The Authorised Version renders Revelation 20:14 as, ‘And death and hell
were cast into the lake of fire.’ My New
English Bible version has it, ‘Then Death and Hades were flung into the lake of
fire.’ This creates grounds for
confusion.
Hades, for those with a smattering of Greek mythology, is the common
destination for the dead, with better areas like the Elysian Fields and worse
ones like Tartarus. Understood in Christian
terms as a sort of temporary holding area, its destruction after the Last
Judgement – when the Lake of Fire takes effect – would make sense.
The destruction of Hell – the place of symbolic fire – by being thrown
into another symbolic fire is more difficult. Indeed, in the minds of many,
Hell and the Lake of Fire are one and the same thing.
If we think of a new Heaven and a new Earth, however, then it becomes
easier. The current frame of things is provisional. New Heaven, new Earth, new Hell: which the
Lake of Fire. Hell as a sort of separate
temporary Hades then makes more sense.
Literary treatments of Hell, and
medieval illustrations, have added to the confusion. Dante is the worst culprit
in this respect. Dante’s Inferno is a
sort of funnel with a three-headed Satan at the bottom of it gnawing on Brutus,
Cassius and Judas. That suggests Satan
is fixed where he is; otherwise, what happens to Judas and the others when he’s
away?
Nevertheless, if Satan is confined to Hell in the medieval understanding,
his minions are free to visit Earth. In
Chaucer’s The Friar’s Tale a summoner
meets a yeoman even more demonic that himself; for the yeoman turns out to be a
fiend, riding to the world’s end in search of prey. At the end of the story, of
course, the fiend returns to Hell, taking the summoner with him to the special
shelf reserved for summoners. (Chaucer’s
Summoner is not pleased, but gets revenge by pointing out that friars in Hell
are in an even worse location.)
Even in a later example, such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Lucifer himself still remains in Hell, and sends
his servant, Mephistopheles.
FAU.
Where are you damn’d?
MEPH. In hell.
FAU. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
MEPH.
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Although we might applaud the perception
that Hell is a spiritual condition as well as a physical location, what about 1 Peter: 5:8, where ‘The devil goes
about like a roaring lion.’ ? That says pretty unequivocally that Satan is
still free to roam. So does Satan’s
temptation of Christ. True to this spirit, in Coleridge’s satirical little poem
‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, the gentleman in question leaves his “brimstone
bed” and visits Earth to pick up some
new ideas for torment. Coleridge is much more biblical than the other literary
examples I have cited.
If the biblical devil is not yet confined,
neither are his demons. In Matthew 8 the demons who later flee into
the Gadarene swine ask Christ if he has come to torment them “before their
time”. That suggests they are still
free; although they know of a future doom.
Why they choose the pigs is puzzling.
Don’t they have another location they could go to? What happens to the other demons that are
cast out? Where do they go?
Is Hell, in fact, an option for them at this stage? In Matthew
12:48, Christ says, “When an unclean spirit comes out of a man it wanders
over the deserts seeking a resting-place, and finds none.” It returns with seven other spirits more
wicked than itself. None of them, it
seems, has any other fixed abode. (I
concede, of course, that the whereabouts of demons in not the main point of Christ’s
words: he is talking about keeping one’s spiritual house in order, and allowing
no opening for evil.)
A counter to all this is the difficult
verse in Jude about the rebel
angels: ‘God has reserved them for
judgement on the Great Day, bound beneath the darkness in everlasting chains.’ One suggestion is that these are a special
case. These are the Nephilim of Genesis: too
dangerous to be allowed on Earth. They
have been found guilty, but await their sentence. Yet a problem remains. What and where is this darkness – even
metaphorically speaking – that they are beneath? Are they in the same place as condemned
humans; or are they in a special place for condemned angels?
In Matthew
25:41 Christ says to the ‘goats’; “Go from me to the eternal fire prepared
for the devil and his angels.” That
suggests a future location about to come into effect and not yet operative. That is clear enough for the ‘goats’ alive at
the time of Christ’s return. But what of
those ‘goats’ already dead? Where have
they been in the meantime?
Christ says to the penitent thief, “This day you shall be with me in
Paradise.” Paul says that the dead will
be ‘asleep’ in Christ: aware, but still waiting for their resurrection
bodies. This suggests that judgement
happens immediately after death. The redeemed,
like the thief, are with Christ in Paradise.
The damned are in Hell: a place of metaphorical fire (the Lazarus and
Dives parable) and metaphorical darkness: the darkness, perhaps, below which
the chained angels are to be found. It is a place where there is consciousness of
loss: hence the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It would appear to be a place/condition simply for humans. The idea of tormenting devils seems to be as
unbiblical as their supposed pitchforks.
Satan is described in the New
Testament as “the prince of this world,” and “the prince of the power of the
air.” It is not the Bible that describes
him as the Prince of Hell. To that
extent, Coleridge’s poem, too, is unbliblical; although, given its satirical
nature, we need not take it any more seriously than we need take Chaucer.
Christ returns, and there is the Last
Judgement. Those alive are judged. The revived dead receive their resurrection
bodies and have their fate confirmed.
The present order of things comes to an end. The redeemed are with God in the new Heaven
and New Earth. The Devil, his demons and
unregenerate humanity are cast into the Lake of Fire. Even here the idea of devils punishing humans
seems amiss: the devils will themselves be punished. Unless, of course, all the self-willed of
whatever description are consigned together and left to fight it out for
precedence.
This
has been a sombre topic to discuss, and limited in scope. My purpose has not been to consider the
literal versus the figurative; the grounds for redemption and damnation; or the
vexed issues of Purgatory, Annihilationism and Universalism. My
purpose has been to clarify for myself – and hopefully for others – a problem
of biblical chronology.
