Hell Hath No Fury
With fire and brimstone out of fashion, modern thinking says the netherworld isn't so hot after all
Words and deeds. But the nuanced differences and gradual shifts in the biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment often are obscured in English Bibles, which frequently translate all three terms--sheol, hades, and gehenna--simply as "hell." Greek texts of the gospel of Matthew, for example, use gehenna when quoting Jesus as warning: "Anyone who says, 'You fool,' will be in danger of the fire of hell" (5:22). But they use hades where Jesus vows that "the gates of hell shall not prevail" against his church (16:18). Rather than talking about a place of eternal punishment in this instance, some modern Bible scholars interpret Jesus's words as a dramatic affirmation of his power over death demonstrated by his own Resurrection.
Other New Testament passages offer frightening glimpses of hell as a place of "outer darkness" and of "weeping and gnashing of teeth" where the "worm never dies and the fire is never quenched." But the portraiture is far from complete. Many of the early church fathers, including the fourth-century Latin theologian Jerome, assumed that hell was a place of sensory torment. "We should indeed mourn for the dead," Jerome wrote, "but only for him whom Gehenna receives . . . and for whose punishment the eternal fire burns."
The view was far from unanimous. Both the third-century father Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa, a theologian of the fourth century, thought hell was more a place of spiritual suffering--of remorse and separation from God. In the fifth century, the great Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo staked out a middle ground by suggesting that suffering in hell was both spiritual and sensory--a view that continues to hold considerable sway.
Uses and abuses. While most of the early church fathers taught that hell's purpose was to punish impenitent sinners, however, Origen suggested it was remedial--that in hell, even the worst of sinners could be rehabilitated and ultimately find their way to paradise. But his "universalist" view was rejected by church leaders at the Council of Constantinople in 543. And while a few theologians of the day believed that sinners ultimately would be annihilated, most held the belief that the torments of hell were unending.
In the early 14th century, the graphic imagery of a multileveled subterranean chamber of horrors became fixed in the popular imagination with Dante's fictional descriptions of the Inferno in The Divine Comedy. Two hundred years later, leaders of the Protestant Reformation rejected the terrifying depictions of hell in art and literature. While Martin Luther and John Calvin regarded hell as a real place, they believed its fiery torments were figurative. Hell's worst agonies, they said, were the terror and utter despair of spending eternity cut off from God.
Nonetheless, old notions of hell as a place of both physical and spiritual suffering experienced a resurgence in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Westminster Larger Catechism declared hell's agonies to include "grievous torments in soul and body," in addition to "everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God." But Origen's premise that all would be saved also began to draw a new following. And the rise of liberal Protestantism in the 19th and early 20th centuries spawned renewed objections to the thought of eternal retribution in a material hell. Rather than becoming more uniform, the Christian doctrine of hell grew more fragmented than ever.
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