Going down?

Sunday mornings are always special to me, because that’s when “Sunday Morning” on CBS is on. One of my favorite segments aired about a year ago; it was called “Going Down,” and featured a Baptist minister from Knoxville–the denizens of Tennessee always being good for a few laughs–preaching fire and brimstone from the pulpit, with what looked like puffs of smoke emerging from a backdrop as a visual aid.

“You’ll have the sound of the screams and the smell and the fire,” thundered Reverend Charles Lawton, in one of his apparently typical performances. “You’ll be dropping down into the land of the condemned.”

Okay, maybe he’s no Jonathan Edwards, but his congregation seemed intimidated enough, responding to his flights–or should I say dips–of fancy with what sounded like muffled moans.

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“There’ll be weeping and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth; their worm will not die,” Lawson told the CBS interviewer, who was more or less speechless. “That’s a place you don’t want to go to,” he added, somewhat superfluously.

Such images of Hell, the piece pointed out, are not from the Old Testament, as you’d expect, but from ancient Greek myths about Hades, elaborated on by the art and literature of the Middle Ages. The Hell of the Bible was not a place of eternal damnation, or punishment of any kind. The word “Sheol,” standing in for “Hell” in the King James Version, referred to a graveyard or dump.

Dante, with his detailed architecture and descriptions of a multi-level torture chamber, almost singlehandedly changed our perceptions, and the Church was only too happy to perpetuate his fantasies. (In the CBS story, a cool piece of museum art, taken from a medieval church, depicts a Hell-ish monster devouring a hapless sinner, a la King Kong chomping on a Skull Island native. Another shows Jesus, in the interim between his death and his resurrection, leading people out of the maw of Hell, rendered as a beast’s open mouth.) The Christian Hell is apparently a human invention.        

But what about Heaven?

“Heaven, in the Bible, is a place over our head where God lives,” said a professor of theology, also interviewed for the segment.  Beyond that, the Good Book has precious little to say about it, save for Jesus mentioning a mansion of many rooms. (He was even more cryptic about Hell.) Nor have many writers or artists ventured to describe the place.  

One who has is Randall Wallace, who directed and wrote the screenplay for “Heaven Is for Real,” a 2014 movie telling the “true” story of a four-year-old boy’s sojourn somewhere above the clouds. Wallace explained to CBS that in imagining Heaven for the film he was inspired by The Lord’s Prayer, which contains the words “On earth as it is in Heaven,” a phrase that actually sheds no light at all on Heaven, as it might if it said, “In Heaven as it is on earth.”

But who needs precision when it comes to the celestial kingdom? “If you mess up in your conception of Heaven, it won’t matter, but if you mess up on Hell, you’re in trouble,” the Reverend Lawson assures–or warns–us, nonsensically.

Even though no one has described Heaven to the extent that Dante described the other place, many want to go there, and stay forever. A CBS poll shows that two out of three Americans believe in Heaven and Hell, but only 2 percent think they’ll go to Hell. Maybe they’re right, and nobody ever goes there anymore, because it’s too crowded.