Alas, Poor Theology!

 I was walking through Times Square yesterday and had to dodge a woman with a sign that read: "Jesus is King. Don't Go to Hell!"

I had to sigh that in two thousand years they still haven't come up with a better argument than appeals to spiritual terrorism. 

I thought of that scene in Tess of the d'Urbervilles in which Hardy describes a series of signs put up in the Wessex countryside bearing legends like "Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not." 

Hardy observes: 

"Some people might have cried 'Alas, poor Theology!' at the hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time."

Robert Tressell too makes the point that it is hard to imagine a salvation worthy of the name that would come alongside the eternal torment of other created things. 

As he writes in his Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: 

"As for the happiness that passes all understanding, it certainly passes MY understanding how you can be happy when you believe that millions of people are being tortured in Hell; and it also passes my understanding why you are not ashamed of yourself for being happy under such circumstances."

Most of today's respectable churches, of course, would join me in dodging the woman in Times Square with embarrassment. 

But it's not clear where exactly their official creed would depart from her statement. 

At some point in the nineteenth century, Mark Twain once observed, "perdition" was quietly removed "from the Protestant Church’s program of postmortem entertainments." But it's not like they formally avowed universalism either. 

Hell just became something that polite Christians don't talk about. Much like heaven, God, or Jesus, for that matter. 

Why can't they just bite the bullet and declare themselves for universal salvation? Well, because that would be heresy. 

  ’Tis blasphemous; I know one may be damned

For hoping no one else may e’er be so; —as Lord Byron once sardonically put it. 

Many a mainline Protestant would rather reduce the whole catechism to a metaphor than alter one jot or whit of its doctrines. 

They may not believe the trinity is real, per se; but they will fight you for it on fan fiction grounds or as a more satisfying symbol than some equally symbolic Socinianism or Arianism any day. 

So it will ever be. People would rather retire hell to a polite obscurity—leaving their children who hear the catechism to grow up in terror thinking their parents and the minister still literally believe this stuff—rather than just come out and reject the doctrine. 

Alas, poor theology, indeed!