Hell 1.0

The Sacrament of Reconciliation is a grace of escaping hell. Which hell(s) matters!

Hell has come a long way since the Scriptures. Most current depictions and theologies of hell are the sour fruits of tradition, especially stemming from The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The Bible never uses the word hell.”

In the Hebrew Bible, there was no cultural understanding or belief in an eternal soul apart from the body. People do not have souls, they are souls. The soul is the amalgam of the emotions, body, mind, spirit. It is located in the neck, the trachea, and not the heart. When people died in the Hebrew Bible, they descended to the place of the dead, the Pit or Sheol. Like Hades in Greek thought, Sheol was the underworld. Literally under the world, Sheol was dark and the destination of the rich, poor, righteous, wicked, proud, and humble.

After encountering Zoroastrian notions of Dualism and the doctrine of eternity and the Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas of eternity and the perfection of a spiritual essence imprisoned in temporal and crass body, Hebrew theologies began to change. During the Maccabean revolt against King Antiochus Epiphanes IV around the year 170 BCE, resurrection entered the theological vocabulary of the apocrypha. Antiochus embarked on a forceful campaign of pan-Hellenism (arguably the most effective “evangelist” of all time, Alexander imposed Greek language and culture on all territories he subdued, reaching as far East as the Indus Valley. Not only did Attic Greek become the lingua Franca for more than 500 years, so did gymnasiums and theatre become endemic, making a Greek world view, a pan-Hellas that eclipsed even Hebrew as the language of sacred texts through the Septuagint by 70 BCE), punishing Hebrew customs severely: circumcised infants were killed and worn around the necks of their mothers for a day, after which the mothers were executed; Torah scrolls were burned with their owners; and a pig was sacrificed to Zeus in the holy of holies (the abomination that causes desolation). Some Hebrews, led by Mattathias and Judas, later called the Maccabees, led an armed guerilla resistance to these policies. Many died. The thought emerged that those who lost their lives for their faith would get them back, a resurrection. Throughout the 1^st Century BCE, dialogue ensued about eternal justice for unjust humans. The debate continued throughout the first several centuries of the Common Era.

The Greek word translators render “hell” as gehenna, which is itself a transliteration of the Hebrew word geh-hinom, “valley of hinom.” The Valley of Hinnom is the relative minimum point outside of Jerusalem. It was an ancient trash dump, where broken boards and rent garments were burned into ash. As the low point, it is also where blood and offal from the Temple flowed. Prior to becoming the dump, the Valley of Hinom, as the relative minimum point, was where earth-gods like Molech, Chemosh, and Milcom were worshipped through child sacrifice. Worshippers of these gods believed that offering the deity their most valuable commodity, their first-born son, obligated the deity toward repayment, a divine quid pro quo. Kings of Israel engaged in this behavior. Hell, as the amalgam of all three, is the place where trash is incinerated, where the leftovers of our best intentions run and pool, and where we sacrifice the living to appease an otherwise angry or indifferent god.

Hell is not forever, not even in the Bible. In 1 Peter, Jesus descends to the spirits chained under the earth to invite them to freedom. These spirits show up in the non-canonical book of 1 Enoch and very briefly in Genesis 6.1-2. They are heavenly beings that took on human consorts and produced super-human offspring. In 1 Enoch, their behavior was described as rebellion for mixing human and superhuman categories and they were imprisoned for their crime indefinitely. Peter claims that Jesus harrowed even that hell, offered release for even spirits that should have known better. C.S. Lewis offers a similar corrective vision in The Great Divorce: hell is only eternal if we choose that. God invites us out of hell over and over again, for all eternity.

A theological problem. The Western church (because of Greek influence!) asserts that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. If God is everywhere at all times, then either God is in hell, or hell is in God, like an ulcer. Evangelicals often define hell as “separation from God,” but the BCP offers this same definition for Sin. In either case, if God is omnipresent, we can only experience God’s absence but never achieve it.

Perhaps it is worth thinking through the Hebrew ideal. Hell is very much a real place in this life. Ask any addict or a family member. I have lived in hell as a parent. It was the epitome of isolation, even from people who loved me and beckoned me, alongside God, to leave. I have moved out of hell as a primary residence, but I know the shortcut there and can hear the doors calling me and sometimes am tempted to go back, back to the self-righteousness, loneliness, brokenness, etc. God’s goal for humanity, revealed throughout Scripture, is to break our bondage so we can be free and live freely. A just God would never eternally punish a person for a temporal crime. Eternal hell as punishment should come off of our table. In Revelation, the rebellious spirits, the –isms of race, class, age, etc- are tossed in a lake of fire to be annihilated, not tortured. God would refine us, annihilate our experiences of separation and division, for our joy and good! And the Sacrament of Reconciliation might be an incredible resource as we journey from the hells of shame, regret, anxiety, blame, and the residues that bind us to the low places in our lives, as both individuals and communities.