Hard Questions: Is hell real?

The word gets used constantly and thought about almost never. It's a punchline, a threat, a bumper sticker. Politicians invoke it. Preachers use it to fill seats. People say "hell" the way they say "damn" — reflexively, without much weight behind it.

But the question is serious. And the Christian tradition contains considerably more variety on this subject than most people in the pews have ever been told.

The confident version — eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire, forever — is not the only position the tradition has produced. It is the dominant one, particularly in certain Protestant strands. But the alternatives are not modern departures from orthodoxy. They go back a long way.

Eternal conscious torment is the traditional majority position. It holds that those who die apart from God are separated from God permanently, and that this separation involves ongoing suffering. It roots itself in texts like Matthew 25:46 ("eternal punishment"), Revelation 20:10 (the lake of fire burning "day and night forever and ever"), and Mark 9:48 (where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched). Its defenders argue that Jesus spoke about hell more than almost any other subject, that the severity of the warning implies the severity of the consequence, and that softening it dishonors both the seriousness of human choice and the seriousness of what Christ came to save people from. Serious theologians across many traditions have defended it and still do.

Annihilationism — sometimes called conditionalism — holds that those who die apart from God are ultimately destroyed rather than tormented forever. They cease to exist. The punishment is real and final, but it ends in non-being rather than unending agony. Its proponents work from the same texts but read them differently: "eternal fire" means fire with eternal consequences, not fire that burns forever. "Destruction" means actual destruction. The wages of sin is death — real death, not endless dying. John Stott, the most respected evangelical Anglican theologian of the twentieth century, came to this position and said so publicly in a 1988 book-length dialogue with liberal David Edwards — a move that gave the view, as one observer put it, "an air of mainstream status among Anglicans." The Church of England's own Doctrine Commission, in its 1995 report The Mystery of Salvation, described hell not as eternal torment but as "total non-being" — the final, irrevocable choosing of what is opposed to God until there is nothing left of the self to choose. N.T. Wright and F.F. Bruce both wrote about this position with more openness than the traditional view's defenders were comfortable with.

Universalism holds that God's love cannot finally be defeated, that an eternal hell is incompatible with a God who is the ground of all being, and that the scriptural witness as a whole points toward ultimate reconciliation. This has ancient roots — Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and others in the early church held versions of it — and serious contemporary defenders, including David Bentley Hart (discussed in Article 9 of this series). It has never become official doctrine in any mainstream tradition. The tradition has never fully put it to rest either.

Where does the Episcopal Church land?

The BCP catechism defines hell as "eternal death in our rejection of God." That is a stripped-down definition — no fire, no torment, just separation from God, and framed as something we choose rather than something God inflicts. The Episcopal Church's own glossary adds that hell "is a permanent state of separation from God that can be freely chosen, not God's angry punishment for misdeeds."

That sits considerably closer to the annihilationist end of the spectrum than to eternal conscious torment, without formally committing to either. N.T. Wright, commenting on the 1995 Anglican report, called it "a kind of mediating position, as you might expect in classic Anglican style" — which is about as accurate a description of the Episcopal approach to hell as anyone has offered.

The tradition has also always made room for what theologians call hopeful universalism — not the confident assertion that hell will be empty, but the hope that it might be, held without pretending the tradition guarantees it. Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, argued that Christians are permitted — even required — to hope that all will be saved, while acknowledging we cannot be certain of it. Karl Barth held something similar. Neither position is universalism proper, but neither is comfortable watching theology draw confident lines around who suffers forever.

The scriptural evidence is genuinely complex, and anyone who tells you it isn't is not reading the texts carefully.

On one hand, Jesus talks about something like hell more than almost anyone else in the New Testament. The sheep and the goats. The rich man and Lazarus. The outer darkness and the weeping and gnashing of teeth. The narrow gate. These are not decorative. They are central to how Jesus describes the stakes of human life.

On the other hand, scholars have long noted that the Greek word usually translated "eternal" — aionios — is better rendered "age-long" or "of the age to come." It describes a period of great, decisive significance, not necessarily an infinite duration. Early theologians in the second and third centuries were already making this observation. It doesn't dissolve the texts, but it opens the question of whether "eternal punishment" means what the English word "eternal" implies to a modern reader.

The picture of Gehenna — the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem that Jesus references — was recognizable to his Jewish audience as a charged symbol, not a literal map of the afterlife.

None of this settles the question. But the confident assertion that Scripture teaches one clear, unambiguous position — and that position is eternal conscious torment — is harder to sustain than it sounds.

So: is hell real?

The tradition says yes, in some sense. The possibility of permanent separation from God — of a self that finally, irrevocably refuses the source of all goodness and life — is not something the tradition has been willing to dismiss. Human freedom means something. Choices have weight. Not every story ends the same way.

What the tradition is far less certain about is the furniture. The fire, the pitchforks, the medieval geography — these are images, and the tradition at its best has always known the difference between an image and a doctrine. The Episcopal tradition has been willing to hold the seriousness of hell without locking in the details, to take the warning without pretending the warning is a blueprint.

The question worth sitting with is the one underneath the doctrine: What does it mean that love can be refused? That freedom is real enough to be finally used against itself? That is the actual theological claim behind any serious account of hell — not that God tortures people, but that God does not override human choice even when that choice moves all the way toward its own undoing.

Whether that undoing is eternal, whether it ends in annihilation, whether the love of God finally reaches into it and draws everything home — on that, the tradition leaves room. More room than most people have been told.

Where are you with this today? Maybe the hell you grew up with was used against you — held over you as a threat, wielded to control or shame. If that's where you carry it, you're not wrong to be suspicious of what you were told. The tradition is larger than the version that scared you. And if you've never thought about it much, this might be the question worth sitting with: not what happens to other people, but what it means that love can be freely refused. The answer to that question says something about both human dignity and divine love that nothing else quite reaches.

Sources and further reading: Matthew 25:31-46; Mark 9:43-48; Luke 16:19-31; Revelation 20:10-15 (NRSV). Church of England Doctrine Commission, The Mystery of Salvation (Church House Publishing, 1995). The Book of Common Prayer (1979), Catechism, p. 862; "Hell," episcopalchurch.org/glossary. John Stott and David Edwards, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (InterVarsity Press, 1988). David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale University Press, 2019). Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? (Ignatius Press, 1988). C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Geoffrey Bles, 1940), Chapter 8. N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).