What the Hell?
How our disdain for Inferno proves God is real and we're living in God's world.
This is part one of at least four essays on hell, heaven, and how the entire conversations taps into the reality of life today and the enduring hope available in the truth about Jesus.
“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
— Dante Alighieri
“Where are you with hell? Is it real? Is it literal?” This question rises out of the ashes of quiet pauses around fire-pits when confused neighbors look at me and wonder, “Is this guy really a religious nut? After all he’s a priest, but he’s also kind of nice.” (I’m not a priest, but it’s okay…I do wear lots of black).
“How could God create hell?” The anguishing perplexity of a soul coming to find hope and joy in Jesus while simultaneously terrified of the possibility of a jail boss God. After all, the bad guy in every prison movies is the warden. No one watches Shawshank redemption and roots for Samuel Norton.1 If there’s a hell, what happened to the Jesus we love?
The captives are the heroes. Jesus came to set them free. How could eternity have a prison guard Jesus?
People hate hell and I’m glad.
Not because it makes “evangelism” easier (it doesn’t in the way people think; in fact, the use of hell to motivate people to do evangelism and to believe makes me nauseous you can read my rant in the footnotes).2 Not because I’m a universalist trying to gain followers. I’m not a universalist, but I would love the likes and subscribes. I’m happy people hate hell, because that’s how its supposed to be.
The repulsion of Dante’s hell fills me with comfort. My friends know something deep about how the world is supposed to work. The instinct toward a shared eternal bliss over eternal torture is, I believe, hard-wired into our psyche. The rejection of an image of God as eternal prison guard is, in fact, correct.
I like the questions about hell. The questioner is nearer to the heart of God and the true story of the world than they know.
What you think and feel about hell tells you more about your belief in God and your journey towards God than almost any other topic. And why we hate the concept of hell drives us towards the the greatest truth in cosmos.
Your disdain for the idea of hell proves how close you are to understanding the goodness of Jesus that has captured centuries of imaginations.
Your Living Hell
Hell seems incredibly cruel. The horror of an eternal life of doom terrifies because, if true, it means this existence doesn’t get better, just worse. If hell is a place of horrific sights, wicked people, dehumanization, and darkness, then I’m quite prepared for it.
A world of abuse, neglect, pride, anguish, hatred, and cruelty isn’t futuristic fantasy but lived reality.
We all know: life shouldn’t end with more horror. It should end in paradise or Nothing at all.
Our primary repulsion, dread, or anguish about the concept of hell comes from the circumstances of the reality we are experiencing now.
“You’re telling me that after toiling through this meager existence of labor without flourishing, parenting without rewards, chaos at the hands of the powerful, injustice around every corner, and agony…there will be even more suffering? Haven’t we had more than enough hell already?”
What can be worse than:
The rejection of a mother?
The betrayal of a friend?
The abandonment of a father?
The futility of financial peace?
The sting of suicide of a sibling?
The starvation of the soul?
The defeat of life to death?
What can be worse than this reality we already feel?
This list doesn’t even include share of human carnage most humans have experience through the history of the world: drought, famine, starvation, war, assault, slavery, and physical abuse.
Hell is human.
Franz Kafka states this dynamic well:
“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”
Our objection to hell is the natural instinctual hope that life surely wasn’t intended to be this broken and it can’t possibly be this bad after death either.
There are two primary responses to this instinct:
Acceptance
This is just how it is. Life is terrible, then you die and that’s probably terrible as well. What else could we expect? The best thing you can do is gain resignation to the fact that this is all there is and what comes will be more of the same. This is what we mean through the emotion when we yell, “I’ll see you in hell.”
Sartre leads us down this path: “I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.” Many others would simply say, grow up and make your life as fun as you can. Stoics will tell you, get over it and live. Sartre’s friend Albert Camus added to this line of thinking: “Where there is no hope, we must invent it.”
Nothingness
The other response is to have hope in the nothingness. That death is a freedom from this present reality and into a void. We go to sleep and there’s nothing. No more pain, sorrow, grief, angst, or anxiety. The great jailbreak of our existence is the grave. Take comfort, we tell ourselves on death beads, we’re close to the end of agony and eternal nothingness is about to start.
