Search Results

Jesus’ words about salvation and damnation reveal an extraordinarily heightened sense of the absolute claims the spiritual makes upon us, independently of belief in a future state. Jesus enforces with prodigious power the sense that failure to live with total confidence in God's fatherhood forfeits everything. St. Paul transforms the message by adding a timeless, mythical character to the mission of Jesus, sublating the tragedy of his execution into the history of a savior god. The chapter explores early accounts of hell in the apocrypha, Fathers of the Church, and Origen who denied hell's eternity, preaching a restoration of all (apocatastasis) at the end of time. It ends with a brief account of some Muslim traditions of hell, of Izra ‘il, Angel of Death, of interrogation by the angels Munkar and Nakir, the Sirat or narrow bridge over hell which all must pass over.

Here again modern interpreters seek to provide deeper understanding of, or give new meanings to, the modalities of the day of resurrection. Consideration is given to attempts to reconcile the Qur’an with modern scientific findings, to the strongly ethical dimensions of the Qur’anic presentation of judgment and recompense, and to the physical and spiritual dimensions of the rewards of the Garden and the punishments of the Fire. A prominent theme in contemporary interpretation is the relationship between divine justice and human responsibility.

The novel The Damnation of Theron Ware captures the shift to respectability among nineteenth‐century Methodists that Asbury had feared and many nineteenth‐century “croakers” decried. Through the nineteenth century, observers, including Ezekiel Cooper, Nathan Bangs, Abel Stevens, and Edward Drinkhouse, bent Asbury’s legacy to serve their own purposes. Twentieth‐century writers, most prominently William Warren Sweet, also used Asbury’s legacy to promote their own vision for the church, as did the backers of a bronze monument of Asbury on horseback dedicated in Washington, D.C., in October 1924. Asbury’s image was treated with far less respect by writers such as Herbert Asbury, who published a cynical and mostly fictional biography of Asbury in 1927. Asbury is better understood through an appreciation of his piety, his ability to connect with others, his cultural sensitivity, and his administrative abilities.

This chapter focuses on the 1920 essay “The Damnation of Women,” Du Bois's collective biography of African American women. Despite the masculinism that defines much of his writing, and the tensions that qualify even his strongest arguments on behalf of gender equality, this essay demands that readers grapple with the meaning of “womanhood” and “citizenship” through the lens of black women's history. It also reorients feminist citizenship theory in the United States by demonstrating the need to go beyond reckoning with race to confront the lingering shadows of slavery.

This concluding chapter argues that all three Abrahamic religions professed a belief in hell, whether they called it Gehinnom, Gehenna, or Jahannam, and all three successfully resisted similar objections to it within their own communities. To counter these challenges, religious specialists posited purgatorial fringes that offered lesser sinners temporary discipline outside the core of hell, thus sparing them damnation. Despite these threats to hell’s essence, authoritative pronouncements succeeded in reasserting eternal punishment as the consensus or orthodox position in the three religions. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam therefore agree on the existence of an eternal hell for incorrigible sinners. Still, it became necessary to reconcile such a dramatic and apparently cruel fate with the mercy of God. Around the core idea of hell, specialists and visionaries perceived alternatives to hell in the form of escape, periodic relief, and purification.

Chapter forty-five is a detailed examination of Hodge’s views on the Church universal. As denominations competed for members and new religious traditions arose on the American landscape, a wide array of Protestants turned their attention to defining the true nation of Christ’s earthly Church and who its members might be. Hodge believed that form did not so much define the Church as did people who were filled with the Holy Spirit. He also spoke against infant damnation and in favor of the use of liturgies in church services.

The overarching plot requirements of the Commedia undergird Vergil's damnation and suggest that to think in terms of his salvation is to opt for the lectio facilior, in the sense of the reading that is easier for us emotionally. Why does the critical literature ask only whether Dante hopes for Vergil's salvation? Does no one else's matter? Why do we care only about Vergil? The answers, to this way of thinking, are: no, no one else's salvation does matter, because the problem is less intellectual than emotional, and the response has been dictated by the text.

