Surveying some of the controversy sparked by the film Heaven is for Real, which suggests everyone will end up there, Peter Berger considers how Christians through the centuries have grappled with the question of hell:
However the details of hell were imagined (Christian art was busy for centuries depicting such images), there can be no doubt that both Testaments proposed a day of judgment that would segregate the blessed from the damned. Jesus himself is identified as the judge who effects the segregation—heaven this way, hell the other way. Arguably Islam puts the day of judgment at the center of the faith more than the other two “Abrahamic” religions. Yet from early times there were Christians who believed in the apokatastasis/ ”restoration”—when the entire universe would be restored to what God intended it to be. In this ultimate climax of redemption there would be no more place for hell. One could put this in rather vanilla-seeming terms: Everyone would really be in heaven then! Obviously this raises the question of the worst evil-doers, and different answers were given. One of the great if controversial Church Fathers apparently believed in the “restoration”—Origen, who taught in Alexandria in the 3rd century CE. There is disagreement about just what Origen really meant—did he believe that eventually even the devil would be saved?—did he believe in the transmigration of souls? But there were enough doubts so that, despite the esteem he was held in, he was not canonized by either the Eastern or the Western Church.
Berger goes on to note the mystic Julian of Norwich’s uncertainties about hell:
More than any other mystic, the English nun Julian of Norwich (1342-1462) kept repeating over and over again that God is love, that he created the world out of love, and that this love keeps the world in being every moment. Julian was preoccupied with the question of how even the devil could be kept in hell forever in a world fully restored to God. She knows that this is what the Church teaches, and she is an obedient daughter of the Church. But she asks God how this can be. He replies that what she cannot understand, he can do. In her little book “Showings”, where she tells of all the things that God showed her in her visions, there follows the passage for which she is best known. I am not quite clear, whether these are supposed to be words spoken by God himself, or Julian’s own words responding to him. They are in the literary form of a lullaby, such as a mother might sing to soothe a frightened child; I guess one might call it a cosmic lullaby: “And all will be well. And all will be well. And every manner of thing will be well.”
(Image of Francesco Botticini’s 15th century painting The Assumption of the Virgin, which offers a glimpse into the heavens, via Wikimedia Commons)
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