By James Gómez in Misfit Faith — 03 Feb 2023

What If I Told You I Said "To Hell with Hell?"

Four reasons why I threw eternal conscious torment into the intellectual lake of fire.

A few weeks ago I was catching up with a good friend. We hadn’t talked in some months because he and his wife recently had their first child and have been transitioning into the joys of parenthood. While I casually asked my friend, “how’s it been being a dad to a little girl?” His response kind of stunned me….

He said:

I AM JAMES GÓMEZ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“Man, I didn’t know I could love someone as much as I do my little girl. I can tell you, after holding my daughter for the first time I thought to myself ‘I would do absolutely anything for this girl, there’s no way I can worship a God who would send his children to hell.’ I haven’t done enough digging to explain the why but becoming a dad has wholeheartedly convinced me if God is more loving than me he would never let anyone go to hell.”

What hit me hardest was:

Being a daddy of 4 kids I know exactly the depth of love my friend feels for his daughter. Though my kids are no longer babies the feeling that I would do anything to protect them has never waned.
His connection regarding the inconsistency between a loving and merciful God and that same God tormenting the majority of his creation was spot on. As a jacked-up, oftentimes selfish, and easily annoyed father myself, I would never on my worst day allow any of my kids to experience hell if I could help it, so why would God? For the better part of the last year I’ve been wrestling with the doctrine of hell, or what I’ve concluded is the false doctrine of hell.

Why the Hell Do I No Longer Believe in Hell?

Have you ever gone down an information rabbit hole so far that you inadvertently ended up overloading on information? Like you jumped on Youtube looking for some recommendations for left-handed pens and 3 hours later you’ve ordered a few books on calligraphy, you understand the differences in GSM quality of paper, you’ve committed to never taking a typed note again, and have bought tickets to an upcoming fountain pen conference. Well, I did something similar in researching what I actually believe about hell.

So I don’t overwhelm you with thousands of thoughts and pages on why I don’t think hell is a thing I’m just going to give you 4 compelling points I’ve come across as food for thought and a handful of resources to help you wrestle with the topic.

Here are some of the reasons I no longer believe in hell.

If hell has always been God’s plan for those who don’t believe in him why is the Old Testament silent on the topic? Now stop and think about this for a second. If a lake of fire exists where human beings are tortured for all eternity (I come from a church background that taught a view of hell that is called “eternal conscious torment”) I feel like that would be a pretty significant detail God would want us to know. Interestingly, the Christian Bible is approximately 75% Old Testament and hell is never mentioned. Yeah…I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but it’s not there. What is there is the word Sheol which is used 31 times and always means “the grave,” “the temporary abode of the dead,” or “death.” In the Septuagint (meaning 70) the Greek translation of the Old Testament translates Sheol as Hades. However, hades isn’t a Jewish creation, but ancient Greeks believed in an underworld of judgment where people who displease the gods are sent. The Greek idea was read into and applied to the Jewish Scriptures, but is not native to the text.
The hell Jesus speaks on, more times than any other person in the Bible, isn’t some physical lake of fire but a very real trash heap. The word Jesus uses for hell is Gehenna which translates to The Valley of Hinnom. Hinnom is an actual place on the East side of Jerusalem where child sacrifices took place in worship to the god Molech during the time of Isaiah the prophet, and was essentially the city landfill during the time of Jesus. What both Isaiah and Jesus are doing in referencing Gehenna is not telling of a literal place where the majority of humanity is tortured but using a metaphor for the horrible consequences that await those who choose to continue to live contrary to God’s loving will in the here and now.
Our contemporary concept of hell has never existed in Jewish theology and it was the minority view for the first 500 years of church history. After Jesus ascended back to heaven, for the next 5 centuries the majority view held by Christians was what is known as universal reconciliation. In a nutshell, universal reconciliation means that all humans who are alienated from God (read everybody) will in the end be reconciled to God because of His love and mercy. The primary text that modern Christians do gold medal-worthy gymnastics routines to get around that unpacks this idea is Romans 5:12-19. The earliest Christians believed (as do I) that the gospel is so good and that what Jesus accomplished through his life, death, and resurrection is so big that God’s love will ultimately win through the salvation of all humanity.
Mathematically if the choice is to profess Jesus in this life or go to hell the overwhelming majority of humanity will go to hell. Let’s be clear if the vast majority of humanity is doomed to an eternity in hell just by sheer numbers wouldn’t that make the kingdom of hell greater than the kingdom of heaven?

There really is so much more I can, and want to, say on the topic of hell. If there’s enough interest in reading more about what I’ve learned about hell let me know and I’ll be happy to write more on the topic. In the meantime here are some of the best resources I’ve engaged with that have been instrumental in my learning.