Shakespeare portrayed how Henry had his disguised troops conversed with a soldier called Williams regarding issues on how princes had spiritual responsibility for the casualties and death of soldiers during both unjust and just occurrences in war. By looking into how Shakespeare's expressed such conversations, a Christian view point can be seen, one which shows how the people who died in war were not given opportunities to attain repentance so therefore would be sentenced to eternal damnation. Also, this chapter examines the legal point of view. In relation to the issue about whether Kings should be liable for the damnation of soldiers who failed to repent before their deaths, Henry distinguished the authorized acts that involved military duties which the King was without a doubt responsible for, and the private acts that he should not be deemed responsible for, for such acts are determined by an individual's soul.

This chapter pays attention to the question of government, composition of things, and consequent multiplication of the pedagogic, political, economic, and methodological arts that took place as of the sixteenth century. It talks about disassociation from critique, the “critical attitude” that will be expressed in a more modern fashion in the question of “how not to be governed.” The chapter also mentions Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In it, Plato provides a whole repertoire of locations of frontiers and thresholds and investments in a regard that is pregnant with life-or-death consequences, in theologies of salvation or damnation as well as epistemic moralities of truth and falsity. Within the stage machinery of comings and goings, it was decisive that a center is established so as to give meaning to movement and place.

This chapter examines the widespread claim that early modern Protestantism produced a culture of despair, melancholy and suicide. While accepting the widespread reality of that experience, and its link to the doctrine of predestination, it argues that this is an exaggerated and inadequate reading. Early modern Protestants were conoisseurs of despair, who generally saw the threat of Hell and damnation as essential to salvation: a stage to be passed through, rather than a state to be trapped in. To concentrate on despair misses the wider point: that early modern Protestants read their own inner state as an index of their spiritual well-being, and treated emotion as a form of revelation (in particular, a revelation of assurance of salvation, often described as ‘sweetness’). The chapter examines in detail the way Protestants heard God speaking to them through their emotions.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the debates concerning postmortem punishment in three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These three religions shared faith in many aspects of eschatology—the branch of theology that concerns the end of an individual’s life and the end of time. However, opposition to eternal punishment arose within each of these religions, and each entertained alternative beliefs about how wickedness in life might be punished in death. Cure, escape, and periodic relief were the chief rivals to uniform and eternal perdition. Hell survived these threats, and in the process of defending it, its advocates used the idea as a model of justice, a spur to right behavior, a guide to introspection, and a warning to neighbors in danger of damnation if they did not accept it and learn to respect the God whose sentence it executes.

This chapter examines Gregory the Great’s doctrine of hell. Gregory’s account of postmortem punishment reveals how as pope he declares dogma, as a scholar he expounds theology, and as a preacher he tells exemplary tales. His flair for paradox allowed him to pursue difficult analyses by combining opposed pairs to explain, for example, how the pains of hell could confound the damned and gratify the saints. If “things are images through which we consider the nature of their causes,” then Gregory’s statement articulates a cosmos in which a just Judge corrects all wrongs and rewards all righteousness. The balance he asserts between continuity and contrast in his punishments links the lives of sinners to their pains after death, still haunted by their old obsessions. The disorder in the desires of the damned distorts their perceptions of reality, but the confusion they suffer in hell can be understood outside. Through paradox, chaos becomes order.

This chapter focuses on inner death. Inner death occurs when the suffering associated with hell occupies a living person. If not corrected, this torment becomes eternal. The locus of this perturbation is the conscience. These infernal attacks in the conscience constitute, for monks and nuns, an early warning system. Indeed, fear of hell is an aspect of inner death that practitioners cultivated as a deliberate, self-imposed discipline precisely to keep them from hell. Inner death, with its concomitant fear, accepts one’s liability to hell and acts on the belief that engaging one’s offenses and their postmortem consequences in this world would forestall them in the next, absent pride. Humility, the proper strategy, requires focusing on one’s shortcomings in order to spring from the intimation of one’s damnation to the culmination of Jerusalem.