Those are the two intentional or accidental choices most of us fall into. Life is terrible and after you die it probably keeps being terrible. Or, life is bad but then its over. Hope in the end.
Humans are curious beings. We can’t bring ourselves to settle for Sartre, Freud, or Nietzsche. We’re grievously idealistic. We dream of the healing of every scab, wound, and heartache. We demand a future deposit of joy. Our appetite for dipping our toes into a peace that flows like a river over parched human soul cannot be quenched.
Humans want utopia, not only because we already live dystopia, but because deep within our genetic code and lineage is the conviction we belong to paradise. Ask a child what happens after death and they will say: “something good somewhere good.”
Our rejection of hell is the embrace of a hope for good life.
Maya Angelou captures this internal experience in her poem, “I Know why the Caged Bird Sings”:
“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,
of things unknown, but longed for still,
and his tune is heard on the distant hill,
for the caged bird sings of freedom.”
Your Living Heaven
The intent of your existence is paradise. That dream is destined to come. The caged bird is supposed to be set free.
You’re right. You, your friends, your loved ones, and even that stranger sneezing next to you at the coffee shop shop, were made for heaven.
How Do We Get Out of Hell and Into Heaven?
How can humans get heaven and beat hell? How is it supposed to work? How is heaven made? What are we supposed to do? Lets take a quick survey of religious, spiritual, and philosophical ideas:
Nirvana
Some people say, we get lots of tries at this life until we get it right. When we do, we will nirvana, blessed, eternal existence. This is the plot of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day, the prevalent notion of reincarnation, and the technocrat’s vision for human maximization. Heaven is formed by our lessons learned, forged virtue, and applied schemes. Heaven is made through life-hacks. It is precisely through this progressive refinement we become the type of people who are heaven bound and, as a bi-product, create heaven. Right here and now, or later, when we get it right.
Only, our progressive advances seem to advance greater mechanisms for pain than for peace. The split atom didn’t bring eternal peace but horror. History repeats itself. Lessons seemed to never be learned. Life-hacks, as brilliant as they seem on TikTok, fail within the real world. It’s hard to imagine a human-made utopia.
Jannah
Others will say this paradise we long for comes through the cost of rigidly following the steps. There’s a series of activities to form the path or way to an eternal peace. For example, Islam teaches a few daily, yearly, and life-time practices that must be done to gain access to Jannah, paradise. Like Pokemon, all you need to do is collect them all. Do the prayers, do the fast, and do the pilgrimage. In fact, and perhaps most interestingly, Islam is not an internal faith but an external one. It’s not about what’s going on within you, but what you’re doing outside of you.
You might not be a Muslim, but you might subscribe to this paradise path. The steps are go to college, get a job, find a spouse, get a mortgage, have a child or two, build an investment portfolio, get your kids into college, see them have a spouse, get a grand child or two, pay off your mortgage, retire, die. Then, heaven is offered to you: you did all the steps!
Except, your internal life wasn’t great. Your bitterness swelled as you did the steps. Your career was replaced by a machine. You spouse became a roommate. Your children became heirs to stuff. But, banks made a good return on your life through interest and the government got its taxes. Even if you do it all well, how can it guarantee paradise?
A Road Back to You
Heaven is for those who have done the internal work on themselves. We must pursue a path of healing within and rid ourselves of the burdens of shame, guilt, and disfunction by discovering our authentic goodness buried deep within. We would be good and the world would be good if each person dug deep they could find the good and pure version of themselves and bring it to the surface. Through therapy, self-discovery, and the establishment of boundaries against toxicity we can be set free to be good. Once we get there, heaven calls to us; either in this life or the next. The path to glory runs through your soul. You’re on a quest to uncover the real you.
