What the Hell?
What the hell is hell, anyway?
Many English translations of the Bible are confusing. They often translate both Hadesand Gehennaas “hell.” Hades is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Sheol, and simply means the abode of the dead. It can mean a grave, a tomb, or someplace dead souls go after death. In Greek philosophy, Hades is a shadowy underworld where disembodied souls dwell. Gehenna was, in New Testament times, the garbage dump just outside of Jerusalem – the Valley of Hinnom where the city’s refuge was tossed along with the bodies of the many people Rome executed. There, the fire was never quenched and the worm never ceased. (It’s a nice public park today. There might be a sermon in that.)[1]
The concept of hell as a never-ending torture chamber is a mediaeval invention that got its strongest boost from Dante (born 1265), who described his version hell in vivid detail in his Inferno. By doing so, he was reawakening an ancient pagan concept unknown to either Judaism or Christianity. If that’s what we mean by “hell,” we need to cast it off. It is pagan.[2]
Moreover, the concept of disembodied souls that preëxisted this life and continue after death comes from Plato, not Christianity or Judaism. In fact, the Bible has very little to say about where a person is after death, and never implies preëxistence. God does not have baby souls lined up waiting for tiny bodies.
There are a handful of verses that give us hints. David said he would eventually go and be with his deceased son.[3]Paul speaks of it being far better (than this life) to go be with the Lord and says that to be absent from the body is to be present with Jesus.[4]Jesus says he is going to prepare a place for us so we can be with him[5], and told the thief dying next to him on the cross that he would be with him in Paradise that day.[6]Paradise may also be the “Abraham’s bosom” Jesus’ referred to in his parable of the rich man and Lazarus.[7]
It would seem that Paradise is equivalent to Hades/Sheol – an intermediary resting place between physical death and physical resurrection. It also appears that we will be conscious there. But that’s not the end game. The New Testament is primarily interested in resurrection – the physical, bodily resurrection that will take place when Jesus appears at his “second coming.” Scripture is not mainly concerned with where you go when you die, but rather, that we are faithfully following the teachings of the resurrected Christ now.
The emphasis of the Bible is on heaven coming to earth,[8]not on a few of us evacuating to heaven after we die. All of nature, the cosmos, creation, is being, and will ultimately be, redeemed, transformed, united with God.[9]The goal of redemption is not simply that a few of us get to go to heaven; it is the means by which God will “bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”[10]
Even many Christians, like their non-Christian neighbors, speak (especially at funerals) of being reunited with loved ones, as if a grand family reunion is the goal. When I was a hospice chaplain, I heard countless family members speak of “being in a better place,” “up there fishing with uncle George,” “with daddy,” or the like. The biblical goal is to be with Jesus, not mommy. The purpose of our lives is to be with Jesus right here, right now, following him, loving him serving him, and for that to continue into eternity as heaven and earth become one.
Jesus, and the authors of the New Testament, do, however, use metaphors to describe damnation.[11]The metaphors are mixed, which indicates that the authors and speakers are saying, “It’s kind of like this.” Those metaphors include: a lake of fire, outer darkness, being bound and tossed into the street by bouncers at a party, wailing, grinding ones teeth in anger, not being let into the house, and separated like sheep from goats. The very fact that so many metaphors are used tells us that we can’t take any one of them with wooden literalness. There’s no torture chamber in the belly of God’s castle.
Theologians have historically presented four views about hell.
- The literal view, held by some evangelical and most fundamentalist believers, sees hell as a literal, physical place that looks much like a huge lake made of fire, in which all people who reject Jesus will be physically tortured for all eternity. Most fundamentalists would even go a step further and say that only those who purposely and cognitively accept Christ will avoid hell.
- The metaphorical view also sees hell as eternal conscious suffering, but speculates that the suffering may be more mental than physical. This view sees hell as more of a state of mind or feeling, as opposed to a place.
- Christian universalists believe that hell is not permanent, and that God will eventually use his persuasive powers to convince everyone to come to him and be saved. Most mainline Protestant preachers and theologians, many Roman Catholic priests, and an increasing number of Calvinists (who speculate that God has elected everyone and will, either in time or in eternity, irresistibly draw them to himself) hold this view.
- Annihilationism is the belief that those who reject Christ will be annihilated at the final judgment. This view is increasing in popularity among evangelical believers.
In my opinion, we should set aside the first view. With so many different metaphors in play, it should be apparent that they couldn’t all be literal. Hell can’t literally be a lake of fire, outer darkness, and the town dump all at the same time.
The other three views have scriptural support. There are many universalist passages in the Bible. But, there are also passages that may indicate annihilation, as well as passages that seem to point toward eternal suffering or loss. To land on any one view almost requires ignoring or reinterpreting opposing scriptures.
I’d love to believe in universalism, but it seems to me that to do so is to negate human free will. Humans, if truly free, must, I think, have the capacity, tragic as it may be, to finally and permanently reject God. Besides, if universalism is true, it takes the air out of many of Jesus’ stern warnings.
Is it possible for personhood to cease existing? Perhaps. If so, Annihilationism – the belief that those who repeatedly, knowingly, purposely say a firm “no” to being children of God – may in fact be the end game.
