Hell is NOT in the bible

Fire, a dark pit, demons with pitchforks, torture that goes on and on and on for all of eternity. This is what most of us picture when we think about hell. But if you ask actual Christians, like devout, church-going, Bible-believing Christians, what happens after you die, well, a huge number of them actually don't believe anything like that. I mean, Catholics, evangelicals, Eastern Orthodox, entire denominations, all looking at the same Bible worshipping the same God using the same name, but describing wildly, irreconcilably different versions of hell. So how did that famous picture, that fiery burning pit of hell, become so popular in Christianity? And what does the Bible actually say about hell? And the question underneath all of it, a question that no Christian really can escape, does God's justice really mean torture for all of eternity? Well, today we're going to find out, and we're going to open the Bible, look back on every major conflict in early Christianity, and find out where we get our traditional idea of hell, and look at some other really fascinating ways of interpreting eternal torment. And, uh, spoiler, it's probably not what you think. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, dude, and welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagdon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explored the most interesting, fascinating controversial stories from every religion from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here, is I'm trying to figure out what everybody believes. Yeah, I grew up Catholic, okay, and I still profess the faith to this very moment. But there's a lot of religions out there and a lot of different versions of God, and everyone's doing something different, so I want to know what's going on out there. Yeah, that's what I do here at the campsite. I want to know how people orient their lives around God, because one, I think it just is the responsible thing to do, it makes me stronger in my faith, and it helps me understand all the other arguments and versions of God that are out there. Also, I like to take everything from every religion that I like and apply to my own life. I saw a comment recently that was like, hey, you can't really do that. I think you can. Hot take. I really like the devotion of the Muslims. I like the study of the, you know, the Jews and the rabbis. I like the kindness of the LDS, you know, the Mormons, as people call them. So, for me, it's like, you know, if the Muslims were praying five times a day, I should pray more, you know, why don't I take that type of devotion to my kind of faith? If they're fasting all of Ramadan, well, I should fast a little bit, right? You can add things into your faith, even if it's not the exact one that you profess, you can take elements of it and apply it to your practice. That's what I believe. Again, I'm not saying all roads go to the same place. Maybe they do, but I don't have the answers for that. But maybe when I'm, you know, five thousand episodes into religion came, maybe I will have the answer. But today, we don't have any time to waste because we're talking about hell. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Fire, scary, gnashing of teeth, all that stuff. But what actually is it? Okay, before we go any further, I want to say thanks to you, dude, or girl, whoever you are for tuning in on this beautiful Sunday, because this shows not possible without you. Truly, I mean, I would probably still do it if no one watched, but the fact that you're here really means a lot. So thanks so much for tuning in because every time you click like comment anything like that, you tell the God of the algorithm, whoever that God is, someone over a Google or meta or something, that our show is pretty good. And you keep the lights on at the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. I also want to thank my good pal, Christos, kind of made a calispeda, Christos. Now you got to write this time. The first time calimata, right? No, calispeda. Dang it. Okay, give me a second. I'm not Greek Orthodox. That's why I don't know. Yeah, I'm sorry. We added that filio quay. Anyway, we did a whole episode on the schism. You should check it out. But that's not the point of today. We're talking about hell. When you think about hell, what do you think about? Just put that idea in your head because I think about the scariest thing. You know, I think of like the classic idea of hell. I'm thinking like a fire horn devil endless torture. But that vision is actually like a composite. Yeah, like it's kind of like a collage of ideas that were stitched together over a bunch of centuries and out of a bunch of different things like biblical language, some medieval paintings. I mean, Dante's like divine comedy, like Dante's version of hell and like that whole thing really changed a lot of people's perspectives. Like fire and brimstone, like sermons that happen throughout America. I'm gonna eventually Hollywood. And each of these layers added more detail and a more vivid description of what hell is. I mean, the pitchforks, the demons, gleefully, like poking centers with like, they're always naked too, which is always kind of funny. You always see like little demon butts and all these just depictions like the medieval ones. You pull it up. You see a lot of demon butts out there. It's all I'm saying. It's just kind of an interesting detail. But a lot of that stuff is medieval art and later imagination. It's not like chapter and verse from the Bible. And the popular image that we're familiar with has a really powerful kind of depiction precisely because so many hands have spent centuries building. It's kind of like the perfect kind of crowdsourced version of the thing to terrify you the most. But underneath the