If Hell Isn't Real Why Do I Need Jesus?

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article, “What If I Told You I Said, ‘To Hell with Hell?” and surprisingly received mainly positive feedback on the piece. Most of the feedback I heard revolved around folks feeling relieved that someone they know put words to what they’ve personally felt about hell themselves. Alongside his feedback was the gratefulness people felt about my willingness to say, I reject hell as eternal conscious punishment thoughtfully and openly.

Of course, there have been folks who my piece angered or triggered a zealousness to share how I am a heretic for no longer adhering to hell as eternal torment. Despite the negativity of some, I am overall grateful for the largely positive response.

At the same time, the question that has easily floated to the top of people’s minds, whether they agree with me or not, is, “If hell isn’t about eternal torture and suffering, why do we need Jesus?” This is the question I will humbly, thoughtfully, and concisely seek to answer in this piece.

The Problem is the Question Behind the Question

As I’ve given this question more thought, I’ve come to a somewhat disturbing realization. The question people are usually asking when asking why Jesus if there’s no hell, is really, “If there’s not a threat of hell, why do I need a savior?”

I find this question disturbing because it shows a deeper misconception I would argue a majority of Christians have, which is that Jesus is primarily saving us from something and not to something. Said differently, our priority tends to be that Jesus’s use is to keep me from going to hell (saving from something) rather than Jesus coming to redeem me back into a relationship with my creator God (saving to something).

This distinction is significant for at least two reasons:

Jesus speaks of his work and ministry as a means to bring people into God’s kingdom, not keeping them from hell.

The description Jesus most used in describing his ministry was in terms of bringing in the “kingdom of God.” Here are two short verses that demonstrate the point.

When Jesus inaugurates the start of his ministry, he does so by announcing the coming of his kingdom.

Mark 1:14b-15, NRSV, “James came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of god has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.”

When the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, he gives them a blueprint focused on God’s kingdom.

Matthew 6:9–10, NRSV, “Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is heaven.”

Jesus’s priority was always saving us to something, mainly a restored relationship with God in the here and now. Through this restored relationship, all of Jesus’s followers would serve as representatives of God’s loving, merciful, and just kingdom within every broken human empire in the world. Jesus didn’t come to save us from a lake of fire to some ethereal “pie in the sky” heaven in the distant future. He came to bring us life and a relationship with God, starting in the here and now with real-world implications that last through eternity. My growing conviction is that our infatuation with hell is more about controlling people through fear than speaking and demonstrating the love of Jesus.

A Faith Built on Fear Must Keep Its Followers through that Same Fear.

Once during a discussion with another pastor, he shared his disdain for “seeker-sensitive” or “attractional” churches because they only take consumers of capitalist institutions and turn them into consumers of Christian institutions, not followers of Jesus. One line he shared, in particular, has stuck with me:

“What you catch them with is what you have to keep them with.”

What he meant is if you get someone into your church through concert-level worship, amazing light shows, and entertaining sermons, that’s what you have to keep giving in order for that person to stay at your church. Once a better product comes along, congregants will stop consuming your religious goods to get more entertaining ones down the street.

I bring this up because I wholeheartedly believe the saying is true, but the pastor didn’t take the sentiment far enough to its logical conclusion. The entire way Christians are taught to think about and present the gospel is, first and foremost, through a lens of fear. Fear in what? Fear of hell, that nasty place of fire, torture, and little red people with pitchforks where we never die, just endlessly tortured. You see, we start with fear, as if Jesus came to (no pun intended) scare the hell out of people.

Because we start with fear, most of the Christian life is built on keeping you afraid. When you instill fear in a people, you create a passive group who will obey and follow, but only because they are afraid of what may happen if they don’t. Tragically, I believe one of the key reasons why the church in America has become so toxic and full of hypocrisy is that the majority of Christians became believers out of fear rather than love. From spiritual infancy, we are fed all the things we are against and all the types of people that will burn forever for not being like us. What we aren’t taught is how to enter into the mess of life through relationships equipped with the love, mercy, and kindness of Christ.

Author Steve Gregg summarizes Jesus’s lack of emphasis on hell, or heaven, for that matter.:

“Never do we find hell mentioned in any of the evangelistic sermons of the preachers that are recorded in the Bible…We are often told that Jesus spoke more on the topic of hell than did any other person in the Bible. This would not be difficult for Him to do, since almost all the biblical authors were silent on the subject. When Jesus and His disciples preached the gospel to unbelievers, there was little attempt to turn the listeners’ thoughts to matters of the afterlife.” (All You Want to know about Hell pg. 58–59)

For everyone, myself included, who read my last article or stumbles upon this one, my encouragement is to pause and consider your true motives for associating with Jesus. Is it because you are afraid of an eternity being burned and tortured? Yeah, I was afraid of that, too; who wouldn’t be?

What we believe about hell reflects what we really believe about the nature of God. Looking at the life of Jesus, I can’t find an angry, vengeful, vindictive deity who would punish anyone forever out of a sadistic sense of justice. What I do find in Jesus is love, kindness, honesty, justice, compassion, and mercy. We need Jesus because his life, death, and resurrection were about restoring us in the here and now back to a relationship with God. Jesus is our victor and model for living an ethic built on God’s love in a broken and messed-up world. Hell has never had anything to do with this.