While the images, especially in the prophets, are “metaphorical” they are not only that: they have a historical and even natural core, which is why biblical metaphor is not a matter of unreality but of reality under a figurative form. The difference is monumental for thinking and living from within the biblical thought world, yet it runs directly against the grain of modern popular reading practices. Consider the three quakes in Matthew: twice the earth quakes – at the cross and at the resurrection (27:51; 28:2); but the other quake is a quaking of the sea in 8:24.

How should we think of this triplet? Each time there is a quaking, someone emerges from a tomb. The quake of the sea in ch. 8 foreshadows the resurrection. There is Jesus, in a boat, on the sea, sleeping. Later, he will sleep the sleep of death having been tossed into the Gentile waters, tried, and executed. Jesus “rises” from his sleep in ch. 8:25-26 just as he will “rise” from the dead in 28:6-7. Jesus demonstrates his authority over wind and sea by rebuking it, just as he will proclaim his authority in heaven and on earth after rising from the tomb. When the boat in Matt. 8 reaches land, they are in Gentile territory, and Jesus casts out a legion of demons from two demoniacs who live in a cemetery in the country of the Gadarenes. These demoniacs are evidently coming out of the tombs (so the Greek), suggesting a picture of zombies or mummies rising from graves to confront Jesus. After Jesus dies on the cross, the earthquake cracks open other tombs and saints “come out of the tombs” (same Greek construction), and after Jesus rises from his tomb he will send out his disciples to make disciples of the nations of the (to speak thematically) “demon-infested” Gentiles. According to Matthew, the Gospel is about the shaking earth and the shaking waters of death, the shaking of the realm of death itself, shaken until she gives up her dead and the righteous are vindicated, which, we remember, as Paul tells us, is what the earth groans for. First, then, in Matthew the ground gives up demoniacs, then the saints, then finally Jesus, in which the world is finally to be turned back (and forward) from chaos to glorious order.

The role of the waters in all this is extraordinarily rich. On the cross we witness God’s darkness descending, and Christ’s darkness at the cross is the deep, dank darkness which blanketed fearful Abraham in the covenant ratification ceremony in Genesis, that swallowed Egypt as a plague, that filled – ironically by its emptiness – the cavity of Jonah’s fish in which God’s prophet was entombed in the deathly waters.

What we fear about drowning, about abandonment as a speck on the swelling waves of the vast, endless ocean, connects us not only to our own mortality but to the shape of divine judgment. The darkness of the cross was not only the hiddenness of the sun but also the darkness of the deep. The deeper one descends in the watery abyss, the fainter the light of the sun becomes, until there is no light at all, no sense anymore of what is up and down, of direction and movement. Order is absent, chaos rules. It is hellish; it is the taste of hell on the tongue. In the abyss, where there is no sense of one’s relation to the world, or to God himself, there is – it would seem – no hope. The “waters” slowly swallow up the soul and not just the body.

To redeem the soul from such a pit as that, to reach as far down as the worst of such horrors and put the world right, Christ himself descended to the deepest depths, descended into hell, and swallowed the waters as the waters swallowed him so that we might emerge from them, with the blessing of the Spirit hovering over us, as new creation. This is the sense in which Rev. 21:1 speaks of the new creation as a state in which “the waters are no more.” It is these waters, not what the waters are by creation but what they became as a result of the Fall: the potential instrument of disorder, of bloody judgment, a place of threat and of danger with devouring monsters hidden underneath. “The waters are no more” because the waters have been calmed not only by the voice but by the death of Jesus. He who was swallowed by them in death has walked on them by resurrection, and so reversed disorder into glorious order and life.

The post The Quaking of the Sea appeared first on Greystone Theological Institute.

A sketch of some conclusions from my month at the Center:

1. The prevailing narrative for explaining the transition from pre- to post-Enlightenment thought and culture is a story of maturing from ignorance to knowledge and, even more condescendingly, myth to science. Particularly when it comes to shifting perspectives on the reality of hell, this is outrageously inaccurate and not only because it oversimplifies the basic facts of the scientific and philosophical revolution.

