Putting Away Childish Things
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
-1 Corinthians 13.11
Evil Spirits Are Lurking Everywhere?
The Southern Baptist preacher seized his handkerchief, patted his forehead, and beat the drenched piece of cloth down in his pocket before letting out one last glorious cry: “Accept Christ or burn in a demon’s hell for eternity!” He gasped like a lawnmower sputtering along until it finally shuts off. “Amen, preacher!” encouraged a believer, clearly trying to crank things back up. But the preacher’s thundering voice now shifted to a somber, soft one as he breathed into the microphone. He lamented the fate of the unsaved; they will all be left behind with the antichrist after believers meet Christ in the air during his second coming. From heaven they will see unbelievers in hell. Then, as he ended his lengthy sermon, the pianist played a heartrending melody that indicated the beginning of the altar call.
My heart was heavy, and it pounded.
Was it Jesus knocking?
My hands felt like flags quivering in the wind.
Was it Satan holding me back?
My eyes began to well up. As I hesitated and deliberated, a young man suddenly ran down the aisle, wailing. It multiplied the terror I experienced, causing the hair on my arms to stand up. The wailing sounded unnatural, as if it were coming from another dimension, as if it were not human. The preacher placed his right hand on the head of the unsaved — which caused the sinner to fall to the ground and shake convulsively. Whispers spread throughout the church.
A cool air drifted past me. “Did ya feel that?” someone in a pew behind me whispered to her neighbor.
After the church service, I walked outside and leaned on a flagpole. My eyes faced the ground, trying to make sense of those strange events. That cool air was weird, I thought. And it happened right after that guy’s shaking stopped. A fellow churchgoer issued a dire warning: “Do not touch that pole! Do not touch anything! A demon, an evil spirit, can posses anything!”
In other words, I had experienced an exorcism. I was around seven years old — a young kid surrounded by evil spirits that had the power to enter almost any material thing within creation.
Psychological Damage
Momentarily my faith in Christianity was strengthened. It all seemed so real as a child. But, as I grew older, experiences like the one above left me disenchanted for a number of reasons.
For one, I believe this particular strand of Christianity had hindered my own personal development before I arrived anywhere near the truth. And I am not alone: it has been psychologically damaging for countless others who have (or have not) de-converted. As the author of The Rapture Exposed shares in her book, many young children influenced by rapture theology were scared out of their wits when they returned home to find their family was not home too. Instead of wondering if their family had gone out to a local grocery store, their first thought under the sway of this destructive theology was as follows: Were they all raptured without me?¹ Such an experience resonates with me.
I must shamefully confess: I prayed for Christ to delay his coming for selfish reasons. I had to have my mother’s tacos on my seventh birthday! On a more serious note, I did not want to be left behind while friends and family met the savior in the sky. I could have been doing more productive things than being anxious about this fictitious belief, but why waste time learning science in order to tackle civilization’s big challenges when I know the world is destined for failure anyway? Time lost can never be recaptured.
Rapture theology is escapism par excellence. Barbara Rossing quotes the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, who succinctly sums up this hope of escape from a world beyond repair: “Individual survivors might be rescued, but the vessel itself was beyond hope.” Such a blatant indifference to the progress of human civilization and the human individual sustains a spiritual malaise that must not be allowed to flourish in the hearts of our children. I reject rapture theology based on its bad fruit for the two reasons mentioned above — its psychological damage on our youth and its encouragement to neglect human affairs.
In my early teenage years, I remember walking through red-tinted hallways illuminated by the flames of hell. A volunteer — dressed in a demon’s costume, a black cloak with a hood — snuck around hissing and gnashing his teeth. Others cried in agony; they were no doubt tormented from the licks of the paper flames. They distorted their bodies. Metal chains — perhaps gathered from Christian dog owners sympathetic towards this fiery message — clanged together. The passerby could not help but squinch and contract from so much manufactured horror. Holding hands, loved ones held each other closer and closer as they walked. Dressed in his dazzlingly white robe, Jesus appeared on the stage. He condemned Satan to the lake of fire before announcing his triumphant victory with outstretched arms. This play reignited my fear of hell.
But this time with less power.
