Why We Need Hell - Frederica Mathewes-Green

I really like Frederica Mathewes-Green. She's a wonderful writer and if you've never read her book The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation, I highly recommend it. This piece was something she did for Belief Net as part of a group of writers approaching Hell from their various perspectives. I don't endorse all she says (which you should assume about anything I post on here.) but there are some gems in this...

Hell has never been a fashionable destination, but it in recent years it's met a fate that even the most passé hotspots don't endure; people suspect it doesn't exist. Or, if it does exist, it attracts no customers; "we are permitted to hope that hell is empty" is how this is sometimes phrased. Even the most conservative Christians have a hard time putting a positive spin on a wrathful
God who flings evildoers into flaming torment.

It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus' fold. No wonder some become atheists; who would want to spend eternity with such a tyrant?

Yet I'm going to make a case for hell, though not the one you see in cartoons, a fiery cavern where demons poke you with pitchforks. Dante made that kind of thing look pretty exciting, but "The Inferno" was written almost 1300 years after the Gospels. When you strip away European and medieval assumptions, and look at the writings of Christians in lands and cultures closer to Jesus' time, you get a different picture.

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