Nobody likes the idea of hell – even believers – but many unbelievers simply loathe the concept. They think punishing sinners in hell is not befitting of a supposedly loving God, and appeal to the doctrine as evidence against the truth of Christianity. Is hell truly a stain on God’s character? I don’t think so, and when the skeptic examines his own beliefs about justice a bit more carefully, I think he’ll come to agree that hell is not the egregious concept he claims it is. Here’s a tactical way to get your skeptical friend to see this point.
The next time someone tells you a loving God should not send anyone to hell, ask them if they think the government should act in the same manner they want God to act? Do they support emptying all of our jails and prisons of criminals? Should we no longer send people to prison for their crimes against humanity? I doubt anyone would agree with such an approach. If human authorities are just in punishing those who commit crimes against humans and isolating those who are a danger to society, then why the outrage over a cosmic authority who does the exact same thing? The purpose of hell is to punish people for their moral crimes against God and other humans, and to isolate them from the rest of us who want to be responsible citizens in God’s society. Unless the skeptic truly believes we should forego any and all punishment for crimes in human society, they have no principled basis for objecting to God’s punishment of humans for their moral crimes. Justice requires punishment, and hell is God’s means of meting out punishment for moral crimes.
I also find it a bit ironic that skeptics commonly complain about both the existence of evil and the existence of hell. They claim that if God exists He should do something about all of the evil in the world, but then turn around and claim God is unjust for doing something about evil (hell). For these skeptics, God is damned if He does and damned if He doesn’t. They don’t like it when God extends mercy by not punishing us immediately for our sins, and they don’t like it when God executes judgment at the end for our sins. Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways.
See also:
- We Should Not be Embarrassed by the Doctrine of Hell
- Craig on God’s goodness and the existence of hell
Thinking to Believe 
October 17, 2013 at 11:26 am
Hell isn’t the problem, everlasting hell is. That’s why our Jewish forebears generally find the concept of endless punishment an outrageous perversion of justice, according to how the Bible defines justice.
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October 17, 2013 at 11:36 am
Stan,
Do you also find life imprisonment to be problematic?
Regarding the duration of hell, yes, even some Christians find this problematic. Here are a couple of ways of answering this:
First, we tend to assume that people are being punished infinitely for a finite number of moral crimes. In other words, we tend to assume that those in hell stop sinning after their death. Why assume this? If people sin because they are in moral rebellion against God, and they are in moral rebellion because they hate God and refuse to submit to His sovereignty, then why think this deep-seated hatred of God will change once they are in hell? If they continue in their moral rebellion against God forever, they will continue to sin forever. Since their sin is perpetual, so is their punishment. Consider those in Revelation who refused to repent even when experiencing the judgment of God.
Another way of understanding the eternality of hell is that it is just punishment for sinning against an infinitely holy God. One’s degree of guilt is proportional to the dignity of the person offended. If I torture and kill a dog I should not be punished to the same degree I should be punished if I did the same to a human being. The offense against the human is greater because humans have a higher status than dogs. Or consider someone who kills a homeless man versus someone who kills the President of the United States. Surely the latter would be punished more severely because of the dignity and status of the office the President holds. Likewise, offenses against God are greater because God has a higher status than humans since the value of God outweighs the value of humans to an infinite degree. Because the dignity of God is infinite, offenses against God are infinite in seriousness. Crimes against God, then, result in greater consequences.
The justice of a punishment is not informed by how long it took someone to commit the crime, but rather by the kind of crime that was committed. It only takes a few seconds or a couple of minutes to kill someone, and yet most people would agree that the just punishment for such an act is death or life imprisonment. Both forms of punishment have temporal consequences that are highly disproportionate to the amount of time it took to commit the crime. Capital punishment results in the irreversible extinction of life, and life imprisonment results in the enduring loss of personal liberty. When it comes to deciding the punishment for murder, no one asks, “How long did it take Joe to kill Karen,” and give a lesser sentence to Joe if he killed her in three seconds, or a greater sentence if he killed her in three minutes. We understand that the nature of some crimes is such that the only just punishment is one that endures for the rest of one’s conscious life (or one that makes it impossible to have a conscious life). Likewise, the duration of divine punishment for sin is not based on how long it took to commit the crimes against God. The duration is based on the nature of the crime itself. Rebellion against an infinitely holy and sovereign creator carries with it a punishment that is infinite in duration.
