‘In hope are we saved’

According to recent surveys, 60 percent of Catholics do not currently believe in the existence of hell. (Interestingly, roughly the same percentage of Americans believe Osama bin Laden is there right now).

Internet blogger Andrew Sullivan, pastor Rob Bell, and author J. Peter Nixon have all recently explored the trend of modern Christianity to move away from preaching and discussing hell in the pulpit and the classroom.

Christian Smith penetratingly argues that “moralistic therapeutic Deism” reigns today, especially among young people. For this segment of the population, religion is an aspect of life which is seen to provide positivity, balance, spiritual grounding and happiness for its adherents if one chooses to practice it.

While a life of faith does in fact aid in manifesting all of these realities, any “prosperity gospel” that unqualifiedly claims God wants us always to be comfortable, successful and unchallenged, or that rejects a prophetical call to eschew dimensions of the predominant culture around us, is not based on any New Testament texts that I’ve read.

Jesus is clear that “anyone who says even ‘You fool’ (Raca) will be liable to fiery Gehenna” (Mt 5:22). None of us can ever rest assured in our justification and practical moral ethics, but must instead always “work out our salvation in fear and trembling” (1 Cor 2).

Dante’s “Inferno,” Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters” and “The Great Divorce,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Goethe’s “Faust” and Sartre’s “No Exit” are among the classics that have treated the subject of hell. Rahner, Dulles, Kreeft and Benedict XVI’s favorite theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar have all written on the subject, the last of whom authored a fabulous little book entitled “Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?”

We all know well the brokenness of the human condition, the radical self-centeredness that epitomizes what I see as the three major elements to sin: First, the seductive and magnetic draw of putting one’s own interests before God’s and others’ (from Milton, “better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven”). Second, the tragic, grief-stricken, and deadening emptiness of supposed self-reliance (from Dante, “I did not weep, I turned to stone inside”). Last, the supreme stupidity and illogic of misplaced love of things and creatures in place of the Creator to which Jesus alludes in the parable of the wicked tenants (“Let us kill the heir, so we will then come to inherit the vineyard” — This is nonsensical. One stands to inherit nothing in such a scheme. Not a well thought out plan, gentlemen).

When human beings idolatrously cling to their own pain, sadness and desires, Dante’s words, while terrifying, speak to us as they have to generations of Christians. Our sinful race again and again chooses to “feed on the burning bile that rots one’s guts” and to “bow one’s face toward the icy mirror of sadness welling in the heart” rather than to abandon ourselves and our wills to the “love that moves the stars.”

As I tell my undergrads, if these words haven’t yet touched the very core of your experience, they one day will. But I also encourage them to rest assured, such horror and heartache aren’t the end of the narrative. As St. Paul encourages us, and Pope Benedict reiterates, “In hope are we saved” (Rom 8:24). Dante does eventually come to see the light of Beatrice in God’s presence at the end of the Paradiso.

If our decisions have lasting significance, if they really do matter, then an absolute rejection of God is a logical and necessary correlation. Love cannot be forced or coerced, it must be freely exchanged. And so we must have at least the potential to reject Ultimate Love knowingly, willingly and definitively; to remove oneself from it permanently. That is the real meaning of the hell of which the church warns us.

It is perhaps not theologically accurate to say that God condemns unrepentant sinners to hell, for “he wills that all will be saved” (1 Tim 2:4) and God’s will cannot be thwarted. Rather, he gives human beings authentic freedom, even to reject his words and commands, and will in that sense “judge” us accordingly. The optimism of the previous reference is always counterbalanced with the dire warning that “wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction” (Mt 7:13).

As C.S. Lewis puts it, there are in the end only two kinds of people: those who, even after struggling, say to God “thy will be done” and those to whom God, after hearing they want no part of him, eventually says in response “thy will be done.”

As evidenced by the wounds of Christ, transcendent love pours itself out even to the point of opening itself to such scorn and rejection. Hell is the theological language that Christianity uses to describe such a possible final rejection. It has an important and permanent role to play in the narrative of salvation history, even if we can, like von Balthasar and John Paul II, dare to hope that it remains an unfulfilled and “empty” possibility whose potential inhabitants the church has and always will ponder in silence. (cf. Crossing the Threshold of Hope, 186).

Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty at Sacred Heart University.