The first time I can distinctly remember being told that eternal conscious torment could potentially apply to me was when I was in fourth grade at the tender age of nine. As a result of familial dysfunction and instability, we were living with my maternal grandparents the year I was in fourth grade. One night, a man selling cemetery plots came over to sell my grandparents plots in a local cemetery. The salesman was clearly an evangelical because he segued from his official job of selling people a burial plot to the potential for eternal damnation in hell if said people had not accepted Jesus as their savior before they died. That was quite the set up by the fundamentalist cemetery plot salesman. He didn’t stop with my middle aged grandparents though. I was brought into the room to hear the evangelical spiel and I was told that if I died that night, despite only being nine years old, that I would doubtless be subjected to eternal conscious torment (ETC) in hell if I failed to get saved immediately by saying a sinner’s prayer and asking Jesus to come into my heart. What kind of person traumatizes a child like that and thinks it is a good idea? Is it any wonder religious trauma is now a specialty in the mental health field? Hey God, what the hell is up with hell??

A lot of people believe that ETC in hell is what the Bible consistently teaches. One of the reasons for that is because hell is so often harped on by conservative Catholics, fundamentalists, and evangelicals, many of whom take a perverse delight in imagining human beings suffering endless torture with Satan and his minions in the sulfurous conflagration in the pits of hell. During my decades of life attempting to be a good fundamentalist Christian, I was never taught anything different about what the Bible says about the afterlife. The choice was clear for those of us toeing the fundamentalist “party line” so to speak — accept Jesus as personal Lord and savior without equivocation, doubts, and backsliding, or spend eternity screaming in agony not only because of the horrific torture induced pain and suffering, but also because one is forever separated from God. Talk about an extreme miscarriage of justice. If one is lucky, a human gets to live 70-80 years of life on Earth, but if one believes the wrong things or behaves in the wrong ways, then God will punish them for all of ETERNITY.

There are of course many problems with the traditional view of hell espoused by conservative Christians – one of which is that it turns that disreputable and disgusting version of God into an absolute monster who is unworthy of worship and in whom there is a complete dearth of divine love. Another of the enormous problems with ETC is that the anthology of texts that make up the Bible actually contains four different views of the afterlife rather than just the alleged ETC. To begin with, the concept of ETC in hell is almost completely absent from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, that is until the writer of Daniel 12:2-3 incorporated the idea into the the apocalyptic section of Book of Daniel sometime between 167-164 BCE. The original Israelite concept of the afterlife in Sheol had nothing to do with divine punishment or reward, rather Sheol was simply the netherworld where all of the Jewish dead went without regard to how devout they were or how well they had behaved. In Ecclesiastes 9:2-6;10 (NRSV) the writer notes that “…the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice…The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; the have no more reward, and even memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun…Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.” Scholars date the book of Ecclesiastes to sometime between 450-330 BCE, which is much earlier than the aforementioned reference in Daniel.

The above passage from Ecclesiastes is remarkably different from the idea of ETC in hell. Everyone is in Sheol, not just the wicked. Everyone’s sins die with them and no one is conscious of their existence in Sheol, much less in a constant state of consciously being tortured. As Dr. Sharon L. Baker notes in her book Razing Hell : Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about God’s Wrath and Judgment, that the concept of hell initially came to Judaism from Greek and Persian religious ideas that then developed during the intertestamental period (Baker, p.5) The intertestamental period was the time between when the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament ends and the New Testament begins and was about 400 years long. Dr. Keith Wright, a Presbyterian minister, in his book The Hell Jesus Never Intended wrote that the earliest known instance of hell came from clay tablets from the Tigris-Euphrates valley in Iraq 4000 years ago where Zoroastrianism was dominant. He goes on to say that Zoroaster “had enormous influence, directly or indirectly, on the history of Christianity, and specifically, of Hell.” (Wright, pp.39,42)

The fact that the idea of ETC in hell originally came from outside of Judaism and Christianity 300-400 years prior to the writings of the New Testament shows it to be an idea of religious syncretism — that is a combining of different religious beliefs. This syncretism between Greek, Persian, and Jewish beliefs eventually led to the so-called “traditional view of hell as ETC” which people often attribute to writings in the New Testament or when they mistakenly mistranslate Sheol into hell. Yet, the belief that the New Testament consistently speaks to ETC, as I will show in Part II, is a limited view of what the New Testament has to say on the subject of the afterlife and what hell actually is. For now I will close with the following quote from Dr. Baker which speaks to one horrible byproduct of a belief in ETC that has all too often been proven true, “By believing in a God who uses violent measures to accomplish divine purpose, we justify violence and evil in God’s name.” (Baker, p.) 16

If you enjoyed this essay, please pick up a copy of my latest book here: Theological Musings Volume 1