In fact, objections to the possibility or reality of hell were religious and theological, even within the sciences. And this is because they always are and must be. Indeed, the obstacles that moderns believe stands in the way of their submission to the thought-world of the Bible, with heaven, hell, angels, demons, and the like – the enormous gulf they are sure exists between them and buying into that – are in fact greater and runner much deeper than they imagine. The whole picture involves a radically new and different way of seeing all of reality, a revolution of posture toward what it means to be. And the economic image of buying into is deliberate: we moderns trade on the ideas we think have currency in the marketplace of relationships and the myriad of desirables that propel our activities.

But again the gulf is greater still. The Christian Faith, buying “all in” into the world of the Bible, leaves no remnant of the former world intact. No object, aspiration, expectation, or interpretation is untouched. Yet the obstacles to embracing that full-orbed world, purportedly scientific yet in fact quite unscientific, do not typically include the more sophisticated error of, say, Ivan Karimazov, that most compelling of skeptical hesitations. To the figure of Ivan, I suggest we must add Stephen. If Ivan Karimazov’s posture is the most noble and worthwhile among what some have called the faithful disbelieving, Stephen Dedalus’s is easily the more common. Here we face the posture of the petulant. Allow me a word of explanation.

James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains some of the most compelling imagery on hell to be found in the modern world. The darkness, the stench, the devils: they are all there. These images are, for the hero of the story, the singularly memorable moments in the sermons he heard in his youth from a Jesuit priest, Father Arnall, whom the reader overhears preaching early on to a group of Catholic schoolboys. In the group is the adolescent protagonist of the story, Stephen Dedalus. Struggling with shame over his impurities, Stephen trembles at the pounding images as the priest – in what was in fact the classically baroque Jesuit way – provokes the boys into imagining, as darkly and horrifically as possible, the sufferings of Christ and of eternal hell.

Joyce introduces nothing new. All of his grotesque and horrifying images for hell are familiar ones pulled from the long tradition of Christian reflection on the infernal torments. And it is clearly important for Joyce that they be recognized for all their traditional, churchly pedigree. Joyce expects his reader to be at once disgusted and amused: disgusted at the oppressive propensities of the human imagination (here are boys in the raging, confusing, hormonal passions of their adolescence being tutored in the scalding punishments awaiting them for their “self-polluting” acts) and amused, perhaps with the tender but real condescension of a teacher discovering childish drawings of the family dog.

The distinct, intended impression left not only by the inclusion of this material in the novel but especially in its location in the story is impossible to miss. It is in large measure the message of the novel, and it resonates with the experience of many who doubt the biblical world today. Stephen Dedalus is a child, an adolescent on the cusp of maturity, a human being torn in many directions and pulled to a point of decision. And “religion,” specifically in this case belief in the reality of a hell, is something to be outgrown, a tangling net from which to flee and from which to be freed:

“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

And this is in fact the acerbic point of Joyce’s story: “religion,” and the world it commends, is adolescent. It is fantastical, delusive, peculiar. A chimeric blip on the screen of human development. Perhaps belief in heaven and hell served a useful role in ancient cultures, curbing morals and awakening human altruism, but that we have not yet evolved beyond belief in such things is incredulous. It is absurd, it is naïve, and it is adolescent. And surely we are well past that.

Most students of literature identify Stephen Dedalus as Joyce’s alter ego and it seems a safe if not unassailable reading. Just about every significant juncture in Stephen’s journey of maturation parallels a point in Joyce’s biography, and the notion of having not merely left but “outgrown” his Christianity is an enormously important point in both narratives. Upon the author’s death, Joyce’s sister put it in these very terms. She explained that Joyce “felt it was imperative that he should save his real spiritual life from being overlaid and crushed by a false one that he had outgrown” (Joyce Stanislaus, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 120).

