What the hell, Bart?

A Cursory Response to Bart Ehrman’s Audacious Claims about Heaven and Hell

The short version of what Bart is saying is simply this:

Neither Jesus, nor the Hebrew Bible he interpreted, endorsed the view that departed souls go to paradise or everlasting pain.

https://time.com/5822598/jesus-really-said-heaven-hell

Even though Bart Ehrman is capable of some impressive scholarship, let’s not assume he is an objective historian and New Testament scholar. No one is perfectly objective of course. Some are less so than others. Bart, in my opinion, is a revolutionary, a rebel, a guerilla, and saboteur. There is a sizeable, formidable, and somewhat organized movement of people against the God of the Bible, and against various essential doctrines of the Christian faith, and I think Ehrman wants to help sabotage these for personal reasons. I also think he makes a good side income in being one of the scholarly-credentialed horsemen of the anti-Christian apocalypse. He found his niche many years ago and has a “good thing going.” Over many decades, Bart has journeyed from being an evangelical (on the fundamentalist side of the spectrum), to a theologically liberal Protestant, to a seemingly sincere agnostic, to an atheist. I think he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder from a time some years ago when God allowed someone he cared about die. I spoke some time ago about him and his departure from the Christian faith to a Secular Humanist faith here: https://youtu.be/HxPeRCOGtxE?t=2401.

Bart is very intelligent. In some ways, I take him very seriously as a scholar. He does make some really good points some times. In some ways I really value Bart’s input on a lot of topics because I think he can help keep scholars who are Bible-believers honest about some things–to keep them from getting a little carried away perhaps. There are other times when I think Bart is just being a trouble-maker without warrant. Here he happens to be making an argument against against heaven and hell in a way that is a little audacious, intriguing, and interesting, has *some* truth to it, is fairly potent in its persuasive power, and is potentially dangerous to the historic Christian faith. Even so, I will attempt to begin to argue that he’s still wrong.

To be transparent, I haven’t read all of Bart’s book on the topic. I haven’t even finished reading the Time article that summarized it. To be honest, I skimmed the article twice, felt like I got the gist of it, and recognized that I’ve heard most of this before.  I’m reminded of a lot of conversations I have enjoyed in years past with my Jewish friends who are on the liberal to secular side of the spectrum in their philosophical and religious convictions. With that in mind, my off-the-top-of-my-head, knee-jerk, short, initial, cursory, partial answer to Bart.

There was a sect of ancient Judaism, known as the Sadducees, that only accepted the five books of Moses as their authoritative scriptures and, partially as a result, they did not believe in the future resurrection of dead bodies. (The usual joke here may be cliché but poignant: “That’s why they were sad, you see?”) The Sadducees accepted only five of the books of the Jewish Bible and ignored the other forty-five books of the Old Testament canon that most of the other Jews accepted. They also were influenced by some of the pagan thought that was vogue with the scholars of the Hellenistic Greek world. The prevailing attitude towards the physical body in the Hellenistic world, and in the echo chamber of the Sadducees, was that the material world (and therefore our bodies made of flesh and bone) was inferior to the spiritual, ideal, higher world. Like many Hindus, Buddhists, and Gnostics today, they were more interested in escaping the “prison” of the material world and of the fleshly body. The Christian hope that we will be raised by God in some future day and the immaterial part of our selves (spirit, soul, mind) would be reunited with a physical body was something they found repugnant. Now I’m not saying Bart is a modern day Sadducee or a modern-day Gnostic, but I will say that his arguments seem like regurgitations of arguments that have been around for a long time. Then again, perhaps he has taken them to the next level.

I’d like to digress briefly to respond to the Sadducean precedent. In doing so, I will also be answering Bart indirectly. The fact of the lack of focus on the afterlife in the first five books of Moses (a.k.a. the Torah or Pentateuch) is not a big surprise to me. Those books had a specific purpose for a specific audience. They are in part history books and in part books of laws–laws that focus on temporal blessings and punishments for the Israelites living in the land of Canaan. If they worshipped the one true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, rather than worshipping idols of lesser gods, and if they upheld “justice” in their society, especially for the widows, orphans, immigrants, and the weak, God would bless them in temporal ways in the land of Canaan/Palestine. Conversely, if they let God’s standard of social justice (not to be confused with the modern, Marxist-flavored view of social justice) wither and if they started worshipping idols, God would give them severe temporal consequences until they mended their ways. In a nutshell, that’s what the Torah is about. The fact that it is about temporal matters rather than eternal matters is not a problem for me. The bigger problem is that the Sadducees were not playing with a full deck of cards. Bart, on the other hand, extends the argument way past the Torah and into the rest of the Old Testament (OT) books and even into Jesus himself. This is a bold move that the Sadducees would have never dreamt of. (Because there actually is a lot in the OT that implies an afterlife.)

Jesus responded to the Sadducees in a brilliant way. It was so brilliant that I have to admit I’m not sure I can fully track with the brilliance. Not long after Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday in a way that made it clear to everyone that Jesus was announcing that he was the ultimate King-Messiah of the Jews, all the religious sects of second-temple Judaism were threatened by Jesus and his followers. Jesus had invaded their territory. And they took turns trying to make him look like a fool in front of the crowds. The Sadducees took the third attempt to triumph over Jesus with the most lethal logical problem in their arsenal: If a woman were married to seven different brothers, whose wife will she be when the dead are resurrected? I fully expect that they had used this before to humble more than one of most promising Pharisees (a sect that did believe in the resurrection of the dead, and heaven and hell) in their high-stakes games of Stump-the-Chump. Their trap seems designed to funnel the chump into resolving the problem by denying the premise about the dead being resurrected. If Jesus chose to risk being impaled on that particular horn of the dilemma, he would undermine much of his own teaching and would look extremely foolish to the crowds. If he tackled the horn of multiple marriages, he would be unable to solve the problem convincingly. It seemed like a no-win scenario for Jesus.

But Jesus was no chump. He surfaced a third premise to attack. He was probably the first to ever exploit that weak point. The story is recorded in Matthew 22:23-33, Mark 12:18-27, and Luke 20:27-40. Jesus’s counter-argument may be hard for most of us modern people to appreciate but it would have been very powerful to all Jewish ears, regardless of whether they were of Sadducee or Pharisaic in their presuppositions.

I think the flow of Jesus’s logic went *something* like this:

Making it even more impressive, Jesus formed his argument from the Torah, the few books that the Sadducees accepted as authoritative. He was on their turf. He let them choose the battlefield and he still won. He still ran logical circles around them such that it was clear they were the fools and not him. We today are so far removed from their ways of thinking that we cannot properly appreciate the brilliance of Jesus and his grandmaster chess-playing prowess. I don’t think Bart Ehrman is smart enough to get the nuances of it either. But for the people of Jesus’s day, they were impressed. The crowd was “astonished at his teaching,” the scribes (biblical scholars) admitted that he had answered well, and the Sadducees “no longer dared to ask him any more questions.” Jesus’s answer was so brilliant that he could walk right into their best trap, dismantle it quickly, and leave them so entrapped that they were silenced.

Bart goes way further than the Sadducees did. I’m astonished that he’d make the claim that the Old Testament doesn’t talk about afterlife, heaven, and/or hell. There are many examples I could cite. I’m not going to bring them all up. I’m just going to bring up the ones that I had the delight of discovering on my own (not that millions of others hadn’t discovered it before me) in my own personal readings of the Bible in the past couple years. I’m excited about them because they feel like new discoveries.

Consider Daniel 12:2. It is in the Old Testament. Daniel’s book is a book that Jesus quoted from and/or alluded to frequently, predicts: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth [are dead and buried] shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

The book of Ecclesiastes (also in the Old Testament collection of books) is one long argument for an after life. In it Solomon makes the point in many ways that this life is “vanity” or futility if this life is all there is—if there is not an eternal dimension to our existence. He asks, rhetorically, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes downward into the earth?” (Ecc. 3:21). He answers it a few pages later saying, about death of humans, “the dust returns to the earth as it was and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecc. 12:7). Solomon has two conclusions in his long line of argument. First, “Go eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. . . Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life… for there is no work … in Sheol, to which you are going” (Ecc. 9:7-10). Here there is an element of afterlife.  Sheol is not the same as Hell. Sheol is a temporary place for the spirits of the dead while we await judgment. Hell is opened later, after the judgments. With an element of eternality to our existence implied, this short, strange thing we call life is no longer futile, vain, pointless. Solomon’s final conclusion is, “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Ecc. 12:13-14).  So even though Solomon doesn’t use the word Gehenna, he is expressing a concept that would be given the name Gehenna a few hundred years later.

There are countless passages in the Psalms and Proverbs which indicate that God will punish evildoers. While then when and where of that punishment it is not made clear, it is clear that it will happen someday. Given the fact that many wicked people do not get their recompense for their evil in this life, and given the fact that many of the not-very-wicked people do not get rewarded in this lifetime, there is the strong possibility that the general truth must carry on beyond this life and into the next life.

Consider the ending of the book of the prophet Isaiah, one of the most important of the Old Testament books, where Isaiah predicts a future day when God makes a new heavens and a new earth [Isaiah 66:22] and says, “they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me [God]. For their worm will not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence…” [Isaiah 66:24]. Jesus quoted Isaiah and/or alluded to the writings of Isaiah very frequently. He may have been alluding strongly to Isaiah 66:24 in Mark 9:48 where Jesus describes Hell/Gehenna as a place “where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.”  Bart is correct about the Valley of Hinnom, or gehinnom (Hebrew transliteration), or Gehenna (anglicization), or Hell (usual English translation), being one of the valleys surrounding Jerusalem. If I’m not mistaken, it was used for as the city dump, the city sewer, and cremation ground for the bodies of those who attacked the city walls and failed. That which was useless, that which was filthy, that which needed to be quarantined outside of the city gates flowed or was moved to that valley and burned and/or allowed to rot. It was a place where the “worm never died” and the “fires never went out,” meaning, I think that one would always see maggots there, gnawing away on some organic refuse, and the flames would be burning 24 x 7 x 365.

If someone were an enemy of Jerusalem or perhaps even a criminal, they might run the risk of having their dead body burned in the city dump, the gehinnom. And in that context, it would not be about an after-life per se. So the immediate, obvious, temporal reference that Hell has is to a literal valley on a literal earth next to a literal city of Jerusalem. However, that is not the only reference it has. Over time, this valley, this dump, this place where waste and evil was removed and quarantined, became a symbol, simile, analog, metaphor, or double-referent to something larger, something trans-temporal, something beyond this world, something in the eternal realm. This should be pretty clear in the way Jesus talks about it in Mark 9. There he says twice that the fire is unquenchable—suggesting that it is not a fire that we’re used to in this temporal world. When I read Is. 66 and Mk. 9, I get the sense that they’re talking about something more eternal, enduring, and transcendent than just the usual city dump outside of Jerusalem.

There were a few Jewish traditions that evolved in the 400 or so years between the time the Old Testament books were written and the time Jesus’s followers began to write down what he had said. Those traditions are not authoritative because the writers were not written by prophets who received information from God. They were trying to interpret the revelation that the prophets had given. But it helps to show that there was an eternal-punishment theme that the expert readers of the Old Testament books were interpreting and systematizing (they were not just making it up out of a vacuum). This of course does not mean that they were right in their interpretations. Nor does it mean that Jesus necessarily embraced most, much less all, of those inter-testamental traditions. He didn’t.  But, painting with broad brush strokes here, Jesus did agree with and validate the idea that punishment would be meted out after this life. His teaching does fit in that general flow. And he does adopt the intertestamental word “Gehenna” (which was not used in the OT but arguably strongly implied in Isaiah 66) as the eternal place where the trash will be taken out to.

And so ends my cursory reaction to Bart’s audacious claims. If anyone wants to send me a copy of Bart’s book for a more full review, contact me and I’ll consider it. I own a lot of Bart’s books but probably won’t buy his book on Heaven and Hell.

