A strange idea of joy

The book I wished I could write

Readers of The Discreet Traveler may have noticed that we haven’t traveled much in a while. I promise that I am working on a travel story for my next post! But in the meantime, I’ve been meandering around the Internet, encountering diverse individuals who provide useful resources for studying the quirky things I’m interested in (I write with my postgraduate Jewish Studies hat on). These range from men with whom I completely disagree about female leadership in the church, to a theoretical physicist at Cambridge (“the other place”) and his Mom, a longtime Sunday school teacher.

Today’s source is a book I recently gave 5 stars on Goodreads—which I almost never do. Here’s the background story: There’s a book I’ve wanted to write for decades. Many people have complained that Christians, over the centuries, are more concerned with heaven and “pie in the sky” than doing something about the suffering on earth now. What was missing, I thought, was the other side: the fear of hell in Christianity, and the dominance that this terrifying vision plays in the religion of so many.

When I was twelve years old, a couple of things happened to me. One was that I got baptized, which was a normal thing to do at the age of around twelve, in the tradition I was raised in. I don’t remember either my family, or the churches we went to, ever teaching me about hell, but I knew about it from the Bible (English Bibles, unhelpfully, translate up to four different words from the original biblical languages as “hell”). More graphically, that summer at church camp I’d heard hair-raising preaching about people going to hell. I was planning to get baptized anyway, but I remember the fear put in my heart, about what would happen if I didn’t.

The other thing I did when I was twelve was read the Diary of Anne Frank. It wasn’t the first I’d heard about the Holocaust, but it was the most personal. Somehow—again, I never actually heard this at home or in my home church—I’d absorbed the belief that everyone except Christians (who believed or said or did exactly the right things) were going to burn in hell for all eternity. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was this sort of destiny for Anne Frank, or indeed any of the six million Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust. Only a few of them had been converts to Christianity, but were all of the others really going to hell? Had they not already suffered through hell on earth itself?

I was raised to believe that God is our loving Father, and that if I was unable to sleep, my Mom said I should say a prayer. I was also taught that I could talk to God about anything—that a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” meant that we could talk to the Divine as a person, a close friend. So, as I recall, I poured my heart out in prayer about this. I just could not accept eternal damnation for people who’d already suffered so much, especially the Jewish people who, I’d also learned from the Bible, were the chosen of God, the children of Israel through whom God introduced the world to himself and, of course, Jesus.

I couldn’t articulate this at twelve, but there was a big problem. “Personal relationship” to me meant lying in bed, earnestly talking to God as if he were right nearby, asking for reassurance that Anne Frank was not going to hell. But “personal relationship” at church camp, and in some Bible teaching I’d heard, meant that you had to ask Jesus to save you and get baptized. And if something happened between the time you intended to complete this ritual and actually doing so—even something that wasn’t your fault—then no one could help you.

Not even God.

Needless to say, I am far from the only person who’s ever felt this as a contradiction. In subsequent years I read many wise writers, from Corrie ten Boom to Madeleine L’Engle, who helped me grow in my understanding of what (I believe) the nature of God is. In The Irrational Season, L’Engle dared to write about hell, and mention various church fathers of whom I’d never previously heard, and touch on the development of some of their doctrines. Because of the focus on the Bible as the inspired Word of God, I’d never thought much about how Christianity developed over the centuries after the time of the biblical books. But as I read more history and, especially, studied Jewish history, I was increasingly appalled by what I found. Namely, the people who were executing others for heresy or infidelity were often Christians. The churches went to religious war with each other, and horrible persecution was perpetrated. Most unforgivable, to my twentieth-century mind, was the hatred of the Jews that grew in Christianity, becoming so endemic in European culture that it finally burst forth cancerously in the Nazis and all their crimes against humanity.

All of this only strengthened my belief that a just God could never be on the side of the Nazis or torture. There was no way I could worship a God like that. And yet…there was always something nagging at me that said: You don’t know what God really thinks. Are you just reimagining God the way you think he should be? What’s so special about your era, that you think God shares your values? Isn’t that the mistake people make in every era?

Most distressingly, from the back of my mind: What if you just aren’t accepting a truth because you wish that it were otherwise?

The fear of hell, as a place of fiery torment for eternity, is so powerful that it pulls other concepts of religion into its field of gravity and distorts them. L’Engle wrote about a young woman who was raised to believe that “part of the joy of the blessed in heaven is watching the torture of the damned in hell. A strange idea of joy,” L’Engle concluded, with ironic understatement.¹ I felt very strongly that it was wrong to fear, that this could not accurately characterize a God who is love. For the past three decades I have wanted a book about “A Religion of Hell,” about this belief that pervades the image of Christianity and the faith of many, many adherents to it; but I did not have the levels of expertise to write it myself. I wanted a book that would answer the questions I’d had all these years. What I really wanted, in the depths of my heart, was a book that would answer my twelve-year-old prayer about Anne Frank.

