After Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces on May 1, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee had a message for his corpse: "Welcome to hell, bin Laden."
Huckabee is a fundamentalist Christian. He was the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Southern Baptist State Convention. So his views on Hell, as a place of eternal torment, with gnashing of teeth and the burning of unquenchable fire, fit well within his tradition, which stresses a literal interpretation of scripture.
Of course, as a fundamentalist, Huckabee would also have to believe that, as a Muslim, there was no way in Hell Osama was going anywhere but Hell [Dash] the repository for all who do not accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Under this theology, Osama would have plenty of company, including Buddha, (eventually) the Dalai Lama and Gandhi.
And that's where fundamentalist preacher Rob Bell draws the line.
Bell, the leader of the Mars Hill Bible Church, which typically draws 8,000 to 11,000 parishioners every Sunday, dropped a bombshell into a religious community that believes in the inerrancy of scripture. In "Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived," he claims that the belief in hell as "conscious, eternal conflict," is a "misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."
And with those words, Bell ignited his own inferno in the evangelical community. Christian blogs were afire with criticism of Bell's assertion. Blogger Karen de Young spoke for many, writing: "We need the doctrine of eternal punishment. Time and time again in the New Testament we find that understanding divine justice is essential to our sanctification. Believing in God's judgment actually helps us look more like Jesus. In short, we need the doctrine of the wrath of God."
Bell, fundamentalists charge, has left the fold and become a Universalist, an assertion Bell denies.
"Love Wins" reads like a breezy, conversational sermon that focuses not on hell and damnation, but on an eternal life, which, Bell writes, "is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of live lived now in connection to God."
That's a vision that sits well with many denominations, including Episcopalians and Catholics. "Our theology doesn't posit the devil-with-the-pitchfork mentality as much as it does a state of a loss of grace," said the Mark Suslenko of St. Anthony's in Prospect. "When it comes to our eternal life, being thrust into one element or another is not what God does. It's what we choose," he said.
But Hell offers an effective way to "control people through fear," said Peter S. Hawkins, professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, which made it effective. Hawkins maintains that scriptural references to Hell are few. "It was not Jesus' method or message. This notion of an eternal punishment of torture is obscene to me."
But Hell has had a hold on the human psyche for centuries, if for symmetry alone. If the good guys get heaven, the bad guys must get its antithesis. The Christian tradition is rich with searing imagery of Hell's grisly appointments. It got help from artists and writers, particularly Dante, whose elaborate treatment of the Inferno would scare the evil out of anyone.
But over the years, writers and the general public has grown dubious of Hell as an exit ramp on the after-death highway. Only 59 percent of Americans believe in hell, compared with 74 percent who believe in heaven, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"What is hell?" T.S. Eliot asked. "Hell is oneself." The more misanthropic Jean Paul Sartre had a different idea. "Hell is other people," he wrote.
For Yale's Hawkins, John Paul II's depiction of Hell, articulated in front of a general audience at the Vatican in 1999, is the keenest, and most sensitive he has heard. "Rather than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy," John Paul said. Hell, he added, is "a condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life."
But that view is at extreme variance, not just for fundamentalists, but for humans frustrated with the inaptness of justice as it is meted out here on earth. Kill the Cheshire killers or consign them to life in prison. Neither seems to compensate for the horror they wrought. Hell sates a lust for vengeance unquenched here on earth.
But does that mean that Hell is the fate of unbelievers, where they are, as Jonathan Edwards preached, to be suspended "over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire? Is it, as Edwards described, a place where God "exercise(s) no love and extends no mercy to any one object there, but pours out upon them horrors without mixture?"
In "Love Wins," Bell asks: Is that the all-merciful, all-compassionate Jesus who died to forgive our sins?
Bell's book may be a watershed for a religious community living too long under the spell of Hell. As he writes "There are individual hells, and communal, society wide hells, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously."
Wherever Hell is [Dash] in the center of the earth, as Dante posited [Dash] or in the center of men's souls, one thing is certain: No mortal, and certainly no politician, can say for sure who has a first-class ticket. That's a decision that is, mercifully, left out of our hands.