2. That said, let’s turn to features of the discussion that are more historical in nature. In my work, I’ve become nothing less than astonished by the relevance to the hell question of the parallel and intersecting histories of religion and magic. (The landmark work by Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) remains, I think, the most reliable point of departure.) What follows are some scattered observations on the 16^th to 17^th centuries and the Enlightenment turn in relation to spirituality and notions of hell/suffering.

a. It is critically important to recognize that there were parallel functions for religion, astrology, and magic in this period. These parallel functions included, principally, how to avoid misfortune and how to deal with it when it struck. Yet here their difference becomes most visible, too: in the face of misfortune, religion refers to the fundamental issues of human existence whereas magic turns primarily on the management of specific, concrete, and detailed problems. The contrast is between a collection of various recipes (magic) and a body of doctrine (religion). Magic, then, had a rather circumscribed set of social and psychological functions whereas religion commended a comprehensive view of the world.

b. Why was there a rivalry? (1) Magic represented a competing “pastoral agency” with respect to dealing with misfortune; and (2) the incompatibility of magical explanations of misfortune with theological ones. In religious discourse, the causes of misfortune are not the stars, magic, fortune, bad luck, etc. but sin and God’s providence, said the preachers.

c. The Reformation took a lot of the magic out of medieval religion, leaving the astrologers to fill the vacuum. The sectarians then brought the magic back out during the Interregnum (at least this was the nature of the orthodox critique of the sensationalists/enthusiasts). Furthermore, the break with Rome led to an expansion of popular magic as the “wise woman” took the place of the healing shrines of the magical saints. Perhaps surprisingly, astrology saw a boom after the Reformation: there was an explosion of almanacs and astrological guides in the 17^th century but not necessarily of all magical agencies. The 17^th century was very much a period of transition, many common people using religion for magical purposes. This was a form of syncretism.

d. Wizards and astrology eventually lost their prestige in the 17^th century, but not because of rationalism and naturalism per se but because of a developing doctrine of divine providence in which God works through “natural” laws, thus rendering less compelling those approaches which pushed an either/or relationship to the natural world. Importantly, this shift also meant an increased place was given to the idea and possibility of unmerited suffering, and the more frequent use of the Book of Job against claims of witches causing misfortune. Indeed, the achievement of this highly attenuated kind of “natural” theology in the 17^th century was that it effected a final break in the presumed necessary association of guilt and misfortune which had driven magical beliefs for centuries.

e. The scientific and philosophical revolution of the 17^th century was, in essence, the triumph of the mechanical philosophy over part of (not all of) the traditional Aristotelian and neoplatonic cosmology. And with the collapse of microcosm theory went the whole intellectual basis of astrology, chiromancy, alchemy, physiognomy, astral magic, etc., and natural law apparently killed miracles, answered prayers, and divine inspiration. Except that it didn’t:  Newton’s secret alchemy experiments are a great example, but most relevant to my interests, we find that preachers and theologians, with their more robust grasp of the how and what of divine providence in the world and in life, are not leaving behind the premodern cosmology so much as adapting it to new language, thought forms, and questions. Hell, especially, is either still physically located somewhere (for Tobias Swindon, it has to be on the sun since we now know it can’t be the center of the earth) or is still spiritually located at the extremities of the worst of human experiences of horror, evil, and suffering. (Just as those Jesuit preachers did.)

f. An interesting episode in this transition of close relevance to the hellfire question and the ways to combat misfortune is the history of the development of firefighting! From the introduction of the “hand-squirt” in England in the last decade of the 16^th century, to fire engines in the 1630s, to the Dutch leather hosepipe in the 1670s, the symbolism of this increasing awareness of how to “manage” the threat of fire is hot with irony when brought alongside the changing ways of managing hellfire culturally and theologically.

g. In England, at least, it was the abandonment of magic (because of growing skepticism) which made possible the upsurge of technology, not the other way around, and this suggests that the re-enchantment of the world on the other side of the Enlightenment (when the nature of the Enlightenment turn is properly understood) might look more like addressing the cynicism wrought by unsatisfying scientism (the new magic) than by becoming somehow less scientific and rational. Indeed, it is along these lines that the Church may want to apply greater zeal to the problem of recognizably magic-type thinking that floods nominal, lay “Christian” thinking about God, evil, and providence today.