Jason
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October 17, 2013 at 12:29 pm
>Do you also find life imprisonment to be problematic?
Assigning responsibility is about recognizing causal factors. Our response thereafter is to fix them if they’re unsavory (so that they don’t happen in the future), and encourage them if they’re pleasing (so that they’ll happen more frequently in the future).
The former response can take many forms, but a common form is punishment. Just punishment is always remedial. This doesn’t mean that just punishment is always intended to remedy the criminal himself. Rather, it means that just punishment is always intended to remedy that displeasing consequence which the criminal represented.
What are some ways we can do that?
(1) We can attempt to fix the criminal’s brain so that he won’t willfully infract again. Punishment is a common way of doing this; we can punish a dog for chewing on a chair by applying a startling noise, for instance, and create an association between the two events, modifying the dog’s brain to conform to desired future behavior. This is called rehabilitation.
(2) We can attempt to fix his being free to infract. We can do this by sequestering him away from society, for example. We can also do this by killing him or, depending on the crime, by amputating his limbs or removing his eyes, or whatever other horrid thing. Those who reject libertarian free will might consider #1 a variant of this.
(3) We can attempt to fix a greater perceived problem in society — that society generates this kind of criminal in the first place — by doing something bad to the criminal as an implicit threat to others. This is like fixing the criminal’s brain, but instead, we’re attempting to fix the brains of prospective criminals of the same kind. This is called deterrence.
Lex talionis, in primitive societies unable to reliably imprison, is a really effective way of hitting #1, #2, and sometimes #3. In our society, imprisoning for life punts on #1 (though it may incidentally happen), but hits #2 and #3 pretty well.
In any case, each of these methods are goal-oriented, the goal being to repair something unsavory. If a method of punishment is certain to fail to repair anything, then it is cruel. This is often called “pure retribution.”
Many sci-fi stories explore the cruelty of pure retribution by contriving situations in which #1, #2, and #3 are not in play, but yet an agent wants to punish someone anyway. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you might check out VOY 7×13 “Repentance.”
The theses of the above:
(1) Endless punishment that makes no headway toward fixing something is purely retributive and thus cruel.
(2) Believing #1 does not at all create a logical dilemma for those who advocate imprisonment, life imprisonment, slapping wrists, capital punishment, eye-gouging, amputation, startling noise, an ice cube down the shirt, or whatever else as a way to “fix” unsavory patterns.
>In other words, we tend to assume that those in hell stop sinning after their death. Why assume this?
Because it is the only plausible assumption.
Gregory of Nyssa: “Being good, God entertains pity for fallen man; being wise, he is not ignorant of the means for his recovery.”
>Another way of understanding the eternality of hell is that it is just punishment for sinning against an infinitely holy God.
This is “weight to the great,” a perversion of justice according to the Bible. Justice, as the Bible defines it, is punishment in equal portion to the crime WITHOUT referencing the status of the claimants. Other perversions include favoritism to the rich or poor, bias against foreigners, and indifference to those who lack husbands.
The nature of justice is not really up for us to redefine in order to accommodate our particular eschatological views. But such a redefinition is necessary in order to solve the “Endless Hell Problem”; a novel, unusual conception of justice must be invented. It’s a conception foreign to our Jewish brethren, which is why they generally believe in a purgatorial punishment and find the idea of an endless punishment absurd. We should listen to them, and self-critically analyze whether the Bible, either in Hebrew/Greek or a good literal translation like Young’s or Weymouth’s, actually supports the prevalent view among Christians (it doesn’t).
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October 17, 2013 at 1:17 pm
The difference with the Hell Concept as opposed to the Prison System is that in the Prison System are those presumably who have committed an abhorrent social behaviour compared to biblical hell concept that Christians wish upon non believers; but isn’t that just the point, Hell is dished out by Christians onto unbelievers simply because they do not believe in the belief system of Christians, but their’s is not a criminal behaviour against humanity or a violent crime against another individual necessarily; their’s is simply considered worthy of punishment for the way they believe, not the way they behave necessarily although religionists would be quick to point out that the way one behaves is directly attributed to the way one believes.
But wouldn’t it also hold true that if God created all, the God who made me is the same God that made you and yet you believe that your belief is made more valid by religion than my belief and that I deserve hell condemnation because of it.
It is worth noting that The sad part is, most of the Justice”s budget money has been used to lock up drug offenders.
