This is the sixth in a 13-part series wherein I give you Hell, a little booklet by the inimitable Dr. Jeff Obadiah Simmonds.

If one looks at the Scriptures, it is apparent that God’s response to evil is annihilation. That is, because God is holy and cannot co-exist with evil, He always moves to destroy it. While it may seem offensive to us, the stories in Joshua about the children of Israel exterminating whole cities and societies are about annihilation. God did not ask the Israelites to torture the Canaanites, or to keep them alive endlessly pouring burning coals on them. Rather, these peoples given over to evil (such as the practice of child sacrifice) were to be destroyed—annihilated.

Similarly, in the Old Testament Law God commanded that certain people—such as adulterers—were to be put to death. This is because God’s response to evil is to destroy it; the adulterer and the idolater were to be annihilated.

Throughout the Old Testament we read of similar responses to evil. The northern kingdom of Israel was also annihilated. Those who went after the Baals were not tortured by God—they were simply destroyed.

This is the model for how God deals with evil. In the afterlife God will not torture the wicked—He will punish them by destroying them. This is because God cannot co-exist with evil, and to keep wickedness alive in some corner of the Universe in order to punish it would be opposed to the character of God. Remember that God is present everywhere and the idea that hell is a place where God is absent is contrary to the teachings of the Bible.

God, in the end, will have a “clean universe”—a universe without evil. God will not keep the wicked eternally alive—cursing God and blashpheming His Name as they are tortured in fire—since sin and evil would be perpetuated. If this were true God would be segregating evil, and not destroying it.

However, Scripture consistently indicates that the wicked will be destroyed. Jesus also spoke of the wicked “perishing” or being destroyed. When told about some Galileans who had been killed by Pilate, he said:

“I tell you… unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Lk 13.3)

Consistently, the language used throughout the Bible to describe the fate of the wicked is imagery of destruction, not of enduring torment. Interestingly, sometimes the Biblical authors speak of fire as the agent of God’s judgement, but this image is always one of destruction—fire consumes and destroys—not as an image of torture.

In Obadiah’s prophecy, judgement on Edom was extinction:

“The house of Jacob will be a fire
and the house of Joseph a flame;
the house of Esau [Edom] will be stubble,
and they will set it on fire and consume it.
There will be no survivors
from the house of Esau.” (Ob 18)

God’s judgement, it seems, is one of annihilation. The fire of God’s judgement, like the fire of hell, is a consuming fire. Those upon whom it falls will “disappear from history, as though [they] had never existed.”

This is the fifth in a 13-part series wherein I give you Hell, a little booklet by the inimitable Dr. Jeff Obadiah Simmonds.

The early Christian writers, who were influenced by a Greek doctrine of the immortal soul, also adapted another element into their theology: that of a place of eternal torment. Their reading of the Bible and its reference to hell was influenced by their understanding of Greek philosophy and mythology.

The notion of an eternal hell was a logical result of the immortality of the soul—God, or the gods, had to “put” the evil souls somewhere, since they will eternally continue to be. The theory of a place for these souls, in which they will be tortured for their sin, is a Greek idea. For example, Plato wrote:

Wild men of fiery aspect… seized and dragged off several of them… they bound head and foot and hand, and threw them down and flayed them with scourges, and dragged them along the roads at the side, carding them on thorns like wool, and declaring to the passers-by what were their crimes, and that they were being taken to be cast into hell. (Plato, Republic 10)

Here, and elsewhere, we find a pagan notion of eternal suffering. Some early Christians were influenced by this mythology, and created a barbaric and horrific theology of eternal torment. An early Christian writing from the early second century describes some of the miseries of hell:

There were certain there hanging by the tongue: and these were the blasphemers of the way of righteousness; and under them lay fire, burning and punishing them. And there was a great lake, full of flaming mire, in which were certain men that perverted righteousness, and tormenting angels afflicted them…
And near those were again women and men gnawing their lips, and being punished and receiving a red-hot iron in their eyes, and these were they who blasphemed and slandered the way of righteousness…
And other men and women were being hurled down from a great cliff, and reached the bottom, and again were driven by those who were set over them to climb up upon the cliff, and thence were hurled down again, and had no rest from this punishment, and these were they who defiled their bodies acting as women, and the women who were with them were those who lay with one another as a man with a woman. (Apocalypse of Peter).

This vision of terrible torment was created by Christians reading the Bible with a pre-understanding of hell derived from Greek mythology. We, too, inherit the theology and presuppositions which have been handed down throughout Church history, and come to the Biblical text with a pre-understanding of what we are reading, which is sometimes quite wrong. When we read of everlasting fire and eternal damnation we think of the kinds of torment outlined in that 2nd century writing. But this is derived more from Plato and pagan mythology than from the Bible. The idea of hell which we inherit is only partly Biblical, and is partly mythological. (The English word “hell” is derived from an ancient Norse myth in which the underworld is ruled by a goddess named “Hel”.)

The first century Jewish people who heard Jesus and who read Paul and John also had a pre-understanding of what “hell” was. They had images in their mind—but they were not the images of Greek philosophers. Jesus’ audience would have recognised the Old Testament references and allusions, and their world-view would have included Hades—a shadowy underworld of the dead—and Gehenna—the city dump of Jerusalem. While the Greek idea of eternal punishment was of eternal torment (and it is this idea we inherit in our Christianity), the Jewish idea is of ultimate destruction and annihilation. It is this idea which the New Testament writers, and Jesus Himself, was speaking about, though we often miss the point because our pre-understanding is so different.