When Christians talk about salvation, it seems that often, we don’t take the time to consider what we actually mean. What are we being saved from? What happens if we aren’t saved? What is our incentive for good behaviour? For many, the easy answer to this is the concept of hell – we are saved from eternal torment and torture, and this is the incentive to make good moral choices, go to Church, and believe in God. If we do not behave a certain way, or believe a certain doctrine, our souls are subjected to eternal, punitive suffering through torture. This has been essentially uncontested Christian doctrine for centuries. However, when we really put this into perspective, does the average Christian truly believe that around two-thirds of God’s creation will have their souls brutally tortured for all eternity? The children of a loving God cast aside into a burning pit as if they were all fundamentally evil, deserving of the harshest of punishment, broad-brushed as God’s enemies. This cannot be right. The idea of hell does not square philosophically with an eternally and unconditionally loving God, and therefore requires significant re-evaluation.
Now, before we do anything else, we must make one thing clear: eternal torture in hell does not exist in the Bible. It is often argued by fundamentalists that Jesus mentions ‘hell’ more often than any other person in the Bible. The word most commonly transliterated as ‘hell’ in the New Testament is Gehenna.
"It is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna." – Matthew 5:29.
This would seem straightforward to many ‘traditional’ or ‘orthodox’ Christians – you behave badly, and you go to hell. Hell is such a terrible fate that one would be better served sacrificing limbs, eyes, or organs than continuing in their sin and ending up there.
In the Bible, Gehenna is described as a place of unquenchable fire where both the soul (psyche) and the body could be destroyed. Sounds like the conventional understanding of hell, right? Except that Gehenna was, and is, a real place, a valley surrounding Jerusalem from the west and southwest that still exists today. It was notorious for being a place of fiery destruction, immorality, violence, death, and pain. There are numerous mentions of Gehenna in the Hebrew Bible, with 2 Chronicles 28:3 stating, “the valley of the son of Hinnon…burnt his children in the fire”, which describes an instance of child sacrifice, referring to the extreme suffering and depravity in the valley.
Gehenna is not some far-off dimension, and the message of Jesus and the New Testament references to ‘hell’ suggest not that the majority of humanity will burn for all eternity. Instead, they suggest that if we continue to live in sin, our society will descend to the same dark depths as the broken and destroyed valley of Gehenna. If we do not love our neighbour, love our enemy, uplift the poor and vulnerable, forgive those who do us wrong, and stay true to God’s commands, then Gehenna will become a reality for us all.
When we reframe our understanding of ‘hell’ as not a separate dimension, nor eternal punishment in the afterlife, but a real place, known to Jesus and his followers, we realise what salvation actually means.
“When Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna he was not, as a general rule, telling them that unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one. As with God’s kingdom, so with its opposite: it is on earth that things matter, not somewhere else” – N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.
Jesus himself did not believe that we needed to be saved from a torturous fate in the next life. He believed that we needed to preserve our world in this life, forming the beloved community over the ‘hellish’ dystopia of Gehenna, which would be easily comparable to more civilised society for anyone who followed Jesus, as it closely neighboured Jerusalem, where the early Church found its home. The traditional concept of hell does not exist, and Jesus Christ himself did not preach about a different dimension in the afterlife where souls would face eternal and unbearable torture. If we only learned about the Bible from evangelical pastors and fire and brimstone traditionalists, we would be forgiven for thinking that it is a story about the afterlife, and a warning about the wrath of God. This view loses sight of the love of God and the real-world significance of salvation as the forming of the beloved community of the Kingdom of God in this life. The afterlife is not the central narrative of the Bible.
This wrathful view of hell is not only a significant theological failure, but a profoundly unhealthy way of viewing God and our relationship with him. Is constant fear and anxiety the way of Jesus Christ? Was the central focus of his ministry love for neighbour and forgiveness of sins, or willing subjugation to a tyrannical and seemingly apathetic force? Being in constant fear of punitive suffering is not a healthy foundation for a way of life that asks us to act with faith, hope, charity, and love. For those brought up in conservative or fundamentalist environments, told from a young age that one must accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour, so that they can avoid a fiery eternity in hell, this incorrect teaching can lead not just to theological illiteracy, but the much more serious issue of neurosis and severe mental health problems. Imagine that every time your small child made a spelling mistake, you scalded them with a flame, and warned them of immeasurable pain and suffering to come if their minor transgressions continued. It would be expected that the child would develop neurotic behaviours and paranoia around spelling and writing. Then imagine that they had spelled the word correctly in the first place, and there was no reason for causing them pain. This very effect has been achieved throughout the history of Christianity, through its flawed teachings on hell.
But surely universal salvation (the idea that everyone avoids eternal punishment) is new and liberal? How can traditional believers accept that there is no hell?
One liberal progressive known for promoting Christian Universalism is Church Father Origen of Alexandria (185AD-253AD). Origen’s fundamental principle about evil is as follows:
“Evil is against the plan of God, it is created not by him but by ourselves; is, therefore, properly speaking, a negation, and as such cannot be eternal”.
For Origen, the logical conclusion of this argument is that the same is true of punishment – it is neither punitive nor eternal. Origen stated that even Satan himself is turned from evil to good by the love of God and is not subjected to eternal punishment in hell. The idea that multiple Church Fathers and their theological schools espoused universalism (whilst, admittedly, stopping short of comprehensively denying the dimension of hell at this time) was something of a revelation to me, and would, I imagine, be an even greater revelation to those brought up in environments where hell is lauded over young, earnest believers who are given no licence to question why their all-loving creator, who poured out his unbounded love into every corner of his creation, would condemn this same creation to eternal punishment in hell. An even greater surprise, given that the Church treats the doctrine of hell as indisputable, orthodox teaching, is that the universal salvation promoted by Origen and others was not condemned until the year 544 AD, centuries after Origen’s death. Only then was eternal damnation enshrined in church doctrine.
I am not of the belief that the Church Fathers were infallible or objectively inspired, nor do I believe that they establish an infallible canon. However, they are of undeniable expertise, and the notion that the leaders of the fledgling Church were seemingly not as convinced on the notion of hell as the average evangelical pastor, and the fact that they promoted universal salvation from eternal torture, is a compelling argument that we should drastically re-evaluate our theology of hell and punishment.
This short reflection does not even scratch the surface of how fundamentally damaging our theology of hell is (in large part because, as someone raised atheist, I have no firsthand experience of the damage this view can cause), and neither does it make a comprehensive enough case for the nonexistence of hell. In this first short essay, I only hope to have prompted some re-evaluation of the philosophical legitimacy of ‘hell’ in light of an omnibenevolent God, outlined the profound misunderstanding of scripture and the focus of the Bible that leads to such a focus on our eternal pain in the afterlife, drawn attention to the serious and aggressively damaging effects of hell-centred theology (particularly on young people), and provided endorsement for the universalist view from authorities like the Church Fathers. Take this essay as my short and succinct case for why hell does not, and can not, exist, and why the doctrine of hell must be abandoned to ensure a healthy, faithful, and loving Church.
P.S. More content on hell will come soon, this is hopefully the first of many reflections and essays on salvation and punishment.
This was a fantastic and really insightful read. I’ve never considered Christian theology’s idea of hell something to be differently interpreted until now — but it makes a whole lot more sense.
lazarus and dives