Since 1998, individuals arrested for drug crimes have constituted the largest portion of federal prison admissions, followed closely by those arrested for immigration and weapons-related offenses. Meanwhile, the Congressional Research Service(CRS) reports there has been a significant drop off in the number of inmates entering prison for violent or property-related crimes, which only made up about 4 percent and 11 percent of prison admissions in 2010.
A huge portion of those drug offenders are arrested for marijuana offenses, even though the substance – now legal in 18 states for medicinal use– has become increasingly mainstream. However, statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation reveal more people were arrested for marijuana possession than all violent crimes combined in 2011.
The growth of federal prisoners can be attributable to three main policy changes that have occurred since 1980: increasing the number of federal offenses subject to mandatory minimum sentences, expanding the federal criminal code to make more crimes federal offenses, and eliminating parole.
Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/drug-offenses-not-violent-crime-filling-federal-prisons-1047240
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October 17, 2013 at 1:38 pm
SonofMan,
If you think hell is for those who fail a theology test, then you don’t understand the Christian doctrine of hell. Neither did you read my post carefully. Hell is punishment for moral crimes, both against God and against other human beings. No one goes to hell for not believing in Jesus. They go to hell because they have sinned and deserve punishment for their sins. Jesus is the solution to their sin. It’s like doctors and patients. People don’t die because they don’t visit the doctor (Jesus), but because they have a disease (sin). Visiting the doctor is simply a remedy for their disease so that they can avoid death.
Jason
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October 17, 2013 at 2:31 pm
Jason:
I think the concept of hell becomes problematic when it is conceived of as an infinite amount of punishment in response to a finite amount of sin. Note that I am speaking of the amount of punishment or sin, not the duration of the punishment or sin. Much like an asymptote in mathematics, it is possible for the amount of punishment in hell to approach a finite amount as the time in hell approaches infinity. Hence endless punishment in hell, by itself, does not call into question God’s justice.
The suggestion that people continue to sin in hell also seems problematic. If God ultimately defeats sin at the eschaton then how can it continue into eternity?
It seems to me that there are three options concerning hell that fit well with Christianity:
(1) People in hell do not continue to sin. The amount of punishment they endure approaches a finite amount proportional to their sins.
(2) People in hell are annihilated after an amount of punishment proportional to their sins.
(3) People in hell are ultimately restored to a right relationship with God. Hell is not just for retribution but for rehabilitation.
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October 17, 2013 at 2:54 pm
Actually Jason, nobody goes to hell, any more than they go to heaven; heaven and hell are not places one goes to but rather concepts that exist in the minds of men.
Jesus said that the Kingdom is within you and the corollary of Heaven within you, is Hell within you, as well.
You might also remember in the Lord’s Prayer the sentiment expressed thusly: “Thy Kingdom come; Thy Will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven….”; your duty as prescribed by Jesus, to bring Heaven to Earth, not going to heaven in the there and after but bringing it in the here and now! Not dying for the cause but living for the cause.
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October 17, 2013 at 6:35 pm
[…] by jasondulle Read and add to the Comments […]
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October 18, 2013 at 1:04 am
One issue I rarely see acknowledged is the idea that hell is some kind of physical, material place were those who are sent there suffer a physical, material torment to their bodies.
Hell is cosmic, celestial, immaterial. It is the abode of lost souls, which are identically immaterial (i.e. they have no physical substance).
Any language used (e.g. fire, torment/torture) is symbolic.
But instead we have this idea of someone, a la the burning bush, literally being set on fire, screaming in a literal agony for a literal eternity, never being consumed or annihilated.
I don’t believe this is the case.
I see this instead:
The human soul, if un-regenerated, has not been purged/purified by the blood of the Lord Jesus and the Spirit of God. If so, such a soul, containing its particular aspects like conscience, rational, emotion, and etc. is then polluted, corrupted, warped, and condemned.
Upon death and judgment, that soul will meet an infinitely holy, just, loving eternal God who could have been their Savior, but now instead, will be their Judge.
As Scripture declares, each soul will then give an account to this infinitely holy, just, loving eternal God for everything they did in their life.
After being forced to recite the litany of all their sins and moral failures, they will stand just as condemned then as they did in life, but with a difference.
At that point, they will then know that they had had a chance to rescued from such judgment but for whatever reason, they chose to live out their life in sin and rebellion against God. There will be no ignorance.
