Hell: Let’s Try This Again
July 6, 2011, 12:52 am
Posted by J. Peter Nixon
Sorry folks. The content of the post I put up earlier somehow got deleted, which did, of course, deter several of you from responding!
I’m working on a feature about conceptions of hell among Catholics and I was looking for folks to share their personal experiences rather than theological arguments per se. Did fear of hell play a significant role in your religious imagination when you were growing up? Does it still? Have your views changed over the years? Thanks to all who have already responded and for the chance to clarify my original question.
This is a burning issue for Catholics who want to keep on worrying about Catholic things, oblivious of the signs of the times and the promptings of the Spirit.
Luther gave the answer long ago, and it is neatly summarized in a beautiful hymn: “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=TSjy6NHxLIs&gl=US
Aha. Personal experiences. OK.
I must confess that I’ve never given it much thought. I converted to Catholicism from Methodism when I was about sixteen years old. I don’t recall that hell was of much significance in my experience of Methodism or, later, of Catholicism. Perhaps that’s because it’s such an outrageous idea – devils with pitchforks, eternal damation, all for eating meat on Friday. It just doesn’t compute in the modern mind.
With all the talk here lately, I’ve begun to give it more serious thought than ever before. It still seems not to square with the contemporary popular image of a loving God, though – and that’s the image I’ve been most exposed to.
My parents weren’t the fire-and-brimstone kind of people. I remember my father, who grew up in the hills of mid-south Ohio, joking when someone said something that seemed a little far fetched, that you could go to hell for lying same as for stealing :o) I can’t say I remember that Mother ever spoke of hell. Hers was very much a loving God.
I was looking for folks to share their personal experiences rather than theological arguments per se.
I repeat myself — if anyone has ever known the loss of a loved one, either by death or breaking off of the relationship, then he has had a taste of Hell, because Hell is the ultimate loss of a loving relationship.
And that IS a personal experience.
And the prospect of the actual Hell being a much, much worse experience than merely that taste of it here on earth is also a deterrent against people who might be tempted to end their worldly suffering by purposely ending their worldly life, which the Church understands to be a mortal sin.
That too is a personal experience.
I wasn’t really raised in any religion but my grandmother and her sister were Presbyterians who believed in hell, so I did worry about ending up there. It’s probably one of the reasons I waited so long to become a Christian and then became a Catholic (instead of Prebyterian). I hate the idea of hell and I don’t think I could love or respect a God who would create such a place.
We never talked about hell when I was a child. I never thought about it and I guess I didn’t believe in it. Once my CCD teacher told us a story of a young woman who, she said, was nice and helpful to all, but not baptized. Would she go to heaven after death? the teacher asked. Of course, answered all the children. Wrong! exclaimed the teacher: people who are not baptized go to hell. We were skeptical. It didn’t make sense to us children.
Now that I read and pray the lectionary, it is not so simple. I cannot simply choose to believe what intuitively makes sense to me: I also need to fit it in with even challenging texts from the gospels (and, if possible, with the catechism). It’s more difficult, what with the “gnashing of teeth” and all that.
I believe in hell as separation from God, and that’s about as scary as the idea of the non-existence of God. If God doesn’t exist then we’re already in hell now. It’s a possibility that I find hard to confront. I wish I had more courage. My faith would be more genuine if I was more ready to face the possibility that it is in vain.
Recently I thought about some people I knew who died and who didn’t get along very well when they were alive. It’s hard to imagine them together in the communion of saints. That’s what purgatory is for, I guess – a transformative period that will get us there. Hell would be a damn convenient solution to deal with the problem of reconciliation with the people I don’t like. If I can’t imagine reconciling with them, then if only they ended up in hell, it would make it so much easier for me to go to heaven without needing to first change in depth!
I look forward to being with Christ after I die. Finally I will see him, will be with him, will be able to touch him, and we will never be apart ever again. I wish the Church helped me find my way to him.
My father, who was a sensitive child, had problem with insomnia as a child because he was afraid of going to sleep, because his evening prayer asked God for protection in case he died in his sleep, and he had learnt in catechism that he would go to hell after death if he hadn’t confessed all his sins beforehand.
The idea of Hell as a place of endless suffering in eternal fire, which is what I was taught as a child, was perfectly terrifying and remains perfectly terrifying even though it is for me now more of a superstition than a religious belief. Also, all the reinterpretations of Hell as freely chosen eternal separation from God—and oh, isn’t that much worse than roasting in a pit for all eternity!—are unconvincing. The people who say things like that have obviously never suffered a serious burn. And also, didn’t Mother Teresa go for years without the experience of God’s presence? Do sincere atheists suffer terribly believing God does not exist?
Then, of course, there are the inhabitants of Hell—Satan and all the various demons. Again, perfectly terrifying, even as superstition rather than religious belief. I still can’t figure out how Jesus conquered Satan (Luke 10:18), and yet the latter is allegedly free to roam the earth tempting people, possessing people, and causing the proliferation of Internet pornography (according to Archbishop Chaput). The pastor of our church when I was a kid loved to tell stories about the Curé of Ars, which he seemed to find humorous, but which left me worried that the devil was going to set fire to my bed in the middle of the night.
When I was in high school, or shortly after I graduated, someone that I had known slightly was killed in a car crash. I found out from one of the Christian Brothers who taught at the school that he had spoken to the boy’s mother, and she was worried that her son was in Hell. What do you say in a case like that? “Could be, but rest assured that if you make it to Heaven, one of your chief pleasures will be watching him suffer (according to Aquinas)”?
It seems to me that much of what I learned as a student in Catholic school attributed to God the kind of behavior we were otherwise taught was grossly unfair. What should have been a blissful life on earth for all of humanity was ruined by two people who ate a piece of forbidden fruit. To make up for that minor transgression, God sent his only Son to be tortured to death. Otherwise good people who commit a mortal sin and die in a car crash on the way to confession go to Hell for all eternity, but those who make it to confession and are killed on the drive home go straight to heaven (even skipping purgatory!) if they happened to fulfill the conditions for a plenary indulgence after going to confession. I remember my sister and I would talk about how, if it hadn’t been for Adam and Eve, we wouldn’t have to go to school. “It’s not fair!” we would whine. And we were right!
As a child – this probably would have been during the early 1970s – my family was on vacation in rural Indiana. At homily time at the small town Catholic church where we attended Sunday mass, the priest mounted the pulpit, glared at all of us, and began his homily by pronouncing, “Most of you, after you die, will burn in hell”. He then proceeded to preach in this vein for another 8-10 minutes. I had never experienced anything even remotely like it. It is, still today, the only truly fire-and-brimstone sermon I’ve ever experienced.
