I refer to the survey under the heading ‘Maltese Catholics: a la carte believers?’ which appeared on MaltaToday 4 April 2010. I note that 52.3% of those surveyed don’t believe in Purgatory and 26% do believe in Hell.
This disturbing fact made me recall that about 15 years ago, the Church of England abolished Hell: or at any rate, the hell we have been familiar with for the past 2000 years. No longer are sinners who die unrepentant tormented for all eternity in a fiery furnace.
A report at that time called ‘The Mystery of Salvation’ expressed regret that Christians had been frightened in the past by such sadistic images of horrible suffering that made God appear a cruel monster rather than a kind old man.
Looking at it objectively, it appears that this is an attempt to project the Christian message more credible to a sceptical generation – results of surveys confirms this.
The terrifying depictions of Hell by painters such as Hieronymus Bosch come from an age, like that when the Gospels were written, where bodily torment in the form of torture, deaths, plague and disease were a common occurrence and therefore readily sprang to mind.
In our era, despite the ubiquity of the TV camera, death and disease are hidden behind a screen of good taste. We may talk about such things but rarely, if ever, do we see pictures in the last stages of terrible diseases that still stalk our planet.
‘Hell’, says the report ‘is total non-being’.
It is not surprising therefore that more and more people are today paying less and less attention to what awaits them beyond the grave if the worst in store for us sinners is “total non-being”. A good percentage of us are quite happy with the idea of total non-being. The thought of eternity gives us agoraphobia; we are happy to do without Heaven as well as Hell. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It also accords with the indulgent ethos that now prevails in our modern society. Judgment is out of fashion, guilt is a dirty word. There is always an excuse or an explanation if we are out of line. Parents hesitate to punish their children, teachers to discipline their pupils. Everything is relative.
The report stipulates that to the Christians, the concept of sin is not developed by either men or women, but comes from divine revelation.
It is from the Gospels that Christians learn what is right or wrong. Much of what is commanded in the gospels is hard to take. It is not always easy to love one’s neighbours, almost impossible to love one’s enemy! Few of us are instinctively humble or kind.
Yet the values incorporated in our laws are mostly taken from the Christian Gospels. To abandon such values leads to serious malfunctions. Being true to ourselves is not enough. Our conscience can easily be influenced and changed. The rights of others are not self-evident and without the admonitions of the Gospels, it would be only too easy to push them aside.
We can’t just pick and choose when assessing the truths of the scripture. “Christianity is a system, a consistently thought-out and complete view of things. If one breaks out in a fundamental idea, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces.”
Either the Gospel is the world of God, or it is not. The reading of scripture suggests a very real danger of damnation. It is real that Christ is trying to get across the message that the unrepentant sinner is in real danger of ending up somewhere extraordinarily unpleasant. There are at least 15 references to Hell and damnation in the Gospel of St Matthew alone. If your right hand should cause you to sin, better cut it off for it will do you less harm to lose one part of you than to have your whole body go to Hell.
Hell must exist for the Christian hypothesis to make sense. Christ died for us to save us. Save us from what? Saddam Hussein? South African apartheid?
Or did he not rather die to save us from the ‘eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels’? (Matthew; 25)
The powerful images referred to earlier on were probably chosen to suggest something just as terrible if not worse. There arise questions that are a matter of theological speculation. They will be answered; if there is one, in the world to come. Of value to all – Christians and non-Christians alike – is the idea of individual moral responsibility inherent in the idea of hell.
We are saved or damned not as a society but as an individual. Some idea of the suffering promised in that life to come – whether it be from the acute torment of the heat from a fiery furnace or the just total non-being will be encountered in the here and now.
For the man with a guilty conscience, Hell is not other people. Hell is himself
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