The End of Christianity (34 page)

However
odious someone is, we now think it is wrong to boil them in oil, skin them alive, or beat them to death with sledgehammers. Again, why? Are we more sentimental or more tolerant of moral turpitude now than our forebears? No, I think that the unwillingness, at least in liberal democracies, to resort to the old medieval punishments is one of the few unquestionable examples of moral progress. The principle of retribution in its pure form was expressed in the
lex talionis
, the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The
lex talionis
equates justice with retaliation. After a crime, the moral order is restored when the authorities retaliate on behalf of the victim. The
lex talionis
now enjoys less prestige than it used to. As the poor milkman Tevye says in
Fiddler on the Roof
, if we always repay an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the world will be blind and toothless. Even in Texas, where executions are about as common as 100-degree days in Dallas, we are now beginning to see that payback and justice are not the same thing. Yet the traditional doctrine of hell preserves the lex
talionis
in its full ferocity. Unregenerate sinners must pay the price in full. Indeed, given the failure of apologists to successfully rebut the “imbalance” argument, it seems that the price of sin is paid infinitely more than in full.

2. In offering his own reply to the “imbalance” objection, Lewis interestingly admits that there would be an imbalance if eternity meant endless time. However, Lewis thinks that eternity should not be thought of as the infinite prolongation of time but as something else altogether, and he tries to develop geometrical analogies to explain his meaning. Here, I must confess that the usually pellucid Lewis completely confuses me. I am not sure at all what he is saying. If, like Kreeft and Tacelli, he is saying that eternity is a timeless dimension, then Lewis's response inherits the same difficulties as theirs. Otherwise, what does he mean? And shouldn't sinners at least get a second chance after death? Lewis says not:

I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. But a master often knows, when boys and parents do not, that it is really useless to send a boy in for a certain examination again. Finality must come some time, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when.

But if omniscience knows ahead of time that someone will not convert given a second, third, or a million extra chances, why even give him a first one? Why create him at all? So that his punishment in hell can amuse the elect?

3. Next Lewis addresses the problem of the frightful intensity of the torments of hell. He cautions us not to confuse the imagery with which artists and scripture have depicted the torments of hell with the actual doctrine. Of course, hell will be “something unspeakably horrible,” but Lewis puts more emphasis on the idea of destruction and privation than outright torture. This is all pretty vague, however. By “destruction” Lewis does not mean annihilation. In fact, he points out that souls may be intrinsically indestructible, and, further, that in our experience things are never utterly annihilated, only turned into something else, as the burned log turns into ash, heat, and smoke. It is hard to get really clear on just what Lewis is suggesting here, but he does hint at an interesting idea. Perhaps the damned do not see their situation as unendurable; this is only how it looks to the saved. The damned may even experience pleasure and no pain but still live in a wretched and utterly debased state. Maybe Lewis is getting at a point made by John Stuart Mill: Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Socrates's existence is so qualitatively superior to a fool's that it would be better to be Socrates, even when he is having a bad day, than Sarah Palin having a good day. Similarly, the elect in heaven would live in such a qualitatively superior state compared to the damned that they would infinitely prefer the discomforts of heaven (if any) to the pleasures of hell.

Did Augustine, Aquinas, Edwards, and all the other eminently rational teachers and thinkers quoted earlier really not mean it when they spoke of the tortures of hell? When they warned of the torments facing the unregenerate, were they perhaps merely indulging in rhetorical excess to frighten sinners into repentance? I see no reason not to take them as speaking absolutely literally. Even scripture often sounds quite straightforward. In Revelation, chapter 20, when it says that the damned will be cast into a lake of fire, it really seems to mean a literal lake of fire, not, say, that they will suffer the metaphorical burning of an eternally guilty conscience or something like that. As for the idea that the soul cannot be annihilated, is Lewis implying that souls obey conservation laws? According to traditional theology, the doctrine of
creatio continuans
, God maintains all things in existence at all times, and only has to suspend his creative input for an instant for things to cease to be. Surely, this applies to souls as well, and even if not, God can certainly leave the souls of the damned in eternal dreamless sleep, which is tantamount to not existing.

What about the intriguing idea that heaven is better than hell, not because the damned are in torment-indeed, they might be enjoying some sort of demeaning pleasure (maybe hell is like a giant Las Vegas casino)-but because of an infinite qualitative difference between the lives of the damned and the lives of the elect? Again, these suggestions are, perhaps unavoidably, quite vague, but they prompt an interesting query: Why is there such a qualitative difference between the lives of those in heaven and those of the ones in hell? Lewis seems to hold that what makes hell so hellish is the people who go there, not any tortures inflicted on them. While this is an improvement over the traditional doctrine of fire, brimstone, and devils with pitchforks, it raises many serious questions.

The idea that the damned make their own hell would be persuasive if the only people in hell were ones like the atrocious miscreant Lewis imagines. Surely, any place populated only by such types as brutal dictators, sadistic serial killers, slave traders, pedophiles, talk radio pundits, and big oil CEOs would be a hell, even if the accommodations were luxurious. But traditional Christian doctrine implies that vast numbers of ordinary and even saintly people go to hell. What finally condemns you to hell is not being bad but refusal to accept Christian salvation. Around the world many billions of perfectly respectable people have heard the Christian message but have chosen to remain Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, pagans, deists, atheists, and so forth. Lewis asked earlier about what we find tolerable or intolerable about postmortem punishment. Can we really find it tolerable that billions of people will be condemned eternally because they choose to remain true to their deepest beliefs?