Afterward, my father in particular was quite pleased with the experience, and remarked to me that this was how sermons were when he was a child, and he thought that we needed much more of this sort of thing. In addition, several parishioners chatted with us after mass (one of the wonderful things about small parishes in small towns is that everyone really does know everyone, so we were easily marked as visitors), and they enthused about their new pastor.
My takeaway is that, if hell loomed more prominently in the religious imagination of the pre-Vatican II generations, one important reason may be that it was preached more frequently than it is now. Perhaps we should preach about it more today than we do. Jesus talked about it; that may be a clue that we should, too.
I think this is from Dosteoevsky’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, but one of the most moving descriptions of hell is that when a person is faced with infinite love – God’s love for us – the person is unable to respond in love.
That ultimate isolation, that failure to let oneself be loved – and to love in return, are what I think Hell is.
A few years ago, teaching a religion class in a state university we discussed heaven and hell. I don’t remember much of this but I do remember that one minority woman student talked about hell as being the current reality for her.
Maybe Catholic eschatology can give us a tool to understanding that both heaven and hell are already here but not yet experienced in the fullness (or, in the case of hell, its complete emptiness.)
I would propose that the fires of hell are nothing more than the flames of God’s love licking at the hearts of those who won’t melt.
Three personal reactions to Hell. First, since the love of God has always seemed to me much more a “more or less” phenomenon rather than an “either/or” phenomenon, I have always wondered how one sorts out the “mores” from the “lesses.” Of course, Purgatory is theoretically a solution to this, but one that I find increasingly less satisfying.
Second, the entire idea of Hell has long struck me (at least since teenage years) as a fear based form of institutional perpetuation. Keep people afraid of Hell, tell them that the Church is the only way to stay out of Hell, and lots of them will remain in the Church. This perpetuates a Christianity based on fear rather than love and it makes the churches look nasty rather than nurturing. Fear based Christianity is alive and well, but I think fewer and fewer Catholics are buying into it.
Third, evolution obviously problematizes the Fall and anything “original” about original sin. But I think it does more than that. Religious writers (at least as far back as Paul) have compared our awareness of God, and our ability to know and do God’s will, to sight. But evolutionary studies have made clear that sight only evolved very slowly and very stepwise. I think it is a mistake to assume that our ability to know God is, or was in some primordial past, analogous to the clarity of sight our eyes have achieved through evolution. I sometimes think we are not much farther along than the “eye spots” that were the earliest stage of the eye: aware of the presence and absence of light, but nothing more. If our ability to know God is more rudimentary than we have assumed, I doubt that we can or will be held fully accountable for our lack of awareness. Instead, we will be constantly “encouraged” to see more.
All of this presupposes continued existence after death. While it is difficult not to believe in it (at least for oneself), I would have to say that I have no sense at all (whatever it would be) that those who have died that I knew and cared about continue to exist. When I think of, say, my mother, I think of her as gone, not existing in some other realm or some other mode of being. This says absolutely nothing about whether existence does continue in some way after death—only that I have no sense of it. Regarding the story I told above about a mother who was worried that her son had gone to Hell, it does not occur to me to wonder if I knew in his or her lifetime anyone who has died and gone to Hell. As for some of the great moral monsters of the past, like Hitler, there are many things I might wish to be their fate, but eternal torment is not one of them.
I seem to remember from C S Lewis’, “The Great Divorce.” that idea of hell as hanging on to one’s most cherished possessions of hate, love of something/someone more than God, etc. and being unable to let go and that his movement in the “bus” toweards heaven was “letting go of one’s most intimate souvenirs of hell.” I’ll have to review that, but it seems like that notion of pride iand ego is the essential element. Also, the image in Louis Evely’s first classic, “That Man is You,” quoted, I believe, a play of Jean Cocteau whose has the sheep and goats divided at last judgment and then the word spreads that God is forgiving the “goats” also and many of the sheep rise in rebellion and at that moment are damned for their lack of compassion in the guise of “justice.” These are the powerful images I retain… but even with tons of theology, I still admit those primeval childhood fears deep in the psyche also if I am honest…not so much in God judging others and THEIR deserving this, but my own salvation… always resting in God’s loving compassion…sure hope so….
I would propose that the fires of hell are nothing more than the flames of God’s love licking at the hearts of those who won’t melt.
Why doesn’t he just leave them the hell alone? :P
But seriously, I find it inconceivable that there is anyone an omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving God could not find a way to reach. Such a person would have to be some kind of total psychopath—and it is difficult to believe God would hold someone with a twisted personality fully responsible for his actions.
Hi David,
Your joke asks a serious question. He doesn’t leave them alone because literally nothing can live without God. God is author of life and nothing can live without him. All life is radically dependent upon God in its essence. But that’s the problem. Imagine how horrible, after death, to be radically dependent on the one being you can stand and don’t want to be with. You need him for your very existence, but you can’t stand him, can’t understand him, and don’t want to learn.
It’s like some marriages I know. (which is a whole other reflection come to think of it).
I have no doubt God will reach everyone he can. That’s what purgatory is. The gradual (?) willing accommodation of the person to his radical dependence on and participation in the love of God when he or she has nothing else to hide behind. But if a person radically sets himself against that participation, despite having nothing else to hide behind, there isn’t alot God can do about it and person is eternally tormented by his own choice. Even God cannot do that which is not in his nature to do. God is not a destroyer, so simply annihilating the person isn’t an option. God is radically respectful of our free will, so forcing himself on us isn’t an option (that would be rape). In the end, hell is the most merciful choice left open to God; allowing the person to exist and eternally giving the person the perpetual opportunity to accept his or her radical dependence upon and participation in his love.
It is up to the individual to decide what to do with that reality. Acceptance of it leads to purgatory and ultimately, heaven. Rejection leads to an eternity in hell. But it’s up to the individual.
This of course, flirts with the whole idea of universal salvation, an idea I have sympathy for as long as we remember that it is God that makes salvation possible but our participation in his saving work makes it actual. God desires to save everyone. But whether that happens FOR us is up TO us.
G
Just to be clear, in the model I’m proposing, heaven, hell and purgatory are the same thing; being in the presence of God and all that means with nothing else to hide behind. What that means to you–whether that experience is ecstasy, a painful transition, or sheer terror and torment–is ultimately, existentially, up to you.
The heart does not open to love through being faced with dire threats.
