Sorry for all this biography but sometimes experience does clarify.
The odd part of all this is that Hell ultimately never became a huge issue for me. And that was because even at my most pious I could never ever really internalize the idea of eternal conscious torment. Oh if you had asked I would have said all the right words but down deep I could never square the love of God with a never ending torture chamber. And how could I possibly enjoy the glories of Heaven while billions of people were being tortured? I guess I just suppressed it until I had the words to reject it much later. The result is that I never had any fear of Hell when I left the church. I have met people that do have such fears and I feel much sadness for them. Imagine having to carry that throughout your life!
I will follow Stephen’s example and reflect on how my belief in hell, as a young Catholic, influenced me.
I don’t generally talk about hell because it is the territory of bitter ex-Christians and I don’t want to fall into that stereotype.
While I was still a believer, I actually had a little back-and-forth with DBH in which I defended the coherence of hell. So it is something I’ve thought about.
But I guess if I am to look back on how it influenced me, as a Catholic, a couple of things stand out:
The first thing that sticks out to me is how binary hell is. As a Catholic we had a concept of venial sin and purgatory (which is by nature, temporary). But in the scheme of eternity, temporary punishment goes to 0. You don’t need to sweat hundreds of years of terrible future pain and humiliation if you know that at then end there will be endless bliss beyond imagining.
But hell, well, the calculus obviously changes when the punishment is unrelenting.
But what that means is that you end up having to draw a hard line somewhere in the scale of misbehavior where you jump from “bad but, honestly, pretty much nothing in the grand scheme of things” to “you are doomed to a fate worse than death.”
(This is all very legalistic and Western, but once the premises are granted, the questions arise quite naturally.)
I don’t raise this to say the system is illogical (though I think it is), I simply observe that there was something very weird living in that system, where what felt like a gradual scale of badness had to be mapped onto a sharp dichotomy between two radically different eternal fates.
A second thing I’d note is that, in the Catholic tradition, this teaching comes hand-in-hand with teaching about what sins constitute grave matter, i.e., what actions objectively deserve such eternal punishment. Here we see the same problem again (how much must one steal for it to move from a forgivable sin to a mortal sin? In principle there must be a line, but any specific answer seems arbitrary.).
But you also here have the most insidious teaching that infidelity, including even open-ended doubt about dogma, is mortally sinful. It is sort of an ultimate discussion ending belief. Once that hook was set in me, I was stuck in the system.
You also have the (too oft noted) teaching that any sexual gratification outside of the marital act performed in marriage is objectively grave matter, meriting hell. I don’t want to dwell on that (it is oft noted, and people generally assume the worst), but I will say there were times I was perhaps too touchy with my girlfriend, and found myself driving home in the rain thinking that if I were to get in a fatal accident, I would likely spend eternity in torment. It is a strange position to be in. (Something I do wonder about–especially as a father–, and something I know other former Catholics also wonder about, is what life-altering mistakes I might have made if I hadn’t be operating with such strict guardrails. Were those guardrails necessary to stop me from ruining some girl’s life? Or could the real consequences, properly explained, have effectively controlled my adolescent libido? On the thought that real consequences would have, and did in fact, I can point to the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound reasoning that hell invites: once you believe you are guilty of a sin that merits eternal torment, you have no immediate incentive not to keep going. If going to second base is enough to put me in hell, why stop at second base? It wasn’t fear of hell that stopped me, it was something else that kept me in bounds. What the fear of hell did do was saddle me with guilt and self-loathing for things that were, at worst, minor failures of self-control in the face of perfectly natural impulses.)
There were other things: as a kid I remember writing a story in my head of a knight on the frontier of a kingdom who had a passionate affair with a courtesan, but was then duty bound to go into battle. (Catholic moral theology has outs for this–perfect contrition and all of that, but such routes are psychologically uncertain–you can know you sinned gravely, but you can’t know for sure you have been forgiven). I lived this decades later, when I believed I was not in grace on the morning the house behind me caught fire: I heard a woman screaming “they are in there; they were just babies!” I rushed back into my house to get shoes, thinking I was about to run into a burning building while not in a state of grace, thus risking my eternal fate. (It turned out they were some puppies, and I did not go into the house for them.) I remember at the time thinking, if God condemns me for this, well, that’s his problem, not mine.
