In 1971, John Lennon’s song “Imagine” became an instant “anthem,” that is, a song that expressed allegiance to an idea shared by its adherents. The worldview of “Imagine” was that of a global, boundless (borderless), apolitical, idealistic community of people who shared and dreamed together, and lived life in peace. Apparently, they also eschewed religion and its promises of “heaven” and threats of “hell.” A couple of years after Lennon’s song came Dan Fogelberg’s “Part of the Plan” which included the line,”There is no Eden or Heavenly gates that you’re gonna make it to someday…” I played both songs on “Celebration Rock,” even though the program was sponsored by a faith community that did indeed (and still does, for that matter) affirm Heavenly gates (of some kind) and which must be considered a “religion.” Hell is still up for grabs, but I have my doubts.
What brings me to this comment is the memory of speaking to a class at a Richmond high school and having to deal with the subject of “hell.” I can’t remember whether I had been invited by a student who listened to CR and thought I might be a good resource person for that humanities class, or whether the invitation came via the teacher. But I took with me several songs to play and reflect on, with no restrictions on content or subject matter. And since it was common knowledge that I was a minister and that “Celebration Rock” was a Christian program, and since it was, after all, a humanities class, the topic of religion did come up. The issue was the old bugaboo backmasking.
The kids in the class shared what they had heard about the controversy, though I doubt that any of them had torn up their records trying to play them backward. I dismissed the whole idea (as I wrote some time ago in this e-journal), finally simply saying that since I didn’t believe in a personal “Devil” or “Satan” or “Hell” for that matter, backmasking didn’t keep me up nights worrying. I did give a humanities class nod to Milton’s paradises lost and gained, and to the imagery of Dante’s “Inferno,” and explained my own understanding of metaphor, but we were getting way beyond the topic of rock music and descending into hell, so we eventually moved on to other things.
But after the class, as students were leaving the room, one very concerned girl approached me and asked a significant question: if there is no hell (imagine…), why should we be “good?” Without a looming punishment of eternal damnation, why should anyone strive to be a moral person? Because Jesus gave us the commandment to love one one another, I said. And the other Ten are important too. Why not just choose the loving and just way to live, without choosing that road simply as an alternative to the threat of hellfire? She had to move on to her next class, so the conversation ended there. I could tell she didn’t buy my explanation.
If we had had time, we might have talked about judgment as described by Matthew in the 25th chapter of his Gospel (25:31f). We might have talked about the three-storied universe belief prevalent in the time that the Bible was written. We could have wondered why a loving God would cast misbehaving children into a lake of flames forever, while a loving parent would never punish a child for all the rest of her days. Oh, and there’s grace, too. We might have talked about that.
Imagine there’s no hell. A few years after the Lennon song was a hit, an episode of the old TV sit-com “WKRP in Cincinnati” dealt with the controversy that surrounded “Imagine.” I think it was an indignant pastor who complained that the station had played a song very offensive to Christians, because the song said there was no heaven. The station manager said, “No, it didn’t say there was no heaven; it only said imagine there’s no heaven.”
Now comes the unasked question from that concerned high school girl. If there’s no hell…does that mean there’s no heaven? Nothing beyond this life? No afterlife? When you’re dead, you’re dead? As far as I’m concerned, the Christian faith doesn’t rise or fall on the idea of hell. But it certainly does rise on the risen Christ. Take away Easter and its promise and proclamation, and you are left with the admirable ethic of the loving life and teachings of Jesus, but without the eternity of it all, the forever-with-God part. Which I will not let go…for the belief has not let go of me.
I like the way another Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner put it: “We think of Eternal Life, if we think of it at all, as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.” With God. Those of us who affirm that Resurrection life make up something called the Church, not necessarily the ecclesiastical body, but a global, boundless (borderless), apolitical, idealistic community of people who share and dream together, and live life in peace.
Imagine that.