It occurred to me that there must be dozens of Bible Dictionaries out there that could explain the “evolution” of the Jewish concepts of a pleasant afterlife and an unpleasant afterlife to more distinct place names like Heaven and Hell. I’m including some entries from a few of those Bible Dictionaries and a few other resources that were conveniently available on my computer.

Hell. Hell has been called cruel, inhuman, and barbarous. Bertrand Russell said anyone who threatens people with eternal punishment, as Jesus did, is inhumane (Russell, 593–94). Unbelievers in general have questioned both the existence and justice of hell. Orthodox Christians, however, both Catholic and Protestant, have defended both the reality and equity of hell.

The Existence of Hell. The existence of hell has been defended by arguments both from Scripture and from human reason.

Jesus Taught the Existence of Hell. Scripture emphatically affirms the doctrine of hell. Some of the strongest assertions that there is a hell come from Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. He had more to say about hell than concerning Heaven. Jesus warned, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). He added of those who reject him, “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age” (Matt. 13:40).

In the Olivet Discourse our Lord said that at the final judgment God will say “to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’ ” (Matt. 25:41b). Of the seriousness of the danger of hell, Jesus warned, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out” (Mark 9:43). The reality of hell is obvious from a vivid story told by Jesus in Luke 16. This story is unlike a parable, since in it Jesus uses the actual name of a person (Lazarus). The story concerned the fate after death of a rich man and a beggar, Lazarus:

The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.” But Abraham replied, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.” He answered, “Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.” “No, father Abraham,” he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” [Luke 16:19–31]

The Bible Teaches That There Is a Hell. Other inspired writings of the New Testament affirm the existence of hell. Perhaps the most graphic is found in the Revelation of John:

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. [20:11–15]

The apostle Paul spoke of everlasting separation from God, saying: “This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power” (2 Thess. 1:7b–9). The writer of Hebrews adds a note of finality: “Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

God’s Justice Demands a Hell. In addition to direct affirmations, Scripture offers reasons for the existence of hell. One is that justice demands the existence of hell, and God is just (Romans 2). He is so pure and untainted that he cannot even look upon sin (Hab. 1:13). God is no respecter of persons, “For God does not show favoritism” (Rom. 2:11). As Abraham declared, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25). Psalm 73 is representative of passages teaching that not all justice is accomplished in this life. The wicked seem to prosper (Ps. 73:3). Thus, the existence of a place of punishment for the wicked after this life is necessary to maintain the justice of God. Surely, there would be no real justice were there no place of punishment for the demented souls of Stalin and Hitler, who initiated the merciless slaughter of multimillions. God’s justice demands that there is a hell.

Jonathan Edwards argued that even one sin deserves hell, since the eternal, holy God cannot tolerate any sin. Each person commits a multitude of sins in thought, word, and deed. This is all compounded by the fact that we reject God’s immense mercy. And add to this man’s readiness to find fault with God’s justice and mercy, and we have abundant evidence of the need for hell. If we had a true spiritual awareness, we would not be amazed at hell’s severity but at our own depravity (Edwards, 1.109).

God’s Love Demands a Hell. The Bible asserts that “God is love” (1 John 4:16). But love cannot act coercively, only persuasively. A God of love cannot force people to love him. Paul spoke of things being done freely and not of compulsion (2 Cor. 9:7). Forced loved is not love; it is rape. A loving being always gives “space” to others. He does not force himself upon them against their will. As C. S. Lewis observed, “the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of his scheme forbids him to use. Merely to override a human will … would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo” (Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 38). Hence, those who do not choose to love God must be allowed not to love him. Those who do not wish to be with him must be allowed to be separated from him. Hell allows separation from God.

Human Dignity Demands a Hell. Since God cannot force people into heaven against their free will, human free choice demands a hell. Jesus cried out, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Matt. 23:37). As Lewis said, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done’ ” (Screwtape Letters, 69).

God’s Sovereignty Demands a Hell. Unless there is a hell there is no final victory over evil (see Evil, Problem of). For what frustrates good is evil. The wheat and tares cannot grow together forever. There must be an ultimate separation, or else good will not triumph over evil. As in society, punishment for evil is necessary that good might prevail. Even so, in eternity good must triumph over evil. If it does not, then God is not in ultimate control. God’s sovereignty demands a hell, otherwise he would not be the ultimate victor over evil that the Bible declares him to be (cf. 1 Cor. 15:24–28; Revelation 20–22).

The Cross of Christ Implies Hell. At the center of Christianity is the cross (1 Cor. 1:17–18; 15:3). Without it there is no salvation (Rom. 4:25; Heb. 10:10–14). It is the very purpose for which Christ came into the world (Mark 10:45; Luke 19:10). Without the cross there is no salvation (John 10:1, 9–10; Acts 4:12). Only through the cross can we be delivered from our sins (Rom. 3:21–26). Jesus suffered great agony and even separation from God on the cross (Heb. 2:10–18; 5:7–9). Anticipating the cross, Jesus “sweat as it were great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44). But why the cross and all this suffering unless there is a hell? Christ’s death is robbed of its eternal significance unless there is an eternal separation from God from which people need to be delivered.

The Nature and Location of Hell. The Bible describes the reality of hell in forceful figures of speech. It is said to be a place of darkness (Matt. 8:12; 22:13), which is “outside” [the gate of the heavenly city] (Rev. 22:14–15). Hell is away from the “presence of the Lord” (Matt. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:7–9). Of course, these are relational, not necessarily spatial, terms. God is “up” and hell is “down.” God is “inside” and hell is “outside.” Hell is the other direction from God.

The nature of hell is a horrifying reality. It is like being left outside in the dark forever (Matt. 8:12). It is like a wandering star (Jude 13), a waterless cloud (Jude 12), a perpetually burning dump (Mark 9:43–48), a bottomless pit (Rev. 20:1, 3), a prison (1 Peter 3:19), and a place of anguish and regret (Luke 16:28).

To borrow the title of the book by Lewis, hell is the “great divorce”—an eternal separation from God (2 Thess. 1:7–9). There is, in biblical language, “a great gulf fixed” between hell and heaven (Luke 16:26) so that no one can pass from one side to the other.

Nowhere does the Bible describe it as a “torture chamber” where people are forced against their will to be tortured. This is a caricature created by unbelievers to justify their reaction that the God who sends people to hell is cruel. This does not mean that hell is not a place of torment. Jesus said it was (Luke 16:24). But unlike torture which is inflicted from without against one’s will, torment is self-inflicted.

Even atheists (see Sartre; Atheism) have suggested that the door of hell is locked from the inside. We are condemned to our own freedom from God. Heaven’s presence of the divine would be the torture to one who has irretrievably rejected him. Torment is living with the consequences of our own bad choices. It is the weeping and gnashing of teeth that results from the realization that we blew it and deserve the consequences. Just as a football player may pound on the ground in agony after missing a play that loses the Super Bowl, so those in hell know that the pain they suffer is self-induced.

Hell is also depicted as a place of eternal fire. This fire is real but not necessarily physical (as we know it), because people will have imperishable physical bodies (John 5:28–29; Rev. 20:13–15), so normal fire would not affect them. Further, the figures of speech that describe hell are contradictory, if taken in a physical sense. It has flames, yet is outer darkness. It is a dump (with a bottom), yet a bottomless pit. While everything in the Bible is literally true, not everything is true literally.

The Duration of Hell. Many unbelievers would be willing to accept a temporary hell, but the Bible speaks of it as everlasting.

Hell Will Last as Long as Does God. The Bible declares that God will endure forever (Ps. 90:1–2). Indeed, he had no beginning and has no end (Rev. 1:8). He created all things (John 1:3; Col. 1:15–16), and he will abide after this world is destroyed (2 Peter 3:10–12). But God, by his very nature, cannot tolerate evil (Isaiah 6; Hab. 1:13). Hence, evil persons must be separated from God forever. As long as God is God and evil is evil, the latter must be separated from the former.

Hell Will Last as Long as Heaven Does. Heaven is described as “everlasting” in the Bible. But the same Greek word (aionion), used in the same context, also affirmed that hell is “everlasting” (Matt. 25:41; cf. vs. 46; 2 Thess. 1:9; Rev. 20:10). So, if heaven is forever, so is hell. There is absolutely no ground in Scripture for supposing that hell is temporal and heaven is eternal.

Nor is there a possibility of getting out of hell. A great gulf is fixed so no one can leave (Luke 16:26). Judgment begins immediately after death (John 8:21; Heb. 9:27). This is not unlike the fact that some decisions in life are irreversible. Suicide is a one-way street.

People are conscious after they die, whether they are in heaven (2 Cor. 5:8; Phil 1:23; Rev. 6:9) or in hell (Luke 16:23). The Beast was still conscious after a thousand years in hell (Rev. 19:20; 20:10). It makes no sense to resurrect unbelievers to everlasting judgment (Dan. 12:2; John 5:28–29) before the Great White Throne (Rev. 20:11–15) unless they are conscious.

Objections about Hell. Unbelievers have offered many objections to the doctrine of hell (see Lewis, Problem of Pain, chap. 8).

Hell Is Annihilation. The Bible clearly affirms that there is conscious suffering in hell, such as will cause “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12). Annihilated persons are not conscious of any suffering. The beast and false prophet in hell will be conscious after a thousand years of suffering (Rev. 19:20; 20:10; see Annihilationism).

Annihilation would not be a punishment but a release from all punishment. Job appeared to prefer annihilation to suffering (Job 3), but God did not grant his desire. Jesus speaks of degrees of punishment (Matt. 5:22), but there can be no degrees of nonexistence.

Annihilation of the wicked is contrary to both the nature of God (see God, Nature of) and the nature of humans made in his image (see Immortality). It is not consistent with an all-loving God to snuff out those who do not do his wishes. Were God to annihilate human beings he would be attacking himself, for we are made in his image (Gen. 1:27), and God is immortal. The fact that these persons are suffering no more justifies annihilating them than it does for a parent to kill a child who is suffering. Even some atheists have insisted that annihilation is not to be preferred to conscious freedom.

Hell Is Temporal, Not Eternal. Hell could not be just a long imprisonment. Hell must exist as long as a righteous God does against whom all hell is opposed.

While the word forever can mean a long time in some contexts, in this context it is used of heaven as well as hell (cf. Matthew 25). Sometimes the emphatic form of “forever and forever” is used. This phrase is used to describe heaven and God himself (Rev. 14:11; 20:10). And God cannot be temporal; he is eternal (Edwards, 2.85–86).

The suggestion that temporal suffering will lead to ultimate repentance is unrealistic. People in hell are gnashing their teeth which does not indicate a more godly and reformed disposition but a more rigid and stubborn rebellion. Hence, after the people have been in hell for some time there is more justification for God’s punishment of them, not less. If hell had a reformational effect on people, then Jesus would not have pronounced woe on those who reject him and are headed for hell (Matt. 11:21–24). No sin would be unforgivable if people in hell were reformable (Matt. 12:31–32). Likewise, Jesus would never have said of Judas that it would have been better if he had never been born.

How can a place devoid of God’s restraining grace accomplish what no efforts of his grace could accomplish on earth, namely, a change of the heart? If hell could reform wicked sinners, then they would be saved without Christ, who is the sole means of salvation (Edwards, 2.520). Suffering has no tendency to soften a hard heart; it hardens it more (see Pharaoh, Hardening of). The recidivism and hardened criminality in modern prisons confirms Edwards’ point.

God’s justice demands eternal punishment. “The heinousness of any crime must be gauged according to the worth or dignity of the person it is committed against” (Davidson, 50). Thus, a murder of a president or pope is deemed more heinous than that of a terrorist or Mafia boss. Sin against an infinite God is an infinite sin worthy of infinite punishment (Edwards, 2.83).

Why Not Reform People? Why eternal punishment? Why doesn’t God try to reform sinners? The answer is that God does try to reform people; the time of reformation is called life. Peter declared that “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9; cf. 1 Tim. 2:4). However, after the time of reformation comes the time of reckoning (Heb. 9:27). Hell is only for the unreformable and unrepentant, the reprobate (cf. 2 Peter 2:1–6). It is not for anyone who is reformable. If they were reformable, they would still be alive. For God in his wisdom and goodness would not allow anyone to go to hell whom he knew would go to heaven if he gave them more opportunity. As C. S. Lewis observed, the soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will never miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened (Lewis, Great Divorce, 69).

