A Place Called Hell
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 13, 2008
I've been on a chat-line for UU ministers for about the past ten years now. Most of the time I stay in lurk mode, and every once in awhile I'll jump into a conversation. What generally happens is that a minister will toss out a subject, issue, or problem they're dealing with and then a bunch of us others will chime in with all kinds of wisdom and knowledge. As is the case with a lot of these kinds of chat-lines, you get a core of regulars who seem to have something to say on every subject that comes along; which always leaves me wondering, "Don't these people have sermons to write or something?"
I'm recalling this morning one round where the subject was how to deal with religiously orthodox or very conservative family members who are having difficulty with the fact that a member of their very own family is a UU minister. This is an issue, fortunately, I've not had to deal with. But in this one round of exchanges one of my colleagues shared the following: "I have a fundamentalist sister-in-law who told the entire family [not just the one who's a UU minister] once that she was sorry, and she would miss us, because she was going to be sitting in heaven watching the rest of the family roast in hell."
There was a time in my life when such a statement would have outraged me. Maybe it's the supposed mellowness of old age, but all I could do upon reading that was to shake my head in sadness. There is something truly sad about needing to be so right in one's own beliefs that you have to consign all those who are not in accord with you to a place called "Hell" - even if they are members of your own family.
It also occurred to me that it is sentiments like these that keep religious liberals from seriously examining such notions as hell or damnation at all. If hell is nothing more that a device with which to threaten non-believers, well then, to hell with it. This, in fact, was the conclusion I reached before I got out of college and headed off to a very theologically liberal divinity school. But, for reasons I hope I can shed some light on today, hell and damnation are subjects the religious liberals might well devote some serious attention to, which is what I'll attempt to do. So if anyone asks you what the minister at your friendly local UU church spoke about today, you can tell them it was hell and damnation.
We do keep the term hell around for its metaphorical value. In speaking or writing of World War II references will be made to the "hell of the Holocaust" or the "hell of Hiroshima". A particularly painful or tragic time in one's life will sometimes be referred to as a "journey through hell." Even a poorly tended stretch of highway is called "the road from hell." We can read Dante's Inferno or Milton's Paradise Lost and appreciate their portrayals of hell for their poetic or symbolic value. But hell is also very real to a lot of us - as the survey I'll now cite shows.
Last Sunday I spoke about a Pew Research Group's study on the current American religious landscape. If you can bear with me for another quick set of numbers today, I promise to lay off the stats for awhile after this. This is from a Daniel Yankelovich poll done for Time Magazine nearly 10 years ago about the views we Americans hold about the afterlife - and I doubt they've changed all that much over the past decade. To the question: Do you believe in the existence of heaven where people live forever with God after they die? 81% answered yes. To the question: Do you believe in hell where people are punished forever after they die? 63% answered yes. So heaven has an 18 point lead over hell in our latest tracking polls (and I've been watching way too much primary election coverage!)
But here's the interesting part. The next question in this poll was a multiple choice one with five possible answers: Immediately after death which of the following do you think will happen to you: Go to heaven; Go to hell; Go to purgatory; Be reincarnated; or Death is the end of existence. I could have come up with a few more options myself, but the Yankelovich people didn't consult me when they set this up. And among the results they got to their multiple choice picks, only 1% said they were going to hell. That's not surprising I guess. Who, after all, wants to acknowledge they think eternal punishment is in store for them? But consider this: Nearly 2/3 of our citizenry believe in hell but practically nobody thinks that they personally are going there! In the French philosopher, and atheist, Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit the central character declares that "Hell is other people." Apparently most Americans have their own variation on Mr. Sartre by thinking that hell is for other people.
Well, I did say I wanted to treat the subject of hell seriously and so far all I've done is play around with it. So, let's try a little seriousness. I believe that most of our beliefs about heaven and hell come from somewhere well beyond any specific concepts we may have of these alleged locales. They are, I feel, ultimately rooted in the human need and desire to believe that we live in a moral universe with certain fixed and transcendent moral principles. Consider this statement by Dr. Jerry Walls, a Professor of Theology at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, which - in contrast to the one I attended - adheres to a very conservative Christian theology. Dr. Walls: "I believe we need God, heaven, and yes, hell to make sense of morality. If there is no God, no heaven, no hell there is simply no persuasive reason to be moral."
Just so I'm playing with my cards up, I categorically reject that assertion of Professor Walls. But I do not reject it in the same way as I do the statement cited at the beginning of this sermon from the woman who said she'd watch the rest of her family burn in hell from her vantage point in heaven. The absurdity of that kind of remark isn't worth discussing. To use the threat of hell to coerce a certain kind of belief is nothing less than spiritual abuse and should be named as such.