collage, there is a serious ancient theological position about hell. And it's still really talked about a lot. Theologians call it the eternal conscious torment. Sometimes it's called ECT. And the idea is pretty straightforward. Those who are finally judged wicked on judgment day remain consciously aware and consciously punished for all of eternity. Now, whether that punishment is like literal fire or just symbolic fire or just separation from God's love and light. And it's kind of standing in place for something worse, you know, that remains to be seen. But either way, the torture never ends in this version. This is the formal official teaching of huge swaths of the Christian world today. Many evangelical and pentacostal churches still hold on to this version pretty firmly. So like, for example, the assemblies of God, this is a specific denomination. It's one of the largest pentacostals and nominations on earth. They formally affirm an eternal hell and explicitly reject all alternatives that we are going to explore later in this episode. So for millions of people, this is simply what the word hell means. Now, how many people are we talking about? Well, the number here will maybe surprise you. It was surprising to me. And honestly, it's kind of reflective of why we are talking about this topic because it's not as many as you think. So Pew, the big like research institute, they did a survey in 2023 about the religious landscape study. That's what they call it. And they surveyed more than 35,000 Americans. And from this sample, roughly six out of 10 US adults said that they believe in hell. But then Pew asked specifically about a hell where people who have not accepted God will be eternally punished. Well, the numbers actually split pretty distinctly by tradition. So 82% of evangelical Protestants affirmed it. And about 81% of Christians in the historically black Protestant tradition did as well. But only like 69% of Catholics, 60% of Orthodox Christians, and 59% of mainline Protestants actually affirmed it. And that's a pretty wild spread because these are all Christians. They all believe in Jesus Christ and they all in some sense believe in hell. But yet a Catholic and a Pentecostal and an Orthodox Christian believe pretty strikingly different things about that word, which sets up an argument that, you know, the church and many churches have basically been having for 2,000 years. Because even though some Christians might agree that hell is eternal, they don't agree on what exactly eternal means. Like, is the fire eternal? Is the separation? Is the consequences eternal? Well, it goes deep. So let's kind of try to dive in here. Okay. Here is the issue. And a lot of English translations, a single word like hell, for example, is often used to translate several completely different words from the original languages. Now again, I'm not an epistemologist. I'm not a linguist. I'm not a, I'm not a scholar. I don't speak aramaic or Hebrew or Greek or anything like that. So I'm pulling from scholarship that other researchers have done to the best of my knowledge. So if I get anything wrong, please don't hesitate to correct me in the comments. But these words don't necessarily mean the same thing. And these words don't necessarily describe the same place. But we kind of flatten them all into one word with no direct translation. And all of a sudden, we kind of erase the debate that these biblical writers are already having, which is kind of what happened with this word hell. The original language is actually used like three or four different words. And they all mean slightly different things. But the English translation just kind of puts them all into the same umbrella, which, yeah, doesn't give you like the full context of what's actually happening. So let's try to break down the different versions and what we're actually talking about. So the first word we're going to look at is shield. And it dominates the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. And shield is not a fiery torture tambourance, more like the shadowy, like realm of the dead. It is like kind of like the underworld. It's the grave. It's this dim kind of liminal space where the dead simply just are. And what's crazy is that good people go there, bad people go there, it's just death itself. It's not necessarily a place of moral punishment so much as it's just kind of a place of like the beyond. Like there's no flames in that description usually. And then there's Hades. This is the Greek term that the New Testament borrows for this realm of the dead. And crucially, Hades is often understood to be like a temporary place, not the final destination. And you can tell that this matters because of one wild detail in the book of Revelation. At the very end, it says death and Hades themselves get thrown into the fire. Now we did a whole episode on Revelation and we went through like some of the interpretations at another episode about the rapture. But this is a pretty interesting line. The realm of the dead itself and death itself, two distinct places both get destroyed by the final judgment, which means whatever the lake of fire is, it can't be the same thing as Hades. Because Hades gets thrown into the lake of fire. So they're distinct and now maybe Hades gets kind of consumed and like sort of brought into the lake of fire. But it seems like at least from this revelation from John of Patmos that they seem to be distinct things in the Bible. is distinguishing this, you know, an intermediate state of death from the final reckoning, which is pretty interesting. And then there's a third big one. And it is called Jehanna. This is the word that Jesus actually uses in the gospels when he warns about a fiery judgment. And Jehanna was actually a real physical place. It's a place in the valley