THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY, THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST. JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER; MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY, THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY. ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. (Dante's Inferno)
If Dante were to revisit the Inferno today, he would find his visions of hell deeply embedded in our Western psyche, culture, and religion. Images of fire and brimstone, dungeons and torture, demons and judgment continue to ignite imaginations and controversy. In our era of CGI everything Dante described in poetry can be recreated on the big screen for those who want to face their deepest fears in a climate-controlled environment where the smell of buttered pop-corn masks the stench of sulfur. Modernized upgrades of medieval artwork imbue movies like Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998); comic books like Hellblazer and Hellboy; and video games like Inferno. One can even take the Dante’s Inferno Test online, where visitors are exhorted, “Test your impurity, find out which level of Dante’s hell you will be spending eternity in.” And for a personal taste of hell, why not marinate some chicken wings in Dan-T’s White Hot Inferno sauce? I’m sure even Dante would be confused: Is hell a place, a state or a brand?
Western civilization does not hold a monopoly on the dreams and nightmares of the afterlife. Taoist and Buddhist mythology contain their own layered maze of terrifying torture chambers (Diyu), and the Hindu Naraka features the usual fire, boiling oil and other instruments of abuse for karmic atonement between incarnations. And Dante’s hell barely holds a torch to the hellish punishments described in the Koran:
Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed with rods of iron. Whenever, in their anguish, they try to escape from Hell, back they shall be dragged, and will be told: “Taste the torment of the Conflagration!” (22:19–23)
Global belief in some form of divine judgment remains as unquenchable as its flames, the New Atheists notwithstanding. For their part, writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins give voice to those whose atheism is rooted less in unbelief than in hatred of a religion-projected god whose mind reflects humanity’s need to best one eternal excruciation with another. They and Bill Maher mock such notions as patently religulous and write off faith as laughable were it not for its dangerous capacity to incite fear and violence.
Do they have a point? I can only offer my own experience in response. As a sensitive little boy raised in the evangelical church, I was a horrified but Bible-convinced infernalist. I accepted in good faith the word of camp counselors who described the fate of the lost as we stoked orange coals during late night marshmallow roasts. Seeing as I had prayed the “sinner’s prayer,” they assured me I had no need to worry. But worry I did.
What about the unchurched cousins I loved so dearly? God loved them, but if they didn’t love him back, he would skewer them on an everlasting rotisserie—just like the stick I used for roasting my marshmallows. My great commis- sion was to “snatch others from the fire and save them” (Jude 23). And if I failed, I feared their blood would be on my hands (Ezekiel 33:6).
Just as awful as being that traumatized eight-year-old camper was the fact that I was being groomed to become the next zealous counselor. My first convert responded quickly to the choice between eternal life and everlasting flames. I remember being troubled by his expression — not the wide-eyed fear I expected, just incredulity and a rushed prayer before the dinner bell rang. I sensed that he was un- convinced of the gravity of the decision, especially when I discovered that he had “fallen away” within days of returning home.
Highly visual, I became overwhelmed by mental images of bubbling skin and the attendant shrieks of the masses with whom I went to school, stood in line with at McDonalds, and prayed for every night before bed. Unlike Hitchens and Dawkins, I knew and loved (and feared) a living God too much to junk my entire worldview just because the idea of eternal, conscious torment in hell clashed with what I conceived to be his loving character.
I tried to swallow the discrepancies in denial or wallpaper over the holes like a writer trying to hide glitches in a bad plot. But eventually, the necessary rational and emotional disconnect got caught in my throat. There it would remain until I could discover an alternative view that was just as faithful to the Bible — not that I even dared to hope one existed. If only I had realized that the Christian theologians were already on the case — had been for centuries.
Renovating Hell: Theological Options for Divine Judgment
Sheltered in my tiny corner of Christendom, like many evangelicals I was unaware of the heated discussion around damming up the river of fire through various alternative perspectives on hell that did not transform God into a wrathful tyrant-judge who consigns the unrepentant to Dante-esque tortures for eternity. As it turns out, the view of hell with which I grew up — infernalism — is only one of several options handed down to us through our forefathers in the faith. We will survey each of them briefly here.
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