The Population of Hell

A reader writes:

Do you think we can know for sure that there are people in hell (not that we know which particular people are there)?

The current Roman Catholic teaching seems to be that we don’t know if there are people in Hell (a la Hans Urs von Balthasar).

I wouldn’t say that Catholic teaching is that we don’t know. The situation has been muddied a bit recently, but as far as I can tell the Church’s official position is still that there are definitely people in hell, it just doesn’t claim to know which individuals are. The most recent, highly authoritative statement is still that of the Catechism, and it gives no hint of the “maybe everybody gets saved” position.

To clarify matters, consider the following positions:

1. Nobody is in hell.

2. *Maybe* nobody is in hell.

3. Some people are in hell.

4. Some people are in hell and we know who some of them are.

5. Boatloads of people are in hell.

6. Everybody is in hell except for the tiny remnant that *I* belong to.

7. Everybody without exception is in hell; Jesus died for nothing.

From what I can tell, the Church is willing to sign off on position #3, though not precluding the other positions listed, except for #s 1 and 7, which are right out. Positions #s 2-6 seem to be permitted (or at least tolerated), as evidenced by the fact that the pope named von Balthasar (a holder of position #2) as a cardinal and the CDF has allowed the Feeneyites (holders of position #6) to remain as Catholics without being subject to theological discipline and even (in the case of one group) being allowed to raise money as a Catholic organization.

As far as what *I* think, I’m an exponent of position #4. I think that we know at least two people who are in hell: Judas and one of the early Roman emperors, most likely Nero. This is because Jesus says that it would have been better for Judas if he had not been born (and if he ended up in heaven then that clearly wouldn’t be the case) and because Revelation speaks of the Beast (most plausibly identified as the Emperor Nero) being thrown into the lake of fire. The fact that these two gents are in hell means that *some* people are in hell, and thus position #2 is wrong.

In fact, I think that the von Balthasar position is hopelessly wrong for a number of reasons, and if I were pope it would be swiftly ejected from the permitted opinion list. If you like, I’d be hapy to explain why, but at the moment it’s getting late. 🙂

Interracial Marriages

A correspondent writes:

when i see inter-racial couples my spirit tells me that this is not natural. i have seen the child of an inter-racial marriage. the child had a black skin, had a white scalp with bright red hair. the child looked like a freak

I can’t agree with you, nor does the Church. From a moral perspective, differences in skin color are no more significant than differences in hair color or eye color. Neither are other racial characteristics. The human race is already one big family; it’s simply that certain characteristics have come to predominate in different parts of that family.

stormFrom the perspective of intrinsic morality, there is no more reason for people with different skin colors not to marry than for people with different hair colors or different eye colors. That may lead to uncommon combinations, but hey, I always thought Storm from the X-Men looked cool.

There can be extrinsic reasons why individuals of different racial backgrounds ought not marry. E.g., two hundred years ago in America a mixed-race couple would face an extremely hard life, including in some places imprisonment or worse. For example, in early Utah Brigham Young decreed that any white man who had conjugal relations with a black woman was to be put to death:

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so [Journal of Discourses 10:109].

Fortunately, in the developed world, the attitudes creating such factors have virtually disappeared.

Let me share with you the Bible’s perspective on interracial marriages. First, they are not at all unusual in Scripture. Palestine is located at a major junction between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and so mixed race marriages were far from unknown. They occasionally crop up in the Bible. For example, two of the tribes of Israel (Ephraim and Manasseh) resulted from the union of the patriarch Joseph (a Semite) with the daughter of Pharoah’s high priest (an Egyptian, and thus a Hamite).

Scripture also records God’s intense displeasure at the criticism of one particular interracial marriage. In Numbers 12 we read that Moses’ brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, criticized Moses for marrying a black woman (she is described as a Cushite, meaning she was probably of Ethiopian ancestry):

Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman.

And the LORD came down in a pillar of cloud, and stood at the door of the tent, and called Aaron and Miriam; and they both came forward. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against them, and he departed; and when the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow. And Aaron turned towards Miriam, and behold, she was leprous.

And Aaron said to Moses, “Oh, my lord, do not punish us because we have done foolishly and have sinned. And Moses cried to the LORD, “Heal her, O God, I beseech thee.”

But the LORD said to Moses, “If her father had but spit in her face, should she not be shamed seven days? Let her be shut up outside the camp seven days, and after that she may be brought in again.” So Miriam was shut up outside the camp seven days; and the people did not set out on the march till Miriam was brought in again [Num. 12:1, 5, 9-11, 13-15].

