A. S.
Religion, Space, and Place
November
21, 2014
HELL YES: A TALE OF TWO
MARS HILLS
Until
late 2014, there were two different evangelical, non-denominational
megachurches named Mars Hill: Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA, co-founded by
controversial pastor Mark Driscoll, and the Midwestern monolith Mars Hill Bible
Church in Grandville, MI, founded by the equally controversial pastor Rob Bell.
Names and controversy, however, were the only things these two churches shared.
An examination of some of the extensive differences between the two men and
their churches underlines a great deal of the tensions present within parallel
and possibly antithetical strains of contemporary American Christianity; common
theological issues, like the nature of scriptural authority, places for women to
contribute to ministry and leadership, and inclusion of genderqueer
relationships rear their heads. But when boiled down to their respective
essences, these prominent evangelical figures and their respective arguments
represent nothing less than the nature of Hell itself.
Before making those examinations, it is necessary to
provide additional context and definitions to some of these topics:
specifically the churches and their former leaders themselves, the marker
“evangelical,” and the concept of Hell itself.
A TALE OF TWO MARS
HILLS, VOL. 1: THE PAISLEY MIDWEST
Master of Divinity degree from Fuller Theological
Seminary in hand, Rob Bell and his wife, Kristen, headed (mid)west. Under the
tutelage of prominent pastor Ed Dobson, Bell began to preach at Grand Rapids,
MI’s Calvary Church, founding Mars Hill Bible Church in 1999. The church
expanded quickly; in 2005, the church estimated that the cumulative attendance
for the two Sunday morning services, referred to as “gatherings,” was around
11,000 people, a far cry from the services initially held in a local school
gym.
Bell himself—and his church, through a particularly
American Christian version of the halo effect—found secular success at a young
age. His books, featuring provocative, idiosyncratic names like Sex God and Velvet Elvis, displayed Bell’s inclusive brand of Christian
theology—in 1995, Bell said “I affirm the truth anywhere in any religious
system, in any worldview. If it’s true, it belongs to God.”[1]
These books, combined with his contrasting blend of lo-fi worship services,
featuring minimal technology, and successful utilization of social media as a
promotional platform, embody his appeal both as an alternative evangelical
figure and a youth-friendly figure among a din of hip new voices.
It only took the release of his 2011 book, Love Wins, to change everything. The
book’s primary focus is an exploration of the theological, scriptural, and
ethical validity of the prominent contemporary American Christian notion of Hell
as a literally physical place in which the unsaved—that is to say,
non-Christians—suffer from eternal conscious torment at the hands of a wrathful
God. While Bell does play some semantic games and pick exegetical knits
regarding Biblical language, the central tenet of his book is, as summarized by
Alex Murashko in the Christian Post, that “a loving God would not send billions
of people to a horrible hell.”[2]
While these notions may seem—and are, really—relatively mild to someone outside of evangelicalism
looking in, some of the evangelical reactions to Bell’s book took on a
horrified, pearl-clutching tone that often sounded more like the laments of a
jilted lover than theodicean disagreements.[3]
Prominent figures within the community, including publisher and writer Justin
Taylor, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, and head
of the other Mars Hill church Mark
Driscoll, pilloried both Bell and his book across multiple platforms; perhaps
the best example of this reaction came from famed Reformed Calvinist pastor
John Piper, who simply tweeted “Farewell Rob Bell,” along with a link to
Taylor’s review of Bell’s book.[4]
Despite the general support of his congregation and
colleagues at Mars Hill, Bell left his position as pastor in late 2011 and
moved to southern California with his family. Since his relocation, he has
expressed support for same-sex marriage, as well as concern that the
evangelical community has become “…a very narrow, politically intertwined,
culturally ghettoized Evangelical subculture.”[5]
He continues to publish new books, has worked on developing a serial television
drama with former Lost producer
Carlton Cuse, and joined Oprah Winfrey, whose book club featured Bell’s 2013
book What We Talk About When We Talk
About God, for her national “The Life You Want” stadium tour.
