Hell

Hell is always an interesting topic. Once upon a time, I was terrified of Hell. After I found my way to my faith, I found so much beautiful inspiration in the Life of Jesus, but couldn’t help but be scared of so much in the Bible. Joshua was terrible. Revelation. Oh my heck.

There was my faith… and then came Religious Studies. I guess some would say that my “secular” education corrupted my mind. I put secular in quotations because my professors came from a diversity of religious backgrounds; many of my teachers were quite religious. Anything well-rounded considers many perspectives. That said, the majority of my professors were quite good at concealing their own views and all of them were always obvious about when they were interjecting their own view or when their perspective was at odds with scholarly consensus.

In any case, one of the things I learned throughout my educational experience at my university was that Hell is not real.

People understand Hell in very different ways. Here are the most common:

1. Hell exists as a type of torture for the evil and unjust (think of Dante’s Divine Comedy). Lots of fire and brimstone. Especially brimstone.
2. The descriptors of Hell in the Bible are metaphorical. Hell is separation from God, which feels like torture once we know what that separation is like. Is this the progressive view? I don’t know.
3. Hell? What? Silly, silly religious person.

I would call my view 3.5, because few people have it (because few people have studied Religious Studies, I suppose). References to Hell are not spacial metaphors, not descriptors of physical places to spark the imaginations of the faithful. THEY ARE NOT METAPHORS. This doesn’t mean that at 123 Hell Street you can knock on the door of the inferno, it means Gehenna was a real place. It wasn’t a metaphor. The references to “Hell” in the Bible are references to real, terrible places that people were outcast to in ancient times. They speak of cultures which really did things like sacrifice babies in fire. They aren’t metaphors. There is no Hell. There were some terrible places in ancient times, as well as people that exaggerated the terribleness of their neighbors.

One of my professors can recall conversations with Pastors in which they discuss this type of thing. The Pastor will agree that there is no Hell… but he is going to keep preaching on Hell because fear works.

I don’t want the type of religion that uses what it knows to be falsehoods to manipulate the masses. Certainly many Christians and many pastors genuinely believe in Hell. I believe that they are misinformed and could do well to take a class from Brent Walters.