The Christian Idea Of Hell
has sometimes been, may be seen by quoting the following testimonies. Do they resemble anything in the Old Testament? Do they not exactly copy the heathen descriptions? Whence came these ideas? They are not found in the Old Testament? And yet the world was full of them when Christ came.
Read the verse of Pollok as lurid and blasphemous as it is vigorous:
- Wide was the place,
- And deep as wide, and ruinous as deep.
- Beneath I saw a lake of burning fire,
- With tempest tost perpetually, and still
- The waves of fiery darkness, gainst the rocks
- Of dark damnation broke, and music made
- Of melancholy sort; and over head,
- And all around, wind warred with wind, storm howled
- To storm, and lightning forked lightning, crossed,
- And thunder answered thunder, muttering sound
- Of sullen wrath; and far as sight could pierce,
- Or down descend in caves of hopeless depth,
- Thro’ all that dungeon of unfading fire,
- I saw most miserable beings walk,
- Burning continually, yet unconsumed;
- Forever wasting, yet enduring still;
- Dying perpetually, yet never dead.
- Some wandered lonely in the desert flames,
- And some in fell encounter fiercely met,
- With curses loud, and blasphemies, that made
- The cheek of darkness pale; and as they fought,
- And cursed, and gnashed their teeth, and wished to die
- Their hollow eyes did utter streams of wo.
- And there were groans that ended not, and sighs
- That always sighed, and tears that ever wept,
- And ever fell, but not in Mercy’s sight.
- And Sorrow, and Repentance, and Despair,
- Among them walked, and to their thirsty lips
- Presented frequent cups of burning gall.
- And as I listened, I heard these beings curse
- Almighty God, and curse the Lamb, and curse
- The Earth, the Resurrection morn, and seek,
- And ever vainly seek for utter death.
- And to their everlasting anguish still,
- The thunders from above responding spoke
- These words, which thro’ the caverns of perdition
- Forlornly echoing, fell on every ear—
- “Ye knew your duty but ye did it not.” * *
- The place thou saw’st was Hell; the groans thou heard’st
- The wailings of the damned—of those who would
- Not be redeemed—and at the judgment day,
- Long past for unrepented sins were damned.
- The seven loud thunders which thou heard’st, declare
- The eternal wrath of the Almighty God.
- * * * There in utter darkness, far
- Remote, I beings saw forlorn in wo,
- Burning continually yet unconsumed.
- And there were groans that ended not, and sighs
- That always sighed, and tears that ever wept
- And ever fell, but not in Mercy’s sight;
- And still I heard these wretched beings curse
- Almighty God, and curse the Lamb, and curse
- The Earth, the Resurrection morn, and seek,
- And ever vainly seek for utter death;
- And from above the thunders answered still,
- “Ye knew your duty, but ye did it not.”
Such descriptions are not confined to poetry. Plain prose has sought to set forth the doctrine in words equally repulsive and graphic. Rutherford, in his “Religious Letters,” declares that hereafter “Tongue, lungs and liver, bones and all shall boil and fry in a torturing fire,—a river of fire and brimstone, broader than the earth!”
Boston, in his ‘Fourfold State,’ says: “There will be universal torments, every part of the creature being tormented in that flame. When one is cast into a fiery furnace, the fire makes its way into the very bowels, and leaves no member untouched; what part then can have ease when the damned sinner is in a lake of fire, burning with brimstone?”
Buckle, in his “Civilization in England,” thus sums up the popular doctrine: “In the pictures which they drew, they reproduced and heightened the barbarous imagery of a barbarous age. They delighted in telling their hearers that they would be roasted in great fires and hung up by their tongues. They were to be lashed with scorpions, and see their companions writhing and howling around them. They were to be thrown into boiling oil and scalding lead. A river of brimstone broader than the earth was prepared for them; in that they were to be immersed. . . Such were the first stages of suffering, and they were only the first. For the torture besides being unceasing, was to become gradually worse. So refined was the cruelty, that one Hell was succeeded by another; and, lest the sufferer should grow callous, he was, after a time, moved on, that he might undergo fresh agonies in fresh places, provision being made that the torment should not pall on the sense, but should be varied in its character as well as eternal in its duration.
“All this was the work of the God of the Scotch clergy. It was not only his work, it was his joy and his pride. For, according to them, Hell was created before man came into the world; the Almighty, they did not scruple to say, having spent his previous leisure in preparing and completing this place of torture, so that, when the human race appeared, it might be ready for their reception. Ample, however, as the arrangements were, they were insufficient; and Hell not being big enough to contain the countless victims incessantly poured into it, had, in these latter days, been enlarged. But in that vast expanse there was no void, for the whole of it reverberated with the shrieks and yells of undying agony. Both children and fathers made Hell echo with their piercing screams, writhing in convulsive agony at the torments which they suffered, and knowing that other torments more grievous still were reserved for them.”
