Is Hell Real?
Challenging Traditions
Eschatology is not simply the purview of Christianity. Almost every religion has some concept of judgment in an afterlife; even Buddhism has a multilayered hell, which while not eternal, the lowest levels are nonetheless said to persist for incredibly long periods of time, from billions to quintillions of years. But hell is not a problem just for the religious. That is to say that beliefs have real world effects: both for the believer (and those they impact) and the one who does not hold that belief. Oftentimes, our beliefs have led us to make a hell on earth. Even those who think they are above such medieval fairytales should take pause as they are likely not as over it as they think they are. Many of those who say they have moved past the concept of hell are just as quick to endorse a conception of justice and punishment that underpins the notion of hell, or to feel a sense of righteousness when others ‘get what they deserve’. In fact no one, not even the most peace-and-love, kale-smoothie drinking vegan, is really beyond this. The desire for retribution, for revenge, for judgment, lives in us, and all the more so in society.
When the judge sentenced Nassar for the sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and girl gymnasts under the guise of medical treatment, she told him that if the Constitution did not forbid cruel and unusual punishment, she “would allow some or many people to do to him what he did to others.” This “revenge-rape fantasy” as one LA Times writer described the judge’s comments, is often a running joke in relation to US prisons. (Contrast this with the way Norway treated Breivik who killed 77 people, many of whom children, in Norway’s deadliest terrorist attack. Or much better yet, contrast this with how the Amish community responded to a school shooting that killed 10 young schoolgirls. A grandfather of one of the girls on the afternoon after the killing expressed his forgiveness towards the killer. After they buried their own daughters, many families went to the funeral of the killer and hugged his widow, and later on donated money to her and her three young kids.) We live in a world where there are about 11.5 million human beings in cages, with the US holding the title of having the most prisoners of any country (although, granted, China is more than likely fudging their numbers), but nevertheless, the US incarceration rates are certainly higher than either that of China or even Russia, and one of the highest in the world. And the number of incarcerated has been massively increasing.
In one way, this concept of hell is deeply intertwined with our sense of judgment, which at one time at least was arguably necessary for civilization to flourish, though must by now hopefully be nearing its expiry date. But in another way, our culture is saturated with this concept of hell; it lurks in our unconscious, in our archetypal structures, ready to play on our insecurities and fears, and we do not know how far down this fiery imagery goes.
The Evolution of Hell
The history of Christianity is one of continual evolution and renewal, more so perhaps than any other religion. And one of its central tenets that has been the cause of both an internal struggle as well as a stumbling block to many would-be believers is its notion of hell. It is particularly abrasive because it seems so out of character with the rest of the message. Hell has traditionally been conceptualized as a final place of eternal, inescapable, conscious torment reserved for unrepentant sinners. (For Catholics, this place is a complete separation from God; for the Eastern Orthodox, there is no separation from God, rather, God’s presence is experienced as torment for the unrighteous.) I say traditionally, but I think two things are necessary to point out. Firstly, in the Old Testament, this conception of hell is absent. The place people went after death was Sheol — the grave or the unseen world of the dead, often corresponding with the idea of sleep. The concept of a place of torment after death (or after the resurrection) or an eternal hell appears to have first found its way into Jewish apocryphal writings around the first century BC, influenced by Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic cultures, particularly Zoroastrianism’s conceptions of a heaven and hell and the Greek concept of Hades. The words translated as “hell” in the Bible are Sheol, Hades, or Gehenna (and in some translations, one use of the word Tartarus, from Greek mythology), the latter of which is a reference to the Valley of Hinnom where the Israelites had once sacrificed babies to Moloch and which was then later condemned and likely used as a trash dump, particularly for the burning of the bodies of criminals — which then became associated in Jewish apocalyptic literature with divine retribution and as the final destination of the wicked. Gehenna is used 12 times in the New Testament, but it is important to note that utilizing a concept known to the audience, often for means of analogy is not the same as endorsing the concept as an actual reality.
