Conclusion:
Getting to the Bottom of Hell
The following article is the
conclusion and summary of all of the material on this
Is It True What They Say About Hell? website. If you
have arrived at this page directly from a websearch, and
have not examined the other articles, you are encouraged
to reserve judgment on what you read here. Links are
provided throughout the article to documentation and
commentary elsewhere on the website regarding the
concepts under consideration. If your preconceptions are
in conflict with the material below, may God grant you
the wisdom and patience to examine all the
biblical evidence and reasoning presented on this
website before you make a final judgment on the topic.
Do you remember your first
reaction to learning about the history of "The Inquisition"?
Most people recoil in horror at the idea of humans inflicting
excruciating pain and suffering on other humans "in the name of
God." The mental image of a group of robed "Holy Men" in a
dungeon observing a fellow human, male or female, being
stretched on "the rack," or tormented with burning metal, or
being subjected to numerous other grotesque methods of torture,
is enough to make most people physically sick to their stomach.
How bizarre that the men who imposed the physical tortures of
the Inquisition are viewed as cruel, heartless, and inhumane ...
... yet the notion that a merciful and loving God has planned
an ever-burning Hell full of even more obscene tortures--torture
not for just hours or days or weeks, but endlessly, for
eternity--is
acceptable even to this day in most Catholic and conservative
Protestant circles!
In other words, Christians are
asked to believe that the God who placed within them a
repugnance towards such cruelty of man is, Himself, unspeakably
cruel. If the man or woman who died on the rack in the Middle
Ages was not "saved," then the next moment after their death,
they would find themselves in the hands of far crueler
torturers. And their torments would never, never end. Likewise, the young
Jewish person who died at the hands of the "experiments" of
Josef Mengele in the Nazi concentration camps, a split-second
after death would find himself in a place far worse than
Auschwitz. And his eternal suffering would not be condoned by a
maniacal Hitler, but by the God of Love Himself.
“It [the doctrine of eternal
torture in Hell] is a doctrine which
the natural heart revolts from and struggles against,
and to which it submits only under stress of authority.
The church believes the doctrine because it must believe
it, or renounce faith in the Bible, and give up all the
hopes founded upon its promises.” [Charles
Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York, 1871),
3:870.]
This is the
"bottom line" regarding the doctrine of Hell: The majority
position within most Christian circles of the past 2000 years
has been that the Bible teaches this hideous perspective on the
nature of God, and thus to doubt it is to reject God and the
Bible. What many Christians do not understand is that, while
this is the majority position, there has always existed a
minority, even within "orthodox circles," who have proposed that
the doctrine is built on an incorrect interpretation of the
scriptures. An increasing number of Bible scholars and teachers
in recent years have called into question the soundness of the
reasoning that led to the doctrine as currently accepted in most
Protestant and Roman Catholic churches.
One such
scholar is Clark Pinnock:
Four views on
Hell Zondervan, (1992), Page 136
"...we are asked to
believe that God endlessly tortures sinners by the million,
sinners who perish because the Father has decided not to
elect them to salvation [while they were alive on earth],
though he could have done so, and whose torments are
supposed to gladden the hearts of believers in heaven. The
problems with this doctrine are both extensive and
profound." C.H. Pinnock
"The Destruction
of the Finally Impenitent," Criswell Theological Review
4 (1990-Spring), Pages 246-47.
"How can
Christians possibly project a deity of such cruelty and
vindictiveness whose ways include inflicting everlasting
torture upon his creatures, however sinful they may have
been? Surely a God who would do such a thing is more nearly
like Satan than like God, at least by any ordinary moral
standards, and by the gospel itself." C.H. Pinnock
If the Bible
truly teaches this doctrine, then Charles Hodge, quoted above,
is right. All Christians must believe it or deny the very basis
of their faith, the Bible itself. But if the Bible does not
teach this doctrine, then those who promote it are denying the
very nature of God and, as Pinnock wrote, remaking Him in the
image of Satan.
The
reality is that the doctrine of an ever-burning Hell, where the
unsaved are perpetually tortured with unimaginable suffering
throughout eternity, is not just a fringe doctrine that can be
swept under the rug, or put on a shelf, or otherwise hidden from
sight and ignored. It is, in one way, the centerpiece of a
debate to define the very nature of God.
It is a primary goal of this
website to bring
the full horror of this doctrine into sharp focus.