Because I could never find such a book, I assumed it could not be written. Yet finally, in the year 2024, Eitan Bar published the book I knew I needed: Hell: A Jewish Perspective on a Christian Doctrine. Other reviewers have described chains falling off their hearts as they read this book. It’s rare that a book truly changes lives, but this one has.

Dr. Bar’s background is unique. He is a Jewish Israeli and native speaker of Hebrew, and also a believer in Jesus, who has earned advanced degrees from conservative Christian institutions. He knows the Bible and the Jewish context of Jesus and the authors of the New Testament, to an extent that few Christians do. He also, evidently, knows a lot about the history of the church. And, he comes from a family in which people survived the Holocaust, and understands completely why most Jews cannot possibly accept Jesus, as he himself has. Because the Christianity they’ve seen is, for them, a religion of hell!

Now when I was a teenager, I realized that I was gay. So in the era before the Internet, I spent a lot of time finding books that would help me understand my sexuality and religion, and I know when an author is bullsh*tting. I have heard writers and even those leading worship try to explain away every part of theology under the sun. And I don’t appreciate misleading the pastoral flock, whether from a conservative or liberal point of view.

Eitan Bar does not do this. He knows every book in the Bible and every relevant passage. One of the pleasing side effects, for me as a student of the Bible, is his illumination of Leviticus, a book that most Christians tend to avoid. He shows the value of the Law (Torah) to the Jews and how crucial it is for Christians’ understanding of atonement—a key concept if we want to understand the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

He also knows all those church fathers Madeleine L’Engle wrote about, and more. What we think of as “hell,” a concept actually called Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT), seems to have originated with Augustine of Hippo, then filtered through centuries of medieval imagination (like Dante’s Inferno) to the theology of John Calvin. Bar is too polite to say so, but I conclude that the Middle Ages made God over in their own image. Medieval Christians were the ones who burned people.

The author builds a picture of this vivid interpretation, “Augustinian-Calvinist” with an antisemitic assist from Martin Luther. But it’s not just Eitan Bar’s immense knowledge that makes his argument so powerful. He builds it systematically, in the Jewish tradition. He is far too clever to launch into his family background or personal feelings. Only after a thorough tour through the Old and New Testaments, church history, and modern evangelical theology (such as at the online Gospel Coalition) does the author get to perhaps the ultimate argument for hell, or at least against universalism. What about Hitler? Doesn’t Hitler go to hell?

For those readers who aren’t Christian or aren’t bothered by the concept of ECT hellfire, you might wonder what use this book could be to you. Although Bar doesn’t touch on it in his book, I found it also helped my understanding of something that puzzles many people when they look at evangelical Christianity, above all in the context of the U.S.A.: Why so little love? Why does it seem, not only to an unbelieving world but even to many Christians like me, that those who are most vocal about God and Christianity seem uninterested in how society treats poor people, and proclaim a gospel that seems so far removed from a loving Jesus?

Dr. Bar’s argument brought to the surface something that’s nagged at me since I first knew these evangelical Christians—because I have known many of them, and I know them to be sincere: They want to save sinners (all people sin, but this often means unbelievers, or homosexuals). They want to save us from hell, which is very real to them. I believe they are in the grip of this theology of hell; they are the way they are because they are afraid of God. They kind of believe that “God is love,”² but they really believe in fear, as described in Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours….³

Is the truth “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,”⁴ or is it that “Jesus came to save us from God the Father”? The first is in the Bible; the second, Madeleine L’Engle was brave enough to call a “heresy.”⁵ Tim Mackie, theologian and founder of The Bible Project, addresses this idea that “Jesus rescues us from God”: “The main problem with this story, to be a bit snarky, is the Bible.”⁶

Such error does not just have implications for theology, but for ethics on earth. Fear warps believers into judgmental people and twists the image of God into something that no one wants to worship. The theology of hell, Eitan Bar suggests, says more about power and terror in ancient pagan religions than it says about the God of Israel or Jesus Christ.

I believe that this author’s work, and the knowledge he brings to it, are a gift from God and will change many more lives.

Next time on The Discreet Traveler: Paris and London!

1. Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season. New York: HarperCollins, 1977. p. 97

2. I John 4:8

3. https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/edwards_jonathan/Sermons/Sinners.cfm

4. John 3:16

5. The Irrational Season, p. 88

6. “Animal sacrifice? Really” June 2, 2017: bibleproject.com