Is Hell a place where demons stick pitchforks into writhing bodies? Is it a place where the unsaved suffer eternally, while the saved look on and enjoy watching their pain? Both of these have been popular images of Hell. What do people believe today about the fate of the wicked? What should we believe?
This question matters, because it raises two important issues.
So I am am aiming to present an understanding of Hell that is faithful to the Bible, that upholds God's goodness in ways people can understand, and that people today can seriously believe and respond to. This article does not look at the questions of who will go to Hell and why - I have covered these areas in reasonable detail elsewhere.
I have held back from dealing with this subject for a long time. There are various questions concerning what happens after death and when. The Bible does not seem too clear about some of these questions - especially about the timing of various things. I do not wish to be dogmatic about these areas. However, we are told a great deal about other aspects, and in particular we are told about the fate of the wicked, so let us concentrate on what we have been told.
Before we jump into the details and start to chop up individual texts, I would like to establish a few basic points that do not depend on individual texts. Any discussion of this area will be confused or mistaken unless we get the context right - unless our 'big picture' is a Biblical one.
In mainstream evangelical thought, the dominant teaching about Hell (when we are taught anything at all!) is that it is a place where the unsaved suffer eternal, deliberate and conscious torment.
We should note that there has always been a strong opposition to this position, and many respected (I have heard them described as 'otherwise sound'!) church leaders have not held this position. For centuries, teaching about this area was controlled very carefully because of the social implications - but that is not what this article is about.
To make my position clear from the outset, I consider the traditional position to be possible but not probable. In other words, you can support this position from the Bible, but it is not the most obvious conclusion to reach once you have considered all the Bible's teaching on the subject.
I do not want to be dogmatic on this point, but it seems to me the weight of evidence in the Bible suggests that people who do not go to Heaven will cease to exist. The usual theological term for this idea is 'conditional immortality'.
We live in a world which is dominated by Greek thought, and we do not always appreciate the extent to which some of our basic assumptions contradict the Hebrew world view.
After all, Christianity (if it is true!) is the fulfilment of Jewish belief - we believe that God has revealed more than He revealed in the Old Testament, but it is the same God and the same truth. Nothing in the New Testament suggests that the Jews were wrong and the Greeks had been getting it right after all.
One of the key differences between Greek and Hebrew thought lies in their understanding of the soul. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul - when the body dies, the soul is freed from its earthly prison. In Hebrew thought, the soul is the life of the living body - without the physical body, it cannot exist.
The doctrine that souls could be tormented for all eternity - or even for a shorter time - just does not exist in Jewish thought. You can't torment disembodied souls - you can't do anything to them!
The 'traditional' evangelical position only makes sense if you adopt the Greek view that each person's soul will continue to exist for all eternity - that souls are, by nature, indestructible - and therefore the souls of the damned must be somewhere and experiencing something.
The Hebrew view - shared by the writers of the New Testament, of course - is that Human souls are not, by nature, immortal. Immortality is an attribute of God, not of man. God, and God alone, is immortal (1 Timothy 6:16). This clearly does not mean that we cannot inherit immortality, but it would make very little sense if all human beings are and always have been immortal.
If there is any doubt about this, the story of the fall makes clear the distinction between the Biblical (Hebrew) view of the soul and the Greek one. Mankind is mortal - he will not live for ever - and to ensure that this remains the situation, mankind is banished from the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:22-24).
Much of our understanding is clouded because, when we read our Bibles, we have in our minds Greek concepts and expectations, not Hebrew ones. Jesus and the early Christians were all firmly rooted in Hebrew thought. While some of the New Testament writers - Paul is a good example - could use Greek ideas when they were helpful, they were always working from a Hebrew background and mindset.
I should point out that while there is a reasonable amount of controversial material in this article, the point I am making about the difference between the Greek and Hebrew views of human life is, as far as I know, fully accepted by all reputable scholars - even if the implications are not widely understood. One nice summary puts it this way: "Christianity takes from Judaism the realistic recognition that man is an animated body and not an incarnated soul" (John Polkinghorne, The way the World Is, page 92).
When we switch from a Greek to a Hebrew understanding of the soul, many of the Biblical passages about the afterlife suddenly take on a very different meaning.
We should note at the outset that the hope we are offered in the New Testament is repeatedly described as 'life ' or 'eternal life'. You don't need me to quote chapter and verse for all the references here!
But if God is offering us the hope of eternal life, this only makes sense if we do not already have it! People who believe in eternal torment seem to be saying to the unsaved that they already have eternal life - the problem is that they will spend it in the wrong place.
At this point, the response is generally that I do not understand what is meant by 'life' in the New Testament - it is much more than simply living, and refers to a tremendous quality of life. I am sure I do not understand all that is meant by the word 'life' in the New Testament. It certainly does include the idea of quality as well as quantity of life. But this objection completely misses the point.
'Life' may (in many passages) mean much more than just existing, but 'death' must surely mean no more suffering. You may well suffer as you die, but once you are dead, you feel neither pleasure nor pain. The response comes back to me from the believers in a traditional Hell: they claim that I am using 'human reasoning' at this point - it makes sense, but it is not what the Bible teaches. Sadly, they fail to go on and show me where the Bible teaches that ordinary human beings can be dead and feel either pleasure or pain.
