I know, I know.
It’s a controversial headline.
Some of you have come to this article with rocks in your hands, ready to drag me outside the village and stone me to death for my heresy. But hear me out.
I’ve had a hell of a time wrestling with the notion of Hell recently. It is the dark shadow of my evangelical upbringing that rears its ugly head from time to time, doing its best to make me afraid.
“What if you’re not really ‘saved,’ Dan?”
“What if you’ve got this all wrong?
“What’s going to happen to you when you die and meet Jesus face-to-face?”
These are the questions that have been rolling around inside my head from pretty much the first time I remember hearing about Hell… which would have been when I was 2 or 3 years old. It sure seemed scary back then. When my ‘favorite’ fundamentalist preacher, Joel Ramsey, posted about Hell on his Instagram feed, it triggered me again.
What a bright and cheery picture he paints.
But the more I reflect on the idea of Hell, the more I am convinced that the only way to truly love and follow Jesus is to ditch the notion of Hell altogether. And there is a very simple reason why.
The choice that isn’t a choice
When Evangelicals present their version of the “gospel,” it usually goes something like this: “You were born sinful from birth, and the punishment for your sinfulness is eternal conscious torment in a place called Hell. However, God sent his Son, Jesus, to take the punishment for your sins so that if you choose to believe in him, you won’t go to Hell.”
They call this “the good news,” and they present it as a free choice that every human being has to make. Choose Jesus and live. When I became a “Christian” at the age of six, I know that my only reason for making that choice was to avoid Hell.
But let me ask you a question. Does this really seem like much of a choice to you? I mean, I can get people to do a lot of things if I threaten them with death. If I point a gun at a person and say, “You have a choice to do what I ask, or I’ll kill you,” does that really constitute a choice? After all, if I threaten to torture a person, I could get them to say whatever I want ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Heck, I might even get them to profess that they believe me to be God.
And if I pin a person face-down on the ground, hold their arms behind their back, and dig my knees into their kidneys, I could probably force them to say they loved me if I promised to get off their back. But would they actually love me?
No.
Ditch hell to love more
Do you see what I am saying? As soon as you try to convince people to follow Jesus by bringing Hell into the equation, you are, in fact, taking away free choice by reducing it down to a non-choice.
You cannot create free lovers by force.
A person who follows Jesus to get out of Hell is not following Jesus for who Jesus is. They are not compelled by love. They are, in fact, simply doing what most human beings would do at a basic, instinctual, animal level: Self-preservation.
Only when you remove the threat of eternal punishment — and even the promise of eternal reward — can you say you are truly intrinsically motivated to follow Christ — rather than merely following him for what you can get out of the deal. The person who follows Christ without the threat of Hell or the promise of Heaven is a true follower.
You might call yourself a Christian. Perhaps you really desire to love God with everything you have. If you want to grow your love for him, then live as though there is no Hell. And if you’re going to create true followers of Christ, then convince them of the merits of following him without using fear, guilt, shame, and the threat of Hell.
But didn’t Jesus warn us about Hell?
I can hear my conservative Christian friends interjecting at this point: “Hold on a there second, but didn’t Jesus warn us about hell?”
It is true that in the Bible, Jesus occasionally drops the “H-bomb” and talks about “Hell.” In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus says, “Anyone who called their brother a fool will be cast into hell.” (Matthew 5:22, 29–30).
But the English word “hell” here is merely a translation of the word Jesus actually used — the term “Gehenna.” Venture back in time to Jerusalem, and you’ll stumble upon the infamous Gehenna, a valley notorious for its wickedness and abandonment. According to the Old Testament, this desolate place witnessed horrific acts of child sacrifice to foreign gods, leaving no doubt in people’s minds that God had condemned it to its godforsaken state.
So, when Jesus talked about Hell, he was talking about a literal place on Earth: Gehenna — a literal valley outside of Jerusalem.
Even so, there are other passages that may seem to suggest that Jesus believed in the kind of life-after-death version of Hell. For example, In Matthew 25:31–46, Jesus shares a well-known parable about the last judgment. He describes a scenario where all nations gather, and God separates people into two groups: the sheep and the goats. The sheep represent those who have shown kindness to those in need, such as the hungry, sick, and poor. They are rewarded with entry into heaven. On the other hand, the goats, symbolizing those who neglected to help those in need, face a fate of “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” At first glance, that sure sounds like the Hell that many Christians believe in.
However, when Jesus wraps up this parable, he doesn’t present the divergent destinies of the sheep and the goats as “eternal pleasure” or “eternal pain.” Instead, he reveals that the opposite of eternal life is death, not endless torment. The punishment for the goats is complete annihilation. Okay, so it’s not nice to think about, but that was certainly the gist of what Jesus was saying. It won’t be pleasant, but it will be over in the blink of an eye.
In Matthew 7:13–14, Jesus mentions two gates that people encounter on their journey. One gate represents a narrow and challenging path that leads to “life,” but only a few choose to embark on it. The other gate, wide and easy to traverse, is the popular choice. However, it ultimately leads to “destruction,” a significant word to note. The wrong path doesn’t lead to eternal torture in the bowels of hell but rather to death.
In a similar vein, Jesus illustrates the future kingdom using a fisherman who pulls in a huge catch of fish (Matthew 13:47–50). Once the catch is hauled in, the fisherman separates the good fish from the rest, discarding the latter. There’s no torture involved; the bad fish simply meet their end. Similarly, the kingdom is likened to a person who gathers the wheat they have grown in their field (Matthew 13:36–43). They carefully preserve the good grain while disposing of the weeds by tossing them into the fire.
The fish and weeds might meet their match, but it’s a one-time thing, not an endless barbeque.
Jesus famously said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16), while the apostle Paul said, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life” (Romans 6:23).
Death is death. Yet, most Christians seem to believe that death really means living forever — in the fires of Hell, presumably in a perpetually regenerating immortal body. The idea of eternal punishment in Hell can only exist through pushing the consistent meaning of words like “death, destruction, and perish” beyond their semantic limits and reading between the lines to invent concepts that are nowhere explicitly taught in scripture.
What can we conclude from all this? Jesus had his own unique take on the afterlife, and it absolutely doesn’t align with the fiery, eternal torment version of Hell that often gets tossed around by evangelicals.
He didn’t believe it, and he definitely didn’t go around spreading it like gospel truth.
Period.
Hell doesn’t create lovers of God
Right now, there are millions — if not billions — of people across the world who are terrified of dying because they are scared that God will cast them into a fiery pit where they will be tormented for trillions of years.
Many of them say they follow Christ, but they are not motivated or compelled by the life of Christ or his teachings. The fact that Jesus was the preeminent teacher of love, grace, and compassion is nice but ultimately extraneous to the primary reason they call themself a Christian: To obtain their ‘get-out-of-hell-free’ card.
Don’t you see?
Hell doesn’t create lovers of God. Hell creates people who try to appease God by saying, doing, and believing the right things because they believe that their acceptance by God is dependent on those things.
And what does that leave us with? A fear-based religion where salvation is dependent on human performance rather than the goodness and grace of God.
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This post was previously published on Backyard Church.
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