War and hell are inextricably interlinked in Christian history and theology. Below are some thoughts about both, with relation to a movie and a book.
I. The Christian and War: Reflections on “Saving Private Ryan”
“War is hell”, observed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. And Steven Spielberg dipped us right into its fiery midst in his 1998 summer release.
War is indeed hell. Yet, in the long history of the Christian Church, apart from the earliest era, every war engaged in throughout Christendom has been supported by the Church on both sides of the conflict. How in the name of Jesus can this be? What, for starters, of Christ’s express words?: “Love your enemies (Matt. 5, Luke 6).” Further, how can Christians do an end run around Jesus’ explicit teaching by reverting to Old Testament endorsement of war when Jesus flatly said?: “So in everything [except war?], do to others [except your enemies? - see Matt. 5:43ff] what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (Matt 7:12).”; and “... ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments (Matt 22:37-40).”
Or how can Christians ignore other New Testament voices such as the Apostle Paul’s?: “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another [except your enemies?], for he who loves his fellowman [except his enemies?] has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself.’ Love does no harm to its neighbor [except your enemies?]. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:8-10).” Or what of James’ pithy statement?: “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself,’ you are doing right (James 2:8).” And John’s witness?: “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother [except his non-Christian enemies?], he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother [except his enemies?], whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother [except his enemies?] (I Jn 4:19-21).”
What kind of exegetical gymnastics are utilized to dodge such overwhelming and consistent New Testament testimony? Is not the New Testament “face” of Jesus both in sayings attributed to him, and in other writers’ inspiration from him univocally non-violent?
Richard Hays writes: “This is the place where New Testament ethics confronts a profound methodological challenge on the question of violence, because the tension is so severe between the unambiguous witness [for total nonviolence] of the New Testament canon and the apparently countervailing forces of tradition, reason, and experience (1996, p. 341).” Again, he says: “The vocation of nonviolence is not exclusively an option for exceptionally saintly individuals, nor is it a matter of individual conscience; it is fundamental to the church’s identity and raison d’être (ibid, p. 337).” He says further: “Although the tradition of the first three centuries was decidedly pacifist in orientation, Christian tradition from the time of Constantine to the present has pre¬dominantly endorsed war, or at least justified it under certain conditions. Only a little reflection will show that the classic just war criteria (just cause, authorized by legit¬imate ruler, reasonable prospect of success, just means of conduct in war, and so forth) are—as Barth realized—neither derived nor derivable from the New Testa¬ment; they are formulated through a process of reasoning that draws upon natural-law traditions far more heavily than upon biblical warrants. It is not possible to use the just war tradition as a hermeneutical device for illuminating the New Testament, nor have the defenders of the tradition ordinarily even attempted to do so (ibid, p. 341).” The tradition for all but three centuries has overwhelmingly been unfaithful to Jesus. He says finally: “One reason that the world finds the New Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the church is so massively faithless. On the ques¬tion of violence, the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry (Hays, 1996, p. 343).”
Is it possible otherwise that all the New Testament witnesses, Jesus included, did not read their Old Testaments? Or is it likelier that many Christians have not read their New Testaments? Are John 1 and Hebrews 1 not really in the Bible, both of which point to the primacy of Jesus as the final revelation of God’s will?: “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe (Heb 1:1-2).”
Like Timothy, I was raised on Scripture. From a child I could recite volumes of it, including the all-time favourite verse of evangelicalism, John 3:16 - in my case in the majestic King James Version: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
I discovered only later to my shock that apparently John 3:16 has a reprised footnote inserted into most Christians’ Bibles. It is never quoted out loud, however. But it is obviously no less binding dogma. After “world”, “whosoever”, and “perish” and “life” the footnote reads: “Except our enemies!”. They must in fact indeed “perish”! Yet, I always was told it was the “Liberals”, masters of the exception clause, who played fast and loose with Scripture...
Watching Spielberg’s film, with the overwhelming random slaughter and maiming, it occurred to me again that war is the most complete inversion of evangelism imaginable! Not good seed, but bullets and bombs are scattered with abandon, thereby utterly inverting the evangelistic mandate. One means “life abundant”, the other delivers “death indiscriminate”. In excess of 110 millions have been annihilated in largely Church-endorsed wars this past century alone. I doubt if all evangelists worldwide for the entire 20th century could add up their collective catch to match that harvest of death. Yet, most evangelists in their work of “saving souls” have supported the unspeakable carnage. Is this not profoundly disturbing?! What could be more blatantly anti-Christian? Why has no major evangelistic voice ever spoken out?