A TALE OF TWO MARS
HILLS, VOL. 2: THE NORTHWEST
Founded in 1996 with fellow pastors Lief Moi and Mike
Gunn, Driscoll’s church boasted fifteen different campuses, weekly attendance
of more than 13,000, and nearly fifty pastors on its payroll at its 2014 peak.[6]
As the public face of his Mars Hill, Driscoll, who studied at Western Seminary
and earned a Master of Arts degree in exegetical theology, has long courted
controversy with his aggressive preaching style, hardline Reformed Calvinist
doctrine, and successful utilization of social media; Driscoll’s theological focuses—as
well as the subjects of several of his best-selling books—often stress a “complementarian”
dynamic in male/female relationships—wifely submission to a husband’s will—and
conservative sexual mores, particularly lionization of virginity or “purity,” condemnations
of homosexuality, and distaste for what he considers feminism.[7]
These
and other similar views of Driscoll’s manifest themselves not only in sermons
and books, but also as provocative tweets; on Inauguration Day in 2013,
Driscoll tweeted that he was “Praying for our president, who today will place his
hands on a Bible he does not believe to take an oath to a God he likely does
not know.”[8]
In 2000, Driscoll posted pseudonymously as “William Wallace II” on an online
Mars Hill forum, including castigating groups of young Christian men for being
“pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship
loving mama’s boy sensitive emasculated neutered exact male replica
evangellyfish.”[9]
Both
Driscoll’s theology and persona have attracted increasing criticism over the
years, but that criticism has increased with allegations of emotional abuse and
cult-like disciplinary tactics purported to be “…less about getting right with
God than public humiliation and congregation control.”[10]
In addition, he and his Mars Hill have come under substantial fire from within
both the church and publishing worlds for practices that skirt the lines of
plagiarism and ethical marketing, if not crossing them outright.[11]
Mars Hill began dissolving its organization in late 2014, with a stated goal to
completely disband by the end of the calendar year.[12]
Driscoll has released several public apologies for what decisions he said he
“regretted…[examples] of a wrong I had learned from.”[13]
On November 20th, 2014, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported
that, in the wake of his resignation, Driscoll will receive a severance package
of one year’s salary, which was estimated to be around $500,000, a figure that
includes a $200,000 housing allowance.[14]
WHO LIVES IN THE CITY
ON THE HILL?
After
looking at two of the most prominent cultural representatives of evangelicalism,
it is now necessary to define “evangelical.” Unlike Roman Catholicism or the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, evangelicalism has no official
membership or authoritative bodies, making a declarative definition about group
composition tricky. In addition, tribal gatekeeping and the social and
professional shunning of those who even consider straying from the path
prevents self-identification from being a particularly reliable metric;
nondenominational Christian churches may shy away from a potentially limiting
label like “evangelical,” while ultraconservative Catholics like Rick Santorum
may be more theologically at home at evangelical megachurches than Holy Mother
Church.[15]
For
the dual purposes of clarity and consistency, I generally share David
Bebbington’s definition of “evangelical” as a theological identifier[16]:
Trinitarian Christians who believe in Conversionism, the experience of being “born
again;” Activism, which manifests as the sharing and embodiment of the Gospel
in daily life; Biblicism, the belief in and obedience to the Bible as the
divinely inspired word of God; and Crucicentrism, the theological focus on
Jesus Christ’s sacrifice as the only way for a sinful mankind to access
redemption from evil.
Bebbington
proposed his definition in 1989, the same year that the American evangelical
political group Moral Majority disbanded, and while his definition is in many
ways not exclusive, he was primarily describing characteristics of British
evangelicals; however, American groups like the National Association of
Evangelicals and Wheaton College’s Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals
align themselves with Bebbington’s quadrilateral. And that specifically
American evangelicalism, while similar, is
unique, with much of its foundations built upon particularly American
traditions and narratives.
While
W. Scott Poole’s Satan in America
documents the historical tendency of religious people, conservative or
otherwise, to literally demonize their opponents, I believe that the animosity
of conservative vitriol directed toward President Barack Obama and his allies—be
they actual or imagined—necessitates some addendums to Bebbington’s definition:
essentially, all four of Bebbington’s components are augmented to arguably fundamentalist
extremes in American evangelicalism. Thus, activism becomes “witnessing” to
anyone within earshot, Biblicism becomes a belief that the Bible is not only
“inerrant,” but also perfectly internally consistent, perfectly historically
accurate, and derived solely from God’s inspiration of faithful men.