This chapter explores how the discipline of slaves framed the conception of hell. The torments of slaves, the punishments of some criminals, and the fate of the damned resemble one another. The liability of slaves to physical punishment corresponds to their otherness in religion. Just as wrong belief determined one’s liability to torture in the afterlife, it also determined one’s liability to slavery here and now. The torture of slaves largely focused on ethnic and religious others because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam forbade the enslavement of their fellow believers. Thus, religious differences came to provide a rationale for damnation, the ultimate othering. In addition, lifetime suffering, including torture, imposed on slaves strongly influenced images of postmortem retribution. Therefore, wrong religion made one liable to both enslavement here on earth and damnation in the otherworld.

This chapter argues that although many Jews today deny that Judaism embraces any afterlife at all, postmortem sanctions attracted Jews for centuries. In biblical times, postmortem punishment was a minority opinion, but hints of segregation in Sheol and postmortem shame for the wicked can be traced from the writings of Jeremiah on. However reluctant Jewish writers may have been to see Gehinnom as the permanent prison of Jews, it remained exactly that for two categories of people: unrepentant Jews and worshippers of false gods. Ultimately, one cannot speak of a unified “Jewish tradition” that transmits a single doctrine on any given point concerning Gehinnom. Though they found repentance to be the most potent arm against damnation, they registered many differences suggesting other ethical paths, such as forgiveness. Still, there clearly is a hell in rabbinic Judaism, from which some will never exit.

This chapter examines hell in Islam. For the damned, intimations of the truths taught by Islam emerge as one enters the grave. Hell suddenly appears in the distance, and unbelievers begin to realize that the teachings of the Qur’ān are true. These dead will wish to return to life to amend their ways and affirm the new faith, but they will be prevented by a barrier called the Barzakh. Here, those who denied resurrection nevertheless find themselves resurrected and facing divine scrutiny. The character of hell will then be apparent. Those who scoffed at reports of hell’s existence will run in desperation, but in vain, to locate intercessors. That sense of late recognition of the truth, which now penetrates the sinners’ innards, is crucial to the Qur’ān’s account of damnation. So, too, are the taunts of the saved and even those of the divine judge.

Having explored Lacan’s account of modernity, this chapter demonstrates how certain biblical and doctrinal themes in Thomas Aquinas’s theology introduce ‘a turbulent otherness’ into his quest for philosophical rationality. It considers these in the light of Lacan’s theory that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo introduces an ontological void into Western consciousness. It discusses law, transgression, covetousness, and violence in the Summa Theologiae and Thomas’s Commentary on Romans, pointing to a violent dualism in Thomas’s conflicted views of God as both loving and punitive, reasonable and arbitrary, and to ambiguities in his account of love of neighbour. It discusses Thomas’s representation of prime matter as ontological evil in relation to his idea of the demonic as moral evil, and it relates this to questions of materiality, damnation, and the threat of hell. It concludes with a discussion of Thomas’s justification for the killing of heretics.

This chapter discusses the Qur'anic ‘grand story’, which refers to the underlying, basic conceptual scheme that informs Qur'anic stories and bestows meaning and coherence on them. Ths basic conceptual scheme is predicated on a relationship between humankind and God that leads to either salvation or damnation. In expressing this relationship, the Qur'anic narrative form turns God into a person with a dramatic presence and human attributes. The chapter reflects on the beginnings as expressed by the creation story and on the eschatological future. It cites the cosmic beginning as the seed of the Qur'anic grand story; this beginning is a preparation of the physical stage for the climactic moment of the human beginning when God creates Adam. It also explains how the creation story and the specificity of the ‘Adamic beginning’ relate to the grand story.