That knowledge, along with the experience of having met an infinitely holy, just, loving eternal Savior who then, because of their sin and rebellion, was forced to become their Judge, coupled with the continued stain and condemnation already found in their soul, i.e. in their conscience, in their rational, in their emotions, and etc. will be torment.
And the torment will be separation from their Creator and all that He is, was, and could have been for them into eternity had they but listened and obeyed the Gospel.
They don’t need any additional, literal torments like a physical fire, or a devil’s pitch-fork, or etc.
The suffering, agonizing conscience of a guilty soul will be torture enough.
And/But that separation will be eternal, thus making the suffering/torture equally eternal.
For a case in point:
Before God saved me and purged my conscience of all my evil deeds through the blood and Spirit of Christ, I was in constant torment: mental, emotional, and even sometimes physical (on account of the other two) torment. My guilt, shame, self-loathing, depression, and condemnation for my own personal evil, was a constant, unrelenting force that nearly destroyed me. As Jesus said, this is the condemnation: that men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.
Had I died lost, why should I have expected for there to be any change in the state my conscience in the afterlife?
That kind of suffering alone, coupled with a temporary interaction with God at judgment, would have been a sufficient torment constituting what we call hell. Trust me.
This then makes hell something other than retributive. It makes it a just reward for all the unrighteous, that is, it’s an accurate reaping of what was sowed, in life: sinfulness, moral iniquity, rebellion, and faithlessness toward the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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October 18, 2013 at 8:41 am
Aaron:
One thing for sure, you have an active, vivid imagination; you could make a science fiction video or a game boy entry in the creative arts.
“My guilt, shame, self-loathing, depression, and condemnation for my own personal evil, was a constant, unrelenting force that nearly destroyed me.”
This is the kind of scenario heaped upon sensitive, compassionate, good human beings that religion takes advantage of.
Whoever knows what goes on in zoos is doubtful whether the beasts in them are ‘improved’. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, they become sickly beasts through the depressive emotion of fear, through pain, through injuries, through hunger. It is no different with the tamed human being whom the priest has ‘improved’. In the early Middle Ages, when the church was in fact above all a zoo, one . . . improved, for example, the noble Teutons.
But what did such a Teuton afterwards look like when he had been ‘improved’ and led into a monastery? Like a caricature of a human being, like an abortion: he had become a sinner; he was in a cage; one had imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts . . . . There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself, full of hatred for the impulses toward life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy. In short, [he was] religious.
The concept ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, finally even ‘immortal soul’, invented so as to despise the body, so as to make it sick — ‘holy’ — so as to bring to all the things in life which deserve serious attention — the questions of nutriment, residence, cleanliness, weather — (it makes them all a) horrifying frivolity! Instead of health (you get) ‘salvation of the soul’ . . .
• The concept of ‘sin’ invented together with the instrument of torture that goes with it.
• The concept of ‘free will’, so as to confuse the instincts, so as to make mistrust of the instincts . . . second nature . . . no longer being able to discover where one’s advantage lies.
Religion delights in petty rules and the exercise of power over its followers. What theistic religion does not attempt to curtail believers’ freedom with nonsensical decrees about foods that may or may not be eaten, fibers that may or may not be worn, days on which they may or may not work, coverings that must or must not be worn on their heads,
books that must or must not be read, images that may or may not be created, words that may or may not be spoken, ideas they may or may not explore, actions they may or may not perform, rituals – whether physical or symbolic – they must perform in order to cleanse themselves of impurities of religion’s own invention?
There is no aspect of our lives, no matter how intimate, which religion does not unblushingly insist on its right to control. Whom we may love, whom we may desire, with whom we may physically express those feelings: in such restrictions on our freedom religion is at its most insistent and intrusive. But it does not stop even here, for religion does not limit its control to our deeds or even words:
no, the invisible Thought Police of religion do not scruple to pursue us even into the innermost recesses of our minds and there to stand ready to condemn us for our very thoughts. Not even the most heinous ruler or most brutal slave-owner ever achieved such extremes of tyranny; yet religion grants us no privacy, nowhere to hide, no freedom to entertain even a fleeting thought without its being immediately known to – and judged by – a cosmic dictator.