As
with that intensity of both belief and action, fears and concerns are similarly
amplified, with worries of somehow having “lost” the United States as an
institution to the forces of Satan and liberalism.[17]
This can also be tracked by the rise of ultraconservative Tea Party groups, who
“draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants”
and “say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their
opinions on…social issues.”[18] In fact, an October 2014 poll conducted by
Fox News asked US voters to choose which of two statements would be a more
accurate description of their feelings about the world’s future; the offered
choices were “Everything will be alright” or “Things are going to hell in a handbasket,”
with 35% selecting the former and 58% selecting the latter. [19]
With that, we have an operational definition and some
evidence of “evangelical,” acknowledging the label as a marker of religious,
generally conservative Americans who, as Poole helpfully adds, “emphasize
martial images of the Christian life and portray spirituality as a struggle
against a powerful prince of evil and his works on Earth.”[20] But there is still one missing piece: if
evangelicals are indeed deeply concerned about the Earth going to Hell, what is Hell? In fact, the proper
question may be completely different: if asking those who believe in it as a
literal, physical place, where is
Hell?
That’s the hard part: nobody seems to know. While Bell’s
bestseller questions a supernatural Hell’s existence altogether, Driscoll has a
characteristically aggressive belief: on January 14th, 2014, he
tweeted that “If you are not a Christian, you are going to hell. It’s not
unloving to say that. It’s unloving to not say that.”[21]
While the principle behind that belief is not uncommon among Christians,
particularly those in more theologically (and politically) conservative camps,
it is rarely stated so matter-of-factly, but almost never without making waves.
On one hand, resistance to hardline theology, particularly the extreme Reformed
Calvinism that Driscoll maintains, is healthy and good for a community’s
dialog. On the other hand, no matter his credentials or official title or
popularity among many Christians, Driscoll appears to value victory, power, and
physical strength over perhaps all else.
Which, as so many other fascinating things do, leads us
to the Vikings.
HELL AIN’T A BAD PLACE
TO BE (FOR JESUS OR A VIKING)
The Harrowing of Hell is the story of how Jesus Christ
descended into Hell immediately after his crucifixion and returning to Earth at
his resurrection. Different versions of the story are presented in different
forms; the Apostles’ Creed simply says that “[Jesus] descended into hell,”[22]
while both the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and Dante’s Inferno offer more rousing, even adventurous accounts. The story is
not considered part of the Protestant scriptural canon, but is accepted
elsewhere, including as part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.[23]
While the specifics of each account vary, a recurring
narrative aspect of the Harrowing of Hell is Christ’s triumph over not only the
devil, Hell’s ruler, but also of death and sin. As Virgil explains it, Christ
entered Hell “in majesty and awe, And on his head were crowns of victory,” and
proceeds to rescue Abel, Noah, Moses, King David, Abraham, and other righteous
denizens, who had been confined there since their deaths and until Christ’s resurrection
allowed them be the first human souls to “[see] salvation.”[24]
In addition to religious texts, the Harrowing of Hell narrative
also appears in anonymous works once often credited to St. Caedmon, the
seventh-century Anglo-Saxon poet. As the Anglo-Saxons transitioned from
worshipping the Norse pantheon to developing a new and uniquely violent view of
Christianity, not all of their previous traditions were lost or abandoned to
their new faith; writing for the BBC, Gareth Williams addresses a number of
similarities between the god figures, including a divine trinity and Odin, the
“Allfather,” being hung to death and pierced in his side by a spear.[25]
Violent Viking raids of Christian settlements gave way to more peaceful commercial
interactions; through the centuries of efforts (and demands) of rulers like
Norway’s Hakon the Good, Denmark’s Harald Bluetooth, and St. Olaf Haraldsson,
the Vikings had become a mostly Christian people, with even Mjolnir, the hammer
of Thor and a Norse symbol of power and strength, being merged with the cross.
