c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Pope John Paul II’s recent discussions of heaven, hell and purgatory have stirred up an ancient theological debate: Is hell a real place of burning fire, or a state of mind reflecting a dark, cold emptiness distant from God?

In his weekly Vatican speech in late July, John Paul said hell is”the state of those who freely and definitely separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.” Although the pope was expressing the view spelled out in the Roman Catholic Church’s catechism, U.S. tabloids seized on the description of hell, calling it”shocking.”Some evangelical Protestant leaders expressed misgivings about the implication hell is an abstract separation from God rather than a literal lake of fire as described in the biblical book of Revelation.”My concern here is the temptation to make hell a state of mind, to psychologize hell,”said Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.”As attractive as that may be to the modern mind, that is not the hell of the Bible.” Hell’s once burning popularity has indeed cooled off. Polls show 70 percent of Americans believe in heaven while only 50 percent believe in hell. Few of those surveyed who believe in the nether region think they’re going there.

Evangelical Christians offer a sterner view of salvation and damnation. A Southern Baptist Home Mission Board study in 1993 estimated 70 percent of all Americans are going to hell, based on projected numbers of those who have not had a born-again experience.”Historically, hell has been portrayed in evangelical sermons as fire and brimstone,”said Timothy George, dean of the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.”The most we should say is that hell is a place of unexplainable mystery. The reality is probably far worse than our most vivid imaginations can conjure up. The reality of both heaven and hell are both greater than we can express.” While other conservatives lament the lack of hellfire preaching, George notes that at times evangelicals have overdone it.”While it’s very important to teach and preach about the reality of hell, it should be done only with evangelical tears,”George said.”There is sometimes a kind of gloating that people are broiling in hell. I don’t think that honors God or reflects the love of Jesus. We should shed tears over those who are perishing. Sometimes I think that’s been missing.” Heavenly happiness offers a better approach to evangelism than how hot it is in hell, George said.”We ought to focus on heaven and not lose sight in focusing on what the temperature is in hell,”he said.”We ought to not lose sight of the alternative, which is eternity with God in heaven.” The pope’s comments on hell came a week after a teaching on heaven, which, he said,”is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds but a living and personal relationship with the Holy Trinity.””You have to start with heaven when you talk about hell,”said Bishop David E. Foley of the Catholic diocese of Birmingham.”To be where Jesus is, is heaven,”Foley said.”It’s a state of being. If you turn away and refuse this relationship with Christ, if you give it up, then there’s nothing for you. You then live in a state of oblivion. That separation from almighty God is hell. To be in separation from God for eternity is hell.” The Bible’s descriptions of hell are to be used as a warning, not as a thermometer, Foley added.”When we talk about the fires, the fire is a mental fire, for all eternity, to be separated and in oblivion. What could be more burning than that? Fire is not just a physical fire. It’s the remorse that it could have been different. The fires of hell that Christ speaks about are the fires of separation from God. You can’t just say it’s a place of physical flames. The state of definitive self-exclusion is called hell.” Human ideas about hell were in still in ferment as the Bible was being written. The theological concept of hell has a rich cultural heritage, according to Alan Bernstein, professor of history at the University of Arizona and author of “The Formation of Hell” (Cornell University Press).

The ancient Hebrews focused on the afterlife during their Babylonian captivity, when they experienced the torment of ungodly enemies who seemed to have an unjustifiably good life on Earth, Bernstein said.”With the Babylonian exile, the Jewish community had certain questions about divine justice where they desired to see God punish Israel’s enemies,”Bernstein said.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

During the Babylonian exile, the Jews were exposed to Zoroastrianism, which asserts there is an eternal struggle between good and evil, with good triumphing in the end. The Hebrew concept of Sheol, the place of the dead, may also have been influenced by the Greek mythology of Tartarus, a place of everlasting punishment for Titans, a race of gods defeated by Zeus, Bernstein said.”That along with the Zoroastrian notion that good triumphs and evil is destroyed, all of this gets mixed up and debated in the cosmopolitan Hellenic world,”from about 300 B.C. to A.D. 300, Bernstein said.”Those influences combine with Hebrew speculation about an eventual comeuppance to those who live in wealth of the world.” In translating the Bible from Hebrew to Greek, the Greeks used the terms Tartarus, Hades and Gehenna. “It’s clear in Greek thought, Hades is not a place of punishment; it’s where the dead are separated from the living,” Bernstein said. The term Gehenna referred to a ravine outside Jerusalem that was used as garbage dump. In the extrabiblical but widely known book of Enoch, it was the place where fallen angels were punished by fire, Bernstein said.

These perceptions of hell were all at work in the culture of the Middle East and the Roman Empire that Jesus was born into, he said.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In 410, St. Augustine defined four states of afterlife: those so good they go to heaven, those so bad they go to hell, those who deserve some relief in their eternal torment, and those who deserve to be lifted out of torment after making up for sins they were sorry for. That set the stage for the doctrine of purgatory in 1237, Bernstein said.”It seemed generous and understanding and merciful,”he said.

Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s”Divine Comedy,”completed shortly before his death in 1321, pictures an imaginary trip through hell, purgatory and paradise.”It was the height of an era of imaginative elaborations on what the details of the afterlife might be like,”Bernstein said.

The Bible contains a litany of colorful images of hell as both fire and darkness, as in Matthew 25:41, which refers to”the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,”shortly after Matthew 25:30 refers to”the outer darkness”where”men will weep and gnash their teeth.” It is hard for humans to conceive of hell as being both fire, which gives off light, and darkness, George said.”I don’t want to lessen any of those images,”George said.”It’s so real our most lurid imagination cannot comprehend the depth of suffering.” The point is that hell is very real and very terrible, Foley said.”Hell for me would be I would never see God,”he said.”That would be the greatest punishment.”

DEA END GARRISON