The Nature of Hell
"Tis the infinite almighty God that shall become the fire of the furnace."
Hell is a spiritual and material furnace of fire where its victims are exquisitely tortured in their minds and in their bodies eternally, according to their various capacities, by God, the devils, and damned humans including themselves, in their memories and consciences as well as in their raging, unsatisfied lusts, from which place of death God's saving grace, mercy, and pity are gone forever, never for a moment to return. Edwards nowhere gives such a comprehensive definition, but this is the way we put his message together as his overall view of hell, to which he gave so much reflection in his study and in his pulpit. Perhaps it should be recalled here that God had, according to Edwards, ordained many humans and devils to this awful destiny in accord with their own moral choices, and that fact had been viewed by him originally as "horrid" doctrine, his conversion occurring only when he experienced the beauty of its truth."
Commenting
on Matthew 13:47-50 (1), "The wicked will hereafter be cast into a furnace
of fire,"12 Edwards notes that "furnace of fire" is a
common and most apt biblical representation of future punishment. Many times
in this sermon and elsewhere he uses this metaphor. In the Romans 2:8, 913
message he referred to the "deluge of fire," preaching that when the
day of judgment comes, the wicked shall rise to the resurrection of damnation.14
"It will be a dreadful sight to them when they come to their bodies again,
those bodies which were formerly approved by them as the organs and instruments
of sin and wickedness . . . and they shall very unwillingly enter into them.
"15 Indeed, these bodies will be "loathsome and
hideous."16 In this condition "they shall have nothing to
do to spend away their eternity but to conflict with these torments."17
In the Ezekiel 22:14 (2) sermon Edwards speaks again of the great
furnace of fire.18 Using the "rhetoric of sensation" even
more explicitly, he depicts the furnace as heated "by degrees" and
describes the humans being eternally destroyed after the simile of the spider
in the flame. In addition to the furnace metaphor Edwards frequently uses the
expressions "lake of fire,"19 "conflagration,"20
"burnt in hell."21
Actually the furnace is figurative so far as the soul is concerned,
literal as it pertains to the body. There is nothing impossible about its being
literal, and Christ's words in Matthew 10:28 require it. After all, it takes
real fire Is this furnace spiritual or material? It is both. In the same sermon
which notes that "furnace of fire" is the most common biblical
symbol,22 Edwards addresses the question whether the furnace is
metaphorical or material. It may be understood either literally or
figuratively, he reasons. Figuratively speaking, the wrath of God is a
consuming fire. Dives in torment spiritually, even before the resurrection of
his body, was described as in fire, begging to have Lazarus wet his tongue to
relieve the pain. The metaphor points to the all-over prevalence of the anguish
and its intolerable severity. Divine wrath will be far more terrible than its
symbol.
But the symbol is also "very probably" literal. to bum the
heavens and earth in the great conflagration, which is hell. Therefore that it
will be literal fire is evident.23 It will be more obviously
literal after the day of judgment.24 The bodies of the wicked will
be cast into a "lake of liquid fire. "25 This doctrine is
clear from reason as well as Scripture and from the traditions of the heathen.
Commenting on the brazen images heated to white heat, in which ancient
Israelites sometimes "passed" their children to the heathen god,
Molech, Edwards surmises that these images were probably "not unlike"
hell.26 "Tis probable that this earth after the conflagration
shall
be the place of the damned . . . many thousand times hotter than
ordinary fire."27 "The Scripture is plain that that great
fire will be that in which the wicked will suffer to all eternity."28
Later, Edwards calls the world after the conflagration a "universal
wreck."29 It will be the wicked's "fixed abode."30
Edwards
finds much support for "literal" hell-fire. Comparing the suffering
of hell to the agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (which caused him to
sweat great drops of blood), Edwards justifies the torments of the damned being
"literally as great as they are represented by fire and brimstone. . .
,"31 The sermon on Matthew 10:28 goes most particularly into
the question of physical and spiritual torture in hell. "The bodies of
wicked men as well as their souls will be punished forever in hell."32
In a
careful analysis, Edwards observes that pain is only in the soul.33
What is meant by "bodily pain" is that which is conveyed by the
organs of the body.34 Spiritual pain refers to that which comes
directly from the soul's reflections-35 It is fit that man should
suffer in body and soul because he was created such and sinned in both.36
In hell man is deprived of all pleasure derived through the sense; in fact, he
is tormented through each sense (hearing, seeing, feeling).37 Still
the torments of the soul will be greater. The devils suffer only in soul, but,
even so, more than men. The application of this sermon exhorts the wicked to
give up seeking pleasure. The clothing which you so much covet now will be a
cloak of fire in hell hereafter. A very practical direction follows the lament
("you have been told hundreds of times what you must do"):38
You must give yourself body and soul to Christ.