Religion is the ultimate slavery: it is the slavery of the mind, slavery to the fear of divine judgment and damnation. The devilish irony consists in the fact that ‘God’, ‘divine judgment’ and ‘damnation’ are themselves the inventions of religion: religion creates and exquisitely perfects the fear, then cynically declares itself the sole and indispensable liberator from it.
And yet we are invited to credit religion as the source of true freedom? It is a laughable claim, a disgraceful claim, a claim that makes a mockery of language as well as of truth and of human dignity. As such it is on a par with other religious claims, such as those that define perfect forgiveness as something dependent on the barbaric sacrifice-by-crucifixion of an innocent man,
perfect justice as consisting in the innocent being tortured to death so the guilty can be let off scot-free, and perfect love as something that would damn us to hell for all eternity if we refuse to accept such grotesque monstrosities as evidence of a perfect and loving god.
True freedom requires us to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of religion as well as from the tyranny of brutal earthly regimes.
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October 18, 2013 at 9:28 am
For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:
But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; (1Cor 1:22-23)
Naz
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October 18, 2013 at 10:46 am
I see you’re point, but you don’t follow it all the way through. One could easily counter that if God’s will is to forgive, and further for us to forgive, then prisons in fact should not exist.
Also, our prison system is no only incredibly ineffective, being based on retributive “justice,” but certainly does not bear the character of love. There are plenty of other models of prisons which are explicitly rehabilitative, and which in fact insert criminals into communal projects and activities to help them reconcile to their communities–precisely what Christ does with us.
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October 18, 2013 at 11:11 pm
Leo, your rant may have had some substance if, and that’s a BIG IF, it had any actual bearing my particular life and situation.
My family was completely non-religious. No church attendance, no Bible in the home, no religious symbols (cross, paintings of Jesus, etc.), no prayers, no saying of grace before meals, no religious celebrations of holidays. Weddings and funerals had no religious meaning; just marriage and death.
Not even a God bless you when we sneezed. We were as secular and as un-Christian/non-Christian a family as you could possibly hope to find.
I never even heard of the Holy Spirit until I was 11 years old. And that was from a friend’s mom.
So me being somehow poisoned by “religion” isn’t true. The fault of my sad state prior to conversion was thoroughly my own.
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October 18, 2013 at 11:20 pm
These two verses bear some meaning, I think:
Matthew 25:41,
41. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels…
John 8:44,
44. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
Since the Lake of Fire (what we think of as Hell) was prepared primarily for Satan and other fallen angels for what we might think of as an eternal prison, and if those who are of their father the devil, in this life, committed those deeds for which he is infamous, is it any wonder that such sinners will spend an eternity in Hell with their father, the same way that regenerated believers will spend an eternity in Heaven with their Father, as seen below?
Matthew 25:46,
46. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
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October 19, 2013 at 10:26 am
One out of 5 billion is indeed an exception but that ain’t bad.
Churches are built like hollow caves so when someone talks the echo reverberates for effect and that’s why clerical preaching is always so hollow.
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October 21, 2013 at 5:46 am
My personal view is that the option of “where” you go will be completely up to you, but that in being in the undiluted presence of God, all souls will wish to depart. This is when Christ will remind those that believe of the righteousness imparted to them and the removal of all sin, at which point, all shame and guilt will be fully cleansed and we will choose life with God.
Unbelievers will not have this righteousness and so will condemn themselves to everlasting damnation.
The interesting point regarding hell though, is that it is only preached (in scripture)to believers – not unbelievers. This to me suggests that it is not there as an evangelistic tool, but to spur us into preaching Christ crucified.
Aaron – interesting post. I like it and will ponder over it some more I think.
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October 21, 2013 at 8:35 am
HEAVEN AND HUMAN RIGHTS COMING TO EARTH FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN OSTRACIZED BY RELIGION FOR CENTURIES.
“Thy Will be done, on earth,(out in the open) as it is in Heaven (in the mind-Lk17:21)
LAMBERTVILLE, N.J. (AP) — Gov. Chris Christie dropped his appeal to legalized same-sex marriages on Monday, hours after gay couples began immediately taking advantage of a court ruling that compelled the state to become the 14th in the nation to recognize same-sex nuptials.
“Look! Look! God and human rights have moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women! They’re his people, he’s their Good. He’ll wipe every tear from their eyes. Death is going for good—tears gone, crying gone, pain gone—all the first order of things gone. Look! I’m making everything new. Write it all down—each word dependable and accurate.”
