Does God send people to hell?

For centuries secular thinkers have decried Christianity on the basis that Hell is a damnable doctrine that has no place in the modern world. Some critics suspect that the Church even invented Hell simply as a scare tactic to win converts, while others wrestle with the so called problems of Hell I mentioned before.

For all kinds of doubters and deconstructionists, the traditional picture of Hell seems so grotesque and disproportionate that it casts a devilish shadow over the goodness of God. Even seasoned believers tend to treat Hell as one of those beliefs you hide away in the attic of your Christianity, struggling to come to terms with how a loving God could, at best, passively allow their lost loved ones to be tormented for all eternity, and at worst, actively torture them with hellfire? C.S. Lewis went so far as to say that if he could delete one thing from Christianity, he would gladly cut Hell out of the Bible. So what does the Christian story teach about final judgment? Does God send people to Hell?

This is a heavy question, where as someone who has spent years studying this topic personally and academically, I feel the weight of heralding Jesus’ warnings about Hell. The simple truth is, according to Jesus, Hell is real. Now the Hell that Jesus taught, though, is probably not the Hell you imagine.

For starters God isn’t absent from Hell. People aren’t sadistically tortured in Hell. And Satan certainly doesn’t rule in Hell. So we all need to be rethinking Hell according to the Christian story, for too often our imaginations are shaped more by movies and medieval poetry than by what God has revealed in Scripture. But before we look at what Hell is really like, I want to start with why Hell exists. Why is Hell real?

And according to Jesus, Hell exists because people choose evil. When you track back to the beginning of the Christian story, Genesis teaches that everything was created for good by God. We as human beings were made for deep and meaningful relationships—to love God and love each other—and for the meaningful role of being governors and gardeners of God’s good world.

But our creaturely freedom was central to a meaningful existence. And so to create beings capable of love, God imbued all of humanity with the right of self-determination. A choice was set before us. We could either choose God and trust His good design: a path that leads to life. Or we could define good and evil on our own terms, rejecting God as the source of all that is good, and so become damaged by evil. Only evil comes at a cost. Death. For to run away from the author of life is, in itself, a death sentence.

And so when Jesus talks about judgment, when he warns about Hell, he speaks of it as being the final destination for those who have chosen evil. God grants us the dignity of our choice, where the situation is more akin to people choosing Hell over Heaven because they don’t want God for all eternity, rather than people who want to be with God being consigned to Hell against their will.

C.S. Lewis said it well in The Great Divorce: “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." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.

I guess the problem is, we don’t often think of ourselves as deserving of judgment. We compare our lives to most of the people around us, and because most of us haven’t committed any heinous crimes, we tend to think of ourselves as pretty high up the moral ladder. But that is like a crooked stick judging itself to be straight only by comparing itself against an even more crooked stick.

Because when you look at what we were created for, lived out beautifully in the life of Jesus, the truth about our sinful condition is exposed. Consider for a moment everything we have ever thought, said ,and done, or the good things that Jesus would do that we have left undone. If everything about me was exposed in the light of perfect goodness, if the ledger of my life was opened and weighed on the scales of justice, I would have no defence but to plead guilty.

Or let’s imagine that there was no judgment for sins, small or big. What would we think of a God who, at the judgment, simply passed over all the evil things done in this world as though they don’t matter? Who dismissed hatred, murder, rape, genocide, greed, injustice, and oppression? Far from there being something wrong with God for restoring justice through judgment, the truth is a loving God must deal with evil. If God remained forever indifferent to the pain evil has caused, or waived it off as though no big deal, then there is no way we could consider Him either morally good, or worthy of our worship. Any loving Father must step in to deal with the evil that hurts those whom He loves. And so Hell exists because people choose evil.

But what is Hell? Well, according to Jesus, I’ve been to Hell. When our English Bibles use the word Hell that translates a Greek word Gehenna, which was shorthand for the Valley of Hinnom. A valley that lies to the south and west of the Old City of Jerusalem. I’ve stood there.

Contrary to popular teaching, there is no ancient evidence to suggest that Gehenna was ever a garbage dump for Jerusalem, or that it was perpetually on fire to burn off the stench. The only source for that notion comes super late in the historical record, tracing back to Rabbi David Kimchi in 1200AD.

