Preaching hell to depressed teens

I’ve been thinking about hell quite a bit recently—not because I enjoy it, because I’m obsessed with morbid subjects or because I’m reading Peter Bolt’s Living with the Underworld. I’ve been thinking about it because I was warned recently that we should beware of how we teach the subject of ‘hell’ and God’s wrath to teenagers. Many of them, so the argument goes, are prone to low self-esteem, depression and suicidal thoughts. They have no trouble believing that they are sinners, and that God is ‘mad’ at them. So we should beware of manipulating their feelings with lurid and excessive depictions of hell, which would compound their misery rather than helping them to understand God’s grace and love. In addition, the New Testament’s way is not to subject already shamed individuals to dreadful and imaginative descriptions of God’s wrath.

For me, the argument from teenager-dom didn’t ring true. Many years ago, as a depressed teenager, a friend had scared me into reading the Bible by assuring me that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. If God wasn’t true, he told me, reading the Bible and going to church couldn’t hurt me. If God was true, then ignoring him could hurt me a great deal. In fact, I was headed for the fires of hell.

There are probably other ways Woody could have encouraged me to find out about Jesus. That’s not the point. The point is that the idea of hell actually shook me out of my depressive and self-centred state long enough to get me along to church, to start reading the Bible, and to find out who Jesus really was—something for which I will be eternally grateful.

The other, more important thing is that in the ‘lurid’ stakes, what Woody told me was nothing compared to the horrors I discovered when I read the Bible. There in the Gospel of Luke I was confronted with a Jesus who, far from pandering to my teenage angst, spoke in the strongest possible terms of how terrible it would be to face judgement. In addition, if I didn’t repent, I might end up like the rich man in the story of Lazarus who ends up begging for a drop of water for relief from the flames that were burning in Hades (Luke 16:19-31). That was the place where there would be terrible wailing and gnashing of teeth, and God’s enemies would suffer in outer darkness (Luke 13:27-28; cf. Matt 8:11-12).

Now, some might argue that these horrors are mainly reserved for the smug religious hypocrites that populate the pages of the Gospels. The poor, the weak, the sensitive and, most especially, the depressed teenager aren’t Jesus’ target. But this doesn’t match the reality of what we actually find when we look at the Gospels closely. It was emphatically not just the religious leaders, but Jesus’ own disciples and “thousands of the people” (Luke 12:1), who heard him say these words:

I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! (Luke 12:4-5)

It’s this fear of the Lord that was the beginning of wisdom for at least one depressed teenager. If youthworkers and preachers and school chaplains are doing their job as they should, then, like the Lord Jesus, they will be scaring the hell out of many more teenagers the world over simply by repeating the words he spoke.

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