HELL AFTER DEATH -Is It Hot Or Cold Place? -How Can We Avoid That Area Of Severe Agony?

Just a few years ago, someone threw out an odd joke which immediately provoked lots of brainstorming. He said: he saw in a dream that whilst Mother Teresa was joyfully being led into heaven; Princess Diana was making a few months' stop-over in Purgatory prior to her entry into heaven, a sweating ex-dictator President was being dragged into the hot blazing fire of hell on a loudly proclaimed charge that he had stolen billions of dollars of state money and stashed it in a foreign bank! And he was being whipped at the buttocks.

The mention of hell fire at once became a point of dispute. A friend retorted: 'hell does not consist of flames of fire you people think of. It's just been discovered that it's an icy cold place after all. At least that's the eye-witness report of an American lawyer who resurrected from death'. No doubt, this friend was referring to the news story of the weekly newspaper P&P which reported that a 58-year-old lawyer, Amos Cavano of USA who, some months earlier, had a heart attack, died and saw himself taken into hell, and later came back to life.

The resurrected lawyer was reported to have said: 'I felt myself in the cold, reptilian hands of two hideous demons. In the distance, I could hear the sounds of screams and moans. The demons pulled me down through the darkness toward the sound, and as they did, I kept getting colder and colder'.

Lawyer Cavano continues: 'finally we arrived at a vast plateau that looked like an Artic wasteland -but worse. I saw millions of souls naked and shivering in pain. It was so cold that breath was condensing, freezing and falling to the ground in the form of ice'. Such description of hell as an icy place raises lots of eyebrows. Hell, for all one knows, is described in the Bible as a place of hot fire meant for the wicked in the society. Thus Jesus Christ says of it: 'They (the angels) will throw them (evil doers) into the fiery furnace (of hell) where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth' (Mathew 13:42).

Ironically, some 64 American and European Bible scholars and priests are reported to believe the lawyer's 'cold-hell' narration as true and Biblical. A priest, by name Father Miguel Suenoz, argues, 'In the Old Testament, the Bible describes hell as hot. But as any geologists will tell you, the Earth's core has been constantly colder ever since then. Later, when Jesus came along, hell probably averaged a chilly 40-50 degrees year round. Many people misunderstood what he meant in the book of Mathew when he talked about 'the fires of hell' and a place of 'wailing and gnashing of teeth'.

Following lawyer Cavano's icy-hell argument, scientists are believed to have estimated the temperature of hell to be 'in the neighborhood of absolute zero -that's minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit'. The question then is asked: how did Father Suenoz and the scientists come by their calculations that hell was hot in the ancient times, less hot before Christ's birth, then falling to 40-50 degrees cold during the time of Christ, and now below zero degrees cold? It is contended that since such reckoning cannot by any means be established practically, the argument of Father Suenoz and the scientists lacks logical cogency; and thus cannot be believed.

Besides, it is argued that since Father Suenoz and his ilk are unable to offer any explanations as to why the temperature of hell has gone down from hot to cold, their conclusions appear less convincing. Yet those who support Father Suenoz's cold-hell theory hit back with two interesting points to argue their case out. In the first place, they explain that the fire of hell as referred to in the Bible, is something which means: 'rubbish barrels that dot the landscape (of hell), the only source of warmth in that God-forsaken place'. That means, hell consists of small piles of smouldering rubbish fires. Not fascinating?

Indeed, there is the suspicion that this argument takes its cue from the old Hebrew customary practice by which heaps of rubbish were burnt in the valley of Hinnom; a deep pit incinerator (bola) South of Jerusalem. Actually, decades before King Josiah's reign, BC 639 (2 Kings 21:26) sacrifices were offered to the Ammonite god, Moloch, and were dumped into that pit. But the Godly King Josiah came to destroy this bloody practice, and instead, filled the pit with burning rubbish so to desecrate it.

The place was called 'ge-henna' (Mathew 5:29), a Greek word derived from the Hebrew 'ge-hinnom', meaning, the Valley of Hinnom or (pit of Hinnom). This burning rubbish in the Valley of Hinnom was later believed to be providing some warmth to the murdered and 'lost' souls crying in it.