In the early Hebrew texts, the dead (both the just and the unjust) are to reside in the shadowy Sheol, depicted in the Psalms as a place of darkness and silence. There is no clear concept of a future resurrection or a day of judgment, but there are glimpses of this hope that this sleep of death is not the end, the most prominent of which comes to us from the (equally paradoxical) Book of Job: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes — I, and not another.” During the Second Temple period, again partly also influenced by Persian and Hellenistic ideas, Jewish thought began to introduce notions of a bodily resurrection and a final Day of Judgment. In the Book of Daniel, at the end of days, those “who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” By the time of Christ, at least two distinct beliefs in the afterlife had formed: the Pharisees endorsed resurrection and judgment, envisioning a paradise for the righteous and Gehenna for the wicked, while the Sadducees denied an afterlife entirely.
Though it is likely many of the writers of the New Testament had at least some conception of a final Day of Judgment, this being line with the evolution in Jewish thought about the afterlife, it is also likely that some of them, particularly John and Paul, did not believe in this ‘traditional’ concept of hell. For John (and similarly with Paul) “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life”.
Secondly, even as far back as the early church fathers, eternal torment as the final fate of unbelievers was not by any means a universal view. Arriving at these positions seemingly with equally valid exegesis, there were those who held to Annihilationist or Universalist conceptions (traditions which continue to this day among different denominations). Annihilationism is the view that the wicked will ultimately be destroyed rather than suffer eternally. The scriptural support for this is found in numerous places beginning in Genesis where death enters the world because of eating from the forbidden tree, and continues to the Pauline epistles where the “wages of sin is death” (not eternal torment). The early church fathers associated with this view include Ignatius, Irenaeus (who argued against the Neoplatonian concept of the soul as a simple substance that is inherently immortal), and Arnobius, who wrote of “annihilation” as the last end of the unredeemed. Conversely, Universalism is the view that ultimately all souls will be reconciled to God. This view is most in line with a thematic or holistic reading of the texts as a narrative that starts with a fall from grace and ends in reconciliation. The scriptural support for this view appeals to the magnanimity of God, who is “not willing that any should perish” and who “desires all people to be saved”. The early church fathers who shared this hope include Origen, who wrote of the “salvation of all”, and Gregory of Nyssa, for whom even the Devil will be saved. Clement of Alexandria — Origen’s teacher — was arguably a Universalist as well. In fact, according to the 1908 Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, of the six theological schools of early Christianity, four taught Universalism, one taught conditional immortality (or Annihilationism), and only the Roman one taught “endless punishment of the wicked”. Nevertheless, the concept of hell and eternal torment ended up becoming solidified as the prevailing view in what was to become the Roman Catholic Church, due in large part to the influence of Tertullian, and later, St. Augustine (himself greatly influenced by Neo-Platonism).
“For everyone shall be salted with fire”
Leaving aside potential political or expedient motivations for incorporating this view of hell in their theology, it is nonetheless easy to see how this view could have taken hold with an audience that read apocalyptic writing as literal. The Book of Daniel is an early example of this apocalyptic style. Yet here, most understand the different beasts, for instance, as metaphors for world powers (as Daniel helps to spell it out). The Book of Revelation — following in the same apocalyptic style that had become increasingly popular — talks of a lake of fire, that, quite different to the case with Daniel’s beasts, is often taken as a literal lake of fire. To back up for a moment, it is true that one could make the claim of eternal torment even without Revelation, but we must take into account that when Jesus refers to Gehenna, as he is recorded as doing in the Gospel of Matthew, he is already referencing a notion that was mixed in with apocalyptic symbolism, and he often does so with the use of additional hyperbolic language. It is unlikely that anyone would go away from one such sermon and, finding that their hand had committed some offence, go and physically cut it off in order to not get their whole body thrown into Gehenna. In fact, Jesus quite often spoke in parables, which tended to confuse the people listening, sometimes including his own disciples. One reason for this is given by Jesus to his disciples when he is recorded as saying that he does it on purpose because it is not for others to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.
