Rethinking Bible Language: Hell and Judgment

Dualistic thinking has certainly backed the Western church into a corner on this topic. Christians have turned highly symbolic language about justice and making the world a better place into a binary system of eternal afterlife bliss and torment. This is where it becomes incredibly hard to read the Bible in any other framework because dualistic thinking is so ingrained in how we interpret these ancient sacred texts. We will have to counter that way of thinking with poetry, paradox, and our imagination if we hope to understand the portrait of hope painted by the biblical writers.

To start, we should acknowledge that the Old Testament has no concrete concept of hell, particularly as a place of eternal conscious torment. To the ancient Hebrew, there was only life followed by death. The place of the dead was Sheol (the grave) - a place of silence and rest for the so-called righteous and the wicked. It was the eventual destination of all common creatures once the life-breath of God no longer animated their body. To be a common material creature meant mortality. Only the spirit creatures (Elohim) of the heavens experienced immortality. More on that later.

Highly figurative, poetic, and dramatic apocalyptic literature emerged as various nations invaded Jerusalem and oppressed its people again. In their suffering, they began to imagine a cosmic justice that would set everything right. By the time the New Testament was written, ideas about the afterlife had evolved but with no real consensus. Some rabbis continued to believe death was the end while others had hope for a resurrected life, that God could restore his life-breath to that which had already crossed the gates of Sheol.

Along with the hope of resurrection emerged the concept of a cosmic judgment - the hope that God would restore the world to a place free of corruption - free of hatred, violence, and oppression. The city of Jerusalem became a symbol for that cosmic hope - and Gehenna (translated as hell in English) became a symbol for justice and a fire that consumes our selfish and hateful actions towards others - as if any glory gained through violence, greed, and oppression is turned to ashes before our eyes.

Gehenna was an actual location outside the gates of Jerusalem where dead animals and trash were burned - a never-ending fire that kept the city pure and free of decaying things. Jesus spoke of Gehenna as a place “prepared for the devil (literally the one who speaks falsely) and his messengers (those who also speak falsely)”. If these are understood as spirit creatures (the devil and fallen angels), this could suggest why Gehenna is sometimes described as an eternal fire* for these immortal spirit creatures. But another point may be that this is the judgment of falsehood itself - a place where illusions, lies, and false identities are exposed and only that which is true will emerge from the flames like refined and purified metal.

( * A note about “eternal”: Eternal is a problematic translation confused by the fact that the Greek “aion” is sometimes translated as “eternal” and other times translated as “age” - an era with an eventual end. These contradictory translations should point out that we are probably thinking about this in the wrong categories. Many have pointed out that this term has little to do with a duration of time, and everything to do with a quality of existence that can transform into something else in a new era.)

Our dualistic minds like to make judgment about being innocent or guilty - either acquittal or a life sentence. But God’s judgment in the Bible is described as righteous and restorative, a move towards reconciliation rather than isolation. It separates evil from that which is holy, but that isn’t as simple as splitting humanity into two camps. Evil, as it relates to humans, is described in the Bible as deeds of the flesh - a concept often described in terms of one’s ego or a false identity. These are the selfish acts that inevitably result from our false belief that we exist independently and separately. It's the ego's attempt at self-preservation at the expense of the true self. The counter to this false identity is the incarnation of Christ, where humanity finds its true identity within a perfect divine-human union - common creatures given holy life and awareness by God’s own breath. In this sense, Jesus reveals what it means to be truly human by showing that no real separation exists.

So what would it look like for each of us to be judged? What would remain if we passed through a purifying fire of restorative justice? What would we see if each of us were confronted with the false identity of our ego? To use another biblical analogy, what is the process of separating wheat from the chaff? I don't think it means burning half of the wheat and saving the rest.

The book of Revelation imagines a new Jerusalem where heaven and earth are joined together and where the gates will never be shut (Rev 21:25). This is a place where nothing unclean, unholy, or false (Greek pseudo) will enter. Just outside the gates of the city is Gehenna, that eternal falsehood consuming fire. Again, this is all poetic language so we have to be careful about not taking this too literally, but why would the gates remain open with Gehenna just outside? Perhaps something remains of those who pass through the fire. Perhaps the fire is only intended to burn away our false illusions before we enter the city. Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus asks us to do now - to die to ourselves, to our ego, and find the breath of life inside us, our true self inseparably loved by the God who gives life and breath. Calling back to Genesis 3, the only way back to Eden and the tree of life is on the path guarded by the flaming swords. On this path it may become clear that the only hell that truly exists is what we ourselves made.