Luther got it right — when I look to myself I am outcast, damned, sinful, unfree, when I look to Christ I am a Son, saved, free, holy, a saint.
“There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.”
To go on worrying about hell and how to escape it is unworthy of Christians.
No, Gregory Popcak — “up to you” sounds horribly Pelagian.
God’s “alien work” of condemning the sinner is only a preparation for the encounter with God (in Christ) in his “proper work”, the forgiveness of sins.
It is all “up to God” — “Come to me… and you shall find rest unto your souls”.
Our dear Protestant sisters and brothers know this so well: “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=TSjy6NHxLIs&gl=US
I was raised in the pre-Vatican Church and learned about Hell in religion classes (pictures in the Baltimore Catechism of folks burining in Hell and all). But I can’t remember being especially frightened of Hell. I knew that I would never deliberately do anything that would put me in the “near occasion of mortal sin”, but not because I ‘feared the pains of Hell’ but because I felt that God would really be disappointed in me—because God loved me so much. And I loved God and didn’t want to dissapoint Him (Her).Yep, I felt that way as a child.
Today, I pretty much feel the same way. I believe that God gives us much freedom—as God loves us much. With all the theology and spirituality courses that I’ve been privileged to take—I do believe that so many of the above bloggers have the right concept. God really loves and desires to see us in Heaven. It is up to us to cooperate with all that God gives us. And I especially agree with Gregory Popcak’s concepts—seems about right to me.
To clarify, we cannot will ourselves into the state of being right with God. Only Christ can grant this, clothing us with His, not our, righteousness.
“it is up to us to cooperate” — again, this risks sounding like the Pelagian idea, that “Christ has done his part, now you do yours” — our salvation is ALL Christ’s doing, his gift.
Yes, yes. One does have to cooperate with grace though, doesn’t one? We’re talking about the point between my alleged Pelagianism on the one hand and your potential Calvinism on the other. A generous reading of each other’s blog combox posts–not really a great format for theological exposition–will prevent charitable readers from seeing heretical over-reaching where there is none.
Hell is the best God can do for a mortal soul that willfully squanders or rejects the gift of humanity. Understanding and free will are like muscles; when somebody ceases to exercise them, to study and learn and to desire and strive for what is good, humanity atrophies. What’s left is an empty, meaningless, shadowy existence. As Homer says:
“Just as inside the corners of a monstrous cave
bats flit around and squeak when one of them falls down
out of the cluster on the rock where they cling
to one another, their spirits squawked
as they moved on together.”
Odyssey, XXIV.610
It is not a possibility to dismiss thoughtlessly. But I do think it is neurotic to be preoccupied with the Last Things. In place of the rather hysterical Miss Elliott, I would recommend sane old Father Faber“But we make His love too narrow/By false limits of our own;/And we magnify His strictness/With a zeal He will not own.”
Hell seems passe’ in the contemportary Western Catholic culture. It is usually viewed by the Western laity as a superstition left over from the barbarous middle ages. But should it be totally dismissed;
To this old woman, it’s a bit odd that in this long discussion of views of Hell nobody has mentioned Graham Greene’s existential novels == novels about the very facticity of individual human lives in which choices between good and evil must be made and are made, and some some choices involve a very real possibility of damnation.
Greene’s influence on my generation was very great. His greatest novels are largely concerned with temptation, sin, and a very real and permanent Hell. He wasn’t a theologian and was often accused of some heretical beliefs. He was so suspect in Rome that Rome called him down for one of his novels, “The Power and the Glory”. It’s about a Mexican priest after the Mexican Revolution when priests were literally hunted down and killed. The unnamed priest is a very weak man in some ways, an alcoholic who has fathered a child, who, nevertheless, risks his life to bring the sacraments to the people. Yes, he is finally executed. It’s widely regarded by secular critics as one of the greatest novels of the century. And in the end, Paul VI encouraged Green to keep writing his novels :-)
In other Greene novels, the protagonists are seen choosing evil, and, therefore, Hell. They seem very, very real.
Greene didn’t go into the nature of Hell, but for him Hell was not just a *possible* result of sin but a *necessity* if we truly believe that there is ultimate justice and that some of our sins can be great failures of choice — conscious choices that are actually very unjust, prideful, selfish, verycruel and all those other terrible *realities*that we sometimes do in full knowledge of their evil. In other words, for Greene’s people, Hell is really possible because great sin is really possible.
And — this is what sets Greene apart, I think — he saw ordinary people as capable of such serious evil given our individual desires and our capacity to choose in full knowledge of the consequences of our individual, particular choices. In this he was totally Catholic, I think, and his descriptions of Catholics in the act of choosing both good and evil are so masterful they can be frightening.
Greene was anything but a puritain. He is also totally Catholic in his vision of a loving God, the God whose grace permeates the world reaching in highly personal ways even to cruel murderers. But he never lost sight of the fact that we are free and we use our freedom, both for good and evil. Terrible evil without repentance requires terrible consequences. How ironic that his novels are still appreciated in the secular world while he is being forgotten (or ignored?) by Catholics.
Greene was a great preacher, but not by appealing to theology. (I didn’t start out to lecture on Greene today. My sermon just emerged. Lesson: great artists sometimes have a lot more to say than mediocre theologians.)
It seems like there are two ideas about hell for those who believe in it …
– people choose to go to hell freely because they want to get away from God. There’s no evidence for this in scripture, and it seems to me like a way to have your cake and eat it too …. bad people still go to hell but God remians a nice guy.
– In the NT, Jesus describes hell like Gehenna, the continuously burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem where children had once been sacrificed, and he thinks bad people do go there, that they don’t want to go there, and that it’s a bad experience.
I don’t like either of those ideas and I find it hard to understand how anyone could be happy in heaven knowing there’s a hell where people are suffering (even bad people) just over the rise. I like what Keith Ward says in his book “What the Bible Really Teaches: About Crucifixion, Resurrection, Salvation, the Second Coming, and Eternal Life” ….
“If we are to do good to those that hate us [Luke 6:27], God cannot do less. We have the clearest warrant to think that God will love, save and seek to do good to everyone, however evil. When you set this belief alongside the parables about Gehenna, the outer darkness and the lake of burning sulfur, you have to get an interpretation that is consistent with the unlimited love of God. Unending torment is not consistent with such a love.”
I don’t think I have ever believed in hell, as a young adult convert with reform ideas. But I do think that we experience the gnashing of teeth and burning fires in this life already. I do think that a form of purgatory or transforming purifying experiences may await after death.
Hell was never big on my horizon as a child growing up. However, the realization of the eternal consequences of our choices really hit me in my first year of undergraduate studies.
