Hello my friends!

I want to thank you for all your messages last week. I'm continually thankful for how thoughtful and diverse in your thinking all of you are who follow this newsletter every week. Your responses not only help me challenge assumptions I may not even realize I have but they also encourage me to know that I am in such good company with those who are taking these conversations so intentionally. For that I am really grateful.

I had so many questions about hell last week that I thought we would think through that topic a bit together this week. I decided to walk you through where I currently stand on hell and the reasons that brought me there. For the majority of my life, I have believed in hell as a place of eternal torment. A place where unbelievers would suffer terribly for trillions and trillions of years. I found those conceptions deeply challenged the more I studied scripture and church history.

But before I get further into that, here are some resources you might find helpful on this topic.

Resources To Consider

-One I have already mentioned on this topic is called, "Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife" by Bart Ehrman, Ehrman began his own religious journey in a more moderate Christian upbringing. He then became a fundamentalist Christian later in life. His love for the Bible and history took him to Princeton Seminary. During his years earning his PhD, he joined a more liberal wing of Christianity before eventually becoming an agnostic. He is honest about those views in his book. I am thankful he is open about his own faith journey. I have found his scholarship incredibly helpful in this work, even though we both arrive at different conclusions. He concludes with Socrates while I conclude with Jesus, as you will see below. Having spent most of my academic life in church history, I am so thankful for his work. He covers so much I just can't cover in one newsletter. Like how Jesus would have understood all the different words and ways we interpret as "hell" today, including his parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus, which seems to express eternal torment in hell. If you are looking for a good history on the development of ideas through the Bible and church history, I recommend diving into this book.

-Another video I have recommended before is a short presentation by Tim Mackie from the Bible project. In this video, Tim brilliantly shows the contrast of our modern views of the gospel and what the gospel message is actually trying to say. As always, it includes brilliant illustrations along the way, including about earth, heaven, and hell. You can watch it here.​

-A theologian I admire by the name of Brian Zahnd wrote a great piece you might consider reading as well. It's called "Hell... and How to Get There."​

Okay, onto today's content.

Unraveling Hell

One of the things I find so taken for granted in Christian circles is the reality that Christian beliefs, ideas, and concepts evolve over time. They continue to evolve.

There is this subconscious belief that the way we Christians believe now has always been the way Christians believed.

Even though we can look back on our own lives and see that isn’t true at all. What we believe about the world, ourselves, each other, and even God has evolved over the course of our lives.

The same is true over the course of Christianity.

This is why studying church history is so important. It gives us a lens through which to understand why we have the beliefs we do and more importantly why they are the way they are.

The idea of hell is no different.

It’s hard for us 21st century Christians to imagine thinking about the gospel of Jesus without thinking of heaven and hell in the way we have been taught to think about them.

If you were to ask people around you, in your town, your coffee shops, and perhaps even at your local church about what we Christians believe about the afterlife, you’d most likely get this general concept:

When a person dies, depending on their beliefs and how they lived their life, God would judge them and send their soul instantly to heaven or hell for all eternity.

Both heaven and hell are understood as eternal disembodied realities for our eternal disembodied souls.

Heaven is envisioned as a paradise of pure bliss in the clouds and hell a place of torment and fire underground.

This is generally what is accepted in so much of mainstream Christianity today.

Yet, this is not at all how Israel, Jesus, or Paul would have understood things.

Even in the first several centuries of the early church, the concept of heaven and hell as we believe them now would have been really strange to them.

Let me just explain a few contextual reasons why:

This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list. Simply some of the top reasons I've found deeply compelling.

You don't have a soul, you are a soul.

• The idea of a soul, let alone an immortal soul, comes from Greek philosophy, not the Bible. In Greek Philosophy, the soul is seen as this immaterial you that is the real you trapped in your material body. That is a completely foreign concept in the Bible. In the Bible, humanity is created in the beginning by the “breath of God.” Or the "ruach" of God. Both the Hebrew and Greek words in the Bible we translate as “soul” nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ) and psuché (ψυχή) mean not only the breath of God in us, but our entire being, including mind and body. There’s no separation between soul, spirit, strength, mind, and body in the Biblical understanding. We are one united being. We don't have souls, we are souls. This is why the command to love God and neighbor is all encompassing. Heart, soul, mind, and strength. These are not separate parts, but descriptions of our entire being. God is the source of life and being for humanity and everything else that lives. Once we “draw our last breath,” it is “to dust we shall return.” The only thing that is eternal is God alone. The problem God wants to save humanity from is futility and death. God wants to restore all of creation to eternal life, as it was “in the beginning.” The concept of the immortal soul flies in the face of all that as immortality already implies that we wont ever really "die."

See more about the word soul in the Hebrew Bible here.​

Sheol

• When someone died in the old testament, people would talk about “Sheol” which is “the place of the dead” or “the pit” or “the grave.” Again, remember the biblical concept of soul. Sheol isn’t a place where human beings are imagined to be existing in another way. They are “in death.” Meaning dead. Sheol is the place of the dead.

Resurrection

• As you read the Hebrew Bible, you will begin to see these ideas evolve. You will read ideas about God enabling nations to “rise again” from death and these are the beginning ideas for the “resurrection.” As in Ezekiel 37:1-10 for example. By the time you reach the time of Jesus, this idea or hope for the resurrection was also being debated as possibly applying to individual persons and not just nations. The hope was that God would raise all human beings up as well, granting them eternal life. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead, but the Sadducees did not.