On the contrary, many evangelists, and all military chaplains, have preached to the troops at war in hopes to see them “made right with God” since tomorrow they might die. But when have those same evangelists and chaplains heeded Jesus by preaching the Gospel, lest tomorrow they might kill? How can their converts or their “converters” possibly be right with God when they destroy/endorse destruction of the neighbour (I John 4)? Or can “love of brother” somehow be twisted to mandate “slaughter of enemies”? And is such twisting the work of God or the work of the evil one (“Did God really say... (Gen. 3:1ff?”))? Do evangelists and chaplains know better than Jesus? Did not Jesus always call for death of self, never death of the other? Are there not two “great commandments”, not just one? Is not love of God, peace with God (Billy Graham’s famous book title), only half the Gospel – and when only half, a bald-faced heresy?
What of the Apostle Paul’s declaration?: “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds (2 Cor 10:3-4).” Is war not the ultimate worldliness, a “total depravity”, according to the New Testament? How can something so patently anti-Christian be so blessed by so many Christians throughout so many centuries? What kind of awesome brainwashing, what potent spell, what horrific deafness, is at work here? Dare we call it, simply, sin?
Is it possible that on this issue we have for centuries tended to be equally blind as another group of believers to whom Jesus said?: “Why is my language not clear to you? [How could Jesus’ language about “love of enemies”, or that of all other New Testament witnesses, be any clearer?] Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me (John 8:43-45)!”
Now the truth that sets us free (John 8:32) is obedience to God’s will summed up in the two “great commandments” (Matt. 22; Mark 12; I John): love of God and love of neighbour. As believers, failure to love in this way is to invite Jesus’ warning: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock (Matt 7:21-24).”
Can it be, that after all, many proclaimed followers, “imitators”, of Jesus are in fact not? Is it possible that most Christians who claim “...not I, but Christ... (Gal. 2:20, KJV)” on the contrary embrace religious nepotism, of which patriotism is its most hideous expression? For all our protestations, despite our reputed allegiance to what “The Bible says!” (Billy Graham’s favourite expression), do we in the end dismiss it like the “Liberals”? Have many Christians been far closer to the spirit of Pharisaism, one of murderous prevarication, than we ever dare to admit (John 8)? Does this spirit not directly contradict the “weightier matters of the law”: love of God and neighbour (Matt. 23:23, echoing Micah 6:8)? Was Gandhi right?: “The only people on earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as nonviolent are Christians.” Is it thinkable that we Bible-believing Christians stand in danger one day of hearing Jesus’ words: “...'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt 25:41).’ “, for “... ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these [except our enemies?], you did not do for me (Matt 25:45).’ “ Is that not hell: the failure to love (Jesus in) the neighbour and the enemy (Matt. 5 - 7, Luke 6, I John 4)?
War is indeed hell. In the movie, Captain John Miller comments: “For every man I kill, the further I get from home.” Of course! A Nazi defendant at the post-War Nuremberg Trials said: “You have defeated us Nazis. But the spirit of Nazism has arisen like a Phoenix amongst you.” Precisely! We always become what we hate. One need only casually peruse two books by William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000), and Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (1998), or a great mass of other witnesses, to discover the wrenching truth of that challenge. But like our counterparts during the Nazi German era, we would rather not be exposed to such chilling truth.
When the U.S. dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, and obliterated and wounded instantaneously 135,000 lives, then three days later 65,000 thousand more were slaughtered or burned in Nagasaki (in sheer death-dealing magnitude rendering miniscule this past decade’s Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, executed by the U.S. federal government, or the terrorist attack against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, September 11, 2001), President Harry Truman declared: “That was the greatest event in human history!” This from a lay Baptist preacher and Sunday School teacher... Astounding! What, in God’s name, could be a more blatant denial of the Resurrection than those bombs and that statement?! For Christians, the Resurrection alone is the greatest event in human history! And it means the absolute inversion of war: life abundant and everlasting. What business did that Bible-believing Christian have in so utterly contradicting the very centrepiece of Christian faith?
And what business did the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians have at the time in cheering Truman on? And do not the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians still applaud the continued development of post-War weaponry and its deployment, which, in 1996 dollars in the U.S. alone, has amounted to 5.5 trillion dollars and countless lives for whom Christ died snuffed out? And do not most Bible-believing Christians right now in North America and Britain support the “war against terrorism”? Where are the leading Christian voices opposing this anti-Christ obscenity? Why, in Jesus’ name, are they silent? Why?! “In God we trust”? “America the Beautiful?” “How Great Thou Art?” Balderdash! Murderous lies! Perpetrated by vast numbers of conservative Christian leaders.
“Home” (Captain Miller) ultimately is where love is. Where God is. Its opposite is hell. So hell is also war! For hell is in the end the obstinate refusal to love God and neighbour; the endless attempt at doing end runs around the two “great commandments” (Matt 25). The biblical witness is: the only test case for love of God is love of neighbour (I John 4). And the test case for love of neighbour is love of enemies (Matt. 5 - 7, Luke 6). Failure to love the enemy is failure to love God is choosing hell.
