Reflections on Hell and Hope

Daniel Patrick Huang, S.J.

San José Seminary/Loyola School of Theology

Although artists, poets, and preachers have painted lurid, detailed pictures of hell, the teaching of the Church on hell is really very limited, reverently reticent when it comes to describing this aspect of the future promised us in Christ. What does the Church teach? First, that those who die in radical rejection of God—in mortal sin, in other words-- are consigned immediately to a state of punishment called hell. Secondly, that this state of punishment is eternal. Third, that the essential pain of the damned is that of their complete separation from the God of love. Does this doctrine speak a word of life to the Philippines of the third millennium? A recent important survey of the youth of the Philippines between the ages of 7 to 21 revealed that a minority of our young people, a mere 42% acknowledges the existence of heaven. An even smaller number, only 21%, believes that hell exists. This disturbing data invites reflection and questioning. Has our increasingly secular culture in this part of Asia limited the horizons of our young to hope within history and our world alone? Have suffering and disillusionment, experienced so early by our young people, especially the majority who are poor, reduced them to such ultimate hopelessness? Has our increasingly postmodern and fragmented culture led our young people to reject, or at least, distrust the great Christian story of hope? Is this large-scale abandonment of belief in hell a product of our emerging culture of moral relativism and lazy tolerance? Have our young people become indifferent to hell simply because more and more of them have been influenced by various cultural forces to regard sin and evil as mere lifestyle preferences, functions of individual choice, without ultimate significance? In this context, the Church’s teaching on hell is surely important. For belief in hell is the most radical statement of Christian belief in and reverence for human freedom. In a real sense, hell is God’s eternal ratification of the free choice of human beings to live in self-enclosed isolation. To believe in hell means to believe that human freedom is so awesome and powerful a gift that, by its misuse, a person can irrevocably decide to cut himself off from life-giving relationship with God and other human beings. In our superficial culture of material consumption and possession, hell teaches us that we have souls that we can lose. In our morally relativistic culture, hell reminds us that, in our freedom, in our choices, we have the terrifying power to destroy ourselves, to pervert our deepest humanity, to lose our souls. Yet we must add this in the end. For the Christian, heaven and hell are not equal alternatives. For "where sin has multiplied, grace immeasurably exceeded it." (Rom 5:20) With Jesus, the symmetry between salvation and damnation has been broken. In Jesus, we have come to know that the Father’s desire is that all human beings be saved (cf. 1 Tim 2:4), and in Jesus, and through his Spirit, poured out on the world by his death and resurrection, the world is "tilted" irrevocably toward salvation and life. Thus, while the Church recognizes and celebrates the saints in heaven, she has never dared to pronounce that anyone is in hell. Finally, the Creed calls us to remember and believe that Jesus, by his death, descended into hell. The mystery of Holy Saturday, rediscovered for our time by Hans Urs von Balthasar, is a mystery of deepest hope. In his passion and death, the Son of God, the sinless one was made sin for us (2 Cor 5:21). With a love beyond our imagining, God himself, through his Son, accompanies the damned in their self-chosen isolation. With the compassion of the good shepherd, God himself descends into the abyss, to share the damned sinner’s Godforsaken desolation. Through the mystery of Holy Saturday, the words of Psalm 139 have assumed their profoundest meaning: "If I climb to the heavens, you are there. If I sink to the depths of the nether world, you are there." The doctrine of apocatastasis, associated with the name of Origen, the universalist belief that all will necessarily be saved has been condemned by the Church and rightly so, for such a teaching trivializes human freedom and transgresses upon the mystery of God’s sovereignty. But faith’s contemplation of the bruised and broken Son of God, dead with the dead, damned with the damned, filling the utter darkness of hell with the radiance of his silent, faithful love, surely allows us to hope that perhaps all might be saved. Perhaps too the doctrine of hell is a call to follow the Lord in his loving accompaniment of those in Godforsaken desolation. In the darkness suffered by the saints, by Therese of Lisieux, for example, the saving mystery of Holy Saturday continues. Cardinal Ratzinger has expressed this "mission to hell" in memorable words with which we shall close our reflection: For the saints, ‘hell’ is not so much a threat to be hurled at others but a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent in the Night. One draws near to the Lord’s radiance by sharing his darkness.

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Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1033-1037, esp. 1035.

NFL-Trends Youth Study 2001, 25.

Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans.

Michael

Waldstein (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,

1988),

216-217; Dermot Lane, Keeping Hope Alive (New York: Paulist, 1996),

140;

Tony

Kelly, Touching the Infinite: Explorations in Christian Hope (Victoria:

Collins

Dove, 1991), 185-86, 190-91.

Cf. Karl Rahner, S.J., "The Hermeneutics of Eschatological

Assertions,"

Theological Investigations, vol. 4. trans. Kevin Smyth (New York:

Crossroad),

323-46.

Cf. LG 48: "Already the final age of the world is with us and the

renewal

of

the world is irrevocably under way."

Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 631-35.

For an excellent study of Von Balthasar’s "theology of Holy

Saturday," cf.

John Saward, The Mysteries of March (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic

University

of America Press, 1990).

Cf. Zachary Hayes, Visions of a Future: A Study of Christian

Eschatology

(Wilmington: Glazier, 1989), 178-89; also Peter C. Phan, Responses to

101

Questions on Death and Eternal Life (New York: Paulist, 1997), 86-87.