Huckabee is a fundamentalist Christian. He was the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Southern Baptist State Convention. So his views on Hell, as a place of eternal torment, with gnashing of teeth and the burning of unquenchable fire, fit well within his tradition, which stresses a literal interpretation of scripture.
Of course, as a fundamentalist, Huckabee would also have to believe that, as a Muslim, there was no way in Hell Osama was going anywhere but Hell [Dash] the repository for all who do not accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Under this theology, Osama would have plenty of company, including Buddha, (eventually) the Dalai Lama and Gandhi.
And that's where fundamentalist preacher Rob Bell draws the line.
Bell, the leader of the Mars Hill Bible Church, which typically draws 8,000 to 11,000 parishioners every Sunday, dropped a bombshell into a religious community that believes in the inerrancy of scripture. In "Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived," he claims that the belief in hell as "conscious, eternal conflict," is a "misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."
And with those words, Bell ignited his own inferno in the evangelical community. Christian blogs were afire with criticism of Bell's assertion. Blogger Karen de Young spoke for many, writing: "We need the doctrine of eternal punishment. Time and time again in the New Testament we find that understanding divine justice is essential to our sanctification. Believing in God's judgment actually helps us look more like Jesus. In short, we need the doctrine of the wrath of God."
Bell, fundamentalists charge, has left the fold and become a Universalist, an assertion Bell denies.
"Love Wins" reads like a breezy, conversational sermon that focuses not on hell and damnation, but on an eternal life, which, Bell writes, "is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of live lived now in connection to God."
That's a vision that sits well with many denominations, including Episcopalians and Catholics. "Our theology doesn't posit the devil-with-the-pitchfork mentality as much as it does a state of a loss of grace," said the Mark Suslenko of St. Anthony's in Prospect. "When it comes to our eternal life, being thrust into one element or another is not what God does. It's what we choose," he said.
But Hell offers an effective way to "control people through fear," said Peter S. Hawkins, professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, which made it effective. Hawkins maintains that scriptural references to Hell are few. "It was not Jesus' method or message. This notion of an eternal punishment of torture is obscene to me."
But Hell has had a hold on the human psyche for centuries, if for symmetry alone. If the good guys get heaven, the bad guys must get its antithesis. The Christian tradition is rich with searing imagery of Hell's grisly appointments. It got help from artists and writers, particularly Dante, whose elaborate treatment of the Inferno would scare the evil out of anyone.
But over the years, writers and the general public has grown dubious of Hell as an exit ramp on the after-death highway. Only 59 percent of Americans believe in hell, compared with 74 percent who believe in heaven, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"What is hell?" T.S. Eliot asked. "Hell is oneself." The more misanthropic Jean Paul Sartre had a different idea. "Hell is other people," he wrote.
For Yale's Hawkins, John Paul II's depiction of Hell, articulated in front of a general audience at the Vatican in 1999, is the keenest, and most sensitive he has heard. "Rather than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy," John Paul said. Hell, he added, is "a condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life."
But that view is at extreme variance, not just for fundamentalists, but for humans frustrated with the inaptness of justice as it is meted out here on earth. Kill the Cheshire killers or consign them to life in prison. Neither seems to compensate for the horror they wrought. Hell sates a lust for vengeance unquenched here on earth.
But does that mean that Hell is the fate of unbelievers, where they are, as Jonathan Edwards preached, to be suspended "over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire? Is it, as Edwards described, a place where God "exercise(s) no love and extends no mercy to any one object there, but pours out upon them horrors without mixture?"
In "Love Wins," Bell asks: Is that the all-merciful, all-compassionate Jesus who died to forgive our sins?
Bell's book may be a watershed for a religious community living too long under the spell of Hell. As he writes "There are individual hells, and communal, society wide hells, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously."
Wherever Hell is [Dash] in the center of the earth, as Dante posited [Dash] or in the center of men's souls, one thing is certain: No mortal, and certainly no politician, can say for sure who has a first-class ticket. That's a decision that is, mercifully, left out of our hands.
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