‘What the hell?’ by Claire Lynch, 5 May 2024
What is hell, and where have we got our ideas about this from? Claire Lynch looks at the stories and images in the Bible that relate to this, and how people in the Bible, including Jesus, communicated by referring to concepts that were meaningful and resonant with their audience. These included ideas drawn from Hebrew and neighbouring cultures, and were quite different from the imagery which became common to describe hell much later in western culture. Could the ideas of eternal, conscious torment and separation from God be based on misunderstandings or misapplications of the Bible? If so, what can we learn from the Bible, its prophecies, teachings and the words of Jesus to give us a better understanding of what God might do with us when we die?
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
You may have heard of the ancient story, about a fish, which, because it was a fish, had lived all it’s life in water and knew nothing whatsoever of anything else.
One day, as it swam in the lake where all it’s days had been spent, it happened to meet a turtle friend, who had just come back from an excursion on the land.
The fish greeted the turtle, ‘I’ve not seen you for a long time. Where have you been?’ ‘Oh,’ said the turtle, ‘I’ve just been for a trip on dry land.’ ‘Dry land!’ exclaimed the fish. ‘What’s that? Is it wet? Is it cool? Is it clear? Can you swim in it?’ ‘No,’ said the turtle. ‘I just can’t describe it to you.’ ‘Why not?’ asked the fish. ‘Because there is nothing in your experience that you can compare it to,’ replied the turtle.
Have you ever been so convinced of something, that you simply cannot see it another way. And the thing is, you just don’t know what you don’t know.
Let me put it another way. Have you ever walked into a glass door?!!
I have!! It was one of those highly embarrassing moments, I wouldn’t want to relive, I was grateful there were not too many people around! But I was at work, in a place I wasn’t familiar with and I was coming down the stairs about to walk through a large open door into a corridor, except it wasn’t a large open door but a large pane of clear glass! I went full throttle, face first into it. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but it takes a moment for your brain to conceive what just happened! You stand there stunned waiting for your brain to catch up!
It wasn’t that the glass was all shiny and clean and couldn’t be seen, other people walking past seemed to have no problem at all seeing it. It was that somehow my brain was convinced it was an open door and didn’t question other wise!
A term for this would be confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out or prefer information that supports our pre existing beliefs and ignore information that contradicts those beliefs.
So believing I was approaching an open door, my brain saw the open space, with no wooden panel or door handle - that is what I expected to see - however - my brain ignored the fact that there was no actual door present, no hinges of an open door, it even seemed to ignore the wooden frame along the floor! My brain just couldn’t see it.
Confirmation bias is something that can often come into play when we read the Bible. So when we read certain texts, we read into the texts what we already think we know and so we see confirmed what we already expected to find.
One subject where we can commonly make this mistake, is the subject of hell.
We’ll all be familiar with the popular western view of hell as a fiery tortuous place, devoid of God presence, where unrepentant sinners go to be punished for all eternity.
The late Billy Graham, a well known and respected evangelist - in his last book published in 2015, he described hell as a place of sorrow and unrest, a place of wailing and a furnace of fire; a place of torment, a place of outer darkness, a place where people scream for mercy; a place of everlasting punishment!
This view of hell has been so widely taught in the Western World over the centuries, that when we read the word hell in our English translated Bibles, we say “ah I know what that means”. I know what hell is! And so we read into the text, our pre-exiting ideas and unwittingly fall into the trap of confirmation bias. It’s like adding up 2 and 2 and getting 22. We think we know what we’re talking about, it makes logical sense, but we are way off the mark.
So why does it matter what we think about hell? It’s not exactly the most fun thing to be talking about on a Sunday morning.
Well, this talk is part of a series called ‘What is God like?’. And if you’ve listened to any of the previous talks, you’ll likely have heard me say that what we think about God, his character and his nature, affects everything about the way we see ourselves, the way we relate to God, other people and our world.
And what we think about hell is closely linked with what we think God is like, and therefore how we relate to him and each other.
As a teenager, our Youth Leader, in an attempt to encourage us to give our lives to Jesus, told us that she had made that same decision as a child when she had a dream that all her family had been taken away to be with God and she had been left behind. It was that fear of being left and essentially being sent to hell, that caused her, to give her life to Jesus.
Not that she regretted giving her life to Jesus, but that decision was based on fear rather than a response to love. I wonder if you can identify with that? And a relationship based on fear is very different to one based on love.
So today, I want to look at what the Bible really means when it uses the word hell and I want to look at why we have this commonly held view of hell that we do, so that, we can more fully relate to God in the way he intends for us but also so that we have the words to articulate and explain this to our friends or family who might similarly struggle with a concept of hell where a ‘loving’ God might punish us for all eternity if we don’t respond to him.
