Hell

For some reason or other I’ve had a lot of conversations about hell lately. I don’t know why. It seems to be one of those topics that spring up unexpectedly, like little conversational weeds growing out of the sidewalk. It’s one of those subjects that pastors dread, innocently positing as genuine curiosity what is really a Trojan horse of litmus test of orthodoxy. Worse yet, much of what is so confidently asserted from pulpits or axiomatically lobbed out in TV sound bites has only a passing relationship to what scripture has to say (which is admittedly very little) or what can be inferred rationally by reading between the lines.

Scripture is largely silent on the topic of hell, which seems strange from the standpoint of Christianity’s near-obsession with it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Christianity presented as little more than a much better alternative to eternal suffering. Love, justice, mercy, grace and free pardon all take a back seat to the necessity of avoiding damnation, which must be done no matter what else you do. When scripture talks about the concept we know as “hell”, it typically uses one of two words as a description:

Gehenna (Josh 15.8, 18.6, 2 Chron 28.3, Is 30.33 [by inference, “the burning place”], 66.24 [cited by Jesus in Mark], Matt 5.22, 5.29, 5.30, 10.28, 18.9, 23.15, 23.33, Mark 9.43, 9.45, 9.47, Luke 12.5, James 3.6) can be used to describe one of several things. As a physical location it refers the Valley of Hinnom (the literal meaning of the Hebrew Ge Hinom) south of Jerusalem, which was reputedly the place where pagans sacrificed their children to Moloch (or whatever other Canaanite god was in vogue at the time). Later the Valley of Hinnom purportedly became a gigantic, smoldering garbage heap. In addition to the ordinary refuse that would have been part and parcel of a 1^st century garbage dump, supposedly the unclean dead, those who didn’t warrant life in the “bosom of Abraham” were disposed of here. This would include those unfortunate Jews who died of certain diseases (especially those that resulted in skin disorders or obvious bleeding), execution for serious Torah violation or, heaven forbid, crucifixion by the Romans. You can imagine the horror of a place like this; the stench alone would make the area uninhabitable for miles around. Now imagine that you’re a Jew during that time period. It’s hard enough to maintain an adequate level of ritual purity under ordinary conditions; a Jew would not be permitted to touch even the dead who died pure. Gehenna would be the worst place you could possibly think of. The level of uncleanness would mean eternal separation from God, who could never have been imagined to inhabit a place like Gehenna. Those whose bodies were thrown onto the trash heap were an awful, visible reminder of the stakes of Torah observance. In other words, a person who was careless in terms of Torah might very well have been asked the question, “you don’t want to wind up in Gehenna do you?”

Sheol (Dt 32.22, Ps 86.13, Gen 37.35, 42.38, 44.29, 44.31, 1 Sam 2.6, 1 Kg 2.6) is a place of separation from YHWH. It is cold and distant, like the surface of the moon from which extraction is impossible. It is “outer darkness”. This word can also be translated “death” or “the grave”, roughly the equivalent of the Greek concept of Tartarus. No matter what way you translate the word, the strong inference is that Sheol is a place that was never meant for human beings to begin with. It’s a place for the dead, not for YHWH’s vindicated covenant people.

So, right off the bat I think we’re on firm ground both biblically and rationally to say the following:

1. Hell is a place of total separation from God, from each other and from God’s creation from which there is no escape. C.S. Lewis was right to say, “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked from the inside” (The Problem of Pain, my italics and emphasis).
2. Hell was never made for human beings to begin with. An individual who winds up there no longer reflects the image of God in any meaningful way.

The view of hell that is authoritatively asserted, that of a physical locale wherein the damned are tortured in flames, bears little resemblance to scripture’s image. The closest it comes is Gehenna, but one must realize that the point is not rigid literalism; the point is that Gehenna is the worst thing Jesus (or anyone else in 1^st Century Judaism) could imagine. If one could pick a place not to spend eternity, that would be it. One might press into service the lake of fire from Revelation 20.15, but that would force the literal interpretation of that one image from the midst what is, by all accounts, a highly figurative (and highly subversive) writing. Consequently the reader would be forced for the sake of consistency to adopt a similarly rigid literalism for the rest of Revelation, which lands you in all sorts of exegetical hot water. No – it’s quite simply the case that the bible doesn’t intend for us to understand hell that way.