Only when Christians can examine this doctrine
in the clear light of day, with sound reasoning,
and consider BOTH sides of the debate,
will they be able to form a truly informed opinion
on what the Bible actually says on the subject.
The position
regarding the nature of Hell supported by documentation,
biblical exegesis, and sound logic on this website is the
following:
-
The Lord
promised that a day would come when the inequities of this
present life would be settled by His righteous justice. The
wicked often seem in their physical lifetime to prosper, and
to die at a ripe old age without any suffering. The servants
of God often seem to suffer throughout life, and perhaps
even die an early death. So the only way for the inequities
to be settled is for there to be a time of reckoning outside this lifetime.
-
There is a
component of man that continues on after the death of the
flesh, commonly called the "soul." This component can be
joined again to a new body, either physical or non-physical,
and the person can "live again." This new life is called
a
"resurrection."
-
The
individual thus resurrected does not have within himself the
ability to exist eternally. God retains the right eventually
to either grant him eternal life, or destroy him, body and
soul, permanently. (See the article
Body, Soul, Spirit, Mind.)
-
There are
only a
very few references in the Bible implying a special place of confinement for the
souls of the wicked after physical death. The details are
very sketchy about such
a place, and we would do well not to elaborate beyond what the
Scriptures say. Most Bible passages which touch on the subject
seem to portray death as a type of "sleep" in which
all who
have died have no perceptions. A few passages seem to
portray the possibility of some sort of shadowy conscious
existence. But no passages describe for the unsaved the sort
of gory, never-ending "tortures of the damned" as portrayed
by writers, artists, and sermons of the past 2000 years in
Catholic and Protestant circles. (See the article
Tortures of the Damned?)
-
The Bible
portrays a time of resurrection to a period of Judgment. The
wicked will be punished, the righteous will be rewarded. The
Bible is, however, very sketchy about the details
of just how all this punishment will be administered and what
the rewards will be like. Some passages seem to indicate
that some of those who receive punishment may eventually
have an opportunity for reconciliation with God. The Scriptures regarding this are also very sketchy, and we need
to be very careful about speculating about the details. But
one thing is abundantly sure ... there is no description
anywhere in the Bible of any never-ending hellish tortures
such as portrayed in the writings of Dante and others for
the past 2000 years.
-
At some
point after these things, all who have not been granted the gift of
eternal life will be cast into the "Lake of Fire," which is the
second death, and which results in their total annihilation.
-
The only way
to escape this second death is to be found, on the very final Day of
Judgment, to be "in Christ Jesus."
-
We can know
now, in this life, what our eternal destiny is. We need only
accept by faith the reconciliation provided by Jesus, and live by
faith the life He provides. If we do, we will be in the first
resurrection, at the return of the LORD in power, and
Blessed and holy are those who have
part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power
over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and
will reign with him for a thousand years. (Revelation 20:6 NIV)
See the
articles Old Testament View of Hell
and New Testament View of Hell
for a careful examination and commentary on most of the passages
in the Bible that address the issue of the Afterlife and Hell.
See the article on The Resurrection
for more information on that topic.
In spite of the
lack of any details in the Bible describing torture, a vast
collection of writings and artworks by "Christian" authors and
artists have depicted excruciating details of an ever-burning
Hell of torment. Three brief examples (click on each author's
name
for more samples of their writings):
11th Century:
Dante Alighieri
Dante, an
Italian poet, claimed to have had a divinely-inspired vision
of Hell in the year 1300 AD. He wrote of it in his poem
The Divine Comedy, which is considered one of the great
classics of European literature.
A few brief snippets from a
description of the content of the poem:
[...gluttons are] forced to lie in the mud under
continual cold rain and hail whilst being forced to
consume their own excrement.
Those
who committed simony [sellers of religious favors] are
placed head-first in holes in the rock, with flames
burning on the soles of their feet.
A sword-wielding devil hacks at the sowers of discord. As they
make their rounds the wounds heal, only to have the
devil tear apart their bodies again.
19th Century:
John Furniss
Furniss, an
Irish Roman Catholic priest, wrote books for young children,
including The Sight of Hell, from which this excerpt
is taken:
Come into this room. You see it is very small. But see, in the
midst of it there is a girl, perhaps about eighteen years old.
