Hell of Loneliness

Some Christians and skeptics alike believe that sects which soften the old-fashioned hell are running a considerable risk. Fear of the eternal fire, they hold, helps to make people behave. Last week the powerful United Church of Canada, a union of Canada's Methodists, Congregationalists and some Presbyterians, seemed willing to take this chance. Its Committee on Christian Faith published a booklet, Life and Death, that repudiates the fire and brimstone of the traditionalists' Hell.

"In popular language Hell is the place of dreadful punishment . . . Is this how we should think of Hell?" Not at all, says Life and Death. The Bible uses the word Hell to translate the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades, which were underworld places where all the dead lived shadowy, unsubstantial, joyless lives; at least at first, Sheol or Hades was not considered a place of punishment or torment. Gradually, the idea developed that there was a difference between the life of the righteous and the life of the wicked in Sheol. The part where the wicked dwelt was called Gehenna, and the part where the righteous dwelt was called Paradise. Often translated "Hell" in the New Testament, Gehenna is really derived from the Valley of Hinnom, outside the city of Jerusalem, which was notorious as the place where fires burned to consume refuse and as the scene of ancient child sacrifice.

Gradually, the idea of flames became associated with the life of the wicked in their part of Sheol. Jesus, says Life and Death, used this as a figure of speech in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, and he was not threatening his hearers with fearful torment so much as reminding them that life is set within a divine order in which man reaps the harvest of his deeds. "We have no right," says the committee, "on the basis of this parable, to go further than this and interpret Hell as the place of everlasting fiery torment."

Echoing other theologians, the committee argues that a less primitive kind of Hell certainly exists. "Some form of punishment, in the next world if not in this, may be necessary if sinners are to be brought to a realization of what their rebellion has meant to God in the rejection of his love and the frustration of his purpose. Sin involves separation from God . . . We have said that to be in Heaven is to be with God and with his redeemed. Hell is to be without God and without the fellowship of those who love him and rejoice in his presence. The farther we get away from God, the farther we get away from our fellows and from all that is good and true and beautiful. Hell is the state of infinite loneliness, desperate deprivation and final frustration."

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