Two final and much briefer notes on literature:

3. With respect to understanding Calvin on hell, we’re not reading widely enough, and we’re also missing the obvious: in the literature, there is a surprising paucity of work carefully relating his teaching on the “descent into hell” to his exposition of passages traditionally understood to describe or refer to hell itself.

4. Again briefly, the work of Charles Drelincourt merits attention. Drelincourt, a highly regarded French minister in the 17^th century, was trained at Saumur but not closely connected with the controversies in which that school was tied up (he stayed quiet). He was very well known for his skill in pastoral visitation, and his The Christian’s Consolations Against the Fear of Death (1651) – basically an example of the ars moriendi tradition – is his main legacy on this front. Notably, his French treatises written in defense of Calvin (1677), including specifically on the descent, provides an example of thinking and acting theologically upon the relationship between Christ’s sufferings and the prospect of death, with occasional but largely undeveloped moments in the text when it is hell, and not mere suffering or death, that is in view.

The post Hell on Earth? The Descensus, the Disenchanted Modern World, and the Materiality of Hell (Part 2 of 2) appeared first on Greystone Theological Institute.

Here is a summary of my labors for my month at the Center:

Hell on Earth (and Beyond): Christ’s Descent into Hell and the Imagination of an Anguished Humanity

Botticelli’s Map of Dante’s Inferno

How should the Christian react to horrendous evils? What is the relationship between the Christian’s faith in God as Creator and Redeemer in Christ and the horrors of natural disasters, genocide, or severe personal suffering? I am working on an interdisciplinary project that develops a Christian response to horrendous evils from within the thought-world of the Bible. If this project has a center and a circumference, at the center is the notion of Christ’s descent into hell – the descensus ad inferos of the Apostles’ Creed – and on the circumference is the array of biblical, theological, and cultural motifs that converge upon and illuminate this rich idea. One consequence of my work thus far has been the discovery of connections between various ways of imagining hell and ways of understanding the atonement – and, ultimately, of relating Christ’s uniquely redemptive sufferings to one’s own. This intersection of the Christian theological and literary-cultural imagination on the one hand, and the Christian’s pilgrim existence in a dark, troubled, horror-filled world on the other, includes an important historical element I have tried to explore more fully as an Emo F. J. Van Halsema Fellow of the H. Henry Meeter Center.

When it comes to depicting heaven and hell, the early modern period was among the most fertile for the theological imagination. The moorings or foundations of that imagination were also on the cusp of undergoing seismic development, however, and this transition has been variously interpreted. In Piero Camporesi’s monograph, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe (Penn State, 1987), a study of Italian Counter-Reformation preaching, the author argues that, unlike in the post-Enlightenment world, hell was an everyday, vivid reality for Christians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Camporesi documents how this was due, in part at least, to the success of preachers who effectively portrayed hell in terms of the ordinary sights, sounds, experiences, and fears of the common folk. Whether as a rotting sewer, an imposing city, a feuding family, or an overcrowded plaza, the decay, stench, and terror of hell were put forward as extreme extensions of realities common people already knew and loathed. In this way preachers built on the established traditions of Gregory the Great and Dante, yet their sermons extended that traditional imagery in new directions by exploiting more deliberately the terrors of common life, thus advancing freshly horrific forms for the hell which threatens the ungodly.