of Hanam. This is a ravine that's actually just outside of Jerusalem. And it was remembered in Israel's tradition as like a cursed site once associated with idol worship and child sacrifice and all the terrible stuff that happened in that specific ravine. But over time, in a lot of Jewish apocalyptic writing, that valley, like the literal place of horror, became a symbol for fiery judgment at the end of the world. Now, if you've heard the word Jehanna before, you may have heard it that it was Jerusalem's perpetually burning garbage dump, like literally a landfill that was full of trash and like excrement and throw away that was smoldering day and night. And it's thought that that's what Jesus was pointing to. And that image is in thousands of sermons, like even going back into like, you know, like medieval times, like people have referenced this. But historians actually consider that claim to be kind of shaky. The solid connection is to the valley's dark like scriptural representation, not the confirmed ancient trash fire. So just keep in mind if you hear it out in the wild. It's also a word that sounds very similar to the Muslim version of hell, Jehanna, I believe it's pronounced. And I'm assuming the words are connected. Again, I haven't actually even like super looked into that. I'm just sort of piecing it together on the fly here. But it's another interesting sort of connection. Now finally, the Bible talks about the lake of fire. And it is a haunting nickname from Revelation. They call it the second death. And this is the image of the final judgment that you're pretty used to hearing about. And this phrase, the second death is going to become the single most fought over set of words in this entire episode because everything really hinges on what that means theologically. Like, does second death mean conscious suffering that goes on forever? Does it mean permanent exclusion from God's presence? Does it mean a place of purification? Or is it just what it sounds like? Like a final irreversible ending of consciousness altogether, right? Like annihilationism as some people prefer to call it. That question gets answered in four different ways by four different groups of Christian. And every one of them is reading the same verses. So the first interpretation I want to go over is the idea that hell isn't so much a place that God sends you as a place that you choose and refuse to leave. Now, you're probably thinking like, who would choose to go to hell? Right? That sounds pretty crazy. But let me explain how this view kind of works in this view. The true agony of hell isn't the flames. It's not pitch forks. It's not the actual torture. It's the separation from God. Hell is the condition of being cut off forever from the Father who, in Christian theology, is the source of all life, love, joy, and goodness. So you take away that source completely and permanently by your own choice because you chose not to follow God who, basically, if you do that, what's left for you is just hell and separation. It's not a dungeon that God built for people. It's a door that you locked from your side because of the behavior and the choices you made on Earth. 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Most AI tools are still answering questions but perplexity computer is completing full projects. Now, let's get back to the show. Now in this view, the reason that you're not in hell right now, if you're not like a believer or if you're just completely atheistic or something, it's because God's presence is in and around the earth because of the Holy Spirit. So just by virtue of being alive and on earth, God is with us in some capacity and the Holy Spirit is amongst us as human beings. So as a result, we are still in God's light, but after judgment, things will be different. God's presence will be moved from you completely and you're going to feel it. Again, this is just one view, but there's a twist that a lot of people don't expect. You might assume this psychological, modern sounding idea comes from liberal churches kind of softening like old doctrine, but actually it's the most articulated one in basically most traditional institutions on earth and specifically the Roman Catholic Church. So the Catechism, which is like the kind of official like compiling of Catholic teaching, it's a pretty interesting little book. It's almost like a pamphlet. You can read through the Catechism of the Church and it basically describes everything that the Church believes. And it describes hell as definitive self-exclusion from communion with God. And the self-exclusion part is pretty important modern language yet at the same time. The Catechism insists that hell is real and it is eternal and that those who die in unrepentant sin descend there immediately. So this isn't a church trying to escape like hard doctrine. It's a church holding the hard doctrine and affirming that hell is a real painful place. And the person who made this idea really unforgettable wasn't even a Catholic theologian. He was a novelist and some say a deathbed convert to Catholicism again. That is rumored. But his name is C.S. Lewis. Yeah, you know, C.S. He wrote Chronicles in Arnia. Famous obviously like Christian writer. He wrote the screw tape letters, which is a fantastic book. If you've never read it, it's basically like about a demon that like plots on how to like take over souls and it's all from like the demon's perspective. It's pretty crazy. And there's a line of his that you probably certainly heard. It says, "The doors of hell are locked on the inside." So he wrote another great book called The Great Divorce where he paints a really different picture of hell. He imagines the damned like the people that have been cast judgment on in hell, which he describes just being really sad and like