Spielberg gets it right: war is hell, and (in this case) hell is war. Chillingly, unconscionably, unimaginably, the vast majority of Bible-believing, God-fearing, self-proclaimed “Christ-centred” Christians past and present wholeheartedly endorse such pure hell! The simple question begs asking: What business have Christians ever had propagating hell? The tragic question is: who of such ilk, from Martin Luther to John Calvin, from D.L. Moody to Billy Sunday, from C.S. Lewis to Billy Graham, from Francis Schaeffer to J.I. Packer, has sanctioned other than hell?
In response to a version of the above material, I received this terse response from a Christian Editor I know:
“Hi, Wayne-sorry to take so long to get back to you this time around. We decided not to use your article for reasons of length (too long!), style (too many rhetorical questions) and tone (too harsh).
Thanks for going to the trouble of thinking this through and writing down your thoughts.
[The Editor]
My simple addition to why it was rejected: “… and argument (too true)”. I wonder when this particular Editor last read Matt. 23? Or if she had ever perused (evangelical author) Douglas Frank’s Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century (1986) – especially Frank’s haunting Epilogue comparing Evangelicals to modern-day Pharisees – murderers and liars from the beginning; profoundly self-deceived as in Jeremiah 17:9?
In another context, J.I. Packer writes in a Foreword to a book on the doctrine of hell (see below): “It is suggested that the Bible is unclear, or incoherent, or inconsistent, or untrustworthy, when it speaks of the outcome of judgment after death, or alternatively that virtually the whole church has for two thousand years misunderstood the texts. I do not think so… (Dixon, 1992, p. 7).” Yet this very phenomenon of misunderstanding the texts, so eloquently presented by Richard Hays, nonetheless doubted by Dr. Packer, is precisely the reality when war and hell are at issue. Why should it not be surprising therefore that hell should for almost two thousand years likewise have been misunderstood? Especially when “war is hell”, and vice versa. One may ask with terror and horror: Just what “face” of Jesus has the Church been looking at since the era of Emperor Constantine?
With that terrifying question in mind, I can only take room to endorse the thesis of Constantine versus Christ: The Triumph of Ideology (Kee, 1982) . “The corruption of the best is the worst”, Ivan Illich has taught in The Corruption of Christianity and Rivers North of the Future (Cayley, 2000; 2005). Is this what has happened since the fourth century when the cross inverted from a sign of weakness to a symbol of state power? Can it be that mainly “another (anti)Christ” has been seen by majority Christendom, instead of the face of Jesus? Unthinkable (Dr. Packer)? Then why do Protestants almost slavishly honour the Reformation? And what was one of the Reformation watchwords?: Ecclesia semper reformanda. The Church must always reform itself: must ever seek to see Jesus anew and aright. It must amongst other things rediscover the anthropological thrust of the Gospels, most recently brilliantly presented in René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001) and a vast array of related publications .
And if the Church has after all seen for centuries another Christ with reference to Jesus and the enemy? Then it must repent and rediscover a Jesus that it never knew. Else the Church perpetuates heresy (in this context, heresy means wrong choice). It embraces hell. It rejects Jesus, while all the time protesting loud allegiance to him! It is otherwise the naked Emperor and his sycophants in The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001). It needs instead to “clothe [itself] with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience (Col 3:12).” – in particular towards the enemy.
II. The Christian and Hell: Theological Moorings of Violence in the Image of God
The doctrine of hell necessarily arises in the context of a Christian consideration of violence. For a theological discussion of violence inevitably brings us to the most extreme instance of violence in God, if the traditional, most dominant, doctrine of hell is indeed biblical – namely, eternal conscious punishment of the unbeliever. I will discuss this by interacting with The Other Side of the Good News, by Larry Dixon (1992).
The central conclusion of the book in the author’s words is that there is an “adequacy [in] the traditional view of hell... and that alternative views do not adequately reflect the scriptural data concerning hell... Pointing out the weaknesses in the three alternative positions to hell does not in itself prove the truth of the traditional eternal conscious punishment view (pp. 172 & 173, emphasis added).” Dixon continues at that point to “set out four areas in which the traditional position enjoys biblical, as well as rational, support.”, after allowing that the traditional view “might also be erroneous (p. 173).” I shall return to that possibility.
Widely read evangelical author J. I. Packer in the Foreword underscores the author’s conclusions: “To believe what the Bible appears to say about human destiny apart from the grace of God is a bitter pill indeed, and no one should wonder that attempts are made to explore alternative understandings of God’s revelation on this topic. It is suggested that the Bible is unclear, or incoherent, or inconsistent, or untrustworthy, when it speaks of the outcome of judgment after death, or alternatively that virtually the whole church has for two thousand years misunderstood the texts. I do not think so, nor does Dr. Dixon... For one I am grateful for his work, and commend it to all who are willing to be biblically rational on this sombre subject (p. 7).” The implication is clear throughout the book and from Dr. Packer’s words: one is simply unbiblical to deny the traditional view that hell is eternal conscious punishment for all unbelievers who fail to accept Jesus Christ as personal Saviour this side of death. As the author says at the end of the Introduction: “May we be ready to pay [the] price to bring lost people to Christ so that they won’t spend eternity on The Other Side of the Good News (p. 14).”
