Hell became a source of tremendous controversy last year around the publication of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins. For better or worse, Bell forced Christians to reconsider the ways we conceptualize hell and the Bible passages we use to support them. But Bell by no means broke new ground in offering alternatives to the classic or traditional way of thinking about hell. C.S. Lewis provides very cogent arguments for hell not as a place but as a state of being. These arguments, in turn, take shape around Lewis’ assertion that the Christian life is primarily about a relationship with the living being we call God. Hell, within Lewis’ theology, is the inevitable end result of living with a particular posture toward God. In God in the Dock, Lewis famously states, “The gates of hell are locked from the inside.” In other words, hell is populated by those who, in life, wanted nothing to do with God. In death God has simply given them what they wanted.
In Mere Christianity, Lewis says this:
“…Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse —so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.”
Here it sounds as though Lewis agrees with Bell on one hand (“Hell is of our own making”). Yet he contradicts those who go on to conclude that hell is temporary, imaginary or metaphorical. As Lewis puts it, every human being was created to live forever. The real question is whether we will live forever in the company of the God whose company we’ve embraced here and now. Or whether we’ll get in eternity the thing we’ve demanded on earth: to be left alone. If you want God to leave you alone now, why would the prospect of God leaving you alone forever offend you? If on the other hand you want God’s company forever, God invites you to start enjoying it now.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Repent
If I could summarize the season of Lent in one word, it would be repentance. We typically associate repentance with fire-and-brimstone preaching and guilt trips. Being reprimanded for doing things we want to do but know we shouldn’t. We associate repentance with that feeling that Brian Regan so aptly expresses: “You’ll never be right no matter what you say!” Never being right.
There’s nothing appealing about repentance when you think about it like that. But what if repentance wasn’t so much beating yourself against an impossible standard as it was responding to the love of someone you really wanted to be with? What if that person already loved you, and you just wanted to be the person they saw when they looked at you? In the movie As Good as it Gets, Jack Nicholson plays Melvin, an author who’s a lifelong bachelor and lifelong sufferer of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. His life follows an idiosyncratic routine over which he has utter control. He’s also completely alone. Then he meets and falls in love with a single mom, Carol, played by Helen Hunt. And in order to get close to her, he has to upset the careful balance of his life. Melvin’s routines and rituals are so powerful that it’s almost impossible for him to change. But the possibility of love – giving and receiving true love – is an opposing force strong enough to turn him around. At the end of the film, when Carol has had about enough of Melvin’s particular brand of crazy, he asks her to give him another chance. And he says, “You make me want to be a better person.”
The thing that motivates us to repent is the love of God. A God who loves us because he called us into existence. A God who knew us before we were born. Knows the number of hairs on our heads. Knows just how selfish and broken and afraid we are. And loves us anyway. Repentance is change. Changing your mind. Changing your course. Turning and returning. Repentance isn’t an escape clause from the fires of hell. Repentance is coming back to the relationship you were born for.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis puts it this way:
“Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.”
Lewis goes on to say,
“…the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christlife inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us…”
Don’t waste your time and energy trying to be good. Just stop running. Turn around. And let God’s love do the work. Repent.
There’s nothing appealing about repentance when you think about it like that. But what if repentance wasn’t so much beating yourself against an impossible standard as it was responding to the love of someone you really wanted to be with? What if that person already loved you, and you just wanted to be the person they saw when they looked at you? In the movie As Good as it Gets, Jack Nicholson plays Melvin, an author who’s a lifelong bachelor and lifelong sufferer of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. His life follows an idiosyncratic routine over which he has utter control. He’s also completely alone. Then he meets and falls in love with a single mom, Carol, played by Helen Hunt. And in order to get close to her, he has to upset the careful balance of his life. Melvin’s routines and rituals are so powerful that it’s almost impossible for him to change. But the possibility of love – giving and receiving true love – is an opposing force strong enough to turn him around. At the end of the film, when Carol has had about enough of Melvin’s particular brand of crazy, he asks her to give him another chance. And he says, “You make me want to be a better person.”
The thing that motivates us to repent is the love of God. A God who loves us because he called us into existence. A God who knew us before we were born. Knows the number of hairs on our heads. Knows just how selfish and broken and afraid we are. And loves us anyway. Repentance is change. Changing your mind. Changing your course. Turning and returning. Repentance isn’t an escape clause from the fires of hell. Repentance is coming back to the relationship you were born for.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis puts it this way:
“Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.”
Lewis goes on to say,
“…the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christlife inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us…”
Don’t waste your time and energy trying to be good. Just stop running. Turn around. And let God’s love do the work. Repent.
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