God cannot force free creatures to be reformed. Forced reformation is worse than punishment; it is cruel and inhumane. At least punishment respects the freedom and dignity of the person. As Lewis insightfully notes, “To be ‘cured’ against one’s will … is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals” (Lewis, God in the Dock, 226). Humans are not objects to be manipulated; they are subjects to be respected because they are made in God’s image. Human beings should be punished when they do evil because they were free and knew better. They are persons to be punished, not patients to be cured.

Is Damnation for Temporal Sins Overkill? To punish a person eternally for what he did for a short time on earth seems at first like a gigantic case of overkill. However, on closer examination it turns out to be not only just but necessary. For one thing, only eternal punishment will suffice for sins against the eternal God (see God, Nature of). The sins may have been committed in time, but they were against the Eternal One. Furthermore, no sin can be tolerated as long as God exists, and he is eternal. Hence, punishment for sin must also be eternal.

What is more, the only alternative to eternal punishment is worse, namely, to rob human beings of freedom and dignity by forcing them into heaven against their free choice. That would be “hell” since they do not fit in a place where everyone is loving and praising the Person they want most to avoid. Or, God’s other choice is to annihilate his own image within his creatures. But this would be an attack of God on himself.

Further, without eternal separation, there could be no heaven. Evil is contagious (1 Cor. 5:6) and must be quarantined. Like a deadly plague, if it is not contained it will continue to contaminate and corrupt. If God did not eventually separate the tares from the wheat, the tares would choke out the wheat. The only way to preserve an eternal place of good is to eternally separate all evil from it. The only way to have an eternal heaven is to have an eternal hell.

Finally, if Christ’s temporal punishment is sufficient for our sins eternally, then there is no reason why eternal suffering cannot be appropriate for our temporal sins. It is not the duration of the action but the object that is important. Christ satisfied the eternal God by his temporal suffering, and unbelievers have offended the eternal God by their temporal sins. Hence, Christ’s temporal suffering for sins satisfies God eternally (1 John 2:1), and our temporal sins offend God eternally.

Hell Has No Redeeming Value. To the objection that there is no redemptive value in the damning of souls to hell, it can be pointed out that hell satisfies God’s justice and glorifies it by showing how great and fearful a standard it is. “The vindictive justice of God will appear strict, exact, awful, and terrible, and therefore glorious” (Edwards, 2.87). The more horrible and fearful the judgment, the brighter the sheen on the sword of God’s justice. Awful punishment fits the nature of an awe-inspiring God. By a majestic display of wrath, God gets back the majesty he has been refused. Those who give God no glory by choice during this life will be forced to give him glory in the afterlife.

All people, thus, are either actively or passively useful to God. In heaven believers will actively praise his mercy. In hell unbelievers will be passively useful in bringing majesty to his justice. Just as a barren tree is useful only for firewood, so the disobedient are only fuel for an eternal fire (ibid., 2.126). Since unbelievers prefer to keep at a distance from God in time, why should we not expect this to be their chosen state in eternity?

Hell Is Only a Threat, Not a Reality. Some critics believe hell is only a threat that God will not carry out. But it is blasphemy to hold that a God of truth uses deliberate lies to govern human beings. Further, it implies that “those who think hell is a deception have outwitted God Himself by uncovering it” (Davidson, 53). As Edwards stated it, “They suppose that they have been so cunning as to find out that it is not certain; and so that God had not laid His design so deep, but that such cunning men as they can discern the cheat and defeat the design” (Edwards, 2.516).

Can Saints Be Happy if a Loved One Is in Hell? The presupposition of this question is that we are more merciful than is God. God is perfectly happy in heaven, and he knows that not everyone will be there. Yet he is infinitely more merciful than are we. What is more, if we could not be happy in heaven knowing anyone was in hell, then our happiness is not in our hands but someone else’s. But hell cannot veto heaven. We can be happy in heaven the same way we can be happy eating knowing others are starving, if we have tried to feed them but they have refused the food. Just as we can have healing of bad memories here on earth, even so God will “wipe away all tears” in heaven (Rev. 21:4).

Edwards noted that to suppose God’s mercy does not permit suffering in hell is contrary to fact. God allows plenty of suffering in this world. It is an empirical fact that God and creature-pain are not incompatible (Gerstner, 80). If God’s mercy cannot bear eternal misery, then neither can it bear lesser amounts (Edwards, 2.84). God’s mercy is not a passion or emotion that overcomes his justice. Mercy so construed is a defect in God. It would make him weak and inconsistent with himself, not fit to be a Judge.

The attitudes and feelings of the saints in heaven will be transformed and correspond more to God’s. Hence, we will love only what God loves and hate what he hates. Since God is not miserable at the thought or sight of hell, neither will we—even if it holds people we loved in this life. Edwards devoted a sermon to this: “The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous.” In Gerstner’s digest of it, “it will seem in no way cruel in God to inflict such extreme suffering on such extremely wicked creatures” (Gerstner, 90).

Why Did God Create People Bound for Hell? Some critics of hell argue that if God knew that his creatures would reject him and eventuate in such a horrible place as hell, then why did he create them in the first place? Wouldn’t it have been better to have never existed than to exist and go to hell?

It is important to note that nonexistence cannot be said to be a better condition than any kind of existence, since nonexistence is nothing. And to affirm that nothing can be better than something is a gigantic category mistake. In order to compare two things, they must have something in common. But there is nothing in common between being and nonbeing. They are diametrically opposed.

Some one may feel like being put out of a life of misery, but such a one cannot even consistently think of nonbeing as a better state of being. True, Jesus said it would have been better if Judas had never been born (Mark 14:21). But this is simply a strong expression indicating the severity of his sin, not a statement about the superiority of nonbeing over being. In a parallel condemnation on the Pharisees, Jesus said Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented had they seen his miracles (Matt. 11:20–24; see Miracle). This does not mean that they actually would have repented (or God would surely have shown them these miracles—2 Peter 3:9). It is simply a powerful figure of speech indicating that their sin was so great that “it would be more tolerable” (vs. 24) in the day of judgment for Sodom than for them.

Further, simply because some will lose in the game of life does not mean it should not be played. Before the Super Bowl ever begins both teams know that one of them will lose. Yet they all will to play. Before every driver in America takes to the road each day we know that people will be killed. Yet we will to drive. Parents know that having children could end in great tragedy for their offspring as well as for themselves. Yet the foreknowledge of evil does not negate our will to permit the possibility of good. Why? Because we deem it better to have played with the opportunity to win than not to have played at all. It is better to lose in the Super Bowl than not to be able to play in it. From God’s standpoint, it is better to love the whole world (John 3:16) and lose some of its inhabitants than not to love them at all.

But People Can’t Help Being Sinners. The Bible says we are born sinners (Ps. 51:5) and are “by nature the children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). If sinners cannot avoid sinning, is it fair to send them to hell for it?

People go to hell because they are born with a bent to sin, and they choose to sin. They are born on a road that leads to hell, but they also fail to heed the warning signs along the way to turn from destruction (Luke 13:3; 2 Peter 3:9).

While human beings sin because they are sinners (by nature), their sin nature does not force them to sin. As Augustine correctly said, “We are born with the propensity to sin and the necessity to die.” Notice, he did not say we are born with the necessity to sin. While sin is inevitable, since we are born with a bent in that direction, sin is not unavoidable.

The ultimate place to which sinners are destined is also avoidable. All one needs to do is to repent (Luke 13:3; Acts 17:30; 2 Peter 3:9). All are held responsible for their decision to accept or reject God’s offer of salvation. And responsibility always implies the ability to respond (if not on our own, then by God’s grace). All who go to hell could have avoided going there if they had chosen to. No pagan anywhere is without clear light from God so that he is “without excuse” (Rom. 1:19–20; cf. 2:12–15; see “Heathen,” Salvation of). As God sent a missionary to Cornelius (Acts 10:35), so he will provide the message of salvation for all who seek it. For “without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Heb. 11:6).

Reasonableness of Hell. While many believe hell is unreasonable, following Jonathan Edwards, a good argument can be made for its rationality:

It is a most unreasonable thing to suppose that there should be no future punishment, to suppose that God, who had made man a rational creature, able to know his duty, and sensible that he is deserving punishment when he does it not; should let man alone, and let him live as he will, and never punish him for his sins, and never make any difference between the good and the bad.… How unreasonable it is to suppose, that he who made the world, should leave things in such confusion, and never take any care of the governing of his creatures, and that he should never judge his reasonable creatures. [Edwards, 2.884]

Reasons Hell Is Rejected. As surveys show, people are far more willing to believe in heaven than in hell. No good person wants anyone to go to hell. But, as Sigmund Freud would say, it is an illusion to reject something simply because we wish not to believe in it. Indeed, as even some atheists have observed, the belief in hell eliminates the charge that it is merely an illusion. Whether there is a hell must be determined on the basis of evidence, not desire. The evidence for the existence of hell is strong.

If the evidence for hell is substantial, why then do so many people reject it? Edwards listed two main reasons for the unwillingness to accept hell: (1) It is contrary to our personal preference; (2) we have a deficient concept of evil and its deserved punishment.

Actually, a denial of hell is an indication of human depravity. Edwards draws attention to our inconsistency. We are all aware of the heinous nature of wars and acts against humanity. Why are we not equally shocked at how we regularly show contempt for the majesty of God (Edwards, 2.83). Our rejection of hell and God’s mercy are an indication of our own depravity—and therefore we are deserving of hell. Edwards wrote, “Doth it seem to thee incredible, that God should be so utterly regardless of the sinner’s welfare, as to sink him into an infinite abyss or misery? Is this shocking to thee? And is it not at all shocking to thee that thou shouldst be so utterly regardless as thou hast been to the honour and glory of the infinite God?” (ibid., 2.82).

Sources

Augustine, City of God

W. Crockett, ed., Fours Views on Hell

B. W. Davidson, “Reasonable Damnation: How Jonathan Edwards Argued for the Rationality of Hell,” JETS 38.1 (March 1995)

J. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards

L. Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News

N. L. Geisler, “Man’s Destiny: Free or Forced,” CSR, 9.2 (1979)

J. Gerstner, Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

———, The Great Divorce

———, The Problem of Pain, chapter 8

———, The Screwtape Letters

D. Moore, The Battle for Hell

F. Nietzsche, Toward a Genealogy of Morals

R. A. Peterson, Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment

B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

J. P. Sartre, No Exit

W. G. T. Shed, The Doctrine of Endless Punishment

J. L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation^[1]

THE FINAL STATE OF THE LOST (HELL)

Among many other things, hell has been called cruel and barbarous. As we’ll later examine,¹ Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said that anyone who threatens people with eternal punishment, as Jesus did, is inhumane (WIANC, 593–94). Unbelievers in general have questioned both hell’s existence and justice; even some otherwise evangelical Christians, such as John Stott (b. 1925), have denied it. However, mainstream orthodox Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has defended the reality and equity of hell.

THE BIBLICAL BASIS FOR THE DOCTRINE OF HELL

The existence of hell is supported by many arguments from both the authority of God’s Word and the use of human reason. Scripture contains numerous emphatic affirmations of the doctrine of hell.

Terms Used for the Place of Ultimate Damnation

The Old Testament Hebrew word for hell is sheol, which means “the unseen world.” While sheol is often used of the grave, wherein the body is unseen, it also sometimes refers to the world of spirits.² The New Testament Greek word for hell is hades, which usually signifies a place of departed wicked spirits.

In addition, gehenna is often translated using the word hell;³ the Valley of Gehenna was a putrid dump outside Jerusalem that burned perpetually. In reference to the eternal damnation of fallen angels, the New Testament also uses the word tartaroô (2 Peter 2:4); Tartarus was envisioned by the Greeks as a subterranean place even lower than hades (see Arndt and Gingrich, GELNT, 813).