It was then that I was exposed to Dante’s inferno and the image of people being tormented in proportion and similar to their choices on earth stuck with me. I recall the second ring lust (I guess appropriate for that age) when the souls who were overcome bye their passions on earth continued to be blown around by winds without ceasing. The point is the consequence of their choices on earth continued below and their fate was to be eternally blown about aimlessly and indiscriminately. For some reason (divine intervention) that image stuck and help me from straying toooooo far from the road even if i occasionally travelled on the odd path here and there.
For me now it makes me realize that there are consequences to choices and some of those are eternal so it is important to choose wisely and to help others choose wisely. As for grace, I think that God is so good that He continues to give us grace even if we are on the wrong path and is always rooting for us to return home and will do everything in his power to make sure that will happen.
But part of maturity and freedom is responsibility and the freer you are the more responsible as well.
PS
Agree with Ann above too.
Unending torment is not consistent with the unlimited love of God.”
Why?
What if the unending torment is the only way that God can affirm the person’s humanity? How is it loving to force Heaven on someone who would rather reign in Hell? How can God respect us if our bad choices must be overruled and goodness forced on us when we want something else?
The metaphoric descriptions of Hell, like Gehenna, use physical imagery to express spiritual reality. They should not be read too literally. Mt 10:28 describes “body and soul” being burned in Gehenna, but souls do not burn. The point is that the soul can be tormented like the body can be burned, but the burning of the body is less of a torment than the ‘burning’ of body and soul. It is an affirmation of the soul’s importance, of the whole person rather than just a part. That affirmation is a sign of love, not a threat of literal burning.
Forgive me for being foggy on the specifics, as it was a number of years ago, but I recall that John Paul II once stated that hell was more of a state of existence or a state of mind, rather than a physical place, and a brouhaha ensued such that he needed to retract it and state that there actually hell really is a place. Does anyone remember more about this than I do?
Well, as I wrote last night… I see hell as a state of being ‘outside of the existence of God’. To spend eternity with only yourself.
Though, when asked about this very subject by parishioners, I typically will say that my concept of hell is sitting on a folding chair, for eternity, listening to Paul Harvey read stories from Reader’s Digest magazine.
Either way, a pretty gruesome prospect.
I’ve read with great interest all the comments on both of Peter Nixon’s recent requests for views on hell. On this one, he explains his objective: “I was looking for folks to share their personal experiences rather than theological arguments per se. Did fear of hell play a significant role in your religious imagination when you were growing up? Does it still? Have your views changed over the years?”
It’s interesting how few personal experiences about the role of hell in our religious imaginations his inquiry has drawn and how much theological argument instead. I wonder why. I suspect that embarrassment might be a factor, embarrassment at how formative in our lives things that we now reject can be.
Hell was an important part of the religious landscape of my childhood. It was the hell of flames and endless pain and punishment although even in second or third grade I recognized that there was something “mythical” about this. For Halloween, my older brother dressed in red Long Johns with a grease painted face, horns, and a pitchfork and I was an angel with cardboard wings wearing two holsters and six-shooters, and we fought all around the playground at St. Joseph’s School. That put demons (though not angels) in something of the same category as witches like the ones in Hansel and Gretel and Snow White.
Nevertheless, hell was important. It was scary. It was not as scary as a lot of other things, like the knife-wielding pirate that I suspected of lurking underneath my bed. It was the antithesis of heaven, and unlike the knife-wielding pirate had a socially recognized status. It was not as scary as the visions of nuclear war that sent us all scrambling under our desks in civil defense exercises, and which in fact were somewhat blended with notions of the end of the world and the Final Judgment.
Hell was part of the economy of venial and mortal sin that structured my moral sense. I don’t remember being haunted by hell or wondering how to harmonize it with a good God who meant us all to share eternal happiness with him. I certainly didn’t worry that anyone I knew, certainly not my Jewish grandfather, was likely to go there, or even anyone I didn’t know, like the Chinese who hadn’t heard about Jesus. There was always baptism of desire. And I wasn’t in the big league capable of committing mortal sins. That hell, in all its terrifying aspects, did not distress me or deform my assumptions about a loving God I attribute easily enough to the fact that I was surrounded by loving family — and it’s equally easy to see how that could be quite otherwise in other cases.
So what I think hell contributed to my religious imagination, apart from some melodrama, was a sense of the seriousness of moral choices. The very idea that there were deeds that carried this kind of consequence undoubtedly made a deep impression. I’m sure that this carried over to the time when I did graduate into the big league capable of committing mortal sins, though I don’t think that fear of hell was ever much the primary disincentive to doing so.
I had my share of fear-of-hell talk at high school retreats, although they were not up to the standard of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the fact that many of us had read that portion of Joyce had an inoculating effect.
And then hell became a problem for me as for others commenting on this blog. So, yes, my views have changed radically and I see no way of hanging onto this belief without the kind of major reinterpretations that have been offered here. I also think that the inability of the church to proclaim a loving God and the kind of damnation that could result from disobedience of church disciplines like Friday abstinence (once upon a time) or attendance at Sunday Mass (even now although you’d be hard pressed to find it in papal writings) has changed the leverage of Catholic authorities in a profound way that they have yet to absorb.
Hell can no longer play the part in Catholic formation that it did for me. It did communicate a depth to life. Life was to be lived for high stakes. I set before you heaven and hell was a kind of physicalist and simple-minded but very blunt version of I set before you life and death: choose life. We can do better, I’m sure. I hope we won’t simply collapse hell’s problematic or its decline into I set before you unacceptable or nice: choose nice
Karl Barth wrote 600 pages in his Church Dogmatics on predestination. His conclusion: all are damned in Christ and all are saved in Christ. This is a discussion greatly admired by Von Balthasar.
Peter Steinfels is right that people are embarrassed to recall the role hell played in their early years. But they may also feel that the exercise is regressive, cultivating an obsession that the Church has left behind. They may even feel that digging up these memories could become a plaint about child abuse (which is one way of reading Joyce’s famous chapter).
I don’t have any memorable personal experiences of my childhood reaction to the doctrine of hell. I think I automatically categorized religious teaching into plausible (David and Baathsheba) and mythical (Noah and the ark) and hell got pegged as mythical. Hell sounded terrifying, but I was a lot more interested in how to spell “booger.”
But I had a personal experience when I was an adult. My cousin’s husband spent some time in prison and shortly after he came out he was murdered by some friends of some people he had fallen afoul of in there. One holiday, his daughter, who was about ten, said her class in school had learned about hell and some of her classmates had helpfully speculated that her father was probably there. What did we think?
