Is God in Hell?

If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

Psalm 139

That God inhabits heaven is not doubted.  If, like the Psalmist, I ascend into heaven, it is certain that “thou art there.”  But what of those who take up residence in hell?  If I make my bed in hell, what will I find?

At this juncture in American history, this is the critical doctrine of the Bible.  

Our culture has become permeated with a kind of Biblical naiveté that wouldn’t know a figure of speech if it were turned into a pillar of salt.  A hyper-anthropomorphism has so distorted our conception of God that we embrace simplistic views of scripture that are contrary to the very genre of the biblical passage we pretend to explain.   So Genesis Chapter 1 becomes a detailed creation manual of 24 hour time periods, without regard for its literary type.

At the time of the Revolutionary War, church membership in the colonies was less than a fifth of the population.  Today that number is almost two thirds of our citizenry.  Even taking into account those early Americans who were devout, but not church members, the two century trend line of increasing formal religious participation is clear.  We are more formally devout than we’ve ever been!

And yet the oft lamented fact of our biblical illiteracy is strikingly true.  Too often, those who profess their faith in the most determined manner, are obviously unaware of the real nature of the Bible they claim to love. 

Nowhere is this more true than in the use of figures of speech within the various biblical genres.

Because we are anthropomorphs, we speak of the divine presence in an anthropomorphic way.  Though the Bible states that God is not literally male (1 Sam 15:29), we use anthropomorphic pronouns that figuratively make “him” just that.  Of course that is fine, as long as we are aware of what we are doing.  It is only when our anthropomorphic language becomes our literal theological model and absolute frame of reference that a real problem begins.

God is spirit (or literally “wind”) as Jesus noted in John 4.  The divine presence is there in our innermost being and flows up with joy (John 7).  Humanity is connected by this immanence within each of us.  Acts 17 notes Paul, quoting the poets, as saying that it is in this presence that “we live and move and have our being.”  Truly the light is within every person coming into this world (John 1:9).  Whether we are true to this light is another question.  But we are all aware of this mystery of love within us and that joins us together.