There is a particular parable in the Gospel of Luke of the rich man and Lazarus that is often taken as a literal description of hell. Here, the rich man is in conscious, inescapable torment in Hades. But this was already a well-known trope, as we can see from the Egyptian story of Setme and Si-Osiris and other Jewish stories of that time that have a rich and poor man whose roles are reversed in the afterlife. But Jesus adds a twist. He is obviously comparing the rich man to the Jewish leaders in saying that even if one rose from the dead they wouldn’t believe. He had previously said of these religious leaders that they have taken away the “key of knowledge” and have hindered others from entering the kingdom of heaven. (In Matthew, this phrase “key of knowledge” is recorded as “kingdom of heaven”). These same leaders he calls the sons of Gehenna (“sons of hell”), and says that “tax-collectors and prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of God ahead of you”, indicating that they still will eventually make it. In Luke, after telling these leaders that there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” when they see others in the kingdom but themselves shut out — a phrase often used in concert with the concept of hell) — Jesus is then recorded as saying that the first will be last and the last will be first, again indicating that they will eventually make their way in to this kingdom of heaven, whatever this might be. As mentioned before, it is a bit of a jump to assume that metaphors and analogies using common tropes, especially as an indictment of the legalism of religious leaders, were intended to be understood as literally true for the individual.
Returning back to Revelation, this book of paradoxes found its way into the Bible only after considerable controversy and mainly due to the insistence of a certain Bishop, Athanasius, just barely making it into the lineup we have nowadays, but beating out other ‘revelations’ such as the Revelation of Peter. It is said to be written by a man named John after witnessing the destruction of the Jewish temple and the suppression of the Jewish rebellion (most scholars agree this was not John the Apostle but a John of Patmos). It is written in the apocalyptic style well-known in ancient Judaism, marked by esotericism and symbolic imagery. But in addition to this apocalyptic writing style with all its hyperbolism, an additional problem is with the translations and the modern connotations of the words that may not be coming across as they were intended. The Greek words for “everlasting punishment” (αἰώνιος: agelong; kόλασιν: pruning as one of its meanings), appear in one translation as “an age-lasting correction”. There is a similar issue with the words translated as “forever”. It is said that “forever” is used over 50 times in the Bible to describe things that have already ended. Then we have the word translated “tortured” or “tormented” coming from the Greek “basanizo” which also has the meaning of a touchstone, used to test the purity of metals. Jesus is often quoted as saying the phrase “hell fire”, which may be an inspiration for the fiery imagery of Revelation, and yet in that same chapter it says “For everyone shall all be salted with fire.” Quite clearly, whatever this fire is, it comes for everyone. It seems the test and correction motif could be a more accurate reading of the fire imagery rather than that of eternal punishment.
“For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”
Yet, even after working through the literary style and translations, there remains the issue of the overall character of the Book of Revelation. Even though it is as much about hope as it is about vengeance and judgment, one cannot ignore that parts of Revelation seem to be completely out of place with many parts of the New Testament, particularly with its depictions of a vengeful God who exacts his wrath upon the world (something more in common with the God of the Old Testament). The Lamb of Revelation is worlds apart from the Jesus of the Apostle John, as are their depictions of God, described in First John not simply as a God of love or a God who has love as one of its attributes, but as Love itself. To the Annihilationists and Universalists, this dissonance is irreconcilable: that a God who is called love and who is said to have loved the world so much that he sacrificed his own son, would yet maintain a realm where souls are “tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb” and where the “smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever”.
