“When man mistook reflection for revelation, he built a temple of himself.” – Arion J. Bezuidenhout
Introduction
Ever seen the anthropomorph in hell? Neither does he.
His eyes are mirrors, not windows; he calls the fire feeling, the chains choice, and the absence of God intimacy.
There are few lines in modern theology more haunting than the silence between self-adoration and self-destruction. Humanity no longer needs to be deceived by the serpent, it has become the serpent, seduced by its own reflection. Where Eve once reached for promise, modernity reaches for perception. We no longer crave truth; we crave to see ourselves wanting it.
The Western soul, bloated with the luxury of introspection, has turned the mirror into a moral philosophy. The modern person performs the self as though the act of seeing is salvation. Yet Scripture warns otherwise: “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror … and immediately forgets what he saw” (James 1:23–24).
The Mirror of False Knowing
Modernity defines truth as recognition rather than revelation. The Western self becomes its own catechism, naming replaces knowing, reflection replaces revelation. Foucault teaches that knowledge is power; Freud, that truth is repression; Nietzsche, that God is dead, and, therefore, so is definition. These three prophets of the inward rebellion baptised self-consciousness as truth’s new altar.
But other worlds remember differently.
From the global South, Ubuntu begins not with I am but we are. Identity here is bestowed through relation to others, to creation, to God. In Ubuntu’s anthropology, being is never private property. It breathes through community, ancestry, and moral reciprocity. Augustine knew this when he wrote, “The self that loves itself without God loses itself.”¹
Far to the North, the Icelandic sagas root identity in land and language. To vera maður (to be a person) means to stand rightly in the world. The soil and sea are not scenery but participants in moral life. When the land suffers, so does the soul. As Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson observed, Icelandic myth understood creation as covenant, humanity in stewardship, not supremacy.²
Together, Ubuntu and the Icelandic imagination form a twin indictment against Western narcissism:
the South reminds us we are bound to one another;
the North reminds us we are bound to the earth.
Thus, the mirror shatters not through rebellion, but through belonging.
The Flame With False Feeling
Desire, once a homing instinct toward God, has become the West’s favourite addiction. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation re-envisioned pleasure as liberation; consumer culture made it liturgy. The result is a civilisation aflame with its own appetites; mistaking heat for holiness.
The contemporary creed whispers: If it feels good, it must be true. Yet in that inversion lies the oldest lie, that sensation can substitute for sanctity. The modern eros consumes because it cannot commune.
By contrast, African mysticism and Pentecostal spirituality know another fire, one that sanctifies rather than seduces. Desire, when purified, becomes the language of worship. Where the Western flame flatters, the Spirit’s flame forms.
Hell, therefore, is not so much about the absence of God.
It is humanity’s successful demand that God keep His distance.
The Exchange; Hell Rebranded
Rebellion today no longer hides; it markets itself as authenticity. “My truth.” “Self-care.” “Unapologetic living.” These are flames disguised as warmth, are the light of self-deification. Western modernity has monetised the Fall.
Cultural theorists sell freedom without obedience, love without covenant, truth without cost. But a love that never says no is not love at all, it’s indifference with good branding.
From the barrios of Latin America rose a theology that refused such deceit. Liberation theology proclaimed that authenticity is not self-expression but solidarity; the cross carried together.³ The global South exposes the West’s aesthetic of rebellion: it sees that self-assertion without sacrifice is merely empire with better PR.
To mistake sin for sincerity is to rename hell “healing.”
The True Flame of Redeemed Desire
There is another fire, one older than Eden’s sword and brighter than Babel’s glow. Augustine confessed, “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”⁴ The true flame purifies; it does not flatter. It defines; it does not indulge.
When divine love burns, it re-creates. The mirror becomes a window; revelation replaces reflection. The self no longer gazes inward for meaning but outward for mercy.
Desmond Tutu captured this transfiguration in a single sentence: “Without forgiveness, there is no future.”⁵ Forgiveness shatters the mirror and sets the soul alight with grace. The flame of God does not consume, it commissions.
Closing Confession
To mistake heat for light is to fall in love with one’s own burning.
But the soul that turns outward finds itself illumined by another Flame, One that does not destroy, but defines; not desire’s echo, but Love Himself.
Hell offers a romanticised view of the self; a worship of one’s own reflection. As Paul warned, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). This is not merely rebellion but self-fascination turned to idolatry. In the last days, wrote Paul again, people “will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant… having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:2–5). The pathology of hell is not chaos but choreography, a dance of mirrors in which Lucifer’s ancient boast is endlessly rehearsed: “I will ascend to heaven… I will make myself like the Most High” (Isa. 14:13–14). Yet, as James cautions, “Such wisdom does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic” (Jas. 3:15). The mirror that flatters becomes the flame that devours, for to mistake one’s own image for illumination is to baptise pride as revelation.
Heaven is the surrender of that mirror to the light of another face. A Holy Lamb, dressed as the Conquering King.
Practical Application
The temptation to stare into the mirror is subtle. It looks like confidence, creativity, even self-care, yet slowly, the reflection replaces revelation.
The task for the believer is not to smash the mirror in self-hatred, but to turn it toward the Light.
This week, practise one small act of displaced attention, a deliberate turning outward:
Write a letter of gratitude.
Serve someone whose name you forget between Sundays.
Step outside and notice the earth beneath your feet, the same ground on which the Son of God once knelt to wash another’s.
Ask: What part of me still calls the fire feeling, and the absence of God intimacy?
Then invite the Holy Spirit to teach you again the difference between heat and light.
Prayer
Lord of fire and reflection, burn in me, burning away what’s not from You. Teach my eyes to see beyond themselves, my heart to desire what sanctifies, not what flatters.
Shatter every mirror that makes me forget Your image, and rebuild in me the face You formed before I knew my own. Where I have mistaken pain for depth,and self-love for salvation, forgive me.
Make my life a forge of holy becoming, where Your flame defines, Your grace restores, and Your truth burns bright enoughto guide others home.
In Your Holy Name Lord Jesus, the Flame that never lies.
Amen.
TRACK TO ENJOY:
References
1. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), III.3.
2. Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, Under the Cloak: A Pagan Ritual Turning Point in the Conversion of Iceland (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 1999).
3. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), xxii–xxiii.
4. Augustine, Confessions, I.1.
5.Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Rider, 1999).
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