Church teaching has shifted away from damnation and now focuses on salvation. Is that a good thing?

To a young girl attending Catholic school in the 1940s, eternal damnation was no abstract concept. “The nuns really terrified us,” says Pat Conroy, who grew up in Maryland. The list of potential transgressions—from eating meat on Fridays to missing Mass on Sundays—was long. “It seemed like almost anything was enough to send you to hell. I became so scrupulous and worried about everything I did.”

“Hell was an important part of the religious landscape of my childhood,” recalls Peter Steinfels, who grew up in Chicago during the same period. “It was the hell of endless flames and eternal punishment; although even in second and third grade I recognized that there was something mythical about this.”

For Catholics like Conroy and Steinfels, who were raised on “fire and brimstone” images of hell, some of the changes associated with the Second Vatican Council brought spiritual and psychological relief. “There was much more emphasis on God’s love and how God really wants to save us. It was such a relief,” says Conroy, who now works to bring that message to the inmates of a county jail near her parish.

Over the last half-century hell has moved from being a fixture of the Catholic landscape to something that exists far over the horizon. “Other than hearing my father say ‘damn it to hell’ more times than I can remember, we didn’t discuss it much,” says Mona Cholowinski, who attended religious education at her parish in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s. “It did come up occasionally as the ‘place other than heaven,’ but the discussions were more about being good and avoiding temptation,” she says.

Annie Selak, a rector at the University of Notre Dame, sees a similar dynamic at work among a younger generation. “I would say that most of the high school and college students I’ve encountered rarely think of hell. The vast majority assume they are going to heaven. It seems like an automatic for them. They are good people, so of course they will end up in heaven.”

Some recent polling also bears out this change. The Pew Center on Religion and Public Life’s 2007 Religious Landscape Survey found that only 60 percent of Catholics believe in hell. While comparable to mainline Protestants (56 percent), that’s far below the 82 percent recorded by evangelical Protestant churches.

No way in hell

Though the discussion of hell as a place to be feared has seemingly disappeared in Catholic parishes, schools, and homes, the debate over hell’s existence, and whether anyone actually goes there, has been reignited among evangelical Christians, most of whom continue to affirm that eternal damnation is the fate of any person who does not make an explicit personal commitment to Christ.

In his recent book Love Wins (HarperOne), evangelical pastor Rob Bell recalls how his church sponsored an art show on the subject of peacemaking. One artist included a quote from Mahatma Gandhi in her work. Someone attached a piece of paper to it that read, “Reality check: He’s in hell.”

“Really?” writes Bell. “Gandhi’s in hell? He is? We have confirmation of this? Somebody knows this? Without a doubt? And that somebody decided to take the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?”

That experience led Bell to write Love Wins as a way of exploring one of the central tensions at the heart of the Christian faith: the desire of an all-powerful God to save every member of the human race and the willingness of this God to allow individuals to suffer eternal damnation. As Bell puts it more pointedly: “Will all people be saved, or will God not get what God wants? Does this magnificent, mighty, marvelous God fail in the end?”

As can be gleaned from these quotes, Bell’s work is more a set of questions for reflection than a work of systematic theology. Nevertheless it has provoked a strong reaction within the evangelical community.

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, called the book “theologically disastrous,” and accused Bell of embracing “universalism,” the belief that God will ultimately save every human being (and, in some versions, even the devil himself) regardless of their beliefs or behavior.

Popular evangelical blogger Justin Taylor took issue with Bell’s rejection of “substitutional atonement,” the doctrine that, as Taylor puts it, “Christ absorbed the Father’s wrath on behalf of those who trust in him and repent of their sins.”

Not all evangelicals were as critical as Mohler and Taylor. Eugene Peterson, professor emeritus at Regent College and the author of a best-selling adaptation of the Bible titled The Message (NavPress), wrote that Bell’s book did not compromise “an inch of evangelical conviction.” In a subsequent interview Peterson noted that “Luther said that we should read the entire Bible in terms of what drives [one] toward Christ. If you do that, you are going to end up with this religion of grace and forgiveness. . . . There is very little Christ, very little Jesus, in these people who are fighting Rob Bell.”

The headlines over Bell’s book also piqued the interest of some Catholic bloggers, who began discussing anew the debate over hell. Father Robert Barron, director of Word on Fire Ministries, responded to controversy surrounding the book by explaining on his website that Catholic teaching affirms hell’s existence, but doesn’t tell us if anyone has ever been sent there. The church’s vision of hell isn’t as much about God’s punishment as it is about personal choice, Barron writes. “Think of God’s life as a party to which everyone is invited,” he says, “and think of hell as the sullen corner into which someone who resolutely refuses to join the fun has sadly slunk.”

Bell’s suggestion that God may not actually condemn anyone to hell isn’t the only idea he’s introduced to the evangelical community that has something in common with Catholic teaching. When Bell writes of the possibility that those who do not personally know Christ may nevertheless be saved through Christ, he is echoing the words of Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, which states that “since Christ died for all, and since the ultimate vocation of human beings is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to everyone the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.”

Still, the controversy that Bell has caused with his book is not unlike the discussions about hell that raged for centuries in the Catholic Church; the Catholic Church has not always taken such an inclusive position when it comes to salvation. Indeed, for most of its history, the majority position among the church’s theologians and bishops was that the number of those damned to hell would outnumber those saved.