How Can We Be Content In Heaven When Hell Exists?

[CeeBee]

I know that heaven is supposed to be a place of complete contentment but what has been bugging me recently is how can that be the case if other people (maybe even some we have known and loved) are in hell? My understanding is that God really isn't happy about this because he loves all of us and I don't really get how we can be truly holy if we're enjoying ourselves while others are suffering? What's the official line on this?

[Theoketos]

I think that C.S. Lewis does an awesome job illuminating this question in both “The Great Divorce” and in “Pilgrim’s Regress.” At first the main character has the same thought about Hell as you perceived. John (the main protagonist) received such a notion from being raised by puritans.

[quote]
However, it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext. [/quote]

However, after John crosses the chasm of becoming a Christian, a guide, who is leading him to heaven, explains Hell. (Adam’s Apple = Mountain Apple = Sin in this part of the story.) The following is the exchange between the guide and John, starting with the guide.


"... The Landlord has taken the risk of working the country with free tenants instead of slaves in chain gangs: and as they are free there no way of making it impossible for them to go into forbidden places and eat forbiddden fruits. Up to a certain point he can doctor them even when they have done so, and break them of the habit... You must not try to fix the point after which a return is impossible, but you can see that there will be such a point somewhere."

"But surely the Landlord can do anything?"

"He cannot do what is contradictory... it is meaningless to talk of forcing a man to do freely what a man has freely made impossible for himself."

"I see. But at least these poor creatures are unhappy enough: there is no need to add a black hole."

"The Landload does not make the blackness. The blackness is there already wherever the taste of mountain-apple has created the vermiculate will. What do you mean by a hole? Something that ends. A black hole is blackness enclosed, limited. And in that sense the Landloard has made the black hole. He has put into the world a Worst Thing. But evil of itself would never reach a worst: for evil is fissiparous and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it would be no longer evil... The walls of the black hole are the tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached. It is the Landlord's last service to those who will let him do nothing better for them."