I had no idea what to say. Theological speculations might actually be somewhat comforting to a ten-year-old, but no use at all for refuting her peers. Lucky for me, my sister unhesitatingly explained that hell is impossible because eternal fire requires an eternal oxygen supply, which is not possible without plants to do photosynthesis, but plants burn in fire. I’m sure Professor Aquinas would have something to say about this proof, but for playground disputation it’s hard to beat.
Here is JPII on heaven, hell and purgatory. FWIW.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2heavn.htm
I don’t want to be snotty, but isn’t the phrase “cooperation with grace” a bit suspect too? Grace is God’s unmerited favor to sinners because of Christ. There is not a synergistic composition between it and human effort. While I do not like the hymn Amazing Grace I think its theology nicely avoids this sort of “God does his part — you do yours” approach. “Twas grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home”.
I grew up in a very intellectual Irish Catholic family. Critiques of the latest sermon or novena talk were the normal conversation at our dinner table. Priest theologians were family friends and I found volumes of la Nouvelle Theologie and much stuff about liturgical renewal, church architecture and so forth on our bookshelves.
Yes, I did go to Sunday School – all the years of it – etc.
Hell was relegated to the category “that old fire and brimstone” and was considered subject matter for priests with nothing to say. I never worried one second about Hell, although I did believe in Purgatory – for the sake of justice.
So the answer is “No, for me as a child in a devout family, Hell did not exist- except as a theme for art. God was too loving to make such a ‘place’ and surely anyone, although Hitler was a hard case, would confess his sins and amend his ‘afterlife’ when in front of that God.
I was born in 1942, grew up in Boston and now think that Hell is the full realization of the evil you have done or caused to be done in your life.
Does God’s grace work against the will of the person? Does God, with His grace override the free will of the person? Does God, with His grace, effectively turn the human person into a robot?
Grace is indeed an unmerited gift. But any gift, to be completed, must not only be sent, it must be accepted and then used. One must cooperate with the gift. Grace works upon our nature to perfect it, grace does not destroy or replace that nature.
God wants us to do something, anything, to assist in our own salvation — He is not going to do all the work by Himself. Indeed, the whole reason He established the Church was so that we might help Him in the work of salvation. We see this very clearly with Mary, when God became small and wholly dependent upon her in her womb. If she had not cooperated, then God’s work of salvation would never have come to fruition.
If the FedEx guy comes to your door and you refuse the package, or you give it back marked “return to sender,” have you received the gift? If you leave the Christmas gift lying under the tree, unopened, have you received the gift? If you open the gift, but stick it in the back of your closet, unused, do you receive the benefits of that gift?
Grace is not merely an action by God — it is a transaction. It is communication of certain divine favor or power. A transaction, as opposed to an action, is two-way. Same with communication (from communion, meaning “one with”), which to be completed requires a speaker and a listener.
Inasmuch as we are free creatures, and not programmed robots, a positive response to God’s offer of grace is of course necessary to actually receive that grace. If one does not accept the unmerited grace of salvation, which is freely and gratitously offered to all, then there is no communication of that grace. The sin of refusal to accept God’s forgiveness is the only unforgiveable sin.
God stands ready to save us, and has done a great deal toward that end, a great deal. But if we take our inheritance and leave, He will let us go and, instead of chasing after us, instead of having His servants come kidnap us and drag us back home, He will rely upon what He has instilled in us until such time as His prodigal son realizes his folly and chooses to come home. But the prodigal son must take some action himself toward that end of coming home, if not walking back to his Father’s estate, then at least giving his Father a call and asking Him to send the car to pick him up.
We also see the necessity of “cooperation with grace” in the Sacraments.
To receive the grace of sacramental baptism, one must, of course, perform the sacramental action with the proper internal disposition. One must cooperate with God’s conferral of that grace by pouring or immersing in water and saying the proper words.
To receive the grace of the Eucharist, a priest must of course say the words of consecration over the bread and wine.
Same with the other Sacraments. If one does not cooperate with grace by engaging in the form and matter of the Sacrament, then such sacramental grace is not conveyed.
I sympathize with Bender(above) for I have known too much loss in my life – as I child I had absolutely no doubt about heaven and that my Daddy, killed in WW II, was in heaven, was happy, and could watch me all the time. As I said, I did not believe in hell, or at later on, did not believe God would put anyone there. After my adult daughter’s death, I have had struggles with the concept of heaven and, suddenly, have had to rebuild that reality every day. I pray, “Lord, I believe, help me in my unbelief.”
I was responding to Bender’s earlier post about loss as a taste of he’ll n earth.
Bender has just had a lot to say. I was not agreeing with Bender’s later posts, just the first post about loss.
Hi, Susan, I’m sorry for the terrible losses you’ve suffered. And I appreciate your thoughtful comments here.
(I also like Bender in his catechetical mode – so I AM agreeing with his later posts, too :-))
By downplaying the pain of hell we may be doing a disservice to those who are incapable of perfect contrition. The more refined among us, and of course I include in that number everyone who comments here, should not forget that some can only embark upon a life of conversion because of the fear of painful consequences if they don’t change.
I was always impressed with stories of deathbed conversions, often by gangsters (usually from Chicago), as retailed by grammar school nuns. I figured that I would have a chance if these characters made it. But fear of hell played a part in those stories and without it there is less likelihood of repentance, at least for some. If we endorse perfect contrition exclusively then we have deprived many souls (perhaps even a few intellectuals) of some very useful incentives.
“If any man assert that attrition . . . is not a true and a profitable sorrow; that it does not prepare the soul for grace, but that it makes a man a hypocrite, yea, even a greater sinner, let him be anathema”
Council of Trent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperfect_contrition
My earliest memory about Hell is of having worried that the superb old man next door was going there because he was a Protestant, whatever that meant. Knowing Mr. B for the kind and generous soul that he was, I eventually concluded that God couldn’t be such a nit-picker – as soon as He got to know Mr. B as I did, He would invite him in. Although burdened since then with many years of education and experience, I find similar thoughts recurring on being told the real truth(s) about Hell.
Then and since, the concept of Hell has been imposed by authorities, Biblical, official, and self-proclaimed, on me and others as a threat to encourage specified desirable behaviors and thoughts and discourage specified undesirable ones. Specifications change in time, raising the question of what happens to those condemned in the past, without (human) doubt, who would be innocent under current criteria. Similarly, what of those who may have died apparently innocent before Bishop T. Tobin, RI, announced last week that “Catholics may not participate in civil unions. To do so is a very grave violation of the moral law and, thus, seriously sinful.”