I’m not sure what to take from this. In my experience, growing up with the Catholic teaching on hell, It did cause significant anxiety and guilt, some of it unwarranted. It did influence my behavior–though I’m not sure it really inculcated virtue or self-control, especially in light of the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound thinking, but it did very effectively keep me from questioning my faith. And through out, it never quite sat with my experience of human conduct and weakness; it forced a binary state on what I experienced as a graduated scale.
Any maybe, despite my own sincere assertion that I did believe, despite my anxiety over it, I never really did believe it. I mean, if I *really* thought I could spend eternity in suffering, how would I ever have transgressed the least rule? In some sense it was never really real to me. It was just a proposition I assented to, without really conceiving what it said as real.
The first thing that sticks out to me is how binary hell is.
Porphyry what strikes me most is that in your experience, it matters what you do. Actions and choices have meaning for your ultimate spiritual fate. One’s spiritual state is malleable, fluid and provisional. I was raised in a world of unqualified absolutes. You were saved or damned. And once you were saved you could never be unsaved. (You could “backslide” and had an occasional need to “rededicate” your life.) But we lived in fear of what we called a “works based salvation”, the idea that one could be saved because of their good works. Nope, Sola Fide! The consequence was that good works were marginalized, even denigrated. It became part of the minister’s job description to visit the sick or the bereaved.
>> I was raised in a world of unqualified absolutes. You were saved or damned. And once you were saved you could never be unsaved.
Yes, I never experienced that, but I imagine it would give rise to a vacillation between an absolute confidence bordering on antinomianism, on the one hand, and a petrifying and implacable fear–what if I am among those who seem saved but turn out never really to have believed–on the other.
And I hardly need mention to this crowd that Luther’s sola fide was occasioned by just the sorts of incongruities and doubts I experienced as a Catholic. I think his struggle with scrupulosity is generally known, but the Catholic system magnifies scrupulosity to an intolerable degree. The irony is that his solution may have made the psychological pain worse for many.
Porphyry said
>> I was raised in a world of unqualified absolutes. You were saved or damned. And once you were saved you could never be unsaved.
Yes, I never experienced that, but I imagine it would give rise to a vacillation between an absolute confidence bordering on antinomianism, on the one hand, and a petrifying and implacable fear–what if I am among those who seem saved but turn out never really to have believed–on the other.
And I hardly need mention to this crowd that Luther’s sola fide was occasioned by just the sorts of incongruities and doubts I experienced as a Catholic.
Yes I encountered examples of both conditions. Extreme confidence vs self-doubt. I remember once listening in fascination during a Sunday dinner while my Father confessed that the sermon that morning had made him “doubt his salvation”. Now he didn’t really think he wasn’t “saved” but he didn’t like sermons that he thought were intended to make believers question themselves. You were supposed to condemn unbelievers and admonish but encourage believers in their spiritual walk. But a message that seemed intended to undermine one’s confidence seemed over the line.
When you’re in a hermetically sealed thought bubble all the nuances, let alone the incongruities and outright contradictions in the thinking, are easy to push aside. Concerns remain private because there is no public context provided to express them. It is astonishing when you finally encounter others who had those same questions. How could you have known?
Robert, Stephen, Porphyry, thank you for writing so openly. Three of you, formed in different religious worlds, and yet each describes a version of the same thing: you understood what the doctrine claimed, but it never became fully real. Stephen and Porphyry could say the words; Porphyry even defended its coherence in public. Robert, your route was different again: priests and nuns at a Christmas party, and a child realising that they too were simply human beings trying to work things out. One thing I notice in all three accounts: none of you describes rejecting hell because you had already concluded that there was no God. Stephen, you could not square it with the love of God. Porphyry, you thought: if he condemns me for this, that is his problem. Robert, you filtered what the priests and nuns said through your own sense of things. The resistance arose from within belief, not after belief had disappeared.
Bart closed the seminar on a related note: that it does not make sense, and almost certainly is not true. What strikes me is that the resistance each of you describes did not arise from a historical argument about Sheol or Gehenna. That makes me wonder what the final step of the seminar was really resting on. Not, I think, on Gehenna being a valley. So my original question remains, now sharpened by your stories: how much does this convergence tell us about the three of you, how much about the teaching itself, and what kind of reasoning takes us from the historical reconstruction to “almost certainly not true”?
