LET'S TALK ABOUT HELL. In David Bentley Hart’s remarkably important book That All Shall Be Saved, he outlines the reasons that we should not fear an afterlife of unending torment in a Dantesque lake of flame. “It makes no more sense, then, to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or out of his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender regard for her moral autonomy.” Read the book—really, read it. It will inoculate you against some of the ideas about God that can’t help but edge their way into your psyche.
But then let’s talk about the other kind of hell, the one we make for ourselves. And here I’m going to skip the usual discussions about the various “hells” we might build by our greed, our narcissism, our selfishness—the hells of addiction, loneliness. They’re very real, very sad, and very overwhelming, as are the Hades of poverty and of racial oppression.
For now, though, I want to talk about the hell that looks like hell. In Australia, in the first days of the new year, bushfires were creating walls of flame 100 feet high or more. The greatest heat wave in Australian history meant that the average high temperature for the whole continent one day topped 105 degrees Fahrenheit. In the suburbs of Sydney, one of the world’s richest cities, the temperature topped 120 degrees, and the lovely capital of Canberra had the dirtiest air on earth as wildfire smoke turned the midday black (and the night red). Those venturing into the burned-over areas reported the sound of burned animals screaming—scientists think the number of animals killed over the course of weeks numbered in the billions, and several species may have been driven extinct. Volunteer firefighters spent weeks trying to beat back the flames, but often they simply had to withdraw—the winds topped 50 miles an hour, carrying embers miles to where they could touch off new blazes.
God told Noah that God wouldn’t flood us again but didn’t tell us we couldn’t flood ourselves (just ask the families of the Indonesians killed in record floods even as Australia burned). And God didn’t tell us we’d be consigned to the flames—but neither did God tell us we couldn’t consign ourselves. And we have. Last year saw a new record for carbon emissions. It saw the hottest month ever recorded on this planet. It saw millions of climate refugees on the move.
If the gospels don’t tell us much about hell, they do tell us about love. They tell us to love our neighbors—which is what we have to do. We have to keep the fossil fuel industry from killing them. We have to keep the banks from funding the fossil fuel industries. We have a lot of work to do, to keep the hounds of hell off our heels. It’s the Lord’s work.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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