The concept of Hell is also is part of the confirmation by assertion that something happens after the body dies. In that role, it provides the righteous a satisfying destination to which one can hope the really evil who seem to escape unpunished on earth will go to meet justice. Dante was not the last to name names.
Both roles of the concept answer age-old human concerns throughout the world. (See Wikipedia “Hell” for a quick long list.)
====================
Before trying to put some coherence in the above, I paused to look at the first pictures of my new granddaughter, born 2 hours ago. I cannot imagine attending to this thread any more after seeing her. Among my many hopes for her life, a lesser one is that she won’t grow up surrounded by the extraordinary confusion about what happens afterward as indicated above. Perhaps the International Theological Commission can help as they did on limbo.
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0702310.htm
Bender –
Fine post on our ooperation with grace. For Once I agree with everything you say:-)
I have great respect for B16s basic theology, except for his strongly Lutheran leanings. Pseudo-orthodoxy.
Patrick–
Your point that fear of He’ll is justified is well taken. The great lesson for us in the old image of fire and brimstone is, I think, that very point. Hell is Hell and not to be taken slightly.
(Wow! To show you how the notion of Hell has been trivialize in this culture, I’m writing this on my iPhone, and every time I write “Hell” the spelling checker changes it to “he’ll” and I have to correct the corrector!)
Damn! This cheeky cell phone actually cOrrected my first correction *after* I sent the post off. Sneaky atheist! :-)
Bender,
What about God knocking people off their horses, blinding them, and saying in a booming voice, “Hey, you are turning away from me! Let’ talk.”
It seems to me that saying God can do nothing if people turn away from him is kind of like saying there’s a debate an omnipotent and omniscient God can’t win with a mere mortal. Is God, seen in his full glory, really resistible? Who can resist infinite goodness, infinite beauty, and infinite love?
By downplaying the pain of hell we may be doing a disservice to those who are incapable of perfect contrition.
Patrick Malloy,
The idea of imperfect contrition plus confession being enough for salvation seems to me to contradict almost everything else in Catholic teaching. All that is necessary for imperfect contrition is fear of punishment. Any moral monster should be capable of imperfect contrition. Someone irredeemably evil could make a confession on his deathbed purely out of fear of hell, then do something to gain a plenary indulgence, and go straight to heaven! No purification in purgatory required! If salvation is about accepting or rejecting God, a person whose rejection of God is exceeded only by his fear of frying for all eternity can be saved. It makes absolutely no sense.
David N –
Who can resist infinite goodness, beauty and live? Me, for instance
David N:
Forget about hell — That anyone can gain complete happiness, eternal bliss in heaven, by merely avoiding mortal sin and performing a few finite, barely moral acts makes no sense either. There’s an awful lot in the gospels, or in most religions for that matter, that “makes no sense.”
Alexander Pruss is a philosopher at Baylor University who often blogs about Catholic-related topics. He invariably shows that orthodox views also have philosophically interesting implications.
Here are some of his reflections having the tag “hell”:
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/search/label/hell
Here’s an intriguing one (may need some calculus):
“The damned will be in hell suffering forever. Does it follow that their overall sufferings will be infinite? I will argue in the negative. (I am not claiming that the sufferings [for] sin [in] hell are finite, just that infinity of suffering does not follow from everlastingness.)
“Argument 1: Suppose that the amount of suffering decreases exponentially to zero as time goes on. Then, it seems, the total suffering (the integral of momentary suffering) is finite, even though the suffering goes on forever.”
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-eternal-suffering-in-hell-infinite.html
“I was always impressed with stories of deathbed conversions, often by gangsters (usually from Chicago), as retailed by grammar school nuns.”
This is great! I’m reminded of that scene at the end of “Angels With Dirty Faces.”
I grew up in a family that didn’t believe in God, so no heaven or hell for us. I was fascinated with my Catholic girlfriends’ religion think-and-do books that showed guardian angels with white wings and demons with bat wings in a Hell that resembled Carlsbad Caverns. One ripped out the picture for me when the school year was over because I liked it so much.
Who can resist infinite goodness, beauty and live [love]? Me, for instance.
Ann,
God has revealed himself to you in all his glory, used his full powers of persuasion on you, and you have said no?
It seems to me that whatever we know of God, we “know” by faith. Perhaps some tiny number of people experience something of God in ways like Saint Teresa of Avila. If the Bernini sculpture is in any way accurate, I have never experienced anything like it. Moses himself only caught a glimpse of God’s back. I wonder how many of us here, far from having experienced God, don’t wonder sometimes if God exists at all. Anyone who accepts God is not accepting the experience of God in its totality, and anyone who turns away from God is not turning away from an infinitely good, infinitely loving, infinitely lovable, infinitely beautiful God. The most we can accept, or turn away from, are miniscule hints of something we can’t even be sure of. That is at least one reason why the idea of Hell is so hard to accept, and even the idea of Hell as rejecting God, or of Hell being the absence of God, is so baffling to me. I have met a few people in life who were so charismatic or appealing that had they wanted to, they could have seriously manipulated me and I would have found it very difficult to resist. They were extraordinary people, but fully human, without any infinite qualities. Imagine someone infinitely charismatic, infinitely kind, infinitely good, and infinitely wise. Such a person would be irresistible. We do not encounter such a person. We encounter what we take to be a hint of the shadow of such a person. We are all operating with next to no information to allegedly make a choice that will have infinite consequences. I just really find it difficult that God (if he exists) can stay so totally hidden and then reward and punish people based on whether they accept or reject him. We can’t even be sure he exists. And people whose “faith” is a lot deeper than mine will ever be are plotting how to surgically embed explosives in their bodies so they can blow us up and become martyrs. (Let’s not pretend that Christians are the only ones who think they know God and know his will.)
Pardon me if I sound combative. I have been attacking Joe Carter over at First Things today. :-)
“The most we can accept, or turn away from, are miniscule hints of something we can’t even be sure of.”
I think it’s like when you were little and you first realized there was something called “reading,” which seemed to give people a lot of pleasure and make them generally better (better at doing things and better, wiser people morally. Obviously, the analogy is not perfect.) You didn’t know what it was but you knew you wanted to learn it. So you resolved to exert yourself to learn it and eventually, you did. But all your life, you’ll keep trying to learn to read more perceptively and to understand more profoundly what the author of the text is saying (if the text is worthwhile.) And there will always be more to learn.
