Artwork "Way to Hades" by Sanjay Sonwani

Thinking.

Preface: I tend to see a lot our evangelical ills as connected with the seduction of empire. (Or as I call it in public these days, “superpower.” Because people who reject the notion that the United States is an empire, will proudly claim the moniker of “superpower.” So, empire, superpower, it doesn’t matter to me, both fall under the same prophetic critique.) Anyway, I realize I tend to pull a lot of diverse things into my critique of evangelicalism’s unholy allegiance to the compromised values of a superpower, so I could be off base here. But I don’t think I am.

Hell. Hell as an afterlife torture chamber generated by a wrathful God who is personally offended at the transgressions of sinners. (As opposed to sin-generated contemporary Gehennas and whatever afterlife self-imposed exiles and adverse reactions to the love of God there may be [which have the potential to be “forever” and are for ever…until they are not.]) That Hell—the punitive Hell of Jonathan Edward’s angry God (where the wrath of God is understood, not as an anthropomorphism for the consequences of sin in a universe created with a default mode of goodness, but as the literal fury of an offended deity)—that Hell serves a useful purpose in the psyche of those committed to the necessary violence of an empire…I mean, superpower.

In my reading of Cain and Abel, the city Cain built, Abraham’s quest for a different kind of city, especially in Jesus’ cryptic comments about lies and murder in John 8, and finally the city of God unveiled in the Apocalypse, allegiance to violence lies at the heart of much of what God in Christ is saving the world from.

But the good folk living in a superpower have a hard time hearing this. Because even if they only know it subconsciously, there is an intuition that our (all important!) lifestyle is maintained by violence. It’s simply the way the world is, if it is arranged around an axis of power enforced by violence. This is the world of Cain’s city and Pilate’s truth—the world of violence, collective murder, and the lies we tell ourselves about it.

So if the God of the Bible is ultimately a raging violent deity hurling his enemies into a burning hell, we have a powerful warrant for the necessity of utilizing violence for achieving our own good ends.

For example: If those godless Japs are headed to an eternal hell anyway, what’s the big deal if Harry Truman orders Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned into temporal hells? (Ironic factoid: Truman’s nickname was “Give ‘em hell Harry”) And if today we need to give some Muslims a taste of burning hell from an Apache helicopter, it’s nothing compared to what God is going to give them later on! So praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! (Or is it praise the ammunition and pass the Lord?)

Yes, I think an “infernalist” view of hell (thank you for that term, Brad) is intimately connected to our still largely unchallenged allegiance to violence, a problem which is especially exaggerated in a superpower culture. I have anecdotal evidence of this. On several occasions when I have challenged our allegiance to violence by appealing to the Sermon on the Mount, I have been “trumped” by hell. People do connect the dots. And then look for an escape. They look for an someone to save them from the “impossible” demands of Jesus. Sometimes they go backward into the Old Testament and use Joshua to save them from Jesus (“Well, in the Old Testament God commanded war.”) Sometimes they leap forward into a literalist interpretation of Revelation and use Edward’s angry and violent God to save them from Jesus. (“God is not opposed to violence, look what he does in Revelation!”)

What I’m saying is that violence and our acceptance or rejection of it has a lot to do with how we form our eschatology, atonement theory, and ideas of eternal judgment.

And empire has a hell of a lot to do with our desire to find a way for violence to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One of the ways we do this is to imagine that God himself is eternally addicted to violence.

But I don’t believe it.

God is like Jesus.

God has always been like Jesus.

There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.

We have not always known this.

But now we do.