Systematic Theology – Eschatology

The Eschatology of Hell

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 26 of 32

Track: #26

Year:

Dictation Name: 26 The Eschatology of Hell.

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we come with joy and thanksgiving to praise Thee for all Thy blessings, to rejoice in the certainty of Thy grace and government, to know oh Lord that even the wrath of man shall praise Thee, that there is no tyranny in the Soviet Union, in China, or in any other country in this world, including our own, that Thou wilt not turn to Thy purpose, and to Thy praise and service. And so our God we come to Thee rejoicing in Thy gracious ways, in the totality of Thy government, and Thy so great salvation. Arm us by Thy word and by Thy Spirit, that we may be strong as we face things of this world, knowing that all things come from Thee, and shall accomplish Thy purpose. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture today is from the eschatology of hell, and our text Mark 9 verse 42-48. Mark 9:42-48, the Eschatology of hell, these are our Lords words:

“And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.

43 And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

44 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

45 And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

46 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

47 And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire:

48 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”

One of the problems which plagues our thinking is the Greek philosophical heritage. The Greek philosophical heritage reduces everything to abstractions. Forms, ideas, are the realities of this world; according to Greek philosophy. Now if the realities are abstractions this will mean anyone governed by such a faith will not be ready to deal with reality as we know it under God; with people, with sin, with guilt. They will tend to abstract everything, and this is what our sociology does today. Everything is abstracted and we have general terms to account for the problems of crime, anything but the sin of the individual. This tendency to abstraction is devastating in its consequences for life. In the moral realm it means that good and evil are separated from God’s law and then abstracted from people as well, so that we do not ascribe good and evil to individuals and say, “this man has sinned”, we ascribe it to an abstraction, the environment; which can mean anything. And thus anyone in the tradition of Greek thinking, Greek philosophy (which means most of the world) cannot cope with the problems of everyday life.

Moreover, it means falsifying reality dramatically. Let me illustrate. We have a great deal of talk about love, and how wonderful love is, and how we should avoid hate. But this is an abstraction. If a person loves there’s wife, that’s good. But if a person loves the woman next door, that’s bad. Love is not something in and of itself. If a person loves sin, that’s an evil love. If a person hates sin, well that’s good. So to speak of love and hate as in themselves something, is seriously wrong. It perverts our perspective. But this is the sociological perspective, this is the perspective of humanism, to deal with reality in terms of abstractions, and so we have love praised. But love today is very commonly of narcotics, of homosexuality, of adultery, of murder, of lies, and much more. But we cannot condemn such people, because in the modern perspective, such people, there problems are to be ascribed to abstractions.

But, when we abstract things from the context of life as God has created it we will then approach the Bible and regard it as somehow gauche, as somehow a problem, as crude, and hell, the doctrine of hell, will be a tremendous offense because hell is not an abstraction, and hell denies abstraction. It says “thou art the man” it says to us, as our Lord says, “It is better for thee to do this and that than to risk hellfire.” Why? Because guilt is involved in doing certain things, and the consequences of guilt means always judgment, and the ultimate judgment is hell.

Existentialism, not as a formal school of philosophy, but as an outlook which governs the philosophy in modern man, says that there is no meaning to the universe, only man. And existentialism too leads to the distaste for any doctrine of hell, because existentialism says that the past is not real, and the future is not real, and only the moment and man are real. So that there are no consequences, there is neither heaven nor hell; and as a result existentialism is hostile to the doctrine of hell.

Then you have other philosophies which believe in a immanent heaven or hell. For example we have the doctrine of poetic justice which ruled very heavily in 18th century thought, and lingered into the 20th century. According to poetic justice judgment came not in eternity, but here and now. And so in terms of poetic justice everything had to happen immediately. This is why, in terms of the doctrine of poetic justice, writers took Shakespeare, King Lear for example. I have a copy of King Lear as it was revised by Nahum Tate in which King Lear has a happy ending, it had to in terms of the doctrine of poetic justice. Because not believing in the doctrine of hell they had to ascribe judgment and consequences, everything working out here and now. Well life isn’t that way, there’s a partial reward and a partial judgment in time, the fullness is in eternity. And now we have the reverse of that, poetic injustice. Look at any film of a serious nature, or any T.V. thing of a serious nature, what happens? Everything works out for bad. Everything frustrates, life is a total frustration that is today high and serious drama. For the masses it’s poetic justice, for the intellectuals it’s poetic injustice. Everything has to be contrary and to frustrate man and justice.