\
Nobody is going to Heaven or going to Hell for the concepts of heaven and hell are the two wolves inside every person and the wolf you heed is the wolf you feed.
CHEROKEE LEGEND:
CHIEF: A fight is going on inside every other person between two wolves. One is evil; he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good; he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
GRANDSON: Which wolf will win?
CHIEF: The one you feed.
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October 31, 2013 at 2:41 pm
I find puzzling what most of my fellow Christians consider “Hell” to be. First, IMO the bible teaches only God is immortal. Second, God is just and a just God would not allow a place like Hell (as described by most Christians) to exist. I believe the unsaved are destroyed forever in hell fire, that is burned up body and soul. Again, IMO my fellow Christians jump right over the verses that prove my point and latch onto the ones that prove there point. If I’m right about hell, would there be more people going there, less people going there or it wouldn’t make any difference. I think there would be a lot more people going there and that scares the hell out of me.
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October 31, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Paul:
Nobody is going to hell because hell is not a place that anybody goes to…………….. simple!
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November 1, 2013 at 11:54 am
Son of Man,
To clarify, I’m discussing what IMO the bible says about hell, not whether or not the bible is correct about hell, that is a whole other discussion. There is no place like hell (as most Christians understand) according to the bible, but there is a place called hell and hell fire. The confusion comes in from two main problems. First, satan, his angels and the human soul (soul is a whole other discussion) are not immortal. Only God is immortal and what God made, God can destroy. Second, mistranslations/misunderstandings of hell and forever. Hell can simply mean the grave. I have friends and loved ones who have died and are in hell (i.e. the grave). They are in the peaceful sleep of death, not in heaven or being tortured in hell. From my studies the forever burning fire is also a mistranslation/misunderstanding. I understand it to mean an unspecified amount of time and the fire burns till it destroys satan, his angels, the beast, the false prophet and the “tares” and then it goes out but the consequences if your are burned up in that hell fire are forever (i.e. your gone and your not coming back). This all happens after what is referred to as the second resurrection at the big judgement. Sadly the misunderstandings on hell keep some people from God and lull others into a false sense of security.
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November 1, 2013 at 2:21 pm
Paul:
Most professing Christians’ concept of hell does not come from the Bible. Accepting the distorted ideas from this world, cut off from God, their beliefs originated from pagan philosophy. However, proper understanding must be based on the sound truths of the Bible. Before proving the truth about hell from God’s Word, we need to take note of the world’s traditional beliefs.
The New Jewish Encyclopedia comments on the subject of hell in a very definitive manner: “Judaism does not teach a specific concept of hell. It is assumed that evildoers will be punished, but the manner and place of chastisement are left to the justice of God.”
Other religions, also not based on the teachings of the Bible, exercise much more imagination to fit their concept of eternal punishment. One of the best summaries of man’s traditional concept of hell is found in the Encyclopedia Americana:
“As generally understood, hell is…whither lost or condemned souls go after death to suffer indescribable torments and eternal punishment…It is the place of divine revenge, untempered, never ending. This has been the idea most generally held by Christians, Catholics, and Protestants alike.” As to the similarity of the concept of hell among various religions, the article continues, “The main features of hell as conceived by Hindu, Persian, Egyptian, Grecian, and Christian theologians are essentially the same.”
The writings of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) made a strong impression on Catholics during the later Middle Ages. His work The Divine Comedy provided vivid detail of sufferings in the dismal setting he described as hell or “Inferno.” His influential writings describing this inferno were inspired by the philosophers Plato and Virgil, to whom he looked with reverence and attributed divine inspiration. Since this inspiration led these famous philosophers to envision ideas contrary to the Bible, it had to come from a source other than God.
After having seen in Lesson 8 that the saved do not go to heaven and, in Lesson 9, that man does not possess an immortal soul, you are now ready to learn the truth about hell. This lesson rounds off some very important understanding to which the world is oblivious. The goal of this course is to help you unlearn error and replace it with truth.
LESSON 10
Definition of Hell
In the Authorized Version of the English Bible, there are three Greek terms and one Hebrew term translated “hell”: (1) sheol from the Hebrew and hades from the Greek—both terms clearly mean “the grave”; (2) tartaros from the Greek, meaning “a place of restraint”; and (3) gehenna, the Greek term for the “Valley of Hinnom,” a location just outside ancient Jerusalem. Gehenna can mean “hell” or “hell fire.”