a really depressing ghost town. And they're being offered a bus ride like an actual journey out of hell and up towards heaven. And some of them go and when they arrive at the edge of paradise, many of them can't bear it. Heaven is too real and too beautiful and too bright. And to stay there, they'd have to let go. They'd have to let go of their grudges and their pride and their ego. And the wounded version of themselves that they spent a lifetime nursing and they just can't do it. So they'd rather return to the gray gloom where they just get to stay themselves than surrender into a joy that requires them to transform to be in the presence of God. And that's kind of what he means when he says hell is lost from the inside. So CS Lewis would say it's people choosing their sin and their ego and their pain rather than choosing to let it go. And you can probably see why this version hits so hard with many modern Christians because it really preserves human freedom and free will in a really interesting way. Hell is something that we do to ourselves and it keeps God from looking like a cosmic torture who like delights in our pain, but rather someone who has empathy and sadness for us while we're choosing to stay committed to the dark parts, the shadow self in a way. And it takes a seriously deep moral intuition that love, like real love from God doesn't force itself onto anyone. And even in their ruin, God honors people's self determination and free will to say no. And it's kind of a beautiful metaphor because I think we can apply to like our lives on Earth right now where it's like, you know, I could forgive this person that wrongfully. I could, you know, like do something to a group of people that's kind and generous despite the fact that they've never done anything for me, but still I'm holding onto my ego and my pain and my my persistence to be right that I'm kind of cutting myself off from the joy that I could get from altruism and rather I'm kind of defending my ego. But and this is the crack that the next view kind of prize wide open critics have pushed back on this, right? Can a finite human being that is limited and wounded and deceived ever truly make a free, fully informed, eternal choice to reject God, right? Like this is the question that people have asked of CS Lewis's work, the great divorce. If someone is trapped in a self deception, is there refusal actual freedom, right? Like no one would choose to be in a worse place if there's a better place they could be. So is there a choice to be committed to their sin into their ego, even free will at all? Or is it exactly the kind of sickness a perfectly loving God would heal, right? And if God could heal it, why would he leave them locked in that room forever? Which leads directly to the Christians who say he wouldn't and he doesn't? Yes, this is a interesting view that for a lot of you is going to be perhaps the most surprising one because it is held by sincere conservative Bible-centered Christians and it dismantles the thing that everyone assumes is non-negotiable, which is the idea that hell is forever. Again, this is a new, different view. And this view is built on two connected ideas. The first is called conditional immortality. And the claim here is that human beings are not naturally or like automatically immortal, right? We tend to assume that the soul is an indestructible thing that has to exist somewhere for all eternity. But that assumption, these Christians argue, is actually borrowed from Greek philosophy and not from the Bible. In scripture, they say eternal life is a gift, something God grants to the saved. It's not the default setting that every soul comes with. So if immortality is a gift to be redeemed, then a possibility kind of opens up for everyone else. And the second idea is also important. I mentioned it before. It's called annihilationism. It says that after judgment day, the wicked are not kept alive forever in torment. They are just annihilated. And I know it sounds like a violent word, but in the context, it actually is kind of charitable. Like it's kind of nice. It just means like ceasing to exist. The fire doesn't torture them for eternity. It just consumes them and then it's over. They go to wherever we were before we were born, assuming that reincarnation is a real, just that place of like, hey, what happened in the 1700s? You're like, I don't know. And it's like, yeah, because you weren't here. Your consciousness didn't exist yet. And it was created. And so annihilationists would say, like, okay, if you're damned to hell or to Hades or to Shoal or whatever, you just don't exist. Now, this gives a whole new understanding that, you know, some of those words we were talking about earlier. Supporters of this view will point to the Bible's own vocabulary over and over. The fate of the wicked is described with words like death and perish and destroy and destruction. All these words that seem to indicate some type of ceasing of existence. And revelations phrase for the final fate, remember the second death. So they ask a pretty pointed question. If the wages of sin is death, you can sure you've heard them before. The wage of sin is death. It's written in the Bible. Then why do we picture the opposite of eternal life as eternal life in torture? The true opposite of living forever isn't suffering forever. It's just ceasing to exist at all. Now, critics of this view use this example to push back. In the Gospel of Matthew, this is the first book of the New Testament, it talks a lot about Jesus's teaching, Jesus contrasts eternal punishment with eternal life, literally using the same Greek word for both versions of eternal. This word Ionios for both. And that argument sounds pretty good, right? It's the same word. So if life is everlasting, then everlasting punishment