Extra Credit: Four Views on Hell, Preston Sprinkle, Ed.

I am a person of faith. I love that I can have some kind of relationship with the mind that made the cosmos. When you say it that way, it really helps you realize why Paul said that "now we see through a glass, darkly"! I believe with all my heart in eternal life, but the few times in my life I actually thought I was facing death, I was surprised at how terrified I was. And when family members were facing death, I was even more surprised at the still, small voice that prompted me: "You should study Hell."

Wait, what now?! Who wants to think about Hell?

First, every single person I've ever talked to who has lost a loved one, no matter what beliefs they professed about life, the universe and everything, reported some sense of that person's continued presence in their lives after death. So there's that.

Second, I've never talked to a person of faith who believed in "eternal conscious torment" (aka "Hell" as commonly understood), who wasn't beset by a nagging sense that it wasn't actually a very great idea.

So, reluctantly, I actually started looking hard at what the Bible says about the afterlife. I read a couple of books, including the excellent Four Views on Hell (Dewey 236.25). This fine review beautifully summarizes the structure and purpose of the book in detail. 

I also read all four Gospels, marking everything Jesus said that might possibly refer to dire punishments waiting after death. I even watched some movies about preachers and teachers struggling with the same issue. I highly recommend Hell and Mr. Fudge, but you might also enjoy Come Sunday. 

Thanks to Four Views  and another, denser book called Hope Beyond Hell, which advocates in great detail for a Biblically rigorous form of Universalism, I went deep down rabbit holes involving Hebrew and Greek verb tense sequence, the cultural significance of the location called "Gehenna," and how long an eon is, exactly. (A great overview of some of these issues , to whet your appetite for a whole book on them, can be found in a 3-part series from Brazen Church blog.) 

My conclusion: faithful and reasonable people can differ about what exactly the Bible teaches about life after death, and we really won't know every exact detail until we get there! 

While I dived deep, though, I also pulled back to the big picture: Why did the idea of eternal conscious torment bother me, anyway? Why was it that even when I tried to imagine Hell as inhabited only by demons and Hitler, it seemed like an eternity of it was, for lack of a better word, overkill? 

I applied the reasoning Jesus taught us: "If you, being evil, give good things to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give?" If I, a deeply flawed human being, don't really need even Hitler to suffer eternally, why should God? Even though I grew up in a punitive culture that views justice in terms of making the perpetrator pay for suffering with his own suffering, could there be another kind of justice-- restitutional justice focused on returning to the victim what was lost, and reconciling the perpetrator to the community?

I came to believe that the Bible is NOT clear that after we die, God will send some of us to Heaven to sit on clouds and play harps and others to Hell to burn forever without ever being consumed. What the Bible IS clear about includes the following:

Actions have consequences. Sorting out those actions and consequences is the work of a lifetime. I think a relationship with God and the stories He told helps.

God made us out of love, so we could be with Him. Heaven and Earth were meant to be one, and we are all meant to be with God.

Humans make this world a Hell at times, and woe betide us when we contribute to that.

Meanwhile, God through His Spirit is constantly working to expand His Kingdom on earth -- His dwelling place and the one intended for us from the beginning. We are expected to work with God in this project.

When suffering and death entered the world, so did God, and, in the person of Jesus, volunteered to live in one of the most barbaric ages of history. He was born and raised in poverty and even refugee status, He was routinely harassed, and ultimately He was tortured to death. He didn't put us through anything He Himself didn't experience. 

This is what God does about evil: He gets right in the middle of it and lets it destroy Him.

And then He rises from the dead, and eternal life-- life after death with God-- becomes available to everybody.

I have a lot of theories about how all of this *might* work out, but the bottom line is that God loves ALL, ALL have sinned, and Christ died for ALL. That is why nowadays, when I talk about people who have died, I often say they are "with God." I don't know exactly what they may be experiencing, but I do feel confident that they are in God's hands, experiencing His love as best they are able. They are doing just fine. They are with God, and God is love, and everything is going to be all right in the end!

600-609: Introduction to applied science. Bunch of Amateurs, by Jack Hitt

Melvil Dewey dedicated the 500s to "natural science" and the 600s to "useful arts," encompassing everything from agriculture to engineering. As it happens, I have already read my share of medical books and home management advice, but I look forward to learning "how to" in some new areas, too. I gotta get inspired about all this applied knowledge and practical advice; thus, Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt.

Jack Hitt is interested in people who do things for the love. He’s hoping that he’ll meet someone who gets a genius grant or invents a time machine, and although, spoiler alert, that doesn’t happen, what does happen is he gets transported, not by the mechanics of inventions, but by the character of the inventors. By which I don't confirm or deny that the inventors are characters but attest that they have character: intelligence, curiosity, persistence and a certain humility, a comfort with being the smartest and yet the poorest or least known person in the room.

Hitt, like the walrus in Alice in Wonderland, talks of many things, among which:

• Dobsonian telescopes, so called because a guy named John Dobson Johnny Appleseeds his way around the country teaching people how to make them out of porthole glass, cardboard tubes, and an eyepiece cannibalized from a pair of cheap binoculars
• The process of figuring out how to make a slightly bigger telescope— with a lens about a meter wide— out of scavenged industrial waste and ready-made components for less than the price of a used car
• How Ben Franklin invented Americans when he went to France
• How a French “transcriber” discovered the shocking truth about Franklin's famous and numerous relationships with French women (they were platonic!) and became one of America's best-known Franklin scholars
• How a loose federation of people with kitchen labs are using recombinant DNA to attempt to create everything from new vaccines to glow-in-the-dark Jello
• That American robots look like they are made to do jobs like tighten lug nuts, vacuum floors, or detonate mines; Japanese robots look like people or animals; and European robots already have a bill of rights because they are that close to robot consciousness
• How various amateur experts have claimed to discover, aka invented:
• Irish settlements in Southeast Connecticut dating from the time of Brendan the Navigator
• “Caucasoid” settlements in the Southern US far predating the crossing of the Bering Strait
• The return of the believed-to-be-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker

Along the way, we learn many fun facts. For example, in one timely passage, Nina Jablonski, paleoanthropologist, theorizes that skin pigmentation is an evolutionary response not to the dangers of sunburn but to the need to regulate the amount of Vitamin D3 manufactured just under the skin in response to intense sunlight. Too little, you feel like crap. Too much…. Oh rats, you also feel like crap! So, assuming humans emerged in Africa with relatively dark skin to protect from excessive D3 manufacture and then began to travel,  evolutionary pressure would favor darker skin near the Equator, and lighter skin in areas that have less sunshine AND no dietary sources of D3, like Scandinavia. In areas like the Arctic, abounding in seal and whale meat, light skin would provide no evolutionary advantage, so the population remained dark. “When we look at the different races… All that we are seeing, the only thing we are seeing when we look at skin color, according to the science, is a meandering trail of Vitamin D3 adaptation rates.”

There’s also a highly relevant-to-our-moment discussion of cognitive biases in the chapter about “Kennewick man.” Apparently it is quite hard for us humans to gain accurate information about reality. We are constantly falling for the first analysis we hear, preferring a confident person who doesn’t know what they are talking about to a tentative person who is getting ready to find you all the facts. We then get caught up in avalanches of bad information that land us squarely on the wrong side of the mountain. Basically: it’s really easy to be wrong, and this book is full of people who are enthusiastically, persistently wrong about topics they really, really love! 

But no fear: it also includes many others who succeed in their quests-- whether for glow-in-the-dark Jello or a bigger, cheaper telescope. So: here's to "how to"!