Old Testament Teaching on Hell

The doctrine of hell, like the doctrine of the Trinity,⁴ was revealed progressively: more implied (implicit) in the Old Testament and more developed (explicit) in the New Testament.

Genesis 3:15

From the very beginning, hell is implied in the curse on the serpent (Satan): “I [God] will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” As we learn later, the devil’s final defeat will come when he is cast into the Lake of Fire (Rev. 20:10; cf. Rom. 16:20).

Psalm 9:17

“The wicked return to the grave [Heb: sheol], all the nations that forget God.” This word for hell and its translation as hades in the Septuagint⁵ often mean “the grave,”⁶ but some passages seem to go beyond this, suggesting something deeper into “the unseen world.” Deuteronomy 32:22, for instance, speaks of the “lowest hell” (nkjv). At any rate, since death is the soul’s point of departure from the body,⁷ there is more involved in hell than the body’s burial in a grave—death is also the soul’s entrance into the spiritual realm.

Psalm 16:10–11

You will not abandon me [David] to the grave [sheol], nor will you let your Holy One [Jesus Christ] see decay. You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Just as in the Old Testament (here as elsewhere) the word sheol means more than the grave for a believer,⁸ so it means more than the grave for an unbeliever. Specifically, this includes the spiritual world, to which the grave is merely the entrance.

Daniel 12:2

“Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.”

Isaiah 66:22–24

“As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me,” declares the Lord, “so will your name and descendants endure. From one New Moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,” says the Lord. “And they will go out and look upon the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, they will be loathsome to all mankind.”⁹

Intertestamental Jewish Belief About Hell

In the era between the Old and New Testaments,¹⁰ Jewish religious sources referenced hell. The writer of 4 Maccabees said:

Thou for our cruel murder shalt suffer at the hands of divine justice sufficient torment by fire for ever.… Thou for thy impiety and thy cruelty shalt endure torments with end … [in] eternal doom.… The divine justice delivers thee unto a more rapid and eternal fire and torments which shall not leave hold on thee to all eternity.… A great struggle and peril of the soul awaits in eternal torment those who transgress the ordinance of God. (9:9; 10:11, 15; 12:12; 13:15)¹¹

Flavius Josephus on Hell

In a similarity with statements that Christ made,¹² the Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37–100), a contemporary of Jesus, wrote a “Discourse to the Greeks Concerning Hades”:

Hades is a place in the world not regularly finished; a subterraneous region, where the light of this world does not shine; from which circumstances, that in this place the light does not shine, it cannot be but there must be in it perpetual darkness. This region is allowed as a place of custody for souls, in which angels are appointed as guardians to them, who distribute to them temporary punishment, agreeable to every one’s behaviour and manners.

In this region there is a certain place set apart, as a lake of unquenchable fire, wherein we suppose no one hath hitherto been cast; but it is prepared for a day afore-determined by God, in which a righteous sentence shall deservedly be passed upon all men.… [They shall receive] this everlasting punishment, as having been the causes of defilement; while the just shall obtain an incorruptible and never-dying kingdom. These are now confined in Hades, but not in the same place wherein the unjust are confined.…

[God allots] to the lovers of wicked works eternal punishment. To these belong the unquenchable fire, and that without end, and a certain fiery worm never dying, and not destroying the body, but continuing its eruption out of the body with never ceasing grief.

Jesus’ Teachings on the Existence of Hell

Perhaps the strongest of all arguments for hell as a place of punishment for those (angels and humans) who reject God is that the Lord Jesus Christ, second person of the Holy Trinity,¹³ repeatedly affirmed its existence. Indeed, He had more to say about hell than He did about heaven.

Matthew 5:29–30

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.¹⁴

Matthew 10:28

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Matthew 11:23

“And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths. If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day.”

Matthew 13:40–41

“As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.”

Matthew 13:49–50

Jesus added of those who reject Him, “This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Matthew 22:13

“Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ ”

Matthew 23:15, 33

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.… You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?

Matthew 25:41

In His Mount Olivet Discourse, our Lord declared, “Then he [the King] will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ ”¹⁵

Mark 9:43–48

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where their “worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.”

Luke 12:5

“I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell.”

Luke 16:19–31

In a stunningly vivid story that speaks for itself and, unlike parables, uses a person’s actual name (Lazarus), Jesus tells of a man in hell:

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.… The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.”

But Abraham replied, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.”

He answered, “Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.”

Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.”

“No, father Abraham,” he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”

He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

Other New Testament Teachings on the Existence of Hell

In addition to the words of Jesus in the Gospels, other New Testament writings also affirm the doctrine of hell.

2 Thessalonians 1:7–9

Talking of everlasting separation from God, Paul wrote,

This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power.

Hebrews 9:27

The writer of Hebrews added this note of finality: “Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.”

2 Peter 2:4, 9

“If God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment … if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue godly men from trials and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment, while continuing their punishment.”

Jude 6

“The angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.”

Jude 12–13

These [immoral, godless] men [who secretly slipped in among you] are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.

Revelation 2:11

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.”¹⁶

Revelation 14:10–11

“He [the beast], too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever.”

Revelation 19:20

“The beast was captured, and with him the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”

Revelation 20:10

“The devil, who deceived them [those who march against God’s people], was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”

Revelation 20:11–15

Then I [John] saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Revelation 21:8

“The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

THE THEOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE DOCTRINE OF HELL

Several attributes—some of God’s and some of ours—call for the existence of hell. The characteristics of God that necessitate hell are His justice, His love, and His sovereignty. The characteristics of humanity that require the same are depravity and dignity.

God’s Justice Demands a Hell

In addition to the direct biblical affirmations, Scripture contains many other reasons for hell’s existence. One is that justice demands it, and God is just (cf. Rom. 2); He is so pure and holy that He cannot even look upon sin (Hab. 1:13). “There is no partiality with God” (Rom. 2:11 nkjv), and “the Judge of all the earth [will] do [what is] right” (Gen. 18:25).¹⁷

It is a simple fact that not all evil is punished in this life; many observers have noted that the wicked sometimes prosper (cf. Ps. 73:3). Thus, the existence of an after-this-life place of punishment for the wicked is necessary to maintain God’s justice. In a trenchant defense, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) pointed out that even one sin deserves hell:

The eternal holy God cannot tolerate any sin. How much more, then, a multitude of daily sins in thought, word, and deed? This is all compounded by the fact that we reject God’s immense mercy. And add to this man’s readiness to find fault with God’s justice and mercy, and we have abundant evidence of the need for hell. [Therefore,] if we had a true spiritual awareness we would not be amazed at hell’s severity but at our own depravity. (WJE, 1.109)

God’s Love Demands a Hell

The Bible shows that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), and love cannot be coercive but rather is persuasive. A God of love cannot force people to love Him;¹⁸ we respond to His love freely, not because we are required (1 John 4:19; 2 Cor. 9:7). God does not force Himself upon humans against the will He chose to give them (cf. Matt. 23:27), so those who do not wish to love God must be released. Those who decide not to be with Him must be allowed to be separated from Him (see Lewis, GD, 38). Hell is eternal separation from God.

God’s Sovereignty Demands a Hell

If there were no hell, there would be no final victory over evil.¹⁹ Evil frustrates good. The wheat and tares cannot grow together forever (cf. Matt. 13:40–41)—if there were no ultimate separation, good would not ultimately triumph and God would not be in ultimate control. God’s sovereignty demands a hell;²⁰ His Word declares Him the ultimate victor over evil (cf. 1 Cor. 15:24–28; Rev. 20–22).

Jonathan Edwards argued,

It is a most unreasonable thing to suppose that there should be no future punishment, to suppose that God, who had made man a rational creature, able to know his duty, and sensible that he is deserving punishment when he does it not; should let man alone, and let him live as he will, and never punish him for his sins, and never make any difference between the good and the bad. (WJE, 2.884)

Human Depravity Demands a Hell

The only just punishment for sin against the eternal God is eternal punishment. God is absolutely perfect (Hab. 1:13; Matt. 5:48), and human beings are irretractably sinful:²¹

There is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one. There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.²²

Not a word from their mouth can be trusted; their heart is filled with destruction. Their throat is an open grave; with their tongue they speak deceit.²³

They make their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s; the poison of vipers is on their lips.²⁴

His mouth is full of curses and lies and threats; trouble and evil are under his tongue.²⁵

Their feet rush into sin; they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are evil thoughts; ruin and destruction mark their ways. The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths.²⁶

There is no fear of God before his eyes.²⁷

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.… There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.²⁸

The wisest man who ever lived said, “This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes” (Eccl. 7:29). We are born in sin (Ps. 51:5) and are “by nature the children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3 kjv):

[Although God’s creatures] knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. (Rom. 1:21–23)

How can anyone suppose that unrepentant, depraved rebellion against flawless, unblemished holiness is undeserving of God’s wrath?

Human Dignity Demands a Hell

God created humans to be free;²⁹ because He will not (cannot) force people into heaven against this freedom, human dignity demands a hell. Jesus cried out, “‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing’ ” (Matt. 23:37). C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) explained, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done’ ” (GD, 69).

The Cross of Christ Implies Hell

At the center of Christianity is the Cross;³⁰ it is the very purpose for which Christ came into the world.³¹ Without Him salvation is not possible,³² and only through His finished work can we be delivered from our sins (Rom. 3:21–26). Jesus suffered unimaginable agony and even separation from His beloved Father (Heb. 2:10–17; 5:7–9); anticipating the Cross, His “sweat became as it were great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44 asv). Why the Cross and all this suffering unless there is a hell? If there is no hell to shun, then the Cross was in vain. Christ’s death is robbed of its eternal significance unless there is a hellish eternal destiny from which sinful souls need to be delivered.³³

It Is Illusory to Deny Hell

It is not only Christians that acknowledge or demonstrate the reality of hell. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) defined an illusion as beliefs that “are derived from human wishes.” He added, “We call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and [when] in doing so we disregard its relations to reality” (see FI, 38–40). Given the evidence for hell, denial of hell is a strong candidate for an illusion. Freud said of religion, “We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence … but it is very striking that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be so” (ibid., 52–53). We can rephrase this as: We can tell ourselves that it would be wonderful if there were no hell or no final day of judgment at which we will be held accountable for all our deeds, but we shouldn’t fail to note that all of this is exactly what we naturally want to be true.

Another atheist, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980), admitted that belief in hell is not based in illusion: “It neither follows that everybody who believes in hell is prompted by wishful thinking nor … that belief in hell originated in this way” (CRP, 135). Indeed, belief in hell did not; however, disbelief in hell may have originated as such. Polls have yielded an interesting statistic in this regard: While a majority of people in North America believe in the reality of hell, very few believe they are going there. This could be an even greater illusion than that of those who deny hell’s existence.

HELL’S NATURE, LOCATION, AND DURATION

What is hell like? Where is it? How long will it last? These and numerous other questions have been the subject of theological discussion for centuries.

The Nature of Hell

The nature of hell is a horrifying reality. Hell is like being left outside in the dark forever. Hell is like a wandering star, a waterless cloud, a perpetually burning dump, a bottomless pit, an everlasting prison. Hell is a place of anguish and regret.³⁴

To borrow the title of a marvelous book (see Lewis, GD), hell is like a great divorce—an eternal separation from God (cf. 2 Thess. 1:7–9). There is, in biblical language, “a great gulf fixed” between hell and heaven so that no one can pass from one side to the other (Luke 16:26 nkjv).

It is noteworthy that Scripture nowhere describes hell as a torture chamber where people are forced against their will to undergo agonizing pain; this is a caricature of hell created by unbelievers in an attempt to paint God as cruel. That a loving God will not torture anyone does not mean hell is not a place of torment—Jesus said it is (v. 24). However, unlike torture, which is inflicted from without against one’s will, torment is self-inflicted by one’s own will. As has been noted even by atheists—for example, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)³⁵—the door of hell is locked from the inside.

We can be condemned by our own freedom: Torment is living with the consequences of our own bad choices. Torment is the anguish that results from realizing we used our freedom for evil and chose wrongly. Everyone in hell will know that the pain he or she suffers is self-induced; hence, the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 22:13; Mark 8:12).