Some say that God, in addition to being all-loving, is also perfect justice and therefore requires either the ultimate blood sacrifice or the eternal punishment of the sinner, and the evidence for this is God sacrificing his son (to himself). But God does not need a scapegoat, we do. We can read this process of reconciliation not in the archaic way as a wrathful God being appeased, but as consciousness letting go of judgment that had created an illusion of alienation (as Adam and Eve in the garden who made clothes to hide themselves from God). Others, though, defend hell as a just and righteous punishment for wrongdoers. It is only fair for the wicked to be judged, they might say. But (and though this retributive justice is one of the most deeply rooted ideas that is the hardest to give up), even by our own human standards, there is no evil in the world that would warrant someone an eternity of hell fire (and surely not the ‘evil’ of not believing in the right religion).
Still others try to lessen God’s culpability by saying God does not send anyone to hell nor wishes anyone to be there, but that hell is simply the absence or separation from God that people by their own free will enter into by rejecting a relationship with him; and because God does not want to act against their free will, he does not stop them from making decisions that will lead them to ultimate isolation. Now, besides the problem of how could there by a realm outside God if all things exist in God, the main issue with this is that even by our human standards, if someone is drunk or having a psychotic break, we would act against their free will (to not let them drive for instance) on the principle that the sober or mentally stable version of themselves would want us to help them. If hell is truly both unbearable and inescapable (and not like some interpretations that say sinners would be happier in hell than in heaven), then truly no one would wish to be there, if only they could understand. The free-will defense does not hold up. Why would ignorance or delusion or anything else about humanity be incurable for God? –The same God who would leave the 99 to go out and find the 1 who was lost.
But leaving aside these theodicies of hell, we ought to return to a major theme in the New Testament, that of the continuous indictment of the legalism or literalism of the Jewish leaders who followed the letter of the law but not the spirit of it. Jesus reproaches them for being unable to recognize him as the prophesied messiah. But in their defense, there is an actual passage in Deuteronomy that says if a prophet comes and talks of another God, even if he does miracles, that he should be put to death. Here comes Jesus doing miracles but then making himself an equal to God; If that did not meet the conditions of blasphemy, nothing else would’ve. It seems only reasonable then that a properly educated Jew should have called for his execution. Paul understands this, having himself been caught up in the legalism that drove him to persecute Christians before his conversion experience, and that is why he writes of a “new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
There is another example of this, that of the inquisition of the Catholic Church. For inquisitors such as the Dominican friar Bernardus Guidonis, It was right and noble that the heretic’s body be physically tortured in order that their soul might be saved from eternal damnation. He was not wrong. If it is literally true that there is an eternal, inescapable hell reserved for those who do not believe the correct belief, then the kind thing to do is to stop at nothing, even to go as far as the most twisted torture, in order that they might be convinced otherwise. (Leaving aside the fact that torture doesn’t seem to be that great a way of truly convincing anyone of anything — except, of course, in the successful ‘deprogramming’ of Winston by the Ministry of Love in 1984.) But the irony of it all must have given Bernardus pause. They helped create a hell on earth out of a fear of a hell hereafter. Perhaps then it is appropriate that Revelation comes after the writings of John. If you do not accept a God of love (and only love), and by so doing find your name written in the Book of life, you will be condemned to accept a god of fear and vengeance, which invariably ends up with the ushering in of hell on earth. For the Apostle John, fear and torment are incompatible with love, and since God is love, are incompatible with God. He goes on to speak about having “boldness in the Day of Judgment”, because “There is no fear in love”.
“Judge not, lest ye be judged”
A reasonable exegesis of the New Testament does not make it entirely clear what the writers precisely believed or what Jesus precisely taught about the Day of Judgment and the fate of those not found in the Book of Life, nor even is there a clear consensus on how one can ensure that their name is included in the Book of Life. This issue of salvation is the biggest and most fundamental difference between the Catholics, who believe in faith and works, and the Protestants, who believe in salvation through faith alone. This goes back to the original authors where the disagreement is plainly laid out. Paul says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Contradicting him, James says, “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” Jesus is recorded as telling the thief on the cross that that thief will join him that day in paradise, but Jesus is also recorded as saying that “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” The prevailing theme of the New Testament is that salvation centers on a belief (rather than some behavior or action). Paul, when asked by the jailer how he might be saved, replies “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved — you and your household.” But leaving aside what it means to be saved, what are we to understand of the unsaved? What about this concept of the Judgment Day?