Jesus and Eternal Life

• This is the narrative that we hear Jesus speak about. Resurrection and eternal life. He spoke a lot about the kingdom of heaven and a lot about what we might interpret as “hell.” Yet, he wouldn’t have been thinking about where our eternal soul would go because Jesus isn’t a Greek philosopher. He is a Jewish Rabbi. He would have thought about God’s desire to rescue humanity's nephesh from sin and death, giving humanity eternal life, saving humanity from the alternative of being dead eternally. Or as Paul wrote so succinctly: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23). Notice Paul didn’t say the wages of sin is eternal torment in hell. Notice also how eternal life comes from God through Christ. You don’t need eternal life if your “soul” is already “immortal.” You see, modern conceptions of the soul envision Jesus not as the giver of eternal life, but just as the one who decides where you will spend your already eternal soul. In that mindset, Jesus is saving you from hell, not death. These are two starkly different ways of thinking about this concept.

The Goal Is Resurrection

• The whole goal of God for Jesus, Paul, and the early church was “the resurrection of the dead.” It wasn’t about “going to heaven.” It was working to make life on earth in harmony with heaven until Christ returned and established heaven on earth forever. Reuniting heaven and earth together, as they were “in the beginning.” Banishing sin, death, and evil forever.

Revelation 20:11-15

• Even the book of Revelation shares this vision. Hell is forced to “give up its dead.” Humanity is judged and those who still insist on evil are ultimately vanquished (not tormented forever). They are sent to a "second death." Then Satan, all the demons, and even hell itself are thrown into the “lake of fire.” Which is called the second death. (Revelation 20:11-15). Now, this shows us that the “lake of fire” isn’t hell, because hell cannot in fact be thrown into itself. Fire has always been a symbol of God’s presence all throughout the Bible. The burning bush, the pillar of fire, the tongues of fire at Pentecost, etc. This eternal lake of fire is God’s final cleansing act of all that is evil. God’s holy love then is what will be burning for eternity, in which nothing evil can survive.

The Beginning and The End

• As we see in the Genesis creation accounts, hell is not listed as something created by God. Whatever hell is, God didn’t create it. Yet, just as we see the characteristics of heaven in Genesis--harmony, peace, abundance--we see its opposite as well. We see lying, violence, oppression, murder, evil, and death. Through these ways, hell is unleashed on earth and on each other. The goal of God from Genesis on is trying to get the hell out of earth and out of humanity, to reunite all of creation with heaven as it was in the beginning. As the book of Revelation shows, God will ultimately accomplish this task. Conquering sin, death, and all that creates it forever. It would be such a contrary act for this God to somehow assign some human beings to trillions and trillions of years of torment, when torment is such an attribute of sin.

So why do we have the conception of heaven and hell we do today?

As the centuries of the church dragged on and Jesus still hadn’t returned, the concept of heaven and hell evolved with the church’s theology of justice.

After the third century, the Greek concept of the immortal soul was adopted as well as immediate judgment of individuals upon their death, rather than waiting for a final judgment at the end of history.

If heaven was what those who were faithful to God were given after death, then there must be a place where those who were unfaithful would go and their punishment must be as equally bad as the faithful was good. Here again, we see Greek dualism.

The church didn’t stop there though. There became levels of heaven and levels of hell. After all, some were martyred for God and deserved an even higher heaven than those who lived a pretty good life of faithfulness and died in their old age. And for the scales of justice to be even in the afterlife, there needed to be levels of hell as well. After all, there were those who sinned so great during their lives that their torment in the afterlife needed to match their sin. Others who didn’t sin as great didn’t deserve such great suffering, so their hell would be a different, less harsh level.

As you can imagine, depending on how we view these concepts radically changes what we believe about the goal of Jesus and our own lives as Christians.

If Jesus is simply the one in whom we must believe so that we can escape eternity in hell, our “salvation” will be solely preoccupied with our “spiritual” salvation for our immortal soul. After all, eternity is a lot longer than the here and now, so its best to forsake everything in “this life” for the sake of the hereafter.

Yet, if Jesus is the actual source of eternal life, not just for our spiritual selves, but our entire being and all of creation. If he is the difference between eternal life and nonexistence. If he is the one who is working to reunite heaven and earth, abolishing the forces of hell, even here and now, then that will be the focus of our salvation too as well as the salvation of others.

In the second view, we are compelled to participate with that work of salvation here and now, because our hope in Christ’s salvation is that “all things will be made new!” We not only want to inherit eternal life from him, we want to participate in the work of eternal life here and now. We want to have God's "will be done on earth as it is in heaven" not just in the future, but here in the present as well. Just like Jesus taught us to pray. All while we anticipate him returning to finally reunite the cosmos with heaven for all eternity, leaving us knowing nothing but an existence of love.

After my years of studying church history and the world behind the Bible, this is where I’ve arrived on my belief about hell. I deeply believe a lot of our modern conceptions about hell and eternal torment are not only unhelpful, but psychologically damaging, especially for children, and can be used as a tool of manipulation and fear by those seeking power over others.

I also feel that a preoccupation with hell in the afterlife among us Christians can distract us from all the ways hell is being unleashed here and now on others and on our planet. A hell that must be opposed on earth by the ways of heaven.

This doesn't mean that I claim to have all the answers or that I think I am absolutely right on this topic. This is simply where I have personally arrived. I feel this more consistent with what I have discovered in scripture than the beliefs on hell I held before.

In the midst of knowing I still have so much to learn, I do find the Book of Revelation’s vision of hell being destroyed forever after God forcing it to give up all of those it was holding onto to be a much more helpful and powerful picture.

If our entire Bible has hell ending there, I feel comfortable having my theology of hell end there as well.

Now I'd like to hear from you.

How do you resonate with what I have written here? Is your approach to this topic different from mine? How do you feel like your beliefs about hell impact your view of God, yourself, and the world around you? Respond to this and let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts!

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Thank you all for reading and for all the ways you support me and this project every week.

I deeply appreciate you all,

Ben

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