I didn't know where else to put this. It's something I wrote about hell, from the perspective of a damned soul within it.
It was very....interesting....to write this out. Oddly easy, as if I could fit myself into the twisted logic of the unregenerate. It really flowed off my pen, and when I was done I was like...whoa, that's really scary. Praise God that Christ has taken all that for me on the cross.
This is totally an imaginative excursion into hell; I think it's generally accurate but really we can't exactly know details, so I don't claim this to be totally true or anything. Just thought-provoking, I hope.
Just to keep this within the parameters of the Theology forum, I'll ask a couple questions afterwards.

Darkness all around – so thick I cannot see my own body – and yet the burning heat of flames running in lines and swirling patterns over my charring flesh.

I am alone, utterly destitute and isolated from any other being, and yet my soul is filled with all the screams of the damned ever uttered – among them my own. I open my eyes and they stand around me, tearing at themselves and each other.

Then a hand clutches my throat, the fingers devoid of flesh. A face with burning eyes is thrust into my sight. Screaming through the clutching fingers, I reach up and tear out a flickering eyeball.

There is a maggot twisting, turning in the eye, its jaws champing audibly. I cannot kill it. Then I feel a maggot in my own eye, and the eyeball in my hand is no more.

I run, stumbling on bloody stumps of feet, not looking forward, only tearing at the worm in my eye.

Then I am falling into a pit without end, and yet my body feels as if it is sitting on earth so hot it scorches me every second. I fidget to get that elusive comfortable – or at least bearable – position, and never find it. Then I hit the ground at such a speed that for a few seconds it feels like I’m moving upwards, backwards. When I know I am stationary, then I know the pain. Every bone is broken – each and every one. Old sores are broken open and stream blood and pus. Fresh cuts ooze the filth of worms that latch on from the darkness around me and begin to burrow, burning trails of pain into me.

And that is not the worst. It could all have been over. It could have never begun. For there was love. There was forgiveness. There was a Father waiting, watching for a return of His love that never came.

Against love. Against love so great it would have forgiven my sin and filth and poured the torment I now know on another – that is the love I have sinned against. There is no such escape anymore, only endless cycles of the same endless moment.

The justice of it eats and burns and wears at me. It is right. This must happen. I know that mine is the greatest crime possible – to put myself and others on the supreme throne of the universe, to denigrate the proper Ruler of all creation to the level of dung and filthy refuse. To say that God is so worthless He may as well live the hell I now cannot endure – and to say that that would not be injustice.

I know my fate is just and that knowledge is torment, because I rejected the only forgiveness when it was offered; there was a way out and I told it to go where I am now. So now there is no way out.

And yet, were one offered now I would not accept it. It is further torment to know I would say no, but still I would refuse. I can imagine – barely – the cessation, the peace from all the noisy disorientation of the mind-filling pains and torments, and I desire it with all the longing my soul is capable of. And yet still I must cling to the identity I have embraced – futilely fighting, in some small way unconquered by that love and forgiveness, because I still rebel. I do not see that Hell itself is His victory over me, that the battle has been fought and won.

So to fight on still, to require God to further punish me, those are the only steps I can take. I shake my fist. Come join me and see then if you can endure your own wrath!

Lightning strikes all around me, and the image of a cross burns behind my closed and cracking, puffy eyelids, which ooze thick pus that drips into my eyes.

He did endure His own wrath. There is nothing I can do to push Him further than He has gone Himself. Every fraction of every second of every minute of the hell that I am suffering now He suffered too. Poured out on Him in infinitely greater measure, because He is infinitely greater. Appeased and swallowed up in total, because He is infinitely greater.
He did it.

Because He is greater. Because He alone deserves to sit upon the throne.

I cannot best Him.

I cease the train of my thought, broken once again by the seamless walls He has woven around my mind. There is no way out. No way to still the doubts and quiet the uncertainty as there was in life. For there is no life to distract me. Only death to kill me continually.

The waves of His anger shake me like atomic shock-waves, forming instant bubbling blisters on all my skin, tearing off my clothes, searing and boiling the liquid within me, exploding millions upon millions of my cells, warping them into ghastly mutations. My hand a claw that rakes out furrows of my scalp when I scratch at the burrowing, burning, itching lice. My foot a bloated stump that bursts open at the slightest weight put upon it, spilling hundreds of squirming worms, their mouths spewing a burning poison that I fall into – writhing, screaming, shrieking. My fists rise above my head, shaking.