The
reason the great furnace is material and spiritual and incomparably more than
a furnace or a lake of fire or even a conflagration is that it is really God
himself. What are all these representations when we consider that "tis the
infinite almighty God himself that shall become the fire [of] the furnace
exerting his infinite perfections that way. "39 "The
appearance of the presence of an angry God in them and everywhere round about
them, can be represented by nothing better than by their being in the midst of
an exceedingly hot and furious fire. ..." All this will be aggravated by
the remembrance that God once loved them so as to give his Son to invite them
to the happiness of his love.40 The "spiritual" fire
consists largely in this sense of "their being perfectly hated of
God."41 God feels this antagonism while the impenitent are in
this world, but the stupidity42 which desensitizes them here is
removed hereafter. "In hell is inflicted the fierceness of the wrath of a
being that is almighty'' is the theme of the Revelation 19:15 sermon.43
How they are hated and loathed by God!44 Even before you come under
his wrath "it may be," preached Edwards, that "God has appointed
you to the slaughter."45
The
all-important feature of heaven and of hell is God himself. He is the one who
makes heaven, heaven. He is the one who makes hell, hell. Indeed, according to
Edwards, he is hell and he is heaven. Eternity for sinner and saint will be
spent "in the immediate presence and sight of God. . . . "46
Preached Edwards:
"God will be the hell of one and the heaven of the other. "47
It
is because God is the fire which bums in hell that words can never convey—much
less exaggerate—the terrors of the damned. "Who can know the power of his
anger?" asked the psalmist. Edwards took this to be a rhetorical question.
"The law and the gospel both," he insisted, "agree that God
intends an extraordinary manifestation of his tembleness."48 If
this be so, it was inevitable that Edwards would assuredly advise: "Let
not the sinner imagine that these things are bugbears."49
Future punishment is contrary neither to Scripture nor reason. In fact, it is
most reasonable to suppose it.50 He gives five arguments to prove
that ministers have not "set it out beyond what it really is. "5! He
then concludes confidently: "If I have set it [forth] too much then the
Scripture has too which is blasphemous."52
It is interesting to hear the man whom all America and perhaps the
world thinks so grossly overstated the anger of God against the sinners in his
hand, confess: "After we have said our utmost and thought our utmost, all
that we have said or thought is but a faint shadow of what really is."53
Although God is the misery of hell as he is the joy of heaven, the
damned souls contribute to their own misery and not to one another's relief.
They have no more friends in hell than they have in heaven. Instead of the
damned being comforted in each other's company, it is probable that they will
be as coals or brands in the fire that heat and bum one another. This is
spelled out in the sermon on Matthew 13:3054 in which Edwards says
that so far from other wicked persons being a comfort, they will "greatly
augment" each other's misery and torment as they detest, hate, and condemn
one another. "They will perfectly and extremely hate one another. "55
If, as George Bernard Shaw and others have claimed, all the interesting people
will be in hell, they will have no interest in one another except to torture.
Even Lewis's Great Divorce, suggesting the loneliness of souls in hell,
is understatement if, as Edwards represents it, they only add to the torment
by their presence. In hell misery hates company.
The devils' thing is to inflict torture on the poor human sinners whom
God hands over to them. One of the horrors Edwards drew for the congregations
of ' 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was that
the devil stands ready to fall upon them and seize them as his own, at
what moment God shall permit him. They belong to him; he has their souls in his
possession, and under his dominion. . . . The devils watch them; they are ever
by them.. . they stand waiting for them, like greedy hungry lions. .. . The old
serpent is gaping for them; hell opens its mouth wide to receive them... .56
Torturing
human sinners does not relieve the devils; in fact, it adds to their own
torment. Notwithstanding, the malice of the devil is as steady as the flames.
"No degree of misery though it be eternal will satisfy him so but that he
would be glad to have it greater. How great is this cruelty and how great must
all other wickedness be that is in proportion to it.'
Sinners
in hell also torture themselves. Their pain is a "mixture of sorrow and
rage."58 Their lusts ever rage and there is never any
satisfaction. In this world they gratified the sins by the nongratification of
which they are tortured in hell.
We know that many modern criminals dread fellow prisoners more than the prison itself and ostracism from the rest of society. They have more to fear from inmates than guards. This will not be true in hell. That is not because the inmates will not be cruel enough but because they cannot possibly be as cruel as their satanic guards who, so far from being restrained, are to do their damnedest. But even their worst tortures are gentleness by comparison with the real tormenter of hell, who is none other than God himself. There will be no comforts or consideration or "rights" from any direction—least of all from the one who sends these criminals to this dungeon. And they will not come out until they have paid the "uttermost farthing."
11. Faust and Johnson, op.
cit.. pp. 57f. Cf. D. B. Shea, Jr., "The An and Instruction of
Jonathan Edwards's Personal Narrative" in S. Bercovich, ed., The
American Puritan Imagination (London: Cambridge University Press. 1974). p.
165.
12. P. 1, June 1746.
13. "Indignation, wrath,
and misery and anguish of soul is the portion that God has allotted to wicked
men" (p. 4). Nov. 1735. Hickman. II, 878f.. Dwight. VIII, |95f.
14. Ibid., p. 31.
15. Ibid.. p. 32.
16. Ibid.. p. 33.
17. Ibid.. p. 41.
18. "When God comes to punish wicked men for
their sins their heart cannot endure it" (p. 1), St. Ind., May 1753, Mohr.
19. M275.
20. Ibid.
21. Rom. 3:19, p. 241. Cf. note 196 below.
22. Rev. 21:8 (1)-(3), "[ would show how or in what is
represented to us by the wicked's hereafter being cast into a lake of fire and brimstone.
2. How it is said that they shall have their part in it. 3. Why this is called
the second death. 4. And lastly, I would warn all from thence to take heed.
..." (p. 3). Jan. 1744-45.
23.
Ibid.. p. 9.
24.
Ibid.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Man. 5:22, pp. 3f.
27. M275.
28.
Rev. 21:8 (1)-(3), p. 14.
29.
Hickman, n, 883.
30.
Cf. section below entitled "The Locality of Hell."
31.
M280.
32.
Before 1733.
33.
Ibid., p. 5.
34.
Ibid.. pp. 6f.
35.
Ibid.. p. 6.
36.
Ibid., pp. 8f.
37.
Ibid., pp. 14f. "The body will be full of torment as full as it can
hold, and every part of it shall be full of torment. They shall be in extreme
pain, every joint of 'em, every nerve shall be full of inexpressible torment.
They shall be tormented even to their fingers' ends. The whole body shall be
full of the wrath of God. Their hearts and their bowels and their heads, their
eyes and their tongues, their hands and their feet will be filled with the
fierceness of God's wrath. This is taught us in many Scriptures ..." (p.
15).
38.
Ibid.. p. 24.
39. Job 41:9, 10, "We may in some measure judge how much more terrible the fierceness of God's wrath is than that of creatures by the difference there is between him and them" (p. 1), .Jan. 1742-43, p. 11.
40. M232.
41. M592.
42.
Exod. 9:12-16, p. 43.
43. P. 4, April 1734. This sermon includes a three-point argument that God will never have pity on hell (pp. 12f.).
44.
Luke 16:25 (1) and (2), "I. Wicked men in hell will remember how things
were with them here in this world" (p. 3). "II. The wicked in hell
will be sensible what a happy state the saints are in [in] heaven" (p. 2).
Before 1733 and Sept. 1757. Cf. sermon on Heb. 12:29 (1), "God is a
consuming fire" (p. 3), Aug. 1731-Dec. 1732. (2) "God himself is the
fire that shall destroy and consume wicked men" (p. 1), May 1742.
45. Rom. 1:24, "God sometimes punishes sin by giving men up to sin," n.d., p. 11.
46. II Cor. 4:18 (2), "There is such a thing as eternity" (p. 1), April 1742, p. 5.
47. Ibid.
48. Job41:9f., p. 15.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Rom. 2:8, 9, p. 50.
52. Ibid., p. 56.
53. Ibid., p. 53.
54. Matt. 13:30, May 1743. "Wicked men will have no comfort or relief by having company in hell but on the contrary they will greatly augment each other's misery and torment" (p. 1), May 1743, p. 6.
55. Ibid., p. 3. This sermon also says that "they will be most ghastly and terrible sights one to another" (p. 3). "They will be strong to torment one another" (p. 5).
56. Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God. "A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741. At a
time of great Awakenings; and attended with remarkable Impressions on many of
the Hearers. Boston, Printed: Edinburgh, Reprinted by T. Lumisden and J.
Robertson, and sold at their Printing-house in the Fish-market," 1745, p.
10.