Yeah, hell is real. Sorry

Ask a church receptionist #5

Whatever hell is like, I’m sure it has a lot of AI-generated art

Welcome to another installment of Ask a church receptionist, a monthly column where I answer your questions about the Bible, Christianity, and what the deal is with airplane peanuts.

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Dear church receptionist,

Is there a hell? If so, is it more likely to be in the vein of Dante’s Inferno or C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce?

—Blake I. Collier, your bestest fan

Dear guy who apparently doesn’t know about my Vornado,

Let’s get the obvious joke out of the way first:

Is there a hell?

…

…hell if I know.

Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.

But this column isn’t about what I know (very little); it’s about the Bible. And, taken on its own terms, I think the Bible is pretty clear that there is a hell. Revelation 21:8, for instance, puts it in some pretty unambiguous terms:

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

(Article continues after the break:)

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So yeah, you have to jump through some pretty big hoops to argue that the Bible doesn’t teach there’s a hell. Even if you want to style yourself as a purely “red-letter Christian”—i.e., one of those “Screw Paul, Moses, and everyone else, I only follow Jesus!” types (which is really just the Marcionite heresy, but I digress)—you’ll still have to contend with the fact that Jesus talked about hell far more than anyone else in the Bible. (Here’s a list of Bible verses about hell; take note of how many are direct quotes from Jesus’s sermons. The idea that Jesus only taught about peace, love, and acceptance is, uh…not accurate. Sorry.)

Now—obviously, there are Christians who still question hell’s existence, usually on the grounds that God is love (which is, of course, also biblically accurate!). But—if I could just grind my axe for a minute—think about what you’re saying there, bud. You really want a God who pats Hitler on the head and says, “You little scamp, come inherit eternal life”? (Is that love?) And if Hitler is too melodramatic for you, you can substitute in whatever other cultural bogeyman you like: Jeffrey Epstein, pedophile priests, the guy who invented Disney Plus—take your pick. There really are people who’ve done horrible things in their lives and gotten away with them; I wouldn’t presume to mete out eternal justice on them, but, like…someone ought to, right?

To grind the axe a little more, it’s not at all surprising to me that Christians who question the existence of hell tend to be fairly bourgeois—it’s awfully easy to endorse mercy-for-all when no one has personally done you any serious injustice. But try telling a rape survivor she’ll be chilling up in heaven¹ with her rapist sometime, and see how she reacts.

But anyway.

While I think it’s clear that the Bible teaches hell is real, there are a number of caveats here.

In the first place, you won’t encounter the word “hell” in any original manuscripts of the Bible, for the same reason you won’t encounter the word “the”: “hell” is an English word of Norse origin, and the Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. English translations of the Bible frequently make use of the word “hell” (which originally referred to the Norse goddess of the dead), but when they do, the word in the original text is usually one of the following:

• Sheol. Most modern translations actually leave this Hebrew word untranslated, since it refers to a more neutral “land of the dead” than a place specifically for punishment of evildoers.

• Gehenna. This was the name for a literal garbage fire outside Jerusalem, but by Jesus’s time the word had become widely used in Rabbinic literature as a metaphor for a place for the torment of the wicked dead, which I hope hasn’t been claimed as a band name yet.

• Hades. This word was (obviously?) borrowed from Hellenistic paganism, where it refers to the land of all the the dead, and/or specifically the land of torment for the wicked dead, and/or the god of the dead, and/or death itself. The New Testament uses it to refer to all of these things, except the pagan god, for what I assume are obvious reasons.

• Various more colorful phrases, such as limne tou pyros (Greek for “lake of fire”).

This sort of thing shouldn’t surprise anyone—if you’re a writer not named “Shakespeare” or “Dr. Seuss,” you make use of the words you have, not the words you wish you had. But the upshot of all this is that, while Scripture pretty clearly teaches that a place of punishment for the wicked exists, you probably won’t see a sign at the gate reading, “Welcome to Hell™️ (The Tormentiest Place under Earth™️)!”

Second, and more importantly, while canonical Scripture teaches that hell exists, it’s fairly quiet on the specifics of what it’s like. There are a smattering of references to fire, worms, weeping, and “gnashing of teeth,” but not much else—and I wouldn’t fault anyone for taking those references as metaphors for misery, as opposed to literal things: it’s not hard to imagine that the metaphysical plane is very different from what we experience in this life.

So are the fires real, or are they metaphorical? As you pointed out in your question, medieval writer Dante Alighieri went with the former approach in his epic poem Inferno, which gave us a lot of the basic ideas about hell that you see in modern cartoons: wicked people, surrounded by fire, being tormented for all eternity, often in cruelly ironic ways—for instance, Dante portrays habitual liars as being buried up to their necks in literal boiling bullshit.

Modern author C. S. Lewis, on the other hand, took a more psychological approach to hell in his novel The Great Divorce (which I have to confess I haven’t read, but I promise I skimmed the Wikipedia article very thoroughly): In the Divorce, hell is inhabited by people who don’t even realize they’re there—they’re so blinded by their own cruelty, selfishness, and ambition that they simply can’t imagine anything better than their own misery. Given the choice to spend eternity in the presence of God’s love, they all choose not to, simply because they can’t even comprehend what it is.

But who’s right? As with most theological controversies, my own personal answer to this is my trademark wishy-washy “Why not both (and also neither)?”

Personally, the vision of hell that’s always resonated the most with me is the traditional understanding in the Eastern Orthodox Church—namely, that “hell” and “heaven” are fundamentally the same place (or state of being), just experienced by different people. When you die and the veil of physical reality is torn away, there’s nothing left to shield you from God’s love and holiness. And either you’ve chosen to embrace them, in which case you experience them as light and bliss (i.e., “heaven”)—or you’ve rejected them, in which case you experience them as fire and torment (“hell”).

Because, like…that’s the whole ball game, isn’t it? If God is real—even if hell per se isn’t—you’ll one day have to stand before him and give an account of everything you’ve done in life, whether good or evil.

That alone should be terrifying enough. On top of that, stuff like fire and worms is just window dressing.

Perpetually trapped in an existential hell of my own making,

—the church receptionist 🕹🌙🧸

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1. There’s probably a whole article to be written about this, but the pop culture idea of “heaven” isn’t really a thing in Scripture. The last few chapters of Isaiah and Revelation are pretty clear that the eternal reward offered to the righteous is, in fact, a recreated and perfected earth. I’m not entirely opposed to using the word “heaven” as a convenient shorthand for this idea, though.