And it was not an infinite Devil, but a just and merciful God who was accused of having committed all this infernal cruelty.
Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment is an attempt to describe in paint, what was believed then and has been for centuries since. Henry Ward Beecher thus refers to that great painting. (Plymouth Pulpit, Oct. 29, 1870):
“Let any one look at that; let any one see the enormous gigantic coils of fiends and men; let any one look at that defiant Christ that stands like a superb athlete at the front, hurling his enemies from him and calling his friends toward him as Hercules might have done; let any one look upon that hideous wriggling mass that goes plunging down through the air—serpents and men and beasts of every nauseous kind, mixed together; let him look at the lower parts of the picture, where with pitchforks men are by devils being cast into caldrons and into burning fires, where hateful fiends are gnawing the skulls of suffering sinners, and where there is hellish cannibalism going on—let a man look at that picture and the scenes which it depicts, and he sees what were the ideas which men once had of Hell and of divine justice. It was a nightmare as hideous as was ever begotten by the hellish brood itself; and it was an atrocious slander on God. . . . I do not wonder that men have reacted from these horrors—I honor them for it.”
Tertullian says: “How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquifying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish than ever before from applause.”
Jeremy Taylor, of the English Church, says: “The bodies of the damned shall be crowded together in hell, like grapes in a wine-press, which press one another till they burst; every distinct sense and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most exquisite sufferings.”
Calvin describes it: “Forever harrassed with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulf would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors.”
Jonathan Edwards said: “The world will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globe of fire, in which the wicked shall be overwhelemed, which will always be in tempest, in which they shall be tossed to and fro, having no rest day or night, vast waves and billows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of which they shall forever be full of a quick sense within and without; their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet, their loins and their vitals, shall forever be full of a glowing, melting fire, fierce enough to melt the very rocks and elements; and, also, they shall eternally be full of the most quick and lively sense to feel the torments; not for one minute, not for one day, not for one age, not for two ages, not for a hundred ages, nor for ten thousand millions of ages, one after another, but forever and ever, without any end at all, and never to be delivered.”
And Spurgeon uses this language even in our own days; “When thou diest, thy soul will be tormented alone: that will be a hell for it, but at the day of judgment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that which we have on earth thy body will lie, asbestos-like, forever unconsumed, all thy veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string on which the devil shall forever play his diabolical tune of Hell’s Unutterable Lament.”
“A Catholic Book for Children” says: “The fifth dungeon is a red-hot oven in which is a little child. Hear how it screams to come out! see how it turns and twists itself about in the fire! It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor of the oven. To this child God was very good. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much worse in Hell. So God, in his mercy, called it out of the world in its early childhood.”
Now the horrible ideas we have just quoted were not obtained from the Old Testament, and yet they were fully believed by the Jew and Pagan when Christ came. Whence came these views? If the New Testament teaches them, then Christ must have borrowed them from uninspired heathen. What does the New Testament teach concerning Hell?
Within a few years Christians have quite generally abandoned their faith in material torments, and have substituted mental anguish, spiritual torture. But the torment, the anguish, the woe and agony are only faintly hinted by any possible effect of literal fire. The modification of opinion from literal fire to spiritual anguish, gives no relief to the character of God, and renders the “orthodox” hell no less revolting to every just and merciful feeling in the human heart, no less dishonorable to God. It is woe unspeakable to millions, without alleviation and without end, inflicted by a being called God, ordained by him from the foundation of the world for those he foresaw, before their birth, would inevitably suffer that woe, if he consented to their birth, compelling his wretched children to cry for endless æons in the language of Young (Night Thoughts):
- “Father of Mercies! why from silent earth
- Didst thou awake and curse me into birth,
- Tear me from quiet, banish me from night,
- And make a thankless present of Thy light,
- Push into being a reverse of Thee,
- And animate a clod with misery?”
This question never can be answered. Good men groping in the eclipse of faith created by the false doctrine of an endless Hell, have tried in vain to see or explain the reason of it. Albert Barnes, (Presbyterian,) voices the real thought of millions, when he says:
“That any should suffer forever, lingering on in hopeless despair, and rolling amidst infinite torments without the possibility of alleviation and without end; that since God can save men and will save a part, he has not proposed to save all— these are real, not imaginary, difficulties. . . . My whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me why sin came into the world; why the earth is strewn with the dying and the dead; and why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects, that has given a moment’s ease to my tortured mind. . . . I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers—upon death-beds and grave-yards— upon the world of woe filled with hosts to suffer for ever: when I see my friends, my family, my people, my fellow citizens—when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger—and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do so, I am struck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.”
Hadees In The New Testament.
