Heaven and Hell Reconsidered

Heaven and hell are central aspects of my belief system, but I understand them quite differently than most Western Christians do. [E1] Unfortunately, over the course two thousand years, the Christian teaching about heaven and hell has gotten deeply entangled with the mythologies of the cultures it has engaged. [E2] This entanglement has produced a horrific blend of belief systems, in which the Christian God is committed to retributive justice and therefore tortures anyone who does not submit to Jesus Christ. [E3] The story of how we got to this troubling perspective is long and complicated. For now, I just want to look at one piece of it: what we have absorbed from Germanic mythology.

In the ancient mythologies of the Germanic world, the universe was divided into three basic parts. The upper part is where the gods live. It is a place of great luxury in the sky.  The middle part is the earth, where humans live.  It is distinct and separate from the two other parts. The lower part is underground. It is the shadowy place of the dead. The name for this place is Hel, which is the word Christian missionaries used to translate their concept of the afterlife into German, and subsequently, English. In fact, the King James Bible translated a number of different biblical words, including Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus, into a single word: hell.

Unfortunately, in borrowing this language, Christians ended up absorbing the three-tiered vision of the universe associated with it. We consider earth to be the place of the living, and then after you die, we imagine that God sends you either "up" to heaven or "down" to hell. But that is not what Jesus and his disciples taught. Remember, Christians believe in the general resurrection, a doctrine that teaches that every human being will be resurrected in the same place, i.e. the earth. [E4] This includes those who have done good and those who have done evil. [E5] Consequently, heaven and hell do not ultimately name the places where we will reside. Instead, they describe the kinds of experiences we will have when we are resurrected. For some people, resurrected life on earth will be so wonderful that the best language to describe it will be heaven. For others, it will be extremely unpleasant. It won’t be an exaggeration for them to call it hell.

But why will it be unpleasant for some people and not for others? Why can’t God make it wonderful for everyone? Although God wants to do this [E6], the Bible teaches that our afterlife experience will largely depend on us. Whether it is joyful or miserable will be based on the kind of people we have become. Let me explain with an example. Picture that glorious moment when everyone is mysteriously brought back to life on this planet. When everyone wakes up and looks around them, they will see the masses of people with whom they will share eternity. For racists, this won’t be a pleasant moment. When they look around, they will see people “from every tongue and tribe and nation” around them, [E7] and they will immediately feel resentful, bitter, and hateful about having to live in this situation. Thus for them, eternity will be hell.

God does not punish us for our sins by sending us to a torture chamber; the punishment naturally flows from the sin itself. The Bible talks about this over and over again. Consider, for example, Proverbs 19:19, which says, “A violent-tempered person will bear the penalty; if you effect a rescue, you will only have to do it again.” The point of this verse is that people who can’t control their anger will be miserable wherever they go. You can try to “effect a rescue” by bailing them out of jail or moving away from those whom they dislike. You could even put them in a place where they live in a mansion and walk on streets of gold. But even then, they would “bear the penalty” of their sin, because something would undoubtedly tick them off. Violent-tempered people, like people with every other type of vice, want to blame it on the circumstances, but the problem is actually rooted in them.

Numerous other passages make the same point. Galatians 6:7 argues that a person will reap what they sow. Titus 3:10-11 explains that a divisive person is “self-condemned.” Even those passages which seem to depict God as angry and vengeful, when you take a closer look, are really only claiming that God lets people experience the consequences of their own actions. Look at one of the most “vengeful” passages in the New Testament, Romans 1. This is the one that says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” So, in this quintessential verse of divine judgment and anger, what does God do in this rage? Three things: “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity,” “God gave them over to shameful lusts…” and “God gave them over to a depraved mind.” The only action that God takes in this chapter is to hand sinners over to the consequences caused by their own sins. However, this is a great punishment indeed.

This isn’t always clear because the Bible usually talks about it in metaphorical terms. We usually associate hell with one particular metaphor, “the lake of fire.” [E8] Although it’s not incorrect to think about hell like this, what people don’t usually realize is that heaven is described in terms of fire too. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says that the life of a Christian “will be shown for what it is, for… it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.” Just as fire has a different effect on different materials – melting some and hardening others – so the “fire of God” will create a different experience for different people. It will be heaven for some and hell for others.

But if is ultimately our character that determines what the afterlife will be like, wouldn’t that mean that we should just try to be good people? Why would our beliefs matter in this understanding of heaven and hell? What does Jesus have to do with our salvation? I’ll consider these points in the next post.

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End Notes (You don’t have to read these)

[E1] I say “Western Christianity” because for the most part, the Orthodox Church has preserved the understanding of heaven and hell that I am presenting here. Fortunately, it is slowly making its way into the West through C.S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, which was the book that influenced me in this direction.

[E2] The relationship between Christian teaching and mythological teaching on the afterlife is very complex, especially since the New Testament occasionally uses Greek terms like Hades and Tartarus to describe hell. However, it is especially clear in texts like Dante’s Inferno that Greek mythology has intruded into Christian thought in non-biblical ways.

[E3] Christians would rarely describe God as a “torturer,” although this implication if God both designed hell and sends people there. In some traditions, God does this reluctantly because of the demands of justice while in others, God does it quite willfully, and we sinful mortals are simply not capable of comprehending the justice of this action. The Mennonite critique, articulated especially well by figures like J. Denny Weaver, is that this account of retributive justice that is articulated by both sides of this continuum is precisely the model of justice that Jesus subverts in his parables.

[E4] This is not to deny that there may be physical separation between people on earth. The Bible certainly talks about a separation of the wheat and the chaff, the sheep and the goats, etc.

[E5] Cf. John 5:28-29.

[E6] Cf. 2 Peter 3:9, which says that God does not want anyone to perish but all to come to salvation.

[E7] Cf. Revelation 7:9, and really the whole chapter.

[E8] This metaphor is drawn from Revelation (cf. Rev. 20:10) and is similar enough to Jesus’ description of Gehenna (cf. Matt 5:22) that the two are often assumed to be identical.