Popular Beliefs About Hell That Aren’t Actually In The Bible

Many Christians believe that when we perish, we are judged by God and sent to either heaven or hell. Christian children worry about people who have passed, hoping they aren’t in the Lake of Fire.

It turns out that God doesn’t work that way. Instead, God withholds judgment until the final day. According to the Bible, no one is in hell right now except Satan and his demons. Every single human ever to have lived, from the very best to the very worst, is simply sleeping, waiting for Christ’s return and the final day of judgment.

One of the most contentious debates throughout Christian history has been on the value of good works versus God’s grace. The gospel of works says that we must perform good deeds in order to be admitted to heaven. The gospel of grace says that God decides where to place us based on criteria beyond our understanding or control.

Surprising as it may seem, the gospel of grace is more supported by the Bible. Take Ephesians 2:8-9, which says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.”

This is perhaps the most pervasive misconception about hell. Members of the fire-and-brimstone branches of Christianity will be familiar with the phrase “everlasting torment.” However, there is a large contingent of theologians who believe the Bible supports a doctrine of annihilationism.

Annihilationism is the belief that, after a period of torment, God simply wipes out the consciousness of those who cannot be redeemed. Annihilationists point to passages like Isaiah 5:24 to support this position:

Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw

and as dry grass sinks down in the flames,

so their roots will decay

and their flowers blow away like dust;

for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty

and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel.

Lucifer was originally known as ha-Satan, a term that simply means “the Adversary.” In the Bible itself, Satan’s powers and provenance are not well defined. It is only much later, through Dante and especially Milton, that we get our image of Satan as a powerful, winged demon – AKA the King of Hell.

In the Bible, and in all mainstream post-Biblical theology, it is understood that hell is Satan’s prison, not his kingdom. God rules over hell just as he rules over heaven. However, this is hard to square with events like Satan’s temptation of Jesus during his 40 days in the wilderness. There are also moments in Genesis that seem to imply God allows Satan to be a kind of co-ruler of Earth for his own mysterious purposes.

Ultimately, there is no resolution for these contradictions. Some theologians have posited that Satan is used by God as a test or temptation to see who is worthy of entering heaven.

The modern church puts a great deal of emphasis on hell, so one might expect there to be a similar emphasis in the Bible. However, the truth is that the Old Testament contains zero mentions of hell. There are some passing references to “sheol” and “Gehenna,” but those concepts have little in common with the Christian hell.

In fact, “hell” is mentioned 23 times in the New Testament, compared to a whopping 250 mentions of heaven. Why the disparity? Some Christian scholars believe that missionaries commonly used hell as a motivational tool to convert unbelievers, whereas the writers of the gospels were not particularly concerned with spreading the faith because they believed that Jesus’s return was imminent.

One of the most difficult things to reconcile in Christian theology is the fate of unbaptized babies. Theology is quite clear that baptism is the only way into heaven, yet a loving God would surely not abandon infants to hell. To answer this question, Christian thinkers developed the idea of limbo, a place where unbaptized babies could escape punishment.

There is no evidence for limbo in the Bible, but the idea was posited to soften St. Augustine’s assertion that unbaptized babies would go directly to hell. However, Augustine was on sturdier theological ground than his critics.

Blame this one on Dante. There is absolutely no indication in the Bible that there are multiple “circles” or zones in hell, or that there will be any modulation of the degree of punishment based on the sin. Rather, the Bible treats the entire host of the damned the same, as a mass of sinners and unbelievers who will be tossed, en masse, into the Lake of Fire.

Many religious traditions believe that punishment ought to in some way fit the deed. It is likely that Dante was influenced by Greek and Roman mythologies, such as the story of Tantalus. After taking ambrosia from the gods, Tantalus was punished to endure eternal hunger and thirst in Tartarus. He was placed in a pool of water that receded whenever he tried to drink from it and beneath a fruit tree that kept its fruit forever out of his reach.

The doctrine of purgatory states that there is an intermediate, hell-like zone in the afterlife in which one’s sins are burnt, or “purged,” in order to prepare one for heaven. While some Biblical issues are ambiguous and open to interpretation, purgatory is not. There is simply zero evidence for it in the Bible.

The concept was originally proposed by the early theologian Clement of Alexandria, but it was Pope Gregory the Great who, in the 5th century, made purgatory an official part of church doctrine. Many denominations still believe in purgatory, but this is ultimately a theological doctrine, not a scriptural one.

God shows many faces in the Bible. At times, he is full of wrath, eager to damn everyone in sight, and utterly unwilling to consider reconciliation or forgiveness. At other times, he is a benevolent father wanting the best for his children. So which are we to believe?

There is no easy answer to that question. However, there is significant evidence that God takes no joy in the condemnation of sinners, and is eager for their return to his arms. Consider this passage from Ezekiel 18:

“But if a wicked person turns away from all the sins they have committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, that person will surely live… Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked?” declares the Sovereign Lord. “Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

Matthew 7:13 seems to answer this one: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”

An eternal conundrum in Christian apologetics is the question of the reach of God’s mercy. God is supposed to be eternally mercifully, and yet passages like the one above seem to indicate that most of humanity will eventually burn in fiery torment. If one accepts Biblical inerrancy (the idea that the Bible contains no errors or faults), it seems inevitable that the vast majority of the human race will burn. The work of reconciling these two ideas is ongoing.