More importantly, I find it hard to believe that Jesus did such a poor job of choosing His words and explaining what they meant. If He wanted to teach the difference between eternal bliss and eternal torment, he should really have offered us 'pleasure' rather than 'life'.
There are many passages in the New Testament that tell us about 'life' and 'eternal life'. Is there a single passage that qualifies the meaning of 'life', to turn it into something that will fit the doctrine of eternal torment? A single passage which explains we are not supposed to understand 'life' to mean what it ordinarily, obviously means, and explains that it really means something radically different when the New Testament writers use the term? Not one.
Take the best known verse in the Bible, for example.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16)
This seems to be pretty clear. If you believe in Jesus, you will gain something you did not have before - you will gain eternal life. The alternative, if you do not believe in Jesus, is that you will perish - die, be destroyed.
What Jesus should have said, if eternal torment were true, should have been "... whoever believes in him shall not have eternal life in torment, but have eternal pleasure in paradise instead." Or am I missing something?
Of course, there is a well-known passage that explains exactly what Jesus means when He talks about eternal life. When Jesus is praying in John 17, He says: "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent" (John 17:3). What is eternal life, according to Jesus? It is to know God. It is not to be rescued from the flames, it is not to avoid eternal torment. It is to know God, to know Him personally, to be in a relationship with Him. It sounds good to me.
Was Jesus really that bad a communicator? The doctrine of eternal torment turns John 3:16 completely on its head. In this verse, Jesus says He offers us eternal life as an alternative to perishing; but (if this doctrine is true!) what he really intended to say is that we don't need to be given eternal life because we already have it, and we don't need to worry about perishing because we can't.
I refuse to distort Jesus' clear teaching in this way - especially not if I can understand His words in their natural, obvious sense and remain faithful to the rest of the Bible's teaching at the same time.
The New Testament is pretty clear on this subject - eternal life is something we do not naturally and automatically have as human beings: it is something given to us by God when we believe in Jesus Christ. We do not have an immortal soul when we are born, but we can be given one.
(We can now come back to the theology for one moment: the difference between 'conditional immortality' and 'annihilationism' is that the former assumes the Hebrew understanding that the human soul can become immortal, while the latter assumes the Greek understanding that the human soul is in essence immortal, and it takes a deliberate act of God to take this immortality away.)
(Another side track... I think we have to be very careful in talking about the state of Adam and Eve before the fall. In a sense, they were immortal, in that they were neither dying nor destined to die. But they were not immortal either in the way that God is by nature or in the way that we inherit. Unfortunately, the best description I can think of to describe their state is 'conditional immortality' - but it is almost the opposite of the conditional immortality we have been talking about. For us, we can gain immortality if we believe in Jesus; for them they could lose immortality if they chose to disobey God.)
Finally - the final point in the introduction, that is! - I want to clear up one misunderstanding that sometimes gets in the way. Some people object to this teaching about destruction on the grounds that 'it is only what most non-Christians believe anyway.' I don't see why this should be such a problem. After all, most non-Christians believe that water is wet and fire burns. But in any case, in this instance at least, what they believe is quite different.
We have here a confusion between the end point and the road you take to get there. In one way they are similar, but only in this sense: imagine you are in court. You have committed some dreadful crime, and have been found guilty. You are sentenced to death. Imagine facing the gallows, or the firing squad. Now, compare that prospect with the option of dying peacefully in your sleep one night. I know which most people would choose. On one level, both options are the same - in both cases, you end up dead. But most people are interested not only in the end point - death - but also in the route you take to get there.
Most non-Christian seem to believe that death is the end: you live, you die, and that is all there is. Christians, on the other hand, believe that death - physical death - is not the end. One day, we will all stand before the throne of God, and be judged. People who have rejected God in this life, will be rejected by Him in the next.
I sometimes tell people who believe that death is the end: if you are right and I am wrong, I will never know. My error will make not the slightest difference to me. But if I am right and you are wrong, we will both stand before God one day. And, when that happens, the question of your relationship with God will matter more to you than anything else in the world.
People can imagine, perhaps, what it must be like to be on trial for your life. But a human court can only take away - at worst - your life. They can only take away from you what you will have to give up in a few years anyway. When you stand before God, you will face losing, not a few years of life, but an eternity.
From a human court, you may go to the gallows convinced that the jury was mistaken, or perhaps you might attempt a degree of revenge by maintaining your innocence to the end. But when God pronounces judgement, you (and all creation with you) will know that what He says is right.
Whatever we believe about the nature of the punishment the wicked will suffer, we must not ignore the Bible's clear teaching that the punishment will only be inflicted after we stand before the Judge of all the Earth and hear his verdict. It is what the Bible teaches us to expect, and in my experience, the Judgement Seat is a far more believable prospect for most people than the traditional pantomime 'demons-with-pitchforks' they usually hear - or imagine they hear - us talking about.
Crisis Centre