I've been thinking about hell quite a bit recently—not because I enjoy it, or because I'm obsessed with morbid subjects, and not even because I've been reading Peter Bolt's excellent new book Living with the Underworld (which, perhaps surprisingly, given the title, looks away from hell rather than towards it).

No, I've been thinking about it because I was warned recently that we should beware of how we teach the subject of ‘hell’ and God's wrath to teenagers. Many of them, so the argument goes, are prone to low self-esteem, depression and suicidal thoughts. They have no trouble believing that they are sinners, and that God is ‘mad’ at them. So we should beware of manipulating their feelings with lurid and excessive depictions of hell, which would compound their misery rather than helping them to understand the grace and love of God. And, it was not the way of the New Testament to subject already shamed individuals to dreadful and imaginative descriptions of the wrath of God.

My immediate response was to feel that the argument from teenagerdom didn't ring true from the start. Indeed, I knew something wasn't quite right because many years ago, as a depressed teenager, a friend had scared me into reading the Bible by assuring me that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. If God wasn't true, he told me, then reading the Bible and going to church couldn't hurt me. If God was true, then ignoring him could hurt me a great deal. In fact, I was headed for the fires of hell.

There are probably other ways Woody could have encouraged me to find out about Jesus. That's not the point. The point is that the idea of hell actually shook me out of my depressive and self-centred state for long enough to get me along to church, start reading the Bible, and find out who Jesus really was—something for which I will be eternally grateful to God and to Woody.

The other and more important thing is that in the ‘lurid’ stakes, what Woody told me was nothing at all compared to the horrors I subsequently discovered when I read the Bible. There in the Gospel of Luke, I was confronted with a Jesus who, far from pandering to my teenage angst, spoke in the strongest possible terms of how terrible it would be to face judgement. In addition, if I didn't repent, I might end up like the rich man in the story of Lazarus—the man in Luke 16 who ends up begging for a drop of water for relief from the flames that were burning in Hades. That was the place where (I was to learn a few short chapters later) there would be terrible wailing and gnashing of teeth, and God's enemies would suffer in outer darkness. If you have the stomach for it, you can read this for yourself in the Gospel of Luke; indeed, you will come across these ideas in many of Jesus' sermons in all four Gospels.

Now, some might argue that these horrors are mainly reserved for the smug religious hypocrites that so populate the pages of all four accounts of Jesus' life and death. The poor, the weak, the sensitive and, most especially, the depressed teenager are not targeted in this way by Jesus' words. But this doesn't match the reality of what we actually find when we look at the Gospels closely. It was emphatically not just the religious leaders, but Jesus' own disciples and “thousands of the people”, who heard him say these words:

I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! (Luke 12:4-5)

It's this fear of the Lord that was the beginning of wisdom for at least one depressed teenager. If youthworkers and preachers and school chaplains are doing their job as they should, then, like the Lord Jesus, they will be scaring the hell out of many more teenagers the world over simply by repeating the words he spoke.

If you want to read some more of my thoughts on the subject, see my blog.

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