Eternal Hell’s Moral Hideousness
Now let us take a brief glimpse of eternal hell’s legacy as a doctrine. Many Christians throughout history relished the thought of the unsaved burning in hell for eternity:
“Aquinas . . . thought that the enjoyment occasioned by witnessing the sufferings of the damned was one of the pleasures of heaven: ‘Sancti de peonis impiorum gaudebunt’ (The blessed will rejoice over the pains of the impious). This displeasing notion was advanced and defended with great tenacity over several centuries, and one of the points orthodox Calvinists and Catholics had in common.”²
No healthy-minded person would delight in seeing their daughter, son, or beloved spouse eternally damned. Consider the relationship between Charles Darwin and his wife Emma. Darwin wrestled with religious doubt for much of his life, especially after receiving a devastating blow from the death of his daughter. In a letter written to Darwin in 1839, a concerned Emma feared they would be separated in the afterlife. Her “anxiety remained a sad undercurrent throughout the marriage, her heartache and prayers increasing with his illness.”³
As a thought experiment, let us assume Emma, a faithful Unitarian, made it to heaven, but Darwin did not. How could she not be miserable knowing Darwin’s eternal fate? She could not bring herself to proclaim the same words as Aquinas above.
In one attempt to answer this concern, Christian apologist William Craig argued “God could simply ‘obliterate’ from the minds of the redeemed ‘any knowledge of lost persons so that they experience no pangs of remorse for them.’” Not only does this contradict what Aquinas, Tertullian, and some other Christians believed, but it leaves nothing of Emma whatsoever, for much of her life was shaped by her love for Darwin. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart eloquently restates this point, and he rightly calls out blissful ignorance for “moral hideousness” it is:
“To say that the sufferings of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed or, worse, increase the pitiless bliss of heaven is also to say that no persons can possibly be saved: for, if the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one’s knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one’s last bliss? Some other being altogether, surely: a spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection, the residue of a soul reduced to no one. But not a person — not the person who was. But the deepest problem is not the logic of such claims; it is their sheer moral hideousness.”⁴
Thomas Talbott, the author of The Inescapable Love of God, observes Craig’s argument for blissful ignorance turns God’s final victory into an elaborate hoax.⁵ To conclude this section, there is no way I can accept the eternal hell the Southern Baptist preacher proclaimed in the beginning of this post — or any other variant of eternal hell 58% of Americans say they believe in as a matter of fact. I learned about a rich stream of universalism (the belief that all will eventually be saved) that flourished for hundreds of years in early Christianity. The Alexandrian school illustrates for us a strong example. Universalism is the only afterlife theory in Christianity that can make sense of the dilemma I encountered with Emma’s experience. Those who promote eternal hell or annihilation have no answer.
Go-to Proof text
Matthew 25.46 remains one of the chief proof-texts for eternal hell:
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matthew 25.46).
Considering eternal hell’s sway over millions of Christian believers in the Bible Belt today, one may wonder why we should even question it. Note that within the first few centuries after Christianity’s birth the tables were turned; Basil the Great (329–379) reportedly wrote about the popularity of universal salvation in his Greek-speaking region:
“The mass of men (Christians) say that there is to be an end of punishment to those who are punished.”
Similarly, Augustine (354–430) wrote:
“ There are very many in our day, who though not denying the Holy Scriptures, do not believe in endless torments.”
So which tradition remains closer to the truth since we can trace both beliefs to ancient Christians? How were these Christian universalists interpreting Matthew 25.46? The Greek word aionios is the key, and it is translated in the NIV as “eternal.” Never-ending torment. That should end any debate, right? Well, not quite.
Josephus (37 C.E.-100 C.E.) and Philo (20 B.C.E-50 C.E.)—both Jewish scholars living in the century of Christ — used the term aionios to mean “a limited period of time.”⁶ This is how it was understood in the Alexandrian school (see Clement of Alexandria and Origen). The term itself is so tricky some translators leave the Greek term untranslated.
Well, there’s more to the story here behind this one verse alone. But I’ll stop here for now.
Works Cited
¹Rossing Barbara. The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation. Basic Books, 2005.
²Keith Parsons. “Hell: Christianity’s Most Damnable Doctrine.” The End of Christianity. Ed. John W. Lotus. Prometheus Books, 2011.
³James Moore. “Charles Darwin.” Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction. Ed. Gary B. Ferngren. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
⁴David Bentley Hart. “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creation ex nihilho.” Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics, Vol. 3, Number 1 (September 2015): 1–17.
⁵Thomas Talbott. The Inescapable Love of God. Cascade Books, 2014.
⁶David Bentley Hart. The New Testament: A Translation.