But
for a culture as brutal and violent as the Vikings, there would be little
appeal to a god as nonviolent as Jesus Christ. Based on Viking cultural values,
a god who accepted “the cup [his] Father has given [him]”[26]
and subjected himself to a gruesome and humiliating death at the hands of mere
mortal soldiers, even castigating his friend for trying to defend him with
violence, was no god, but a coward, a weakling who deserved mockery, not
worship.
Luckily, poems like Beowulf
and Genesis, which J.R.R. Tolkien
specified as a certain in his “Beowulf:
The Monsters and the Critics” lecture as an almost certain inspiration to the Beowulf poet,[27]
served as cultural and linguistic bridges between the two cultures; as Tolkien
argues, certain fantastical components of Beowulf
have origins in both the gods of Pagan myth and the Cain figure of
Judeo-Christian scripture. With these works providing a new joint framework
accessible to both the Pagans and the Christians, the die was cast.
This relates directly back to the Harrowing of Hell; by
adding and integrating a theology of a god that fits into what Jan A.B.
Jongeneel describes in the German poem Heliand
as “Jesus as the Saxon chief who valiantly leads his people to victory,”[28]
the Vikings finally had a doctrine that they could grasp and get behind: God as
warrior-king, a take-no-prisoners divine who not only defeated his corporeal
enemies, but death itself. Visual portrayals of Christ, to borrow a phrase,
kicking ass and chewing bubble gum dotted the artistic landscape entered into
the cultural lexicon.
This anachronistic, even regressive archetype has not
only not evaporated over the centuries, but in fact remained quite popular,
particularly within evangelicalism. One of Driscoll’s most frequently expressed
concerns about Christianity is his aforementioned worry about the
“pussification” of American Christians; he even went so far to pseudonymously
create a dictionary of terms elucidating these concerns, including “male
lesbian” (“any man who thinks and acts like a woman because he thinks that
makes him a better person”), “homoerotic huddle” (“any men’s group where the
men cry inordantly [sic] and hug each other with deep affection”), and,
charmingly, “feminism” (“the enemy of every man, every woman, every child, and
God Almighty”)[29].
In a perfect summary of his views and the views of his followers, Driscoll very
clearly summarized by saying: “…Jesus is a pride [sic] fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and
the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot
worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can
beat up.”[30]
Images of Christ as warrior and hell as the place where
he sends his enemies to be punished, along with the words of Dante and Virgil, have
eventually become the primary source of cultural perception of a Christian
“hell;” the hellfire-and-brimstone concept of Hell does not really appear in a
recognizable form in the Jewish scripture inherited and appropriated by
Christians as their Old Testament, nor do Dante’s specific cataloguing of the
individual circles of Hell and their tortures. The New Testament, as Rob Bell
explains, only contains “the actual word ‘hell’…roughly twelve times”, in this
case being translated from the Greek “Gehenna,” an actual location near
Jerusalem that Bell explains as the “city dump.”[31]
As Alice K. Turner says in her fascinating The
History of Hell, “The landscape of Hell is the largest shared construction
project in imaginative history, and its chief architects have been creative
giants—Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton,
Goethe, Blake, and more.”[32]
So when evangelicals like Driscoll use the Saussurean
signifier of “hell,” the sort of literal location that former evangelical
pastor-turned-hell theology critic Carlton Pearson called “a torture chamber
that’s customized for unbelievers,”[33]
what are they trying to signify? To what—where—are
they referring? Examining the possibilities through use of Edward Soja’s
theories of first, second, and thirdspace may help clarify. Thus, we begin:
Contrary
to comic book illustrations of Hell that portray a blood-red landscape of rock
and flame, there is precisely zero evidence—at this point, anyway—of a physical
place beneath the Earth’s crust in which demons romp, the unclean are flayed,
and Sisyphus pushes his boulder. There is no identified, mappable, “real” space
that can be physically identified and quantified. So unless the fabled 21 grams
of weight a body loses upon death is followed to its ultimate destination—and
the owner is among the unwashed heathen masses doomed to damnation—“hell” cannot
be a firstspace.