Or, perhaps “hell” is something like what C. S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce– people rejecting God, refusing love, because of their self-centeredness and self-focus, resulting in them becoming disconnected from love and community, and thereby less than human.
It would seem that the best we can do is conclude that it is possible to permanently and finally reject God, the consequences of which will be dreadful.
If so, who “goes to hell?”
Not those who have never heard the gospel.
Not babies or children.
Not a bunch of people elected for damnation.
Not Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists
Not those who were in this life notoriously bad.
Not those who have never said a “sinner’s prayer,” responded to an altar call, or joined a church
Not those who do not adhere to the “right” set of doctrinal beliefs
Not those who have never been baptized this way or that.
Whatever “hell” is, it is reserved for those who trample Jesus under foot and despise the blood of Christ[12]– those who purposely, knowingly, consistently over a lifetime tell God to go away. Don’t do that.
[1]There is also one reference, in 2 Peter 2:4, to Tartarus, which, in Greek mythology is an abyss where the Titans are imprisoned.
[2]Side note: Dante’s Infernowas more of a political treatise than a theological work – he depicted people he knew and didn’t like in hell.
[3]2 Samuel 12:23
[4]Philippians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 5:8
[5]John 14:3
[6]Luke 23:43
[7]Luke 16:19-31
[8]Revelation 21 & 22
[9]2 Peter 3:13; Romans 8:19-21
[10]Ephesians 1:10
[11]A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object to which it is not literally applicable. Most of us prefer similes to metaphors. A simile would say, “she is like an angel;” whereas a metaphor leaves out the “like,” and would read, “She is an angel.” That sometimes confuses people unfamiliar with figures of speech.
[12]Hebrews 10:29
Paradigm Shifts
My good friend Fred Coolidge, professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, has done research in paleontological psychology and discovered that at some point in human history, toolmakers began decorating their tools. Not only were they making useful things, they began to care about how those things appeared. It was the beginning of art and signified a paradigm shift in human development.
Paradigm shifts have occurred throughout history.
They are often mentioned with regards to economics. The shifts from hunter-gatherers to agrarian farmers, from agrarian to industrialization, from industrialization to information, and now from information to artificial intelligence are familiar examples of cultural shifts that had profound impact on humanity and nature.
From a universal cosmic perspective, there have been three major paradigm shifts[1]:
- What is normally referred to as “the Big Bang” was the shift from nothing to something, from no matter or energy to the existence of matter and energy. That occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.
- Next, about 3.5 billion years ago, there was another paradigm shift from non-life to life. Living, reproducing cells began to appear and evolve by natural selection.
- Then, somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million years ago, ancestral humans became self-conscious, able to reflect about life.
None of these paradigm shifts can currently be explained by science, although speculative ideas abound.
We who are Christians need to be careful not to fall into the “God in the gaps” fallacy. The temptation is to plug God into anything we don’t currently understand. It is a logical fallacy because it is an argument from ignorance, assuming that God is the explanation for anything we don’t understand. Theologically, it presents a problem because as knowledge increases and fills in the gaps of knowledge, our “god” gets smaller and smaller. It is the basic problem with Intelligent Design.
Now, all Christians believe God exists and that God is intelligent and that God designed and brought about creation. But Intelligent Design (in capital letters as a title) refers to the pseudoscientific arguments of Charles Thaxton, A. E. Wilder-Smith, Michael Behe, and others, that attempt to prove the existence of God by reasoning that some things in nature are irreducibly complex and cannot be explained by evolutionary biology.
Like all God in the gaps theories, it suggests that God must have caused something currently unexplainable to science. Time and again, evolutionary processes have explained that which was presented as irreducibly complex. Moreover, ID doesn’t do much for Christians because, even if you could prove the existence of a divine intelligent being, you still would not have proven anything resembling the God revealed in Jesus.
The fact that we have three major cosmic paradigm shifts (from nothing to something, from something to life, and from life to consciousness) that cannot currently be explained by science does not prove that there must be a God. We don’t need to stick God in the gaps, nor should we fear that scientific inquiry might someday provide a rational explanation for how nothing became something, or how inanimate matter became living, or how beasts became human. It doesn’t change our faith one way or the other.
Once living things appear on the scene (about 3.5 billion years ago), the evidence is overwhelming from multiple independent fields of study that evolution by natural selection is taking place. The fact that the building blocks of life – the genetic codes written into the DNA – are essentially identical in all living organisms, is strong evidence for evolution.
That bothers some Christians. It contradicts a wooden literalistic reading of the opening chapters of Genesis. And, the evolutionary science is complex and difficult for non-scientists to understand. On top of that, we have fundamentalist preachers insisting that if we don’t read Genesis in literalistic simplicity, we have to throw away the Bible.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s no problem with the Bible. The problem is how we interpret the Bible.
The Bible is an amazing, God-breathed collection of 66 books filled with drama, poetry, sacred myth, folklore, biography, history, prose, parable, and apocalyptic genres. No one takes the Bible literally. No one believes God has wings like a chicken or that when we see Jesus He will look like a slaughtered lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. Without exception, every Bible passage leaps to life when we understand the context and genre.
