. So we are all grounded. Or at least we have training wheels on.
Neither grounding nor training wheels are intended to be permanent. At some point, the child is released from the grounding, and at some point, the training wheels are taken off. So what happens then? What happens when God takes the training wheels off our world?
Imagine a group of people who follow after God with all their hearts, freed of constraints. They would make heaven, if allowed to run free. Now imagine a group of people who follow themselves and their own ways with all their hearts, freed from all practical constraints. Imagine all the worst parts of the Michael Crichton book Sphere. Or the Great Divorce. We would make hell.
He doesn’t want that for us. He asks us, over and over, will you accept My love? Do you want to be with me? We say no. So He sends His law to show us how He loves us and wants to provide for us. We say no again. So He sends prophets to tell us about how much He loves us. And we say no again. So He comes Himself. He dies for us. And we say no again. And again. And again. What else can He do? Our one wish is a universe without Him, and we express this wish over and over and over again. If we will not be dissuaded, He grants us that wish. With all the things that come with it.
So we get our wish. A universe where we are unconstrained. A universe without Him. But He is the only thing that brings beauty. And He is the only thing that keeps us from tearing ourselves apart. He is the only one who stops us from making Hell. We would make it right now if it were not for His mercy. And we would all be ‘tough-minded’ and forever alone. We would all trade away everything of value for more and more nothing. He gets in our way. If we ask Him to get out of our way long enough, He just may do that. But after all He want through to stop us, how dare we blame Him for the consequences of that choice. He doesn’t make Hell. We make hell. He just lets us do it.
Even then, He is merciful. Lewis points out that God ascribes boundaries to hell. He limits how far down it goes. It is awful and terrible and worse than we can imagine. But there is a difference between unimaginably bad and infinitely bad. Even in His wrath, He is merciful. Without His boundaries, we would make Hell infinitely bad. Every day would be infinitely worse than the last. Yet He gets in our way one last time. He says ‘this far, and no farther.’ Even when we have done all that we could ever do to hurt Him, He still cares for us.
If God is infinitely good, hell is the absence of God, and God is infinitely good, how can hell not be infinitely bad? Sin has no essence, it is merely a lack. The thing about having something is that you can have more and more of it forever. You can not have more and more a lack of something forever. You will hit the point of totally lacking that thing, and then there will be no farther down you can go. This is the way God made our universe, weaving mercy into the very laws of mathematics. Consider temperature. Heat is movement, cold is a lack of movement. You can keep getting hotter forever, but once you hit absolute zero, you can’t get any colder. Hell is the same way. You can diver further and deeper into God forever, but you can only lose so much of Him until there is none left. This is the worst universe possible, but it is still constrained. This is the world we would make. We would hit rock bottom. Yet, God is still kind in creating a universe with a bottom to hit.
We have been asking the wrong question. Our baselines were all wrong. We think we are entitled to this universe, with all of its joy and beauty mixed with pain and suffering. We gave that mortgage away a long time ago. What we would inherit on our own is a horrific universe. We get angry at God for allowing hell to happen at some point in the future. We forget the constant miracle that it hasn’t happened yet. It is His hand that stays it. Our hands would make it. We have Him to thank, not to blame.
20:20 Posted in Boring Theories (Humanities) | Permalink | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
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So let me get this straight: you inadvertently plagiarize Scott Hahn, and he gets an apology. You INTENTIONALLY and KNOWINGLY plagiarize me an I get nothing of the sort. Okay, fine, my offer is officially rescinded. There's no chance I'll stop calling you a chump now, under any circumstances. You can still redeem some shred of your integrity by publicly apologizing for the many and varied acts of plagiarism you have committed against me, but you will nonetheless remain a big chump. Case closed. :)
Anyway, good post. Where does Lewis talk about the boundaries on Hell? That's not in the Great Divorce, is it?
Posted by: Jana | 19 December 2006
I never plagiarize anything. And you're a chump.
Haha... get it? Irony is funny. I read that in a book somewhere. (I also heard once that I should provide a running commentary on my own conversations.) Layers upon layers, oh when will it end.
Okay I'm done amusing myself.
I'm pretty sure its just implied in Great Divorce. It was explicitly out of one of his non-fictions. Once I finish 'Hideous Strength' I'll be C.S.L. complete. Yay. They all sort of run together into a blur (but a good blur.) I'd probably guess God in the Dock. If I wasn't lazy, I'd look it up. Then I'd put it in MLA or Turabian or APA. Oh wait, I wouldn't do that ever cause Im totally not an academic. Really. (I guess I wasn't totally done amusing myself.)
Thx for the comment, and Ill try to provide a response to your other post that isn't just me being really dumb and thinking it's funny. The really scary thing is that never gets old to me. Hehe.
Posted by: Dave | 19 December 2006