Like Hell

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.