Hi Ahanu —
Thomas, how would you respond to Albert Mohler's blog post in 2009 about Catholicism and Hell?
Well quite simply he's wrong. The Catholic Church has never taught that heaven and hell were physical places, and Mohler makes no reference to where they are supposedly defined as such. It's not in the 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church, and not in the old Penny Catechism before that ... so I don't know ehere he thinks heaven and hell are defined as physical locations.
Heaven and hell have certainly been spoken of in physical terms, but only analogously. That's always been understood.
... But in denying the spatial reality of heaven, the pope neglected the New Testament teaching that we will have resurrected bodies, which will require a spatial dimension.
No, he just didn't confuse or compound the two, as Mohler does. Heaven does not 'happen' at the Resurrection. It, like hell, is outside time and space. The General Resurrection, which is a corporeal resurrection (according to St Paul), will have its physical dimension, but that physicality will be an incorruptible corporeality. That is because the spiritual will be physical, and the physical will be spiritual. All will be all-in-all. The Spirit does not, nor will it ever, require spatial dimension.
Heaven is not quantitative — it does not have physical dimension — it's qualitative. Anyway, how can the angels live in heaven if heaven is a physical place? Angels aren't physical beings.
The same issue arises in his rejection of the spatial dimension of hell. “More than a physical place,” the pope declared, “hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God.” Nevertheless, the Bible speaks of hell as a very real place of torment and punishment, of unquenched fire and unspeakable anguish.
Does it? Really? "very real"? So when Christ says 'Gehenna', He really, really, actually means the valley outside of Jerusalem? Or is that an analogy?
And is Mohler saying that a spatial dimension is more important or more real than the separation from God? Because the logic says the former is as it is because of the latter. The latter determines the former, the principle of separation comes before the place of the separated.
The pope’s most serious revision of the biblical understanding of hell comes at the same issue. “Hell is not a punishment imposed externally by God, but the condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life,” he said. “So eternal damnation is not God’s work but is actually our own doing.”
Yep. Scripture says so. See Matthew 23. God wills that not one soul is lost ... but we have the freedom to lose ourselves.
The language used is figurative, as is the idea of being 'cast out', 'depart from me' and 'eternal fire', which are analogous terms to signify a condition about which, really, we have only a limited comprehension.
... and the dire warnings in Scripture to respond to Christ in faith — while there is time — make sense only if hell is a very real place of very real torment.
Ah, now let's be careful here. I agree that there is a tendency to render hell as an intellectual construct. (Based on what, one might ask?) The next inevitable step is to 'realise' it's an illusion. But essential reality of hell is separation from God, it is the privation of the good, brought to mind by the image of everything bad. As discussed elsewhere, the medieval mindset really went to town on this. But in the same way that a mad dog slavering in front of you is more emotive, more concrete than the
idea of a mad dog slavering in front of you ... the image of the painful presence of eternal suffering is more emotive than the image of absolutely nothing(ness).
I would say being 'cast out' of the Divine Unity and being obliged to 'depart from me', the Divine Presence, is more hellish than any subsequent condition. Hell could be a 5-star beach resort, the anguish would not be diminished one iota. That we don't all cleave to the fear of being 'cast out' is, or cleave to it absolutely, is a mark of our blind wilfulness.
That we don't all live in the fervent desire to savour the Divine Presence is even moreso.
That men needs 'fear' as a backstop shows not only that we are fallen, but that we are still falling. Fear stops the descent. Then begins the labour of recovery. That's where faith and hope come in, because they are themselves founded on love. And if one really loves, then one will see no-one left behind.
If love is the realisation of the Divine Unity, not simply as an intellectual exercise, but as the reality of union with the Divine, a complete union, body and soul, then hell, the privation of that love, the withdrawal of Grace, means being no more a part of the Cosmic Community. It means existing as if one was the only existing thing in an infinite universe.
Separation from God, in the absolute sense, and it is this sense to which Christ constantly alludes, is
extinction. It is the cessation of being, because being is a continuous participation (however contingent and unconscious that participation might be) in God, the Cosmos and the World.
If God withdraws absolutely from the creature, the creature ceases to exist.
We are rightly warned to fear hell and to flee the wrath to come. Good advice comes from John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers of the early church: “Let us think often of hell, lest we soon fall into it.”
True. But tragically so. Would it not be a better world if it was not a question of fear and wrath, but a question of love. And not just love, but Love? The indwelling of God in the soul?
But of course, John the Golden Mouth is right. But let us think of hell the right way, not of demons and pitchforks and flames and pain, but as the absence of God. That, in this life or any other, should surely be our worst nightmare?
If God is everywhere, then heaven must be
everywhere too. And by the same token, hell can only therefore be
nowhere ... so how can it be a place?
God bless,
Thomas
(PS. has he read Pope Benedict on purgatory and judgement? He'd be foaming at the mouth!)