As indicated, the Hebrew word translated “hell” in the Old Testament is sheol. It has a New Testament counterpart, hades. The term sheol, in a concordance, most always references the Greek word hades. They both mean “the grave, pit, world of the dead.”
The word hades is the most commonly used word in the New Testament for “hell.” Some translations have exchanged the word hell for hades. In the 1600s, people in England commonly spoke of planting or putting their potatoes “in hell” through the winter. They understood that hell was a dark, cold, quiet place that was a hole in the ground. This word held no mystery for them. Virtually all sources agree that sheol and hades are the same and that both refer to THE GRAVE. It was only with the passing of time that the pagan view of hell—as a blazing underground inferno—came to replace this original intent of the word.
The second Greek word translated “hell” is found only once in the New Testament. Notice II Peter 2:4: “For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.” The word used here is tartaros and refers to angels, not people. It means “a prison, incarceration, place of restraint or a dark abyss.” This verse describes the imprisoning of the fallen angels (demons) on earth—their “place of restraint” or “prison” after their rebellion.
The third and final Greek word translated “hell” is found twelve times in the New Testament. Notice Christ’s words in Mark 9:43-48. These verses repeatedly refer to “hell” and “fire unquenched.” They also speak of “worms that die not.” (These terms are explained in our booklet The Truth About Hell.)
In Matthew 5:22, Christ spoke of those who could be “in danger of hell fire.” In Matthew 10:28, He warned to “fear Him which is able to destroy both soul [Spirit-begotten life as explained in Lesson 9] and body in hell.” Christ describes destruction in this verse, not ongoing punishing. The Greek word gehenna can be translated as either “hell” or “hell fire.” Grasping its meaning will explain the quote from Mark 9.
The State of Man after Death
(1) Is it appointed unto all mankind once to die? Hebrews 9:27; I Corinthians 15:22.
(2) When Christ became human, was He subject to death as was all mankind? Hebrews 2:14.
(3) Was Christ assured that His soul (being or body) would not be left in hell? Psalm 16:10; Acts 2:27.
Comment: In Psalm 16:10, the term “hell” comes from the Hebrew word sheol, meaning “grave.” Likewise, the term “hell” in Acts 2:27 comes from hades in the Greek, also meaning “grave.”
(4) What is the destiny of every mortal body upon death? Genesis 3:19.
(5) Does a common event befall both man and beast upon death? Ecclesiastes 3:19-20.
(6) Does a common event befall both the righteous and wicked upon death? Ecclesiastes 9:2.
(7) Are the dead conscious or able to think? Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10; Psalm 115:17; 146:4.
Comment: If man is not able to consciously think after he dies, then neither is he able to feel pain or suffering. Therefore, the concept of eternal suffering in hell is contrary to what Scripture indicates about man’s fate.
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November 17, 2013 at 8:44 am
Worship Me or I will torture you for ETERNITY…..but I love you!!! Makes perfect sense to me…..SMH!
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November 17, 2013 at 12:09 pm
Shannon:
I have to be honest with you. Religion is a form of mental illness. Supernatural gods do not exist; no messenger was ever sent by a supernatural god that does not exists. If you had any common sense you would understand that the only true guide in a person’s life is the brain guide of sensory perception, memory and a bundle of experiences.
All men from the days of stoneagism have tried by magic and deception to make themselves out to be something they could never possibly be by holding the people in slavery under the threat of death to get them to agree with religious insanity.
You have absolutely nothing going for you in any so called Holy Book and to say that Abraham was a Muslim before Islam existed shows your retardation to the nth degree.
get over it and take a lesson from humanity itself.
Live and let live and mind your own business and trust that every man who is born is born as an atheist; that is, without a belief in God and it is only religion and the stupids in religion that corrupt and practice child abuse on the most vulnerable in society, the children, to try and continue the retardations of religious stupidity from people of the ancient past who knew nothing about disease, about the spread of infectious disease, knew nothing about electricity, nothing about DNA but they knew plenty about who to kill and how to kill and who and what to sacrifice to the gods in order to get a bumper crop in the harvest.
You will never be part of a future by living in the past. Religion is one of the foulest of all cancers on the planet earth and one day it shall be eliminated just as the gods of the Egyptians and past civilizations were exposed for the stupidity of their generation; just as the militant stupids who go into Malls and indiscriminately shoot and kill innocent people to prove they are the most retarded religious stupids that ever walked this earth.
