From the Minister

Heaven and Hell

Do you believe in heaven or hell? If not, why not? If so, who's going there and how do you know?

As I intimated in a recent sermon, I am not convinced that heaven or hell, in the traditional Western Christian sense, really exist. Nonetheless, I am intrigued with other people's opinions about the afterlife.

The questions above were posed by Sally Quinn and Jon Meachem, two reporters for the Washington Post to some rather well-known writers and theologians. A few responses are posted below and more can be found here

I encourage you to visit the site for more opinions.

Enough of Heaven and Hell

From Susan Jacoby, author and reporter.

Oh, for heaven's sake. This question irritates the...inferno out of me. Of all the pointless, utterly childish notions associated with traditional religion, belief in eternal bliss in heaven or eternal damnation in hell surely tops the list.

Religions that have allowed themselves to be modified by secular knowledge downplay orthodox ideas of heaven and hell for the very good reason that such beliefs have been used throughout history to justify the most evil earthly acts imaginable. Christians slaughtered Jews and Muslims during the Crusades precisely because they believed that they were earning themselves a place in an all-Christian heaven, hemmed in by restrictive covenants.

In recent years, radical Islamists have embarked on suicide murder missions with the absolute conviction that they will be rewarded with a place in a Muslim paradise. The 60 percent of Muslim Americans who, according to a recent Pew Poll, do not accept the fact that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were carried out by Muslim Arabs, are deluded. Like the Christian Crusades, Islamist terror attacks are deeply involved with a form of religion that forsees an eternal reward for dastardly crimes against humanity.

I know that indignant readers will claim that none of these crimes have anything to do with the "real" Christianity or the "real" Islam. They don't have anything to do with modern, moderate forms of Christianity or Islam, but they have everything to do with retrograde expressions of religions that preach, among other things, the doctrine of eternal damnation for unbelievers and infidels. And these retrograde religious forms are on the rise in the world. They are every bit as "real" as religion based on earthly, loving kindness--something that promoters of religion as an unqualified good never want to admit.

Fear of hell has also proved notably inefficacious as a deterrent to evil human impulses; that is why we have man-made laws. Fundamentalists who want to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses have everything backward: we need courthouses precisely because some people just won't obey moral commandments unless they are subjected to earthly punishment.

In our godly nation, the most recent Gallup Poll (released on June 13, 2007) found that while 81 per cent of Americans believe in heaven, only 69 percent believe in hell. Approximately 86 per cent of American adults believe in God, but only 70 percent believe in the devil. We Americans really do like to have our cake (whether angel or devil's food) and eat it too; we seem to prefer the pursuit of happiness to the right to go to hell in our own way.

Because I am an atheist (and by the way, the percentage of Americans who believe in God has dropped by four percentage points--down from 90 percent to a minuscule 86 percent--during the past four years), I naturally do not believe in immortality in either heaven or hell. I say with Milton:

O Earth, how like to Heav'n, if not preferr'd
More justly, Seat worthier of Gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old:
For what God after better worse would build? (Paradise Lost, IX.100)

If I were a believer, though, I would definitely reserve my closest scrutiny for the devil's many earthly workshops, from the office of the current U.S. Vice President (described in such riveting infernal detail in the Post series on Dick Cheney this week) to the hellish refugee camps in Darfur.

There is a devil--not a supernatural being but the sum of the worst human impulses. The devil is in us. Or rather, the devil is us. And what so many people think of as a supernatural being called "God" can be understood in the natural realm as the human capacity for good.

I also reject the concept of limbo, and I send my kudos to the Vatican for finally changing its dogma that unbaptized infants can't go to heaven because someone didn't sprinkle water over their heads. This change truly epitomizes the Roman Catholic Church's commitment to dealing with humankind's most important problems. I am sure that every lunatic who actually believed in a deity cruel enough to deny his presence to sinless infants will be greatly relieved by the Church's change of heart.

But I certainly do believe in purgatory. Purgatory is wondering whether the human race in general, and my fellow Americans in particular, will ever grow up enough to realize that we ought to treat one another decently simply because of our common humanity--not because we are looking forward to being entertained by harpists among the clouds or are terrified of eternal flame.

Modern forms of religion tend to define heaven and hell in a somewhat abstract way--the former as perfect union with God, the latter as the absence of God. Whatever the concept of eternity, it is based on the demonstrably false idea that the hope of heaven and the fear of hell will prevent people from doing evil to one another here on earth.