Hell is also depicted as a place of eternal fire. The fire is real, but not necessarily physical (at least not as we customarily understand the word), because people in hell will have imperishable physical bodies (John 5:28–29; Rev. 20:13–15), so normal fire will not affect them. Further, the figures of speech that describe hell are contradictory if taken in a strictly physical sense. Hell has flames, yet it is outer darkness. Hell is a dump (with a bottom), yet it is a bottomless pit. While everything in the Bible is literally true, not everything is true literally.³⁶ For instance, God is not a literal rock (Ps. 42:9), since He is spirit (John 4:24), but He is literally a solid, rocklike foundation.

The Location of Hell

Hell is said to be “under the earth” (Phil. 2:10), a place of “outer darkness” (Matt. 8:12; 22:13 nkjv), “outside” the gate of the heavenly city (Rev. 22:15). Hell is away from the “presence of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9; cf. Matt. 25:41). Of course, “under” and “outside” are relational terms that need not necessarily be taken as spatial. God is “up” and hell is “down.” God is “inside” and hell is “outside.” Hell is the other direction from God, eternal separation from Him (2 Thess. 1:7–9).

The Duration of Hell

Annihilationists³⁷ argue that the Greek word rendered everlasting (aiôn, aiônios) when applied to heaven means “unending” but when applied to hell means “ending” (see Froom, CFF, 1.433). As we will see, this is inconsistent and untrue—that hell will last as long as God and heaven is supported by several lines of evidence.

God’s Word declares that He will endure forever (Ps. 90:1); He had no beginning and has no end (Rev. 1:8); He created all things (Col. 1:15–16; John 1:3); and He will abide after this world is destroyed (2 Peter 3:10–12). Because God by His very nature cannot tolerate evil (Isa. 6:1ff.; Hab. 1:13), evil persons must be separated from Him forever.

Hell Will Last As Long As Heaven Does

Heaven is “everlasting,” and the same word (Gk: aiônion), used in the same context, also affirms that hell is “everlasting.”³⁸ If heaven is forever, then so is hell; there is absolutely no biblical ground for supposing that one is eternal and one is temporal. Likewise, there is no possibility of a person escaping hell after arriving (cf. Luke 16:26). Judgment begins after death (Heb. 9:27; John 8:21).

What is more, people are conscious after they die, whether in heaven or in hell.³⁹ It makes no sense to resurrect unbelievers to everlasting judgment (Dan. 12:2; John 5:28–29) before the Great White Throne (Rev. 20:11ff.) in order to punish them for their sins unless they are conscious.

Annihilation of the wicked is contrary to both the nature of God and the nature of humans made in His image.⁴⁰ It is not consistent with the character of an all-loving God to snuff out the souls of those who do not do His wishes;⁴¹ can you imagine an earthly father killing his children for not doing what he wants them to do? Further, were God to annihilate human beings, He would be attacking Himself, for we are made in His image (Gen. 1:27), and He is immortal.⁴² That these persons will be suffering does not justify annihilating them any more than having a child in pain justifies smothering him. Annihilationism violates God’s nature and human freedom,⁴³ as recognized not only by believers but also by some who have denied God. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who held that annihilation is not preferable to conscious freedom, once wrote, “I would rather will nothingness than not to will at all” (TGM, last line).

Hell Will Last As Long As God Does

Not only will hell’s duration be as long as heaven’s, but it also will endure as long as God Himself—the same term meaning “eternal” (Gk: aiônion) is used of all three.⁴⁴ Romans 16:26 declares that God’s mystery is “now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him.”⁴⁵ Since hell is reserved for those who have lived for sin instead of for the eternal God, hell will endure as long as the eternal God against whom they have sinned—forever.

ANSWERING OBJECTIONS TO HELL

Critics of biblical and historic Christian teaching on hell have offered many objections to the doctrine. We’ll now examine some of the most common.

Objection One: Why Punish People in Hell—Why Not Reform Them for Heaven?

Why never-ending punishment? Why doesn’t God try instead to reform sinners? Even human beings, with their limited abilities and resources, provide reformatories for criminals. How much more should God, with His unlimited abilities and resources, have a reformatory, rather than an eternal penal institution, for the creatures He made in His image and likeness?

Response to Objection One

The answer is not difficult, either biblically or rationally.

First, God does try to reform people; the time of reformation is called life. Peter declared, “The Lord … is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). After the time of reformation comes the time of reckoning: “Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

Second, hell is only for the unreformable and unrepentant, the reprobate (cf. 2 Peter 2:1ff.). Hell is not for anyone who is reformable; anyone reformable will still be alive, for God in His wisdom and goodness does not allow anyone to go to hell whom He knew would go to heaven if He gave more opportunity.⁴⁶ God wants everyone to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4); hell was created not for people, but for the devil and his fallen angels (Matt. 25:41). Lewis observed, “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock [the door] is opened” (GD, 69).

Third, contrary to the assumption that once a person reached such a horrible place he would want to leave, it is simply not so. There is no evidence for this in the gospel story of the man in hell,⁴⁷ and there is no support for it in the known nature of the human psyche. In regard to changing the hearts and dispositions of wicked people, how can a place devoid of God’s mercy accomplish what no measure of His grace could accomplish on earth? If hell could reform those who choose evil, then they could be saved without Christ, who is the sole means of God’s salvation.⁴⁸ In fact, as opposed to softening a hard heart, suffering often has the result of hardening it more, as illustrated in the case of Pharaoh (Ex. 7–14) and as demonstrated by the recidivism of hardened criminals.

Fourth, and finally, God cannot force free creatures to be reformed.⁴⁹ Forced reformation is worse than punishment, for punishment honors the freedom and dignity with which God endowed His human creation: “To be ‘cured’ against one’s will … is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals” (Lewis, GITD, 292). Humans are not objects to be manipulated; humans are subjects to be respected. People, made in God’s image, receive punishment when they do evil because they were free and knew better (see Rom. 1:18ff.).

Objection Two: Isn’t Eternal Damnation for Temporal Sins Overkill?

To punish a person eternally for what he did temporally seems like a gigantic case of overkill. No human parent would mete out a lifetime of punishment upon his child for a crime that involved a few minutes; why should God punish forever those who have only sinned for a short time?

Response to Objection Two

On closer examination, eternal punishment turns out to be not only just but also necessary.

For one thing, only eternal punishment will suffice for sins against the eternal God. Sins committed in time are perpetrated against the Eternal One; analogically, while it may take only an instant to kill someone, the deserved punishment is life in prison. No sin can be tolerated as long as God exists;⁵⁰ because He is eternal, punishment for sin must also be eternal. God’s justice demands eternal punishment because “the heinousness of any crime must be gauged according to the worth or dignity of the person it is committed against” (Edwards in Davidson, “RD” in JETS, 50).⁵¹ Sin against an infinite God is infinitely evil and worthy of infinite punishment (Edwards, WJE, 2.83).

What is more, as we have seen, the only alternative to eternal punishment is robbing persons of their freedom by forcing them into heaven. This would not be heavenly but instead would be “hell” for them, since they would be trapped in a place where everyone is loving and praising the One they want most to avoid (cf. Lewis, PP, 106–07). Again, God’s third choice, annihilating His own image within His creatures—and, therefore, snuffing them out of existence—would be an attack of God on Himself.⁵²

In addition, without an eternal separation of evil from good (in hell), there could be no heaven, an eternal preservation of good. Evil is contagious (1 Cor. 5:6) and must be quarantined;⁵³ like a deadly plague, if uncontained, evil will continue to contaminate and corrupt. If God did not eventually separate the tares from the wheat, the tares would choke out the wheat (cf. Matt. 13:24–30); an eternal heaven necessitates an eternal hell.

Finally, unbelievers prefer to be distanced from God in time. Why should we not expect this to be their chosen state in eternity?

Objection Three: How Can We Be Happy in Heaven Knowing a Loved One Is in Hell?

The mere thought of a loved one eternally separated from God is dreadful. How could a husband be happy in heaven knowing his wife is forever in hell’s anguish? A parent is tormented by a child suffering the pain of leukemia for a few months; how could a parent possibly be happy in heaven knowing the child is going to be suffering forever?

Response to Objection Three

First of all, the seriously flawed presupposition of this question is that we are more merciful than God. He is infinitely more merciful than we are (cf. Lewis, PP, 114).

Furthermore, God is happy in heaven, yet He knows that not everyone will be there.

Also, if we could not be happy in heaven while knowing that others were in hell, then our happiness would be in someone else’s hands:

What some people [wrongly] say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved. The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned [is] that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven [is invalid]. (GD, 124)

We would not be happy in heaven if we knew that others had been unjustly kept out. However, we can be happy in heaven the same way we can be happy eating while knowing that others are starving—namely, if we have offered them food but they have refused to eat it. No matter the situation, God will “wipe away all tears” in heaven (Rev. 21:4 kjv).

Objection Four: Why Did God Create People He Knew Would Go to Hell?

Some critics of hell argue that if God knew some creatures would reject Him and eventuate in such a horrible place, He would have never created them. Wouldn’t it be better to have never existed than to exist and spend eternity in hell?

Response to Objection Four

Nonexistence cannot be said to be a better condition than existence, since nonexistence is nothing; to affirm that nothing can be better than something is a colossal category mistake. In order for two things to be comparable, they must have something in common, and there is absolutely nothing in common between being and nonbeing—they are diametrical opposites. Someone may feel like being put out of his misery, but he cannot even consistently think of nonbeing as a better state than being. What has no being cannot be better than what is.

Jesus’ statement that it would have been better if Judas had never been born (Mark 14:21) is simply a strong expression indicating the severity of his sin, not a statement of nonbeing’s superiority over being. In a parallel condemnation of the Pharisees, Jesus said Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented had they seen His miracles (Matt. 11:20–24). This does not mean Sodom and Gomorrah literally would have repented;⁵⁴ rather, this is a powerful figure of speech indicating that the Pharisees’ sin was so great that “it will be more tolerable” (v. 24 tlb) for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment⁵⁵ than for the Pharisees.

That not all people will win in the game of life does not mean it should not be played: “If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it” (Lewis, PP, 106). Before the Super Bowl ever begins, players from both teams know that one of them will lose, yet they all will play. American drivers know that people will be killed daily in auto accidents, yet we still daily take to the road. All of us who are parents know that having children could end in tragedy for them and for ourselves, yet our knowledge of evil’s existence does not negate our will to permit the likelihood of good. Why do we will as such? Because we deem it worthwhile—because we know that it’s better to have had the opportunity for goodness, for life, for love. Likewise, from God’s standpoint, it is better to have loved all the people of the world (John 3:16) and have lost some than not to have loved them at all.⁵⁶

Objection Five: That Hell Has No Redeeming Value

Some maintain that hell has no redeeming value because no one ever emerges from it; no one who goes there learns from it; no one “lives to tell the tale.” What’s the point, if everyone who chooses hell stays there forever?

Response to Objection Five

To this argument Jonathan Edwards answered that hell’s redeeming value is that it not only satisfies God’s justice but also glorifies God’s justice by showing how great a standard it is: “The vindictive justice of God will appear strict, exact, awful, and terrible, and therefore glorious” (WJE, 2.87). In other words, the more terrific and fearsome the judgment, the brighter the sheen on the sword of God’s justice.⁵⁷ Awesome punishment befits the nature of an awesome God: By a majestic display of wrath, God reclaims the majesty that the wicked have refused to return to Him.⁵⁸ Awful punishment in the afterlife will bring to God what people stole from Him in this life; those who choose no glory for God during this life will be given no such choice thereafter.⁵⁹

All human beings are either actively or passively useful to God. In heaven believers will be actively useful in praising His mercy; in hell unbelievers will be passively useful in bringing majesty to His justice. Just as a barren tree is useful for firewood, so the wicked are fuel for an eternal fire (ibid., 2.126).

