Inferno - Not quite what I was expecting

I've just finished reading 'Inferno' by Dan Brown.  As an author I can take or leave him, but as a book lots of my friends were reading and which was supposed to say a lot about hell, at least Dante's version of it, I thought I ought to read it.

Hell is one of those topics about which society has a lot of wrong ideas, but which I also think the church often is a little (sometimes a lot) muddled in its thinking on.  So I thought I'd have a read so I was ready to engage with friends with questions about hell.

Except, despite Dante's version of it featuring heavily, the big idea of the book is not hell at all it is overpopulation.  Overpopulation is the spectre which hovers like the sword of Damocles over the human race and which the villain of the book seeks to remedy.  I'm not going to give away how - though being a Dan Brown novel its not particularly hard to work out - though there are some interesting twists.  So the book doesn't raise questions about hell but about how bad the world will get if we carry on reproducing as a species as we are - it will become like Dante's hell.  In fact the human race is presented as a plague which will outstrip resources and destroy itself if we carry on as we are.

Thus the key question which drives the story is how you would solve such a problem.  Do we need a modern black death to thin the population?  Would you be prepared to kill half the worlds population in order to save the rest of the world?

There are a few things that we need to know as we engage with friends about this book.  First on a purely practical level in 1979 the world's fertility rate was 6.0, today it is 2.52, overpopulation does not seem to be the problem Brown suggests.  If the current European fertility rate remains unchanged then the continents population will contract from 738 million to 432 million by the end of this century. (Statistics from 'What to Expect When No-Ones Expecting' by Jonathan Last.) 

But what about theologically.  Dan Brown's book takes a purely biological view of humanity, it is just another species slowly evolving on the planet.  That ought to be something we can talk to our friends about, Inferno has too low a view of man,  by contrast the Bible says man is the apex of God's creation, created male and female in God's image.

There is a second thing we can bring into discussion with friends and that is the role God gives to humanity.  In Genesis 1 God gives Adam and Eve the role of royal regents over his creation.  They are to care for it, to rule over it, not in an abusive way but with direct authority from God, for his glory not their own greed.  So actually as Christians we want to care for the world, we want to care for humanity, we will take threats seriously because God calls us to.  Why is the world such a mess, because of the all infecting nature of sin (Gen 3) which means we selfishly get what we want from the world and from other people.

But most importantly as Christians we know that sustaining this world however it may be done is not enough.  One day the world will end, not due to overpopulation, but because Jesus will come and we need to be ready for his return.

Whilst Inferno didn't deliver the expected discussions on hell, I am hoping and praying it does deliver discussion about humanity, our nature, our future, and our hope.