Purgatory is the only state inhabited by reasonable grownups, never quite living up to our own moral expectations but always hoping to do better.

Neither is The Final Destination

From N. Thomas Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham, England.

Heaven is important but it's not the end of the world: in the mainstream Christian tradition until the Platonists corrupted it, the ultimate destination is THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH, which will involve an ultimate resurrection (bodily, of course) for God's people (in some versions, for all people).

The way the phrase 'heaven and hell' are used today implies you go straight to one or the other, ignoring the solid biblical testimony to an ultimate new creation in which heaven and earth are brought together in a great act of renewal (for those who want it, check out Ephesians 1.10, Revelation 21 and 22, Romans 8.18-27 and 1 Corinthians 15.20-28 -- though once you see this theme it's there everywhere). When Paul says 'my desire is to depart and be with Christ which is far better', and when Jesus says 'today you will be with me in Paradise', the wider context of both indicates that this will be a TEMPORARY state prior to the eventual resurrection into the new creation. This means (by the way) that the 'second coming' is NOT Jesus 'coming back to take us home', but Jesus coming -- or 'reappearing', as 1 John 3 and Colossians 3 put it -- to heal, judge and rescue this present creation and us with it.

(b) The word 'hell' is a shorthand for several biblical themes which converge at the point where (i) God has promised to put the entire world right at last, showing up evil as what it is, the corruption and destruction of what is good, and the distortion of the good humanness which God made and loves, and therefore judging it so that it no longer has the power to infect his good creation; (ii) God will finally say to those who have persisted in their deliberate collusion with the powers of corruption, destruction and dehumanization (i.e. 'sin') that there can be no place for them in the glorious new world that he is making, so that (iii) God's new world will not have in it 'a concentration camp in the midst of a beautiful landscape', as some earlier visions of 'hell' have supposed, but rather the celebration (1 Corinthians 20.28) that 'God will be all in all'.

(c) There is a constant danger for contemporary western Christians of making a similar mistake at this point to first-century Jews. It appears that many Jews of, say, Jesus' and Paul's day supposed that when God acted to put the world right it would be the Jewish people who would be automatically OK.

The great breakthrough in Paul's thinking is that no, the one God of Abraham wants to reach out and welcome ALL people on the basis of faith alone. Similarly today many Christians think God is only interested in rescuing them, as saved humans, FROM the world, whereas the Bible is full of hints that those who know God and receive his salvation here and now are to be his agents in bringing that salvation to the wider world. Note how, even when Revelation 21 and 22 speaks of those who are in the holy city, the new Jerusalem, and those who are excluded from it, it also speaks of the river of the water of life flowing out to the world around, and of the tree of life growing on the banks of the river, with 'the leaves of the tree being for the healing of the nations'. What does that mean?

Abandon Every Hope, Who Enter Here

From Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, President, Chicago Theological Seminary.

As everybody knows who had Dante forced upon her or him in high school, the Inferno is not only about sufferings in the afterlife, but is also an allegory about the politics of his own time. It is entirely believable to me that the spiraling conflicts of politics were Dante’s chosen vehicle for describing in exquisite detail all the circles of hell and the specific sins of which human beings are capable.

Yes, I believe in hell, and in heaven. I believe it because, like Dante, I see it here on earth. All the way down through each circle of hell in the Inferno, or up through the Paradiso, we are led on the same journey. We journey down into the worst of human nature, what we call hell, and up through the incredible capacity of human beings for redemption, what we call heaven.

I once heard Toni Morrison give a lecture about the thought process that led her to write her astonishing novel, Paradise. She read aloud from Revelation 21 in the Bible and the description of the heavenly Jerusalem in it. “[T] he city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every jewel…And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass.”

Morrison asked, “But if heaven is not just high priced real estate, what is it?” This is the question she pursues in that novel. The protagonists, escaped slaves, certainly knew hell on earth in the conditions of their enslavement. They flee slavery and seek to establish heaven on earth. Instead as time passes there is a split in the community and they become engaged in a battle over existence that turns as murderous as the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis.

It has been suggested, in fact, that Cain and Abel are the same person. They are humanity, whole, with our capacity for infinite good and infinite evil. This is the dilemma both Morrison and Dante describe—we can be hell to ourselves and to one another, or the means of our own and one another’s salvation. And sometimes we can be both. This is the freedom God has given us in existence it is the source of the very depth and height of what it means to be human.

Yes, I believe in hell, and in heaven.

My Father's House

From Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and Senior Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center.

