For Atheists.
There are actually five views of hell: 1) It is a place of physical torment. 2) It is eternal separation from God, but not necessarily physical torment. 3) It is a place of purgatory and then redemption. 4) It is total annihilation of unbelievers. 5) It doesn’t exist; everyone is going to heaven (even Hitler and Stalin?).
The Bible doesn’t have a word for hell, but has 3 different words translated into English as “hell.” In the Old Testament it is “Sheol,” meaning simply death or the grave. In the New Testament Jesus several times uses the word “Gehenna,” which is the rubbish heap outside Jerusalem where bodies of criminals were burned. A few times “Hades” is used, which is the mythological Greek and Roman underworld where people are punished after death, but that is a Greek concept, not a Biblical one. St. Paul never mentions hell though he talks about eternal life and heaven.
The Book of Revelation mentions briefly a lake of fire where death and Satan and his angels are ultimately thrown, apparently to receive eternal torment. And 2 Peter 2:4 mentions the Greek Tartarus, the gloomy dungeon where fallen angels are kept until the Last Judgment. In Luke 16 Jesus tells a parable based on a folk tale about a poor man named Lazarus in the “bosom of Abraham” (heaven) and a rich man suffering in Hades. If Gehenna meant a place of eternal torment, why wouldn’t Jesus have used that term instead of the mythological Hades. The parable isn’t meant to be a description of the afterlife but makes a point about people’s unwillingness to believe even if someone, (like the real Lazarus or Jesus Himself) came back from the dead.
Whenever heaven or eternal life is mentioned in the Bible, it is contrasted with death, destruction, or punishment (as in capital punishment), never with hell. For example: John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son so that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life “ Romans 23:6 says, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” There are many similar contrasts throughout the Bible.
John 15: 6 has Jesus saying, “If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown into the fire and burned.” In Luke 3:17 John the Baptist says, “His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Here and in other similar places the fire is clearly destructive of the unbelievers, not a means of torment.
The promise of heaven and eternal life comes from the Bible, which clearly says it is for true followers of Jesus. Jesus Himself says this. Nowhere in any religion is there a promise that everyone will have eternal life after death.
Jesus warns us against those who can destroy one’s body and soul. Elsewhere in the New Testament this is referred to as the “second death.”
Jesus’s reference to the “weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth” by sinners is in the context of the Last Judgment, not hell.
His reference to souls being “cast into outer darkness” is more likely a description of the soul’s annihilation than eternal separation from God in a place called hell. Would the psychological torment of separation from God be less severe than physical torture? In Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit three people are eternally together in a motel-like room in hell. They torment each other psychologically. A famous line from the play is “Hell is other people.”
It would seem to be truly a cruel and vindictive God who tormented eternally billions of people for the petty sins they committed in a brief lifetime. Yet there is the belief among many Christians in a hell of eternal torment. Ironically, it is the Christians who are most likely to take the Bible literally who, in this case, read the Bible figuratively. “Perish” in John 3:16 to them means torture in hell. In Mark 48 Jesus quotes Isaiah 66:24 in referring to Gehenna: “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” Literally this means the dead are dead—worms eat their bodies when they are buried and fire consumes their souls. Only a figurative reading sees eternal torment here. The fire is unquenchable, not their suffering.
People think they can create their own lives apart from God. That is the nature of Original Sin. They may even believe they are thereby “good enough” to go to heaven when they die—if there is a heaven. Millions of people belong to religions that tell them all they have to do to get to heaven is to do good works. But ultimately, I think, these people realize, deep down, that they can never be “good enough” to escape God’s judgment.
Dinesh D’Souza in Life After Death: The Evidence gives a rational argument for eternal life from the standpoint of philosophy and science. In his book Heaven Randy Alcorn explores the possibility of heaven, which one would expect to be even more complex and varied than our amazingly complex and varied life on earth. The Bible doesn’t tell us much about heaven, but it would certainly be more than sitting on clouds playing harps. Four Views on Hell by Walvoord, Hayes, Pennock, and Crockett gives the literal, metaphorical, purgatorial, and conditional views of Hell, argued by their proponents.
Ironically, atheists might be right in saying there is no afterlife—for them. But, on the other hand, they may be missing out on the heavenly afterlife promised to Christian believers.
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