We are supposed to believe that the minuscule hints we get here are enough to make us exert ourselves to want to know God better. This is a rather dubious proposition, when one considers how many people live and die with only the most brief and insubstantial hints of truth, beauty and goodness. But for a rich, healthy adult in a developed country, like any of us, surely it is impossible to doubt that we have received sufficient hints.
“God has revealed himself to you in all his glory, used his full powers of persuasion on you, and you have said no?”
David –
No, not in *all* His glory, etc. But I do have a tiny analogous notion of His infinity, a little mathematical one generated by the recursive concept “and more . . . and more . . . ”
I agree that if I knew all His glory I surely couldn’t reject Him. But I don’t, so sometimes I do.
I don’t have any problems with that, philosophical problems, that is. The problem of evil is a different matter, of course.
I also don’t have any problem with death bed conversons of very frightened bad guys. At least they are willing to admit the power and justice of God, if nothing else, and are willing to confess their wrong-doing. And who amongst us actually deserves Heaven? None of us.
But somehow God’s generosity, charity, love also “makes no sense” either. It’s just a mysterious fact we have to admit, and it over=rides the other problems, usually, anyway.
As I was waiting for this laptop to make its way to dotCommonweal, I picked up the latest issue of Books & Culture. It was open to a review of a book about heaven. The reviewer, who teaches philosophy at Calvin College, reports the outrage of his students at a lecture in which Marilyn Adams apparently questioned the existence of hell. He paints a rather unflattering of his students (this is at odds with my own impression of Calvin College and its students) who, he says, insist on hell as the only sufficient motivator for remaining faithful to God. He traces all sorts of other and more unsavory reasons that have moved Christian belief in hell — and suggests that their belief in heaven can be similarly wanting.
But he prefaces the review with a prayer by St. Francis Xavier — alas, no source provided:
“O God, if I worship thee for fear of hell, burn me in hell; and if I worship thee in hope of paradise, exclude me from paradise; but if I worship thee for thine own sake, withhold not thine everlasting beauty.”
Grace is not a substance or a force — it is the totally free and totally unmerited favor of God toward sinners — Romans 3-8.
“God wants us to do something, anything, to assist in our own salvation”
Perhaps it helps to distinguish justification and sanctification — we are “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven” purely by the favor shown to us by God for the sake of Christ.
Good works, which contibute to our sanctification, come at a second stage. These too are God’s gift of grace, working through our will now freed from bondage to sin.
” — He is not going to do all the work by Himself. Indeed, the whole reason He established the Church was so that we might help Him in the work of salvation.”
The point is that the work has already been done, in Christ. Faith in Christ transfers us to a new realm, links us to the Kingdom, makes us to be endowed with the blessings of Christ’s righteousness, which do not come from us.
Mary can be taken as symbolizing the Faith that accepts this salvation. “Be it done unto me” she says, not “Let me play my part, helping God complete his saving work.”
From EB – http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/260218/hell/260273/Modern-attitudes
http://www.italianstudies.org/hui235/U_S_%20News%20Modern%20thinking%20says%20the%20netherworld%20isn%27t%20so%20hot%20after%20all%20%281-31-00%29.htm
If one googles the words in Peter Steinfels’ comment (“O God, if I worship thee for fear of hell…”) it appears that they come not from St. Francis Xavier but from an early woman Sufi mystic, Rabiah (717 – 802)
http://www.sufijalalani.com/sufism.html
Whether the words are Muslim or Christian in origin one can still question whether they describe ideal motivations, a view which most will have no problem in accepting, or do they represent the only worthy motivations to the exclusion of any of the more mundane considerations.
I believe a lengthy and thorough version of this discussion took place in the 17th century. Two French bishops, Bossuet (a “laxist” in this dispute) and Fenelon (a “rigorist”), argued about the role of self-interest in one’s salvation.
Here’s the Controversy with Fenelon section of the Bossuet entry in Wikipedia:
Fenelon “explained his view that the goal of human life should be to have love of God as its perfect object, with neither fear of punishment nor desire for the reward of eternal life having anything to do with this love of God. The king reproached Bossuet for failing to warn him that his grandsons’ tutor had such unorthodox opinions, and instructed Bossuet and other bishops to respond to the Maximes des Saints.
“Bossuet and Fénelon thus spent the years 1697-99 battling each other in pamphlets and letters until the Inquisition finally condemned the Maximes des Saints on March 12, 1699. Innocent XII selected 23 specific passages for condemnation. Bossuet had triumphed in the controversy, and Fénelon submitted to Rome’s determination of the matter.”
The view from Rome was that Fenelon’s opinions were “temerarious, scandalous, ill-sounding, offensive to pious ears, pernicious in practice, and false in fact”. Exactly my sentiments – - By upholding a perfectionist view as the only acceptable path to salvation we are in danger of excluding all but a few ordinary humans. Al Capone would be wasting his time on his deathbed if he was incapable of emulating the the Sufi ideal.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06035a.htm
Thanks Jim P. for your kind words.
“He paints a rather unflattering of his students (this is at odds with my own impression of Calvin College and its students) who, he says, insist on hell as the only sufficient motivator for remaining faithful to God.”
My Baptist and Amish in-laws believe the fear of hell is the only thing that will keep people in line. But, then, they have to stay in line in so many more ways than Catholics–no dancing, no drinking, no gambling, (and in the case of the Amish), no hair cutting for women, no wearing bright colors, no cars, no electricity, etc.
All Catholics have to do is feel sorry enough for what they’ve done and all is forgiven. I oversimplify, of course, but I wonder if the sacrament of forgiveness helps erode a belief in hell.
“In the modern world, especially in the West, cultural shifts caused by the Enlightenment, 19th-century liberalism, and the psychotherapeutic culture of the late 20th century have contributed to a decline in the belief in an everlasting hell.”
I don’t want to assume I know where this comment tends, but it reminds me that I do hear a lot of Christians and Catholics talk disparagingly about psychotherapy and its erosion of religious belief and its contribution to relativism (I’m OK, you’re OK). This is sad if the attitude prevents people from seeking treatment, which is not meant to wash away culpability but to help suffers better understand how to avoid occasions of damage to themselves and others.
Long rambling historical aside of limited interest follows here:
I just finished reading a version of “Jane Eyre” with and interesting introduction about the themes of mental illness that occur in the novel. In Bronte’s day, it was noted that some forms of mental illness seemed to deprive sufferers from a knowledge of right and wrong (the notion still exists in the “guilty but insane,” or “not guilty by reason of insanity” judgments).