In this passage the text notes that Miriam, who had been criticizing Moses for marrying a black woman, was turned “as white as snow” by her leprosy. It is as if God is saying, “You want white? I got yer white! I got yer white right here!”

More Good News: al-Qaeda Leadership 70% Degraded

Shortly after 9/11, I was talking to a Maronite priest friend who was helping me with Arabic pronunciation, and we got to talking about bin Laden. My priest friend was very worried about the danger posed by bin Laden–and, indeed, he was and is a very dangerous man who needs to be dealt with as swiftly as possible. But I pointed out that with the new U.S. War Against Terror, it would make it much, much harder for bin Laden to operate. He could no longer come out into the open without making himself a target, and it’s hard to raise support and coordinate major attacks if you’re deep in hiding. My priest friend saw the point and was somewhat relieved by this line of thinking.

Now we have reports that bin Laden has been forced so deep into hiding that he now is only a figurehead for al-Qaeda.

The same story goes on to report:

As many as 70 percent of al-Qaeda’s leadership have been captured or killed as a result of the US-led war on terror launched in the aftermath of September 11 in Afghanistan (news – web sites) and other parts of the world, according to US intelligence officials.

More than 3,400 of the group’s lower-ranking operatives and supporters have also been detained or otherwise neutralized, these officials insist.

But a report on worldwide terrorism patterns released by the State Department Thursday acknowledged that al-Qaeda probably still has several thousand members and associates it can rely on.

The Vacation From Hell

hellThis is a picture of a person suffering in hell. He (?) is swimming in a pond of blood. The surprising thing is, this is an exhibit that you can go see in a museum. A whole museum full of images of people suffering in hell. Children go to this museum with their parents.

You might be thinking, “What kind of sick-o Fundamentalist thing is this? This is like what Jack Chick would do if he decided to turn one of his comic tracts into a museum! Such a bizarre ‘educational effort’ could only contemplated by the most hardcore Fundamentalist!”

Wrong! It isn’t Fundamentalist at all.

It’s Buddhist.

Yes, that’s right. I know that the media loves to portray Buddhists as peaceful and calm and serene and enlightened, the kind of people whose faith would never believe in something as offensive as hell, but those media reports give you about as much of a sense of what Buddhism is actually like as Taco Bell gives you a sense of Mexican food is like.

In reality, Buddhists have all kinds of ideas about what hell is like, who goes there, what specific punishments are meted out for what sins, etc. To be fair, Buddhist hell is more like purgatory since you can get reincarnated and try again after suffering in hell. It’s still gruesome as anything, though.

What is fascinating is that Buddhists would build museums and theme parks with hell exhibits. If that were done here in America, it’s would be regarded as kitchy at best and offensively revolting in all likelihood. Yet it’s something apparently is an established trend over there. The photo above is from this hell museum in Singapore. There’s also an amusement park with a hell exhibit in Vietnam. And yet another hell museum in Japan. WARNING: Not for the faint of heart! Some material definitely offensive to Western sensibilities.

Welcome! New Blog Location

Howdy!

Finally decided to get the blog moved from its old location to a new one that offers more whizzbangniftyspiffyblog-o-matic tools. (There seems to be a demand for those things. I was getting e-mail from people asking about the site’s syndication, permalinks appearing before the item goes into the archives, etc.)

I decided to go with TypePad, powered by MovableType, as it seems to be one of the best. From my end there’s a downside in that the posting tool isn’t WYSIWYG, which makes it a bit harder to do what I want in a post, but not too bad. I also figure that the posting tools will eventually get better, and by making the jump now I’ll have my blog in a exportable/portable format, making it easier to “move it without losing it” in the future.

Since I wasn’t using blog software to do the previous site, I had to pull the entries over here by hand. I’ve got them all on the right days (I think), so the basic order is preserved, but the timestamps for the posts before this one are meaningless. Also, I still have a bit of cleanup to do on them (fixing links and images). I’m also trying to get the old comments imported, but this may be a complicated process, if it’s even possible. Worst case scenario, we have to start fresh with new comments on this site (which has a built-in commenting feature).

On the bright side, there’s now an easier way to access the blog. I’ve got it its own URL now. Henceforth, my blog will be www.JimmyAkin.org, while my web site will continue to be www.JimmyAkin.com. In other words, the blog is .org, while the site is .com. Got it?

Enjoy!

Scientists Find Moon Mineral!

How cool is this!