must be the opposite. But annihilationists will respond and say that eternal punishment can mean a punishment whose result is eternal. So they would say a result that is permanent and never reversed rather than a process of punishing that never stops. So if you are annihilated and your consciousness is just completely bang, cut off, never existed, bang. And you cease to exist in a one-time event, the consequence of that annihilation and that non-existence is forever. So eternal in effect, but not in duration, right? So the 7th day Adventist Church actually holds this theology together as a package. They're probably the yeah, probably the largest Christian domination as a whole who generally accepts this idea. Now again, I wasn't raised 7th day Adventist. So if I'm off on that, please let me know. But my understanding is that 7th day Adventists teach that at death a person doesn't rock it off to heaven or just go straight into the fires of hell. They enter an unconscious sleep. Immortality isn't something that they already possess. It is granted through Christ at the resurrection and the final fate of the unredeemed is destruction and annihilation, not an everlasting torture. And interestingly, they're not alone. Conditional immortality has become like a serious growing, still a minority position amongst a lot of evangelicals, precisely because to many, it seems to resolve this kind of unbearable tension. Like how could a God that is perfectly just and perfectly good? And omnipotent, inflict infinite, unending torment as the penalty for the finite sins of one single human life. Now of course, the traditional side has answered for this. They argue eternal punishment is set right next to eternal life and most naturally reads is ongoing. They point to revelations imagery of smoke that rises forever and ever. They raise a moral objection of their own, a mirror image of the one aimed at them. Like, does simply deleting the wicked really take the horror of evil seriously enough? Like if someone did the most atrocious genocide of all time ever the worst thing you can imagine, does just erasing their consciousness is that a fair punishment or does justice require that it be answered and that they have to deal with this and it's not just erased. So for this view, the mercy is precisely in the ending. Hell is horrifying not because God keeps his enemies alive forever and into eternity to be tormented for all time, but because evil in the end finally consumes itself and God just kind of lets it die. Now that brings us to the view that goes further than maybe any of the others in my opinion, the one that many Christians consider like a step too far and that even others consider the most beautiful idea in all of theology. And it is called universal reconciliation. Now you may have heard of the idea of universalism and it's very easy to kind of misunderstand. So I'm going to try to take it as diplomatically and sort of detailed as I can. So just bear with me. Universal reconciliation does not mean everyone gets a free pass to heaven. It does not mean sin doesn't matter or all religions are the same or that we're all touching different parts of the elephant and we're all describing the same thing. Here's the actual claim that in the end God will finally and eventually reconcile every person to himself through Christ and that no one is ultimately lost. Now this view does not deny hell. Again, this is not my view. I'm just trying to explain the view in as good faith as I can. But in most versions of universalism or universal reconciliation, hell is still very real and it is bad, but it is understood as temporary. And its purpose is not endless retribution, but a correction. Think of the difference between a prison built to punish you forever and a hospital that is trying to heal you, but the healing hurts and it is painful and it can take a long time. So in this view, the fire is the hospital. It burns, but it burns with a purpose to burn away and it burns away the pride and the cruelty and the resistance and the ego until even the most hardened soul is finally and fully restored in wanting and able to receive God. The pain might feel like torture, right? Like going on some type of drug program and a rehab and being on methadone is painful, but the pain has a purpose and the purpose has a clear endpoint. And many people feel like this has no basis in the Bible and it's just like wishful thinking for a happy ending eventually, but it's defenders build a really interesting case on some passages. There are some verses where Paul writes that God will reconcile all things to himself through Christ that as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. That one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess. There's a line from first Timothy that says God desires everyone to be saved. So again, it's this theology that kind of pulls a bunch of different elements from the Bible and their logic basically runs like this. If God truly wants all people to be saved and God is powerful enough to accomplish what he wants, then what could possibly stop God? Would God's own deepest desire just fail forever? That seems like it would be out of step with God's omnipotence. And this is not by the way some brand new invention that was thought of like in the last 10 years strands of this idea even reach back to the early centuries of the church. It's associated with really respected or well-known ancient figures like origin or Gregory of Nissa. There's even an old Greek word for it. It's literally that means the restoration of all things. The term is apocquetestosis. And it literally means like, hey, everything's good in the end. Now the early church was genuinely diverse on this point. The scholars will argue about exactly what these men taught and what