Heaven? Yes! Hell? No!

09696
August 14, 2009

Heaven? Sure. Hell? Not so much.

by Greg Garrison
Religion News Service

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Just when it seemed to have cooled off, the topic of hell is back on the front burner — at least for pastors learning to preach about a topic most Americans would rather not talk about.

Only 59 percent of Americans believe in hell, compared with 74 percent who believe in heaven, according to the recent surveys from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

“I think it’s such a difficult and important biblical topic,” said Kurt Selles, director of the Global Center at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School. “There's a big change that’s taken place as far as evangelicals not wanting to be as exclusive.”

At the recent annual Beeson Pastors School, Selles led two workshops to discuss “Whatever happened to hell?” He asked how many of the pastors had ever preached a sermon on hell. Nobody had, he said.

“I think it’s something people want to avoid,” he said. “I understand why. It’s a difficult topic.”

The Rev. Fred Johns, pastor of Brookview Wesleyan Church in Irondale, AL, said after a workshop discussion of hell that pastors do shy away from the topic of everlasting damnation.

“It’s out of fear we’ll not appear relevant,” he said. “It’s pressure from the culture to not speak anything negative. I think we’ve begun to deny hell. There’s an assumption that everybody’s going to make it to heaven somehow.”

The soft sell on hell reflects an increasingly market-conscious approach, Selles said.

“When you’re trying to market Jesus, sometimes there’s a tendency to mute traditional Christian symbols,” he said. “Difficult doctrines are left by the wayside. Hell is a morally repugnant doctrine. People wonder why God would send people to eternal punishment.”

Speakers said the seriousness of Jesus dying for man’s sins relates to the gravity of salvation vs. damnation, according to Johns. “If you don’t mention God’s judgment, you are missing a big part of the Christian gospel,” Selles said. “Without wrath, there’s no grace.”

Pope John Paul II stirred up a debate in 1999 by describing hell as “the state of those who freely and definitely separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”

Although the pope was reflecting official Roman Catholic teaching, some U.S. evangelicals expressed misgivings about the implication that hell is an abstract separation from God rather than a literal lake of fire as described in the Book of Revelation.

The pope’s comments on hell stirred up the ancient debate about whether hell is a real place of burning fire or a state of mind reflecting a dark, cold emptiness and distance from God.

Evangelical Christians have traditionally offered a sterner view of salvation and damnation. A Southern Baptist Home Mission Board study in 1993 estimated that 70 percent of all Americans are going to hell, based on projected numbers of those who have not had a born-again experience.

Human ideas about hell were still in ferment as the Bible was being written. The theological concept of hell has a rich cultural heritage, according to historian Alan Bernstein, author of The Formation of Hell.

The ancient Hebrews focused on the afterlife following their Babylonian captivity, when they experienced the torment of ungodly enemies who seemed to have an unjustifiably good life on Earth. During the Babylonian exile, Jews were exposed to Zoroastrianism, which asserts there is an eternal struggle between good and evil, with good triumphing in the end.

The Hebrew concept of “Sheol” — the realm of the dead — may also have been influenced by the Greek mythology of Tartarus, a place of everlasting punishment for the Titans, a race of gods defeated by Zeus, Bernstein writes.

From about 300 B.C. to 300 A.D., those influences combined with Hebrew speculation about an eventual comeuppance to the worldly wicked.

In translating the Bible from Hebrew to Greek, the Greeks used the terms Tartarus, Hades and Gehenna. In Greek thought, Hades is not a place of punishment. It’s where the dead are separated from the living.

The term Gehenna referred to a ravine outside Jerusalem that was used as a garbage dump. It had once been a place of child sacrifice and became a symbol of pain and suffering, Selles said. As a garbage dump, it was probably often a place of fire as trash was burned, emphasizing the symbolism of the flames of eternal damnation, he said.

Jesus never soft-pedaled the concept of hell, Selles said. “It’s not metaphorical in Jesus’ mind. It’s a real place,” he said.

In 410 A.D., St. Augustine defined four states of afterlife: those so good they go to heaven; those so bad they go to hell; those who deserve some relief in their eternal torment; and those who deserve to be lifted out of torment after repenting for their sins. That set the stage for the doctrine of purgatory in 1237 A.D.

The Bible contains a litany of colorful images of hell as both fire and darkness, as in the Gospel of Matthew, which refers to “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” and “the outer darkness” where “men will weep and gnash their teeth.”

Either way, Selles said, pretending that hell doesn’t exist, or trying to preach around it, short-circuits the Bible.