And it will be a wonderful thing when all of those cretins are themselves eliminated by their own dastardly hand of evil as they proclaim the stupidity of the supernatural retardates of a supernatural god people who invented the gods before they invented the wheel.
Worship Gravity. Worship Electricity, Worship Magnetism, Worship Light, Stardust, the Cosmos but whatever you worship, make no mistake, there is nothing personal about any of it for we are as much a byproduct of what is regardless of who thinks what we are and why we are here that should cause Mankind to grovel like stupid men before other stupids who have power over others whose egos have exploded like supernovas into religious insanity that prepares them to “die for a cause” but who do not have enough intelligent reasoning to “live for a cause”.
That is, when you try to personalize Gravity, Fire, the Laws of Physics, you worship what you do not know. We worship what we know and what we know is knowledge not belief. Religions emanate from the imaginative mythology of fiction writers, hysterical historians, embellishment editors and revisionist conquerers.
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November 19, 2013 at 9:33 pm
Son of Man:
I think you need to read my previous post again. It’s called sarcasm. I was trying to prove a point as to how utterly ridiculous the doctrine of Hell is. And thank you for being concerned about whether I have any “common sense”……I can assure you that I do. Nor am i a “Retard”! I’m an Athiest. But I very much enjoyed reading your rant…even though it did not even relate to me in any way.
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November 19, 2013 at 10:04 pm
Shannon:
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Actually I knew you were writing sarcasm and so it reminded me of a piece I had written to a religious person who actually was quite fanatical about supernatural influence on human life.
I decided to paste this writing in response to you, actually supporting your sarcasm as a tee hee moment. Only thing is that I pasted it verbatim and neglected to edit out the “you” and substitute “they”(the religious diehards) as a better choice.
I am sorry also: because the “retard” was not meant for you either but for the person I originally sent the rant to.
So if you re-read my rant with this in mind you will imagine that it was not a personal attack on you but on the “you” person I actually wrote it too in the first place.
When you are wrong be quick to apologize; when you are right be quick to forgive.
I apologize.
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November 19, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Shannon:
You will also see the kind of person I was writing to in the 3rd paragraph which tells you about the person I wrote to.
“You have absolutely nothing going for you in any so called Holy Book and to say that Abraham was a Muslim before Islam existed shows your retardation to the nth degree.”
lol
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November 21, 2013 at 11:08 am
SonofMan:
Sounds to me like it is I who should apologize. After re-reading your post, it is clear that you were not referring to me….sorry about that! You make a lot of good points in your post….points that I completely agree with!!
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February 10, 2014 at 11:26 am
I don’t understand how eternal torture in a fiery hell can even come close to being compared to an earthly man made prison? It just isn’t logical (IMO).
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February 10, 2014 at 12:55 pm
Matthew37:
It’s easy to understand: One exists and one does not exist, simple eh?
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October 9, 2016 at 12:02 pm
My brother is a Jehovah’s Witness and they use Hell – teaching belief as a way to sway Christian-dom from believing what they have been taught. The major point they use is that when the bible speaks of Hell mostly it is about the grave. Wow you have a lot about the Hell issue on your website which will be hours of reading for me. In order to address his approach, ‘ll have to go back and study it through Hebrew and Greek. If you have a chance to study/post something addressing their brand of denial it would be most appreciated! Have you run across any study materials you could point me to on the subject? I suppose I’ll be a Sheól, Ghehnna & Hades expert after I’m done studying!
God bless you in Jesus name!
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October 9, 2016 at 10:23 pm
Hi, a reply to myself: and all 🙂 I read through this whole article and found a good jumping off place for my bible study (Thanks to SonofMan) who apparently is a JW :). My initial thoughts on the approach is that it seems that God has left the belief of Heaven/Hell wide open for as many opinions as there are people who have ever lived! So, it is like the tail wagging the dog. Whether you believe or do not believe with all the persuasion of your teachings and the approach of your own thoughts and others, this will not be definitively figured out in our lifetimes :). So, does it really matter? I’m counting on my relationship with Jesus Christ to save me, from what? Does not matter, I believe no matter how hard I try to be 100% right, I’m going to miss a few things but God will still let me be with him throughout eternity if I get salvation right, by the help and grace of God I am going to make my request known unto him in prayer!
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