Dixon spends the bulk of the book refuting three alternative views so designated by him. In his words: “Some today suggest that all without exception will be saved, whether they want to be or not (universalism, discussed in chapter 2). Others argue that hell is God’s consuming of the wicked (annihilationism, addressed in chapter 3), not His eternally tormenting them. Still others hold forth the hope that death is not the end of opportunity for redemption, but perhaps a door to future chances for salvation (post-mortem conversion, the subject of chapter 4) (p. 13).”
The author does not wince at taking on theological heavyweights such as Karl Barth, C. H. Dodd, and Nels Ferré (all described by Dixon as outside evangelical orthodoxy). He also challenges evangelical heavyweight theologians such as Clark Pinnock, John Stott, and Donald Bloesch. Dixon in particular bemoans the erosion of evangelical theology as seen in these and other evangelical leaders’ views of the traditional doctrine of hell. He writes: “The evangelical Christian, who can’t forget hell, often seems, in boxing terms, to be up against the ropes.” He describes the buffeting such an evangelical Christian endures from the cults who scorn hell, and writes, “He then returns to his corner for some encouragement and promptly receives several left hooks from his own manager.... One is hardly surprised that some young fighters for the faith seem ready to throw in the towel (p. 149).” His plea is poignant; one can feel his pain as a “fighter for the faith” at this sense of betrayal. Throughout much of the final chapter, he critiques in particular Clark Pinnock, whom Dixon quotes on p. 149: “[E]verlasting torment is intolerable from a moral point of view because it makes God into a bloodthirsty monster who maintains an everlasting Auschwitz for victims whom He does not even allow to die.” Dixon’s dilemma is clearly stated: “Obviously, no follower of Christ wants to be guilty of presenting God as one more heinous than Hitler. However, if the Bible is clear on this issue, the Christian must not throw in the towel (pp. 149 & 150).” And the author proceeds to present God in his holy hatred of sinners precisely in those terms: as one more heinous than Hitler!
The crucial conditional fulcrum for the entire thesis is Dixon’s statement: “if the Bible is clear on this issue”. Dixon and Packer, and indeed a host of Christian voices throughout the ages (though with significant exceptions in every age - some of whom are adduced by Dixon), say the Bible contains indeed precisely such clarity about hell as a place of eternal conscious punishment.
I am compelled to respond to Dixon’s work because of my own vocation: since 1974 I have ministered in criminal justice, and have wrestled from the outset with thinking biblically God’s justice thoughts after him, in particular with reference to judgment and punishment, including the doctrine of hell. I have become convinced over the years that “God’s justice is predominantly, and normatively, redemptive or restorative in intention (Chris Marshall, 1991, “Judgment and Justice: Some Brief Observations”, presented at a postgraduate seminar at the Bible College of New Zealand, May 3, 1999, p. 1.)”
How can one presume to fault this book’s conclusions shared, as Packer rightly indicates, by majority Christians throughout church history? I do so aware of the danger that my critique in part can be turned on me too. We are all inclined to wrongly “handle the word of truth”. (See II Tim. 2:15.)
An unusual picture was once circulated around our Church when I was a kid. I remember it well. The brief notation below the picture explained that a man had been travelling along the highway after a pristine snowfall sparkled its brightness everywhere under a glorious sun. At one point he stopped, and noticed an unusual play of shadow against the backdrop of the freshly fallen snow. Being an amateur photographer with his own dark room, he took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of the strange phenomenon. He was astounded when, upon developing them, one in particular displayed an amazing likeness to the traditional artists’ depictions of the face of Jesus. We all were invited to see what he saw.
What I saw first however, as did most, were dark blotches against a snow-white background. There was no face of any kind to see. Except there was!
It took some doing, some adjusting, but finally I got it! I saw the face too!
Then, what was fascinating after that was, no matter how I looked at the picture, sidewards glance, upside down, back to front even when held against a clear window, I never failed immediately to recognize the face of Jesus in that photo.
We all know this phenomenon: some kind of failure of binocular depth perception.
But some never did see the face. Their eyes simply never adjusted. They even doubted that we who saw really “saw”.
Theology means literally, a word, or words about God. What theology really is concerning is creating for us, the believer, an accurate word-picture of God’s face. Unfortunately, there are no artists’ drawings of the real face of Jesus that have come down to us. So we have to discover the face of Jesus, and thereby the face of God, we Christians says, somehow in the written word – the Bible. The data of Scripture, in ongoing dialogue with Christians’ interpretations through the ages and our faith community’s understandings today all help us throughout our lives to form an ever sharper image of God.