After years and years of hearing sci-fi shows and movies talk about substances “not found on this planet,” we’ve now discovered one!

Oh, sure, it’s not a strange nucleotide sequence that proves the existence of extraterrestial life. Nor is it some new element from the unexplored outer reaches of the periodic table. In fact, it’s made from two of the most common elements in the universe (iron and silicon), but–and this is the point–it isn’t made on earth.

The new substance is called Hapkeite, after the scientist who first theorized the extraterrestrial process that makes it, Bruce Hapke. As it happens, Hapke is still alive and got to say a big “I told you so!” (Actually, his words to the press were “I told them so.”)

Hapkeite is made by “space weathering” on the lunar surface, a chunk of which containing Hapkeite got blasted into space as a meteor, which fell to earth and became a meteorite.

Cool!

Now if we could just come up with some naquadah.

The Ancient Christian Commentary Series

A reader writes:

I have been thinking of getting the "Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture" Edited by Thomas C. Oden

I trust your feed back. This commentary as you know is about $560.00 and is published by a Protestant Press.

Is this Commentary worth the money? Do you know any of the down falls? Do you recommend any other Commentary set that focus on the Patristic writings on Scripture? I have the Navarre Bible set. I am looking for another Scripture Commentary set for my studying.
 

The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture is a good series, and I can recommend it, though there are a few things one ought to know about it:

  1. It is based on the 39 volume Protestant set of early Church writings that is commonly available (including on the web for free). The advantage of the commentary set is that it has the material sorted by Scripture order, so it gathers together passages where the Church Fathers and other early writers are talking about a particular passage. This pre-sorted aspect of the set makes it much easier to find relevant passages on the book or passage you are studying, and it is the chief reason one would want to buy the series.
  2. The set has an older translation that is somewhat clunky in places, and it occasionally suffers from Protestant translator bias. These, however, are minor problems.
  3. More significant is the fact that the set is limited by the 39-volume translation it is based on. This set did not include translations of some writings that would help round-out the picture of the early Church Fathers’ views (e.g., Jerome’s Commentary on Galatians was not translated, though it is key to getting a balanced picture of early Christian interpretation of Romans and Galatians). On occasion, the editors of the 39-volume set appear to have deliberately excluded certain works because they were too Catholic. Still, this is a sin of omission in the work, and the set is still useful.
  4. The upshot is that the set is a good one and I can recommend it, but it requires that you use some critical thinking skills when you read and that you keep in mind that there can be (and sometimes are) important things that you are not seeing because of the limitations of the original translation.

For those who are interested in sampling the series, I should also note that it is available in individual volumes, as at this link. Buying an individual volume or two will let you get a sense of the series as a whole before you decide to punk down the money for the whole thing.

Afraid that at the moment I don’t have another patristic-oriented series to recommend. (I have heard of others, but haven’t had the chance to examine their volumes.) If you’re looking for a good general commentary, I can recommend Word Biblical Commentary. It is much more in-depth than the Navarre Bible. Though it is by a Protestant publisher, is the best commentary of its kind out there at present (and available in individual volumes at the link provided). Fr. Pacwa and I recommend it.

Noah's Ark?

Every few years a story like this one appears in the press about Evangelicals who think they’ve found Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey.

Believe me, I’d love for this one to pan out. I’d love to see the gents in question get together a competent expedition, get the necessary permissions, go to the site, and bring back solid proof of Noah’s Ark.

But I’m not holding my breath.

We don’t have, and never have had, any guarantee that Noah’s Ark or identifiable pieces of it have survived the ages. In fact, if I were Noah, one of the first things I would do after emerging from the Ark–before even planting a vineyard–would be to dismantle the Ark for building materials. In a world with four men, no chainsaws, and no lumberyards, the Ark could be too valuable for its raw materials to simply leave in one piece for future generations.

All the guys the article talks about really have (at best) is some satellite images showing some kind of wooden structures on the mountain (and there is even dispute about whether the location described by Genesis corresponds to the modern Mt. Ararat). Who is to say at this point that they won’t go up there and find the ruins of a few huts that are clearly post-diluvian. In fact, if they find anything, that’s probably what they’re going to find.

While I wish them well, the gents’ getting all this advance publicity worries me. If they fail (as they are likely to), it can embarrass the Christian cause. The worst of all worlds would be for them to go up, retrieve some wood that they loudly proclaim to be proof of Noah’s Ark, only to have the "proof" fall apart under laboratory examination.

Let’s pray that doesn’t happen.