The most interesting article to come to my notice recently from the religious press appeared in the August 1988 issue of Life and Work, the monthly record of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This issue was largely devoted to the jubilee of the Iona Community, and the Editor had the excellent idea of inviting an assessment of the Community’s achievement from Donald MacLeod, the professor of systematic theology at the (dissenting) Free Church College in Edinburgh. Perceptive, astringent, humorous, always controversial, sometimes (as has been remarked in subsequent correspondence) a little unfair, this article had the supreme merit of puncturing complacency and, at the same time, making important constructive suggestions.

Writing of what he sees to be the Community theology, Professor MacLeod says that ‘it has room for the Incarnation but not for the Atonement, and simply cannot bring itself to summon individuals (including the poor) to repentance. Terrified of proselytising, it refuses to evangelise.’ While such a tendency may characterize those who have been touched by the emphases of the Iona Community, it may be said that in the Christian world at large we have to reckon with a passionate renewal of traditional, even fundamentalist, Evangelical teaching. But what gives Professor MacLeod’s remark its peculiar point is the fact that it is addressed sympathetically to those whose theological sophistication may have immunised them against serious engagement with the themes of, for instance, A.M. Toplady’s classic hymn Rock of Ages:

One interesting feature of contemporary Christianity is that some of the ideas which play a central part in popular religion, play little or no part in religious thought. There are in fact a good many such ideas (demonology and the active intervention of the saints for instance), but in this paper I am concerned with only one, namely ‘hell’. The idea of hell figures prominently in the preaching and beliefs of many evangelical Christians, the popularity of whose Christianity can hardly be doubted. Yet for the most part hell has no place in modern theology. It is not just that modern theologians are inclined to downplay the idea, or give ‘liberal’ interpretations of it, as might be said to be the case with miracles or the Resurrection, but that very largely they are simply silent about it.

It should be obvious that this is a feature peculiar to modern Christian thought. Earlier ages talked a great deal about hell, and even the Victorians made extensive use of it, so it is interesting to ask why this should be so. Conceived of as a question about the mentality of religious thinkers and their changing social role, any answer to it must obviously involve psychological and sociological investigation of some sophistication, but this is not the only way we can address the matter. There is at least some reason to think that the concept of hell has dropped out of theological discourse, whatever its place in popular religion, just because theologians and philosophers think it ought to.

The teaching that the wicked will go to hell has about it a certain logic and justice. We may not think that a loving God would wish to consign anyone to eternal torment, but that the final destination of the evil should be different from that of the good is not, on the face of the matter, unjust. A case for the extinction of the utterly evil was argued by Ulrich Simon in his Theology of Auschwitz. May it not be the case that some become so corrupted by the evil of their ways that there is nothing left for them but annihilation? ‘Extirpation is congruous with the feverish activists in annihilation. Damnation is the silent seal on their wickedness. Unforgiven and unforgivable they go to the doom which their own fantasies and crimes have already sought on earth.’ Could justice demand anything less?

Why then has the doctrine of hell fallen into such disrepute? The main cause is that we have lost the concept of the justice of God. A number of reasons for the loss can be listed. First, there is the form the doctrine often took in the tradition. At least from the time of Augustine there has been a tendency to teach that the justice of God consisted in the fact that he could, had he wished, have consigned the whole of the human race to hell, but that he graciously (gratuitously?) saved a few brands from the burning. It is not wholly an accident that folk belief has often held that an unbaptised child will go to hell.

The four last things are death, judgement, heaven and hell, of which only one is certain: the first. Death is the key to the four last things, and thinking about death is the key to the devotion based on the four last things which flourished in a small way at various times and places during the middle ages, and in a changed form in counter-reformation Europe.

Here I am not writing about the last things themselves, but about the devotion, and, even then, not about the counter-reformation devotion, which was part of a different world from the one in which the mediaeval devotion flourished, and had a completely different significance. I want to look at the four last things in the middle ages, as one devotional subject with the emphasis changing from one to another of its constituent parts so that it acted as a barometer for the mood and atmosphere in the Church.

In the last twenty years or so thinking on the four last things has had something of a revival and has, I believe, again been reflecting the Church’s current moods, though in traditional style.

Possibly the most noticeable feature of this devotion, or subject for contemplation, is that it has only been really popular when the religious atmosphere has been restless and when there has been criticism of the established Church to the point of disillusionment. Its popularity has also been related to concern for the individual soul. It has only been in the last few years that theologians have tried to combine communal and personal salvation in a devotion on the four last things.