An Orthodox Belief That Demands An Heretical Response

"The Harrowing of Hell" has a masculine poetic ring to it, and is a metaphor (delving into archaic agrarian terminology) for one of the most bizarre acts ascribed to Jesus before we encounter in The Book of Revelations the prognosticated things he will supposedly do at the end of "history". But getting back to our poetic biblical metaphor, it refers to the belief that on the Saturday of his disappearance between his death on a Friday and his resurrection on a Sunday, Jesus went down to Hell and caught up the souls of the virtuous prophets and patriarchs from "Old Testament Times", and brought them to Heaven. This is all grandly mythological stuff, and you have poets centuries later like Dante for instance, elegiacally bemoaning the necessity of Jesus to leave behind the "virtuous pagans" to the rest of Eternity in the Netherworld. But for the critically-minded Christian who needs moral continuity, even the very idea should be abominable that the ancient leaders of the Hebrew faith, the mother (after all) of Christianity, were ever sent to Hell in the first place! Of course, it is all theologically explained in terms of the concept that these Jewish Elders were sent to Hell because they carried the "stain" of Original Sin passed on by everyone's forebear, Adam, and only Christ's Holy Crucifixion could remove that automatically damning stain, from which even from the godly predecessors of Jesus were not immune. This indeed is a patent insult to Judaism, and certainly Jesus himself would never have imagined Abraham or Moses writhing in Hell, biding patiently through the centuries until the Messiah came to absolve their long-suffering souls. But putting aside the implications of such a fate (however temporary) for the most revered shapers of the Jewish faith, what sense does any of this make for the human race as a whole? When the human species began to fully emerge from animal unconsciousness into sapient consciousness (and therefore moral accountability), are we really expected to believe that all of those of our kind who lived and died in the intervening tens of thousands of years were sent to Hell because they know nothing of Jesus and he had not yet died for them? A moral god (and therefore the One True God) would never have planned things this way. Christians must accept the possibility that people go to Heaven because of the lives they have led, and not because, after 100,000 years of our presence on this planet in our current cerebral form, that God finally sent his only begotten Son to die for us as a sacrificial propitiation for the heritable sin of Adam, the first human. We must remember how Adam earned his moral stain. It was by eating a piece of forbidden supernatural fruit, which, in essence, gave him the knowledge that no other animal possesses: that he and Eve had souls.