[Bill,
April 11, 2007]
What it's all about, Part 901(c)
I didn't post a piece I wrote on Hell on a few days ago, and probably won't. The post rambled a bit, and this morning, it hit me -- I was trying to say this: Hell is not so much punishment as result. To see it as solely as punishment can distort your thinking. I knew it did mine. It gets you into a good boy/bad boy dichotomy, and throws off other aspects of your thinking.
Our current existential situation, so to speak, and our instructions from this life, if the Church and Bible are to be believed, involve a way of developing a relationship with God.
That sounds like a simple, obvious point, but it's really loaded with implications. Some psychologists have suggested that it's difficult or almost impossible to have an intellectually satisfying conversation with someone who has greater than or less than 15 IQ points of intellectual firepower than you.
And that the lack of intellectually satisfactory conversations can put a crimp in a relationship. And you don't have to do much traveling to know the vast differences and relationship problems that comes from crossing cultures -- any Korean wife who took a U.S. GI for a husband, and any GI who took a Korean wife, can attest to the relationship difficulties they cause. Not relationship impossibilities, but difficulties.
If that's true among these small differences in intelligence and culture, imagine if we add into the mix the differences in being between God and an individual -- 1 to 120 years versus eternity. And the vast differences in joy. You might as well ask us to have a relationship with a mountain. That's how vastly different God and man is.
And yet the meaning of this life seems to be about preparing us for that relationship ... seems to be a journey of the mind to God, to quote St. Bonaventure. If the Church and Bible are to be believed. And you don't have to be a mystic to look at the vastness of the galaxy at night, and wonder how am I supposed to have a relationship with Someone smart enough, vast enough, to make this? I mean, what can I say that's not going to come out, from his point of view, as the equivalent of "Golly"?
And if you look at this way, you see the necessity of grace. So as the mind journeys to God, so God journeys to man. Karl Barth describes the mystical experience of life not as man's search for God, but God's search for man. But both must participate, and do their part.
With this mind, perhaps we can see Hell represents an existential result, a failure, at the end of life, of an individual to establish the possibility of a relationship with God. I know there is some discussion of the wrath of God falling on individuals and even nations, and I'm not ignoring it. But I'm not sure punishment and result are not different things. Punishment is a kind of result, and in a punishment situation, there is a relationship. We could be punished, but not damned. I believe Hell may be the lack of a relationship with God.
However, I'll admit I could be making all this up. (I know none of this is new thinking.) It could be that there is no possibility of a non-relationship with God in eternity, and thus, Hell is an eternally bad relationship with God and Heaven an eternally good one.
I'm not quite there yet on this thinking ... these are notes, not an essay or a final conclusion. It could be that things are not punishments that appear as punishments to us. It could be that our nature, without the saving grace of Christ, is such that we could not remain in God's presence without it seeming like Hell to us, but with Christ, it becomes Heaven. This seems closer to the truth, and this last sentence is a paraphrase of Eastern Orthodox thinking.
But one thing that's off, or misleading, is the use of the word Christ without it seeming arbitrary. Christ is about love, His teaching is about what love is, how it works, and what kind of love is required of us. The love that is required of us is not ordinary human thoughtfulness (though that's a great start.) The love that's required of us is that which could love an enemy that nailed us to a cross. But who can manage that?
Am I copping out, and self-justifying, when I say that we only need to move in this direction (toward trying to love even enemies who would or have nailed us to a cross), and acknowledge its truth, to establish this relationship with God? Is the transformation that Paul talks about after death the ability to do this for real, to do what Christ accomplished?
Christianity hints at all sorts of things. Now through a glass darkly ...
Our current existential situation, so to speak, and our instructions from this life, if the Church and Bible are to be believed, involve a way of developing a relationship with God.
That sounds like a simple, obvious point, but it's really loaded with implications. Some psychologists have suggested that it's difficult or almost impossible to have an intellectually satisfying conversation with someone who has greater than or less than 15 IQ points of intellectual firepower than you.
And that the lack of intellectually satisfactory conversations can put a crimp in a relationship. And you don't have to do much traveling to know the vast differences and relationship problems that comes from crossing cultures -- any Korean wife who took a U.S. GI for a husband, and any GI who took a Korean wife, can attest to the relationship difficulties they cause. Not relationship impossibilities, but difficulties.
If that's true among these small differences in intelligence and culture, imagine if we add into the mix the differences in being between God and an individual -- 1 to 120 years versus eternity. And the vast differences in joy. You might as well ask us to have a relationship with a mountain. That's how vastly different God and man is.
And yet the meaning of this life seems to be about preparing us for that relationship ... seems to be a journey of the mind to God, to quote St. Bonaventure. If the Church and Bible are to be believed. And you don't have to be a mystic to look at the vastness of the galaxy at night, and wonder how am I supposed to have a relationship with Someone smart enough, vast enough, to make this? I mean, what can I say that's not going to come out, from his point of view, as the equivalent of "Golly"?
And if you look at this way, you see the necessity of grace. So as the mind journeys to God, so God journeys to man. Karl Barth describes the mystical experience of life not as man's search for God, but God's search for man. But both must participate, and do their part.
With this mind, perhaps we can see Hell represents an existential result, a failure, at the end of life, of an individual to establish the possibility of a relationship with God. I know there is some discussion of the wrath of God falling on individuals and even nations, and I'm not ignoring it. But I'm not sure punishment and result are not different things. Punishment is a kind of result, and in a punishment situation, there is a relationship. We could be punished, but not damned. I believe Hell may be the lack of a relationship with God.
However, I'll admit I could be making all this up. (I know none of this is new thinking.) It could be that there is no possibility of a non-relationship with God in eternity, and thus, Hell is an eternally bad relationship with God and Heaven an eternally good one.
I'm not quite there yet on this thinking ... these are notes, not an essay or a final conclusion. It could be that things are not punishments that appear as punishments to us. It could be that our nature, without the saving grace of Christ, is such that we could not remain in God's presence without it seeming like Hell to us, but with Christ, it becomes Heaven. This seems closer to the truth, and this last sentence is a paraphrase of Eastern Orthodox thinking.
But one thing that's off, or misleading, is the use of the word Christ without it seeming arbitrary. Christ is about love, His teaching is about what love is, how it works, and what kind of love is required of us. The love that is required of us is not ordinary human thoughtfulness (though that's a great start.) The love that's required of us is that which could love an enemy that nailed us to a cross. But who can manage that?
Am I copping out, and self-justifying, when I say that we only need to move in this direction (toward trying to love even enemies who would or have nailed us to a cross), and acknowledge its truth, to establish this relationship with God? Is the transformation that Paul talks about after death the ability to do this for real, to do what Christ accomplished?
Christianity hints at all sorts of things. Now through a glass darkly ...