Keith Hopkins

There were many St Pauls in Antiquity. Even more are still being invented. About each, there are stories, doubts, ambiguities. One problem is that Paul is an icon of early Christianity, and of Western culture. His central significance for later Christian theology means that any interpretation of his thought is necessarily grounded in personal belief, or prejudice. Objectivity is neither achievable, nor perhaps desirable. And this problem is compounded for those who wish to write about his life and character, because we know extraordinarily little about either.

Hell is not just God’s vengeance on humanity, nor is it only, in Sartre’s sardonic phrase, other people. To be sure, it can be the tortured, persecutory visions of a few psychotic madmen. But the most troublesome, pervasive hell is the nightmarish world which each of us constructs, unconsciously, in the sweat of unconfessed, unconfessable fantasies. Hell is that private world of shame, fear and terror, that we have all sometimes felt, and have hoped to forget in the public daily world of post-breakfast conventionality. Hell, for modern liberals, whether atheists or believers, is the vulnerable undercurrent behind the mask of respectability.