Questions From Without: Hell, Damn It's Leaking

You have permission within the bounds of these blogs to say out-loud both 'damn' and 'hell'. We just won't damn anyone or anything to hell, how's that?

In this short blog I want to give you an image from McLaren. P.143 in the chapter "Up Toward the Stars", there is this: "You can't leave a sinking ship until you begin to construct a seaworthy one. Hell is one of the leaks of your sinking ship. You're trying to patch the hole. During your days here, I'd recommend you try to imagine a new ship, a seaworthy one. Put your energy there. You may find that the hell problem sinks with the old ship, then, and you won't solve it, but you'll leave it behind."

This in short is what I will attempt to do, with the help of more learned and faithful people than I. When we deconstruct something, like a value we've held, or an opinion that needs to be changed or behavior that needs to stop, it isn't helpful to simply do away with the old. Because what we take out of one, the nuggets of truth, need to have a place to go. If we're going to examine hell as a concept that Western Christianity has made about the future as a response to its insecurity about the future (which I hope to demonstrate), then there needs to be a seaworthy vessel for the scriptures we look at. There needs to be some kind of construct in the making. You can't simply take all the pieces apart and not build something.

We also don't want to tear something apart just to be new. But when something doesn't work, in our jobs, or families, or lives, or our faith, we can't keep pretending that it does work. If we have made the concept of hell a servant of our anxiety, then it ceases to serve us well. If it is something from God, in the form we have, then we better pay attention. But it seems to me that we have taken the Hebrew understanding or lack thereof of an afterlife and made something of eternity and salvation and punishment that Jesus doesn't make. So while we take things apart to examine, let's also build something up that will take care of our anxiety for the future. Let us build something that is seaworthy for the challenges of life - all of them, not just a few anxious thoughts that get our attention. My feeling has often been that we get tired of trying to contain the complex and we short-cut our arguments and beliefs just to have something. It's a bit like getting a job just to have work without attending to your passions and interests and abilities. (Believe me - getting work if you need it to survive, well, we can't stand on ceremony.) But you get the drift. We're better off recognizing what we're doing and not confuse our anxiousness with vocation. Just settling something to relieve our anxiety, well, it doesn't work. We must take the anxiety full on.

Maybe I'm off subject because of my own anxious life. But I still believe that most of us who have an idea of hell that is evangelical and more conservative in nature, have it rooted not in the text, but in our anxiety. So this is not wasted words. We are anxious for our future. If I can get my ticket into the next life - I'm clear. Goodbye anxiety. Problem is, I've been with too many people who punched their ticket and the anxiety remains to the point of death.

If I read the "Sermon on the Mount" right, then God takes care of his children, we need to trust that basic promise and not be anxious for tomorrow for it isn't real. Today is real. It doesn't mean I don't plan or prepare - that's today's work, but I live in the now not in tomorrow. We've made salvation and promise and punishment all about tomorrow in our Western culture. It's time we stop. So let's build a seaworthy ship for now, for the day, for reality and not the anxiety of tomorrow. That anxious ship will leak.

I want to begin with a reiteration of Lewis's understanding of reading a text, like the Bible. In my next blog we will revisit that. Because it is the biblical witness that gives us guidance here. Our problem is that we let Milton (Paradise Lost) and Dante (The Divine Comedy) overshadow Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And we are terrible of letting go of the familiar. But it is time to let go.