What a terrible dress she has on—her dress is made of fire. On
her head she wears a bonnet of fire. It is pressed down close
all over her head; it burns her head; it burns into the skin; it
scorches the bone of the skull and makes it smoke. The red hot
fiery heat goes into the brain and melts it... You do not,
perhaps, like a headache. Think what a headache that girl must
have. But see more. She is wrapped up in flames, for her frock
is fire. If she were on earth she would be burnt to a cinder in
a moment. But she is in Hell, where fire burns everything, but
burns nothing away. There she stands burning and scorched; there
she will stand for ever burning and scorched! She counts with
her fingers the moments as they pass away slowly, for each
moment seems to her like a hundred years. As she counts the
moments she remembers that she will have to count them for ever
and ever.
20th Century:
Mary Kay Baxter
A popular author in many
evangelical Christian circles, Baxter claimed to have had an
"out of body" experience in 1976 in which Jesus took her to
visit Hell. One website offered this summary of a brief
scene in her book A Divine Revelation of Hell:
The sounds of people in torments were everywhere and there was a
thick horrible odor. Many pits can be seen in the left leg of
hell as well as evil spirits and demons. The pits were filled
with fire and they were everywhere, as far as one can see. On
closer inspection, the pits were shaped like a bowl, three feet
deep and four feet across. There were red hot coals of fire on
the side of each pit and in the center of the pit was a soul
that has gone into hell. Fire would start at the bottom of the
pit and rise up, engulfing the lost soul, leaving the soul caged
in a burnt skeleton. These souls could feel the flames, as wails
of regret and excruciating pain came from them. The fire would
then die down, and then would rise up again, sweeping the
tormented soul. This happened day and night.
Where did
authors such as this get all the gory
details of precisely what Hell is like? Most can likely be
traced back to the influence of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the
huge collection of artworks that have been based on it over the
past seven centuries. This would include Mary K. Baxter’s
alleged visits to Hell. As author William Alnor states on the
Christian Reseach Institute site in an evaluation of Baxter’s
claims:
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/web/crj0124a.html
Like many other modern-day
visionaries, Baxter diverges from Scripture by portraying hell
in terms of The Divine Comedy by Dante (A.D. 1265-1321).
Thus demons and Satan himself function as supervisors in hell,
responsible for inflicting pain (beyond the pain already
inflicted by hell itself) on people under their charge. In one
scene demons are portrayed as dancing around a coffin "chanting
and laughing" as they keep thrusting spears into a human victim.
But where did
Dante get it all, if it isn’t in the Bible? Unless someone truly
believes that Dante had an actual vision from God, which is
highly unlikely since the version of Hell he describes is full of pagan
mythological characters, he had to get his "inspiration"
elsewhere. As is clearly established in the article
Dante's Hell on this website, the
scenarios in his poem are a mish-mash of Greek mythology, Jewish
extra-biblical folklore, alleged visions by earlier Roman
Catholics, and his own fertile imagination.
How about Mary
Baxter? Although she would insist that her “visions” were direct
from God, it is painfully obvious that they are merely the
embellishments of her own subconscious on themes she had heard
or read throughout her life … which could likely be traced back
to the same sources.
And as for
Furniss, he didn't bother to claim divine inspiration for his
writing. He merely distilled common concepts of Hell of his own
lifetime and his own religious background in Roman Catholicism and embellished them with his own vivid imagination.
Those concepts can also likely be traced back almost directly to
the time of Dante.
The Psychology
of Hellish Art and Literature
If
the Bible contained the sort of obscene, graphic details of Hell
that appear in the art and literature inspired by Dante and his
predecessors, Christians would be forced to come up with excuses
for it. But it does not. And that frees us up to examine where on
earth such obscenity and gore came from. For if a teenager today
would be caught in class drawing the sort of "religious" art on
the theme of Hell that was pervasive throughout Europe from the
earliest centuries down almost to the present, he would no doubt
be immediately scheduled for an evaluation by the school
psychologist, and kept under close observation!
For over 1000
years, until very recent times, the religious authorities in
many countries censored or suppressed any artistic expression
that didn't have a religious theme. So even those artists who
were not particularly devout believers were forced to limit the
expressions of their imaginations and artistic talents to scenes
depicting something at least vaguely related to the Bible. Some
chose to focus on inspiring scenes from the lives of the saints
of the Bible, from the birth or suffering or resurrection of
Jesus, or events described in the Bible. But it is very evident
from the collections of frescoes, paintings, manuscript
illustrations and more throughout Europe that many artists
craved to put more "excitement" in their works.
