Hell

Abandon all hope, O ye who enter here
Canto III of Inferno (The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri)

Nowadays, preachers rarely talk about hell in their sermons; in fact, no one wants to address this topic anymore. It seems that the use-abuse-throwaway rule applies here too. As a matter of fact, it used to be an obligatory theme of a good sermon... In those days, the fear of God, interpreted as being afraid of God, brought more people to church than the love of God does now. 

Despite being a recurring word throughout the Bible, there are already many Christians, and even some theologians and priests, who do not believe in the existence of Hell. Hell is here, some say. And it is true as we humans can make our lives and the lives of others a heaven or a hell. But neither this heaven nor this hell is the final one: "there is no evil that always lasts, and no good that always endures” says the proverb. 

God's mercy is infinite, his love knows no bounds; what we do not know about God is infinitely more than what we know. Will anyone be condemned? On what terms? Truth be told, we can not even assert that Hitler is in hell. 

However, we must admit that there is a real possibility of condemnation. If Christ came to save us, he came to save us from something. If this is not so, his coming would have been pointless. If there is salvation, then there must be condemnation, the existence of one of these concepts presupposes the existence of the other. 

If there were no possibility of condemnation, we would not be truly free because it would not be possible to reject God; there would be no alternative to chose from, as we would be like puppets condemned to do whatever God wants us to do.

If there were no possibility of condemnation, there would be no rewards or punishments, nor would there be any difference between good and evil. It is obvious that an action without a purpose is futile and meaningless; if something is not good for something, it is good for nothing. Goodness cannot have value for its own sake, it must be worth something beyond itself.

Banishing the idea of reward and punishment from religion is tantamount to saying that injustice has the last word. It is not logical that the end of a man who strove to be good all his life should be the same as that of the one who not only did not exert himself to be good but was even deliberately evil. 

It would mean that God does not care whether people are good or bad. Let us put it bluntly: looking at the world around us, is there any point in trying to be good? Perhaps it is even more profitable to be evil, corrupt, dishonest, a liar, irresponsible, a thief, a criminal, and cruel.

The idea of hell exists in every culture and religion on this planet. As simplistic as it may seem, without a final judgment at the end of this life and the existence of the eternity of Heaven for the good and the eternity of Hell for the bad, the idea of good and evil, of just and the unjust, would fall apart in this world. And if this idea were to disappear from our minds, there would not be enough police or armies in this world to maintain law and order in our society and to restrain the base instincts of human beings. It would be barbarism all around, the law of the jungle would reign, that is, the law of the survival of the fittest would rule. 

Atheists and agnostics are lucky to live in a world where most people are religious and believe in the existence of a God who is just and good and who will reward them for their many efforts, sufferings and for not taking justice into their own hands, despite the injustices done to them. Hell exists, but it may not be as the picture above shows or as most people imagine it to be.  

What is Hell 
The idea of a hell that burns eternally, where souls burn without ever being completely burned, where they suffer the torments of death without ever dying, has terrified countless generations of people throughout human history. 

We know that it is not God who condemns us, but we who condemn ourselves when we freely choose evil. Despite this, how can a God who is described in the Bible as a merciful and loving Father, standby unmoved and unaffected before a spectacle of eternal torture? People who are being tortured ask their tormentor to kill them to end their suffering; would God refuse to deliver a final death blow of mercy if asked? 

How can a God who is love create an eternal torture chamber when no court of law on earth condemns even the most heinous of criminals to torture? Where even the lightest torture for the shortest time is totally forbidden? 

In human courts, punishment must be proportional to the severity of the crime. An eternity of torture is not a proportionate punishment to even 100 years of life devoted entirely to crime. So how can the divine court be infinitely more unjust than any human court?

In the Bible, hell is not only described as eternal suffering, but also as eternal death. In fact, of the 54 times the word hell is used, only 12 times does it mean a place of fire and torment, while the rest of the times it is mentioned, it means the grave, in other words, eternal death. 

Since people fear suffering more than death, a pedagogical purpose cannot be ruled out in presenting hell as eternal suffering, knowing that what human beings truly fear more than death is eternal suffering. This is clear in the parable of the rich man and the poor man Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31).

