When I first started to question the idea of hell (back when I was still an evangelical Christian), one of the things that frustrated me to no end was words. It seemed to me that people liked to use words like ‘traditional’ and ‘biblical’ to describe their views on the afterlife (as in, “Our church holds to a traditional, biblical understanding of hell”), which was confusing to me for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the accuracy of the words themselves are dubious at best. When a range of different positions could be reasonably called ‘traditional’ or ‘biblical’, the labels become almost meaningless. Besides which, I gradually discovered that ‘traditionally-minded’ Christians are happy to dismiss any number of beliefs which could equally be called ‘traditional’!
Secondly, I found words like ‘traditional’ or ‘biblical’ to be quite loaded. A church or organisation holding to a “traditional, biblical understanding” of this or that often seemed to me to be sending a coded message: If you disagree with our position, you are at best ‘weak-minded’ and at worst a dangerous heretic, and you can expect consequences. Words like this promote conformity to the group, rather than critical thinking among individual believers.
Finally, I found them to lack descriptive power. A ‘traditional’ or ‘biblical’ version of the afterlife could mean almost anything, and therefore always needs to be accompanied by paragraphs of explanation and clarification.
(I could extend these criticisms to so-called ‘literal’ views of hell, which nevertheless interpret ‘destruction’ in the Bible as being metaphorical, and ‘metaphorical’ views of hell, which insist that ‘foreverness’ in the Bible is literal! But that’s a tangent for another time.)
Well, I set out to fix this. As I researched Western history and philosophy, as well as biblical literature, I identified fourteen distinct understandings of the afterlife, and tried to assign them labels that were simultaneously straightforward, unbiased, and descriptive. Here is Part 1 of my list!
Type 1: Predestination
“Those, then, are elected, as has often been said, who are called according to the purpose, who also are predestined and foreknown. If any one of these perishes, God is mistaken; but none of them perishes, because God is not mistaken...
It is not, then, to be doubted that men’s wills cannot, so as to prevent His doing what he wills, withstand the will of God, who has done all things whatsoever He pleased in heaven and in earth,
and who also has done those things that are to come;
since He does even concerning the wills themselves of men what He will, when He will… he beyond doubt had the most omnipotent power of inclining men’s hearts whither it pleased Him.”
— Augustine of Hippo, ‘On Rebuke and Grace’
There are two possible destinations in the afterlife. One of these destinations is a never-ending, inescapable hell. Because God is all-powerful, God exclusively chooses who goes to heaven and who goes to hell; human freedom of choice is essentially non-existent in the face of God’s power. As such, some people will experience never-ending torment solely because of God’s choice.
Type 2: Endless Physical Suffering
“The Bible tells you the truth. Hell is a place of sorrow and unrest, a place of wailing and a furnace of fire; a place of torment, a place of outer darkness, a place where people scream for mercy; a place of everlasting punishment.”
— Billy Graham, ‘Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity, Our Life Beyond’
There are two possible destinations in the afterlife. One of these destinations is a never-ending, inescapable hell. Hell will involve ongoing physical punishments, which may or may not involve real fire.
A person’s destination in the afterlife will be determined by decisions and actions they made within their lifetime. Death is the ‘point of no return’; after death, it is impossible for any person to repent or otherwise escape hell. Some part of human beings is inherently immortal (or, alternatively, God will force all humans to become immortal and exist indefinitely).
Type 3: Simple Separationism
“In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity… Both the Christian and the secular person believe that self-centredness and cruelty have very harmful consequences. Because Christians believe souls don’t die, they also believe that moral and spiritual errors affect the soul forever.“
— Tim Keller, ‘The Reason for God’, Chapter 5
There are two possible destinations in the afterlife. One of these destinations is a never-ending, inescapable hell. Hell will not involve physical punishments; any ‘torments’ experienced by those in hell will be psychological and self-inflicted. The cause of suffering in hell will be due to each person’s ‘separation from God’. This separation is punishment in and of itself.
A person’s destination in the afterlife will be determined by decisions and actions they made within their lifetime. Death is the ‘point of no return’; after death, it is impossible for any person to repent or otherwise escape hell. Some part of human beings is inherently immortal (or, alternatively, God will force all humans to become immortal and exist indefinitely).
Type 4: Simple Destruction
“… we need to survey the biblical material afresh and to open our minds (not just our hearts) to the possibility that Scripture points in the direction of annihilation…
I do not dogmatise about the position to which I have come. I hold it tentatively… I also believe that the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to… eternal conscious torment.”
There are two possible destinations in the afterlife. One of these destinations is destruction into non-existence. A person’s destination in the afterlife will be determined by decisions and actions they made within their lifetime. Death is the ‘point of no return’; after death, it is impossible for any person to repent or otherwise escape the sentence of destruction.
Type 5: Second-Chance Separationism
“I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. But a master often knows, when boys and parents do not, that it is really useless to send a boy in for a certain examination again. Finality must come some time, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when…
And people often talk as if the “annihilation” of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If soul can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul?… to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains”. To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man—to be an ex-man or “damned ghost”—would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centred in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature—already a loose congeries of mutually antagonistic sins rather than a sinner—would be like.“
— C. S. Lewis, ‘The Problem of Pain’, Chapter 8
There are two possible destinations in the afterlife. One of these destinations could be described as ‘hell’. ‘Hell’ is the experience of humans in the afterlife who continually choose to remain separated from God, and instead choose to primarily serve their own ego. Hell, therefore, could be thought of as a disintegrating character trajectory which eventually transforms a person into something unrecognisable as human.
To some extent, human freedom of choice remains after death, meaning that it may be possible for a person to reconcile to God and leave hell. This opportunity may continue to be available for some time. However, there will come a point where second chances are no longer possible (maybe because time runs out, or maybe because the desire and ability to change is permanently lost). Because some part of human beings is inherently immortal, destruction is impossible; therefore, once people pass the ‘point of no return’, they will be permanently trapped in a state of ‘hell’.
This is a modified excerpt from my as-yet-unreleased book, Decoding Gehenna: Hell and the Afterlife in the West. Subscribe or Follow Me for updates and more sneak-peek excerpts!
