The Real Scandal Is Heaven, Not Hell

In recent years, many clerics and intellectuals have labored to evade, qualify, minimize, and deny the eternal punishment of the wicked, supposing that this doctrine, as traditionally articulated, proves a stumbling block to Modern Man, that famous creature. Which is most strange, considering that a far more disturbing doctrine has attracted negligible critical attention: I mean, of course, the eternal reward of the wicked (or, in Biblical parlance, the justification of the ungodly).

As thoughtful souls have noted before, the scandal of heaven easily exceeds the scandal of hell.

Even in an age of relativism and therapeutic spirituality, few ordinary people resist in principle the fundamental logic of damnation: evildoers should endure a post-mortem penalty for their trespasses, up to and including exclusion from the felicity of heaven. How else to meet the demands of justice, which human measures can never wholly satisfy? This is a natural sentiment, springing from rudimentary intuitions. It can be suppressed only by a great deal of theological and philosophical “erudition.”

By contrast, the notion that evildoers should enjoy bliss in the next life is terribly startling, liable to arouse a storm of indignation if dwelt upon with any seriousness. How is it that the realm of perpetual happiness should be populated by criminals and malefactors? Yet this is precisely the divine design.

Indeed, St. Paul—himself a man of violence who conspired in the slaying of St. Stephen—dared to describe God as “him who justifies the ungodly” (Rom. 4:5). Which is quite anodyne compared to the audacious pronouncements of our Lord, who identified tax collectors and prostitutes as citizens of the kingdom of God (Mt. 21:31-32), and assured a condemned thief—a crook with no merits to call his own—that he would shortly obtain paradise (Lk. 23:43).

If we are honest, we must admit that this is topsy-turvy, quite confounding, and nearly too much to bear. But you are not upset, dear reader? Then substitute the tax collector, the prostitute, the thief with, say, the murderer of 168 people, 19 of them little children. For it is entirely possible that Timothy McVeigh—the notorious Oklahoma City bomber—is presently fixed in heaven. McVeigh was a baptized Catholic who received last rites just before his execution by lethal injection. His prison chaplain later remarked that he was confident that the Lord would take McVeigh’s soul into glory. Does this not rankle? 

If you wish to perform an experiment in moral philosophy, approach at random a man on the street. Ask him what he thinks about a mass murderer consigned to eternal misery. He will offer a shrug and an agreeable, if unenthusiastic, nod of the head. Then ask him what he thinks about a mass murderer granted eternal beatitude and he will shudder and give voice to bewildered anger. And, if you are not averse to compounding his ire, paint for him the spectacle of a decent man, a man who observes every social propriety, tumbling into damnation due to his casual neglect of God, even as a villain soars into splendor for sincerely uttering with his final breath, “Jesus, remember me.”

Who can blame him? We are trained to envision heaven as full of saints. And so it is. But every saint was once a sinner, and would be in the opposite place but for the mercy of God, who (as we have already seen) justifies the ungodly. Bizarre how faintly this proposition affects us!

To justify the godly—to declare the godly righteous—is one thing. To justify the ungodly is quite another. The carnal man, roughly acquainted with the natural virtues but ignorant of the cross, recoils at the very prospect. Luther was not wrong when he asserted that the Christian religion stands on the doctrine of the justification of the ungodly. He was simply wrong as to the nature of justification, failing to grasp the effective power of God’s word, which makes exist that which it expresses.

St. John Chrysostom somewhere comments that the infidel howls at the justice of God, who punishes a man unless he is washed with a bit of water. However, having discovered the alleged consequences of this washing, he proceeds to howl at the mercy of God.

The latter howling is more ferocious, unless artificially curbed by thoughtlessness bred of over-familiarity. More ferocious, and more understandable, as more repugnant to the worldly mind. Hell is a topic of dispute chiefly among those demented by the special daftness engendered by excessive book learning; but the “ethical normie,” who operates on lightly cultivated moral instinct, perceives instead the offensiveness of heaven.

If this is the case, what explains the relative lack of argumentation around heaven? It is a false tranquility, a specious peace, occasioned by widespread mutually-informing insensitivities to sin and grace. Because we do not recognize sin, we do not appreciate justification. It neither vexes nor perplexes us that sinners should be made saints, since we hardly think that anyone is a sinner, except perhaps Hitler and a few other “bad guys” like McVeigh.

Certainly, we do not think that we are sinners. If perchance we concede the fact, we stubbornly insist that our transgressions are trivial or excused by circumstance, or else we play the comparison game and conclude that we are clean because filth comes up to our noses, whereas it comes up to our neighbor’s eyes. In a million ways we diminish sin because we are blind, culpably blind, to the majesty of God’s goodness. Thus we succumb to a delusion of our own construction. Who needs to be justified by God when he has already justified himself?

Everyone, we tend to posit, is in heaven because everyone deserves to be in heaven—save for a handful of incorrigibles, who are in hell because they deserve to be there (probably).

It goes without saying that this conception of things is utterly alien to authentic Christian doctrine, which relates that man is born into a state of doom on account of the primordial catastrophe, a position he confirms by adding his personal sins to the original fault.

If we wish to acquire an accurate view of the situation, we must behold our faces in the mirror of Scripture: “By nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3). We might imagine that Hitler or McVeigh or some other “monster” is the worst of sinners. Yet this title was claimed by none other than St. Paul: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Tim. 1:15).

Despite the interminable discoursing of the sophisticated, hell is an issue of limited controversy, for it hardly pricks our sense of justice that the wicked should be punished. Whereas we are sorely distressed when we contemplate the image of evildoers elevated to the ranks of the blessed by the grace of God, who is more pleased with the charity and obedience of Christ than he is displeased with the malice and defiance of Adam.

Now we are Adam, you and I, and we too, in a mystery, are the foremost of sinners. Heaven is a scandal, but it is our scandal, yours and mine. A precious scandal! If we stumble over it aright, it shatters our pride and self-regard, and invites an opportunity to rise not by human merit, but by divine mercy, which brings good from evil by graciously making those who are evil to be good—folly to the world, but wisdom to God, and happily outrageous news to those with ears to hear.