The
very existence of the argument that this essay which you—yes, you, dear
reader—have in your hands or on your screen is evidence of some degree of subjectivity that exists around the space; when I
use the word “hell” and you think of something, anything you’ve seen—a fresco on
the ceiling of a South American cathedral, a background still from an episode
of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or a
visualization of a horror audiobook you’ve heard—and you will likely summon a
vivid, dramatic representation of that fantastical place, probably something
that does not or cannot exist in the “real” physical sense of a firstspace, but
certainly in line with a mental space, what Soja refers to as “representations
of power and ideology, of control and surveillance.”[34]
After all, the fear of damnation for one’s sins is still a powerful enough
agent that Pope Francis made headlines for excommunicating Catholic members of
the Sicilian mafia in mid-2014, threatening those who do not repent and “stop
doing evil” with eternal torment.[35]
Secondspace: check.
Thirdspace,
as always, is both more open to interpretation and more difficult to nail down.
Soja writes that a classification of “thirdspace” would serve in part as a
collection of opposing binaries: a place that is simultaneously knowable and
unknowable, real and imagined, etc. In the case of hell, the thirdspace label,
being a combination of firstspace and secondspace, does not apply. Thirdspaces
are in part “[lifeworlds] of experiences, emotions, events, and political
choices,” all of which could potentially apply to hell, but without the ability
to quantify, qualify, or map it outside of a mental landscape, that seems to
cross the threshold of impossibility for an accurate classification as a
thirdspace.
So
now that hell has been identified as a secondspace, the nature of its
“sacredness” must be addressed. In their anthology American Sacred Space, David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal
offer a helpful, intuitive set of criteria by which a space can be considered
sacred: in order for a space to be
sacred, it must be “a location for formalized, repeatable symbolic
performances,” a “significant space…subject to interpretation because it
focuses crucial questions about what it means to be a human being in a
meaningful world,” and it must be “inevitably contested space, a site of
negotiated contests over the legitimate ownership of sacred symbols.”[36]
Per Chidester and Linenthal’s first criterion, hell must
be a place with an established system that can facilitate the repetition of
specific, identified “symbolic performances.”
Hell itself is a place where, according to Driscoll’s citation and
understanding of scripture, unbelievers will be “…tormented with fire and
sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamba. And
the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day
or night.”[37]
The Lord, Driscoll says, will be “inflicting vengeance on those who do not know
God,” and this eternal cycle of death and destruction, these “symbolic
performances” of vengeance, will continue in eternal perpetuity as a symbol of
the retribution they have brought upon themselves. Hell, then, in existing
solely for this purpose, indeed fulfills Chidester and Linenthal’s first
criterion.
Their second criterion for sacrality, that the space must
be both subject to interpretation and raise questions regarding humanity’s
existence in a “meaningful world,” is clearly met by the very nature ascribed
to hell, with both Bell’s and Driscoll’s disparate views fulfilling this. In
Bell’s eyes, hell is the best way to understand what it is like “…when people
abandon all that is good and right and kind and humane,”[38]
adding that “There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us
to take both seriously.”[39]
These qualifications of Bell’s more ephemeral hell define the opposition to
what is “good,” showing the consequences of immoral and cruel behavior,
illustrating the tension of one of, if not the,
existential questions of existence: what is right, and what is wrong. In
Driscoll’s view, a literal hell is where “all the godless will ultimately be
eternally sentenced,”[40]
which, in a way, reflects Bell’s view, albeit far more literally: hell is the
consequence of evil, the destination for those who practice it.
Chidester and Linenthal’s final criterion, that a sacred
space must be a contested one, does in fact embody the central disagreement
between Bell and Driscoll: one believes in a state of mind, while the other
promotes belief in a literal place. So while Bell’s idea keeps hell closer to a
more metaphorical secondspace, Driscoll contends on behalf of the existence of
a firstspace, resulting in contestation of a space’s actual existence.
It is important to note, however, that compared to
Driscoll’s, Bell’s views do not provide room for hell as a firstspace; thus,
the sacrality of hell is found exclusively within Driscoll’s eschatology and
that of those who share this view. By identifying Christ as Heaven’s MMA-minded
enforcer and hell as his domain, Driscoll manifests Poole’s description of
martially minded Christianity-as-war believers, those who not only frame
spiritual struggles as battles, but literally believe them to be.
