After Eternal Punishment: ‘Fin de Siècle’ as Literary Eschatology

Abstract

That the doctrine of eternal punishment was a lodestone around which gathered many of the key religious conflicts in the Victorian period is beyond question. The idea that the tortures awaiting the damned in hell are literally everlasting became, to a growing number of liberal theologians in the Anglican Church, representative of everything that they were trying to purge from Christian thought and worship. The slender Gospel basis for this doctrine, one passage in Matthew 25:46 ‘And these [the damned] shall go away into everlasting punishment’¹ made it particularly vulnerable to the Higher Criticism and its methods, although ultimately the doctrine came to symbolize much more than a conflict of methodologies. It became a theatre of war in which the strength of liberal theology was repeatedly tested. F. D. Maurice had been forced to resign the Chair of Theology at King’s College, London for arguing in his Theological Essays (1853) for a more flexible definition of ‘eternal’. According to Maurice, the movement of our thought from the temporal to eternal is the ‘very aim of the divine economy’, and therefore it is extremely dangerous ‘to introduce the notion of duration into a word from which He has deliberately excluded it’.² In this context, ‘eternal’ refers not to minutes and hours but to a whole new state of being: separation from God. One of the most controversial elements in Colenso’s 1861 commentary on the Romans was its explicit repudiation of the doctrine.³