CS Lewis: Hell and the Devil

1. CS Lewis:Hell and the Devil Juanita Gibson Carolyn Witte Nathan Wybenga

2. “In all discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends but of ourselves.” --CS Lewis

3. The Devil

4. The Faces of SatanAn Introduction to the DevilJohn Milton, Paradise Lost Book 1 (1667) Say first—for Heaven hides nothing from thy view, Nor the deep tract of Hell—say first what cause Moved our grand parents, in that happy state, Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off From their Creator, and transgress his will For one restraint, lords of the World besides. Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?

5. The Faces of Satan(continued) Th' infernal Serpent; he it was whose guile, Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived The mother of mankind, what time his pride Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring To set himself in glory above his peers, He trusted to have equaled the Most High, If he opposed, and with ambitious aim Against the throne and monarchy of God,

6. The Faces of Satan(continued) Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud, With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.

7. Images of SatanGenesis: Serpent Now the serpent was more subtle and crafty than any living creature of the field which the Lord God had made. And he [Satan] said to the woman, Can it really be that God has said, “You shall not eat from every tree of the garden?” -Genesis 3:1, Amplified Bible And the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, you are cursed above all [domestic] animals and above every [wild] living thing of the field; upon your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust [and what it contains] all the days of your life. -Genesis 3:14, Amplified Bible

8. Images of SatanJob Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. -Job 1:6, New American Standard Bible The LORD said to Satan, "From where do you come?" Then Satan answered the LORD and said, "From roaming about on the earth and walking around on it.” –Job 1:7, New American Standard Bible Question: Why does Satan come to present himself with the sons of God?

9. Images of SatanMatthew: Tempter and Biblical Scholar? Then Jesus was led out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted there by the Devil. -Matthew 4:1, New Living Translation Then the Devil took him to Jerusalem, to the highest point of the Temple, and said, "If you are the Son of God, jump off! For the Scriptures say, `He orders his angels to protect you. And they will hold you with their hands to keep you from striking your foot on a stone.' " -Matthew 4:5, New Living Translation

10. Images of SatanJohn: Prince of Lies and Deception You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. -John 8:44, English Standard Translation “God seeks to comrades and claims love, the Devil seeks slaves and claims obedience.” -Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (1928)

11. Images of SatanRevelations: Dragons and Death Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while. And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth… …but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever. -Revelations 20:1,7-8a, 9b-10

12. Evil

13. “Evil and God” by CS Lewis • Dualism is any theory or system of thought that recognizes two and only two independent and mutually irreducible principles or substances, which are sometimes complementary and sometimes in conflict. • Metaphysical dualisms admit two substances, such as world and God, or two principles, such as good and evil, as a means of explaining the nature of reality. • Ethical or ethicoreligious dualism asserts that there are two mutually hostile forces or beings in the world, the one being the source of all good, the other the source of all evil. • Christian theology generally accepts a modified moral dualism, recognizing God as supremely good and Satan as a deteriorated creature bent everywhere upon the intrusion of evil.

14. “Evil and God” by CS Lewis “Good and evil, then, are not on all fours. Badness is not even bad in the way that goodness is good. Ormuzd {God} and Ahriman cannot be equals. In the long run, Ormuzd must be original and Ahriman the derivative. The first hazy idea of the devil must, if we begin to think, be analyzed into the more precise ideas of ‘fallen’ and ‘rebel’ angel. But only in the long run. There was never any question of tracing all evil to man; in fact the New Testament has a good deal more to say about dark superhuman powers than about the fall of Adam… …The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that the Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael is really in the right and Satan in the wrong this must mean that they stand in two different relations to somebody or something far back, to the ultimate ground of reality itself.”

15. Hell

16. History of the word Hell “In early Christian teaching, after the final judgment, the wicked will be condemned to a hell of fire called gehenna, a Greek word derived from the Hebrew Gehinnom and referring to the desolate Valley of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem, where trash fires burned incessantly and where ancient human sacrifices had been offered to Cannanite gods.”

