The origins of Christian hell

QUAERENS: Journal of Theology and Christianity Studies, 2022

According to the view that is relatively common in the wider Christian culture, heaven and hell basically deserve compensation for the kind of earthly life we lead. Good people go to heaven as a worthy reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go to hell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scale of justice is sometimes considered balanced. But almost all Christian theologians regard such a view, however commonly it may be in popular culture, as too simplistic and unsampled; the biblical perspective, as they see it, is much more subtle than that. It is important to acknowledge the polemical and apologetic setting of its development. Judaism underwent modifications to protect the Jewish faith and chastise apostates in the face of invading Hellenism. For the early Christ-movement, continued growth was necessary to defend itself against both internal defection and first-century Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism. The early church fathers believed that using the dre...

2020

This paper examines the Christian concept of hell and its development: how it is represented in doctrine and conceived in the imagination. It seeks to explore the development of the concept of hell and how people have arrived at their modern conceptions and misconceptions through the three general lenses of history, modernity, and Scripture. It attempts to investigate what hell is, is it a place? A state of being? A concrete or symbolic reality? And if it is a place where and how might it exist? Who occupies hell and who rules it? The paper also attempts to clarify hell’s relationship to time- when it might exist and for how long. The paper finally dares to clarify which conceptions of hell are likely the most biblical and useful.

Numen, 2020

Church History, 2012

(from the Introduction) Intending only to research medieval conceptions of hell, author Alan Bernstein wanted to investigate postmortem retribution in the ancient world for historical context. This investigation turned into an entire book of its own. In The Formation of Hell, Bernstein seeks to explain how the idea of hell achieved a prominent place in people’s minds. He explicitly states that he intends to accomplish this without any prior concern for whether hell actually exists or any preceding judgement as to the nature or value of hell. In the end, Bernstein provides a superb example of historical investigation and rigorous scholarship. Though there are certain theological and metaphysical implications omitted from the book, the author successfully demonstrates that the notion of hell originally arose late in Judaism out of a need to explain the injustices in the world and became a rhetorical device designed to elicit conformity to religious and cultural mores.

Hell is a place where, after death, the souls of unrepentant sinners are eternally tormented by the unmediated presence of God, manifested in his wrath. This claim is confirmed through (i) an exegetical study of the words used to indicate “hell” in the Bible, (ii) a biblical-theological overview of the presence of God manifest in either blessing or cursing throughout the Scriptures, and (iii) a consideration of matters componential to a proper systematic theology of hell.

2008

Hell is being written out of theology and banned from serious conversation; for most scholars and modern-minded people it has become more or less a theoretical issue. Yet it remains alive and burning in the Western mind - there has been a surge in the amount of popular literature written on the subject from the 1990’s onwards. Why the sudden interest? Is there a pattern or social trend that can begin to explain the phenomenon? Part of the responsible way of dealing with the history of a concept such as hell is to point towards the social and political reasons for the emergence and need for certain concepts in particular contexts and circumstances, as they are all utilitarian concepts which are employed and abandoned as needs change and sentiments shift. This article will investigate the rise of the concept of hell by investigating the ancient sources in which it first appears, in order to establish what factors made the concept popular then and now. In doing so, a continuum will be identified between the first origin of these ideas and their present popularity.

Theology and Science, 2022

The traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment is challenged by proponents of universalism and conditional immortality. However, they need to explain why the church has been misled in adopting the traditional view. This paper draws from cognitive and evolutionary science of religion to provide an "error theory" of why eternal hell became the dominant view. Early Christianity grew rapidly despite persecution and marginalization. The fear of hell probably helped Christian communities to maintain cooperation by weeding out free riding even in times of crisis. Here the traditional view proved to be more effective than its competitors.

2013

The singular construct of afterlife within the Hebrew Bible is Sheol, a desolate place where, to the lament of many, the souls of both the righteous and the wicked reside. Yet there are striking developments within the periods of Second Temple Judaism, the New Testament and the post-apostolic Christian era. Within Second Temple Judaism, Sheol is transformed into a place of differentiation: the souls of the righteous depart to a place of blessing, the wicked to a place of torment. For the New Testament writers, this concept remains, but the soul is now conjoined to the physical body, and in the later post-apostolic period there is accentuated terror for the wicked in vivid descriptions of the eternal ires of hell. The modern understanding of a tortuous afterlife is drawn from the imagery of the church fathers, which was further accentuated within mediaeval Christendom. Yet the polemical and apologetic context of this development needs to be recognized. Within Judaism, changes were ma...

Much of the history of scholarship on " hell " has been devoted to tracing genetic relationships between older texts and more recent ones, typically based upon generic elements or the specific features of hell's landscape. This paper suggests a new direction for classics and New Testament study, focusing instead on the rhetorical function of hell in antiquity. This paper argues that the ancient conventions of descriptive rhetoric were at work in the depictions of Hell that we find in the Jewish and early Christian apocalypses. It begins with a definition of these rhetorical devices by examining the Progymnasmata as well as Quintillian's work on rhetoric and discusses the role of the rhetoric of description in the overall Greek and Roman programs of paideia. Next, this paper demonstrates that these rhetorical devices were at work in various ancient depictions of Hades (with examples chosen from Greek and Latin authors such as Homer, Plato, Virgil, Lucian and Plutarch). Finally, this paper shows that this rhetorical technique was also at work in the early Christian apocalypses and concludes that apocalyptic authors, like the Greeks and Romans before them, used these rhetorical techniques to " emotionally move " their audiences toward " right behavior. "