Further, in hell the tares are separated from the wheat and the evil from the good. This is both useful and necessary. For what frustrates evil is good. Hence, heaven is a place where there is no evil to frustrate good people, and hell is a place where there is no more good to frustrate evil people. The final separation is needed for the triumph of good over evil so that evil can no longer contaminate good.

Objection Six: Is It Right (Just) to Send People to Hell When They Can’t Help Being Sinners?

The Bible says we are born sinners (Ps. 51:5) and are “by nature the children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3 kjv). If sinners cannot avoid sinning, then is it fair to send them to hell for sin?

Response to Objection Six

People go to hell for two reasons: (1) They are born with a bent to sin and (2) they choose to sin. They are born on a road that leads to hell, but those who remain on that road also fail to heed the warning signs to turn from destruction and be saved.

While human beings sin because they are sinners by nature, nonetheless, their sin nature does not force them to sin; they choose to sin.⁶⁰ As correctly said by Augustine (354–430), “We are born with the propensity to sin and the necessity to die.” Notice he did not say we are born with the necessity to sin; while sin is inevitable, since we are born with a bent in that direction, nonetheless, sin is not unavoidable.⁶¹ Likewise, the ultimate place to which sinners are destined is also avoidable—all one needs to do is repent.⁶² Everyone is held responsible for his decision to accept or reject God’s offer of salvation, and responsibility always implies the ability to respond (if not on our own, then by God’s grace⁶³). All who go to hell could have avoided it; even the pagan has clear light from God so that he is “without excuse.”⁶⁴ Those who seek will find,⁶⁵ and just as God sent a missionary to Cornelius (Acts 10:23–25), so He will provide the message of salvation for all who seek it: “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Heb. 11:6).

Objection Seven: Why Not Annihilate Sinners Instead of Consciously Tormenting Them?

If God is merciful, as the Bible maintains, then would it not be more merciful to put sinners out of their misery by annihilating them?⁶⁶ If, for example, people shoot farm animals that will not be able to escape burning barns, why should not God be at least as merciful to humans?

Response to Objection Seven

It is precisely because we are not animals that God does not treat us like them. Annihilating those who do not carry out His will would be unkind and unmerciful, as would be a father who shot his son because the young man grew up and disagreed with him. It is more merciful for God to allow us to choose our own way—even if it is against His will—than to force His will on us.⁶⁷

Objection Eight: Hell Itself Is Contrary to the Mercy of God

In the same vein, some have insisted that a merciful God would not permit suffering in hell. No loving earthly father could allow his child to be in perpetual torment if he could do anything about it.

Response to Objection Eight

First, it is untenable to suppose that God’s mercy does not permit suffering in hell. God allows plenty of suffering in this world. It is an empirical fact that God and creature-pain are not incompatible.⁶⁸

Second, Edwards contended that God’s mercy is not a passion or emotion that overcomes His justice. Mercy so construed is a defect in God that would make Him weak and inconsistent within Himself, not fit to be a judge.⁶⁹

Third, from the vantage point of eternity, as our attitudes and feelings will be transformed and correspond to God’s, we will love only what He loves and hate what He hates. Since God is not miserable at the thought or sight of hell, neither will we be—even in the case of people we loved in this life. John Gerstner (1914–1996) compiled a digest of Jonathan Edwards’ entire sermon devoted to this, called “The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous,” in which he says that “it will seem in no way cruel in God to inflict such extreme suffering on such extremely wicked creatures” (“OAJE” in BS, 90). Not doing so would be unjust, and God is perfectly just.⁷⁰ Since none of God’s attributes are inconsistent with each other,⁷¹ it follows that God is not unmerciful to allow hell.

Fourth, and finally, God will have done everything he could do, short of robbing His creatures of His very image in them. He has loved all (John 3:16), sent His Son to die for all (1 John 2:2), and sent His Holy Spirit to convict all (John 16:8). He cannot make their decision for them, and He cannot force a free decision (Matt. 23:37), so the rest is in human hands; God could not possibly have been more merciful.

Objection Nine: Eternal Punishment Is Not Eternal Misery

Annihilationists argue that God’s punishment is eternal in its results but not in its process; that is, the effect is eternal but the duration is temporal (see Froom, CFF, 1.294). Take the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (see 2 Peter 2:6): They are not still being punished, but the result of their punishment will never end.

Everlasting punishment is clearly not the same as being everlastingly punished. It is eternal loss of being. [Hell is a place where] the undying worm and the quenchless flame feed upon their victim until the whole is consumed. (op. cit., 1.295)

Response to Objection Nine

This objection is contrary to clear scriptural statements that speak, for example, of those in hell being “tormented day and night forever and ever” (Rev. 20:10). In hell, their “worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). The flames of hell are said to be eternal.^72[2]

HELL. ‘Hell’ in the NT renders the Gk. word transliterated as ‘Gehenna’ (Mt. 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mk. 9:43, 45, 47; Lk. 12:5; Jas. 3:6). The name is derived from the Heb. gê(ben) (b^enê) hinnōm, the Valley of (the son[s] of Hinnom, a valley near Jerusalem (Jos. 15:8; 18:16), where children were sacrificed by fire in connection with pagan rites (2 Ki. 23:10; 2 Ch. 28:3; 33:6; Je. 7:31; 32:35). Its original derivation is obscure, but Hinnom is almost certainly the name of a person. In later Jewish writings Gehenna came to mean the place of punishment for sinners (Assumption of Moses 10:10; 2 Esdras 7:36). It was depicted as a place of unquenchable fire—the general idea of fire to express the divine judgment is found in the OT (Dt. 32:22; Dn. 7:10). The rabbinic literature contains various opinions as to who would suffer eternal punishment. The ideas were widespread that the sufferings of some would be terminated by annihilation, or that the fires of Gehenna were in some cases purgatorial (Rosh Hashanah 16b–17a; Baba Mezi’a 58b; Mishnah Eduyoth 2. 10). But those who held these doctrines also taught the reality of eternal punishment for certain classes of sinners. Both this literature and the Apocryphal books affirm belief in an eternal retribution (cf. Judith 16:17; Psalms of Solomon 3:13).

The teaching of the NT endorses this past belief. The fire of hell is unquenchable (Mk. 9:43), eternal (Mt. 18:8), its punishment is the converse of eternal life (Mt. 25:46). There is no suggestion that those who enter hell ever emerge from it. However, the NT leaves the door open for the belief that while hell as a manifestation of God’s implacable wrath against sin is unending, the existence of those who suffer in it may not be. It is difficult to reconcile the ultimate fulfilment of the whole universe in Christ (Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:20) with the continued existence of those who reject him. Some scholars have contended that an eternal punishment is one which is eternal in its effects; in any case eternal does not necessarily mean never-ending, but implies ‘long duration extending to the writer’s mental horizon’ (J. A. Beet). On the other hand Rev. 20:10 does indicate conscious, never-ending torment for the devil and his agents, albeit in a highly symbolic passage, and some would affirm that a similar end awaits human beings who ultimately refuse to repent. In any case, nothing should be allowed to detract from the seriousness of our Lord’s warnings about the terrible reality of God’s judgment in the world to come.

In Jas. 3:6 Gehenna, like the bottomless pit in Rev. 9:1ff.; 11:7, appears to be the source of evil on the earth.

NT imagery concerning eternal punishment is not uniform. As well as fire it is described as darkness (Mt. 25:30; 2 Pet. 2:17), death (Rev. 2:11), destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord (2 Thes. 1:9; Mt. 7:21–23), and a debt to pay (Mt. 5:25–26).

In 2 Pet. 2:4 only, we find the Verb tartaroō, translated in rsv ‘cast into hell’, and rendered by the Pesh. ‘cast down to the lower regions’. Tartaros is the classical word for the place of eternal punishment but is here applied to the intermediate sphere of punishment for fallen angels.^[3]

Hell—derived from the Saxon helan, to cover; hence the covered or the invisible place. In Scripture there are three words so rendered:

(1.) Sheol, occurring in the Old Testament sixty-five times. This word sheol is derived from a root-word meaning “to ask,” “demand;” hence insatiableness (Prov. 30:15, 16). It is rendered “grave” thirty-one times (Gen. 37:35; 42:38; 44:29, 31; 1 Sam. 2:6, etc.). The Revisers have retained this rendering in the historical books with the original word in the margin, while in the poetical books they have reversed this rule.

In thirty-one cases in the Authorized Version this word is rendered “hell,” the place of disembodied spirits. The inhabitants of sheol are “the congregation of the dead” (Prov. 21:16). It is (a) the abode of the wicked (Num. 16:33; Job 24:19; Ps. 9:17; 31:17, etc.); (b) of the good (Ps. 16:10; 30:3; 49:15; 86:13, etc.).

Sheol is described as deep (Job 11:8), dark (10:21, 22), with bars (17:16). The dead “go down” to it (Num. 16:30, 33; Ezek. 31:15, 16, 17).

(2.) The Greek word hades of the New Testament has the same scope of signification as sheol of the Old Testament. It is a prison (1 Pet. 3:19), with gates and bars and locks (Matt. 16:18; Rev. 1:18), and it is downward (Matt. 11:23; Luke 10:15).

The righteous and the wicked are separated. The blessed dead are in that part of hades called paradise (Luke 23:43). They are also said to be in Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:22).

(3.) Gehenna, in most of its occurrences in the Greek New Testament, designates the place of the lost (Matt. 23:33). The fearful nature of their condition there is described in various figurative expressions (Matt. 8:12; 13:42; 22:13; 25:30; Luke 16:24, etc.). (See HINNOM.)^[4]

Hell (γέεννα, geenna). The Greek word is often translated in English versions of the New Testament as “hell.” It is a noun derived from the Hebrew phrase גיא הנום (gy’ hnwm), which means “Valley of Hinnom.” The Valley of Hinnom was a ravine along the southern slope of Jerusalem (Josh 15:18; 18:16). In Old Testament times, it was a place used for offering sacrifices to foreign gods. Eventually, the site was used to burn refuse. When the Jews discussed punishment in the afterlife, they employed the image of this smoldering waste dump.

The Afterlife in the Old Testament

Sheol

Sheol generally refers to the dwelling place of a person after death. In a few texts, Sheol is represented as the place where everyone goes—though, this is likely hyperbole (Psa 89:48; Eccl 9:10). Other texts indicate it is the dwelling place for the good or righteous (e.g., Gen 37:35; Pss 88:3; 89:48; Isa 38:10). Still other passages indicate it is the final abode of the wicked (e.g., Num 16:30, 33; 1 Kgs 2:6, 9; Job 21:13; 24:19; Pss 9:17; 31:17; Isa 5:14).

According to the descriptions in the Old Testament, Sheol is located in the “Underworld.” In order to get there, one must descend (Num 16:30, 33; Job 17:16; 21:13; Prov 5:5; 9:18) and one must dig towards it (Amos 9:2). In order to get out, a person would need to ascend (Psa 30:3). Sheol is located opposite of heaven (Psa 139:8; Amos 9:2). It is infested with worms and maggots (Isa 14:11). This language could be figurative.

Valley of Hinnom

In the Valley of Hinnom, King Ahaz and King Manasseh offered their sons as sacrifices to the gods of Baal and Molech (2 Chr 28:3; 33:6; 2 Kgs 16:3).

In condemning the valley as a place of idol worship, the prophet Jeremiah anticipated that it would become a “Valley of Slaughter,” a place of judgment for worshipers of foreign gods (Jer 7:30–34; 19:1–13; 32:34–35).

Isaiah predicted that Israel’s enemy Assyria would be destroyed with fire at Hinnom (Isa 30:29–33). Hinnom became closely associated with death, corpses, and punishment—it became a fitting image of God judging the wicked.

The Concept of the Afterlife in Second Temple Period Literature

In the second temple period (16 bc—ad 70), Jewish writers’ views on hell were likely shaped by foreign ideas about the afterlife. Persian and Hellenistic ideas of retribution after death may have encouraged a Jewish belief in different fates for the righteous and the godless. For example, in 1 En. 22:8–13 the author describes a divided dwelling for the dead—a sphere for sinners and another sphere for the righteous.

