The Hell dynamic

Good post on the wiles of the enemy at Christian Scholar's Review. Here are the first few paragraphs to whet your appetite, but please, read the whole thing! As my seminary theology professor, Dennis Kinlaw, used to say, "You owe it to yourself!"

Lately, I have been especially attentive to outbreaks, like a rash, of what I call to myself the “Hell dynamic.”

It is a spirit of domination and destruction, in that order. It begins with a struggle for power, exerted with greater or lesser straightforwardness. (This is “domination.”) It ends with a reckoning full of blame and punishment. (This is “destruction.”) It is a subtext underlying all sorts of trivial-seeming conflicts: a quibbling workplace disagreement; a cruel sport on a children’s playground; a face-off between mother and daughter; boasting and whispering at a family reunion.

The “Hell dynamic,” I believe, is simply the result of intelligent existence unmoored to God. It creates abusive hierarchies. Where God, the living water, is absent, ego needs are satiated by bids for control (among the strong) or bids for approval (among the weak). The result, taken to its end, is always Hellish. It is always an arena of shame and punishment.

The strong, unsatisfied by their conquests, externalize their self-blame onto the weak. And their victims, who have sought approval, quiver at what feels like negation. However, even as they are punished, these unfortunate victims are not “seen,” for their tormentors are (unknowingly) looking in a mirror.

This is Hell, well and truly. This is the day-to-day-life, I think, of the demons in their echelons, deprived of God’s presence and forever punching down to slake their misery. When we mimic the demons’ twisted dynamic—which is any time we sneer, judge, shame, or dehumanize—we amplify it through resonance, expanding the reach of deepest Hell.

She goes on to examine academia in particular...

As a side note, my notes from Kinlaw's classes are full of bibliographic references of stuff he suggested we read. Would that I had read more of them!