A short list of some of the people who have rejected Christianity, and so presumably doomed themselves to hell, would include Mahatma Gandhi, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Hypatia, Marcus Aurelius, the Dalai Lama, Averroes, Moses Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Charles Darwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Clarence Darrow, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, A. J. Ayer, Jean Paul Sartre, and Mark Twain. A longer list would contain very many more of the greatest scientists, philosophers, artists, writers, statesmen, humanitarians, reformers, and philanthropists. Lewis assumes that everyone in hell is a total degenerate who will simply wallow in his own crapulence. On the contrary, according to traditional Christian doctrine, hell is full of good people.
¹⁵
If the worst that happens to them there is that they must eternally live with their own consciences and the fruits thereof, as Lewis seems to imply, how is that even a punishment? Would that not be heaven?

4. Lewis takes up the further objection that the saved cannot be happy contemplating the torment of the damned. Instead of countering, as did Tertullian, that the torments of the damned will gladden the saved, Lewis says that this objection rests on a dubious assumption:

At the back of this objection lies a mental picture of heaven and hell coexisting in unilinear time as the histories of England and America co-exist: so that at each moment the blest could say “The miseries of hell are
now
going on.” But I notice that Our Lord, while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity usually emphasizes the idea not of duration but of
finality.
Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story—not as the beginning of a new story. That the lost soul is eternally fixed in its diabolical attitude we cannot doubt: but whether this eternal fixity implies endless duration—or duration at all—we cannot say.

Again, we have the appeal to a timeless eternity, and it is still not clear what this is or how it obviates any problems. Also, it still will be the case for many of the saved that they will have friends and relatives who did not make it to heaven. Won't they miss them? Will they not still be sad, indeed eternally so, about the wretched fates of those whom they loved? How can this not detract from the bliss of heaven?
¹⁶

5. Finally, Lewis considers the objection that the loss of souls through all eternity means a defeat for the omnipotence of God. His reply is defiant:

And so it does. In creating things with free will, omnipotence submits from the outset to the possibility of such defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats of the Deity. I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; and that the doors of hell are locked from the
inside.

However, the “possibility” that Lewis speaks of is not a possibility but a certainty. God, being omniscient, knows from all eternity that vast numbers of humans will not be saved and will be eternally unrepentant and estranged from him. How many will be damned? Scripture says this: “Enter ye in the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matt. 7:13–14).

Here, then, Our Lord appears to be saying that a relative few will be saved and the vast majority will go to destruction. Over the entrance to Dante's Inferno there is an inscription that reads in part:

Sacred Justice moved my architect.
I was raised here by divine omnipotence,
Primordial love and ultimate intellect.
¹⁷

I am not convinced. Lewis, or someone, needs to explain to me why it is that the best plan that could be devised by omnipotence, primordial love, sacred justice, and ultimate intellect was a world in which many billions of human beings wind up in hell. Even if each of them is there because of his own free choices, it was God who planned this whole sorry scheme from all eternity, and so it is ultimately his fault. If the purported justification of this scheme appeals to the value of libertarian free will, I would have to say that free will in that sense is a commodity that is grotesquely overrated.

THE INJUSTICE OF PUNISHING BELIEF

I have so far not stated what I consider to be
the
most unreasonable thing about the Christian doctrine of hell, what I call the “doxastic requirement” for salvation. Christian doctrine has always imposed a doxastic requirement; that is, it has taught that to be spared hell you must
believe
certain things. That is, there are certain creedal assertions that are such that if you do not believe them, this is sufficient for your condemnation to hell. Even if the rest of your life were blameless, failure to believe these core creedal claims would be sufficient for your damnation. In other words, willful unbelief in the required propositions is a mortal sin. So you had better get it right.

What must you believe to avoid hell? Well, quite a bit, according to the traditional creeds. For instance, the Athanasian Creed begins as follows:

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic Faith is this.
¹⁸

There follows a
very
detailed list of abstruse Trinitarian tenets that one must “keep whole and undefiled” to avoid perishing everlastingly. For instance, if you entertain the slightest suspicion that in the Holy Trinity the Essence is divided between the Father and the Son, or if you harbor the least doubt that the Son was begotten before all worlds, then you are doomed to an eternity in hellfire. Indeed, when you consider that different churches and denominations have very different lists of beliefs required for salvation, it surprises me that any Christian who takes hell seriously can sleep well at night. How can you be sure that
you
are safe?

Creeds create a difficult problem: The vast majority of would be believers cannot even comprehend the recondite metaphysical formulae of many creeds (indeed, whether
anyone
can understand them is a legitimate question). How can you be required to believe what you cannot understand? In recognition of this problem, the Church has allowed people to affirm merely that they believe all that the Church believes and that the Church believes all that they do. It is hard to see how this helps. If someone were to tell me that the Church believes that “twas brillig and the slithey toves did hey nonny nonny awop bop aloo bop,” my affirmation that I believe what the Church believes would be empty. If I have no idea what you are talking about I cannot sensibly even agree with you. I might
defer
to you as I would defer to Stephen Hawking on M-theory, but agreement-a meeting of the minds-must be agreement over
some
comprehended content.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the creeds assert intelligible propositions, when is it culpable to
lack
belief in some set of propositions? When is the not having of some set of beliefs so egregious a fault that it is deserving of eternal damnation? Is willful unbelief a mortal sin? Saint Paul thought so. Paul famously asserts (Rom. 1:20) that unbelievers are “without excuse” because God's existence is “manifest” to unbelievers, yet they perversely persist in unbelief: