CS Lewis:
Hell and the Devil
Juanita Gibson
Carolyn Witte
Nathan Wybenga
“In all discussions of Hell we
should keep steadily before our
eyes the possible damnation,
not of our enemies nor our
friends but of ourselves.” --CS
Lewis
The Devil
The Faces of Satan
An Introduction to the Devil
John Milton, Paradise Lost Book 1 (1667)
Say first—for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,
Nor the deep tract of Hell—say first what cause
Moved our grand parents, in that happy state,
Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his will
For one restraint, lords of the World besides.
Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
The Faces of Satan
(continued)
Th' infernal Serpent; he it was whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equaled the Most High,
If he opposed, and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God,
The Faces of Satan
(continued)
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.
Images of Satan
Genesis: Serpent
Now the serpent was more subtle and crafty than any living
creature of the field which the Lord God had made. And he
[Satan] said to the woman, Can it really be that God has said,
“You shall not eat from every tree of the garden?”
-Genesis 3:1, Amplified Bible
And the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done
this, you are cursed above all [domestic] animals and above
every [wild] living thing of the field; upon your belly you shall
go, and you shall eat dust [and what it contains] all the days of
your life.
-Genesis 3:14, Amplified Bible
Images of Satan
Job
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.
-Job 1:6, New American Standard Bible
The LORD said to Satan, "From where do you come?" Then Satan
answered the LORD and said, "From roaming about on the earth
and walking around on it.” –Job 1:7, New American Standard
Bible
Question: Why does Satan come to present himself with the sons
of God?
Images of Satan
Matthew: Tempter and Biblical Scholar?
Then Jesus was led out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to
be tempted there by the Devil.
-Matthew 4:1, New Living Translation
Then the Devil took him to Jerusalem, to the highest point of
the Temple, and said, "If you are the Son of God, jump off! For
the Scriptures say,
`He orders his angels to protect you.
And they will hold you with their hands
to keep you from striking your foot on a stone.' "
-Matthew 4:5, New Living Translation
Images of Satan
John: Prince of Lies and Deception
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your
father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and
has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth
in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character,
for he is a liar and the father of lies.
-John 8:44, English Standard Translation
“God seeks to comrades and claims love, the Devil seeks slaves
and claims obedience.”
-Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (1928)
Images of Satan
Revelations: Dragons and Death
Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the
key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon,
that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a
thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it
over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until
the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a
little while.
And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from
his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four
corners of the earth…
…but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil
who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur
where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be
tormented day and night forever and ever.
-Revelations 20:1,7-8a, 9b-10
Evil
“Evil and God” by CS Lewis
• Dualism is any theory or system of thought that recognizes two
and only two independent and mutually irreducible principles or
substances, which are sometimes complementary and
sometimes in conflict.
• Metaphysical dualisms admit two substances, such as world
and God, or two principles, such as good and evil, as a means
of explaining the nature of reality.
• Ethical or ethicoreligious dualism asserts that there are two
mutually hostile forces or beings in the world, the one being
the source of all good, the other the source of all evil.
• Christian theology generally accepts a modified moral dualism,
recognizing God as supremely good and Satan as a deteriorated
creature bent everywhere upon the intrusion of evil.
“Evil and God” by CS Lewis
“Good and evil, then, are not on all fours. Badness is not even
bad in the way that goodness is good. Ormuzd {God} and
Ahriman cannot be equals. In the long run, Ormuzd must be
original and Ahriman the derivative. The first hazy idea of the
devil must, if we begin to think, be analyzed into the more
precise ideas of ‘fallen’ and ‘rebel’ angel. But only in the long
run. There was never any question of tracing all evil to man; in
fact the New Testament has a good deal more to say about
dark superhuman powers than about the fall of Adam…
…The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that
the Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael
is really in the right and Satan in the wrong this must mean
that they stand in two different relations to somebody or
something far back, to the ultimate ground of reality itself.”
Hell
History of the word Hell
“In early Christian teaching, after the final judgment, the
wicked will be condemned to a hell of fire called gehenna, a
Greek word derived from the Hebrew Gehinnom and referring
to the desolate Valley of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem, where
trash fires burned incessantly and where ancient human
sacrifices had been offered to Cannanite gods.”
Statistics
• As of 2003, 68% of Americans say that they
believe in the devil, the Southerners being
the regional people most likely to believe.
• In 2000, 94% of Americans said they believe
in God, while only 75% believed in Satan
Other Author’s Comments
“To Christian writer C.S. Lewis, hell was a place
of nothing. And heaven was a place of
everything. In his book The Great Divorce, he
described hell as a “gray town” that’s extremely
boring. One guy just paces back and forth for
over a year. Nothing has any meaning,
satisfaction, or substance. You can’t drink or eat
or even sit on anything. Houses don’t keep out
the rain, and those who live in hell are more
like transparent ghosts than people.” --Todd
Hertz
Other Author’s Comments
“the wicket shall have to endure, first,
everlasting separation from God, and second,
everlasting “physical” torment in the form of
literal flames which, though they produce the
same experience as an earthly fire, never
consume those who writhe forever in them.”
--Thomas Talbott
Other Author’s Comments
• Lawrence S. Cunningham makes 3 points about
hell:
• Hell is Separation from God
• Hell is described not as a particular location, but a
‘state of existence’
• The pain of hell is that of separation and loss, not of fire
and worms
Other Religions’ Views of Hell
• Judaism believes Hades was the ruler of the
underworld (a literal hell), similar to the role of the
devil.
• Islam believes souls must cross a bridge across the
crater of fire known as hell to go to paradise, hell is
a lake of fire, full of suffering.
• Hinduism believes souls going to reincarnation must
pass through one of 21 hells to destroy harmful
karma, kanna (evil) gets burned away.
• Buddhism believes in a multitude of hells through a
person’s journey towards nirvana.
Other Religions’ Views of Hell
(continued)
• Jainism (branch off Hinduism) believes that the
universe contains 3 realms, the lowest has 8.4 million
hells where sins are punished, and only the most
wicked stay forever
• Taoism believes the dead go to a Buddhist paradise or
to one of several hells
• The Arabic word for hell is “Jahannam”, from the
same word as the Hebrew hell, “Gehenna”,
definition: location used for incineration
“The Problem of Pain” by CS Lewis
Chapter 8, “Hell”
• Lewis strongly disliked the biblical doctrine
of free will as it concerned hell. Lewis
disliked it because he disliked the idea of
man being able to chose to go to hell.
• “The problem is not simply that of a God
who consigns some of His creatures to final
ruin …Christianity… presents us with
something knottier and more ambiguous—a
God so full of mercy … yet still there is Hell”
“The Problem of Pain”
Chapter 8, “Hell”
• In this chapter, Lewis combats common beliefs
against Christianity and subsequently against
the doctrine of man’s free will to choose hell.
• There were four main arguments that Lewis
felt non-believers had against Christianity’s
view of hell.
The First Argument
• There is an objection to the idea of retributive punishment.
• Pain, Lewis says, is often times the way that God works to
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combat evil.
Along with this idea against retributive punishment, there is
an idea that God should forgive a man while he remains “what
he is”, namely, a sinner.
This is due to the confusion between condoning and forgiving.
“To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it
were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as
offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt
can accept no forgiveness.”
“We are therefore at liberty…to think of this bad man’s
perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere
fact of being what he is. The characteristic of lost souls is
“their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves””.
The Second Argument
• The second argument is against the idea that
we will forever in time be punished for what
is, a short lived period of sin.
• However, Eternity is not simply a prolonging of
time.
• “If we think of time as a line, we probably
ought to think of eternity as a plane or even a
solid.”
The Third Argument
• People do not like the frightful intensity of the pains of
Hell as suggested by Scripture.
• “Our lord speaks of Hell under three symbols: first, that
of punishment; second, that of destruction; and thirdly,
that of deprivation, exclusion, or banishment into “the
darkness outside””.
• “the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the
damned go to a place never made for men at all. To
enter heaven is to become more human than you ever
succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell, is to be
banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself)
into hell is not a man: it is “remains”.”
The Fourth Argument
• “A fourth objection is that no charitable man could
himself be blessed in heaven while he knew that
even one human soul was still in hell.
• “At the back of this objection lies a mental picture
of heaven and hell co-existing, so that at each
moment the blessed could say “the miseries of hell
are now going on”. But I notice that Our Lord,
while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing
severity usually emphasizes the idea not of duration
but of finality. Consignment to the destroying fire
is usually treated as the end of the story—not as the
beginning of a new story.”
Conclusions of “The Problem of
Pain”, Chapter 8, “Hell”
• “In the long run the answer to all those who
object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a
question: “What are you asking God to do?”
To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to
give them a fresh start, smoothing every
difficulty and offering every miraculous help?
But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive
them? They will not be forgiven. To leave
them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He
does.”
Any Questions?