This is not a blog about hell, that topic's
been done to death...
But there is a flip-side to the discussion and it's about life. Absolute life.
Remember when we were kids, playing all
day on long summer days, until the sun went down? Remember our hot
sticky bodies, and how they ran and ran and hid and ran again, and
never felt they could or would ever stop?
A child's body is programmed to
exponential growth. It is flush with healthy cells dividing and
redividing, pumping out growth all over the body and on a nonstop
basis. I think this is one reason death so often comes as a
shock to children. It literally does not fit with their body-world
and has to be explained to them.
The news can be devastating. This is why we invent comforting tales like, "Don't worry Grandma
is in Heaven, looking down on us, smiling and happy."
On a recent visit to the family
dermatologist (don't worry, only a minor problem!) the doctor was
eager to talk about his specialism. He said contemporary research
showed there were lots of stem cells in the adult body, capable in
principle of providing fresh growth for all the body's organs. But
they remained inactive, while the aging, defective and dead cells
accumulated. Preventing aging, he said, could simply be a
matter of "taking out the garbage."
Whether this is true or not it sheds
light on the unrelenting medical interest in curing us of...death.
Is this a theological concern? Does it
perhaps derive its roots from the Hebrew and New Testament notion of
life?
The Book of Wisdom tells us "God
created us for incorruption....but through the devil's [the
adversary's] envy death entered the world" (2:3-24). Jesus said,
"I came that they may have life and have it to the full."
(John 10:10). If Christ overcomes the devil (the adversary) then he
fulfills God's created project of life....
Western Christians are not used to
thinking about this human body-existence as one day over-brimming
with life. Rather we have the default thinking from which the Grandma
story above derives: a two-tiered cosmos with some other heavenly
space above this one constituted by a totally other, nonmaterial,
purely "spiritual" existence--that's where we will find
"life"...
Yuk.
I say "yuk" really for three reasons. First, it is contradicted at multiple points by the biblical vision of life: e.g., the Lord who "formed the earth and made it...didn't
create it a waste, [but] ... formed it to be inhabited," (Isaiah
45:18). Second, the mental construct of that perfect world above can only be created by negative pairing and opposition, "spiritual" against "material," "heaven" against "earth." Essentially it's a mental trick and a perverse one. Thirdly and simply, it goes against our first fresh instinct
that life should live and not die. It contradicts those hot sticky
bodies filled with fun and hope and joy. After that primordial child-time
any concept of death is going to be a contradiction to the body-self,
and I don't think a good Creator would make that sensed contradiction
a false sense!
The very first systematic theologian of
Christianity was a man named Origen who lived and taught in
Alexandria, Egypt, in the early part of the third century. His
thought was framed in the Greek philosophical world, especially
Middle Platonism. Despite the formally eternal, other-worldly horizon
of this thought (again think Grandma's heaven...) Origen was a superb
biblical exegete and sought in all things to be faithful to
scripture. That meant he maintained the truth of resurrection (which
is absurd in Platonism). But more even than that he believed in the
final restoration or return of all things to God (apokatastasis), including even the devil! In which case of course hell itself must
be non-eternal. In fact Origen held to the medicinal or restorative
character of all spiritual suffering including that of the "damned."
As he put it, "Each sinner kindles his own fire...," and God
achieves nothing by force or imposition, but by discipline, persuasion, instruction.
What a tragedy that the horizon of
salvation thinking in the West would not be Origen's redemptive,
scriptural and holistic vision, rather Augustine's narrow,
legalistic and punitive one! I think we can reasonably ignore
Origen's Greek metaphysical framework and re-read him in a materially
grounded, culture-and-body process (one in which all the violence of
human relationships is undone and overcome). But it is much more
difficult to separate Augustine's concept of individual election from
an other-worldly framework. A private legal decree by God can never
be known in any final real or historical way, so the matter of who is
saved must, by definition, find its answer in another world. This world, this earth, goes by the by.
It's telling that one of the figures who tried to get Origen's view condemned in the East was the Emperor
Justinian: from the absolute state's perspective if you get rid of
absolute punishment how can you possibly endure? Augustine's theology
fits the interests of the state much better. But now people are less
and less willing to be coerced either by God or by the state, but they
are open to being persuaded by life and its immanent meaning.
In which case Origen's
affirmation of life as absolute may be due for revival. Perhaps we
should be thinking of taking out the theological garbage as well as
the biological!
Tony Bartlett, T&P Theologian-in-Residence