Once an editor (in his 50’s) of a theological piece I had written and was publishing said to me as the task was completed: “I have never been able to shake a picture of God I have had since my childhood. That picture is one of a God who is stern, harsh, totally demanding, punitive, a ‘Hangin’ Judge’ ready to condemn me severely for anything I do wrong, and likely to relegate me to hellfire should I ever so slightly step out of line.” He was a Christian, to be sure, and a faithful church-goer, he acknowledged, but he wasn’t entirely sure that spending an eternity with such a “god” would not be more like his understanding of hell!
The dilemma we are in can be put as an analogy. The Bible is like a monstrous jigsaw puzzle, with a vast number of individual pieces to it. It’s in fact the Ultimate Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle, we Christians believe! I have seen once in my life the kind of jigsaw puzzle I am comparing the Bible to: one with identically shaped pieces. In the puzzle I saw, they were all squares. Now, it was a daunting enough task to put the puzzle together that I saw with the original box and the picture on it. Try doing an identically shaped pieces jigsaw puzzle sometime! But what if there were rival box cover pictures, and debate about which was the authentic one?
I am suggesting that the biblical data is precisely like that kind of jigsaw puzzle with identically shaped pieces. I’m suggesting further that we would have no hope of putting it together at all were it not for the face of Jesus we discover in the New Testament revelation, which becomes for us the ultimate picture of the face of God. I am suggesting that all other box covers than that of Jesus as seen in the New Testament revelation, are inadequate or wrong. But I’m suggesting further that it is nonetheless difficult to see the face of Jesus properly. For some they “see”, but all that is seen are dark blotches. And I think that one in that case does not really “see”, as Jesus and the prophets claimed. Piece together the jigsaw puzzle when one only sees dark blotches, and one’s picture of God will turn out entirely differently from doing it with the face of Jesus seen aright!
Dixon seems to look at a “dark blotches” violently punitive picture of Jesus on a puzzle box cover that was the wrong choice (a heresy in one of its original Greek meanings), a failure to “see” the real face right before his eyes. That differs, in the end profoundly, from the picture of Jesus who exemplified and said: “But love your enemies, do good to them... Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:35-36, emphasis added).” (Interestingly, Dixon does not once in his book refer to this clarion call of Jesus based upon this “box cover” portrait of who God fundamentally is: love.)
Dixon says: “One’s doctrine of the final judgment of the wicked is a direct reflection of one’s doctrine of God (p. 165).” Indeed. And one’s doctrine or picture of God - the box cover - is ultimately seen in Jesus (John 1 and Hebrews 1).
As quoted earlier, Gandhi said of Christians and nonviolence generally, “The only people on earth who do not see Christ and his teachings as nonviolent are Christians.” As Richard Hays has been quoted earlier, it is possible for “virtually the whole church” (contrary to J.I. Packer) to be wrong. With all due respect, and with profound sadness, it has been wrong about Christian nonviolence. Dixon’s “traditional doctrine of hell” is a special category of that same majority Christendom error. The picture on the box of God in Christ for Dixon is sadly one of ultimate violence. I suggest that only if “Jesus” is a “dark blotches” box cover can one agree with Dixon’s assertion: “Jesus is our primary source for the [traditional] doctrine of hell (p. 147)” The nub of the issue is our picture or vision of God in Christ.
One evangelical New Testament theologian, in a significant draft manuscript on hell in a book on biblical restorative justice (my area of ministry), writes: “Jesus shows that those who think of God in terms of strict distributive or retributive justice fundamentally misunderstand God (Matt. 20:1 - 16), emphasis added.” Yet, I suggest, this is the central “dark blotches” misunderstanding of the picture on the puzzle cover of God in the book under review. God is depicted as ultimately violently retributive towards the wicked. On the contrary, Marshall, in surveying the biblical evidence, writes in the conclusion of his paper: “For our purposes the point to notice is that God’s final word is not retribution but restoration, the re-creation of heaven and earth so that sin, suffering, sickness and death are no more (ibid, 1999, p. 21).” God’s ultimate word biblically is, indeed, nonviolent, all-inclusive love, which subsumes all biblical categories of wrath, judgment and punishment! I submit gently, but firmly that, to miss that is to miss, simply, the Good News: in Jesus’ words, to become “twice as much a son of hell” (Matt. 23:15).
The second analogy I mentioned to Dixon is of a document written in Roman script so that an English speaker can read the letters, but the reader does not know a word of the language. It is crucial nonetheless that the reader understand the message in the document. So she phones a friend who speaks the language fluently and reads the document out loud over the phone, seeking an accurate translation. The native language speaker in exasperation finally says that she can barely understand anything at all, for all the accents seem to fall on the wrong syllables! In reading Dixon’s fifth chapter years ago, and later the entire book, I respectfully submit that he consistently puts the accents on mainly the wrong biblical syllables.
