C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce Series

Another memorable figure is the Possessive Mother who comes to Heaven insisting that she see her son. When she is told that she’s not ready, that she hasn’t yet learned to love and is treating God as a means to get to her son, she explodes. “If He loved me he’d let me see my boy. If He loved me why did He take Michael away from me?” (10)Insisting that Mother-love is “the highest and holiest feeling in human nature” she is told that “no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” (11) She argues, “I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one has the right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.” (12) Later MacDonald points out the difference between self-giving, godly love and the selfish, lesser love which is not so much love as need. “She loved her son too little, not too much,” he explains. “If she had loved him more there’d be no difficulty. I do not know how her affair will end. But it may well be that at this moment she’s demanding to have him down with her in Hell.” (13)

There are countless other characters, only one of whom decides to stay in Heaven. The rest are driven by selfishness, self righteousness, or pride to return to Hell. Here is where we come to discover one of the key features in Lewis’ theology, an insistence that God does not send people to Hell. Some people refuse to believe in Jesus Christ because they have trouble understanding how a good and loving God could send someone to hell. Lewis’ answer is both simple and biblical: He doesn’t. Heaven was created for human beings; Hell was not. In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes, “You will remember that in the parable (cf. Matthew 25. 34, 41) the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never intended for men at all.” (14) He considers it a miracle that God would give us the freedom to reject Him and His blessings. Yet he does, and so Lewis concludes in The Problem of Pain, “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” (15) MacDonald says the same in The Great Divorce: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done.’ And those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice there would be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock, it is opened.” (16)

One last issue: How can those who are saved experience eternal joy if there are people who have chosen Hell? Doesn’t mercy require that everyone be in Heaven? “That sounds very merciful,” MacDonald says. But see what lurks behind it… The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs shall be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven…” Heaven will not be blackmailed. “It must be one way or the other,” Lewis says. “Either the day will come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe.” (17) The Dog in the Manger image refers to one of Aesop’s fables about a dog who lies in a feedbox full of food that he can’t eat, refusing anyone who can the opportunity to do so.