Logically, eternal life is opposed to eternal death, not eternal suffering. "For God so loved the world that he gave his own Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16). This text says ‘may not perish’ or die; it does not say may not suffer. Everything that burns is a fuel, and fuel cannot burn forever without extinguishing or burning out; that would go against the laws of thermodynamics. 

...cast into Gehenna, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. Mark 9:47-48

Gehenna was Jerusalem's garbage dump; the fire never ran out because more garbage was always brought in; the worms never die because the garbage decomposes, providing a continuously supply of food to the worms. Ezekiel (18:4), Malachi (4:1-3), Psalms (37:10 and 68:2), and Matthew (13:40), all suggest that fire ends existence, it does not torture indefinitely. 

Hebrew anthropology
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thessalonians 5:23

Hebrew anthropology, which underlies biblical anthropology, is fundamentally unitary. This means that it aims to contemplate the entire personal reality from a particular perspective. Firstly, the human person is all basal, that is, flesh. 

Secondly, the human person is nefes, that is, he or she has a personality that we can approach from a psychological point of view (psyche). 

And finally, the whole human person is also ruah, that is, spirit, insofar as we understand ourselves as a being open to the transcendent. Of this Old Testament anthropology, which is ultimately unitary because it contemplates the entire human reality from a particular perspective, we find a clear testimony in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.

The only objection to hell understood as eternal death is the Greek belief in the eternity of the soul that has infected Christianity to this day, and which has nothing to do with Jewish anthropology, on the basis of which the Bible is written. In Jewish anthropology, man does not have a mortal body and an immortal soul; man is all mortal if he is outside of God, and immortal if he is with God. 

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10:28

Jesus, who knew Hebrew anthropology well, is very clear in this text, explaining that human beings are all mortal when they live outside of God and against God, and all immortal when they live with God and base their lives on the Word of God. Those who live in Christ and die in Christ are resurrected like Christ to eternal life. 

If the soul is immortal, then hell is eternal torture; if the soul is mortal, then hell is eternal death, because eternal life is not the opposite of eternal torture, but eternal death. Some Catholic theologians go so far as to say that hell is nothingness, but not a postmodern nihilistic nothingness. It will be something like a painkiller that would spare us the suffering of not having lived the life that God had prepared for us, it will be a nothingness, but a nothingness that hurts like fire. I find this position not much different from the classic Catholic one: nothingness cannot hurt, and if it hurts it is not nothingness, but eternal suffering. 

Hell as an anti-genesis or eternal death
Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die. Ezekiel 18:4

But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:22-23

The man who became a living soul by the divine breath (Genesis 2:7), is warned by God himself that if he eats of the forbidden fruit, he will die (Genesis 2:16-17); Saint Paul, corroborating so many other biblical texts, affirms peremptorily that the wage of sin is death (Romans 6:23). 

Hell, understood as eternal death, preserves both God’s goodness and man’s freedom. But what is eternal death? It is to return to the nothingness from which everything was created. Those who answer "Nothing" to the 3 fundamental questions that every human being asks himself or herself when he or she reaches the age of self-awareness will freely return to nothingness: Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life? 

The physicists studying our universe say that there are black holes in it that absorb stars and galaxies; they disappear into them. Hell would be like a black hole where beings cease to be and become non-beings.

Those who deny the existence of God in their heart and mind, saying that they came from nothing and are going to nothing, and live accordingly by cultivating lapsed temporal values instead of eternal values, eternal death as a return to nothingness will be the logical outcome of their lives. It is difficult to find anyone who denies God in such a radical manner in his or her mind, heart and deeds, and only these people would condemn themselves. 

Human beings were created in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, all human values (love, peace, justice, music, art, etc.) are attributes of God. With sin, they retained the image, but lost the likeness. But as men and women cultivate or give these eternal values their temporality, these values in their turn will give them their eternity and their likeness to God. 

Those who cultivate temporal values such as power, wealth, pleasure, are living only for themselves and, in life, they are already cultivating death; they are investing in their lives, buying stocks that are worthless in the stock market of Heaven; they are cultivating nothingness, and when they die, what can they expect other than nothing?

Conclusion – Contrary to eternal life is eternal death. Those who believe that they came from nothing will return to nothing: if nothing is what they did in life.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC