Many of my readers might be surprised to learn that I believe in the doctrine of hell.
Universalism is very appealing, and given my experiential and intuitive sense of divine love, as well as the splendid description of the same by Julian of Norwich, I simply cannot understand the notion that God is in the business of damning souls. I think the notion of damnation, of divine wrath meted out to the impenitent, is mostly a caricature of our very human thirst for revenge and punishment projected onto eternity.
Even the Bible subverts the notion of hell-as-punishment. “Perfect love casts out fear,” notes the author of the first letter of John. Jesus may have used hyperbolic language to describe the separation of the “sheep” from the “goats” and to depict hell as a place of eternal torment where “their worm will never die nor their fire be put out,” but he also tells parables of the prodigal son or the widow searching for her lost coin, where the emphasis on divine love and mercy clearly trumps any human fear of retribution. Really, only the Revelation to John leaves the reader with a truly harrowing sense of damnation, as the author notes how “anybody whose name could not be found written in the book of life was hurled into the burning lake,” — but the entire book of Revelation is little more than an acid-trip-metaphor that declares God’s judgment on the time in which it was written; when we realize this, its potency as “prophecy” of the end times loses its sting.
Christian progressives and liberals will all be nodding with my fairly by-the-book deconstruction of divine retribution. How, then, can I turn around and say I still believe in hell?
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