"Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others... but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud. " — C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)
"Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years!"
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
"Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains."
— C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)
"To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
"If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell."
— C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)
"Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him"
— C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)
"In all discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves."
— C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)
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I'm going to be posting on the current ongoing debate re Bob Bell's new book, Love Wins, and wanted to get some preliminary points down before giving my analysis.