The hell that most of us imagine is almost entirely a figment of the medieval cultural imagination, which was itself an outgrowth of the horrors of the Dark Ages, followed closely by the death of much of Europe by plague. Some of the oldest images of hell envision something like a torture chamber in middle of a beautiful castle, where the torments of the damned served as part of the reward for the redeemed. The first detailed literary picture of hell came from The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, written between 1308 and 1321AD. However, The Inferno was not then, and is not now, meant to be understood primarily as a detailed description of what hell might be like; The Inferno is a political diatribe, a polemical argument that took aim at the Italian monarchy, the corrupt church government and the legal system of the 14^th century. In terms of its take on punishment, the work is entirely a product of the medieval world-view, wherein when one insulted the honor of the king the consequences did not involve prison terms or community service. They involved horrific torture, then a slow, agonizing death by mutilation or burning in most cases. Furthermore, torture was not then what it is now. No one was tortured or mutilated in order to obtain information (though it was useful in obtaining confessions), nor was torture primarily used as a deterrent to other would-be brigands, rebels or what have you. Torture was a deeply symbolic activity in which the body of the victim was destroyed methodically as a means of robbing them of honor, which was symbolically then restored to the king. The body became so unrecognizable that it was no longer human; that is to say, no longer an object of compassion, and possibly not recognizable in the after life. To put it another way, one received on earth what one could expect in the hereafter. This is the image of hell that was overwhelmingly accepted at the time of the Reformation in 1517AD, and which was consequently received as doctrinal truth from that time forward. The important thing to note is that it is more a function of the culture of that day and age than it is an accurate description of the relevant scriptural and extra-biblical data.

If we take the scriptural data as a whole I think the most accurate description is the one N.T. Wright takes up in Surprised by Hope:

God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end. This doctrine, like that of the resurrection itself, is held firmly in place by the belief in God as creator, on the one side, and the belief in his goodness, on the other. And that setting right must necessarily involve the elimination of all that distorts God’s good and lovely creation and in particular of all that defaces his image-bearing human creatures.

(SbH, N.T. Wright, pg. 179)

When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. My suggestion is that it is possible for human beings to so continue down this road…that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all. With the death of that body in which they inhabited God’s good world, in which the flickering flame of goodness had not been completely snuffed out, they pass simultaneously not only beyond hope but also beyond pity. There is no concentration camp in the beautiful countryside, no torture chamber in the palace of delight. Those creatures that still exist in an ex-human state, no longer reflecting their maker in any meaningful sense, can no longer excite in themselves or others the nature sympathy some feel even for the hardened criminal.

(SbH, N.T. Wright, pg. 183)

I think that description does justice to the texts and preserves intact for all a strong understanding of God’s goodness, his justice and his mercy. In The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis presents hell as an expression of God’s justice, which is in turn an expression of his love, but when confronted with the idea that God casts his sinful creatures into hell, Lewis reacts strongly. God doesn’t send anyone to hell. We do that all by ourselves, by worshiping what is not him and subsequently becoming like what we worship. In The Great Divorce Lewis says:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.

(The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis)

Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell.

(The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis)

There is one last thing that, as a Pastor, bothers me more than anything else where this subject is concerned. Disturbingly, though the idea of hell should arouse horror in the heart of every Christian, who should desire most ardently of all people that hell were empty, I often notice in them a rather nasty sense of perverse glee when the topic comes up. The evil people, the ones who’ve always caused so much trouble and consternation, will receive their comeuppance. Finally, like schoolyard children we will witness the punishment of the bullies, reveling in their tears while our Father dries ours. The suffering of the damned will be the vindication of the blessed, to say it another way. One must be careful traveling down this road I think, as it is not properly Christian thought at all, but indulgent vindictiveness. If we find ourselves in this state, we must realize that it is not divine justice we seek, but vulgar, self-righteous vengeance. Our Lord impresses upon us the importance of forgiveness for this very reason: that we should not become as evil as those we condemn and so share in their fate, now or in the end.