On Hell: Part One - I Shudder

I remember my father, in all his vast and unsurpassed knowledge and wisdom once asked me what I thought Hell was. Not what I thought Hell was like, but what Hell was. It is of course, an interesting thing to think about.

Now I am not unlike many other good little products of faitful bible school patronage in that I have always known that there is a Hell and it is bad. More than likely, it is also red, and hot, and there is probably no football there [certainly no Big 12 Football anyway.] But perhaps there is so much more to it.

I have been reading Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis. It is a glorious book, and I reccomend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet. Now, having read the entire book, I went back and re-read the first chapter. There is a section of it that really struck me:


Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being "noticed" by God. But this is almost the languge of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him. (I Cor. 8:3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, "I never knew you. Depart from Me." In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside - repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in teh universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but he truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.


This passage struck me. A substantial part of this chapter, is about what it means to seek the Glory of God - or the glory we are promised. And as intially offensive as it may seem, part of his argument, is that the glory we seek is comparable to fame or fortune in the eyes of God. And now, now I realize what Hell is.

One of my biggest peeves is when uneducated indivuduals speak at funerals. It really offends me to hear people say about young children hit by cars, or teenagers shot at school, or mothers who die from cancer "God called them home...He wanted them close by Him." That is just ridiculously wrong. God is not responsible for the evil of the world, we are. So we mess up, partake of the fruit, and to quote Bill Cosby, there's God, 5 seconds later, whistle in mouth: "Everybody, out of the pool!" Laws of nature govern our planet...people who jump off of buildings die. People who are terminally ill die. People who are hit by drunk drivers die. People want to jump off of buildings and drive drunk because of sin. People get sick because we're human in a fallen world: we get sick and die. And while of course if God felt not only the need and want, but found it necessary to alter the chain of natural events to avoid a logical conclusion at any point, that would be His perrogative. But it would be my first contention that He does not because He is restrained by His own love for us and our sanity. If we walked out of our homes everyday uncertain of the natural operations of our world, we'd go nuts. If objects could fall at any speed, or not fall at all; if we could make use of gravity every thrity days, and if people got sick and got better randomly our limited minds couldn't compute that information. We need the control. But secondly I would contend that I do not try to fathom the behavior of God...

But perhaps even more interesting and irritating to me, is when people say to me while crying over the loss of a loved one: "they are in a better place." This too, is simply NOT true. At death, we die. This whole concept of a HUGE difference between body and soul is borrowed from Greek and Roman cultures - it is not Christian theology. This body dies and decays...and when the age has ended and Christ returns, he will CALL UP those who are to be with Him and His father. Everyone else, not so much.

Hell is that seperation that Lewis refers to. Can you imagine hearing the One who knows all and sees all say: "Be gone from me, I never knew you"? Think of those old fairtales, when an offendor to the throne would be told "You are banished from my presence." Remember those? The King's "presence" extended to the far reaches of the Kingdom. But what are the far reaches of God's kingdom - nothing. God exercises dominion over all. So to be banished from the presence of He who is everywhere, rulling everything; to be told "I don't know you" by He who knows all, is Hell. It is being erased from existence.

Douglas Adams in his book 'The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" says that every living creature emits a vibe when under stress that lets others around them know just how far that being is from home. While on Earth, we do not notice that because no one is ever more than a few thousand miles away from the place of their birth. When Ford Prefect is around humans and under stress, we reel at the impact of the distance he is from home. God exiles Hell to outside His kingdom. He still exercises dominion over it because existence is now and always will be on His terms - He created existence. But those who are diseased cannot be allowed to continue to exist in the community of those who are well. Hell is the darkness of non-existence. I shudder at the pure distance.