But before I do this, as the back drop for our thinking today, I want to remind us of some of the things we have been learning about God’s character and nature throughout this series. And as a summary, I really like the quote Kyle used a few weeks ago - so I’m going to nick it!
It’s a quote from James Bryan- Smith, an author and theologian:
“I want to turn your attention to the God Jesus reveals;
His God is Good and beautiful,
Loving and Trustworthy,
Self-sacrificing and forgiving,
Powerful and Caring,
And out for our Good.”
James Bryan-Smith
So I want us to keep this at the forefront of our minds as we consider this subject. OK?
Western View of hell
Surprisingly, the Bible doesn’t actually say that much about hell. The tradition image of hell in the West, where sinners are violently punished for all eternity, know as eternal conscious torment (ECT) - has been largely influenced by mediaeval thought and literature.
Around the beginning of the 14th century an Italian Poet commonly known as Dante (possibly because his full name is tricky to pronounce) Durante degli Alighieri (1265-1321) produced his most famous work the Divine Comedy.
This poem describes Dante’s journey down into hell, all to save the soul of his beloved Beatrice, before navigating his way back, with help, through Purgatory and on to Paradise.
It’s pictured as 9 concentric circles of physical bodily torment and its pretty gruesome.
Dante’s work drew on Western mediaeval Christian theology and philosophy and had such an impact on European renaissance culture that two centuries later, Michelangelo (1475-1564) chose to paint parts of Dante’s poetry into his last commission - known as The last judgment, which covers the whole altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, it took over 4 years to complete, and is a giant depiction of the second coming of Christ and the final eternal judgement by God of all humanity.
The message of the mediaeval Catholic Church was crystal clear - damnation will be everlasting- both a physical and spiritual hell.
But this popular Western view of hell is not based on 2000 years of Church history. It’s not the teaching of the first Christians, it forms no part of the ancient creeds - the classic statements from the first few centuries after Jesus- which define what Christians believe . It is still not the belief of the Eastern half of the Christian Church. And I’d like to put forward today, that it’s is not what the Bible teaches.
Ancient thinking
As I said the Bible doesn’t say that much about hell and and when it does, it is almost entirely in picture language - prophetic passages, apocalyptic (end time) passages and parables - which all have rules of there own on how to understand them.
Our starting point for what the Bible has to say about anything is always the understanding of the people by whom and for whom it was originally written.
Stretching back at least 6 thousand years, we see the slow beginnings of ideas about the afterlife that began in ancient civilisations like the Egyptians or in India and China, which as they developed, passed into Greek culture, then on to the Romans and eventually to us. But in these ancient civilisations, as you would imagine, there is little clarity around what the afterlife actually looks like and that would be true of the Hebrew Scriptures too
Sheol
In the Hebrew Scriptures or the OT, there is the concept of Sheol, the name given for the place of the dead.
So when we read words in the OT, like grave or pit or place of the dead and we immediately think ‘hell’ - fiery pit, eternal punishment. That’s not what the writers would have been thinking of - they would have something very different in mind.
Sheol is a neutral place where everybody is believed to go after death, regardless of what you’ve done in life and the moral choices you've made. It’s a shadowy, gloomy underworld, a place of neither pain nor pleasure, punishment nor reward, where you hope that God will protect you and lead you to something better.
It’s certainly not pleasant and it’s not a place you want to go to, but not because it signifies you’ve done something wrong, but rather that, to go to Sheol too soon would be to die prematurely.
Although ideas about the afterlife may have been vague, the Jewish people did have the idea that there was hope rather than damnation beyond the underworld. - believing that they were the people God loved and had chosen.
(Around the time of Jesus, other ideas were being developed with descriptions of other world spaces with different kinds of souls going to different kinds of places. Both Greek and Roman ideas were influencing thinking. And we see this represented by some of the NT writers towards the end of the first century, referring to rewards and punishments in the afterlife.)
When the texts of the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek around 200 bc, the word Hades, the name for the Greek underworld, was introduced to substitute for the Hebrew word Sheol.
But the word Hades, does not equate to our western understanding of hell either!
Hades
The ancient Greeks believed the underworld was ruled by the God Hades, hence the name. Similar to Sheol, Hades is painted as a tedious, joyless, grim, dreary underworld and again a giant holding bay where all people went when they died, regardless of status or how badly they had lived on earth. Most of the souls were thought to be waiting for some unknown and vague onward journey.