When we reject God, when we reject heaven and hell, we are rejecting the possibility of seeing life clearly and whole; of dealing with the fact of sin and its consequences. When men reject God hell is an affront to them because they have rejected justice, and hell tells us there is justice in the universe. So for us as Christians hell is the triumph of God’s justice. Humanism only seeks the vindication of man, and hence it works to create a social system which will somehow glorify man. For humanism it is the condemnation of God which is justice, but our Lord speaks of the reality of hell over and over again. Some people would reduce everything that our Lord said to some kind of sweetness and light. But it is interesting that there are more references to hell in our Lord’s teaching than in all the rest of the Bible. That says something, doesn’t it? Our Lord took it seriously, no-where in the Bible is hell taken more seriously than by our Lord. Again and again He warns against hell.

Now the word that is used for hell in the Bible in the Greek and the Hebrew is very interesting. I’ve discussed this before, but its well to remind ourselves of it. It is hinnom in the Hebrew and Gehenna in the Greek. It refers to a valley, a valley that was the city dump for Jerusalem, and hell is described as God’s dump heap of the universe. Now in a dump in those days, and until not to very long ago, was a place where trash was taken and some of it was burned, and some of it just rotted there. So it was a place of fire and of worms; and our Lord in our text again and again refers to that fact, of the worms and the fire, some things just decaying, some things smoldering and burning, because it’s the trash heap. This is an image of what hell is like; the worm - corruption, the fire- burning, the gnawing and the burning of guilt. But also in a dump there is nothing that has any meaningful relationship to anything else. Here is an old mattress, and here is some garbage, here is some wire and next to it a lot of paper, no relationship. Now any room, however untidy, things have a relationship one to another. There will be a table, chairs, in meaningful relationship, drapes or curtains, books, bookcases, everything in meaningful relationship to everything else. But in hell we are told there is no meaningful relationship of one thing to another, and therefore also no communication. In hell there is total isolation.

I referred a number of times over the years to Sartre’s No Exit and existentialist writing about hell, and very ably because people don’t know in Sartre’s hell whether the door is locked or unlocked, but they don’t get up to try it. There are people there, but nobody talks to anybody else, everybody is listening only to himself. Have you ever had that experience with anyone? You talk to them and they don’t hear you, all they’re thinking about is what they want to tell you. There mind is always self-absorbed. That’s living in the ante-room to hell and when people are in hell they have no communication with God or with man, each is his own universe, his own God. Hell is the logic of sin and the fall realized, but hell is also a covenant fact, a covenant penalty. Schilder says, and I quote: “all things are determined by covenant statute, the evaluation of sin for instance, and its punishment; for punishment is an avenging of the covenant, even as sin is a breaking of the covenant.” To reject God is to reject life and the meaning of life, it is the rejection of communion and of community, and there can be neither communion nor community in hell.

Hell is the rejection of life. Just as people who are ungodly, who hate God with a passion, don’t want to come to church; so the Godly could not take heaven. Do you think Madayln Murray goes to church every Sunday? Not at all, with her passionate atheism it’s the last place she would want to be; and so it is with those in hell.

Lewis in The Great Divorce has a scene in which the people in hell board a bus on a excursion trip to heaven. “You want to go up there? We’ll take you up there.” “Well, it might be interesting to see, but of course you can’t come back.” But none of them get up there. As they come closer and closer with one excuse after another, each of them gets off the bus and goes back to hell. In fact he has one scene of a theologian who gets off the bus, because he has a lecture to deliver to a theological society in hell. But they cannot have communion in hell, or community. And hence they cannot take heaven, because it is life, not death. “All they that hate me love death” this is what the Lord says. And so it is hell is where they belong, in perpetual isolation from God and from one another, each their own world. In such a perspective the people in hell are saying not “God made me, and therefore I am” but rather “I think, therefore I am; and if I do not recognize you, nor God, therefore you are not.” And so they live in hell in perpetual isolation because those in heaven say “we are God’s creation and possession.”

Hell is the logical end, in other words, of the Cartesian premise. In I Corinthians 13:12 Paul says, concerning paradise, “then shall I know, even as also I am known.” God knows us totally, and once we are freed from the darkness of sin and death, from the fall, when we are perfectly sanctified and in paradise, we shall know God as truly and fully as a creature is capable of knowing Him. “Now,” Paul says “we see in a mirror, darkly. Then face to face, fully and clearly.” In hell there is total blindness. The darkness of hell symbolizes above all else the darkness of sin enthroned, the premise of the fall made the premise of mans being. Thus hell begins in the here and now. People who separate themselves from God are citizens of hell just as we are citizens of the kingdom of God. They live tortured by their own guilt, their sleeping and their waking are under the shadow, the darkness, of sin. And that darkness deepens with the years, however much they may outwardly seek to drown it or cover it up. And hell is the total darkness because then they see nothing in creation except themselves, and they become their own universe, and that’s the logic of the fall. Satan said “ye shall be as God, every man His own God. Knowing, determining for yourself what constitutes good and evil” and so they become their own God and their own universe. This is why Sartre could say God was no problem for him, other people were. As a logical existentialist how could he account for other people? He should be the total universe, the total world. In hell this is all, they have nothing more, it is total blindness, total burning, total corruption.

