Ernie Long believes he has been to hell. He can even narrow it down to a particular moment.
His mother was dying of cancer. As she lay on her death bed, he swiped her last $5 and the car keys from her purse, went out and got high. When he returned, she was dead.
Long goes quiet, thinking about it in the chapel of Guiding Light Mission in Grand Rapids, Mich. When he first moved to the homeless shelter, he recalls, he would wake up in the night haunted by what he’d done.
“The shame and guilt engulfed me,” he says quietly. “I couldn’t stop crying.”
Today, Long is an intake supervisor for Guiding Light’s recovery program. He believes Jesus saved him from the pit of hell and wants other men to be saved too, here and hereafter.
“I think hell is being in the absence of purpose,” says Long, 64, who was addicted to crack cocaine before coming to Guiding Light two years ago. “When I had no purpose, no direction, I actually felt like I was living in hell.”
I know someone who has been to hell and God reached down to save him. He laid down to die under a store and had a near death experience – but his was not the sweetness and light of popular books. His was darkness and grasping hands. He cried out for help from God and God reached down to save him.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Robert Farrar Capon says, in _Parables of the Kingdom_, something like “Hell is merely God’s courtesy to those who insist they want no part of forgiveness.” I think that’s reasonable and at least partly right. We have strong words for people who force their presence upon others; if God were to force his presence on others by forcing everyone to go to heaven, wouldn’t God also then deserve our disapprobation?
[blockquote] Belief in hell dips, but some say they’ve already been there[/blockquote]
Can I submit this for the Lambeth Headline contest?
#1 – Truly God is great!
The Pope spoke last year about this topic, and warned explicitly of the reality of Hell, and that the avoidance of this topic in modern culture was imperiling souls. Your friend and those in this story who had a taste of it are blessed indeed – they *know* what awaits those who refuse salvation. But many people may just float along, numbed by prosperity and the therapeutic culture and experience the grasping hands and darkness only when it is too late.
Fear of hell is a great motivator to good behavior. But we must not base our belief in hell (or its opposite, eternal life with God) on a few vignettes from people’s personal experiences. Scripture attests to some form of eternal punishment. Jesus himself refers to some people being “cast into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It is not healthy for the Church to forget this. Jesus is the One who, through His death and resurrection, rescues us from the fate of eternal separation from God. Praise God the Father for the gift of His Son.
The cosmology in scripture is materially wrong. There is no physical hell after we die for our bodies. Period. To claim such and to teach such to children is abuse. There is enough hell on earth to justify its use currently.
#6 – Sez you. Your stridency is inversely proportional to your authority.
John Wilkins, take care that you do not talk yourself and any who follow you all the way to whatever Hell actually is by taking up the devil’s cause in gainsaying Scripture and thus calling the Holy Spirit who inspired it and Jesus who affirmed it both liars. Jesus is recorded as saying:
“Do not fear those who, having killed the body, can do nothing more. No, I will tell you who to fear. Fear Him who, having killed the body, can cast both body and soul alive into Gehenna forever. Him, I tell you, fear Him!”
Also remember Jesus telling of the rich man who died after the beggar Lazarus and begged Abraham to send the same Lazarus with just a drop of water to cool just the tip of his tongue, being in (real) agony in the (figurative or literal) flames. If you will question Jesus’ authority ar veracity or knowledge of these 2 things of which He spoke, then stand up like a man and deny and forswear ALL Scripture, “abandon the communion” in action as well as in word and teaching, and leave anything that calls itself a Christian church and start your own personal hell-denying and holiness-denying religion.
Know that for a fact, do you, John? If there is a hell and you teach children or anybody else that there isn’t, that seems to me to go way beyond abuse. Sadistic wouldn’t even cover it.
John,
I don’t believe that Scripture places Hell on the physical plane. I don’t know if Jesus or any of the authors of (or authorities behind) Holy Scripture actually describe the location of a physical hell.
Whether physical metaphore is used to denote spiritual reality is a different question. Hell is a spiritual reality (or, more correctly – lack of reality – it being as far removed from Reality as possible). As I said, I know someone who has been there.
As for your comment regarding physical hell, let me repeat the words of my Systematic Theology professor: “Those who cannot understand adult books shouldn’t read them.”
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
[i]let me repeat the words of my Systematic Theology professor: “Those who cannot understand adult books shouldn’t read them.â€[/i]
Do the past many centuries of theological squabbling suggest that anyone has reached a clear understanding about the Bible?
Yes, that is why I am RC. The Catechism was critical in my conversion because I felt in addressed this very problem.
Ember: yes.
ember (#11)
The problem is that too many people use a dogde such as “The cosmology of Scriptures is wrong. We do not live in a three tiered universe (true statement). Therefore, we do not have to listen to what Scripture says about (insert your least favorite doctine). (False statement).
