by Zach Kincaid
Lewis is not shy about the afterlife and the intertwining of the spiritual with the material. Counter to the cyclical trend of finding ways for hell to either not exist or at least not be used for eternal damnation of humans, Lewis says something different: "I believe that if million chances were likely to do good, they would be given... Finality must come sometime, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when."
He further cites three ways that Jesus speaks of hell: punishment, destruction and banishment to darkness, each with a good bit of fire. This reveals that hell is an actual place where the damned will go, though it was not intended for people. "To enter heaven," he says, "is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains'." A person is only complete when his/her passions are obedient to God, Lewis says, but a person is hollow when it's damned since his/her passion is for self alone. How much of a person remains as a separate entity without God's oversight is a difficult question. Lewis calls this "the darkness outside."
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