Helen's Face in Hell

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The American writer Dorothy Parker was one of these miserably unhappy people who use caustic humour as a weapon against a cruel, senseless world. She had some familiarity with the Bible - she called her cage-bird 'Onan' because he spilled his seed on the ground - but she doesn't seem to have understood it much or accepted it at all. Witness this poem, entitled Partial Comfort:

Whose love is given over-well
Shall look on Helen's face in hell,
Whilst those whose love is thin and wise
May view John Knox in Paradise.

Like many millions of twentieth-century Westerners (she lived from 1893 to 1967), Dorothy Parker was misinformed about two important questions regarding heaven: How do I get there? And what's it like? Let's look at these two questions.

How do I get there?

Dorothy Parker was partly right in bringing the question of love into the question of our eternal destination. Her mistake was to think only of sexual love, which, according to the impressions she had gained from the churches of her day, was inextricably linked with sin and damnation. I am pleased to see the church waking up to the fact that God made sexual love too, and that in marriage, its natural habitat or channel, it is good- though like any other powerful thing it is dangerous and destructive if let loose all over the landscape. (I look forward, too, to the day when the evangelical church cares as much about whether people are sleeping in a gutter as it does about who they are sleeping there with.) And the love which we celebrate as the highest Christian virtue, what the New Testament calls agape, is far from 'thin and wise'. True wisdom is loving, but the love which caused God to send his one and only Son to die for us in neither 'thin' nor, superficially, wise. It is foolishness - divine foolishness - to give so unstintingly, to such miserable ingrates. But 'the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom.' (1 Corinthians 1:25)

This, though, is not the heart of the error. Even if we realize that sexual love is not a sin unless abused; even if we see that the love which relates to reaching heaven is another love entirely, one that gives itself without regard to consequences, one that is not dependant on the response of the one who is loved; we can still miss a more basic flaw in the theology of Partial Comfort. This is the assumption that you reach heaven or hell as a result of what you do.

Actually, it's like getting into anywhere else which is hard to reach- such as a job (these days). It's more a matter of what you are and who you know.

C. S. Lewis's understanding, given dramatic form in The Great Divorce, was something like this: The decisions that we make throughout out lives operate together to make us gradually either a 'heavenly' person or a 'hellish' person. As we seek God, so our desires, our thoughts, our nature become more like his; as we reject God, our desires, thoughts and nature also turn away and become centred upon self, lacking in the qualities which are found perfectly only in God.

John Piper, who has been much influenced by Lewis, clarifies this further in his book Desiring God. As we realize these perfect qualities in God, and come to desire him, we also come to desire and admire the qualities themselves. This influences our decisions; we decide, more and more often, on actions which are consistent with the character of God, because we have come to see the character of God as good, right and desirable. This cannot happen until we come to know God and are freed by his grace from out corrupting natures which force us to choose evil. And ultimately, God's character is seen and known in Christ, who is also God's means of freeing us.

For we need help. We have, by our own choice, done what is wrong; and so we are in debt, a debt we cannot pay. Because we cannot pay, we are sold into slavery to evil. Having submitted ourselves once by our choice, we have limited our future choices. We cannot, ultimately, choose to leave our slavery to evil by ourselves. A slave can only be set free by the mercy of the owner - and evil has no mercy - or by purchase. We have no means to buy ourselves out; as the Psalm says, 'A ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough.'' (Psalm 49:8) We are like the 'bar-girls' in the Philippines, who come in from the country and are offered a 'job' with accommodation and food. After a week or so they discover that they are in debt for the accommodation and food, and are bound to their employers, who always manage to keep them in debt by balancing the cost of their board and their wages. Their initial decision has them trapped, always in debt and unable to leave because of it, and with no legal recourse. Their only hope of escape is if someone from outside comes and pays off their debt for them and enables them to leave and find other employment. But few know anyone who is able and willing to pay a debt that someone else owes . . .

We know somebody. Jesus is able to buy us out of our slavery, to fully discharge our debt so that once again we have a free choice between good and evil. If we have the courage and the humility to admit that we need his help (and if we do, it is also by God's grace), he is able to free us from the domination of evil and, gradually, from the desire to do evil. How do we lose the desire to do evil? By knowing Jesus, who shows us the character of God, so that increasingly we move towards an imitation of that character.

And this brings us to the second question on heaven: What's it like? Or, more narrowly, what will you and I be like if we reach there?

What's it like there?

That 'there' is, of course, misleading. Heaven is more a state than a place; a state of perfect relationship with God, perfect knowledge of God, and so, naturally, perfect admiration of God and his qualities leading to out decisions being consistently in harmony with his perfections. It is the logical end of the process I described before, as hell is the logical end of the other process, of turning from those goodnesses and perfections to evil and selfishness.

God, being self-existent and complete within himself, is 'full'. In the ultimate analysis, his goodness is this fulness. Evil, in contrast, is lack, something missing, a flaw, an imperfection. Unbelievers sometimes ask, 'If God is all-good, and God created everything, how did an all-good God create evil? Either he isn't all-good, or there's something he didn't create. You can't have it both ways.' But evil is not a thing to be created, any more than darkness is a thing to be created, though we think of it as such. Evil is a lack of good, as darkness is a lack of light. So absolute evil cannot exist; absolute evil is a total negation, a non-existence.

Think about the implications for Helen's face in hell. Helen was beautiful (we are told). But beauty is a good, a positive quality which comes from God. If Helen refused God, if she preferred evil to his perfections, God ratifies that decision of human free-will and allows her to move towards self and away from him. As she does so, all that she has which comes from him becomes hateful to her. She turns from it. He again ratifies her decisions and takes these thing s from her. Will her beauty survive? No, it goes with all the rest. Will the others who choose the hellish state have joy from seeing her? Joy is a good, a positive quality, something that comes from God. They reject him, they lose joy. If I could show you Helen's face in hell, you might never sleep again without tranquillizers for fear you would meet it in your dreams; and to other self-idolators in hell, it would be a hateful thing, as all non-self things become. (But I am not sure how long personality and consciousness will survive when the rejected grace of God is removed; they are, after all, his good gifts. Perhaps this merciful oblivion is the destruction of hell, symbolized so vividly by the flames.)

Assuming (for the sake of argument) that John Knox did decisively turn towards God, I also believe that if I could show you John Knox in Paradise, you would have the greatest struggle not to fall on your face in awe. The external ugliness of his earthly features was a lack, to be filled from God's inexhaustible goodness like all other lacks.

'For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins . . . See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ. . . .'' (Colossians 1:13-14; 2:8-10)

And that is far more than partial comfort.

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