Oh… hell

Some cheery Christmas thoughts from my favorite Advent writer, Fleming Rutledge:

“I want to be sure to establish the idea that hell is not a place at all, but a realm. It is the domain of wickedness, of stupidity, of despair, of hopelessness. You will remember the famous words over the gate to Dante’s Inferno: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ To have no hope is to truly be in hell.”

“We must believe in hell because there is no other way to take seriously the nature and scale of evil in the world. We must believe in hell because there is no other way to do justice to the victims of darkness. We must believe in hell because, without it, Christian faith is sentimental and evasive, unable to stand up to reality in this world. Without an unflinching understanding of the radical nature of evil, Christian faith would be nothing but a suburban bedtime story.” — Fleming Rutledge, Advent

Advent is the hope of light.