What about hell?

This evening (perhaps yesterday evening depending on how quick I am to write this blog entry) I moderated a very interesting discussion. I had three very competent thinkers on theological matters discussing hell. The topic was formulated as ”Helvetet – vad ska man tro?” (Hell – what should one beleive?) The three trying to answer that question were Eskil Selander, Stefan Swärd, and Torsten Åhman and I will not try to describe their different positions. But I will say a few things.

I asked all three about if you can be a Christian without believing in hell and if you can be a Christian and believe in hell. And I am happy to say that they all said yes to both questions.

One question from the audience concerned if dead people can communicate with the living. I don't think that it happens, and unlike the question about hell it is not a question outside of experience.
People are of course free to believe what ever they want, and concerning hell there is not possible to know anything empirically about it, so it is all a matter of faith. That implies that “what people should believe about hell” can be discussed for a very, very long time. (We discussed it for exactly two hours.) But the question about communication with the other side is either supported by empirical data or it is not, once the existing evidence has been weighted the discussion is over. (Though to be realistic it is unlikely that people will agree about the evaluation of the data.)

A lot more can be said on the issue of testable claims, and even more about faith, but I leave that for some other time.

To interpret literature II

We were talking about René Girard's triangle, not a proper geometric triangle but a way to view relationships in a text, invented in 1965. Originally it was to show how two individuals in their relationship to the same object, idea, or position also have a relationship between each other. It was later developed to include the type of triangles that people are most prone to think about in a book or a film, the love triangle. But the triangle is much more fundamental than that.
In my own thoughts I began to imagine what interesting forms of topology you would get if you tried to identify all the possible triangles in a text. I started to get an image of many interconnected triangles to describe all the different possible relations. For more complicated stories it would of course not be possible to confine the triangles to just two dimensions, or even three. It is apparent that I am heavily influenced by my background in science.
Our teacher was talking about the triangle and invented an example with a man, a woman and the Bible. She explained how the man's understanding and relationship to the woman was influenced by a book that divide women in two groups Madonna or whore. And the book tell the man that the Madonna is good and desirable while the whore is bad and contemptible.
Now it wasn't the time to get into a long discussion outside the topic, but in my mind I did object to her example. I was surprised that someone that studies literature would use that kind of wording. If she had said “the church” instead of “the Bible” I would have understood it better. Because it is possible to find times and places where the church has indeed interpreted the Bible in this way. It is not even difficult to find these times and places. I would have thought that someone who studies literature would know the difference between what the Bible says and how people interpret the Bible.
There are those that would say that the message in the Bible is rather the opposite. You could read the message in Bible to be that there are no grounds to divide people into groups and assign them different value.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians 3:28