Is Hell Real?

“What fresh hell is this?” asked the minister of my minister — a question passed down to us in the aftermath of Trump winning the election. Every day since then has brought a new scandal, a new grievance, another community under attack. So while some people are busy debating whether we’ll go to Hell someday, I wonder if we are living in it right now.

Hell, I believe, is a state of mind, a state of being — the absence of God, or Source. Hell is not a pit in the ground filled with fire where you’ll be tortured for all eternity. God did not make us to break us, no matter what others may try to make you believe. This idea — like so many others — got lost in translation. Centuries of transcriptions, revisions, translation debates, and ultimately a long game of telephone may have changed the message over time, perhaps even on purpose.

It starts in the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrew scriptures didn’t describe a fiery pit of eternal punishment. Instead, they used the word Sheol — a neutral term meaning “the grave,” “the pit,” or “the shadowy realm of the dead.” Everyone was believed to go there, not just the wicked. Later, the Greeks translated this as Hades, borrowed from their mythology of the underworld.

In the New Testament, more than one word shows up with underworld associations. After Hades comes Gehenna — a valley outside Jerusalem, historically linked to child sacrifice and later to burning garbage. Jesus used it symbolically to speak of destruction or judgment. Then there is Tartarus — another Greek mythological term — mentioned in 2 Peter to describe angels bound in darkness.

When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate used the word infernum, meaning “the lower regions.” This translation helped shape the medieval European picture of Hell. By the time the King James Version appeared in 1611, translators had collapsed all these different words into a single one: Hell.

And does it really surprise you that the underworld — once just a resting place for the soul — became, in the Middle Ages, the seven circles of Hell? Think about the context: Rome had fallen. There was no longer one empire holding society together. The Church stepped into that vacuum, using moral law — supposedly from scripture — to regulate crime and behavior. Remember, too, that all these translations were done by a small handful of individuals. Not everyone could read or write, not everyone could study or debate the holy texts. The people had to rely on their leaders to tell them what the scriptures meant.

Today, many Christian denominations have set aside their old Hellfire teachings. They affirm that God would never set us up for eternal burning. Jesus died so that would not be their fate. Instead, they teach that being disconnected from a loving Source — that is the true Hell.

Many theologians agree, and many faith traditions echo this belief. Unitarian Universalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Quakers, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism all reject the idea of eternal torture. Each faith offers its own understanding of what comes after life, but they share this conviction: endless punishment is not part of the experience.

Resources

  Allison, Dale C. The End of the Ages Has Come (1987)

  Anchor Bible Dictionary (Freedman, ed., 1992)

  Bruce, F. F. History of the Bible in English (1978)

  King James Bible (1611)

  The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Koehler & Baumgartner, 2001)

  Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope (2008)