Continuing from yesterday’s post, insights from Timothy Keller:
“In his fantasy The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. There they are urged to leave behind them the sins that have trapped them in hell—but they refuse. Lewis’s descriptions of these people are striking because we recognize in them the self-delusion and self absorption that are in our own addictions.
Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others . . . but you are still distinct from it, You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us” to Hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will Be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.12
The people in hell are miserable, but Lewis shows us why. We see raging like unchecked flames their pride, their paranoia, their self-pity, their certainty that everyone else is wrong, that everyone else is an idiot! All their humanity is gone, and thus so is their sanity. They are utterly, finally locked in a prison of their own self-centeredness, and their pride progressively expands into a bigger and bigger mushroom cloud. They continue to go to pieces forever, blaming everyone but themselves. Hell is that.
That is why it is a travesty to picture God casting people into a pit who are crying “I’m sorry! Let me out!” The people on the bus in Lewis’s parable would rather have their “freedom,” as they define it, than salvation. Their delusion is that, if they glorified God they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a supreme and tragic irony, their choice has ruined their own potential for greatness. Hell is, as Lewis says, the greatest monument to human freedom.” As Romans 1:24 says, God “gave them up to their desires.” All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair than that. Lewis writes:
There are only two kinds of people—those who say “Thy will be done” to God or those who God in the end says, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice it wouldn’t be Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. 13
~Timothy Keller, Belief in an Age of Skepticism, The Reason for God (New York, NY: Penquin Books, 2008,2016), 78-81 (continued. . .!)
12.This is a compilation of quotes from three Lewis sources: Mere Christianity (Macmillan, 1964), p. 59; The Great Divorce (Macmillan, 1963), pp 71-72; “The Trouble with X,” in God in the dock; Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 1970), p.155.
13. From C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Macmillan, 1961), p. 116; The Great Divorce (Macmillan, 1963), p. 69.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
