Hey, wait a minute! No place called Hell??

(Part 2 of a 5-part series)

Conversations with God famously said that there is no such place as Hell. Could such a thing be true? According to the late Pope John Paul II, it is. His Holiness John Paul II told a papal audience on July 28, 1999 that there is no such place as Hell.

The pope said people must be very careful in interpreting the biblical descriptions of hell, which he said are symbolic and metaphorical. The “inextinguishable fire” and “the burning oven” which the Bible speaks of “indicate the complete frustration and vacuity of a life without God,” he said. In other words, Hell is a state of mind, or a state of being, not a physical or even metaphysical “place” to which people who are “bad” are sent by God.

And when this state of being is not something to which God sends souls, the Pope declared. Such a state is “self imposed,” the pontiff said. Surprising a worldwide audience, he announced that “Damnation cannot be attributed to an initiative of God, because in his merciful love he cannot want anything but the salvation of the beings he created.”

Eternal damnation “is not a punishment inflicted by God from outside,” the pope went on. “But man, called to respond freely to God, unfortunately can choose to refuse his love and pardon definitively, removing himself forever from joyful communion with God,” the pope said.

Then what is this doctrine of Hell, or Hades, or Damnation that so many religions on earth speak of? Is it real?  To what does it refer? For it is not only Roman Catholics who speak of eternal damnation. This teaching, I want to repeat, is meant to “indicate the complete frustration and vacuity of a life without God,”John Paul declared. I agree with the holy man’s assessment that a life without God can sure seem like hell.

“More than a place, hell is the situation in which one finds himself after freely and definitively withdrawing from God, the source of life and joy,” the pope said.

Interestingly, in none of his remarks did this pontiff assert that any person who did not accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior would be seen by our Deity as “freely and definitively withdrawing from God.” This seemed to leave open the question of whether Muslims or Jews or Buddhists or members of any other religion or belief system can “get into Heaven.” The Pope also said nothing about a person’s behavior while on earth as prohibiting that person from not refusing God’s “love and pardon definitively,” and therefore not “removing himself forever from joyful communion with God.”

In other words, presumably a person could be “bad” while here on Earth and still “get into Heaven” by simply accepting “God’s love and pardon.”

The Pope also strayed from standard Christian theology (and several other major theologies as well) in another shocking way. If you ask any minister, any ulama, any priest whether there is any question that horribly bad people who are not contrite, never ask forgiveness, and remain ugly and cruel to the end, go to hell, they would say, “Well, of course they do! What do you think we’ve been trying to tell you???” But the Pope had a remarkably different response. Said he: Whether or not any human beings are in hell “remains a real possibility, but is not something we can know.”

Not something we can know??? Wow, what a major concession from the spiritual leader of a worldwide church with billions of members that has been teaching just the opposite–that we can be sure of this–for centuries.

In sharing his thoughts about all this in July, 1999, Pope John Paul II—then in failing health—seemed to be having final reflections on the matter of hell and damnation in the final months before his death. In those remarks to a weekly papal audience, his comments came remarkably close to mirroring some of the messages in Conversations with God, which also teaches that there is no such place as hell…and that deep unhappiness can result from a life (on Earth or in the hereafter) without God, but that a life lived within the embrace of God and inside the acceptance of God as a real and authentic Presence in the Universe and in one’s own experience can never produce unhappiness—no matter what such a life holds.

Yet there is one message from Conversations with God that the Pope did not mirror. The Pope did not say what CWG says unequivocally: God will never forgive anyone for anything.

And we will discuss that teaching in our next entry here.

(Neale Donald Walsch is the publisher of The Global Conversation internet newspaper and the author of the Conversations with God series of books. His latest book, The Only Thing That Matters, releases this week from Hay House and is now available in print or audio form from Amazon.com at this link:

http://astore.amazon.com/wwwnealedonal-20)