Bronte, whose brother was believed to suffer from this sort of mental illness, had great pity for such people. Branwell was sent to an asylum run on the “moral management” lines, which attempted to restore a sense of morality to the residents. Bronte had little sympathy for addicts of any type, whom she believed were simply unable to summon the willpower to withstand their cravings.
The only character in the novel who discusses hell (and holds it over Jane’s head) is St. John, the Protestant missionary. Bronte has both admiration for his purpose and pity for his coldness. Jane rejects him for reasons both moral and romantic.
I found it interesting to note that one of the novel’s most enthusiastic supporters was The Tablet, way back in 1847, which lauded Bronte’s depiction of the characters’ moral and spiritual struggles.
I’ve reread “Jane Eyre” ever four or five years since I was 12. In the intervening 45 years, it never ceases to be fresh of offer new insights about human nature.
Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Jean. Fascinating.
saying God can do nothing if people turn away from him
___________
God can’t “do nothing.” In fact, He does a lot to get people to accept His love. But if they refuse notwithstanding His efforts, love being by its nature a free act, He cannot impose His love upon them against their free will and still have it be called “love.”
Forced love is not love. It is violence.
And plenty of evil people and evil fallen angels (devils) have indeed said a loud “NO” to God’s love. Was Hitler one of those as well? It is not for any of us to judge the state of another’s soul, but many people would say that he did not want God’s love.
“And plenty of evil people and evil fallen angels (devils) have indeed said a loud “NO” to God’s love.”
I think that’s true. But isn’t it also true that what God’s love is is often ambiguous? God sacrificed himself because he loved us. We have to embrace that sacrifice and call a hideous form of execution holy because it saved us.
My grandfather couldn’t get past that. He was adamant that any god who would kill his own son wasn’t anything he wanteed to fool around with. So, did he say “NO” to God? Or was he simply limited by his own human understanding? He fell into alcoholism and despair at the end of his life. He never sought out any religious person, went to church, confessed, or was baptized.
Is he in hell? I hope not. He made his cats scrambled eggs and bacon, bought me dixie cup ice cream, and told me stories about going with his father to live with the Indians in his job as a timber assessor.
God’s love is never ambiguous. It is misunderstood, distorted by our imperfections, obscured, etc.
That is the problem running through this thread. Hell is assumed to be a punishing principle, a goad to a better life, rather than being seen as a gift from God that affirms our dignity and majesty. God gives us the capacity to make the world, and does not override our creativity even when something goes wrong. This is a great gift, even when we misuse it in a punishing fashion.
Hell never meant much to me. I was more interested in saints and their desire to be with God. Even when I read Dante, I did not care as much about the vivid punishments of hell as much as I adored the dance in heaven, the dance with Beatrice and Virgil. Hell was not the fumbling missteps, but the person who was so concerned with his own problems that he will not hear the music and will not dance. God always provides the music, but we sometimes do not hear, sometimes will not hear. Sometimes, the music can even hurt as it draws us away from the agonizing path we choose.
Jim (7/8 9:10 pm):
Sometimes cannot hear, Jim. For many reasons.
Balthasar remarks somewhere on the scandal that Dante’s Inferno has no redemptive significance.
We Catholics are tone-deaf to the insights of Luther on our salvation, which retrieve those of St Paul, and which are sustained by the best Protestant theologians. That is why, when I labor to express the Pauline sense of the gratuity of grace and the sole sufficiency of Christ I know that I am laboring against centuries of negationism (finally ended only on Oct 31, 1999) and I feel I am floundering incompetently. The reading I find most helpful on this is Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, 1535.
It is possible to be mistaken about what one is saying “yes” and “no” to. If Richard Dawkins is going to hell and John Corapi is going to heaven, it is obvious which is the more desirable destination.
“God sacrificed himself because he loved us. We have to embrace that sacrifice and call a hideous form of execution holy because it saved us.”
Jean –
Not (mainly) because it saved us. Rather because His terrible death proved the the almost incredible love of a God who chose to become man out of love for us lowly, lying, cheating, violent, bumbling, lustful, envious, etc., etc., etc., apes with finite minds and flawed wills. It is His generosity that compels our love. Yes, we freeloaders are grateful that we get Heaven in the bargain, but if the Lord weren’t as good as He has shown Himself to be, who would *want* to go to Heaven?
Regarding the irrevocability of being damned to hell: there seems to be some hope implied in the venerable Christian practice of praying for the dead. Why would we pray for our dead loved ones, if they have already sentenced themselves, and there is no possibility of interceding to lessen or commute the sentence?
I understood we pray for the dead on the assumption that they got into Purgatory.
Why would we pray for our dead loved ones, if they have already sentenced themselves, and there is no possibility of interceding to lessen or commute the sentence?
There are many reasons, but I’ll just cite one.
Rather than be presumptuous and rude, we might do the polite thing and kindly say “please” and “thank you” to God.
No one has a right, not even the greatest saint, to simply barge into heaven as if he owned the place. And we have no right to be so presumptuous regarding others either. Even if the deceased had been a “living saint,” it is still right and proper to ask the Father to take that person into His House and not merely assume that God has done so.
“God’s love is never ambiguous. It is misunderstood, distorted by our imperfections, obscured, etc.”
“Misunderstood, distorted, obscured”–God’s love may seem straightforward to God, but certainly ambiguous filtered through our own frailties, no? That’s all I’m sayin’.
Jean,
This is not what your grandfather was saying “He was adamant that any god who would kill his own son wasn’t anything he wanteed to fool around with.” He was not confused, misunderstanding or conscious of his human failings in viewing God. “Adamant” suggests that there was no ambiguity on his part. He, or your rendition of him above, has an absolute moral principle, that no person will kill his son. A worthy principle, nut it runs up against the principle that God is the father of all and the unambiguous way that God lives out loving every person.
I think it is here that faith resides, accepting that God is acting in love rather than condemning God for violating our own absolute moral principle. And that is the only reason I wrote as I did.
[I am not one to judge, but your grandfather's moral principle seems very close to the truth since it embodies a parent's love. That brings him closer to God than many who repeat God's name but advocate a less merciful morality.]
Jim, interesting take on Grampa. He was adamant about everything, but his motivation was not always clear. Was his rejection of Christianity guided by a moral principle? Or was it his way of alienating people he couldn’t stand, particularly “church people,” who he thought were sob sisters and temperance nuts?
Someone speculated at a family reunion not long ago that he might have been involved in a cross-burning on a Catholic neighbor’s lawn back in the 1930s. I was initially shocked at the idea. And then I wasn’t.