The word Hadees occurs but eleven times in the New Testament, and is translated Hell ten times, and grave once. The word is from a, not, and eido, to see, and means concealed, invisible. It has exactly the same meaning as Sheol, literally the grave, or death, and figuratively destruction, downfall, calamity, or punishment in this world, with no intimation whatever of torment or punishment beyond the grave. Such is the meaning in every passage in the Old Testament containing the word Sheol or Hadees, whether translated Hell, grave or pit. Such is the invariable meaning of Hadees in the New Testament. Says the “Emphatic Diaglott:” “To translate Hadees by the word Hell as it is done ten times out of eleven in the New Testament, is very improper, unless it has the Saxon meaning of helan, to cover, attached to it. The primitive signification of Hell, only denoting what was secret or concealed, perfectly corresponds with the Greek term Hadees and its equivalent Sheol, but the theological definition given to it at the present day by no means expresses it.”
Meaning of Hadees.
The Greek Septuagint, which our Lord used when he read or quoted from the Old Testament, gives Hadees as the exact equivalent of the Hebrew Sheol, and when the Savior, or his apostles, use the word, they must mean the same as is meant in the Old Testament. When Hadees is used in the New Testament, we must understand it just as we do (Sheol or Hadees) in the Old Testament.
Opinions of Scholars.
Dr. Campbell well says: * * “In my judgment, it ought never in Scripture to be rendered Hell, at least, in the sense wherein that word is now universally understood by Christians. In the Old Testament, the corresponding word is Sheol, which signifies the state of the dead in general without regard to the goodness or badness of the persons, their happiness or misery. In translating that word, the seventy have almost invariably used Hadees. * * It is very plain, that neither in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, nor in the New, does the word Hadees convey the meaning which the present English word Hell, in the Christian usage, always conveys to our minds.”—Diss. vi., pp. 180-1.
Donnegan defines it thus: “Invisible, not manifest, concealed, dark, uncertain.”—Lex. p. 19.
Le Clerc affirms that “neither Hadees nor Sheol EVER signifies in the Sacred Scripture the abode of evil spirits, but only the sepulchre, or the state of the dead.”
Heathen Corruptions.
It must not be forgotten that contact with the heathen had corrupted the opinions of the Jews, at the time of our Savior, from the simplicity of Moses, and that by receiving the traditions and fables of paganism, they had made void the word of God. They had accepted Hadees as the best Greek word to convey their idea of Sheol, but without investing it at first with the heathen notions of the classic Hadees, as they afterwards did. What these ideas were, the classic authors inform us.
“The Jews had acquired at Babylon a great number of Oriental notions, and their theological opinions had undergone great changes by this intercourse. We find in Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of Solomon, and the later prophets, notions unknown to the Jews before the Babylonian captivity, which are manifestly derived from the Orientals. Thus, God represented under the image of light, and the principle of evil under that of darkness; the history of good and bad angels; paradise and Heil, etc., are doctrines of which the origin, or at least the positive determination, can only be referred to the Oriental philosophy.”[1]
Dr. Thayer in his “Origin and History,” says: “The process is easily understood. About three hundred and thirty years before Christ, Alexander the Great had subjected to his rule the whole of Western Asia, including Judea, and also the kingdom of Egypt. Soon after he founded Alexandria, which speedily became a great commercial metropolis, and drew into itself a large multitude of Jews, who were always eager to improve the opportunities of traffic and trade. A few years later, Ptolemy Soter took Jerusalem, and carried off one hundred thousand of them into Egypt. Here, of course, they were in daily contact with Egyptians and Greeks, and gradually began to adopt their philosophical and religious opinions, or to modify their own in harmony with them.”
“To what side soever they turned,” says the Universalist Expositor, “the Jews came in contact with Greeks and with Greek philosophy, under one modification or another. It was round them and among them; for small bodies of that people were scattered through their own territories, as well as through the surrounding provinces. It insinuated itself very slowly at first; but stealing upon them from every quarter, and operating from age to age, it mingled at length in all their views, and by the year 150 before Christ, had wrought a visible change in their notions and habits of thought.”
We must either reject these imported ideas, as heathen inventions, or we must admit that the heathen, centuries before Christ, discovered that of which Moses had no idea. In other words either uninspired men announced the future fate of sinners centuries before inspired men knew anything of it, or the heathen and “evangelical” descriptions of Hell are wholly false.
Jewish And Pagan Opinions.
At the time of Christ’s advent Jew and Pagan held Hadees to be a place of torment after death, to endure forever.
