In His image

What kind of image do we have of God? For Philip Pullman, the atheist author of the Golden Compass trilogy, God is an old man who eventually gets killed and according to the author, deservedly so. For Pullman, God is a Big Daddy with a stick who metes out punishment to sinners in the flames of Hell.

Hell is one place you don’t want to end up in. This view of Hell as a place of punishment, is an objective and external view – a place imposed on the sinner by God. However there is another view, namely that of the early Christians who saw Hell (or Hades as they called it) as something internal or subjective, that is a condition rather than a place imposed on the sinner by his or her own moral shortcomings. They saw man as the image of God and yet a distorted image through the sickness of sin. God did not take His grace away from Adam but rather Adam lost it through his disobedience. For the early church, and for Eastern Christians today, Hell is an existential experience. It is the inability of a person to respond to his own potential Divinity– created in His image and likeness –an inability to respond to God’s love. It is not simply our moral shortcomings that deprive us of Heaven but the failure to realize our potential and thereby to alienate ourselves from His presence. Sin is a spiritual illness, which transforms the presence of Heaven into Hell.

In today's world there is much mental illness. I believe that much of this is the burden of sin, of being unable to be Christ like. Prozac is not a substitute for prayer.

When we die, we will all stand before the presence of God. For those who have the love of Christ it will be Heaven, but for those who hate the light and are unable to love, it will be Hell, a place where sinners will be scourged by the whip of God’s love.