One example suffices: Dixon’s central, I believe, misuse in Chapter Five of the story of the rich man and Lazarus to discern explicit details about the nature of eternal punishment for the wicked. He quotes approvingly one author who says: “while it was not Jesus’ primary intent here to teach us about the nature of the intermediate state, it is unlikely that He would mislead us on this subject (p. 133).” Really? One could likewise say (and some amazingly do!) that Jesus’ teaching in Luke 14:31 [“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?”], endorses war despite his repeated nonviolent call to “love your enemies”; or his words to the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane about two swords being enough (Luke 22:38) was a call for disciples to take up arms despite Matt. 26:52 where Jesus tells Peter to sheathe his sword (thereby disarming the church forever, commented Church Father Tertullian!) Repeatedly, in this reviewer’s estimation, Dixon (and yes, most Christians throughout the ages!) puts the accents in the Scriptures he adduces in mostly the wrong places.
In this respect, Chris Marshall says: “But it is crucial to recognize... the figurative, parabolic nature of the language used to describe realities which, ex hypothesi [in accordance with the stated hypothesis], lie outside human experience (p. 14).” He then quotes one writer who says: “Such language is ‘figurative and connotative rather than denotative and literalistic’.... To imagine some kind of cosmic torture-chamber where the lost suffer endless or prolonged retribution is to miss the figurative, apocalyptic nature of these utterances, as well as the paraenetic or pastoral intention behind them (p. 14).” I contend that Dixon sustains just such a profound misreading of biblical texts throughout his entire book, as sadly does Dr. Packer.
So Marshall urges with reference to specific details about the fate of those who reject God that “Perhaps a humble agnosticism is the wisest option...” Neither Jesus nor Paul supply specifics about the fate of the wicked, concludes Stephen Travis (1986). Neither should we. And therefore I will not speculate further. I do not have an alternative view. God knows, and that is enough! That Dixon presses the biblical texts beyond what they were meant to bear seems a singularly consistent fault of his hermeneutic. It is so often what non-Christian cults do – ironically enough given his critique of the cults’ critique of traditional Christian teachings on hell!
But Dixon will have none of this, and writes an entire treatise based upon a consistent misreading of the founding texts. How can this be? A book-length treatment of precisely this issue with reference to misguided Christian retributive views in criminal justice is Timothy Gorringe’s God’s Just Vengeance (1996). At one point Gorringe asks, with reference to a pervasive and lengthy Christian tradition of retributive views towards “criminals”: “How is it that the question whether the law might be wrong, or even wicked, does not arise for these good Christian people (p. 5)?” Likewise, Father George Zabelka, Chaplain to the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb squadrons, upon repentance for blessing the murder of hundreds of thousands in an instant, wrote that the just war theory is “something that Christ never taught nor hinted at.” Yet almost all Christians have embraced just war and retributive justice theories throughout much of the Christian era. Why, when it is biblically so unfounded, in fact a heresy?
Similarly, while we both acknowledge that we follow the same Lord and equally take seriously the Bible, I could wish that Dixon would ponder more what he allows is at least possible, that biblically the traditional view of hell “might also be erroneous (p. 173).” In Jesus’ direct allusions to hell, not once are “unbelievers” in view, but always the religiously self-righteous. Disturbingly, Douglas Frank, an evangelical author, in Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century (1986), characterizes evangelicalism as centrally prone towards being pharisaical. “We are the Pharisees of our time, if anyone is.”, he writes (p. 229). A Baptist pastor friend puts it tellingly: “Every Sunday in the pulpit I stand in danger of leading my flock to hell!”
In this reviewer’s estimation, what is lacking in Dixon’s reading of the biblical texts is a Gospel imagination overwhelmed by grace, which leads to a consequent theology of the subversion of all retribution and violence in God and humans. In short: Christian conversion is wanted. Like the White Witch in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Dixon seems unaware of the “deeper (James called it “royal” - James 2:8) law” of love on which “hang all the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 22:34 - 40).” We sing after all “Amazing Grace”, not “Amazing Justice”, Debbie Morris points out at the end of her gripping story, Forgiving the Dead Man Walking (1998). She gets it, Dixon does not. It is apparently that stark. This is what Jesus often spoke of such as in Matt. 13:13ff (and elsewhere): “This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’”.
