5. Why bother to think about
Heaven and Hell?
Most people probably give them hardly any thought at all; and if they
do it tends to be in terms of the ancient three-storey universe, with
heaven above the earth and hell below it. They can’t be blamed for
thinking like this, of course, because that’s what the bible and the
creeds seem to say. And indeed there is nothing wrong with thinking
like this - so long as we don’t try to apply such ideas literally. If
we do, we end up with the sort of nonsense that has proved so
effective at putting most thinking people off Christianity altogether.
Heaven is traditionally thought of as ‘the place where God lives’,
which he shares with the angels, saints and chosen dead. Hell, on the
other hand, is somewhere that is completely separated from God, and is
the ‘home of the Devil’. Going to hell, the place of endless
punishment, was widely thought to be the fate of the wicked and the
unbaptised, and fear of hell was (and to some extent perhaps still is)
an important agent of social control. Hymns, paintings, stained glass
and poetry graphically depicted the waiting fires, and many people
(especially the gullible and the simple) were presumably suitably
chastened as a result. But hell today has little hold over anyone, and
tends to be mentioned only in jokes. Civilised adults don’t make jokes
about truly painful subjects, and because jokes about hell are not
thought to be on the edge of acceptability it shows that hell has, for
almost everyone, lost its horrors. Apart from fundamentalists and some
evangelicals hell no longer seems to matter because it is no longer
taken seriously.
It is against this background that the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven
remains for many one of the embarrassments of the Church year.
Proclaimed loudly (and sometimes pictorially as well) on the
notice-boards outside churches, it means that passers-by are
confronted with what seems to be yet another piece of evidence that
Christians are either half-witted or insane. The impression given is
that Jesus was an early astronaut, with the crucial difference being
that unlike his immediate successor Yuri Gagarin, who returned to
earth, Jesus simply kept on going. It’s inevitable that the question
as to whether he’s still travelling will get asked: even on the most
optimistic view, the 2000 light years he’s been on the move means that
he’s barely even begun his journey across the Milky Way, which is
itself an infinitesimal part of the universe as a whole. At this rate,
it’s going to be (literally) aeons before he gets to heaven!
To put it in those terms is to risk the wrath of the literalists, but
it’s worth doing because it shows the complete lunacy of thinking of
Heaven as a place. In the days when little was known about the
universe, such an idea may well have been reasonable: to hold it now
is simply to invite ridicule. Heaven is not a place, hell is not a
place: they are spiritual rather than physical realities. This doesn’t
mean they’re not real, but it’s the sort of reality explored by poets
and painters and novelists, rather than cosmologists.
A literal understanding of hell brings with it the very real
difficulty about the kind of God who would be willing to inflict
unimaginable torment on his creatures throughout the whole of
eternity. Whatever the merits might be of punishment over a limited
period, there can surely be no possible justification for everlasting
punishment. But in the same way that public hangings and floggings
were popular spectacles (and doubtless would be again, if they were
provided) there are good reasons to think that very many people
(including Christians) get considerable satisfaction at contemplating
others ‘getting their just deserts’ - and if this goes on
indefinitely, so be it. The idea of hell, in other words, has an
unhealthy appeal to the baser instincts of disturbingly large numbers
of people, and on these grounds alone its fading away would be
welcome.
The traditional view of heaven and hell being our pay-off at the end
of life, either reward or punishment as appropriate, rested on the
idea of judgement, which in turn required a judge. The problem is that
the sort of God involved, the God of theism, has come to seem less and
less plausible to more and more people. A God who keeps a tally of
each person’s deeds, putting ticks and crosses against them, and
entering them in a sort of celestial log book is seen by most adults
as about as ludicrous as the idea of heaven being a place. However,
once the spatial dimension is removed, once we stop
talking about supposedly physical things and move into the realm of
spiritual realities, the whole thing starts to fall apart.
But in fact, if we take the spiritual seriously in this way, heaven
and hell cease to be matters of speculation, and become actual and
immediate. If we stop thinking of them as future states or places, and
instead look on them as ways of understanding our everyday lives here
and now, then heaven can be thought of as the state we are in when we
are at peace, and hell the state we are in when we are in torment.
This means that acting in ways that are destructive and hateful are
guaranteed to put us in hell, whilst acting in ways that are
constructive and loving can bring us to heaven, the realm of God. Such
‘demythologising’ means that heaven and hell are seen, not as
metaphysical realities but as regulative ideals, to be understood not
literally but figuratively and creatively.
The result is that although most people who reflect on heaven and hell
and find the traditional picture, literally understood, so incoherent
that they are unable to do anything with it, this can be seen not as a
problem but as an opportunity. Far from meaning that heaven and hell
are no longer important concepts, this may be just the spur needed to
help people think more carefully about the relationship between the
spatial and the spiritual, and in the process help them move beyond
the idea of a theistic God. In turn this may make them more
sympathetic to many of the problems that religious outsiders have with
regards to Christianity, and in so doing may help it become a great
deal more open and inclusive – and intelligent.