Hell

Over at Logan Atone, there is a recent post on passages from the Bible dealing with the reality of hell and its nature. I am posting this here and as a comment over there because hell is a topic that I have planned on addressing for a while.

When we look at passages in the Bible dealing with hell, we need to be careful because so much of our mental imagery of hell owes more to popular culture and Dante than to anything found in the Bible. We need to be careful not to take these passages out of context and meaning (something that Christians have probably been more guilty of than any other).

The Old Testament word that sometimes get rendered "hell" is "Sheol" which is sometimes rendered "Hades" which is simply the place of the dead. The Old Testament is largely silent on what this is like and often implies that is the destination of everyone, good or wicked.

The New Testament word rendered hell is "gehenna" and this refers to an actual physical location: the valley of Hinnom. To take the entry from Funk and Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia:

"GEHENNA (Gr. Geenna; Heb. Ge Hinnom), Valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, where Solomon, king of Israel, built “an high place,” or place of worship, for the gods Chemosh and Moloch, according to 1 Kings 11:7. Because some of the Israelites are supposed to have sacrificed their children to Moloch there (see 2 Kings 23:10), the valley came to be regarded as a place of abomination. In a later period it was made a refuse dump, and perpetual fires were maintained there to prevent pestilence. Thus, in the New Testament, Gehenna became synonymous with hell."

Also, a similar summary can be found in the Wikipedia entry on Gehenna which also contains a helpful list of the occurrences of this word in the New Testament (12 times total, and only once outside of the Synoptic Gospels).

N.T. Wright has some interesting thoughts in his recent book Surprised by Hope on Gehenna/hell that bear quoting at length:

The point is that when Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna, he was not as a general rule, telling that them 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. His message to his contemporaries was stark and (as we would say today) political. Unless they turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God's kingdom in their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy, and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries . . . It is there only by extension, and with difficulty that we can extrapolate from the many gospel sayings that articulate this urgent, immediate warning to a deeper question of a warning about what may happen after death. The two parables that appear to address this question directly are, we should remember, parables, not actual descriptions of the afterlife. They use stock imagery from ancient Judaism, such as "Abraham's bosom," not to teach about what happens after death but to insist on justice and mercy within the present life. This is not to say that Jesus would have dissented from their implied picture of postmortem realities. It is, rather, to point out that to take the scene of Abraham, the Rich Man, and Lazarus literally is about as sensible as trying to find out the name of the Prodigal Son. (176-177).

As Wright alludes to, it is interesting to note that most of Jesus' sayings involving Gehenna are when he is talking with his disciples. If hell was such a pressing matter, then one would think Jesus might have included it more often in his more public teachings. The centrality of the kingdom of God to Jesus' mission and message should never be forgotten when we consider the words of Jesus.

This does not mean that there is no judgment or consequences for those who choose to live in wickedness through their dehumanizing behavior. I think there is much to C.S. Lewis' famous observation that if the doors of hell are locked, it is from the inside. However, we need to realize how little focus on hell (or heaven for that matter) Jesus provides in his teachings, and the danger of trying to read too much of anything into the passages. The word "hell" is full of all sorts of connotations and implications, and it takes some work to try to peel these accretions away and go back once more to the world of Sheol and Gehenna.