It is this lively and fruitful connection between ideas regarding the nature of hell’s torment – including especially the torment of Christ at his cross – and the cultural and experiential roots of those ideas that prompts my interest in this research generally and which also prompted my application to work here as a Meeter Center Fellow. Camporesi’s study focuses on the Baroque imagery of a narrow cross-section of Italian Counter-Reformation preachers, but there are other promising areas to explore, historically and theologically. Like Camporesi, my own interest also arises in part from the sixteenth century, specifically in Calvin’s teaching on the descensus clause of the Creed. Departing to some extent from a perspective dominant in the patristic and medieval periods, Calvin taught that Christ’s descensus referred to his spiritual, hellish torments in his redemptive suffering, especially on the cross, rather than to his translocation to a lower realm whether to release the old covenant saints or to wag a victorious finger in the faces of Satan and his minions. Instead, as least in terms of his emphasis (and there are a few ambiguities regarding Calvin’s fuller views on this), for Calvin the atoning death of Jesus included his exposure to the immediate wrath of the Father, and this experience of divine wrath was his redemptive absorption of the hellish punishment due to the sinners he came to save. While not accepted unanimously, Calvin’s view was followed in many Reformed quarters, including by accomplished theologians Ursinus, Polanus, Trelcatius, Bucanus, Cloppenberg, and in the popular Heidelberg Catechism. This view is still held by many today, including, to a great extent at least, yours truly.

The continuing popularity of Calvin’s view also prompts related questions regarding the transition from pre-modern notions of hell’s reality to (and through) the triumph of rationalism. According to Camporesi, by tying hell more directly to earthly phenomena, the Italian preachers of the Counter-Reformation helped ease the gradual secularization of theological cosmology in the coming Enlightenment. With this turn toward earthly life, traditionally supernatural ideas of hell simply slowly and inexorably gave way to a more scientific and earth-bound mindset.

But while Camporesi’s account rings true historically in many ways, still I am inclined to evaluate the necessity of this transition in different, even contrary terms. Rather than an inevitable step toward what one might call the “disenchantment” of heaven and hell in modernity (Camporesi’s assumption), tying the horrors of hell hermeneutically to the horrors of concrete human fears and experiences may have accomplished – and may still accomplish – just the opposite. At the least, while the Enlightenment may have dislodged certain assumptions about the mechanics of the earth and the cosmos, it did not dislodge but only relocated the ineradicable human fear of perdition, often ironically using decidedly pre-modern forms and words to express that fear. Furthermore, the link of hell with concretely cultural and historical forms of human horror has a rich biblical and theological pedigree that arguably renders hell and the atonement more compelling for a world more exposed than ever to the quandaries of nature, the cosmos, and human ethics. The stubborn survival of premodern ways of thinking of God, sin, the cross, and the afterlife suggests, then, that premodern religious and theological texts may very well serve to “re-enchant” the world on the other side of the Enlightenment in specifically theological and Christological terms.

This brings me back to Calvin’s view on the descensus ad inferos and its own afterlife among the Reformed. I came to the Center hoping to explore the impact of Calvin’s view in two basic directions: firstly, upon the ways Reformed writers linked Christ’s own redemptive experience of hellish torment to various human experiences of pain and suffering; and, secondly, how that first link influenced (or was influenced by) their understandings of the nature of the hell that awaits the unredeemed at death and at the end. More specifically, my goal was to investigate to what extent, if any, the embrace within the Reformed tradition of a Calvinian reading of the descensus prompted theologically promising ways of connecting profound human suffering, devastating calamity, hell, and the cross. The relevant materials for review would therefore include sermons preached during times of crisis as well as theological and biblical materials on the topics of the atonement, hell, and intense forms of evil and suffering, whether physical, natural-environmental, or psychological and emotional. As I knew from previous experience, the Meeter Center’s collections are uniquely fitted for such an investigation, and I am honored to have been given the opportunity once again to make use of them.

In my next post I will outline some of the results of my work at the Center. Many thanks to the highly capable and warmly welcoming staff at the Center, and of course to Mrs. Van Halsema and family.

The post Hell on Earth? The Descensus, the Disenchanted Modern World, and the Materiality of Hell (Part 1 of 2) appeared first on Greystone Theological Institute.