I know we all follow the theological debates within Catholicism about which saint got in touch with which angel to channel which biblical dead person — don’t they have a show on CNN that goes over each week’s highlights? — but one thing you never do, in Catholicism, Protestantism, or Pentecostal Snake-Handlingism, for that matter, is say there’s no hell.
Because that would be Jewish. The Jews have never cared that much about hell. They grudgingly admit that it’s probably there, but it’s just this place that, after you die, you feel intense shame before God for all the times you yelled at your wife or failed to stuff two dollars into the self-parking kiosk. The Hebrew word for hell is “Gehenna,” which is the name of the garbage dump outside Jerusalem that (a) smelled bad, and (b) was always on fire. I can imagine generations of parents using it as a threat to their unruly children: “If you don’t straighten up right this minute, I’m gonna throw you into the smelly garbage dump with the smoke cloud over it!”
So when the Christians come along, they take Gehenna and run with it. They use the name Gehenna to mean hell, and that’s not just trash burning out there, it’s demons and human souls, and it burns forever because it’s mixed with brimstone, which does indeed smell bad when you burn it. Actually brimstone turns red and burns blue, so if you’ve got brimstone out there, you’ve got a blood red gelatinous mass with a blue flame, or what the great preachers call …
The Lake of Fire.
[…]
At any rate, the reason the Catholic press got their cassocks in a bunch is that, over the past half century or so, a lot of theologians have been saying, “Maybe we got the whole hell thing wrong.” They’ve looked back over the appropriate scriptures and decided that, after you die, you don’t get thrown into the flaming garbage dump, you just vanish from all human history, as though you never existed. There’s no memory or trace of you, you’re erased from the universe.
And this might be what the Pope said he believes. After Eugenio reported their conversation, the Vatican scrambled around and issued statements saying that, no, the Pope didn’t go outside the catechism and they were just chewing the fat and please everybody let’s not get carried away. Yes, Gehenna is real. Yes, the Pope believes in hell. Yes, the Pope is Catholic.
Joe Bob Briggs, “Pope Forgets the Lake of Fire”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-06-21.
March 22, 2020
QotD: The notion of Hell
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