What the Hell?

What the Bible Really Says About Hell

By: Dr. Gregory S. Neal

Ask many Christians what happens to people who die without being “saved,” and the answer comes quickly: they go to Hell where God punishes them forever. Fire and brimstone, demons, terror and everlasting anguish, and torment beyond anything imaginable are all combined into a terrifying picture that’s become familiar to us. Indeed, it’s so familiar that questioning it can sound like questioning the Bible itself. There’s a problem, however, is that this is not a Biblical image.

Scripture certainly speaks about death, judgment, resurrection, punishment, destruction, and the ultimate defeat of evil. What it doesn’t give us is a consistent description of a “Hell” where humans are consciously tortured forever by a God who is so filled with wrath and hatred for their sin that their screams of anguish illicit laughter, not compassion.

In fact, several very different biblical ideas, as well as multiple concepts that come from outside the Bible, have been pulled together to make up what many mean by Hell. Understanding those differences changes the conversation considerably.

What Does the Bible Actually Say?

In most of the Hebrew Bible, the dead don’t go to Hell but to Sheol, the abode of the dead. Jacob expects to go there (Genesis 37:35), Job speaks of resting there (Job 3:13-19), and the Psalms describe it as a place of darkness and silence. Sheol is not primarily a place where wicked people are tortured, but where the righteous and the unrighteous alike go when they die.

Only relatively late in the Hebrew Scriptures do start encountering the concept of the resurrection of the dead, and of and different destinations for people after they die. Daniel 12:2 speaks about people dying and rising to everlasting life and others to shame and contempt. By the time of Jesus, Jewish thought contained a variety of developing beliefs about resurrection, judgment, and the world to come. Even then, there was no single universally accepted doctrine of Hell.

The New Testament uses several different terms that later English translations have sometimes blurred together. One is Hades, the Greek realm of the dead and the word that is usually used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to render the Hebrew word Sheol. Jesus refers to Hades in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, but this story is primarily a parable about wealth, indifference, judgment, and the refusal to heed the warnings of “Moses and the prophets.” It’s not necessarily intended as a literal depiction of the afterlife.

Another word is Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. The valley had terrible biblical associations with idolatry, child sacrifice, and prophetic judgment (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31-34). By Jesus’ time, Gehenna had become a powerful image of divine judgment and Jesus used it as an allusion to judgment; but that’s not the same thing as saying that Jesus clearly taught eternal conscious torment. Indeed, in Mark 9:43-48, Jesus speaks of Gehenna as being where “their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.” The imagery comes from Isaiah 66:24, where the objects of the fire and worms are dead corpses, not conscious people being tortured forever. In Matthew 10:28, Jesus says that God can “destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” The language is severe, but it is language of destruction or annihilation, not lingering torment.

In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus contrasts “eternal punishment” with “eternal life,” but that still doesn’t tell us exactly what the punishment consists of. It could be eternal conscious suffering, irreversible annihilation? We simply don’t know, and over the centuries different Christians have understood it in different ways.

The nature and tenure of the punishment aside, it’s worth noting what Jesus’ great judgment scene is actually about. The condemned are judged because they failed to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and care for the imprisoned. If we’re going to take Jesus’ teaching about judgment seriously, we should begin by taking seriously what he says people are being judged for. It’s not wrong belief or human sexuality, but not caring for those who have been marginalized in our society.

Revelation and the Lake of Fire

Revelation adds another powerful image: the “lake of fire.” However, here the imagery is clearly not literal. It comes to us through apocalyptic literature, filled with typologies, dragons, beasts, horns, symbolic numbers, cosmic warfare, and personified abstractions. We should be very cautious about treating the lake of fire as a literal place while interpreting almost everything around it symbolically.

Revelation itself calls the lake of fire “the second death” (Revelation 20:14; 21:8). Death and Hades are themselves thrown into it, and that should immediately tell us that this material must be taken symbolically. Death is not literally a being that can be picked up and thrown into a lake. The central point here is the ultimate defeat of everything that is opposed to God. Evil doesn’t win, and death isn’t victorious.

Revelation certainly contains frightening language about punishment and torment, but constructing a detailed doctrine of the eternal conscious torture of every lost human being from highly symbolic, metaphorical, typological, and apocalyptic imagery requires far more interpretation than is usually acknowledged.

The Hell We Inherited

Part of our problem is that the predominate cultural picture of Hell comes to us from far more than just the Bible. Indeed, a large portion of it comes to us from Dante’s Divine Comedy, particularly the Inferno. Dante didn’t invent Hell, but his narrative poetry gave centuries of Christians an extraordinarily vivid depiction of it, complete with descending layers of increasing horror, carefully measured punishments, demons, grotesque torments, and Satan reigning at its depths. It is undeniably brilliant literature, and while it drew some elements of its depiction from the Biblical world, much of it is sourced in Dante’s own imagination, literature, art, and the folk religion of his time. It’s not the Bible, and yet many people’s vision of Hell is draw more from Dante than from anything else.

Indeed, since it was published in 1321, large portions of the visual arts, music, and literature of the western world regarding hell have been heavily impacted by its imagery. So vivid and influential are its depictions that it managed to survive the iconoclastic tendencies of the Protestant Reformation, informing revivalist preaching, hymnody and contemporary music, modern films, and even non-religious popular culture down to today. As a result, what many people assume to be “the Christian vision of Hell” is actually a mixture of Dante’s Inferno, and interpretations based upon it, far more than anything found in the Bible.

Is Eternal Punishment Just?

There’s also a deeper theological problem with eternal conscious torment that many modern Christians find extremely difficult to reconcile with the character of God. Put simply, if punishment is to be just, it must bear some reasonable proportion to the offense. Modern legal systems recognize this instinctively in their rejection of “cruel and unusual punishment.” If proportionality matters in human systems of justice, how much more should we expect it to matter in the justice of God?

Human beings are finite. We live finite lives and commit finite sins within time. Some human acts are unspeakably evil and unquestionably deserve judgment. Rejecting eternal torment doesn’t require us to pretend that hideous cruelty, exploitation, abuse, murder, genocide, or oppression somehow don’t matter. But neither do they require God to be hideous and cruel in return.

Indeed, how can even the worst temporal evil justify an infinite punishment of unending torture? Imagine a person suffering consciously for a thousand years. Then a million. Then a billion. Then a trillion. At that point, whatever eternity is, it hasn’t even begun to be exhausted. The punishment continues without end. What principle of justice makes endless punishment of horrendous proportionate to a finite offense?

More importantly, how does such a picture correspond to the God Christians say has been revealed to us in in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ? The God revealed in Christ enters into human suffering, searches for the lost, forgives enemies, heals the suffering, feeds the hungry, commands us to love those who hate us, and overcomes violence through self-giving sacrificial love. I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that this same God would deliberately preserve human beings eternally for the sole purpose of subjecting them to unending suffering and everlasting horrendous torment.

An infinite punishment for finite sins isn’t perfect justice; it’s punishment without proportion and is lacking God’s mercy and grace. It seems to reflect far more of humanity’s own capacity for cruelty and vengeance than the character of the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

Other Christian Understandings

It needs to be clearly stated that Christianity has never had only one way of interpreting any of the Biblical texts or cultural and artistic depictions of hell. One of the traditional Western positions is eternal conscious torment: those finally separated from God remain conscious and experience punishment forever. There are, however, other positions on the subject that are witnessed to by multiple interpreters across the centuries.

One of these approaches is usually called conditional immortality or annihilationism. The two terms aren’t precisely identical, but they’re closely related. Conditional immortality holds that human beings aren’t inherently immortal; eternal life is a gift of God. Annihilationism draws the further conclusion that those who finally reject God face judgment and ultimately cease to exist. Their punishment is eternal in its consequence because death is final, not because suffering continues forever.

This isn’t simply a modern attempt to escape an uncomfortable doctrine. Elements of conditional immortality can be found surprisingly early in Christian history. Justin Martyr and Irenaeus both rejected the idea that immortality belongs inherently to the human soul, while Arnobius of Sicca, writing in the early fourth century, explicitly described the final destruction of the wicked. In more recent centuries, the position has been defended by Christian thinkers including Henry Constable, Edward White, John Wenham, Edward Fudge, Clark Pinnock, and, more influential Anglican theologian John Stott.

Advocates point especially to the Bible’s repeated language of death, destruction, perishing, consuming fire, and Revelation’s “second death.” From this perspective, eternal punishment is real and irreversible, but it doesn’t require the eternal preservation of human beings for the purpose of continuing their suffering forever.

Another view is universal reconciliation. Christians who hold this position don’t necessarily deny judgment, punishment, or even the possibility of suffering after death. Rather, they understand divine judgment as ultimately corrective, purifying, and restorative. God’s purpose in judgment is not simply to inflict suffering upon the sinner, but to overcome sin itself and finally reconcile creation to God.

Universal reconciliation therefore makes a distinction between punishment that is eternal and punishment that serves an eternal purpose. Judgment may be severe, but it’s not endless. Evil is ultimately destroyed not by eternally preserving sinners in their rebellion and suffering, but by bringing them finally to repentance, healing, and reconciliation.

Advocates emphasize biblical texts that speak with striking universality about God’s saving purpose: God reconciling “all things” through Christ (Colossians 1:19-20), all being made alive in Christ (1 Corinthians 15:22), every knee bowing and every tongue confessing Christ (Philippians 2:10-11), and God ultimately becoming “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). They also point to the repeated New Testament teaching that God desires the salvation of all people (1 Timothy 2:4) and ask whether God’s redemptive purposes can finally be defeated forever by human sin.

This view also has deep roots in Christian history. Among those who have taught some form of universal reconciliation are: Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Isaac the Syrian. In the modern era, Jürgen Moltmann and David Bentley Hart are among its strongest proponents.

So, Do I Believe in Hell?

If by Hell we mean a place in which God eternally preserves human beings so they can experience conscious torture without end, then no. I do not. That doesn’t mean I reject judgment. I believe evil must be addressed, and that its consequences are unavoidable. What we do to one another matters. Injustice matters. Cruelty matters. The biblical hope is not that God ignores evil, but that God already has victory over it in Jesus Christ.

What I reject is the assumption that defeating evil requires God to perpetuate human suffering forever. The Bible gives us many images of judgment, including death, destruction, fire, darkness, exclusion, Gehenna, Hades, and the lake of fire. Those images should be taken seriously, but combining them into a literal chamber of horrors where everlasting torture is not reflective of the God we have come to know through Jesus Christ. There is much about the life to come that Scripture leaves in mystery, and I’m comfortable with that mystery.  What I am not comfortable doing is turning that mystery into a weapon of terror. God alone is judge, and if the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reveal anything about the God who holds eternity, it’s that grace is greater than we can ever imagine, mercy reaches farther than we could ever expect, and love will always have the final word.

To view the Inclusive Faith Podcast episode on YouTube: What the Hell?