“This is a doctrine, a teaching, that’s being neglected in churches,” Selles said. “It needs to be preached. It’s part of the Gospel.”

Greg Garrison writes for The Birmingham News.

Here We Go Again

09700
August 17, 2009

Is Doomsday upon us (again) in 2012?

by Lindsay Perna
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s that time of the century again. Time to sell your real estate, rid yourself of cherished possessions and purge the evil tendencies of your wicked soul.

The world is scheduled to end in late 2012 — at least according to New Age scholars who look to a 2,000-year-old Mayan calendar for guidance — and it’s time to start preparing.

The Mayans, who were scattered across southern Mexico and Central America from around 2000 B.C. until the Spanish conquest of the 17th century, are noted for astronomical insight and for their “Long Count” calendar, which comes to an end, or perhaps resets, on Dec. 21, 2012.

Cue the destruction of the world.

Hollywood is already playing along. “2012,” a big-screen blockbuster from the director of 2002’s “The Day After Tomorrow,” is scheduled to hit screens in November. Publishers are also cashing in, and the far reaches of the Internet are abuzz with speculation on the end of the world.

Our troubled times are proving to be fertile soil for doomsayers sowing the seeds of Armageddon. Experts say that’s usually how it works.

“Apocalypticism rises and falls with economic and political conditions on the ground,” said Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University. “Give a culture some leisure time and excess income and they’ll forget about the end of the world pretty fast. But mass an army at the border, and prophesies of the end of times will spike just as quickly.”

While the Mayans aren’t normally known as major players on the religious scene, beliefs in the end of the world, or the world to come, are common themes across most major faith traditions.

“Our fears about the end of the world are fairly universal,” Prothero said. “What changes is the form those fears take.”

This time around, they’re taking the form of Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” in which the arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue above Rio de Janeiro break off. St. Peter’s Basilica is reduced to a pile of rubble, and Exodus-style natural disasters plague the planet.

It’s not a religious film per se, but its religious imagery and end-of-days tribulations will resonate with audiences — particularly young people — who take their spiritual cues from pop culture, experts say.

“Hollywood movies tend to succeed if they don’t underestimate (the sophistication of) their audience,” said Lynn Clark, associate professor of new media at the University of Denver. “There is an urgency for (spiritual discovery) that is part of the undercurrent of young people’s lives these days.”

Youth may not be avidly reading their Bibles and attending church in large numbers, but Clark said they do look to the entertainment industry to initiate religious discussions.

Indeed, religious notions of the apocalypse and pop culture’s obsession with what rock band R.E.M. called “The End of the World as We Know It” have often gone hand-in-hand. When Armageddon appears imminent, churches will exploit those fears to get people into the pews.

It worked for William Miller in the midst of an economic downturn in 1837, when he predicted the Second Coming of Jesus in 1843. When that date passed, he changed the date to 1844. Though his failed prophecies eventually became known as the “Great Disappointment,” his followers nonetheless kept the faith. Today, they’re known as Seventh-day Adventists, one of the world’s fastest-growing churches.

People like knowing how it all ends — hoping, of course, it will end well — or that someone else has already figured it out.

“It’s an idea as old as the species that we are part of a pattern, therefore, somebody may be able to trace it ahead of us,” said Volney P. Gay, a professor of psychiatry and chairman of the religious studies department at Vanderbilt University. “There is a certain kind of comfort or relief in that we don’t have to worry anymore.”

Which brings us back to the Mayan calendar, and its focus on 2012.

Publishing giant HarperOne recently released a 356-page book by self-proclaimed Mayan shaman Carlos Barrios, The Book of Destiny: Unlocking the Secrets of the Ancient Mayans and the Prophecy of 2012, that says many interpreters of the Mayan calendar have gotten it all wrong.

The world won’t end when the calendar does in 2012, he says. A new cycle will begin anew, and the doomsday scenarios are already upon us. Armageddon, it seems, may already be in progress.

“A large part of humanity will disappear. This will not happen in 2012, but in the years leading up to this date as one cycle ends and another begins,” Barrios writes. “This period is when are in the most danger.”

In other words, it’s time to clean up our act so that the next cycle — what Barrios describes as a 5,200-year era of peace and self-awareness — can get started.

“If we take the chance to change, we have the opportunity for harmony,” Barrios said in an interview from Colombia. “We are going to pass to the next level with more possibilities to develop ourselves. It’s not today to 2012. It’s today to the future.”