I like to think of the city of Melbourne as being a nice place to live—more predictable and safer than its cousin Sydney, full of cul-de-sacs, footy carnivals, Neighbours and cappuccinos. But apparently it too has a dark underbelly—a monstrous flipside peopled by drug dealers, crime gangs and hit men engaged in a bitter, deadly war. It turns out this other Melbourne was there all along—imperceptible to its more decent citizens until it was shockingly revealed.
The same is true, argues Peter Bolt, of the other ‘underworld’—the world not of Underbelly1 and Goodfellas but of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the world beyond the grave. Once westerners were confident that this other underworld didn’t exist; now things aren’t quite as clear cut, and many are afraid. As Bolt points out in his compelling book Living with the Underworld, the underworld is increasingly surfacing in the contemporary world. People’s fascination with it is growing. But the Bible has a great deal to say about it. Bolt explains,
It is important to understand the underworld properly, because this will help us understand the message of the Bible better, which will benefit everybody. If we understand the Bible better, we will better be able to understand the threat the underworld poses to us all, and this will help us to more compellingly hear the invitation that Jesus is extending to us all. (p. 18).
That is, whatever our experiences are telling us, understanding the underworld is a matter of understanding what the Bible has to say first and foremost.
Bolt makes two fascinating hermeneutical moves in his attempt to expound the Bible’s teaching. The first is that he distinguishes between “the Bible’s centre and the Bible’s periphery; between its middle and its margins” (p. 19). The Bible’s central message about Jesus Christ is crystal clear. However, there are some things in the Bible that are more peripheral, and therefore there is a certain amount of blurriness. As Bolt says, “The underworld keeps poking through in the pages of the Bible, but it is never centre-stage” (p. 21). It is hard to overstate the significance of this for Bolt’s working method: he wants to let the clear, central message inform and shape our understanding of the fuzzy and inexact edges, for the message of God’s love for the world shown in Jesus Christ illuminates everything else.
This strategy deliberately subverts many of the questions we commonly ask about the underworld. Bolt is trying to turn our gaze away from the subject of his book onto the work of God in Christ. This is a little frustrating at first—he seems happy with ‘maybes’ and ‘perhapses’, and doesn’t give us a Hieronymous Bosch painting of the underworld in all its lurid colour and visceral detail—but this is precisely the point: foregrounding a detailed discussion of the topography and population of the underworld would be misreading the Bible, and would cause us to miss the comfort we can gain from God’s real answer to all our fears: “We won’t understand the murky margins by looking at the murky margins” (p. 25).
The second intriguing hermeneutical move that Bolt makes is that he addresses the problem of the Bible’s cosmology. 21st-century western people sing with John Lennon “no hell below us / above us only sky”2—that is, we no longer live in the three-tiered universe of classical cosmology, and therefore the Bible needs to be ‘demythologized’ to get to its true message. But not so fast, says Bolt: were the ancient writers really as dumb as we think they were? Even then, there were writers who saw classic cosmology as metaphoric—a dramatic and visual means of speaking about large and important realities. The New Testament authors, Bolt suggests, were quite possibly aware of the metaphorical nature of their own language, and used it as a ready-made means by which they related the story of Jesus. The point of the New Testament is not to give us a road map of the underworld, but to tell us about what God has done for the world—that, whatever its nature, we need not fear the underworld because its power has been neutralized through Jesus. So we can validly read the language about the underworld as metaphor because the authors intended it to be read that way.
For example, this is clearly the case with what we call ‘hell’. When Jesus talked about gehenna, he described it in terms of ‘outer darkness’ and ‘fire’. Can hell be both fiery and dark at the same time? Clearly symbolic language is being used to speak about a reality which is no less real for being described as such. What we don’t have in the New Testament is a Dante’s Inferno (thank goodness!).
But is this always the case? A lot seems to hang on this ‘perhaps’. Bolt does not assert strongly that the authors of the New Testament knew that they were using metaphors; he merely shows that it was perfectly possible. Granted that this is not a technical book of New Testament study which seeks to present all the evidence, I still thought this crucial move could have been better established.
As Bolt shows, what little we do know about the underworld from the pages of the New Testament is terrible enough: it’s about death and our deep fear of it, evil and our inability to free ourselves from its grasp. Whatever the nature of these twin aspects of the underworld, their existential impact is the same: all human beings fear it, whether they be afraid of ghostly, unclean spirits, or whether they be rationalists facing their own mortality.
But is death all that bad? The secular hope is that death can be faced in a noble and peaceful way—‘with dignity’, as they say. Bolt’s strong claim to the contrary is that the Bible’s talk about the underworld reminds us of our deep, deep loathing of death and of the way death undoes us. In biblical terms, this means physical death, not just the spiritual effects of death. He writes, “When Paul spoke of sin coming into the world, ‘and death through sin’, it was not ‘spiritual death’ he was talking about but death full stop” (p. 90). Death, for Bolt, is always unnatural.
Bolt is keen to put paid to the Stoic view of death as being merely a natural part of life which we ought to learn to accept. However, I have a quibble as to whether this is the best reading of the biblical evidence about the naturalness of death: there are texts in the Old Testament which seem to take a much more accepting view—or at least a more ambivalent view. It seems appropriate for Abraham to die the way it is described in Genesis 25:8: “Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people”. What’s more, in 1 Corinthians 15 (which seems to appeal to Genesis 2 rather than Genesis 3), it seems that Adam’s natural state was earthy and therefore mortal; his original immortality was as a result of participation with God. Perhaps a better way of putting it might be to say that death is a distortion of our purpose rather than our nature.
Inexorably, Bolt takes us to the foot of the cross. It turns out his book is actually about the atonement. Because Bolt addresses the full scope of the problem, he is able to cast the full scope of the solution. Rather than highlight one model or picture of the atonement, he shows how all the models hang together: Jesus by his death conquers evil, and wins a great victory over death and the devil. At the heart of this is the sacrifice he made for sin, thereby undoing the hold that sin had over us, paying on the cross sin’s penalty. Death reigned because of sin; by undoing the hold of sin over us, Jesus overthrew death itself.
This is also the secret of the book. Bolt keeps returning to John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. In a sense, this is all we need to know about the underworld: in Jesus Christ, God has neutralized whatever it is that threatens us. To overcome the fear of death and the devil, we do not need a special mantra or a deliverance ministry; we need only to fix our eyes on Jesus.
Living with the Underworld is certainly addressed to the adult westerner, both sceptic and believer. However, Bolt does not deal directly with the experience of Christians in the two-thirds world who live in cultures far more likely to testify to firsthand encounters with the underworld. I wondered what an experienced missionary or an African Christian might have to say about this topic.
But I want to end this review by pointing out how well this book is written. It is both amusing and disturbing, and it introduces profound theological ideas with whip crack prose. Read it and see: I am confident you will want to pass it on.
Endnotes
1. Underbelly is an Australian television drama based on the events of the 1995-2004 gangland war in Melbourne.↩
2. John Lennon, ‘Imagine’, Imagine, Parlophone, London, 1971. Music and lyrics by John Lennon.↩
