FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Hell-bound

Rant Number 527      19 February 2013

A departed soul, a Christian, reaches the heavenly realm. St Peter, guardian of the pearly gates, gives him a little introduction tour around the house. All’s well till they get to a vast place surrounded by a very tall wall. ‘What’s that?’ the visitor inquires. ‘Keep your voice down!’ St Peter urges. ‘That is the place reserved for Muslims but they must not know we are here. They believe Heaven is exclusively for them alone!’

A heterodox joke that will please religious pluralists. I suppose it would be a bit rude to inform your neighbours that hell is their destination but...cruel to be kind, perhaps.

Between Heaven and Hell discusses not the denizens of Heaven but their problematical counterparts, the dismal folks destined for the kingdom of darkness. It is edited by Muhammad Hassan Khalil. Subtitled ‘Islam, Salvation and the Fate of Others’. A scholarly book filled with stimulating essays, mostly by Muslims, and a subject matter of burning (!) interest.

Muslims are amongst the few left in the West to take hell seriously. Jean Jacques Rousseau, an utterly despicable man, held that hell was socially divisive: you could not live at peace with neighbours whom you believed doomed to eternal fire. Today he shouldn’t worry. Our wimpish Zeitgeist has kicked damnation upstairs. Even mentioning eternal punishment to school children in RE lessons might expose you to the wrath of parents, as it befell a Catholic teacher friend of mine. Yet, hell matters, because salvation matters. I commend these authors for giving hell a chance.

‘No salvation outside Islam’. No beating about the bush. If you are not a Muslim the Fire awaits you. That is the position bluntly espoused by Yasir Qadhi. A stocky, tough-looking, Saudi-trained young scholar, he bases his position on the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. Still, the hell-bound brigade is thrown a kind of sop. Passing judgment on particular individuals is wrong, only general assertions are in order, Qadhi says. So, while it is right to declare that Christians as a whole are surely damned, a Muslim should not be so ungracious to say that Mother Teresa is. Furthermore, punishment might depend on whether rejection of Islam was based on knowledge or otherwise.

Hhhmmm...in criminal matters ignorance of the law is no excuse. Why different in religion? Maybe Qadhi is thinking of peculiar passe’ scenarios, when Islam was thought a religion of backward, exotic and remote races about which one cared little. Today, thanks to 9/11, the media and the large number of Muslims who have settled amongst them, many Westerners know more about the religion of the Crescent than their own. Hence ignorance may no longer excuse, I suspect.

Tim Winter also takes a hard line. ‘Religious pluralism...is incompatible with Islamic monotheism’. (This Englishman calls such pluralism ‘Eurocentric’, a frightful charge, no doubt.) Does it mean only Muslims in heaven and all the others down below? Sounds like that and Winter is a convert to Islam - if he is right...good career move.  But he is also a sophisticated writer so he produces a theory of ‘prophetic intercession, based on Allah’s mercy. Righteous monotheists might then still make it upstairs: good!

Muhammad Legenhausen’s formidably cognitive essay analyses the views of various theologians. Karl Rahner and Shahid Mutahharri, a Catholic Christian and a Shia’ Muslim, both have kindly speculated that the Other could escape the Fire. One may believe in Christ implicitly or subconsciously, Rahner says. Hence God, who knows all the secrets of the human heart, will recognise them at the Last Judgment. Furthermore, one interpretation of the Incarnation of Christ, God becoming man, sees human nature itself in Christ’s flesh now partaking of the divine. Hence, ‘grace is given to the whole world, not merely to Catholics.’

Mutahharri’s view, suitably based on Islamic fiqh, jurisprudence, seems to me a variation on the theme of excusing, non-culpable ignorance. Allah’s supreme justice would not punish those who ‘through no fault of their own do not accept Islam’. Fair enough.

A somewhat unsatisfactory solution was expressed by the medieval writer Ibn al-Qayyim, cited by David Freidenreich. He suggested that Christians will go to hell but only for a short time. Considering that one of the infernal penalties the Qur’an vividly describes is having to drink boiling water, the prospect fails to cheer me up.

Tariq Ramadan, and Mohammed Fadel consider philosopher John Rawls’ take on truth and salvation. Rawls, an archetypical apologist for Western liberal democracy, claimed that in such a polity the public and the private sphere should be set apart. Some attitudes and convictions, like your infidel neighbours roasting in the Fire, should not be publicly expressed. You can still believe you have the Truth but you should not proclaim to all and sundry. Like in the joke above: don’t tell!

Rawls’ viewpoint wonderfully embodies the ideology of secularism. I once heard it expressed by a former Algerian foreign minister at SOAS. God is a matter of your private beliefs, a personal relationship, it is wrong to bring religion into the market place. The priest cannot legislate for Islam but this is certainly not the view of the Church. Neither theologically nor historically. Faith matters. Supremely so. To ghettoise religion is impossible. More, it is false, wicked, absurd. Even the pathetic, failed and apostate Church of England keeps its 26 bishops in the House of Lords: QED.

St Augustine in the City of God writes of an Invisible Church, the full members of which are known only to God. They include much humanity, many of whom are not baptised Christians. At the Last Day, the citizens of that City of God will emerge in all their splendour. A foreshadowing of theological pluralism?

Still, Scripture says that Christ is the conqueror of hell. And he says: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me.’ What do I then believe about my Muslim friends? Are they hell-bound?

Ah, that would be telling...

Revd Frank Julian Gelli