The battle is, in fact, made literal in Tim LaHaye and
Jerry Jenkins’ ultrapopular Left Behind series
of novels, which document LaHaye’s dispensational premillennialism, in which
the believers are taken up to Heaven, leaving the unbelievers to suffer on
earth for seven years of tribulation, during which they have the chance to
accept Christ and avoid the burning torment that the Antichrist and his
followers will inevitably endure. However, as writer Fred Clarke says, Left Behind contains “…a sense of
triumphalism. Those ‘inside the fold’ feel no sense of obligation to those on
the outside—they are bad people who are getting what they deserve and the godly
remnant gets to watch, more in delight than in sadness.”[41]
This notion, which the universalist Anglican writer Frederic Farrar called the
“abominable fancy,” is subtextually—if not textually—present in the cautions of
many believers, beginning with the early Christian church: Alice Turner
describes religious artwork in which “…blessed souls, ranged in orderly rows,
their eyes lowered demurely toward the fiery chaos beneath, watch Heaven’s
eternal late-night TV.”[42]
The connection between this “abominable fancy” and
evangelicalism’s (literally) militant Christ seems to illustrate the root of
contemporary evangelical theology: not confidence in victory, but fear of
defeat. This fear reveals itself beneath the aggressive, macho posturing
typified by Driscoll: if Driscoll can indeed “beat up” a “pussified” iteration
of his lord and savior Jesus Christ, what chance would that same Christ have
against the forces of Satan? Poole identifies an example of this fear in the 2006
documentary Jesus Camp, in which
evangelical summer camp-goers piously pray to fight off the demonic forces that
have seen fit to, for example, interrupt fax machines and obstruct the
successful display of a Powerpoint presentation.[43]
To holders of this eschatology, it seems that the devil is everywhere: everything from broken sound systems and unlit
campfires to the United Nations and Planned Parenthood are all evidence of the
demonic in our world.
When everything is viewed as Satan’s attempts to
discredit Christ and drag every earthly soul to hell, militancy may in fact be
the most—if not only—reasonable response. To this mindset, those damned to
physical hell receive their eternal conscious torment are not brothers and
sisters tragically lost from the warm glow of Christ’s light, but are
vanquished enemies receiving their just desserts, the losing team sent to God’s
never-ending POW camp.
“DON’T WORRY IF THERE’S
A HELL BELOW/WE’RE ALL GOING TO GO” [44]
Make
no mistake: contemporary evangelicals are indeed fighting a war, and they are doing
so on two fronts. One is against the outside forces of the godless, secular
world, what Poole calls “spiritual combat being waged between true believers
and demonically inspired liberals and secular humanists.”[45]
The other is against those found inside the circled wagons, those false
prophets and wolves in sheeps’ clothing who would question the toed party line
for the sake of destroying from within.
In
his Map is Not Territory, Jonathan Z.
Smith writes that “What we study when we study religion is one mode of
constructing worlds of meaning, worlds within which men find themselves and in
which they choose to dwell,” as well as “…the variety of attempts to map,
construct, and inhabit such positions of power through the use of myths,
rituals, and experiences of transformation.”[46]
While the dustups between Bell and Driscoll are in no way the first—nor will
they be the last—of their kind, Smith understands that religion indeed concerns
the worlds in which participants choose
to live, with some calling for annihilation and torment, while others calling
for creation and relief.
Recently,
evangelical minds have produced a good deal of hand-wringing self-examinations
about the declining state of their churches; in 1994, Mark A. Noll, an
evangelical writer and scholar, published The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, the first sentence of which is as direct a
jab as a thesis could be, stating that “The scandal of the evangelical mind is
that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”[47]
Noll’s call for self-improvement, despite substantial praise from both the
evangelical publication Christianity Today and the “liberal media” flagship the
New York Times, has been overpowered by every War on Christmas, Kirk Cameron
CNN appearance, and abortion clinic pipe bomb. Theological purity has replaced
lowercase-c catholicism, with Driscoll and his comrades serving as the spiritual
bouncers that throw the insufficiently adhering onto the cold sidewalk of the
outside. As David Dark writes in his The
Sacredness of Questioning Everything, “When we have questions, illumination
is possible. Otherwise we’re closed and no light can enter.”[48]
Whether
or not there is a hell, one needs only look at the history—and present—of religion’s
place in world geopolitics to see that this and similar issues have been the
catalyst for murders, wars, and horrific actions for all of recorded history. And
while the hell argument would specifically require incontestable, divine
evidence in order to be settled, the pain caused by the argument itself may
actually be what provides us with a suitable answer to the question. I believe
both Bell and Driscoll would agree with Ariel, who told Prospero that “Hell is
empty, and all the devils are here.”