they truly believed. But one of the greatest and most well-known theologians of all Augustine argued forcefully against universalism in his own day. So it was always contested. But it was there from very early on. It's not like a new age modern invention. But of course, it is still very liked by sort of new age kind of like Christian theology. But as it remains today, it is firmly rejected by most Catholic orthodox evangelical and Pentecostal church authorities, which is exactly why it's so provocative. There are all those like finality texts, the warnings of judgment and the language of eternal punishment. And there's also the freedom problem, right? If everyone ends up saved no matter what, is anyone truly free to say no? Like, do human beings even have free will? If someone's just like, hey, God, I'm not going to heaven, no matter what, can God just kind of circumvent their free will and be like, well, you're going to rehab anyway, and I'm going to save you. And you know, there's the moral urgency problem. If the ending is guaranteed for everyone, why do we need to repent? Like, does it just take away the amount of time that you're in like this hospital? Does any choice that you make in this life carry actually any eternal weight? Universalists have a really interesting reply to the freedom objection. They argue that true freedom is not the ability to endlessly destroy yourself. A person drowning in addiction or delusion or hatred isn't free. They are enslaved to their addiction or to their hatred. So you might think that they've chosen this life for themselves, but those kinds of things end up owning you. Like, no matter who you are or how you get into your situation. And so God saving everyone isn't God overriding freedom. It is God finally granting freedom from the slavery that they feel. So liberating people from the very bondage of the self-destruction that they're kind of bonded to in the first place. Now remember, it's not like he snaps his fingers and everyone just suddenly chooses him and free wills overridden and everyone's in heaven. If you don't repent during your lifetime, you do still face judgment and you do have to go to hell as a hospital/intermediary point for a while while you genuinely become refined in your heart. And the argument here is that you wind up choosing God yourself eventually in the end. Right, you can think of people that are addicted to heroin or any other type of terrible drug. Are they free? What does that actual freedom look like? And it poses an interesting question where you're like, I don't know if they have free will. These people are doing awful things but like they are a slave to the substance that they're addicted to. Now, there's also a softer version of this that you may have encountered without knowing the name and this is kind of an interpretation of the same idea. This is a dogmatic universalist and they will say flatly all will be saved. A hopeful universalist says something a bit more restrained that Christians are permitted to hope and pray that all might be saved without ever claiming to know for certain. And that second version has spread for more widely than the label ever has and pulpits and living rooms among people who could never quite bring themselves to believe that a loving, all-powerful God gives up on any of his children for good. So the universalist leave us with the sharpest question yet. If God is the perfect physician, can any wound be permanent? They say no, but love never stops pursuing and never stops trying to heal. And of course, the critics, against this point of view, can say love can heal everyone, but love cannot force a person to accept the cure. And it's a really interesting question that I think is worth thinking about. Obviously, this view is very nice and you like to think even the worst person, the person that's completely turned their back on God, can eventually get to a place where they were refined and purified enough to enter the kingdom of heaven, but, you know, this is not exactly a mainstream idea. Fellas, this episode is sponsored by Blue Choo. Look, life is about preparation. You got to prepare for a camping trip, for your job, for a podcast, and you got to prepare for all of the things happening in your life. And you know, sometimes when the vibe is right, everyone's, you know, being an adult, you're on the same page. Sometimes people forget to prepare for the bedroom and that's why you need Blue Choo Gold. Blue Choo Gold is going to take you to the next level in the bedroom. It combines four ingredients into one powerful solution, two to support you physically, two to support a rousal and desire in the brain. 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And it might be the craziest one of all because it kind of dissolves the entire map that we've been using. So every view so far assumes hell is at least somewhere, like a place or a location or like, you know, like it's a, it's a thing. It's a, you know, the damned are on one side and God is on the other side of this door. But there is a strand of thought expressed by many Orthodox Christians that says, what if the whole picture that we're kind of doing here is wrong? What if no one is ever for one instant, actually outside of the presence of God? Because God is everywhere. And there is nowhere that His love and glory are not. So in this framework, heaven and hell aren't two different places. They are just two different experiences of the same divine reality. I know it's difficult, but just imagine God's presence is like this overwhelming, all consuming light. And what that light feels like depends entirely on what you have become. So to a soul that is shaped by love and humility and openness, the presence of God is warmth, and joy, and it's a homecoming, like that is heaven, like you