But that not what Dr. Walls is doing; and while I reject his point of view, I'll give it a certain respect. He's not talking about Hell as punishment for so called "wrong beliefs." He's trying instead to deal with the age old problem of evil, and about the ultimate sources of morality. He's raising the question of whether or not we human beings are accountable for our misdeeds, our cruelties, our destructiveness in any ultimate or cosmic sense above and beyond that whatever kinds of human justice is handed out for them. I'll grant it's a reasonable question, even though I don't buy the Professor's answer.
From his perspective Hell represents the ultimate or cosmic accountability he feels needs to be in place in order for human beings to live with one another. He believes that all human morality is ultimately vested in a Supreme Being who retains the power to both reward and punish human behavior in this life and in the life to come. Absent such a Being - from this point of view - human morality is arbitrary and capricious and subject to the whims of whoever happens to be in power over other human beings at any given time in human history. This is why Dr. Walls feels there has to be a place called Hell. And if the survey I cited earlier is in any way accurate a good majority of our citizenry is with him.
The best way I can find to respond to the Professor is to take a little excursion into the history of our own faith tradition - this one on the Universalist side of the family. What marked the Universalists as they emerged out of the left wing of the Protestant Reformation was their belief that in time everyone would be saved - or reconciled to an eternity with a loving God - and that there was no Hell. They reasoned that however horrible and depraved a life one might have lived during a temporal earthly existence, a just and loving God would not send some to an eternity of punishment for it. Their earthly goal was to live as good and Godly an earthly life as they could, in accordance with the teachings and example of Jesus, and let God deal with eternity.
These Universalist Christians were, in large measure, reacting - in an almost mirror-like fashion - to the Calvinist Christians of their day, who saw God as a punishing Deity for all of us (and they meant all of us) who were born into original sin. As the original Calvinists saw it we all deserved to go to Hell, but God in his beneficence, might choose, or "elect" to save a few of us. The best known expression of this theology was Rev. Jonathan Edwards's sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" which he delivered in 1741, which was some time before the Universalists even got here. In it portrays human beings as hopelessly fallen sinners who are held over the pit of Hell by an angry God who could drop us in at any time. In that sermon - which goes on for 18 downloadable pages by the way - Rev. Edwards states: "There is no other reason why you haven't gone to Hell since you arose this morning but that God has held you up."
When the Universalists established themselves on these shores a few decades after Rev. Edwards day, they found his theology, and that of his followers, highly repulsive. So they countered with a loving God who would not send anybody to Hell at all; and they were able to muster their theological and Biblical arguments to bolster their position.
But even some of the Universalists were troubled by some of the really horrible kinds of human behavior they witnessed. And remember they were living in a setting, and at a time, where a conscious afterlife was assumed clear across the conservative to liberal religious spectrum. So you had, for awhile, a sub-set within 19th century Universalism who believed in a kind of "Universalist purgatory." If you were really bad you had to go to Hell for awhile to work off all your bad stuff, and then you were restored to full communion with God. This sub-set of Universalists were, in fact, call Restorationists. And while their ideas turned out to be short lived, they - like our Dr. Walls - were trying to find some just way to deal with the problem of human evil.
To stay with this bit of history for just a bit longer, by the end of the 19th century the Universalists were one of America's largest Protestant denominations before going into a long period of decline. In a way they were victims of their own success. As a moderating and liberalizing trend went through mainline Protestantism in America over the course of the early to mid 20th century the Universalists lost their corner, to put it in rather crass terms, on the liberal Christian market. In more and more communities you didn't necessarily have to go to the local Universalist church to find a moderate-to-liberal Christian congregation. So over the course of the 20th century the Universalists moved in a more humanistic direction leading up to the time of merger with the Unitarians in 1961.
Where does all of this leave us now? Where does it leave me? I'm grateful for the legacy of those early Universalists even though my world view is hardly theirs. I appreciate their basically optimistic spirit about human beings. I share it in fact. Our first Unitarian Universalist principle that affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person, is a really humanistic recasting of that old Universalist theology.
I value the Universalist emphasis upon the possibility of healing and reconciliation in this life regardless of how fallen, broken, devastated, or cut off from life one may be or feel at any point in this business of living. But I also have to wonder, if in their desire to counter the, well, depraved Calvinist notion of human depravity, damnation, and condemnation to Hell, the Universalists may have "over-corrected" as it were on the side of human virtue. Hell or no Hell, are there not acts and deeds, damnable acts and deeds of human depravity that go beyond any concept of human good - as held by our Universalist and Unitarian ancestors?