And now something in the other direction, because I cannot find the answer in myself. You may guess freely, and you may be wrong. I will not take it as an attack. I have no difficulty with the idea that God desires communion with human beings, wants to be known by them, and goes as far as Golgotha to restore that communion. And I also find that I can accept that this seeking may not end in communion for everyone, that there may be lasting separation, in some form I do not need to map. That does not create in me the contradiction that eternal conscious torment created in each of you. And I should say that this is not abstract for me either. It comes close to my own life and the people in it.
What do you think accounts for that? I am genuinely asking. It may be something about my formation, about what I have never had to carry, or about a blind spot I cannot see from where I stand. You three have just told me a great deal about yourselves. I would rather be looked at than left unexamined.
Yes, they are radically different. I was not equating them. My point was only about the range covered by the ordinary word “hell”: eternal conscious torment, annihilation or final destruction, and temporary purgative judgment within universalist accounts. Your childhood image is a good example of how different a purgatorial view can be from eternal torment.
For this thread, however, my point is narrower. By “hell” I mean final exclusion from eternal life with God. On Bart’s reconstruction, annihilation is precisely such an irreversible loss. So his historical case replaces eternal conscious torment with annihilation; it does not remove final judgment or final loss.
I have the same problem with Universalism as I do with Annihilationism. If God is going to actively engage with reality then why doesn’t he? If everyone is going to be saved or at least some are going to be destroyed then what’s he waiting for? What’s the point of all this suffering in the meantime? Final bliss or final destruction is not going to undo what is being done now!
Concerning Bart’s talks, I can’t comment, as I haven’t seen the video lectures you refer to. What you described in the initial post does sound like a leap, but a not an entirely out-of-character leap. Again, I have not seen the videos in question, but based on your description, I am sympathetic to your complaint that Bart steps beyond what his scholarship actually demonstrated.
For myself, I will say, I am very much disposed to maintaining the intelligibility of retributive justice. I’m inclined to recognize rank selfishness for what it is and to say it merits, in principle, punishment. I could talk about all the wrinkles for ages, but suffice it to say, I am not at all ill-disposed to the idea that selfish sons-of-bitches who try to get ahead at direct cost to others should suffer for it.
And you are right, my rejection of hell was in many respects independent of my rejection of God (rather than a cause of my rejection of God). It was well after I was free of belief in God (and what I had taken as his Church) that I felt free to articulate, even to myself, the problems I saw in the doctrine of hell.
This reply is deliberately brief, but I just want to note that the topic is really deep. I could spend a *lot* of time teasing out all the issues I see.
Porphyry, thank you. Your qualification is fair: you have not seen the lectures, so you are responding to the structure of the complaint as I described it, not confirming my reading of the video. Even so, you have given me a substantive answer that I can actually work with.
My concern is not that Bart’s final judgment must be wrong. It is that the move from historical reconstruction to philosophical judgment was not marked, so the closing conclusions carried the authority of the scholarship that preceded them, without giving the audience a clear marker of where the historical argument ended and Bart’s own judgment began.
My practical concern is that believers and non-believers may therefore draw conclusions the historical case does not require, namely that any final exclusion from eternal life with God is biblically unfounded. That was why I started this thread. The questions asked in the Q&A showed that this was not merely a hypothetical risk, and I took considerable care in my opening post to represent the lectures as accurately as I could.
But your reply and Robert’s have made me suspect something more specific. Throughout this thread, “hell” has been used almost interchangeably with eternal conscious torment. Robert says he did not believe in hell, and then points to Bart’s case that Jesus probably taught annihilation. In that usage, annihilation apparently falls outside “hell.” Yet annihilation is one of the major models of final punishment discussed in Christian theology under the broader heading of hell, alongside eternal conscious torment and temporary purgative judgment within universalist accounts.
I would be glad if we could loosen that equation, both in this discussion and more generally: “hell” need not mean only eternal conscious torment, provided that we continue to distinguish clearly between the radically different models.
If that narrowing has already happened before the argument begins, then showing that Jesus did not teach eternal torment can sound like showing that he taught no final judgment at all, even though the reconstruction still contains judgment, exclusion and irreversible loss. Is part of the final step semantic rather than evidential?
Robert, thank you. I want to begin with what you have given me.
“Those who are judged unworthy of the Kingdom of God have certainly been judged.” That is exactly the point my opening post was making, and one that repeatedly slipped out of view. Your final paragraph is also helpful. By calling demythologising a legitimate interpretive move, you have identified one possible step beyond the historical reconstruction. My question is whether such a step was clearly marked as distinct from the historical reconstruction itself.