In Greco Roman culture there’s the idea of tours to the underworld - so journeying to Hades and learning something that you can bring back to your audience. These stories would have been widely taught as part of the Greek and Roman program of education (called paideia) - which was used right across the empire.
It was part of the understanding that you would tell these stories to try and educate audiences.
So you may be familiar with a story that Jesus tells about a rich man who dies and goes to Hades and has a conversation with Abraham and a beggar named Lazarus who used to sit at his gate.
So here, when Jesus speaks of Hades, he’s not thinking of hell as we in the West understand it. He’s referring to this Greco-Roman idea of the underworld.— Jesus is simply drawing on the popular thinking about where dead people go, to give context for a story, to make a point and educate his audience.
Just like we might tell a story about St Peter standing at the pearly gates of heaven - we wouldn’t expect someone to take that literally anymore than Jesus would have done here.
It’s thought that rather than this story being about whether hell exists or not, the real point Jesus is making here is concern for the marginalised and how we treat others, and being held accountable before God for that.
Sometimes Hades is translated as hell in our English Bibles, which is therefore confusing. And there are two other words in the NT that get translated as hell - one is Tartarus - but that only appears once and refers to a place for fallen angels. The most common one is Gehenna.
Gehenna
Gehenna occurs on 12 occasions, and it’s Jesus who uses it on 11 of these.
For example, Matthew 18:9 “And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell (Gehenna).”
This is confusing. It would be far better to leave it untranslated since Gehenna is the name of a specific geographical location, outside of Jerusalem, again not hell as we know it in western culture.
Gehenna is the Greek name for the Valley of Hinnom in Hebrew. It’s a valley that was associated with idolatry and child sacrifice during the reigns Ahaz and Manasseh, who were kings of Judah. Ever since then it had been regarded as cursed. Because of this the OT tells us Manasseh’s grandson Josiah eventually turned it into a rubbish dump. So big, smelly piles of yukkiness, smouldering day and night. And as the dogs and wild animals fought over scraps of rotting food there, you would have heard snarling and gnashing of teeth.
And so this valley of Hinnom or Gehenna in the Greek is used a metaphor to describe people who are not following the God of Israel and who are reaping the consequences of that. Gehenna represents judgement, it’s a stinking, disease infested pile of waste beyond the protection of the city and its the worst place to end up.
But in light of this, I just want to draw our attention to two key prophecies about the valley of Hinnom in the OT:
Jeremiah 31:38-40 says:
‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when the city will be rebuilt for the Lord from the Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate. The measuring line will go out farther straight ahead to the hill Gareb; then it will turn to Goah. And the whole valley of the dead bodies and of the ashes, and all the fields as far as the brook Kidron, to the corner of the Horse Gate toward the east, shall be holy to the Lord; it will not be plucked up or overthrown anymore forever.’
This explosive prophecy describes an extension of the boundaries of Jerusalem to encompass the whole region including the Valley of Hinnom, here referred to as the ‘valley of the dead bodies and of the ashes’. Jeremiah declares that all this will become ‘holy to the Lord’ - the future of Gehenna will be turned around it appears. It turns out, after all, this is not an everlasting punishment.
And also in Joel 3:18 it says:
“In that day [the coming day of final judgement] the mountains will drip new wine, and the hills will flow with milk; all the ravines of Judah will run with water.”
All the ravines of Judah flowing with water will of course include the valley of Gehenna. Nothing – even Gehenna – is beyond the redemptive reach of the God of love.
Although in the sayings of Jesus, the stench of Gehenna was a powerful metaphor for the inevitable consequences of a broken way of being human, it had nothing to do with everlasting punishment in hell.
When Jesus warned his listeners about Gehenna, he wasn’t telling them that unless they repented in this life they would burn for ever in the next one. Instead he was warning them that to live out of sync with the values that he was teaching was self-destructive and would have consequences.
Along with Gehenna and the story of the Rich man and Lazarus, one last passage has been particularly influential in implying hell as eternal conscious torment and that is the parable of the sheep and the goats.
Sheep and the goats
In Matthew 25, Jesus tells a parable, where, having separated the peoples of the earth into two groups - sheep and goats - depending on their responses to the hungry and thirsty, lonely and sick, and the prisoners and the destitute. Those that hadn’t responded well, the goats, he sent them away to what various English Bible translations tell us was ‘eternal punishment’.
However, the translation ‘eternal punishment’ comes from the Greek words kolasis aiónios.
Kolasis originally meant to prune or to lop in order to nurture, to cut back or correct. But can also be used as a metaphor, to describe suffering which produces improvement.
