The Obscurity of the Biblical Revelation of Hell, And the End of Esotericism

 Scriptural revelation does not give us a clear teaching about Heaven and Hell.  The Hebrew Bible says almost nothing about Heaven and Hell.  The New Testament says more about this, but what is said is vague and confusing, if not incoherent.  The Quran is more explicit and descriptive in its few accounts of Heaven and Hell, but it's still remarkably unclear.

In the controversy over the Bible's account of Hell, there have been two major questions.  Does the Bible support the predominant view of orthodox Christians that most human beings will suffer eternal torment in Hell?  If it does, does the Bible teach that the torment will be the same for everyone, or will there be different kinds of torment for different kinds of sin?

I won't say much about the second question except to note that the Bible says almost nothing about precise gradations of punishment in Hell (such as what Dante describes in his Inferno).  When Jesus condemned the hypocrisy of the "teachers of the law," he said: "They devour widow's houses and for a show make lengthy prayers.  These men will be punished most severely" (Mark 12:40).  But Jesus didn't explain exactly how such variations in the severity of punishment would appear in Hell.  Jesus also spoke in a parable about slaves receiving different levels of punishment for their disobeying their masters:  "The slave who knows the master's will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows.  But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.  From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked" (Luke 12:47-48).  But Jesus didn't explain exactly whether or how this parable is meant to apply to different kinds of punishment in Hell.

There are many more scriptural passages that can be read as answering the question about eternal torment in Hell.  And yet these passages are so confusing and contradictory that almost every position in the debate over this question seems to have some scriptural support.

A good survey of the positions in this debate is Four Views of Hell, edited by Preston Sprinkle (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016).  In this book, Denny Burk speaks for "eternal conscious torment," which is the traditional interpretation of Hell as the place where most human beings will be condemned to eternal punishment, and they will never be saved.  John Stackhouse speaks for "terminal punishment," which is the idea that most human beings will suffer a period of punishment in Hell, but then they will be extinguished forever.  Robin Parry speaks for "universalism," for the thought that all those punished in Hell will all eventually learn from their punishment that they need to repent of their sins and accept the redemptive mercy offered by Christ, and thus in the end all human beings will be saved and enjoy eternal happiness in Heaven.  Finally, Jerry Walls for "Purgatory," for the idea that sinful people who die in a state of grace, but are less than fully perfected, need to go to a place where they can be purified before they enter Heaven.  

It is questionable whether Walls' argument for Purgatory belongs in a book on "views of Hell," because since all the people in Purgatory are saved and on their way to Heaven, Purgatory is not a mitigation of Hell but a modification of Heaven.  By contrast, Limbo is a real mitigation of Hell, because the unbaptized infants in Limbo are damned by original sin, but they suffer only the deprivation of the beatific vision in Heaven and not the sensible torment of Hell.  In Dante's Divine Comedy, Limbo is the highest level of Hell, just before Purgatory.

To my mind, the best defense of universalism is David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale University Press, 2019).  The best comprehensive history and critique of Christian universalism is Michael McClymond's two-volume The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018).

All of the authors in these books are Christians who look to the Bible as the authoritative vehicle for divine revelation, and therefore they agree that any resolution of the debate over Hell must come from scripture.  The problem, however, is that there are many scriptural texts that seem to support opposing positions in the debate.  So, for example, Burk identifies 10 biblical texts supporting his view of Hell as eternal torment.  While Hart identifies 23 texts supporting his view that while some human beings will endure a period of punishment in Hell, ultimately all human beings will be saved and enter Heaven.

One of the clearest texts for eternal torment in Hell is what Jesus said about separating the sheep from the goats in Matthew 25:31-46.  "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.  All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left."  The sheep on his right will enter the Kingdom of God and enjoy "eternal life."  The goats on his left will be condemned to "eternal punishment" and "the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

Another seemingly clear text for Hell as eternal torment is Revelation 20.  John foresees that Christ will return to earth to rule over all the earth for a thousand years.  At the end of that thousand-year reign, there will be a judgment of Satan, who will be thrown into a lake of fire and "tormented day and night for ever and ever."  Then, there will be a judgment of the dead, and "each person was judged according to what they had done."  "Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire."

Hart has his own interpretations of passages like this.  He notes that in the English translations of Matthew's references to "eternal punishment" and "eternal fire," the word "eternal" is a translation of the Greek word aionios, which is an ambiguous word in Greek.  It can mean a period of endless or indeterminate duration, but it can also mean an "age" or extended interval.  So Jesus might have meant that punishment in Hell will be over an extended period but not "eternal."

There is a problem with this interpretation, however.  When Jesus speaks of "eternal life" for the saved, it's the same Greek word aionios that is translated as "eternal."  The parallelism here between "eternal life" and "eternal punishment" suggests that in both terms aionios really means "eternal."  Hart's response to this is to argue that since many verses in the New Testament say that God intends to save all human beings, Matthew's reference to punishment being aionios cannot be read as "eternal punishment" without contradicting what is said elsewhere in the New Testament.

