Why Don't People Today Seem Worried About Hell? part two

[continued from yesterday's blog...an excerpt from Rodney Stark's book "For the Glory of God," pp. 80–81).

Fear of hell is directly proportional to consciousness of the seriousness of life and sin. Jesus spoke powerful images of hell to confront the self-righteous complacency of people who assumed they were secure as part of a “chosen” group and that religious play-acting was sufficient to shield them from spiritual danger. Awakening to the wickedness, hypocrisy, and corruption of the “principalities and powers” of their civilization was an essential part of becoming a disciple of Jesus (John 1:9-11; Romans 12:2; Galatians 1:4; Ephesians 2:2-3; 6:12; Colossians 1:16; 2:15; James 4:4; 1 John 5:4,19; Revelation 12:9; 13:8). The wickedness and corruption of modern civilization is obvious to anyone who is willing to see it, just as the wickedness and corruption of Roman and Jewish civilization was obvious to Jesus, and became obvious to His followers when He was scourged and nailed to a cross.

Modern people lack a sense of the seriousness of sin in particular and life in general. The degree of complacency of us who claim to be the followers of Jesus Christ is often hard to distinguish from the complacency of self-professed atheists and unbelievers. Perhaps it is hard for us to be worried about hell in this post-modern age because, like a giant parasitic plant, hell is already gripping every aspect of our lives with its tendrils. Perhaps we need to awaken to the extent of anti-Christian power and realize just how evil our civilization is before we will again take sin seriously and realize that hell is truly something to be concerned about.

1. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden (C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory).

2. The concept of indulgences is a classic instance of theological creativity, as opposed to the mere interpretation of revelations (or scriptures), and the same is true of the concept of purgatory on which indulgences were based. It all began with Saint Augustine, who deduced from passages in Maccabees (12:39-45) and 1 Corinthians (3:11-15) that upon death no one except the occasional saint goes directly to heaven. The condemned go directly to hell, but the remainder go to a slightly less painful form of hell to do penance until they are purged (hence “purgatory”) of those sins that had not been offset by good works during their lifetimes. That is, a sin must be offset by sincere contrition, by confession to a priest and receipt of his absolution, and then by a sufficiency of good works. The Church taught that for nearly all people, at death their sins will greatly outweigh their good works, hence the need to suffer the terrible pains of purgatory for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years before they are allowed to enter heaven.

Since time in purgatory was a substitute for good works, it followed that the more good works one accomplished, the shorter one’s stay in purgatory, and someone hit upon the idea that good works of benefit to the church counted more than other varieties. Indeed, the Church soon began to identify such works and assign them values as to time remitted from one’s sentence to purgatory. For example, participation in a Crusade was rated as bringing complete remission from purgatory. This was extended to include those who gave the Church an amount sufficient to hire a crusader. As the Crusades petered out, the Church’s desire for funds did not; hence it was promulgated that through donations or services to the Church everyone could “earn” an earlier release from the tortures of pur¬gatory. Soon, the Church began to sell signed and sealed certificates of specific indulgences, some specifying a period of remission, others provid¬ing dispensations to commit or for having committed various sins. For example, large numbers of people purchased indulgences permitting them to eat prohibited foods on fast days; others bought permissions to keep ill-gotten property.

As time passed, and as the Church’s financial ambitions continued to grow, an elaborate indulgence sales network of traveling monks developed. Then, in 1476, Pope Sixtus IV recognized how to greatly expand the mar¬ket. Seeking funds to pay his many debts and to continue work on the Sistine Chapel, the pope authorized the sale of indulgences to the living that would shorten the suffering of their dead loved ones already in purga¬tory. As a sales slogan of the day put it, “The moment the money tinkles in the collecting box, a soul flies out of purgatory.”

From the start, some members of the Church of Piety such as Peter Abelard had questioned the validity of indulgences, as did Wyclif, Hus, and Erasmus, and the practice of selling indulgences on behalf of the dead had offended Luther for several years before he wrote his famous protest. What prompted Luther to act was a massive sales campaign launched in 1517 to peddle indulgences in Germany to fund the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s basilica in Rome (it had also been secretly agreed that half of the funds were to go to the archbishop of Metz to repay the immense debts he had accrued to buy his office, as well as three other bishoprics). Johannes Tetzel (ca. 1465–1519), a prominent preacher of indulgences, took charge of the campaign in areas near Wittenberg. Drafts of some of his sermons have survived, and the following passage was typical: “[D]o you not hear the voices of your dead parents and other people, screaming and saying ‘Have pity on me, have pity on me . . . We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue us with a few alms, if you would.’ ” Luther was infuriated by this commercialized fear-mongering
(Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God, pp. 80–81).