In Dixon’s reading, grace seems to have been arrested mid-stream in favour of a horrible retributive justice for the wicked – which is exactly mercy’s inversion. The author in interpreting Scripture on hell looks like the man in Matt. 18 who was forgiven an overwhelming debt, yet doesn’t get it at all, and withholds forgiveness at the first opportunity! In reality, the text shows that the “forgiven” man apparently didn’t really experience forgiveness. Or he would have been forgiving towards even the “ungrateful and wicked (Luke 6:35)”. Again, Dixon presents like Jonah who becomes furious at God for showing mercy to Nineveh. Yet, Jesus taught, a “greater [in mercy] than Jonah is here {Matt. 12:41)!” Or the author sounds like the elder brother in the “Prodigal Father” story (Luke 15:11ff) who just cannot fathom the Father’s unconditional mercy towards the wicked son.
Dixon seemingly has no categories for a consistent hermeneutic of grace. He and Packer consequently miss the message of the Gospel by a “great gulf fixed” as wide as that between “Abraham’s bosom” and the Rich Man in Luke 16. In his theology, God’s grace is for a moment, but his wrath endures forever, to invert Psalm 30:5. Sadly, he, and many interpreters like him, appear, like Saul, to have “given approval (Acts 8:1)” to the same sacrificial violence that Jesus castigated in Matt. 23:33 - 35: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.” Jesus also fell victim to this same violence advocated by Dixon! In this book, sadly, Dixon and Packer consistently cry in response to Jesus: “Crucify Him!”
As Marshall says: “Throughout Christian history, the fear of being consigned to hell by a truly merciless God has fuelled and justified all manner of horrific violence (ibid, p. 6).” Dixon writes, in apparent approval of one such instance of “horrific violence”, the Gulf War: “A brave journalist who was in Baghdad when the bombs landed, cried out in his television report, ‘I have been in hell!’ As horrible as war is we would have to say to him, ‘No, you haven’t. If we understand Jesus correctly, war is only a small foreshadowing of that final condition of the forsaken (p. 14).”
The grand and joyous paradox of the Gospel, for those with eyes to see the wildly liberating “picture on the box cover” is: God’s final judgment is his mercy! - just as the doctrine of original sin is a post-resurrection Christian doctrine of grace and forgiveness.
No contemporary biblical theologian this reviewer has read captures this eschatological insight better in fact than James Alison in Raising Abel (1996). The book is a sustained call for Christians through conversion to acquire an “eschatological imagination” that subverts ultimately an anti-christian “apocalyptic imagination” such that “The perception that God is love has a specific content which is absolutely incompatible with any perception of God as involved in violence, separation, anger, or exclusion (p. 48).” Therefore, “The commonly held understanding of hell remains strictly within the apocalyptic imagination, that is, it is the result of a violent separation between the good and the evil worked by a vengeful god. It seems to me that if hell is understood thus, we have quite simply not understood the Christian faith; and the Christian story, instead of being the creative rupture in the system of this world, has come to be nothing less than its sacralization. That is, the good news which Jesus brought has been quite simply lost (p. 175, emphasis added).”
In the end, the greatest critique of Dixon’s thesis is simply this: there is biblically no “other side of the good news”! There is Good News, period! Hell too is embraced by God’s love. Dixon presents a “gospel” without good news that reads, à la Four Spiritual Laws, thus: “God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life... But if you don’t buy in before death, God hates you, and has a horrible plan for your after-life!” No genuine love affair human or divine is imaginable with that kind of time-limited vicious threat hanging over one’s head.
I could wish Dixon on this issue would return to Scripture with eyes to see and ears to hear – and recover a truly Gospel-soaked “eschatological imagination”. I could wish this for Evangelicalism in the main: they do evangelism, but they do not preach the Gospel. As Jesus said: “they do not practice what they preach” (Matt. 23:3). Instead of the Gospel, most Evangelicals preach religion, of whom Jesus would say: “But do not do what they do…” (Matt. 23:3).
Chris Marshall, in personal comment to me wrote similarly: “I did have a look at Dixon’s book …. What a depressing piece!! It illustrates the problems in pulling out a single theme for analysis in isolation from the larger context of the biblical story (May 9, 1999, E-mail correspondence).” I say: “What an anti-Christ/anti-Gospel piece!”
There is ultimately no room for Dixon’s thesis in the biblical Good News that is shot through with God’s “Amazing Grace” - how sweet the sound! Dixon consistently gives grace a terribly sour note, just like the Pharisees! I suggest he is not compelled to his view by biblical evidence but by a misguided hermeneutic dominant in Evangelicalism as in Christendom: the wrong “box cover”. Biblically, God’s love is the ultimate word, and judgment and redemption equally are subsumed under that love. In the end, “mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13)!” in an amazing paradox of grace whereby God is both “just and justifier” (Rom. 3:26). For, as Jesus said repeatedly (Matt. 9:13 and 12:7): “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
I call on Dixon, Packer, and all who hold to an ostensibly sub-Christian, though longstanding “traditional doctrine of hell”: “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ (Matt. 9:13).” Such a call is above all a call to conversion. Lee Griffith writes: “It is upon the least lovable people that God heaps the burning coals of love (Romans 12:20 – 21). This is the terror of God. This is the fire of hell, the eternal torment. Those who would reject all love are forced to endure it… It is God who crosses the chasm. It is God who decides to go to hell armed with the burning coals of love… This is the terror of God from which we cannot hide because, in Jesus, God invades not only the earth but hell itself. God is the one who decides to go to hell. Hallelujah and amen (Griffith, 2002, pp. 184 & 185).”