Christianity is much broader than fundamentalism, and my point was classificatory rather than confessional. A doctrine can be rejected as heretical and still belong to the historical discussion of what final judgment or hell consists in.
Nor is the question a recent invention. Conditionalist strands already appear in some second- and third-century Christian writers, and Arnobius of Sicca speaks quite explicitly of the ultimate destruction of the wicked. Augustine later argues at length for punishment without end against rival Christian readings. The modern debate is therefore a new phase of an old argument, not the creation of a new model. The Evangelical Alliance itself described conditional immortality in 2000 as a significant minority evangelical view.
That makes me wonder whether, in your own usage, “hell” simply means eternal conscious torment, so that annihilation falls outside the word by definition. Is that how you are using it? Historically, I find that narrowing difficult to account for.
You are right that misunderstanding can never be eliminated entirely. But it can be reduced by marking carefully where historical reconstruction ends and philosophical interpretation begins.
This is the point that matters most to me.
A worldview, religious or naturalistic, can be someone’s anchor. I would not want to loosen another person’s anchor with a conclusion stated more broadly than the evidence carries. That cuts both ways. Trying to persuade a naturalist e.g. that hell exists on poorly supported grounds would be just as wrong.
Precision cannot prevent every misunderstanding. But the care we take is some measure of how seriously we take what is at stake for the listener.
Robert, thank you. You have answered my semantic question clearly.
I had assumed that, on a forum devoted to early Christianity, it would be common ground that “hell” has historically covered more than eternal conscious torment. I find it genuinely surprising that the discussion here appears to begin from the much narrower equation of hell with eternal conscious torment.
Your historical question is a good one. Early proponents of what we now call conditionalism need not have used an exact equivalent of the modern English umbrella term “hell.” They spoke of death, destruction, fire, Gehenna, exclusion and the loss of life. The later taxonomy places these statements alongside other accounts of final judgment, it does not claim that the writers themselves all used the same classificatory vocabulary. The precise history of terms such as “hell” and “damnation” would require more careful source work than I can do from memory.
If there is interest in a separate thread on annihilationism, I would be glad to participate and contribute for a limited time. I would need to read myself back into some of the material, since parts of it have faded from memory, but I have books on my shelves both defending and rejecting it.
I also want to be clear that I admire Bart’s informal and accessible way of explaining difficult material. But “successful” can mean different things. If it means that he reaches a large audience and persuades many people of his own conclusions, including conclusions beyond the strictly historical ones, then I agree that the approach has been highly successful. If it means enabling a lay audience to distinguish what the historical evidence establishes from the philosophical interpretation that follows, then I think success also requires that transition to be marked.
You say that what is at stake should be left to each listener to determine. Of course the listener must finally judge what he believes. But does that remove the speaker’s responsibility for the weight his words carry? I have live seen evangelical apologetic work completely unsettle non-believers’ confidence in their naturalistic worldview through arguments that did not adequately support the conclusions being urged upon them. Would you also leave that entirely to the listener, or would you expect the Christian speaker to take responsibility for the effect of overstated claims?
That is why the preceding and following points are inseparable for me. I am not asking a speaker to preserve anyone’s anchor against evidence. I am asking that no one’s anchor, religious or naturalistic, be loosened by a conclusion carrying more authority than the evidence has earned.
A worldview, religious or naturalistic, can be someone’s anchor. I would not want to loosen another person’s anchor with a conclusion stated more broadly than the evidence carries. That cuts both ways. Trying to persuade a naturalist e.g. that hell exists on poorly supported grounds would be just as wrong. Precision cannot prevent every misunderstanding. But the care we take is some measure of how seriously we take what is at stake for the listener.
Which is why I am circumspect in my occasional encounters with folks going through a crisis of faith. I know what I went through to get where I am today. I’ve found the best course of action is, first, to point out that their questions are not illegitimate and then, perhaps even more importantly, that they’re not alone. I will describe my own train of thought if asked but even there I insist that my perspective not be privileged in any way. No matter where you wind up, this is always a troubled path. If I can’t make it better then I sure as heck don’t want to make it worse.
I have seen evangelical apologetic work completely unsettle non-believers’ confidence in their naturalistic worldview through arguments that did not adequately support the conclusions being urged upon them.
And there is the example of believers whose faith was undermined by their own teacher’s bad arguments. Lots of questioners don’t walk out. They are pushed out. I think I was one of those.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)