Chapter 15 Hell

If you have never been troubled by the thought that a fiery place of never-ending torment may await much of humanity, then you may not need to read this chapter. If, however, such a destination remains even a faint possibility in your mind, we encourage you to consider our suggestions and read some of the books we recommend.

An eternal fiery hell is probably the worst future that anyone can imagine. If you were to hold your finger over a candle flame, you would experience serious pain almost immediately. Unfortunately, people with religious power and authority have used this fear of eternal torment to coerce people into (what they deem to be) acceptable behaviour and beliefs. The Christian Church has been guilty of controlling people this way throughout the centuries.

As a result, a reductionist version of hell has become popularised and entered the collective consciousness. Hell is imagined as a place where devils with horns and pitchforks torment people in an underground world of everlasting fire, but these ideas owe more to Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost than anything scriptural.

The word ‘hell’ itself comes from old northern European languages and originally meant ‘a concealed place’. It has historically been used by translators to represent various words in the Bible, each with different meanings in the original languages. The translators of the influential King James Version at the beginning of the seventeenth century used ‘hell’ for some occurrences of the Hebrew word ‘Sheol’ in the Old Testament. However, Sheol in its Hebrew context was the unknown place where all people went after death – both the righteous and the unrighteous – so this does not accord with our modern understanding of hell. You would think that if a place of eternal punishment existed, God would give people fair warning of their potential fate and say something right at the start of human history. But the concept of eternal punishment after death is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament, and nearly all of the widely used translations of the Bible today translate Sheol more accurately as ‘the grave’, ‘the realm of the dead’ or simply as ‘Sheol’. 

But didn’t Jesus talk a lot about hell and warn people about their eternal fate? This certainly appears to be the case when one reads many of the English translations of the gospels. There is no doubt that Jesus gave many warnings about serious future consequences depending on how we live our lives, but the words used by Jesus that are sometimes translated into English as hell are ‘Gehenna’ and ‘Hades’. Gehenna is the Greek word for the Valley of Hinnom, a place just outside Jerusalem’s city walls that would have been familiar to all his listeners. It was where in Old Testament times Jewish leaders had once offered their children up as sacrifices to false gods and it was now the city’s rubbish dump and the place where the corpses of criminals were discarded. It was thus a specific location with layers of context to it and certainly not a place of eternal punishment after death. It is also worth noting that the term is not used by Paul in any of his preaching or letters in the New Testament. ‘Hades’ is a Greek concept for the realm of the dead and was the Greek word widely used in Jesus’ day to translate the Hebrew word ‘Sheol’.

But what about other images of judgment, such as ‘the lake of fire’ in Revelation 20:14,15? This final book of the Bible is highly symbolic and full of coded references aimed at the original readers, most of whom were Jewish believers in Jesus. It was written and shared across the early Church at a time when Christians were being ruthlessly persecuted. The ultimate message in Revelation is that Jesus, the Lamb of God, will be triumphant – that all things will be made new and that everything will eventually become right. The book only becomes divisive and problematic when it is taken too literally and the details rather than the overall message are made the focus of attention.

The Bible uses many literary forms (history, allegory, poetry, letters, rhetorical arguments, wisdom and parables) to communicate the ultimate truths that creation has a creator who is good, loving and can be trusted with everything. This creator is relational and cares for humanity in the same way that a good parent cares for their children. God – our father God – has not designed life as a sick game with horrific eternal consequences for the losers, or as a maze where those who make the wrong choices will be lost for eternity. Indeed, such a thought is unimaginable if you really think about it.

Some people will say, ‘God is loving, but he is also just.’ This is a false dichotomy. God cannot act in justice without also acting in love. It is better to say, ‘God is loving, AND he is also just.’ You cannot split God’s divine nature. If you try, it’s like splitting an atom; it releases massive destructive forces of dissonance and confusion, creating fear, insecurity and anxiety in its wake – whilst also besmirching the character of our heavenly father.

More than any psychotherapist, God is able to see the deepest and most hidden layers of our lives, and he understands why we are the way we are. God sees and understands our hurts, fears, insecurities, motivations, blind spots and prejudices.  From the beginning when God declares of his creation that everything is ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31) and perfectly designed to multiply all species, he has known how to mature and reconcile each one of us to the point where everyone will love everyone in agape love.

The wicked ways of humanity will not go un-addressed by the creator. We should be very sober about that. However, time and again throughout scripture, God holds out grace, forgiveness, redemption, restoration and reconciliation. This flows from the very nature of God as love and life-giver. There are behaviours and attitudes that God opposes and deems unrighteous, unjust, unloving and, ultimately, unacceptable. True to his nature, God will wait patiently until we learn from the consequences of our destructive actions and turn from them. If we fail to learn the lessons during our life on Earth, God’s work of restoring and reconciling will continue in the afterlife.

There are a wonderful range of books that explore this topic in greater detail. ‘Raising Hell: Christianity’s Most Controversial Doctrine Put under Fire’ by Julie Ferwerda is a very readable analysis of the subject. We list many other books and online resources that we have found useful on our website.