And this belief was transferred to the condition of all souls everywhere who are said to be lost, and are therefore in a similar pit of Hinnom (ge-henna) being either warmed up or tormented by rubbish fires. Thus hell is called 'ge-henna', the pit of fire. The disparity here is that whilst supporters of Father Suenoz believe that hell consists of some insignificant smouldering fires of rubbish heaps, many Christians consider hell as a place of smashing fire. Hence, is the unpopular argument that Christ's reference to the 'furnace of fire' in hell, means rubbish fire on the 'cold landscape of hell', but not actual fire.

In the second place, those who believe that hell is icy cold, hold the view that the expression 'gnashing of teeth' of people in hell (as said by Christ in Mathew 13:12) is an idiom which means - shivering cold.

But this argument is rebutted on the premise that the phrase 'gnashing of teeth' derives from the Hebrew custom of grating the teeth (haraq) when one is enraged or in sorrow. Of course this becomes pointedly clear when the phrase 'weeping and gnashing of teeth' said by Christ in Mathew 8:12, is considered in its entirety - meaning, weeping and sorrowing, and not weeping and shivering.

But to many Christians, the argument becomes a bit confusing when the Quran comes in to posit the view that hell simultaneously consist of hot fire and an icy-cold atmosphere.

Whist the Quran Chapter(Surah) 2:24 warns people to guard themselves 'against the fire prepared for disbelievers', its chapter 78:24-26 describes evil doers in hell as being in a place where they can taste 'neither coolness nor any drink, save boiling water and a paralyzing cold, reward proportioned to their evil deeds'.

This two-way (possibly accommodating) position of the Quran (and I stand to be corrected) appears to render support to Father Suenoz's view that hell is cold, and that there are only dumps of smouldering fire there.

This cold-hell viewpoint seems to gain further credence from the 17^th Century 'Christian mystic' Emmanuel Swedenborg who asserts that hell fire is the lust (unholy desire) in man's heart, but not a real fire.

In his book, Divine Providence, Swedenborg argues that 'lusts with their enjoyments can be compared to a fire which blazes the more, the more it is nursed; the freer its way, the more widely it burns until in a city it consumes houses… In the Word (the Bible) moreover, lusts are compared to fire, and the evils from them to a conflagration. The lusts of evil with their enjoyments appear as fires in the spiritual world, hell fire is nothing less'. To Swedenborg, hell fire is only a sea of burning lusts.

However, when the eschatological (life-after-death) story in the Bible in which Christ refers to the badly-thirsty rich man Lazarus, is remembered, the icy-hell argument crumbles down, by the fact that there is an absence of cold ice in hell, otherwise Dives could have satisfied himself with it.

Ice is itself water. And a person vomiting or spewing forth-icy substance 'from the breath' as the resurrected Cavano narrates is therefore not expected to be thirsty.

In conclusion, all appears to be that there are two compartments in hell, with Christ uncharacteristically revealing one part as hot and fiery, and lawyer Cavano exposing the other hidden part as cold and frosty? The question still remains to be answered. But I will argue conclusively that the so-called coldness used in the argument depicts the usual initial process one experiences until one arrives in the blazing hell fire itself for an everlasting continuous torture which Christ describes. Yes, Christ is the TRUTH, and His description of a fiery hell is the unchallengeable truth.

At any rate, the one common denominator in the controversy is that hell is a place of everlasting torment and suffering. Lawyer Cavano is horrified by such hell experience and resolves: 'I never want to go back there -never'.

And no one wants to be there either. But the way to avoid going there is, as St. Paul points out, to refrain from 'adultery, fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, evil disagreements, jealousy, anger, strife, seditions, envying, heresies, murders, drunkenness, carousing' and so on (Galatians 5:19-21)

God save us then from any spectre of a fiery, tormenting and buttocks-whipping hell!

By Apostle Kwamena Ahinful