Moreover, we can't be sure that Jesus meant to indicate a parallel in his use of aionios between the punishment of the age to come and the life of the age to come.  For that, we must look elsewhere in the New Testament as to how the word aionios is used.  In Jude 7, the phrase puros aioniou ("eternal fire") is used to describe the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But Sodom's fire only lasted for one day!  So this suggests that for Jesus, eschatological life and punishment are parallel in belonging to the age to come, but are not parallel in needing to last forever:  life in Heaven must be forever, but punishment in Hell might be for a limited period of time.

And as to all the strange imagery in Revelation about Satan and the damned being thrown into the lake of fire, Hart dismisses the whole book of Revelation as "an impenetrable puzzle, one whose key vanished long ago along with the particular local community of Christians who produced it."

". . . True, the book does contain a few especially piquant pictures of final perdition, if that is what one chooses to cling to as something apparently solid and buoyant amid the whelming floods of all that hallucinatory imagery; but, even then, the damnation those passages describe chiefly falls upon patently allegorical figures like 'Hades' (Death personified) or 'the Beast' (Rome 'brutified'), which hardly seems to allow for much in the way doctrinal exactitude.  As it happens, the text also contains a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, horses with lions' heads and tails like serpents, giant angels, locusts with iron thoraxes, a dragon with seven heads and ten horns and wearing seven diadems, a great whore seated on the beast and bearing a chalice full of abominations, a gigantic city with streets of transparent gold . . . (and so on and so forth).  One would have to be something of a lunatic to mistake any of it for a straightforward statement of dogma" (107).

Indeed, throughout the New Testament, Hart observes, the language about the afterlife in Hell or Heaven should be seen as "an intentionally heterogenous phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct" that provides no precise and literal description of life after death (119).  Moreover, the confusing language about Hell is somewhat hidden by the custom of using the single Anglo-Saxon word "Hell" as a collective translation for three Greek words--Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus.  Hades is the pagan conception of the world under the earth where all of the dead go.  Gehenna is the Greek form of Ge-Hinnom, "Valley of Hinnom," which is located southwest of Jerusalem, which was associated with child-sacrifice for worshippers of evil gods.  Tartarus was a pagan conception of a place where demonic spirits were imprisoned (112).  None of this can be considered a clear description of any Christian doctrine about the afterlife.

By contrast, Hart insists, there are some clear doctrinal statements in the New Testament of God's intention to save all human beings.  "So, then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings" (Romans 5:18).  "For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be given life" (1 Corinthians 15:22).  "Our savior God . . . intends all human beings to be saved and come to a full knowledge of truth" (1 Timothy 2:3).

But isn't there a contradiction between these scriptural statements that all people will be saved and the other statements that some people ("the goats") will go to Hell?  No, Robin Perry argues, there is no contradiction:  "it is arguable that we can legitimately infer that those in hell will be saved out of hell.  If postmortem salvation can be legitimately inferred from teachings that have good claims to being biblical, then the doctrine itself can claim to be biblical, at least in a secondary sense" (117).

But notice that he has to infer this as biblical "in a secondary sense," because there is no explicit statement about "postmortem salvation" anywhere in the Bible.  If this really is a biblical teaching, why did the biblical authors refuse to state this openly and explicitly?

One answer suggested by the proponents of universal salvation, beginning with the early Church fathers such as Origen, has been that universal salvation should be a "secret teaching" known only to the Christian intellectual elite because the common people need to fear eternal torment in Hell as the only way to scare them into good behavior.  Universal salvation must an esoteric truth known only to the intellectual few, while eternal damnation is the exoteric truth believed by the ignorant many.  Eternal punishment in the afterlife is a lie, but it's a noble lie because it deters bad behavior in this life.

One indication of this esotericism in the universalist teaching about Hell is that it has often been hidden in private manuscripts or in posthumous and anonymous publications (see Hart, 200-201; McClymond, 2-14, 20, 46-49, 158-59, 631-40, 696; and D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment [University of Chicago Press, 1964], 5-8, 48, 76-83, 158-62).  From Plato to Locke, philosophers have argued that the public teaching of atheism must be prohibited because atheists deny the eternal punishment of bad people in the afterlife that provides the only deterrence to immoral conduct for most people.

It is remarkable, therefore, that Christian universalism and the denial of eternal torment are now being publicly advocated and debated rather than being hidden as a secret teaching.  It is even being promoted in popular best-selling books--like Rob Bell's Love Wins.

This confirms my argument that modern liberalism's success over the last two centuries has shown that esoteric writing is neither desirable nor necessary in a liberal open society.  We no longer see any need to persecute heretics or atheists.