William Barclay, a Greek scholar and professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at Glasgow University said, ‘it is true to say that in all Greek secular literature “kolasis” is never used of anything but “remedial punishment”’- so punishment that is in the interest of the sufferer and for their improvement.
Kolasis is the only word used in the gospels for ‘punishment’ in regard to God’s dealings with wrong doers.
The root of aiónios, the second word in the phrase kolasis aiónios, is aion. This originally meant ‘generation’ or a ‘limited period of time’.
That’s why in Matthew 28:20, Jesus’ promise to his disciples is translated as ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age (aion)’, rather than ‘I am with you always, to the end of eternity’ - which would make no sense.
Understanding the term kolasis aiónios as Jesus’ original audience did, it would have been obvious to them that Jesus was talking about a time of pruning, rather than eternal punishment.
Conclusion
So there we have it, that's Sheol, Hades, Gehenna and the sheep and the goats parable - none of these are referring to hell as we have come to understand it in Western Christianity.
And it’s worth mentioning that the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Greek- speaking Eastern Church have never held this belief either, their focus has been on Jesus, and his triumphant descent into the realm of the dead between his death and his resurrection - that through his death, Jesus defeated, emptied and closed hell, he stands on it’s broken gates!
Now today might have been helpful in understanding the word hell better when we read it the Bible, and it may help when trying to explain this to friends who have questions, however, I am aware that this might have raised a whole load of other questions! Ones that we don’t have time to go into today.
But I will just say a few things to finish off.
I’m not suggesting that there won’t be a day when we each stand face to face with God and give an account for the way we have lived our lives. The Creeds talk about the second coming of Jesus, that he will come to judge the living and the dead. The Bible is clear that we will all stand one day before God’s judgement seat.
But what that judgement looks like, is not entirely clear.
Throughout the Old Testament, God’s coming judgement is thought of as a good thing: something to be celebrated, longed, yearned and hoped for.
Why? Because injustice will be corrected. Things will be put right. The poor, the oppressed, the unheard, the forgotten, the misunderstood, will all be able to breathe a huge sigh of relief.
We’ve discussed in this series, how God is a God of restorative justice, not punitive, punishing for the sake of it. God is a God who heals, a God who restores, a God who redeems.
Colossians 1:19-20: "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
And it’s worth noting when the `Bible uses the metaphor of refining fire of God in relation to the Day of Judgement as we see described in Malachi 3:2 when it says
“But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap.”
Notice that, the purpose of fire is to cleanse not to destroy, as it is made clear by the second metaphor, the launder’s soap.
You may be asking the question, if there is no fiery hell, then what does happen to my loved one who maybe doesn’t yet know Jesus?
The answer to that is not entirely clear. Theologians differ on their perspective and there are generally 3 main schools of thought.
Eternal conscious torment that we have already discussed today.
Annihilationism, also known as conditional mortality. Essentially those that have not received the free gift of eternal life through Jesus, will simply cease to exist any longer. Death means death, no second chances.
Evangelical Universalism. This is not to be confused with Universalism - the idea that everyone will simply be saved.
But Evangelical Universalism, believes that ultimately everyone will be saved, through Christ, the great reconciler, but only following being accountable to God first.
We don’t have time to go into the theology behind these today, but suffice to say, good and trusted theologians, who love Jesus, will each have different perspectives. I’d encourage you to read around, to explore and discuss this with other people.
In the end, your perspective will be determined by what you believe God to be like. What you believe about his character and nature. You’ll prefer the theological viewpoint which supports your experience and understanding of God. That’s why we’ve been doing this series - understanding more of what God is like.
I’d like to suggest a couple of books and a podcast if you do want to explore more:
How to Read the Bible Well by Steve Burnhope, there’s a chapter specifically on heaven and hell
The Lost Message of Paul by Steve Chalke which will give some contrasting views
And a podcast “Does hell exist?”, Megan Henning, The Bible for Normal People podcast.
So to finish with, I’d just like to take a moment to return to the words by James Bryan Smith that we began with.
There has been lots of information here and possibly lots going through our minds and I just want to land us, resting in the reality of who we believe God to be. Bringing our questions, doubts, fears to him and leaving them in his hands, trusting in his goodness and love.
So we are going to take a few mins to meditate on those words. Bern is going to put some music on. I am going to read the words, they’ll appear on the screen. Then we’ll take a few minutes of silence and I’ll read the words again to finish.
“I want to turn your attention to the God Jesus reveals;
His God is Good and beautiful,
Loving and Trustworthy,
Self-sacrificing and forgiving,
Powerful and Caring,
And out for our Good.”
James Bryan-Smith
More in this series