We stand in awe of a God who created matter from nothing, life from non-life, and human beings with freewill from beasts. How God did it is interesting but not vital to faith.
[1]An interesting book on the subject is The Three Big Bangs by Philip Dauber and Richard Muller.
Divorce
Neither the fact that half of all marriages end in divorce, nor the fact that the percentage is higher among both people identifying as Christian and ordained Christian clergy changes the greater truth that divorce is tragic. Always. All the divorce recovery workshops and self-help books cannot whitewash the lasting psychological and emotional damage done to everyone involved, including the divorcing spouses, their extended families, their friends, those who look to them for leadership, and, most especially, their children. It is for that reason that God forbids divorce except in extreme circumstances such as physical abuse or abandonment. Far too many Christians twist the text to suit themselves. “Emotional abuse,” “not healthy for me or the kids,” “hindering my growth” – phrases that can mean anything or nothing. Marriage is a commitment. “For better or for worse.” The fact that God makes exceptions has been used to excuse all manner of selfishness.
I know, not only from decades of counseling Christians, but also because I did exactly that some 35+ years ago. Yes, God has, over time, healed me, healed those I hurt, and, as God always does, brought good out of the mess I made. Sadly, some people look at that and conclude that it won’t be so bad if they too ignore God and go their own way. Divine unconditional love becomes a rationalization, an alibi. But it is always, under all circumstances, far better to sacrifice self and what we think will produce personal happiness, fulfillment, and actualization for the greater glory of God. Precisely because God is love and loves us unconditionally, having created us in the divine image and redeemed us from the way of eternal destruction, God forbids only what is harmful to us. God does not make arbitrary rules.
God’s perfect will is ultimately what will bring us the most blessing and joy.
God’s perfect will is for us to stay married. Full stop.
+++++++
But maybe in your case it is too late.
If you come from a fractured family, you’re in good company. There is no record of Sarah or Isaac ever speaking to Abraham after Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. Abraham and his 30-something year-old son come down off the mountain – Abraham goes one way, Isaac another. Abraham lives in Beersheba. Sarah lives in Hebron. Were they estranged? Did they ever reconcile? Did Isaac lose faith in his father and Sarah in her husband? Sarah dies in Hebron. Abraham grieves, walks for 15 hours to get there, pays way too much for a piece of property, and buries her. He later remarries and has more children. Isaac has a rough marriage and repeats several of his dad’s notorious mistakes/sins.
From the book of Acts, we get the impression that Saul, the rabbi from Tarsus who later took the name Paul, was a member of the Sanhedrin Council voting for the stoning to death of the first Jesus-martyr. If so, he had to be married – all members of the Sanhedrin were married men. Yet, later, it is clear from his writings that he is not only not married, he prefers being single and recommends it to the general Christian public (unless they really need some sex). Was he a widow? Did he and his wife separate? Did she leave him?
And, of course, there’s the prophet Hosea in the Old Testament married to a prostitute who keeps cheating on him. He keeps taking her back.
God is good at bringing beauty out of ruinous ashes.
But that’s no reason to purposely burn the house down.
Ideas matter
Ideas matter. The ancient Greek Sophist Thrasymachus (c. 459 – c. 400 BC), an antagonist of Socrates, believed, according to Plato, that justice has no intrinsic worth, and that moral values are both socially constructed and subjective. His philosophy directly influencedFriedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche(1844-1900), who not only rejected the idea of intrinsic justice, but also emphasized that, in his view, might makes right, and the strong should rule over the weak. Nietzschecalled Jesus “the pale enemy.” Together, Thrasymachus and Nietzsche bore the fruit of 20thcentury nationalist movements, notably Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Third Reich (1933-1945), and fascism in Francisco Franco’s Spain (he ruled as dictator from 1939 to 1975) and in Bonito Mussolini’s Italy (ruled as dictator from 1922 to 1943).
An identical relativistic morality is evident today, not only in the President of the United States, but also in the deep hypocrisy of the conservative Roman Catholics and white evangelical Christians who wholeheartedly support him. This is a group that ruthlessly attacked Bill Clinton for sexual immorality, yet excuses Trump for far worse. Trump was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who very credibly alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son. Trump bragged he could “grab women by the pussy,” any time he wanted, and boasted of his multiple affairs.
But the Faustian Trump-Evangelical marriage is hypocritical in other, even more dangerous ways. Killing machines flanked and overflew Trump in front of the Lincoln Memorial as he made allusions to fictitious “enemies” – not Russia or North Korea, nor the Saudis who attacked the World Trade Center – no, to Trump and his allies, the “enemies” are refugees, immigrants fleeing violence and poverty, and the Democrats and liberals who support them.
This President has by far the most destructive record in history regarding the environment, air and water quality, and global warming. This President befriends and supports dictators, denigrates allies, mocks women in displays of blatant misogyny, and has a history of racist business practices. He, like Thrasymachus and Nietzsche believes might makes right, and that standards of law and ethics do not apply to him. His character, behavior, and government policies are diametrically opposite the teachings of Jesus. Yet, Christians cheer him on. Not this Christian.
