24 The Question of an Eternal Hell
frankly, neither the Purgatorio nor the Paradiso quite succeeds
at erasing that impression.
God, of course, ought not to be measured by the moral
imagination of even as great a poet as Dante- or, for that mat-
ter, by anyone else's. And it is important to recall that much
depends on the narrative of fall and salvation that one pre-
sumes. Here too, in my early years, Eastern Christian tradition
offered me some relief from my fear that the Christian story
as a whole might ultimately turn out to be a grim absurdity. I
learned fairly early on -from exposure to Eastern Christian
sources, from an attention to the original Greek of the New
Testament (thank God for a classical education), and from a
few especially civilized Western Christian thinkers (such as the
magnificent George MacDonald [1824-1905])-that many of
what had become the standard soteriological models of Chris-
tian tradition in its later centuries, especially in the West, were
products of profound misreadings of the language of Chris-
tian scripture, abetted by absolutely abysmal historical for-
getfulness. It is hard to know how often one hears it said, for
instance, that the gospels or Paul's epistles teach that, on the
cross of Christ, God poured out his wrath on sin, or that the
Son was discharging a debt humanity owed the Father, or that
Christ's blood was shed as a price paid by the Son to the Father
to secure our release from the burden of that debt. And, sup-
posedly, this was all inevitable not simply on account of sins we
have individually committed, but because we have inherited
a guilt contracted by the first parents of the race (which, of
course, must be a purely imputed guilt, since personal guilt is
not logically heritable). All of us, we are told, have been born
damnable in God's eyes, already condemned to hell, and justly
so. And yet God, out of God's love, races to rescue (some of)
us from God's wrath, because God would otherwise be techni-