Hell is the total and self-willed eternal blindness of would-be God’s, who have finally limited the universe to themselves, and are now by God’s decree limited to no more than themselves, and this is hell. And so our Lord as He speaks warns men to fear hell, to turn from their sin and to believe, and to open their being to the totality of God and His universe, His law, His purpose for their lives, and not to narrow their perspectives to themselves. This is why we are commanded to remember the whole of God’s kingdom in our prayers, to remember others, to pray for those in high places and low, for one another. Because the opposite of hell is to grow in grace and to see all the world as under God, and our community with the totality of the world. Only so can we grow as citizens of paradise, of the kingdom of God. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God Thou hast summoned us to be citizens of Thy new creation. Grant oh Lord that day by day we see the full dimensions thereof, that we know that Thou art on the Throne. That we know that we are members one of another, that we know that we have been called to be mindful of Thy kingdom and its citizens, our duties to Thee and to our fellow men, that we may grow in our citizenship that we may grow in the light and walk ever in Thy light. Bless us to this purpose we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now?

Yes?

[Audience member] It’s interesting to see, I’ve never realized this before but during the Middle Ages, the so-called Christian era, it’s reflected in the arts that all these artists, and the drawings and buildings, the actual architecture was all balanced. The artist would measure the face, it’s broken up into thirds, the distance from the eye, from the forehead to the nose, is all the same. Everything was balanced. But as you get up into the era of philosophers like Descartes and Nietzsche the art changes and you get into expressionism and into your {?} and it’s all disarrayed, it’s like a garbage heap. I mean it’s like {?} clear up unto the 50’s you have some {?} where you just take paint and you throw it on a canvas, a total mess, and even in the movies today, right up to E.T. you see this little figure that is supposed to represent a god or a Jesus Christ, he’s actually a mutated form of the human being with a long neck, grotesque looking creature, with eyes that bulge out of his head, it’s a mutated form of the human being which God created in perfect balance. I never thought about it before but this must reflect a philosophy of the day.

[Rushdoony] Very good. It is interesting that Sweden has banned E.T. With all their legislation against the family, the sexual revolution, homosexuality, perversions, everything, an open door to everything there, they decided that E.T. was to savage in its hostility to adults. Now it is interesting that I only saw one analysis of that aspect of E.T. in this country. R.E. McMaster Jr. in The Reaper had an excellent analysis of the anti-adult, anti-family nature of E.T., and he said it was a most destructive film for children to see.

With regard to the medieval art you put your finger on a very important point. Consider the fact that the church then had not only the depictions of the healing power of Christ, but depictions of the last judgment and hell. So that that person in church had a balance of both, and now you never see that. The only thing that is allowed in so-called Christian art today is a one-sided presentation, sweetness and light. Don’t let them see anything about hell, or the last judgment, that might upset them in their sin and in their indifference to the requirements of the faith. So we have a very warped perspective given to Christians now.

Yes?

[Audience member] The doctrine of annihilation as opposed to eternal suffering and hell, is that a doctrine that would be in contradiction to the even the existence of hell? Would you care to …?

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, the doctrine of annihilationism has again and again appeared over the centuries and a few verse are used to give it a semblance of Biblical truth, mainly that hell is spoken of as eternal death. But death in scripture is the absence of God, separation from God. But a great deal of wishful thinking has gone into annihilationism, a feeling of “well if I don’t make the grade it’d be better to be dead eternally.”

Now the punishment of hell is that the sinner is allowed to be himself forever. To be separated from God, to be His own God, and to know the penalty of guilt, the punishment of guilt, the burning fire and the worm. Now what that speaks of is self-torture, and those same images have been used for the gnawing of guilt, the burning of guilt, in the life of man. So that’s what hell is about, the man lives in term of his premise and is face to face with what it means.

[Audience member] In other words Biblical justice as opposed to poetic justice.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Any other questions or comments?

A very important book you know could be written on the place of hell in art, and the role of heaven in art. You touched on a very important point there.

Well if there are no further comments let us bow our heads in prayer. Our Lord and our God we thank Thee that we are in Thy hand who doest all things well. We thank Thee that Thou hast called us out of the death of sin and into the life of righteousness in Jesus Christ. Give us growth therein and joy, that we might ever be filled with the joy and the peace that is ours through Jesus Christ. In His name we pray, amen.