I don't need to belabor this point all that much. The statistics we get hit with about the rates of the physical and sexual abuse of children within the family alone are horrifying enough - just to go to one area of human evil. What greater violation of trust can there be than to suffer abuse, or even death, at the hands of the very persons you trust and look to for protection and safety? This past week we've seen the reports unfold of what is, for all intents and purposes, a sexual slave colony in Texas operating under the veneer of religion - where very young women, some the same ages of those in our ROPES class here, are forced into so-called marriages; and done so in a setting where they don't even know there are other ways of living and being. They have no frame of reference for even knowing that something isn't quite right here. This is truly evil stuff.
Well, I said I wouldn't belabor the point, so I'll let it go for now. I confess to having no clear answer to this question: Are there persons who, for whatever reason, are so cut off from this thing we call "inherent worth and dignity" that their hellish behavior renders them unreachable? All I know is that what can be done, and what has to be done, in the face of such behavior is to offer love and comfort to those left in its wake; and then hope and believe that over time such love and comfort will bring about at least some measure of healing and personal peace. I do believe - I have to believe - this is possible.
Sometimes I actually envy a person like the aforementioned Dr. Walls, who sincerely believes in and can make his case for a moral universe with a God who will ultimately comfort and reward those who are wronged and who will hold accountable and mete out divine punishment to the perpetrators - above and beyond our human attempts to deal with such. There has to be comfort in such a theology, as long, that is, as you believe you're not destined for Hell yourself.
But I have to go other places. I'll share a couple of markers I've picked up along the way as I start to wind this down for today. My first personal marker is Albert Camus assertion at the end of his best known novel The Stranger where he states that we live in a universe that regards us with "benign indifference." "The benign indifference of the universe" is the phrase Camus uses. We live in a universe that wishes us no harm - that's the benign part. It just doesn't care that we're here - that's the indifferent part. The universe is morally indifferent to our unexplained and unexplainable sufferings and misfortunes, including the ones we inflict upon each other. But - and I think Mr. Camus would agree with me on this - we do not, and we cannot, be morally indifferent to one another, however morally indifferent the universe may be to us.
This gets me to my second marker. It's a single line spoken by the late Joseph Campbell in his dialogues on mythology with Bill Moyers that were featured in the PBS series "The Power of Myth." Dr. Campbell: "Heaven and hell and all the gods are within you." This, by the way, is also my response to Dr. Walls. Whatever heavens and hells do exist, they are ones we human beings have generated; and over the course of human history we've seen plenty of both. Our codes of morality and ethics have all grown out of the heavens and hells that reside in the human psyche. By this I mean that in the course of human evolution we human beings became aware of both our destructive and our creative ways. As the need for a social order and for human community came about, we realized that neither human community nor human order is possible without a moral order as well.
So we developed codes of behavior and morality that would protect us from the destructive, or damned if you will, side of our nature - the hell within us to which Dr. Campbell referred. And, by the same token, we created structures and codes of behavior that would cater to and enhance the creative and nurturing and loving side of our nature - the heaven within us, as it were. As for the authority in which these moral codes were ultimately vested, well we ascribed them to gods and goddesses, or to a monotheistic Deity to which were ultimately accountable, and who possessed the power to reward and punish us. That's what gave the moral codes their teeth.
Whether or not there is some Force of Power beyond ourselves and greater than ourselves in which our codes of behavior are ultimately vested, I really don't know. I'll be speaking next Sunday on this whole notion of a Higher Power, and I'll pick it up then.
What I do know is that we have to confront and deal with the heavens and hells that reside in each of us. We need to recognize our capacity for the fears and hatreds and misunderstandings that can separate us from our better selves and turn us against our fellow human beings. Whatever we may each believe or not believe about the ultimate sources of morality, we need to be moral beings nonetheless. By the same token, we need to celebrate our creative and benevolent and loving and justice-seeking selves as well. And we do all this not for the sake of some future reward or punishment, but because we believe in the sanctity and sacredness of the life we experience right here and now, every time we draw a breath.
"Heaven and hell and all the gods are within you..." That is a very powerful statement about what it means to be human and about what it means to take responsibility for our humanity. We seek here, in the life of this congregation, to offer a human community wherein we can discover and celebrate what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels" of our being and of our nature. As we walk together on this common, human way, may we seek - in this blessed earthly existence of ours - to create "new heavens" as we "build eternity in time."
Stephen Edington
April 13, 2008