I feel a personal sadness in critiquing Dixon’s conclusions. On p. 178, he writes: “A former missionary friend, who has since moved away from the traditional doctrine of hell, said to me that ‘God’s penultimate word is wrath, but His ultimate word is love.’” I am that “former missionary friend”. We served together doing evangelism in West Berlin from 1972 to 1974 . The author’s rejoinder to my statement was: “We would have to disagree (p. 178)”. “We” did disagree at the time he was writing his book when I visited him; we disagreed after he gave me Chapter Five to read in manuscript form; we still disagreed in subsequent correspondence. He has since ceased corresponding with me.
The most comprehensive English-language study on the history and theology of capital punishment states: “As is evident, the problem being addressed extends far beyond the issue of capital punishment as such, since this practice is symptomatic and only one piece of the much larger puzzle, the puzzle of accounting for the oxymoronic phenomenon of ‘Christian violence’ (Megivern, 1997).”
Whether war, hell, or capital punishment, the church has been massively faithless in its violent attribution to God of bloodthirstiness worthy alone of the Evil One.
May God have mercy on us all.
References
Alison, James (1993). Knowing Jesus, Springfield, Ill: Templegate.
Alison, James (1996) Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, New York: Crossroad.
Alison, James (1997) The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, New York: Crossroad.
Andersen, Hans Christian (2001). The Emperor's New Clothes: a Fairy Tale, translated
by Molly Stevens, New York: Abbeville Kids.
Bailie, Gil (1995). Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, New York: Crossroad.
Bellinger, Charles K. (2001). The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation,
Freedom, and Evil, New York: Oxford University Press.
Blum, William (1998). Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Buffalo: Black Rose Books.
Blum, William (2000). Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, Monroe: Common Courage Press.
Cayley, David (2000). The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church
and Society Toronto: CBC Ideas – audio tapes.
Cayley, David (2005). The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
Dixon, Larry (1992). The Other Side of The Good News, Wheaton: Victor Books.
Frank, Douglas (1986). Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century, Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans.
Girard, René (2001). I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, New York: Orbis.
Gorrings, Timothy (1996). God's Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation, Cambridge University Press.
Griffith, Lee (2002). The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, Lee Griffith, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Hays, Richard B. (1996). The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, New York: HarperSanFrancisco.
Kee, Alistair (1982) Constantine versus Christ: The Triumph of Ideology, London: SCM Press.
Marshall, Christopher D. (2001). Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for
Justice, Crime, and Punishment, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.
Megivern, James (1997). The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey, Paulist Press, New York.
Morris, Debbie (1998). Forgiving The Dead Man Walking, Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Travis, Stephen H. (1986). Christ and the Judgment of God: Divine Retribution in the New Testament, Basingstoke: M. Pickering.
Williams, James G. (1991 and 1995) The Bible, Violence and the Sacred: Liberation
from the Myth of Sanctioned Violence, San Francisco: HarperCollins and Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International.
Williams, James G. (1996). The Girard Reader, New York: Crossroad Herder.
Hi Paul!
Five years later, I'll respond. This after your urging me to read another book critiquing "restorative justice" so central to the Gospel as compellingly presented by Chris Marshall in "Beyond Retribution" noted above. I reviewed that book you urged me to read (with disapproval), here:
http://www.clarion-journal.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2008/09/annalise-acorns-compulsory-compassion----review-by-wayne-northey.html.
I am not "ad hominem" towards C.S. Lewis and others: on the contrary, I respect for instance greatly Lewis' pointing to the ancient routes/roots of Christian theology ultimately centred on Christ.
I am however critical of these authors for missing so significantly the centrality of "peace" in the New Testament - reprised in the ancient church traditions. (A classic website on this is "In Communion: Website of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship", found here: http://www.incommunion.org/.) The best recent (massive) treatment of this is by Willard Swartley, reviewed here:
http://www.clarion-journal.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2006/12/covenant_of_pea.html.
Jesus' "yellow journalism" in Matthew 23 does embolden one, if respectful towards, say, a Nicodemus...
I wish you well.
Wayne
Posted by: Wayne Northey | July 04, 2011 at 09:38 PM
Sigh, Wayne, when you critique others for their "misuse" of scripture, you really need to be more circumspect yourself. Your scandelous treatment of Lewis and others defames the one you claim to serve.
Posted by: Paul Erickson | August 02, 2006 at 06:53 AM