Hell Hath No Fury
With fire and brimstone out of fashion, modern thinking says the netherworld isn't so hot after all
Whether or not it proves effective, this more figurative view of hell fits neatly with a recent shift in public opinion. A new U.S. News poll shows that more Americans believe in hell today than did in the 1950s or even 10 years ago. But like the pope, most now think of hell as "an anguished state of existence" rather than as a real place.
It should come as little surprise, say some scholars, that modern educated Americans would reject notions of a blazing underworld where anguished souls writhe in endless torment. A literal hell is "part of an understanding of the cosmos that just doesn't exist anymore," says Prof. Stephen J. Patterson of the Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. Were the pope to invoke images of hell with "flames and a red-suited devil with a pitchfork," says church historian Martin Marty, a professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School, "he knows people wouldn't take it seriously. It's cartoonish." Many modern Christians are simply ashamed of hell, explains Groothuis of the Denver Seminary. Even some evangelicals, who generally take a more literal approach to biblical teachings, he says, view hell as "a blemish to be covered up by the cosmetic of divine love." In increasingly secular American culture, adds Mohler, "hell has become about as politically incorrect a concept as one can find."
Yet few religious ideas have proved to be as riveting or resilient. Hell's roots run deep in Judeo-Christian teachings, although its lineage is sometimes difficult to discern. In the earliest biblical times, views of the afterlife were murky, to say the least. The ancient Hebrew texts of Genesis, 1 Kings, Psalms, and Job, for example, suggest that all the dead--both righteous and wicked--were dispatched to a gloomy underworld realm called sheol, a morally neutral place akin to the hades of ancient Greek mythology. In the book of Genesis, for example, the Hebrew patriarch Jacob, believing his son Joseph to be dead, moans: "I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning" (37:35).
By the second century B.C., when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, hades replaced sheol in the Greek Bible, and the two concepts became firmly melded in popular thinking. Later, when belief in a final resurrection of the dead emerged in some parts of Judaism and in Christianity, hades became a temporary abode of the souls of the wicked only--the righteous went to heavenly blessedness to await the bodily resurrection.
In early Christian teaching, after the final judgment, the wicked will be condemned to a hell of fire called gehenna, a Greek word derived from the Hebrew Gehinnom and referring to the desolate Valley of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem, where trash fires burned incessantly and where ancient human sacrifices had been offered to Canaanite gods. The fiery imagery grew even hotter in the book of Revelation, written late in the first century A.D., which declares that any who are judged unworthy will be "thrown into the lake of fire" (20:15) along with Satan and his minions.
advertisement