The author of the book of 1 Enoch does not seem to distinguish between Sheol and gehenna—the terms are used interchangeably (1 En. 51:1–3).

Sheol also began to be viewed as an intermediate holding place for the dead, prior to resurrection. In Iranian thought, the dead had to pass over the Chinvat Bridge in order to reach paradise; demons lurked below the bridge and caused sinners to fall into a pit of torment (Russell, The Devil, 255). The book of 2 Esdras discusses these dual destinies (2 Esd. 7:36). The righteous alone will experience resurrection, according to 1 Enoch (1 En. 22:12–13; 51:1–3). Since resurrection from the dead was only for the righteous, Sheol began to be considered a place of fiery punishment solely for the wicked.

New Testament

The New Testament often distinguishes between ᾅδης (hadēs) and γέεννα (geenna). For instance, a few passages simply use ᾅδης (hadēs) as a synonym for the death or the grave. For example, Acts 2:27 and 2:31 state that Jesus was not left in ᾅδης (hadēs) or “the grave.”

The term γέεννα (geenna) occurs ten times in the Gospels (Matt 5:22, 29; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5) and also in Jas 3:6. The word ᾅδης (hadēs) occurs ten times in the New Testament (Matt 11:23; 16:18; Luke 10:15; 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31; Rev 1:18, 6:8; 20:13, 14).

Jesus’ Teaching on Hell

Jesus teaches that, after their death, people either enter the kingdom of God or are cast into γέεννα (geenna) (Matt 10:28; Luke 13:28). In addition, Jesus discusses three aspects of hell in his teaching: its inhabitants, its features and the extent of its punishment.

Hell’s Inhabitants

Jesus frequently describes those who are destined for ᾅδης (hadēs). Jesus tells the inhabitants of Capernaum that their unbelief will lead them to ᾅδης (hadēs) (Matt 11:20–24). Jesus also warns of several sins that might condemn one to ᾅδης (hadēs), including calling a spiritual brother or sister a fool (Matt 5:22) and giving into sinful tendencies (Matt 5:29–30). For Jesus, a person is either a child of ᾅδης (hadēs) or a child of Abraham (Matt 23:15; Luke 19:9). Jesus questions the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites about how they expect to escape the condemnation of ᾅδης (hadēs) if they are committing the sins of their ancestors (Matt 23:31–33). In His preaching, Jesus promises the gates of ᾅδης (hadēs) shall not prevail against the church (Matt 16:18).

Descriptions of Hell

Jesus describes hell as an eternal fire where the devil and his angels are destined (Matt 25:41). He also calls it the abyss (Luke 8:31). It is a place of darkness, where a person experiences weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt 8:8–12). The weeping suggests suffering and pain while the gnashing of teeth suggests despair and anger.

Beyond these images, Jesus also portrays hell (or ᾅδης, hadēs) in Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). In this passage, ᾅδης (hadēs) is depicted as a permanent abode and a place of torment. Further, it seems it accommodates some individuals, but not others. The rich man went there after dying, and Lazarus did not. Instead, Lazarus is in Abraham’s bosom, a traditional designation for the place of the dead who were righteous in life. This parable also teaches about the irreversible nature of punishment in the afterlife.

The Duration of Hell’s Punishment

There are two primary perspectives on the extent of hell’s punishment. One view contends that the wicked experience eternal conscious suffering (Walvoord, “The Literal”). The other view argues that the wicked eventually are consumed by hell’s fire, thereby forfeiting their existence (Fudge, “The Final End“).

Matthew 10:28 might imply that hell destroys both the body and the soul, making punishment only temporary. However, other texts support the eternal duration of hell’s punishment. For example, Jesus, drawing on Isa 66:24, speaks of hell as the place where the worm never dies and the fire is never extinguished (Mark 9:48). In Matthew 25:46, it seems that the punishment is forever rather than for a while. Jesus claims that upon death some people will go to eternal punishment while others will enter into eternal life.

Paul’s Teaching on Hell

Paul stresses the expectation of salvation, and does not emphasize the topic of hell or its torments. The idea of torture as a punishment for wicked deeds is totally absent from his teaching about the last days. For Paul, salvation is the opposite of death (2 Cor 7:10). In Second Thessalonians 1:8–10, he describes the final days: Jesus will come with flaming fire, and will impose a penalty on those who do not acknowledge God or who refuse to accept the gospel of Jesus (Kyrtatas, “The Christian Origin,” 286).

The Concept of Hell in the Rest of the New Testament

The remainder of literature in the New Testament primarily focuses on the judgment of those sentenced to hell. The Second Letter of Peter includes the verb ταρταρόω (tartaroō), which is often translated as “cast into hell” (2 Pet 2:4 NRSV). In this passage, Peter describes the divine power, which has imprisoned the rebellious angels (Bernstein, The Formation, 251). The verb ταρταρόω (tartaroō) is related to the noun Τάρταρος (Tartaros). Τάρταρος (Tartaros) is the Greek word for a subterranean place, lower than ᾅδης (hadēs), where divine punishment was conducted. The passage suggests that if God did not spare the rebellious angels from the fire of ᾅδης (hadēs) then He certainly will not show mercy on false teachers leading people astray (2 Pet 2:1–10).

Hebrews 10:26–27 also describes those who are bound for the punishment of ᾅδης (hadēs)—a raging fire will consume the enemies of God. Whether this imagery of fire is metaphorical or literal is debatable (see Crockett, Four Views on Hell).

While Revelation does not mention the term ᾅδης (hadēs) directly, the author provides the most pointed descriptions of those who will experience the torment of ᾅδης (hadēs) in the life to come. Two themes concerning ᾅδης (hadēs) emerge in the last book of the New Testament. First, Jesus is the one who possesses power over ᾅδης (hadēs) (Rev 1:18). Second, the lake of fire eventually will house all the “authors of evil” and all whose names are not found written in the book of life (Bernstein, The Formation, 259). Therefore, ᾅδης (hadēs) itself is judged and thrown into the lake of fire (Rev 20:13–14), the beast and false prophet are sent to the lake of fire (Rev 19:20) and finally, the devil is thrown into the eternal fire (Rev 20:10).

The Concept of Hell in Post-Biblical Writings

In post-biblical literature, hell usually retains its characteristic imagery, with variations and elaborations. The Bishop Polycarp (ca. ad 69–155) contrasts a martyr’s death by fire—which is eventually extinguished—with the eternal flames of judgment that never cease (Martyrdom of Polycarp 11:2).

The Christian writer Origen of Alexandria (ca. ad 185–254), had an entirely different perspective on hell’s flames. He considered the flames of hell to be a refining or purifying fire. It was corrective rather than punitive. Origen uses Malachi 3:3 to support his view (Principles 2.10). However, there seems to be little evidence in the New Testament that a person’s experience of hell ever brings about genuine repentance.

In the mid-second century, the Ethiopic text of the Apocalypse of Peter describes Jesus leading Peter through the abode of the dead. The punishments of sinners are described in detail. For example, murderers are cast into the fire, a place full of venomous beasts. Victims are tormented without rest and worms are a persistent pest. In addition to the more elaborate detail, the Apocalypse depicts hell as a much noisier place than in the biblical record. One hears the taunts of tormenting angels, the cries for mercy from the damned, and the hymns of the victims in praise of divine justice (Bernstein, The Formation, 288–289).

Bibliography

Bailey, Lloyd R. “Gehenna: The Topography of Hell.” Biblical Archeologist (1986).

Bauckham, Richard. The Fate of the Dead: Studies on Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. Boston: Brill, 1998.

Bernstein, Alan E. The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Fudge, Edward. “The Final End of the Wicked.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 27 (1984): 325–334.

Himmelfarb, Martha. Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Johnston, Philip S. Shades of Sheol: Death and the Afterlife in the Old Testament. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2002.

Kyrtatas, Dimitris. J. “The Christian Origins of Hell.” Numen 56 (2009): 282–297.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1977.

Walvoord, John F. “The Literal View.” Pages 11–28 in Four Views on Hell. Edited by William Crockett. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997.

David Seal^[5]

Eternal death—The miserable fate of the wicked in hell (Matt. 25:46; Mark 3:29; Heb. 6:2; 2 Thess. 1:9; Matt. 18:8; 25:41; Jude 1:7). The Scripture as clearly teaches the unending duration of the penal sufferings of the lost as the “everlasting life,” the “eternal life” of the righteous. The same Greek words in the New Testament (aion, aionios, aidios) are used to express (1) the eternal existence of God (1 Tim. 1:17; Rom. 1:20; 16:26); (2) of Christ (Rev. 1:18); (3) of the Holy Ghost (Heb. 9:14); and (4) the eternal duration of the sufferings of the lost (Matt. 25:46; Jude 1:6).

Their condition after casting off the mortal body is spoken of in these expressive words: “Fire that shall not be quenched” (Mark 9:45, 46), “fire unquenchable” (Luke 3:17), “the worm that never dies,” the “bottomless pit” (Rev. 9:1), “the smoke of their torment ascending up for ever and ever” (Rev. 14:10, 11).

The idea that the “second death” (Rev. 20:14) is in the case of the wicked their absolute destruction, their annihilation, has not the slightest support from Scripture, which always represents their future as one of conscious suffering enduring for ever.

The supposition that God will ultimately secure the repentance and restoration of all sinners is equally unscriptural. There is not the slightest trace in all the Scriptures of any such restoration. Sufferings of themselves have no tendency to purify the soul from sin or impart spiritual life. The atoning death of Christ and the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit are the only means of divine appointment for bringing men to repentance. Now in the case of them that perish these means have been rejected, and “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Heb. 10:26, 27).

Eternal life—This expression occurs in the Old Testament only in Dan. 12:2 (R.V., “everlasting life”).

It occurs frequently in the New Testament (Matt. 7:14; 18:8, 9; Luke 10:28; comp. 18:18). It comprises the whole future of the redeemed (Luke 16:9), and is opposed to “eternal punishment” (Matt. 19:29; 25:46). It is the final reward and glory into which the children of God enter (1 Tim. 6:12, 19; Rom. 6:22; Gal. 6:8; 1 Tim. 1:16; Rom. 5:21); their Sabbath of rest (Heb. 4:9; comp. 12:22).

The newness of life which the believer derives from Christ (Rom. 6:4) is the very essence of salvation, and hence the life of glory or the eternal life must also be theirs (Rom. 6:8; 2 Tim. 2:11, 12; Rom. 5:17, 21; 8:30; Eph. 2:5, 6). It is the “gift of God in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). The life the faithful have here on earth (John 3:36; 5:24; 6:47, 53–58) is inseparably connected with the eternal life beyond, the endless life of the future, the happy future of the saints in heaven (Matt. 19:16, 29; 25:46).^[6]

Hell

hell, an English word used to translate Heb., Sheol; Gk., Hades; and Heb., Gehenna. In Christian tradition it is usually associated with the notion of eternal punishment, especially by fire. This idea appears in Isa. 66:24, but it is not clearly associated with a place. Jewish writings from the third century b.c. onward speak of places of punishment by fire for evil spirits and the wicked dead (1 Enoch 18:11-16; 108:3-7, 15; 2 Esd. 7:36–38). The book of Revelation describes a lake that burns with fire and brimstone in which the wicked will be eternally punished (Rev. 19:20; 20:14–15; 21:8). See also Gehenna; Hades; Punishment, Everlasting; Sheol.^[7]

Gehenna

Gehenna (ge-henʹnah), hell or hellfire. The word is derived from Hebrew ge-hinnom, meaning ‘valley of Hinnom,’ also known in the ot as ‘the valley of the son(s) of Hinnom.’ Located west and south of Jerusalem and running into the Kidron Valley at a point opposite the modern village of Silwan, the valley of Hinnom once formed part of the boundary between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (Josh. 15:8; 18:16; Neh. 11:30). During the monarchical period, it became the site of an infamous high place (called ‘Topheth’ and derived from an Aramaic word meaning ‘fireplace’), where some of the kings of Judah engaged in forbidden religious practices, including human sacrifice by fire (2 Chron. 28:3; 33:6; Jer. 7:31; 32:35). Because of this, Jeremiah spoke of its impending judgment and destruction (Jer. 7:32; 19:6). King Josiah put an end to these practices by destroying and defiling the high place in the valley of Hinnom (2 Kings 23:10).