17. Statistics • As of 2003, 68% of Americans say that they believe in the devil, the Southerners being the regional people most likely to believe. • In 2000, 94% of Americans said they believe in God, while only 75% believed in Satan

18. Other Author’s Comments “To Christian writer C.S. Lewis, hell was a place of nothing. And heaven was a place of everything. In his book The Great Divorce, he described hell as a “gray town” that’s extremely boring. One guy just paces back and forth for over a year. Nothing has any meaning, satisfaction, or substance. You can’t drink or eat or even sit on anything. Houses don’t keep out the rain, and those who live in hell are more like transparent ghosts than people.” --Todd Hertz

19. Other Author’s Comments “the wicket shall have to endure, first, everlasting separation from God, and second, everlasting “physical” torment in the form of literal flames which, though they produce the same experience as an earthly fire, never consume those who writhe forever in them.” --Thomas Talbott

20. Other Author’s Comments • Lawrence S. Cunningham makes 3 points about hell: • Hell is Separation from God • Hell is described not as a particular location, but a ‘state of existence’ • The pain of hell is that of separation and loss, not of fire and worms

21. Other Religions’ Views of Hell • Judaism believes Hades was the ruler of the underworld (a literal hell), similar to the role of the devil. • Islam believes souls must cross a bridge across the crater of fire known as hell to go to paradise, hell is a lake of fire, full of suffering. • Hinduism believes souls going to reincarnation must pass through one of 21 hells to destroy harmful karma, kanna (evil) gets burned away. • Buddhism believes in a multitude of hells through a person’s journey towards nirvana.

22. Other Religions’ Views of Hell (continued) • Jainism (branch off Hinduism) believes that the universe contains 3 realms, the lowest has 8.4 million hells where sins are punished, and only the most wicked stay forever • Taoism believes the dead go to a Buddhist paradise or to one of several hells • The Arabic word for hell is “Jahannam”, from the same word as the Hebrew hell, “Gehenna”, definition: location used for incineration

23. “The Problem of Pain” by CS LewisChapter 8, “Hell” • Lewis strongly disliked the biblical doctrine of free will as it concerned hell. Lewis disliked it because he disliked the idea of man being able to chose to go to hell. • “The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His creatures to final ruin …Christianity… presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous—a God so full of mercy … yet still there is Hell”

24. “The Problem of Pain”Chapter 8, “Hell” • In this chapter, Lewis combats common beliefs against Christianity and subsequently against the doctrine of man’s free will to choose hell. • There were four main arguments that Lewis felt non-believers had against Christianity’s view of hell.

25. The First Argument • There is an objection to the idea of retributive punishment. • Pain, Lewis says, is often times the way that God works to combat evil. • Along with this idea against retributive punishment, there is an idea that God should forgive a man while he remains “what he is”, namely, a sinner. • This is due to the confusion between condoning and forgiving. • “To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.” • “We are therefore at liberty…to think of this bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is. The characteristic of lost souls is “their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves””.

26. The Second Argument • The second argument is against the idea that we will forever in time be punished for what is, a short lived period of sin. • However, Eternity is not simply a prolonging of time. • “If we think of time as a line, we probably ought to think of eternity as a plane or even a solid.”

27. The Third Argument • People do not like the frightful intensity of the pains of Hell as suggested by Scripture. • “Our lord speaks of Hell under three symbols: first, that of punishment; second, that of destruction; and thirdly, that of deprivation, exclusion, or banishment into “the darkness outside””. • “the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains”.”

28. The Fourth Argument • “A fourth objection is that no charitable man could himself be blessed in heaven while he knew that even one human soul was still in hell. • “At the back of this objection lies a mental picture of heaven and hell co-existing, so that at each moment the blessed could say “the miseries of hell are now going on”. But I notice that Our Lord, while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity usually emphasizes the idea not of duration but of finality. Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story—not as the beginning of a new story.”

29. Conclusions of “The Problem of Pain”, Chapter 8, “Hell” • “In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.”

30. Any Questions?