Framing the Question 27
But then Christ came to set us free, to buy us out of slavery,
to heal us, to restore us to our true estate. In pursuit of those
he loved, he invaded even the very depths of that hell we have
made for ourselves and one another-in the cosmos, in his-
tory, in our own hearts - so as to drag us to himself ( to use
the actual language of John 12:32). Whatever variations were
worked upon this grand, guiding theme in the early centuries
of the faith, none of them ever incorporated the discordant
claim that innocent blood had to be spilled to assuage God's
indignation. And so, considered in these heartening terms, the
language of hell seemed much less inexplicable to me, much
less atrocious. If hell is simply God's enemy, which he has set
out to conquer and to despoil of its captives, and if we then
refuse to be joined to him in love and faith, and if we thereby
condemn ourselves to a suffering that he does not desire for us,
who can reproach God for our perversity?
As it happens, I do believe that the only hell that could
possibly exist is the one of which those Christian contempla-
tives speak: the hatred within each of us that turns the love of
others-of God and neighbor-into torment. It is entirely a
state we impose upon ourselves. And the only Christian nar-
rative of salvation that to me seems coherent is the one that the
earliest church derived so directly from scripture: a relentless
tale of rescue, conducted by a God who requires no tribute to
win his forgiveness or love. Any other version of the story I
regard not only as an exegetical and conceptual error ( though
certainly that), but also as a rather sickly parody of the Chris-
tianity of the New Testament. And yet, even this is not enough.
Having come to this point, I find we have still merely arrived
again where we began; our two questions remain as yet unan-
swered. Could such a refusal of God's love be sustained eter-
nally while still being truly free? And would God truly be the