are fully home and in communion with God. But to a soul that has hardened itself to pride and hatred and destruction and bitterness, that very same presence of the beauty of God, the same relentless love can feel unbearable and it actually burns. And it kind of overlaps with C.S. Lewis' hell is a locked room from the inside, both make hell something internal, like a condition of the person rather than the place or a separation. But there is a key difference. C.S. Lewis emphasizes the soul locking itself away. But this orthodox vision emphasizes the opposite, that there is no way. There's no escaping God. That God is eternal and omnipresence, and that the fire of hell in this view isn't a furnace that God lits in a separate dungeon. It's what perfect infinite love feels like to someone who has made themselves unable to receive it. Now, to be very clear, not every orthodox Christian frames it exactly in this way, and this picture doesn't settle whether the condition lasts forever, or if it's ever changed. But it can kind of be held alongside an eternal fire, and it can be held alongside a hope for restoration. What it changes isn't the duration of the pain. It's what the pain actually is. It moves us from asking, where does God send people to what does a person become, and how does the presence of God feel to a person who can't accept it? Which, as it turns out, is the actual question underneath all the views that we've talked about? So, I know this is a lot, but to get back to where we started, that picture in your head, the fire, the demons, the screaming, we've now kind of unbridled the image that goes into your mind and kind of broken it up into pieces, and we can hold them up real quick side-by-side. Here's the eternal prison, hell, as everlasting conscious punishment, evil is so serious, and God's justice is so real that the consequence of rejecting God and choosing evil and paying for everything that you've ever done that's wrong really never ends. Then there's the locked room. Hell is a freely chosen separation. It's not a cell that God builds and sends people. It is a door that we lock ourselves into, because surrendering to love into the beauty of God would cost us the self that we insist on being attached to. Then there is the extinguished flame, hell as final elimination and annihilationism. The wicked are not kept alive to suffer forever. They perish and the eternity is in the permanence of that loss, not literally the length of the torment. Then, of course, there is the hospital fire, which sounds bad. But it's this idea that hell is very severe and very painful, but it is ultimately a very healing place, and that a judgment that hurts in order to restore until even the last most resistant, most evil soul is finally brought home. This gives us four images, four completely different timelines and destinies, and every single one of them is held by intelligent, educated devout Christians that are reading the same scripture and both profess Jesus Christ as the one true Lord, and all coming really from the same word that we all read as hell. That's how none of these views a race judgment. They don't disagree on whether evil gets what it deserves. They disagree about its duration and its purpose and the mechanism of purification and ultimately its final outcome. So the fire and brimstone preacher and the hopeful universalist are not arguing about whether God takes human cruelty seriously or if justice exists or if there's any type of rectification for evil. They both insist that He does, and they're arguing about what a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly loving at the same time, how does God reconcile these things? What does God actually do about it? And maybe that's the real reason that this question has never been settled in 2000 years of developing theology and even thousands more years of every other different sort of theology. Because underneath all of it, every version is kind of wrestling with the same tension at the heart of the Christian God. It is a love that does not coerce and a justice that will not ignore. A God who honors freedom and a God who wants to save. Even when those two things seem to pull in opposite directions, it's the question of how does God reconcile this? But again, the reason we're talking today isn't about why God allows people to go to hell or why hell even exists in the first place. This is a question about what it could actually be like. So maybe hell is a real place where people will burn for eternity. Maybe it is not. Maybe people burn for a short period of time. Maybe it's being erased from existence altogether. Maybe it's just a holding place. And maybe it's none of those things and we're all completely wrong. Because in the end, every one of these beliefs is standing in front of the same door, asking the same question about what weights on the other side of judgment. And unfortunately, all of us will probably learn this and hopefully not anytime soon. