TRANSCRIPT
“Hell Mend Them!” I said to a friend the other day. We were talking about the US administration. He by the way is an American and also a priest and he had never heard the phrase. I have since discovered like many of my expressions it’s actually idiomatically Scots and also like many of my expressions I didn’t realise that it was Scots until non-Scots pointed out to me that they had never heard it before. The phrase is more accurately “Hell Mend Ye” or “Hell Mend You” and you would be more likely to hear it in previous generations of parents or grandparents, and they would use it as a warning about the consequences of doing something stupid or harmful.
This is Unfkd, the bonus series of my podcast Fkd Up By Faith, where I examine theology or theology-related ideas which are harmful, misunderstood, or just plain wrong. I’m Jude Mills, and today we’re going to talk about hell.
Like most episodes of UNFKD it isn’t my hope or my intention to give you the history and evolution of the idea of hell in Christian theology. I’m going to make the assumption that you are pretty familiar with the Contemporary ideas of hell. As a place of fiery punishment and torture. These images and ideas are rife in art, literature, television and film. They are part of our collective Consciousness Whether we are religious or not. The other thing that I think it’s important to point out is that hell isn’t just a Christian concept. Ideas of hail or health states or hell realms exist in many different religious contexts. And the idea of hell, as we might understand it, isn’t necessarily the idea that was inherited either from the Hebrew Scriptures or from the person of Jesus Christ. I will link to resources in the show notes Gave an excellent breakdown or understandings of hell in Christian theology.
What I am going to talk about is why idea of hell as a place or a state of punishment might be compelling to us, and why I think that the idea of hell is not just harmful and misunderstood it is also just plain wrong. Firstly, I suppose I should talk about why I (and many other Scots) use the phrase Hell Mend Ye.
Given Scots post-reformation history, the invocation of hell is perhaps unsurprising. As the historian Michelle D Brock writes,
‘For many Scots, the Reformed faith entailed, in both theory and in exercise, a complex and often anxious process of questioning the self. This internal questioning stemmed from a potent mix of ideas about the Devil, innate depravity, and double predestination (the doctrine that God has foreordained both those who will be saved and those who will be damned). The collision of these doctrines with experiential struggles against Satan caused the self-identified godly in Scotland, in moments of intense scrutiny, to believe the very worst: that they were irrevocably evil, even demonic, and destined for an eternity in hell.‘
I found myself trying to put this phrase into theological context for my priest friend. What do I mean by ‘hell mend them.’? Even before I could call myself a theologian I knew what the arguments were against the existence of any reality that could be described as hell. If I believe that there is a loving God, I cannot also believe that the same God would subject their beloved children – made in God’s own image – to the eternal torment of fire. The same God whose sacrifice in the figure of Christ, we are also told put an end to all of that eternal damnation nonsense.
The Eastern Orthodox Scholar David Bentley Hart writes this,
‘For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair; and hence the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.‘
If you haven’t read his book ‘That All Shall be Saved’ I highly recommend it. He writes in the mostly deliciously eviscerating way about the literalism of fundamentalist bible interpretations and how utterly illogical the idea of hell is.
What I cannot get away from or avoid is that in the gospels Jesus talked quite a lot about hell. More accurately, however, he didn’t use that word because hell is an English word with Saxon roots. The word that he most often used was Gehenna and Gehenna could mean all sorts of things depending on the context. It could either mean a place of spiritual separation or punishment or torment. It could mean an actual physical place where fires did burn and where historically there were sacrifices made.
My favourite (Maybe my second favourite) bible passage, that one in the Gospel Matthew where Jesus talks about the ‘least of these’? As much as I would like to, I cannot avoid the part where he also talks about ‘eternal fire’ and ‘eternal punishment’. [Matthew 25: 41-46]
‘Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me naked, and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”
Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.‘
And of course this makes it really tricky. It’s easier to perhaps perform a very nifty hermeneutic of avoidance. And I suspect that you may well have witnessed or, if you’re a preacher, even performed such a manoeuvre.
The problem only arises, or at least should, if we indulge in literalism and fail to read the bible, as I believe it should be read, in context. Or more accurately contexts which include the historical, social and religious context of the time that it was written in, the religious tradition that it arose out of, as well as understanding of the biblical use of metaphor and imagery. Which Jesus used all the time. The subject of a literal or metaphorical hell has and continues to be the source of much debate and that includes whether on not Jesus meant that people would literally be consigned to eternal fire, or if he meant something else. As you would imagine, I vote for the something else. Jesus, as we know was Jewish, was speaking to a Jewish audience and they would have been very used to hearing things in the form of metaphor and symbolism. Jesus is frequently heard using metaphors to make a point, and uses parables to illustrate lots of different aspects of his theology. We find it easy to accept that when he says, for example, that we should or cut off our right hand [Matthew 5:30] that he means it metaphorically. I think we can assume, given the style in which the gospel writer Matthew writes, and presents how Jesus spoke, that the same metaphorical analysis can apply to the parts when he talks about eternal fire. Otherwise, we are indulging in a curious kind of cherry picking exercise.
The thing is, part of me finds the idea of post- mortem punishment rather compelling. The world is filled with such blatant acts of cruelty. The truth is it always has been, but it’s more visible to us now. There are those people in the world, and always have been those, who not only don’t do things for ‘the least of these’ but actively go out of their way to make things worse for them. To be uncaring and cruel and sadistic. The idea of hellish consequences for these deeds appeals to my desire for justice. But despite my anger and frustration, I have no real desire to see anyone punished for eternity, even if I believed that such a place existed. But I do have a desire – and I have a feeling this is pretty universal – that a truly people don’t just ‘get away with it.’
It feels right though, doesn’t it, that our worldly actions have a consequence, even (or maybe especially) if we do not face that consequence on the worldly plane
This is how human beings function. We don’t like to see wrongdoing go unchecked. There are those, like me, who believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation, in reconciliation, in restorative justice, and then there are the ‘hanging is too good for them’ types. Either way, the need and the desire for justice is very human. I often see the invocation of there being a ‘special place in hell’, often by non-religious people who are hoping against their own judgement that a divine justice might take the place of a lack of it in this current mortal reality. However, it is sobering to remember – to be reminded – that some of these folk think that I might have such a special place reserved for me. And for people like me, for the leftists and the queers and the ‘woke’.
I’ve been thinking about this and ‘Hell Mend Them’ suggests that hell might have a restorative power. A state, not of torment, but of healing, of cleansing. Being mended means being fixed, being healed, to be made whole .I believe that this maybe (at least partly) is what Jesus meant. That we cannot escape the spiritual and psychological consequences of our wrongdoings. Now we know this to be the case simply from our own experience of guilt and shame (well most of us do) There is another layer of theology which suggests that Gehenna (or hell if you prefer) might be the experience of the absence of God.
My imagination leads me to a mirror, in which the sinful, and the guilty (which is all of us) are invited to look at ourselves face to face. And, held in this reflective fire, seeing who we are and what we have done, we come to know who we are in relationship with God. and how separate we have imagined ourselves to be. I believe that this can only be imagined because the God of my understanding is A God who is the ground and substance and nature of all being. As we heard David Bentley hart say earlier, “the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.”
References
Brock, M.D. (2016). Satan and the Scots : the Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700. Abingdon, Routledge.
Brown, D. (2023). Hell. St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. [online] Available at: https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/Hell.
David Bentley Hart (2019). That All Shall Be Saved : heaven, hell, and Universal salvation. Yale University Press.
Music
Music “Better Day” and “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay https://pixabay.com/users/penguinmusic-24940186/
“Echoes of Heaven Meditation” by Leigh Robinson on Pixabay
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