Percy Dearmer

THE LEGEND OF HELL
AN EXAMINATION OF THE IDEA OF EVERLASTING
PUNISHMENT
WITH A CHAPTER ON APOCALYPTIC
BY
PERCY DEARMER, D.D.
PROFESSOR & FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON
C A S S E L L & C O M P A N Y, L T D.
LONDON, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, & SYDNEY
First published 1929
A FREE ACROBAT BOOK
C O N T E N T S
PREFACE
CHAPTER I
THE DOCTRINES OF HELL AND OF PURGATORY
CHAPTER II
CAUSES AND HISTORY OF THE HELL DOCTRINE
CHAPTER III
CURRENT SOURCES OF THE IDEA OF HELL
CHAPTER IV
APOCALYPTIC
CHAPTER V
AN EXAMINATION OF THE CASE FOR HELL
CHAPTER VI
THE GOOD NEWS OF CHRIST
P R E F A C E
When I was in France during the War, I used to ask the men to put questions
in a box. The question most frequently asked was, "How can a just God send
people to everlasting torment?" Since then, I have found that, whenever
questions were invited at large popular meetings, this was the difficulty
in most people's minds. There is therefore a real need for such a book as
this. Scholars also may find something of interest in the discussion on
Apocalyptic: they will, I hope, forgive my telling them of matters which
they know already; and the ordinary reader is asked to be tolerant if he
finds arguments and references which seem to be more for the student than
for himself.
P. D.
THE LEGEND OF HELL
CHAPTER I THE -DOCTJIIJVSS OF USCC AAfT> OF
vungATony
I. Introduction
When Dr. Johnson towards the end of his life was visiting his old friend,
Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke College, he expressed a fear that he
might be "one of those who shall be damned"; and when the amiable and
philosophical Master said,"What do you mean by damned?" Dr. Johnson
'passionately and loudly' gave vent to the terror which always haunted him,
by replying, "Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly."
This was the plain orthodox view in the eighteenth century, as it had been
in the Middle Ages, and in the Dark Ages before them. To be damned was to
be sent to hell, and to be in hell was to exist in unspeakable torments
which would never come to an end. It is true that the words for 'hell' and
'damnation' do not really mean this in the original Greek; but this was the
meaning that had long ago been fastened upon them, and the meaning they
bear in plain English to-day; and therefore they will be used in this sense
in the pages which follow.
The object of our present enquiry is not so much to refute a doctrine which
in its barbarity needs little further disproof for the educated world of
the present age, but rather to help clear away the taint of it which still
hangs in the air, and still poisons many a conservative pulpit; and to do
something towards removing the prejudice against Christianity which
pervades large sections of people, especially on the Continent of Europe,
because of that doctrine. Most of all, if it be not presumptuous, I would
desire to make it clear to those who may read these pages that the charge
of having fathered such a doctrine can no longer be brought against the
Saviour of mankind.
Throughout this book the word 'hell' will be used in its plain meaning as a
place of everlasting punishment, and no attempt will be made to give it a
new signification by saying that it only represents the ruin of character
in certain persons. The fact that human personality can be ruined is a
terrible thing; but it is not the doctrine of hell. Before the problem of
the origin and ultimate destiny of evil we shall here be content with a
silence, only broken by the assertion that God is stronger than evil. So
far as we can dare to judge others at all-and our Master has warned us not
to make the attempt-it may seem that the ruin of human personality is
possible, and that many pass into the Beyond without having profited by the
experience of this mortal life, the problems of which can only be accounted
for by assuming that it is a school for the immortal spirits who pass
through it. Some seem to us never to rise out of the infants' class and to
have lost all their innocence without learning any of their lessons; and
there are some who, we think, have become entirely loathsome. If we
had to point them out, we should probably find that we had chosen wrong,
and perhaps that those whom we considered outcast and sinners above all
others were like the folk in whom Christ found more good than among some
highly respected classes. We do not know.