God presiding over the Day of Judgment plays a pivotal role in the concepts of heaven and hell. Judgment is what separates the good from the bad, the saved from the unsaved. Although, and especially in the writings of Paul, grace and salvation play a much more central role than judgment, we must still contend with this notion of judgment, for it is what condemns those unbelievers to hell. Without judgment, there can be no hell. But here is something incredibly interesting: God doesn’t judge the world. Who is to be the judge then? “For the Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment unto the Son”. If Jesus is to be the judge, what kind of judge might he be? He is recorded as telling the crowd readying to stone the prostitute that whoever is without sin should cast the first stone. None did. When they were crucifying him, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” But interestingly enough, Jesus tells the Pharisees: “You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one.” What? Who then is going to judge? Paul says, “Do you not know that we will judge angels? … Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?” Paul also says that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”. But in this case, seeing that God removes himself from judgment, how much more fearful would it be to fall into the hands of a pious religious person who has taken on themselves the task of judging the world and who is convinced of the necessity of hell? What if it is we who judge ourselves? This seems to be the message that Jesus gives in Matthew: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”
But then why not just come out and say it, why suspend us in all this uncertainty, why terrify us with images of Gehenna and lakes of fire? Perhaps there is a purpose to the frightful imagery, much like the Divine Ones who wear scary masks in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The goal is not judgment and fear. The goal is to birth something new in us. The goal is to find someone who can sit without turning from the frightful view, one who does not give in to fear but who can see past it; and who by sitting in midst of the fire can birth a new hope. Hell on earth can be definitely real, even without the machinations of man. Nature can be hellish; it can chew you up and spit you out, but not before driving you to procreate to continue the cycle over again. But the hope has always been to transform the world. Without this hope, it is all just “vanity and vexation of spirit” as Solomon says. In fact, heaven is supposed to be this very world transformed. We don’t go to heaven, heaven comes to us. It is with hope that the new world comes. And love is the completion of hope, for love is what hope hopes for. Hope shines the brightest in the face of hopelessness. Love comes most alive in the face of insurmountable fear. In this, a new motif enters consciousness: a love that saves the world. And the mystery of fire reveals itself as a hero’s journey: the fire is not there to consume us; it does not come to judge the world; it is just a test.
Fear is the great instigator. But there is a purpose to fear. In fact, there cannot be a hero’s journey without a sufficient amount of fear. But the end goal of fear has always been to transcend it, not to reify it, not to make it into an absolute, into a god. Solomon says “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. But it’s certainly not the end. It ends in love. As John says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.” And what greater love is there than being willing to brave the fear of the unknown for another? What if the saints, like Jesus did, refuse to judge? This might be the greatest apocalypse of all: the saints laying down their own lives to stand before the fire of destruction, holding their unrepentant, unsaved children; to willingly brave the fire, so that others might be spared; to willingly lose their life, just like Jesus did, in order to gain not only theirs but the lives of all of us.
A Pascalian Wager
It is interesting that the vast majority of those that subscribe to a belief in hell live as if they don’t truly believe in hell. We can see this in their celebration of marriage and children. No one could in good conscience procreate; no one could bring a life into this world if there was even a fraction of a possibility that this conscious life could end up finding itself being tortured for all eternity. Of course, one could be feared into having children —they could be told that it is their duty to procreate and if they do not, they might find themselves in danger of hell fire. But even if that were the case for some of them, God, being God, has no such requirements. If man would refuse in principle to create a life if there was any chance this life would spend eternity in hell, then so much more would God not create. And given that God sees the beginning and the end, why would he create something if he knows their end is to be tortured for all eternity? Therefore, if there is a God of Love, that we exist at all, should be all the evidence needed that whatever this story is, it ends well, for all of us.