I believe in heaven because I believe that God loves us so much that he would not let us simply disappear. I believe in hell because I believe we are free to reject God.

Meditating on our place in the universe as taught to us by science should make us humble. We live for a brief time on a small planet spinning around a sun that is one star in a galaxy that is only one of the millions of galaxies in the universe. How insignificant we are. As a result, I sometimes think that the hardest act of faith for a modern person is believing that God cares about us.

Believing that God loves us—that we are not just a blink of an eye in the history of the universe—is at the core of religious faith. For Christians, that is what the incarnation and the resurrection are all about—God loves us so much he became one of us and raised Jesus up as a sign of our everlasting life. Heaven is everlasting life with God.

Who goes to heaven? Those who choose love, those who love.

Matthew 25 makes this explicit: “Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.”

But we are free not to choose God; we are free not to love. God does not condemn us to hell; we go there freely. Hell is not a place of fire. Hell is the absence of love, the absence of God who is love.

Do only Christians go to heaven? No, anyone who loves can go to heaven.

Hell is Other People; Heaven is Other Dogs

From Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago’s Divinity School.

“Are there dogs in heaven?” someone once asked Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of several wonderful books celebrating the pleasures of life with dogs. “Of course,” she replied; “otherwise, it wouldn’t be heaven.” And she’s right.

Heaven is a place onto which we project our ideas of what a perfect world might be, and so it must contain everything that we hold dear. Yudhishthira, the ethically tormented king in the great ancient Indian poem, the Mahabharata, would also have agreed with Ms. Thomas; he refused to go to heaven unless he could bring his dog with him, challenging the Hindu view of dogs as polluting and hence banned from any holy place.

For some people, heaven is just a metaphor—heaven is dancing cheek to cheek, or heaven is in your eyes, and so forth. For Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, earth itself “is hell, nor am I out of it.” Jean Paul Sartre agreed: hell is other people. But others would say that heaven is other people—it is, above all, the place where they hope to be reunited with loved ones who have gone before. For such people, heaven is much more than a metaphor; it’s a hope and a fear. A fear because, if there is a heaven, there must be a hell, a place without dogs (pace the widespread ancient myth of the Hounds of Hell).

The unquenchable human thirst for life and for justice is what creates heaven. The observable fact that justice does not reign on earth (or that, as Tolstoy nicely put it in the title of a short story, “God Sees The Truth But Waits”), combined with the fact that we do appear to die, though we cannot imagine a world without us in it, gives rise to the hope that after death we will live on, rewarded for our virtues while other people will go to hell and be tortured for their sins.

The tenacity of the hope for heaven is demonstrated by the fact that when the Hindus invented a much more complex and satisfying response to the problems of both death and justice, the theory of reincarnation, they still kept heaven, simply adding on reincarnation. They said that first you went to heaven, then to hell (or the reverse, first hell, then heaven: counter-intuitively, people who had done more good than ill went to hell first, to pay for their small record of evil, and then to heaven, to enjoy their rewards; whose who had done more evil than good went to heaven first, then to hell), and then you got reincarnated anyway, still according to your just desserts. Indian hells, both Hindu and Buddhists, are brilliant evocations of punishments that fit the crimes; adulterers spend eternity crushed and impaled within red hot Iron Maidens. In the Hindu heaven, however, enemies are reconciled, and imperfections of the body are healed.

The fact that cultures all over the world have imagined some sort of heaven shows how deep a human longing it is, and the fact that they all describe it differently strongly suggests that no one has ever seen it (“that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,” as Hamlet so nicely puts it) and that there is therefore no evidence that it actually exists.

For some cultures, paradise is a garden (which is what the word “paradise” originally meant in Greek and Persian); when Voltaire’s Candide ended up deciding to cultivate his garden, now, here on earth, he was implicitly denying the possibility of cultivating it anywhere else. If there were a heaven for me, it would have to be the kind of garden in which no one minds when your dog, in hot pursuit of rabbits, tramples down the peonies.

But I can’t believe in heaven, because I no longer believe in the possibility of justice; I cannot even imagine a world in which there is perfect justice. Even if there were a heaven, all the wrong people would get to go there, just as all the wrong people down here get to go to the Italian Riviera. I do still cherish some hope of an afterlife, but more like reincarnation than heaven, a recycling of what we know life to be, with all it flaws, a living on in memory, a rebirth in people whose lives we have touched. At best, perhaps, rebirth in a world in which, as in heaven, we are together with the sorts of people whom we have loved and who have loved us—perhaps, indeed, rebirth as dogs.