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just some of the interpretations of how Christians look at hell. I mean, what is this kind of an ominous topic, right? Even I was like, we were doing research on this, I was just like, oh man, this is, I gotta go to confession. I gotta say sorry, I gotta say sorry to a lot of people. The wages of sin are death, and I'm gonna die, and I'm gonna find this out. And I'm gonna go someplace and be like, oh, that's what it was. I wonder if there's a moment, like even people that go to hell, if there's a little moment of them being like, oh, interesting. Oh, that makes so much sense now that I'm thinking about it. I gotta wonder, right? Was God allowed for like a little bit of curiosity? I gotta wonder about that, like people that die, like even as they're dying, are they ever like, oh, so this is what it's like. as they're dying. - Yeah. - Like imagine like, you know, like some old guy and he's laying at a bed and he's 150 years old and he's just like his brain slowly turning off and he's just, I wonder if there's a curiosity like, oh, maybe I'll be the first. When I'm dying at 300 years old because technology is able to keep me alive. And I'm on my deathbed and I'm finally going into the light and I'm like, oh wow, this is the light. This is what they've been talking about. - I think I'll be, I think I'll be curious. I think a lot of people are like, oh wow, that's fascinating. It's like the most interesting question of all, right? It answers everything all in one go. - Well, when you die, do you still have your life memories? - I mean, probably your life flashed before your eyes. That's what people say. I mean, I've never seen it. - True. - I would like for my life to flash before eyes. There's a lot of stuff I'd be like, oh, that's where I put that. There'd be a lot of stuff I remember. I'm like, I was looking for that DVD for so long. And it turns out it was in my mom's Toyota Sienna the whole time. I'd be so annoyed, I'd be like, I love the cat in the hat, the Mike Myers version, and I couldn't find this DVD forever. My whole childhood, I just couldn't figure it out. We ended up selling the car, I bet you would send it. - Something might be watching it right now. - That'd be nice, actually. - After this podcast. - Yeah, of course. - Yeah, I don't think I'm going wrong. But what do you guys think? Like again, I think the hopeful universalist is like a nice position to take. Like it's like, yeah, I hope that everyone can be saved and that God's justice can purify all people. Again, it's not a Catholic doctrine, but I don't know if it's anti-Catholic to hope. I hope it's nice. But again, as a Catholic, I'm like, well, there's probably some type of eternal judgment. But as Catholics, we also have purgatory. That is a place for the save to go where they are purged of their sins. That doesn't entirely separate episode that we do not have time to get into today. But at some point in the future, we will get into it. But it is a fascinating question. I don't know, the annihilationist thing is also interesting. Just to say like, hey, eternal life, eternal judgment, but the judgment is eternal, their death is forever, their season to exist, is eternal. That's also kind of a merciful way to go. But then it's like, well, what is the punishment for? I wonder if the annihilationists have room for like, well, there is a period of torment and then there is annihilation. So that all people in heaven are like, well, thank goodness I did all the right stuff and I gave my life to Christ. And these people that did evil stuff that are the worst people we can imagine, like the people that commit crimes against children and genocide and all sorts of stuff, that those people got some type of torture and then they were annihilated. I think you need that. I think if it's just straight up annihilation, then it's like, well, you didn't even care. You know, it didn't even matter. But that's why I almost think like life in prison is better, no, is worse than death sentence. Yeah, I mean, think about like the worst person that committed the worst crime ever. And it's like, well, fire squad, they're gone. It's like, yeah, but they inflicted so much suffering. Like, shouldn't they have to suffer a little bit? And by like keeping them in like a prison for life, it's like, inflicting more suffering, which is maybe more cruel. I don't know. Am I supposed to try to advocate for cruelty? These are the questions I don't know. I gotta go back to philosophy class. Yep, I need an ethicist. That's what I need. Maybe there's one watching right now. What do you guys think? 'Cause someone illuminate me in the comments and just tell me what's going on. As a Catholic, I know what I'm supposed to believe. As a human, I'm a hopeful universalist. As a Catholic, I'm a, you know, a judgment type person. But I'm curious, what is your faith, Legion to believe? What do you think hell is? And what substantiates that? Why do you believe that? How does it organize with your theology? And what were you taught growing up? And did these things scare you? Did they keep you up at night? I would love to know your thoughts. Please drop a comment, you to Spotify. Particularly this discussion, I think I'm gonna weigh in on a lot more. So by all means, please comment. I read all the comments all the time. I might not get back to every one of them, but this one I'm gonna be a little bit more active because it's a very interesting question. Now, I have a couple updates. If you like history content, we'll great news. We have an entire channel dedicated to it. It's called History Camp. It's exactly what it sounds like. We talk about everything that's ever happened. If you like mysteries, similar to this, but more like modern day mysteries, kind of conspiracies, the occult, the unknown, the rabbit holes of the current day. Well, campy agon's place for you. And we also have a secret site, patreon.com/campyagonal, where you get every episode of this show, plus all of our shows completely add free. And you're gonna get bonus episodes that never go to the public. And monthly zooms with me and the rest of squad, where we can chat and chop it up and talk about things going on in our lives. And you get all that for just the small price of a cup of coffee every single month. Now, if you just like to rock with the religious viable great news, you're in the right place. This is Religion Camp. We drop these episodes every single Sunday, and I will see you guys next week to explore more of the mysteries of the divine. God bless you all, have a beautiful Sunday, and I'll see you next time. Peace.