Probably because of these associations with fiery destruction and judgment, the word ‘Gehenna’ came to be used metaphorically during the intertestamental period as a designation for hell or eternal damnation. In the nt, the word is used only in this way and never as a geographic place name. As such, Gehenna is to be distinguished from Hades, which is either the abode of all the dead in general (Acts 2:27, 31; Rev. 20:13–14) or the place where the wicked await the final judgment. By contrast, the righteous enter paradise, or a state of bliss, immediately upon death (Luke 16:19–31; 23:43; 2 Cor. 12:3). Jesus warned his disciples of committing sins that would lead to Gehenna (Matt. 5:22, 29–30; 23:33; Mark 9:45; Luke 12:5). In the nt, Gehenna designates the place or state of the final punishment of the wicked. It is variously described as a fiery furnace (Matt. 13:42, 50), an unquenchable fire (Mark 9:43), or an eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41). See also Hell, Sheol.    W.E.L.^[8]

HELL. The word used in the King James Version of the O.T. to translate the Hebrew word sheol, signifying the unseen state, in Deut. 32:22; 2 Sam. 22:6; Job 11:8; 26:6; Psa. 9:17; 16:10; 18:5; 55:15; 86:13; 116:3; 139:8; Prov. 5:5; 7:27; 9:18; 15:11, 24; 23:14; 27:20; Isa. 5:14; 14:9, 15; 28:15, 18; 57:9; Ezek. 31:16, 17; 32:21, 27; Amos 9:2; Jonah 2:2; Hab. 2:5. See Hades; Sheol. Translation of the Greek word hades in N.T. of King James Version, the unseen world, Matt. 11:23; 16:18; Luke 10:15; 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31; Rev. 1:18; 6:8; 20:13, 14; of the Greek word gehenna, signifying the place of torment, Matt. 5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5; Jas. 3:6; of the Greek verb tartaro¢, signifying the infernal region, 2 Pet. 2:4. Sheol is also translated “grave” in King James Version in Gen. 37:35; 42:38; 44:29, 31; 1 Sam. 2:6; 1 Kin. 2:6, 9; Job 7:9; 14:13; 17:13; 21:13; 24:19; Psa. 6:5; 30:3; 31:17; 49:14, 15; 88:3; 89:48; 141:7; Prov. 1:12; 30:16; Eccl. 9:10; Song 8:6; Isa. 14:11; 38:10, 18; Ezek. 31:15; Hos. 13:14; pit, Num. 16:30, 33; Job 17:16. The English revisers insert the Hebrew word sheol in places where hell, grave, and pit were used in the A.V. as translations of the word sheol, except in Deut. 32:22; Psa. 55:15; 86:13; and in the prophetical books. The American revisers invariably use Sheol in the American text, where it occurs in the original.

The Future Abode of the Wicked: Psa. 9:17; Prov. 5:5; Prov. 9:13–17; Prov. 15:24; Prov. 23:13, 14; Isa. 30:33; Isa. 33:14; Matt. 3:12; Matt. 5:29 v. 30.; Matt. 7:13 v. 14.; Matt. 8:11, 12; Matt. 10:28; Matt. 13:30, 38–42, 49, 50; Matt. 16:18; Matt. 18:8, 9, 34, 35; Matt. 22:13; Matt. 25:28–30, 41, 46; Mark 9:43, 44 vs. 45–48.; Matt. 5:29. Luke 3:17 Matt. 3:12. Luke 16:23, 24, 26 vs. 25, 28; Acts 1:25. 2 Thess. 1:9; 2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6, 23; Rev. 9:1, 2 Rev. 11:7. Rev. 14:10, 11; Rev. 19:20; Rev. 20:10, 15; Rev. 21:8 Rev. 2:11. See Wicked, Punishment of.^[9]

Death, Eternal

1.   The necessary consequence of sin. Ro 6:16, 21; 8:13; Jas 1:15.

2.   The wages of sin. Ro 6:23.

3.   The portion of the wicked. Mt 25:41, 46; Ro 1:32.

4.   The way to, described. Ps 9:17; Mt 7:13.

5.   Self-righteousness leads to. Pr 14:12.

6.   God alone can inflict. Mt 10:28; Jas 4:12.

7.   Is described as

a.   Banishment from God. 2 Th 1:9.

b.   Society with the devil &c. Mt 25:41.

c.   A lake of fire. Re 19:20; 21:8.

d.   The worm that dies not. Mr 9:44.

e.   Outer darkness. Mt 25:30.

f.    A mist of darkness for ever. 2 Pe 2:17.

g.   Indignation, wrath, &c. Ro 2:8, 9.

8.   Is called

a.   Destruction. Ro 9:22; 2 Th 1:9.

b.   Perishing. 2 Pe 2:12.

c.   The wrath to come. 1 Th 1:10.

d.   The second death. Re 2:11.

e.   A resurrection to damnation. Joh 5:29.

f.    A resurrection to shame &c. Da 12:2.

g.   Damnation of hell. Mt 23:33.

h.   Everlasting punishment. Mt 25:46.

9.   Shall be inflicted by Christ. Mt 25:31, 41; 2 Th 1:7, 8.

10. Christ, the only way of escape from. Joh 3:16; 8:51; Ac 4:12.

11. Saints shall escape. Re 2:11; 20:6.

12. Strive to preserve others from. Jas 5:20.

13. Illustrated. Lu 16:23–26.^[10]

---

JETS Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society

^[1] Geisler, N. L. (1999). Hell. In Baker encyclopedia of Christian apologetics (pp. 310–315). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

¹ See chapter 12.

² See below, under Ps. 9:17.

³ See Matt. 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 18:8–9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6.

⁴ See Volume 2, chapter 12.

⁵ LXX, the Greek Old Testament.

⁶ Cf. Gen. 42:38; Ps. 141:7.

nkjv New King James Version

⁷ See chapter 8.

⁸ Cf. chapter 9.

⁹ The phrase “their worm will not die” in connection with the unquenched fire implies (a) that the punishment will be everlasting and (b) that it will involve the physical body.

¹⁰ See Volume 1, Part 2.

¹¹ See Le Roy Froom (1874–1970), The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, 1.674–75.

¹² See below, under Luke 16.

¹³ See Volume 2, chapter 12 and appendix 1.

¹⁴ Cf. Matt. 18:8–9.

¹⁵ In the parable of the sheep and the goats; the goats, separated from the sheep, will be on God’s left.

¹⁶ See chapter 16; see also Volume 3, chapter 6; cf. Rev. 20:14.

nkjv New King James Version

¹⁷ See Volume 2, chapters 13–14.

¹⁸ See Volume 2, chapter 15, and Volume 3, chapter 3.

¹⁹ See chapters 16–17; see also Volume 3, chapter 6.

²⁰ See Volume 2, chapter 23.

²¹ See Volume 3, chapter 5.

²² Ps. 14:1–3; Eccl. 7:20.

²³ Ps. 5:9.

²⁴ Ps. 140:3.

²⁵ Ps. 10:7.

²⁶ Isa. 59:7–8.

²⁷ Ps. 36:1.

²⁸ Rom. 3:19, 22–23.

kjv King James Version

²⁹ See Volume 3, chapter 3.

³⁰ See 1 Cor. 1:17–18; 15:3.

³¹ Cf. Luke 19:10; Mark 10:45.

³² See Acts 4:12; John 10:1, 9–10; Rom. 4:25; Heb. 10:14–15.

asv American Standard Version

³³ Cf. Volume 3, chapters 8–9.

³⁴ Matt. 8:12; Jude 13; Jude 12; Mark 9:44–48; Rev. 20:1, 3; 1 Peter 3:19; Luke 16:28.

nkjv New King James Version

³⁵ See his No Exit.

³⁶ See chapter 13.

nkjv New King James Version

³⁷ See chapter 12; see also Volume 3, chapter 13.

³⁸ Matt. 25:41; cf. 2 Thess. 1:7–9; Rev. 20:10.

³⁹ See Luke 16:26; 2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23; Rev. 6:9; 19:20; 20:10. See also chapter 8.

⁴⁰ See chapter 12.

⁴¹ See Volume 2, chapter 15.

⁴² Ibid., chapter 11.

⁴³ See Volume 3, chapters 3 and 13.

⁴⁴ See Volume 2, chapter 4.

⁴⁵ Hebrews 9:14 likewise speaks of the “eternal [Holy] Spirit.”

⁴⁶ See Volume 3, chapter 15, and Volume 2, chapter 15.

⁴⁷ “The Rich Man and Lazarus,” Luke 16:19–31.

⁴⁸ See Volume 3, chapters 9, 13, and 15; cf. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2.520.

⁴⁹ See Volume 3, chapter 3.

⁵⁰ See Volume 2, chapters 13 and 16.

⁵¹ Ibid., chapter 16.

⁵² See chapter 12; cf. Volume 3, chapter 13.

⁵³ See Volume 3, Part 1.

kjv King James Version

⁵⁴ If that were the case, then God would surely have shown them these miracles; cf. 2 Peter 3:9.

tlb The Living Bible

⁵⁵ See chapter 16.

⁵⁶ See Volume 3, chapter 6.

⁵⁷ See Volume 2, chapter 16.

⁵⁸ Ibid., chapter 10.

⁵⁹ See Volume 3, chapter 13.

kjv King James Version

⁶⁰ Ibid., chapter 3.

⁶¹ Ibid., chapter 4.

⁶² Cf. 2 Peter 3:9; Luke 13:3; Acts 17:30.

⁶³ See Volume 3, Part 2.

⁶⁴ Rom. 1:19–20; cf. 2:12–15. See also Volume 1, chapter 4, and Volume 3, chapter 15.

⁶⁵ E.g., see Deut. 4:29; Prov. 8:17; Jer. 29:13; Matt. 7:7; Luke 11:9.

⁶⁶ See chapter 12.

⁶⁷ See Volume 2, chapter 16, and Volume 3, chapter 3.

⁶⁸ See Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2.84; cf. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.

⁶⁹ Op. cit.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ See Volume 2, chapter 1.

⁷² The errors of annihilationists are discussed more fully in chapter 12. See also Volume 3, chapter 13.

^[2] Geisler, N. L. (2005). Systematic theology, volume four: church, last things (pp. 327–347). Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers.

rsv Revised Standard Version: NT, 1946; OT, 1952; Common Bible, 1973

^[3] Innes, D. K. (1996). Hell. In D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer, & D. J. Wiseman (Eds.), New Bible dictionary (3rd ed., pp. 463–464). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

^[4] Easton, M. G. (1893). In Easton’s Bible dictionary. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Numen Numen: International Review for the History of Religions

^[5] Seal, D. (2016). Hell. In J. D. Barry, D. Bomar, D. R. Brown, R. Klippenstein, D. Mangum, C. Sinclair Wolcott, … W. Widder (Eds.), The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

^[6] Easton, M. G. (1893). In Easton’s Bible dictionary. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Heb. Hebrew

Gk. Greek

Heb. Hebrew

1 Enoch Ethiopic Enoch

^[7] Achtemeier, P. J., Harper & Row and Society of Biblical Literature. (1985). In Harper’s Bible dictionary (1st ed., p. 382). San Francisco: Harper & Row.

ot Old Testament

nt New Testament

nt New Testament

W.E.L. Werner E. Lemke, Th.D.; Professor of Old Testament Interpretation; Colgate Rochester Divinity School; Rochester, New York

^[8] Achtemeier, P. J., Harper & Row and Society of Biblical Literature. (1985). In Harper’s Bible dictionary (1st ed., p. 335). San Francisco: Harper & Row.

^[9] Swanson, J., & Nave, O. (1994). New Nave’s Topical Bible. Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems.

^[10] Torrey, R. A. (2001). The new topical text book: A scriptural text book for the use of ministers, teachers, and all Christian workers. Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Bible Software.