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Good morning. At one stage the fireball in California was moving at a speed of a football field every second. It’s hard to imagine a more vivid experience of hell than being consumed by such an inferno. And all in a town called Paradise.

But the traditional depiction of hell isn’t simply the horror of being consumed by such a furnace. It’s remaining alive and continuing to burn not just for hours, days or even centuries, but forever. For a long time the conventional way of persuading people to adopt the Christian faith was to portray this truly blood-curdling alternative.

It’s surprising it took till the nineteenth century for the moral objection to hell on these grounds to take hold. People simply did the maths and realised that for the worst conceivable offender perhaps a hundred million years of roasting would be reasonable punishment; but that was nothing compared to eternity. How could this possibly be what God wanted?

Put this way, dropping the notion of eternal hell seems obvious, and it’s easy to reinterpret various New Testament references accordingly as colourful exaggerations. But just notice how radically this transforms religious belief. The whole purpose of church changes overnight. Church is no longer an instrument for conveying us upstairs rather than downstairs. God is no longer a mechanism for securing our eternal survival and bliss.

One mystic summed it up in this prayer. ‘If I love you for hope of heaven, then deny me heaven; if I love you for fear of hell, then give me hell; but if I love you for yourself alone, then give me yourself alone.’

These are words of extraordinary power. They reveal that much conventional religious talk instrumentalises God, turning God into an implement for our getting what we want – not just forever, but also now. These words expose the shallowness of such a way of living. Loving God for God’s self alone: God is the end, not just the means. Simply to use God as a technique for acquiring what’s currently out of reach isn’t faith at all – it’s just manipulating the playing cards of existence so the aces all end up in our hands.

These words are not just a redefinition of church and God; they’re a redefinition of love too. The mystic would say that really to love God means to yearn to be with God whatever the outcome – come hell or high water. Thus God ceases to be an escape-hatch up to heaven or a flame-resistant ladder out of hell. Instead God becomes the epitome of beauty, truth and goodness – the summit of everything worth striving for. A life spent longing and working for those things might properly be called a life spent loving God. Maybe that’s what true religion is.

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