[1] http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2005/08/Velvet-Elvis-Author-Encourages-Exploration-Of-Doubts.aspx?p=1
[3] A great deal of
this first wave of criticism came either from those, like Piper and Taylor, who
had read little if any of Bell’s then-unpublished book outside of a few
excerpts from the publisher, and extrapolated from marketing copy, book jacket
text, and promotional materials. http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2011/02/26/rob-bell-universalist/
[4] https://twitter.com/JohnPiper/status/41590656421863424
[5] http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2013/03/hear_rob_bell_support_same-sex.html
[8] http://www.christianpost.com/news/mark-driscoll-rebuked-for-judging-obamas-faith-with-controversial-twitter-post-88675
[9] http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/driscoll-troubled-mind-william-wallace
[10]
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/church-or-cult/Content?oid=12172001
[14] http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2014/11/20/mars-hill-church-what-pastor-mark-driscoll-made-at-his-mega-church/
[15]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/us/santorums-catholicism-draws-evangelicals.html
[16]
David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in
Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1930s.
[17]
Some evangelicals may dismiss any distinctions between satanic forces and liberal
ones; for real-time examples, search Twitter for hashtags, from the fairly
specific #ObamaSatan to the more comprehensive #tcot.
[18]
http://www.pewforum.org/2011/02/23/tea-party-and-religion/
[19]
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2014/10/15/fox-news-polls-us-voters-weigh-in-on-isis-and-ebola/
[20]
Poole, Satan in America, 45.
[21]
Driscoll has since deleted this tweet, but not before it made waves in the
community. A screen capture of the original tweet can be found at http://benirwin.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/screen-shot-2014-01-14-at-7-30-02-am.png?w=676.
[22]
http://auchinleck.nls.uk/mss/harrow.html
[23]
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p122a5p1.htm
[24]
Dante, The Divine Comedy I: Hell,
translated by Dorothy Sayers, p. 92-93
[25]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/vikings/religion_01.shtml
[26]
John 18:11, New International Version Bible.
[27]
http://www.parklandsd.org/web/smith/files/2012/03/Tolkeins-Monsters-and-Critics.pdf
[28]
Jan Jongeneel, Jesus Christ in World
History: His Presence and Representation in Cyclical and Linear Settings, p.
110.
[29]
http://matthewpaulturner.com/2014/07/29/mark-driscolls-pussified-nation/
[30]
http://web.archive.org/web/20071013102203/http://relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7418
[31]
Bell, Love Wins, p. 67-68.
[32]
Alice K. Turner, The History of Hell,
p. 3.
[33]
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3362554&page=1
[34]
Soja, Thirdspace, p. 67.
[35]
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/22/pope-francis-warns-mafiosi-to-repent-or-end-up-in-hell
[36]
Chidester and Linenthal, p. 13-15
[37]
http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/149639-mark-driscoll-to-hell-with-hell_part1.html
[38]
Love Wins, p. 71.
[39]
Love Wins, p. 79
[40]
http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/149639-mark-driscoll-to-hell-with-hell_part1.html
[41]
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2004/05/05/lb-go-to-hell/
[42]
Turner, The History of Hell, p. 4.
[43]
Satan in America, p. 45.
[44]
This title is taken from the lead single of Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 album,
Curtis. I couldn’t resist.
[45]
Poole, Satan in America, p. 185.
[46]
Smith, Map is Not Territory, p.
290-291
[47]
Noll, p. 3
[48]
Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning
Everything, p. 14.
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