And nothing
afforded excitement like the depiction of Hell! Not only did
depicting Hell allow opportunities to show violence and gore, it
allowed for free representation of nudity, from subtle back
views of naked bodies to incredibly obscene pornography, to say
nothing of sadism. Many medieval art works are every bit as
outlandishly ghoulish as the common horror films of today, as
pornographic as the worst XXX-rated films. For instance, one
manuscript illustration of Hell from a 15th century book shows voluptuous naked women lying
on their backs on the ground
helpless while snakes and dogs chew on their breasts and
genitals. And on the walls of medieval religious buildings all over Europe,
from small parish churches to great cathedrals, are hideously obscene depictions of Hell
in which the centerpiece is a huge Lucifer with the bottom half
of bloodied "sinners" hanging from his mouth, and others being
defecated out his bottom.
Artists and
writers such as Dante seemed unusually adept at inventing ever
more fiendish eternal punishments for the damned. And research has
shown that at times they included, in their fictional accounts
of Hell, actual personal rivals that they knew in the real world
at the time ... and took obvious delight in either tormenting or
poking fun at them. For instance, when the magnificent "Last
Judgment" painting by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel was
cleaned of centuries of grime in the 1990s, some details that hadn't been
obvious for centuries were revealed. This included a figure of a
man with a snake entwined about his body, with its mouth on his
genitals--and the facial features of one of Michelangelo's
rivals.
So were all
these works of writing and visual art aimed at depicting
faithfully "scenes of Hell" from the Bible? Of course not. The
Bible contains absolutely no vivid details of any aspect of the
Afterlife at all. And, in fact, it contains no gory
details or lurid pornography in any setting, much less Hell. All of the
Biblical accounts, even when speaking of adultery or murder or
war, are extremely reserved. We know that Bathsheba was bathing
... but we are given no descriptions of her body. We know David
committed adultery with her, but are not given the salacious
details of that night. We know that many people died in certain
battles, but we are not pummeled with descriptions of what their
severed limbs looked like, nor given details of the sounds of
their suffering as they died.
No, the artists
and writers who have brought to life their own versions of Hell
did not get their "inspiration" from the Bible ... or
from the God of the Bible. They got it from their own sadistic,
vengeful hearts. Or perhaps from their own obsessions with sin,
their paranoia about death, and/or the vivid nightmares they had
about it.
And perhaps
some of these artists and writers got their inspiration
literally from a mind affected by a clinical psychological
illness, for which in modern times they would have been
hospitalized to keep them from harming themselves and others.
What kind of sick mind could concoct the vividly sadistic
scenarios found in Furniss's writings, and inflict them upon
small children in the name of helping them learn to love God?
How mind-boggling that such a powerful image as that of Hell,
that is pervasive throughout both religious and secular society
in the 21st century, can have been built up over the past two
thousand years, not on the simple truths and vague hints found
in the Bible, but on the twisted imaginations of deceived,
perhaps even mentally ill, men.
If you believe this conclusion to be
an exaggeration,
you are encouraged to carefully consider the documentation and
commentary
found in the collection of articles on this website.
This site contains a collection
of articles, on the topic of Hell and the Afterlife, that may
each be used independently for research purposes. But it also is
designed as a systematic, sequential overview of the whole
topic, which can be read like a book.
For those who would like to take
advantage of this perspective of the content, the articles are
arranged in the
Reading Guide as they would appear as chapters in a book, along
with a few reference chapters at the end such as would appear in
a book Appendix.
Use the
links below to go to the next article, previous article, or
first article
in the Reading Guide sequence.
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PLEASE
NOTE:
No single short article can comprehensively cover
any aspect of the topic of Hell. If you have
questions or concerns regarding the material in this
article, be sure to first read through the site
FAQ before writing to the
author. It may already specifically address the very
points you are wondering about.
Unless otherwise
noted, all biblical references in this and other articles on the
Is It True What They Say About Hell? website are from the
New International Version (NIV).
All of the articles on this
Is it true what they say about Hell? website were written by Pam Dewey, with
the support and sponsorship of Common Ground Christian
Ministries. For more of Pam's inspirational and educational
writings, visit her Oasis
website.
All website content
© 2007, Pam
Dewey and Common Ground Christian Ministries
All rights reserved. Material may
be copied for personal use of the site visitor. For permission
to copy for any other purposes, please contact the author at
oasis7@gmail.com