“The prevalent and distinguishing opinion was, that the soul survived the body, that vicious souls would suffer an everlasting imprisonment in Hadees, and that the souls of the virtuous would both be happy there, and, in process of time, obtain the privilege of transmigrating into other bodies.” * * * (Campbell’s Four Gospels, Diss. 6, Pt. 2, § 19.) Of the Pharisees, Josephus says: “They also believe that souls have an immortal vigor in them, and that, under the earth, there will be rewards and punishments, according as they lived virtuously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison, but that the former shall have power to revive and live again.” (Antiquites, B. 18, Ch. 1, § 3. Whiston’s Tr.”)
These doctrines are not found in the Old Testament. They are of heathen origin. Did Jesus endorse them? Let us consult all the texts in which he employed the heathen word Hadees.
Thrust Down To Hadees.
Matt. 11:23, and Luke 10:15: “And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to Hell.” “And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shalt be thrust down to Hell.” Of course, a city never went to a place of torment after death. The word is used here just as it is in Isa. 14, where Babylon is said to be brought down to Sheol or Hadees, to denote debasement, overthrow, a prediction fulfilled to the letter. Dr. Clarke’s interpretation is correct: “The word here means a state of the utmost woe, and ruin, and desolation, to which these impenitent cities should be reduced. This prediction of our Lord was literally fulfilled; for, in the wars between the Romans and Jews, these cities were totally destroyed; so that no traces are now found of Bethsaida, Chorazin or Capernaum.”
Jesus Went To Hadees.
That Hadees is the kingdom of death, and not a place of torment, after death, is evident from the language of Acts 2:27: “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption.” Verse 31: “His soul was not left in Hell, neither his flesh did see corruption,” that is his spirit did not remain in the state of the dead, until his body decayed. No one supposes that Jesus went to a realm of torment when he died. Jacob wished to go down to Hadees to his son mourning, so Jesus went to Hadees, the under-world, the grave. The Apostle’s Creed conveys the same idea, when it speaks of Jesus as descending into Hell. He died, but his soul was not left in the realms of death, is the meaning.
The Gates Of Hadees.
Matt. 16:18: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” The word is here used as an emblem of destruction. “The gates of Hadees” means the powers of destruction. It is the Savior’s manner of saying that his church cannot be destroyed.
Hadees Is On Earth.
Rev. 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” All the details of this description demonstrate that the Hell is on this earth, and not in the future world.
The word also occurs in Rev 1:18: “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of Hell and of death.” To understand this passage literally, with the popular view of Hell added, would be to represent Jesus as the Devil’s gate keeper. If Hell is a realm of torment, and the devil is its king, and Jesus keeps the keys, what is he but the devil’s janitor, or turnkey? The idea is that Jesus defies death and the grave, evil, destruction, and all that is denoted either literally or figuratively by Hadees, the under-world. Its gates open to him.
Canon Farrar in Excursus II, “Eternal Hope,” observes: “Hell has entirely changed its old harmless sense of ‘the dim under-world,’ and that, meaning as it now does, to myriads of readers, ‘a place of endless torment by material fire into which all impenitent souls pass forever after death,’—it conveys meanings which are not to be found in any word of the Old or New Testament for which it is presented as an equivalent. In our Lord’s language Capernaum was to be thrust down, not ‘to Hell,’ but to the silence and desolation of the grave (Hadees); the promise that ‘the gates of Hadees’ should not prevail against the church is perhaps a distinct implication of her triumph even beyond death in the souls of men for whom he died; Dives uplifts his eyes not ‘in Hell,’ but in the intermediate Hadees where he rests till the resurrection to a judgment, in which signs are not wanting that his soul may have been meanwhile ennobled and purified.”
Hadees Destroyed.
1 Cor. 15:55: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” This is parallel to Hos. 14:14, where the destruction of Hadees is prophesied. Whatever Hadees means, it is not to endure forever. It is destined to be destroyed. It cannot be endless torment. That its inhabitants are to be delivered from its dominion, is seen from Rev. 20:13, “And Death and Hell delivered up the dead that were in them.” This harmonizes with the declaration of David, that he had been delivered from it already. (Ps. 30:3. 2 Sam. 22:5, 6). It does not retain its victims always, and hence, whatever it may mean, it does not denote endless imprisonment. Hence the next verse reads, “And death and Hell were cast into the lake of fire.” Can a more striking description of utter destruction be given than this? Of course the language is all figurative, and not literal. Hell here denotes evil and its consequences. It is in this world, it opposes truth and human happiness, but it is to meet with a destruction so complete that only a sea of fire can indicate the character of its destruction.
Says Prof. Stuart: “The king of Hadees, and Hadees itself, i.e., the region or domains of death, are represented as cast into the burning lake. The general judgment being now come, mortality having now been brought to a close, the tyrant death, and his domains along with him, are represented as cast into the burning lake, as objects of abhorrence and of indignation. They are no more to exercise any power over the human race.” Ex. Es. p. 133.
Footnotes / Endnotes:
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- Milman’s Gibbon ch. xxi. (↩)