NOTE C. See vol. i. p. 129.
RECENT REACTIONS FROM THE TEACHING ABOUT HELL.
There is no doubt that there has been within the last forty years a great, and in large measure legitimate, reaction from the old—mediaeval and Calvinist—teaching about hell. But one who reads the early chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, or the Gospels, or other parts of the New Testament, in view of this reaction, will probably feel an uncomfortable sense that it has gone too far. It is worth while then to try and discriminate.
To put the matter in as brief a summary as befits a note, I should hold that the reaction has been legitimate so far as it has involved a repudiation of—
(1) the Calvinist doctrine that God has created some men, no matter whether many or few, inevitably doomed to everlasting misery. This doctrine is flat contrary to some particular statements of the New Testament (as to its general spirit) and is only a misunderstanding of others (see above, pp. 8, 29).
(2) any such crude idea of the divine judgement as that God condemns men for merely external reasons, e.g. because in fact, apart from any question of will, they were not baptized, or remained pagans or heretics. Such a conception is quite inadequate, for the divine judgement penetrates to the heart. God is a father: He is absolutely equitable: He judges men in the light of their opportunities. He will reject none whose will is not set to evil. 'This is the judgement that ... men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil' (John iii. 19).
(3) the tendency to exaggerate what is revealed to us, and what, therefore, we can say we know about the state of man after death. Thus (a) there is nothing really revealed to us as to the relative proportions of saved and lost. (b) It is certain that we only know of a probation for man here and now—'Now is the accepted time—now is the day of salvation.' And the absolutely equitable Father may see the conditions of an adequate probation equally in every man's earthly lot. It is therefore foolish to entertain, or encourage any one else to entertain, an expectation of any other state of probation except that which we certainly have here in this world. 'It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgement.' But if St. Peter could speak (as of a familiar subject) of the 'gospel' as having been 'preached' by our Lord's human spirit in Hades 'to the dead,' i.e. to those who had perished in their wickedness under the divine judgement of the flood: and preached with the intention that the judgement might be turned into a blessing and means of spiritual life—and he certainly does speak thus (1 Peter iv. 6, cf. iii. 19): I do not see how we can deny the possibility at any period, or in the case of any person, of an unfulfilled probation being accomplished beyond death. (c) Careful attention to the origin of the doctrine of the necessary immortality or indestructibility of each human soul, as stated for instance by Augustine and Aquinas[[1]], will probably convince us that it was no part of the original Christian message, or of really catholic doctrine[[2]]. It was rather a speculation of Platonism taking possession of the Church. And this consideration leaves open possibilities of the ultimate extinction of personal consciousness in the lost, which Augustinianism somewhat rudely, closed.
But to have convicted our forefathers of going, in certain parts of their teaching, beyond what was certainly revealed, affords no justification for doing the same ourselves in an opposite extreme; by asserting for example positively (a) that almost all men will be 'saved'; or (b) that there is probation to be looked for beyond death; or (c) that the souls of 'the lost' will be at the last extinguished. These positive positions are no more justified than those of our forefathers which we have deprecated. We must recognize the limits of positive knowledge.
And when we have come to the end of what a legitimate reaction from the teaching of our forefathers restores to us, in the direction of a 'larger hope,' we are still face to face with the fact of 'eternal judgement.' Men, as far as their individual destinies are concerned, are passing towards one of two ends, not towards one only—a divine judgement of approval or of condemnation; and both judgements are represented as final and irreversible; and they are the inevitable outcome of the moral law by which our probation is realized—that voluntary acts form habits, and habits stereotype into a fixed character. It is foolish to look to the process or moment of death for redemption from sin; for death, as far as we know, only transplants us with the character we have made for ourselves, and with continuous consciousness, into the unknown world; so that if in this life we have unfitted ourselves for God, we must find it out beyond death, and know there the full meaning of our awful miscalculation here. And the awakening of the 'lost' to what they have cast away—to the meaning of irreversible self-exclusion from the presence of God—is imaged as unspeakably awful; and their state is pictured in metaphors and phrases descriptive both of torment and finality—'outer darkness,' 'gnawing worm,' 'unquenchable fire,' 'eternal punishment,' 'eternal sin,' 'sin which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come,' eternal 'death,' or exclusion from eternal life, 'eternal ruin,' 'wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish.'
In face of all these sayings, it seems to me indisputable that 'universalism'—the teaching that there are to be none finally lost—is an instance of wilfulness. To speak of that which lies beyond death, even in the case of the worst and most impenitent criminal, as a place
'Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain—which must not be,'
is, I cannot but feel, in flat contradiction to the whole tone of the New Testament.
It is no doubt true that there is in the New Testament an expectation of a final unity of the whole universe in God, and that we find it hard to conceive the relation of lost souls in hell to this final unity. Certainly all legitimate avenues of dim conjecture that a very limited revelation allows to be kept open, ought to be kept open. Certainly we know in part—the partialness of our knowledge can hardly be exaggerated. But we must be true to both elements in what is disclosed to us; and Dr. Martineau has reminded us[[3]] how deeply 'the belief in a separate heaven and hell, and a corresponding distribution of men into only two classes of good and bad, friends and enemies of God,' though 'at first sight nothing can appear more unnatural and defiant of all fact,' is yet bound up with 'the inward look' of moral evil and the fundamental reality of moral choice. In fact it seems to be true to say that a really Christian Theism, and a really Christian doctrine of human freedom, are inseparable from the belief in the possibility of wilful sin leading to final ruin.
'It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgement'; and this judgement in the case of those of us who have wilfully hardened themselves, or remained loveless and love-rejecters, in face of the real offer of God to man in Christ Jesus, is a divine condemnation which takes effect in an eternal punishment, the bitterness as well as the justice of which the soul realizes, and which—if it does not necessarily mean an everlasting continuance of personal consciousness—is yet final and irreversible, and unspeakably awful[[4]].
[[1]] Summa, pars. 1, qu. 75, art. 6, 'Respondeo dicendum, quod necesse est dicere, animam humanam, quam dicimus intellectivum principium, esse incorruptibilem.'
[[2]] See Dr. Agar Beet's Last Things (Hodder and Stoughton, 1898), pp. 194 ff, and Gladstone's Studies Subsidiary to Butler (Oxford, 1896), part ii. pp. 260 ff.
[[3]] See Types of Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1885), ii. pp. 60 ff.
[[4]] The only passage in the New Testament which strongly suggests an everlasting persistence of personal consciousness of pain, is Rev. xx. 10, 'Shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.' This is explicit enough. But I am persuaded that all the numbers and expressions for periods of time in the Apocalypse are strictly symbolical. 'A thousand years,' 'forty and two months,' 'three days and a half,' 'day and night for ever and ever,' are expressions which have to be translated into some moral equivalent before they can be made the basis of literal teaching. Thus 'day and night for ever and ever' describes in a picture the completeness of the final overthrow and the anguish of the enemies of the Lamb. The symbolical character of the expression is further indicated by 'the beast' and 'the false prophet'—themselves symbolical figures—being with the devil the subjects of the torment.
Some will say that the deterrent effect of the doctrine of hell depends upon its being held to be a state of strictly endless conscious torment. I do not believe this is the case. The language of the New Testament is full enough of deterrent horror if we are faithful to it.