An Email

Sent to several friends regarding this column:

http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html

This was an interesting read. I'm writing straight from my notes here instead of organizing a true written response, so please be patient if it comes a little scattered.

First, I'd like some more clarity on what Green means by "not a place" but still "real experienced conditions." Does he mean, then, that heaven and hell are states of mind detached without any physical conditions? (i.e. in eternity we are disembodied, and our minds/consciousnesses are the only conduits of perception) This will lead quickly back to talk of the resurrection of the dead, which I didn't find much developed in this article, but in the way I understand heaven and hell, is the central fact. I can entertain the notion that hell is more a state of mind than a plotted place on a map, but whether its experienced with or without the body (i.e. whole person) is very important to distinguish.

Second, I think that Green overplays his hand very badly on two points. First, that the Western Christian imagery of hell-as-a-place was nowhere to be found before the Great Schism, and second, that the biblical language supports his pet theory that hell is within the presence of God. More on these later as well.

He's probably right that Sheol ought to be transliterated. That's about as much as I'm able to say, with my very little Hebrew, about translations in the O.T. He's certainly right about the Greek view of Hades paralleling that of the old Jews; Hades/Sheol is the abode of the ghosts of both the righteous and the wicked, but these ghosts are not whole people. They are echoes of the men, while (as it says in the Iliad) the men themselves lie in their graves. This is all quite different than the Platonic notion that the body is merely a temporary home of the real person, the leaving of which will provide a higher, more spiritual existence. To nearly all ancient people there wasn't really a life-after-death to speak of. With time, the Greek view became more nuanced. The particularly wicked had punishments imagined for them in Hades, and something like Elysium (still in the same "locality") was imagined for the blessed. The Platonic philosophers talked about the soul as the seat of existence, and believed it to be immortal, while other schools dabbled in something like re-incarnation. (You see this in Virgil, which I blogged about here.) And of course, as was often the case in Greco-Roman religion, none of these contradictions really bothered anyone. There was a comfortable jumble of possibilities in Hades, and no one really had anything staked on it. Life (except for a very few, like Socrates) was only really had in the body, and what came afterwards was a number of varied, but ultimately inconsequential possibilities.

In Jewish thought, hints of resurrection creep in by the late psalms and minor prophets, and there is a full blown expectation of it (though it wasn't the center of their religious hopes) by the time of the Maccabean uprising. Indeed, it was the subject of their dying words as they were executed in the temple. It's fairly well established that by N.T. times, the Pharisees and Essenes represented religious interests whose defining dogmas concerned the resurrection. For the Jews of Jesus' time, Hades was still the abode of the righteous and the wicked after death, but it was a stopping-house before a bodily resurrection. (And when I say Jews, I should note that there was pluriformity in Israel as well, although not to the extent of the rest of the Hellenistic world)

So, then for the Old Testament. Again, I can't speak for his specific accusations about bad translation and word study, but I think he's generally on the right track in his representation of the Jewish/Hellenistic interplay. I would make, in transitioning to the New Testament, one observation about Gehenna: no one seems to be able to mention the word (which appears in Hebrew and transliterated Greek) without the obligatory explanation about how it was Jerusalem's burning garbage heap, therefore the association with fire, therefore hellfire, etc. I can't find any evidence of this "fact" before the 19th century. It isn't present in the scriptures, the early church fathers, or any of the rabbinical literature I've read. I wonder if, like the bell attached to the high priest's ankles when he entered the Holy of Holies, or the low gate in Jerusalem that was called the Eye of the Needle, it's actually a Christian urban legend, something that might've come from the 19th century version of Wikipedia. All three of these "facts" would make sense given their context and clarify a confusion, but without seeing any real historical evidence for them, I think we have to leave them as theories. (If anyone has any solid historical evidence, please let me know, and I'll be happy to be corrected)

What then, do we know about fiery Gehenna? It might have actually been a burning rubbish-heap, or perhaps "going to Gehenna," like "going to Timbuktu" might have meant exactly what one would think it means from it's N.T. context. (Not going to the place per se, but to a separate, excluded place of eternal torment.)

I don't know how much we can take from the Lazarus parable. I strongly suspect that it tells us only that a locative heaven and hell were used as a story-telling device (like we use St. Peter at the pearly gates as a joke-telling device) and is not Jesus' systematic exposition of his views on the subject. Also, I'd like to know which passage in the Retractions of Augustine he's talking about. I don't remember anything about this, and don't have a copy at hand.

Onto some Greek...I make no claims to be anything other than barely competent, but I can spot a quack when I see one. Mr. Green is either overreaching his capabilities, or was taught very poorly. The preposition apo, in all dialects of Greek, means "from"/"away from," or "by means of." (It matches the Latin preposition ab/a almost exactly) Just this morning in reading Luke I translated verses saying "full of many people from (apo) all Judea and Jerusalem and the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they came to hear him and to be healed from (apo) their sicknesses. The passage from II Thess. could be read with a sense of apo instrumentally (the word from, with it's locative/instrumental vagueness would be the closest match) but to change it to the meaning of kata or dia (because of, on account of ) is to take a very bold liberty with the text. It's an interesting theory, but it's far from the closed case he makes it out to be. Calvin might be able to clarify this further if he has his Wallace Grammar nearby, which I do not.

Similarly, all of his talk about Tartarus is misrepresenting. Tartarus, in Homer, is just lower hell. Yes, it is the home of the banished Titans, but it is also the abode of Sisyphus and Tantalus. It's the seat of Tisiphone...it is Hell, if ever there was a Hell with a capital H. (I wrote about it in the Aeneid here).

In addition to his interesting but hardly conclusive theories about God as fire, Green does his worst work talking about energeia. Yes, energeia sounds like energy, and the two words do have common relatives. But translators are absolutely right to translate the word the way they do; it is most often the verb ergo (work, accomplish) with the preposition en tacked on. The Holy Spirit energei is the Holy Spirit working in us, and that, not some kind of electrical force, would have been the most accurate connotation. All of his talk about the energies of God is a retrojection of 20th/21st century language on texts that had no clue about them.

All of these language discussions don't really come together into anything more profound than "there appears to be variegated language in the New and Old Testaments about hell." This is not new information. The leap from all which is discussed before to Green's own theory rests entirely on the syllogism: God loves all unconditionally; Unconditional love couldn't possibly lead to separated eternal torment; Therefore God would not torment anyone eternally. Now, I probably wouldn't choose the word unconditionally here. God's love is unconditional, but in the same sense that his justice and his holiness are unconditional. If God is the great First Mover, he doesn't require "conditions" to fully be any of the essential qualities of his person. So in that sense, yes, God loves unconditionally. But does it mean that God will disregard all acts of choice, righteousness, wickedness, virtue, vice, and circumstance in his dealings with mankind, both corporately and person to person? I don't think there's any evidence that's true.

Here are the two things we know for sure from the New Testament: 1) There will be a resurrection of the dead. (1 Cor. 15 for an explicit account of this) and 2) Everyone will appear before the bema seat of Jesus. (A judge's bench) (Rom 14:10, 2 Cor. 5:10). We don't know what the judgement of Jesus will be, and we don't know who will get what. We should, if we have any decency, pray regularly for universal mercy. Wouldn't it seem wonderful to us if all was forgiven everyone? It may even be hard for us to imagine how a God whose essence is love could do anything otherwise, but consider our circumstances: We live in an age in which the principal measure of a person's life-story is success or failure in romantic love. (Try to imagine any novel without this as the driving theme if you don't believe me; now try to imagine inserting that theme into any ancient text.) Couple that with our profound ignorance of fear and evil. When was the last time any of us were truly afraid? We do, I believe, all remember some moment of real fear, perhaps being alone outside in the dark, or hearing footsteps downstairs that shouldn't have been there. Yet most of the time we eat safe, sanitized food, and we can drive out darkness with electric lights, stave off the cold with gas heating, and lock our sturdy doors to the conditions of most of historical humanity. And despite our wish to ignore it, there is evil. Indeed, if we let down our puffery and pride for half a moment and look honestly at how we've cheated and deceived, we can acknowledge how each of us really are split ourselves, not to mention the corporate (oppression by a group of people) or natural (tsunamis, hurricanes) evils. And thus we stand, an age living in denial of danger or evil, and overly enamored with shallow meanings of "love." Is it any surprise that we should be discomfited by the idea of real danger in the beyond, or of a containment of evil?

Again, let us pray for universal mercy. But let's not think that just because we don't like the idea of hell that we can erase it from our theology, just as we've done to the angels. (Another topic that was vague in the scriptures, over-played in the Middle Ages, and now written of as superstition today.) It's in thinking about the angels that I almost would subscribe to Green's theory, that the presence of God (see, by the way, Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, on the terror of the numinous is a searing pain to the mortal eye and mind. Anytime an angel enters the pages of scripture, his first words must be Fear Not...they certainly inspire fear! Yet does this mean that hell is the experience of our own poor choices? It is just as likely it means that the Holy, even when it comes in peace, is a terror...so what about when it comes in judgement?

Here's an interesting idea of what Hell might actually look like from N.T. Wright: Our distinguishing characteristic as living organisms is our partly divine heritage. We are animals, like mammals in most outward respects, but partly descended from the gods. We are, being made, in imago Dei, bearers of a divine likeness. The principal effect of sin (original and otherwise) is a defacing of that image. In fact, the further one is given into sin, the less Divine and more animal he becomes; the more he begins to bear the image of the idol he worships, be that lust, greed, or sloth. Wright suggests that Hell might be the final removal of the divine image...a giving over unto animal nature, to be tormented forever by being subjected to their own idolatry. (Like in Narnia, when the beasts that are given speech revert back to being just dumb beasts.) I like the reasoning behind this idea, though of course it's just a theory and no more absolutely proven than Green's...but isn't it curious that they move in such opposite directions? That one is the removal of the divine and the other is it's nearer presence?

The curious thing about this whole recent muddle over hell (and I still haven't read Rob Bell's book...is there anyone who has a copy?) is that it isn't nearly as controversial or interesting as the muddle we should be having over heaven. There may or may not be human souls in hell following the end of all things, but there certainly won't be human souls in heaven...the astounding truth of the resurrection of the dead is that heaven is coming here.