We use personal language about God, not because we believe that God looks like us but because all other language is less accuate concerning God than personal language. We use physical language about heaven and hell because we are not purely spiritual beings. We cannot describe spiritual realities without using physical words. We can’t describe eternity because we are bound by time. Does anyone ave a perfectly clear understanding of God or Holy Scripture? No. But some understandings are more clear than others and that is why we need the whole Church to correct our personally opaque understandings.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
#9 – Chirstopher, you are absolutely right. If there is a hell. I’ve been wrong before.
I hope that being right isn’t what gets us into heaven. Otherwise we’re all going to go.
On that, I’m going to trust Jesus who said “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”
I’ll make my case when I’m before the great throne.
John,
A wise priest once said to me that you will either say to God, “Thy will be done.” and enter into the joys of heaven or God will say to you “thy will be done” and you will enter into hell. Now, whether we say it or whether we hear it will depend on what we “practice” saying in this life. Our lives will condition us to say to God “Thy will be done” or to say to God “My will be done.”
Since you do not believe in hell, then please remind me why you are a priest in a Church which states that it believes in hell?
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
You know it’s one thing to trust Jesus, but it’s another to poke a finger in God’s eye and wave Jesus around like a “get into heaven free card” or magic talisman. That smacks of manipulating God and Scripture lets us know that that does not work.
First, we must distinguish between hell proper, that is Hades or Sheol, the abode of the dead, and the Inferno or the pit of destruction, Gehenna, commonly but mistakenly called hell. The first is where souls go after they die and before the Resurrection. Those in Christ go to be with Him, after some Purgatory, depending on how that is interpreted (and it’s interesting that Pope Benedict XVI sounds very much in line with Cranmer on this now), while those not in Christ “exist” in some form. The second is the eternal fate of those risen to judgement who are not in Christ. No one has experienced this yet. It is still a future reality. What they claim to have experienced is Hades, where they are separated from the lord of Life and from the light of this world, a horrible plight indeed.
Second, we must remember that no one goes to hell, either the first or the second one, who has not chosen it. In my thinking God does not cast them in so much as honor their demand to be free of Him, which is equivalent to a drowning man demanding his rescuer to let go of him. Why anyone would make such a demand, why anyone would stubbornly reject God, is a mystery, and bound up with what the pope has called the mystery of evil. Why God would honor such a foolish desire and not change the desire is part of the mystery of Free Will.
Chris,
I think your (and all of our) different naming schemes for hell, Hades, Sheol, Gehenna, etc. and the differentiation between what happens between physical death and the general resurrection and judgement is a problem of time and eternity. From God’s point of view, all time is present to Him and all time is NOW. On death, we escape time and enter eternity, so a person who has died has either experienced hell or heaven (with whatever view of purgatory is the right one). We, however, have not. My godmother passed away last Friday. But I know that she has experience the Resurrection (from her POV) but we on earth have not yet caught up with her.
As to why a person would reject God, have you ever seen a child reject good food or medicine because (s)he “knows” it is bad before trying it? Sin and evil so blind us to good that we cannot know it or choose it apart from God’s grace and we don’t necessarily want to know or choose good.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
#15
Not to pick nits, but the original reference is Hosea 6:6 and is set in the context of judgement for the failure to keep alive the knowledge of God and transgressing the covenant.
Jesus does say this twice in Matthew (9:13 and 12:7 respectively), once after the call of Matthew and once in regards to picking grain on the Sabbath. Each is not a call to squishy acceptance or universalism.
The first is in reference to transformation–i.e. sinners can be redeemed. The second in reference to having something greater than the temple–i.e. the presence of Christ.
So, it seems clear, to me, that unless we can proclaim the truth that we have transgressed the covenant, are called to be transformed, and live in the presence of Christ–all our our piety, wonderful liturgies, and maybe even what we call “mercy” become mere sacrifice.
From God’s point of view, all time is present to Him and all time is NOW.
I agree with you completely, Phil. HOWEVER, here:
On death, we escape time and enter eternity
I think you are on very thin ice. Augustine may have believed that we escape time, but other Greek Fathers were not so sure. For My part I agree with them and against Augustine. I hold temporality to be a defining characteristic of creation. Basil had the same idea when he came up with the Son’s eternal generation from the Father as the way to defend his co-divinity. The idea that we escape time seems to be on a par with the idea that we escape corporeality, something which the Resurrection totally refutes. We will become like God, but not in such a way that we cease being His creatures.
But even if we are in the future released from Time, it seems hard to say that such a final escape can have happened yet, for the dead are always depicted as waiting for the coming of God’s Day, for the Resurrection. Whatever the dead, both in and out of Christ, experience now, it is an inbetween period between this life and the new.
Phil, I don’t believe in a physical hell underneath the earth, in the way 1st century Jews did or the way medieval Christians did. That’s all. However, I do believe that the concept has relevance and meaning, and conveys truth. Such as: there is divine justice, and actions have consequences. As it is, there is enough hell on earth to go around, and I believe that it is God’s will for us to be participants in his revealing of the Kingdom, which is very near. And people do experience sorts of hell in their lives at different times.
As far as my ordination, there was the call.