I feel Him and hate Him. He is really all that has ever has been hell, for the physical, the mental – that is nothing to the constant presence of the Almighty here with me. I feel Him all around, every second. Immensity so immense and dreadful that the very world around me creaks and I fall to my knees, the breath forced out of me slowly until there is nothing left. My eyes go dark, and then a light flashes somewhere, perhaps in my very soul. It is holiness, the searing strength of absolute purity ripping into my being, tearing it to shreds, the molecules individually stripped away from one another.

I cannot exist in the presence of goodness. I know it. And yet God, the all-good, is with me always in hell. I am shredding apart under His gaze, and yet never gone. I am infinitely torment-able.

God does not destroy me. My heart, twisted as I know it is, raises a question. Is it because He cannot?

My being is like the smoldering of a wet wick newly lit, so fragile that He could snuff me out by the pressure of His thoughts. But He does not. He cannot. His own character, His own justice demands full payment – for all of eternity. So He is aligned on my side. I have the victory over him! He cannot destroy me. His very being demands that mine dies on – forever.

So I am like God – immortal.

But then the world twists and lurches, yawning under me – I look down into the gaping maw of a volcano, the seething molten rock below me rushing up to meet and destroy me – to eat through every fiber of my musculature and destroy them all separately, each in an individual, recognizable fraction of time, of pain.

The lava washes over me, and the pain, never ceasing, increases. I have memory of when pain was less or more, but in the present there is never ease, never even a miniscule respite. Always it is more than I can bear, just more than I can bear. And always the pain increases – as at the moment, when my every nerve is not only relaying the utter destruction of my body, but is itself being burnt individually – as if a flaming net woven from the beginning of time in the pattern of my nervous system has been draped around me and drawn tight so it burns just beneath the surface of my skin.
Sparks travel up my spine as if along a detonation-cord.

A second later every shred of quietness that was ever possibly present in my mind is shattered absolutely. The explosion brings with it a near annihilation of any consciousness that I have of my body, and yet in a moment I surface in the swirling pool of lava, gasping for a lung-scorching breath of blistering air.

Always every part of my body is destroyed, being destroyed, ad infinitum.
Waves of magma melt through me, pulsing inward towards my bones, wrapping around each one, piercing cellular walls and filling the hollow marrow with living fire, spilling in to invade all thought of rest or quiet.
And I know that it is God. That it is just. That it is the cost of love rejected. That I have no victory.

I am not immortal. I have no life. I am a body subject to eternal death.

That is no victory.

There is no payment except this drawn-out infinity of the present moment . The perfect love of divinity was rejected and spurned by this wretched creature, and now I must repay.

He will never leave me, for the hell of hell is God.


Soooo, that's that.
Now for the questions.
In works of fantasy, should there be a heaven and hell? Is it necessary that we maintain these hall-mark Christian doctrines in works which we are not intending to be taken as literally true? Have we left behind our Christian worldview if we don't include them as the ultimate context behind all of our writing?
I feel like there are times and works where we don't HAVE to explicitly include this Christian context, but at the same time, some part of me wants to scream out that we can't properly introduce people to the truth if we neglect those aspects of it.
It's sort of like writing something where there is no deity. Is that ever proper? Or do we have to keep the framework of truth that holds all of reality together?
The only way I could defend writing without an express Christian context is because fantasy is supposed to be different from real life in order to give the reader a different and clearer view of reality when he/she returns to it. The reason we leave reality behind in fantasy is in order to shape the reader's perception of reality within the 'false' world, where they are willing to suspend disbelief, in such a way that when they return to reality, they have a clearer, better grasp of what it means to be human, to live in this world, and etc.....
Question being that when we leave reality behind, can we leave the ultimate reality of God, heaven, and hell behind us as well? Do we lose the Christian-ness of our writing if we leave those issues untouched? Or can we still influence people towards the ultimate truth without those present as the framework of our alternate worlds?

Areth,

Karthmin

That's a vivid description of what hell might be like!

I think all fantasy worlds need to have God, heaven and hell, and other important truths as part of their theological foundation. These truths, however, may not need to be stated directly in every story. The most important thing is that the author knows all worlds (real or imagined) are ruled over by God, and writes accordingly.

Mhmm. It was even a little scary writing it...

Yeah, I think that's definitely a really good stance to take, Jonathan. That's pretty much the conclusion I've come to as well. Just wondering what other people believe on the issue.

Areth.