W e think of hum an ruin; we ask ourselv es perh aps w heth er som e peo
ple may not destroy their souls, so that there is nothing left to survive;
and then we remember that there are creatures born into the world without
intelligence at all, and some that are only in part human. What made them
thus? Where is the responsibility? And if they are wastage of the creative
Spirit, will that Spirit remake them, or will the scraps disappear into the
melting-pot to be put to other use? We have no answer to such problems of
apparent failure, because we do not know. But we are sure that hell is no
answer at all. And, since we are Christians, we are content to leave it all
to the infinite Wisdom which has power to remake what was ill made, if this
be for the best, and has love sufficient to re-form what has formed itself
amiss.
The doctrine of hell is not the simple truth that terrible results follow
from evil-doing, that sin brings misery in its train; or that discipline is
necessary in this life, which is the only life of which we know the
conditions, and that, lovingly administered, it has good effects.
Punishment cannot be an adequate word for the divine treatment of wrong-
doers; but to believe even in a crude form of future punishment is not
necessarily to believe in hell. We may indeed temerariously estimate that
most men when they die are unfit to go 'straight to hea ven,' without
therefore believing in either hell or purgatory. Nor does the conviction
that there will be an adjustment in another world of this life's
inequalities involve a belief in hell.
Such matters are not the subject of this book; nor am I concerned with
speculations on the methods of the divine justice and love in the life
beyond. But I wish to state clearly at the outset that such theories of the
working of the moral law are not the doctrine of eternal punishment; that
to use the word 'hell' for the condition which a man makes for himself, for
the blindness, bitterness, and shame from which he can escape by
repentance, is to play with words and to employ 'hell' in a sense which in
all its vicissitudes it has never borne. Such a use is only justifiable in
poetry or metaphor, as when Sir Thomas Browne says, "The heart of man is
the place the Devils dwell in: I feel sometimes a Hell within myself;
Lucifer keeps his Court in my breast, Legion is revived in me"-admirably
put; and the word 'hell' will always supply a valuable metaphor (and an
expletive), but this is not its meaning in theology.
Hell, in the language of theology and of common speech alike, is not a
condition that man makes for himself, but a place which God has prepared
for him; neither is it a condition from which he can escape by repentance,
but one from which there is no escape, since he is sent there for ever.
People who believe in hell may reduce the number of its victims, they may
lower by a few hundred degrees the tem peratu re of its flame- or even,
greatly venturing, may aver that the fire is 'spiritual' (as if that made
it of no account); but they cannot make hell other than a place-or at best,
a condition-of everlasting punishment. Nor ca n they, unless they are
Anglicans or Protestants of the modern type, empty their hell of those who
are unbaptised, including all the virtuous heathen who have ever lived,
though they may hope for some mitigation in the best cases. In fact, if
they believe in hell, they must, with whatever modifications and
modernisations, believe in the essentials of the doctrine. This doctrine is
that God, by his inscrutable decree, has created countless millions whom he
knew to be destined to endless agony; that he has also placed most men in
such environments that this fate has been inevitable and will continue so
to be, indefinitely; and that he has carefully devised means for the
torment of all these unfortunates, whose lives he will prolong for ever in
order that they may be for ever miserable. In these words I am summarising
the accepted definitions; and I would beg all whose consciences are
revolted by such a conception not to say that they believe in hell.
For all the detergents of the universe cannot disinfect that word. The
whole conception is wicked, shocking, and monstrous; and not a splinter of
its nauseous wreckage can be retained. To endeavour to spiritualise it, in
the desire to justify the brutalised conceptions of a discredited dogmatic,
is to put ourselves again on the side of Moloch; for, less coarse than the
older Tophet, a spiritualised hell would be more devilishly cruel, under
such refined management as an almighty Tormentor m ust be expected to
provide. To that we will return; but the official definitions will demand
our consideration first.
II. The Doctrine of Hell
Now the doctrine of hell is not dead. Softened-or rather, obscured, since
nothing can really soften the prospect of endless misery-it is still held
and taught by large numbers of people, loosely, it may be, and illogically,
half shamefacedly and half defiantly, sometimes with a slap at the levity
of the age, sometimes with a sneer at its humanity. If the inseparable
horrors are ignored and the implications evaded by the more polished, and
hell is sublimated into the anguish created by God's anger and the sinner's
hopeless remorse, it remains for all who accept it an actual fact of
endless agony.
The doctrine of hell is not dead. It is to-day taught to