I wonder if that’s enough and if that road back to you ever ends. I love therapy but it also feels like a bottomless pit. What if, after all the digging, the soul collapses in on itself. What if you can’t unlock the real you? If you get to the end of the journey and there you are, the guiltless and shameless, version of you in chains locked with a key you don’t possess. That’s what the inward journey has been for me and many others. There’s an ultimate moment where and individual cannot set themselves free. The caged bird remains caged.
Transhumanism3
What if we make ourselves eternal? Death is obviously the problem. Death creates scarcity, jealousy, and lusts for power. If we eliminate death, we make paradise. This seems more possible than ever. Soon we could be able to uploaded our memory into mainframe computer to be later downloaded in the operating system of a humanoid. Micro robotics could be injected into our bloodstream and, with the help of AI and regular updates, eradicate viruses, cancerous cells, and diseases before they even start. Through supplements, isolation, and avoiding the sun a human body could escape environmental harm. With the advancements of prosthetics, synthetic organs, and cloning, we might be able to, overtime, replace each organ, bone, and limb as they decay with age. In fact, the replacements might be better than the original. A human could become eternal through science. Paradise gained! For anyone who can afford it. Only for a world without war, violence, jealousy, and rage that steals even the healthiest human. While the technology is new, the philosophy isn’t. Doubling the global life expectancy over the last 100 years hasn’t made the world less violent, just more efficient in it. Generating the wealthiest planet hasn’t generated prosperity and peace. Trans-humanism traps us in hell more than it leads us to heaven.
These are creative solutions. They have obvious merit and appeal. But also, collateral damage in their wake. Our attempted liberation from hell creates more hell. Our forging of heaven falls flat. Not from a lack of effort, but from our resist to the obvious. Something outside the system must make heaven. The mortal might improve their surroundings but cannot muster an eternal bliss. An outside force has to dictate the terms.
We need a benefactor from the great beyond, someone to hold, make possible, and usher humanity out of the hell we have realized and into heaven we’re born for. The author of the desired delight must initiate the consummated delight.
Like Charles Dickinson’s Great Expectations, we need a wealthy outsider to pluck us out of obscure subsistence to give us in the endowment of eternal joy.4
If you hate the idea of hell and have a desire, even if it’s as faint as a whisper, you believe in God. You’re walking proof of God.
What does God do with heaven and hell? In Jesus, God’s mission gets hell out of earth and brings the kingdom of heaven into a world made new. That’s another essay, but it’s coming soon. For now, you’re left with this phenomenal truth: the only Benefactor who could get you out of both today’s and tomorrow’s hell is gracious, loving, and proactively restoring the paradise lost and the paradise dreamed for.
More on this in my next essay, but this scene is cathartic for the audience because the evil one gets death. We like Warden Norton’s hellish end.
Many “evangelistic” groups utilize hell as a concept to motivate people to go to their friends, neighbors, or even perfect strangers to present the gospel. They compile lists of Scripture, and non scripture (a lot of non-Bible) into an image of a terrifying hell, then say, “Do you want your friends to experience this? Well then you need to tell them the gospel.” It’s revolting for five reasons: 1) It assumes eternal bliss with God today and forever isn’t enough of a motivation to tell your friends about the love of God. God’s kingdom isn’t enough. 2) It abuses the Bible. I love the Bible. Twisting and contorting it to say things it doesn’t say and utilizing cultural artifacts alongside the Bible conflates culture and Scripture intentionally for manipulations. Ironically, these same groups don’t like it when other Christians “succumb to cultural pressure” on other topics; yet they happily put cultural concepts of hell into their teaching. 3) Jesus never motivates with hell but with his own kingship, life, and resurrection. It’s not death that Jesus and the Apostles use to inspire, but life. The Apostolic Teaching is always resurrection. 4) It shrinks and cheapens Jesus into a gross distortion of his power, might, and grace. 5) It doesn’t work. It saves people into fear of damnation rather than the gospel. Hell is real. We should talk about it and write about it. We should engage it. The doctrine of hell actually produces hope in justice and is a powerful apologetic for the gospel without manipulation or scare tactics.
The pioneers of this philosophy was the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and its director, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. For more on this topic, watch this video from John Lennox.