What the Bible does say about Gehenna, though, turns out to be far more confronting. For it was in that valley that some of Judah’s evil kings in the Old Testament, in defiance of Yahweh, ritually sacrificed their children to pagan gods by burning them alive.

What they did was so detestable that God cursed Gehenna. It became an uninhabited wasteland, and the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah foretold that one day Gehenna would become a vast graveyard called the Valley of Slaughter: a detestable site where the corpses of God’s dead enemies would be consumed by worms and fire.

That’s the vision of Hell that Jesus was talking about.

One of the reasons for the confusion about Hell is because so much of the teaching about the final judgment is spoken in symbolic language, parables, and apocalyptic prophecy. You may have heard some of these phrases before: Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth. Unquenchable fire. Undying Worms. Outer darkness. Eternal destruction. Perishing. Second death.

And so to understand what Hell is, the right way forward isn’t just to smash these diverse symbols together into some kind of Franken-verse, because outer darkness doesn’t exactly fit hand in glove with the image of unquenchable fire. No the right way forward is to carefully interpret each symbol, especially from Apocalyptic literature like Revelation, to help get a bigger picture.

Even still, Christians disagree about exactly what the experience of Hell will be like. Some see the fire imagery as depicting an endless state of conscious suffering, where the fires of Hell torment, and others see the fire imagery depicting an irrevocable and eternal death sentence, where, like with Sodom and Gomorrah, eternal fire destroys.

I happen to be more convinced by that second interpretation, or what is known as conditional immortality. Because from Genesis onwards, the warnings and wages for sin are always death. Because Jesus died physically for our sins as just punishment. And because eternal life is a gift of the gospel granted only to those who are saved. So I don’t think the lost will live forever in Hell. As Jesus warned in Matthew 10:28, Hell intensifies the first death, as God destroys both body and soul in Hell.

Conditional immortality also offers unique answers to the problems of Hell. Because the lost only consciously experience shame on the day of judgment, and potentially,  like Jesus, a proportional amount of suffering for the sin debt that they carry as their death sentence is carried out in Hell, this means you do not have to explain how finite sins warrant eternal suffering. Nor do have to explain how heaven’s bliss isn’t forever blighted by the suffering of those in Hell, for no one we love will suffer forever. And since it is the consequences of the punishment that are eternal, namely death, rather than God having to actively punish for eternity, conditional immortality has the advantage of saying that in bringing an end to evil God can be reconciled with all creation, satisfying justice so that He does not need to be angry at sinners forever.

Even still, I have dear friends, even teammates at Questioning Christianity, who disagree with me in good faith, and Christians have the responsibility to graciously develop their own theological conscience on a whole range of issues as we try to faithfully interpret the Bible. Those who hold to the traditional view have their own responses to the problems of Hell, often speaking of Hell more in terms of eternal separation, privation, and dehumanisation, where God passively gives the lost over the consequences of their sin in Hell, rather than inflicting hellfire and torment.

Either way, what we do know about Hell is that it represents God’s eternal and just punishment for sin, where mechanisms or proportionality can be built into the system to ensure perfect justice: that each receives what their sins deserve.

Now those are the headlines about Hell that break my heart. And before you write God off as devilish, remember that He is not happy that anyone is lost. Jesus stared down the reality of Hell with tears as he wept over an unbelieving Jerusalem. And if you want to know whether God really is good, or whether He can be trusted as the judge of all the earth to do right, then consider what God has done to save us from Hell.

We are all deserving of judgment. But God is not willing that any should perish. He wants all of us to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). And so Jesus, God incarnate, served out our sentence so that we don’t have to. Possessed by divine love for us, even while we were yet sinners, Jesus faced the punishment of Hell on our behalf when he suffered and died on the cross. God would much rather be lifted up on a cross than see anyone go to Hell.

So does God send people to Hell?

Yes, and no. Hell is God’s way of dealing with evil, but only for those who resist the free offer of salvation in Jesus. For if God had it His way, then Hell would have been emptied by the cross.