Pascal had a wager: even though a belief in God couldn’t be arrived at through a purely rational means, nevertheless, the rational choice would still be to believe in God, as the cost for not believing in a God if he turns out to exist would be eternal hell, which is a magnitude of orders higher than the cost of believing in God (forgoing some pleasures). But what if we had a different wager? What if we instead transmuted this concept of hell from that of a final destination of eternal torment for the unbelieving sinner, to that of a hero’s journey of liberating oneself (and others) from the ‘sin’ of ignorance? If you let go of the hellish idea of hell, and it turns out that hell is simply a metaphor for what happens on earth, you win (for you will have avoided helping to create hell on earth). If it turns out that hell is just something we condemn ourselves to, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, you also win (for you are no longer condemned). If it turns out that hell is a test, to see if you will choose fear or love, you win, for you will have passed it with flying colors. And even if it turns out that hell is literal and literally real, a belief in hell is anyway not a condition for salvation, so you still win by avoiding a life overshadowed by the specter of hell.
Of course, one might say that even if this wager befits the individual who is already a believer, yet if we do not assist in perpetuating the threat of hell, others might not be persuaded to believe in the first place (or the believer themselves might backslide), and if hell is literally real (and salvation could be abandoned) then that would be a net loss. Now, leaving aside what value a belief might have if its sole motivation is that of an avoidance of punishment (for it could be that even if a belief starts off improperly, it may grow into true belief), and assuming this were the case — that hell is literally real — how many more might be persuaded by a religion that gave up fear in exchange for love? And so it is a win again! (And even for that believer whose belief still remains predicated on a fear of punishment, it is unlikely that such a person would take this wager anyway).
Alternatively, a believing pragmatist might say that even if hell is not real, it is still useful for gaining converts to a worldview which is itself a net positive, in that the temporary and earthly mental anguish allows for the progress of civilization. Or in another way, we must pretend that hell is real, even to ourselves, in order that we might be motivated to evolve and grow and change our ways in order to assist civilization in its progression. Or in another way still, endorsing a belief in hell despite it not being real might be beneficial to the progress of consciousness, and abandoning hell might be akin to cutting the cocoon before the butterfly has emerged — removing a temporary suffering that yet condemns it to a life without flight. To these considerations we could reply that the age of fear and judgment is coming to an end. The software is being updated.
Heaven Birthed, in the Fires of Hell
There was once a Sufi mystic who went around with a torch and a bucket of water, with which things she said she would “set fire to Heaven and put out the flames of Hell so that voyagers to God can rip the veils and see the real goal”. From the Old Testament to the New, the human story culminates in the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb” and where there “shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying” (as it says in both Isaiah and Revelation). This new “kingdom which shall never be destroyed”, while it might be actualized in an earth-shattering re-creation where the “elements shall melt with fervent heat”, nevertheless starts out small, like a tiny seed that grows into a mighty tree (as the parable goes). Its arrival does not come with “observation … For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.” But in order to see and experience this kingdom, one must be “born again”. This new creation runs a new kind of software (both for the individual and for society). No longer is the schema one of punishment and reward, or of shame and guilt and atonement, or of rules and regulations, but one of relationship. “A new commandment I give unto you: that ye love one another”. This kingdom of God is a kingdom of love, for “every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God … for God is love.” This same God “who wills everyone to be saved.” As the prayer of the faithful goes: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And to say this prayer is to every time espouse a hope in Universalism.
There is a fire that guards the way to Eden; that guards the way to the tree of life. To get to this new world, we all must pass through it. The mystery of heaven is that it is birthed in the fires of hell. And we are all in this together. So long as one soul remains condemned in hell, how could any of us be saved?
