What Happens When We Die: Part 5

     Many of the popular ideas people have about hell do not come directly from the Bible, but from the Roman Catholic Church’s mis-translations of Greek into Latin and the resultant interpretations of those texts into word pictures designed more to frighten people into becoming converts than to foster discipleship.  The Roman Church’s teachings about the afterlife must always be taken with caution given the many historical abuses of Popes and bishops in either trying to intimidate compliance or raise money. The Roman view of hell is that after death unbelievers and other assorted non-Catholics will be judged and sent to the fires of hell where they will be mercilessly tortured forever.  Hell as eternal torture is believed and taught not only by Roman Catholics, but by many Protestant fundamentalists.  There is nothing more repugnant to the Western mind, whether believer or unbeliever, nothing more illogical and cruel than the idea that a loving God could condemn people to eternal punishment and suffering based on a single decision or even the span of a short lifetime. A sadistic view of judgment goes against everything Western Civilization has taught about justice, fairness, and love.  Not surprisingly many Christians reject the Roman teaching about hell. Some try to remain faithful to the Bible while others just ignore Scripture as irrelevant and superstitious.  Some argue that hell is temporary and redemptive, or hell, if it exists at all, is a quick and total annihilation; still other humanitarians teach only the most horrible people, like Hitler and Stalin and Genghis Khan, populate hell.  What mistakes in translation did the Roman Church make and how does our picture of hell change in light of correcting those ancient errors?  What can we know about what we call “hell” but which the ancients called by many different names? 

     The King James version of the Bible perpetuated many of the Roman translation errors, lumping several very separate and distinct words all under the single word hell; among these are sheol, Gehenna, Tarturus, and Hades.  We’ve already examined the Hebrew word, sheol.  Sheol is nothing like the Roman Catholic picture of hell.  Sheol originally meant pit or grave.  When the Old Testament said someone went down into sheol, they were simply being buried in a grave.  During the Babylonian captivity, the Jews were influenced by Assyrian myths of afterlife.  Sheol evolved into a place of shadowy, murky existence; nothing about torture or punishment or reward.  When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, the Septuagint regularly used Hades to translate sheol.  In early Greek thought Hades was almost identical to sheol, the shadowy world of the dead thought to be under the ocean floor – the deepest pit imaginable.  During the 400 years between the Old and New Testament periods, Jewish rabbis, influenced by Greek philosophy, began to debate that Hades might be a place of punishment and destruction. The picture of suffering in Hades is chronicled in the Apocryphal book of Enoch.  The Pharisees believed that Hades was a kind of Purgatory in which the dead awaited the resurrection, some to eternal life and some to eternal destruction.

     Jesus confirmed Enoch’s vision of hell as a place of punishment.  Jesus used the word Gehenna when referring to the awfulness of hell.  Gehenna literally means “valley of Hinnom.” It was the ravine just outside the southwest walls of Jerusalem.  Jews regarded the place as sinister and cursed.  Before David renamed the city and made it his capitol, Jerusalem was known as Jebus.  It was the center of worship to the deity Molech.  The Jebusites sacrificed children to Molech in the Hinnom Valley.  Even some of Israel's most wicked Kings (Ahaz and Manassah) reinstituted child sacrifice in Gehenna to placate foreign gods.  The ground was forever cursed by this unspeakable idolatry.  The only gate on that side of Jerusalem was the Dung Gate where refuse was carted out and dumped in the ravine.  Although there is no contemporary evidence of it from Jesus’ time, in the middle ages Gehenna was used as a body dump for strangers and criminals. Because of its association with the worst forms of idolatry, Jews and Muslims would have considered Gehenna a very evil place.  Isaiah concludes his book with an allusion to Gehenna.

And as they go out, they will see

    the dead bodies of those who have rebelled against me.

For the maggots that devour them will never die,

    and the fire that burns them will never go out.

All who pass by

    will view them with utter horror.                          Isaiah 66:24

When Jesus talks about Gehenna in the Synoptic Gospels, he uses Isaiah to talk about the seriousness of sin.

“But if you cause one of these little ones who trust in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone hung around your neck.  If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better to enter eternal (aion) life with only one hand than to go into the unquenchable fires of Gehenna with two hands.  If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better to enter eternal life with only one foot than to be thrown into Gehenna with two feet.  And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. It’s better to enter the Kingdom of God with only one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Gehenna    ‘where the maggots never die and the fire never goes out.’

                                                                                                                                (Mark 9:42f.)

     Let’s look at this text in some detail.  Notice the context of harming children (little ones), associating Gehenna with its original awful history of child sacrifice.  Roman doctrine uses these verses to affirm that Jesus thought of hell as eternal suffering?  He may have indeed, but it’s interesting to me that most believers do not take the first part of the verse literally in which Jesus talks about the benefits of self-mutilation, but take the words about hell as doctrine. Taken literally, Jesus says it’s the maggots that live forever.

     Let’s look at another text in which Jesus talks about suffering in Gehenna used by the Roman Church as a proof-text of eternal sadistic torment. It’s the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus found in Luke 16.  In a great reversal of the prosperity gospel of first century Judaism, the poor man is carried to Abraham’s side (bosom) while the rich man suffers in Hades.

The rich man died and his soul went to Hades. There, in torment, he saw Abraham in the far distance with Lazarus at his side. The rich man shouted, ‘Father Abraham, have some pity! Send Lazarus over here to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue. I am in anguish in these flames.’ (vs. 23-24)

Later in the story Hades is again called a place of torment (v.28).  Is hell the main point of the parable?  My own thinking is that Jesus borrows from a well-known story, perhaps used as part of the rabbinic debate about hell.  Jesus never used people’s names in his stories.  Lazarus and Dives (that was the rich man’s name in these stories) may have been as familiar to Jesus’ listeners as stories we hear about someone dying and meeting St. Peter at the gate. We don’t take that literally (well, if you do, you shouldn’t).  We know it’s a story, probably a joke, about getting into heaven.  The point of this story is not primarily to teach about Gehenna, but to affirm the sufficiency of Scriptures for salvation.  

       Other word pictures Jesus used to describe Gehenna are found in Matthew 8:12 and repeated in 22:13.

“…throw them outside into darkness (or outer darkness) where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

     This idea of weeping and teeth gnashing is interpreted also as tortured suffering by the Roman Church.  But does Jesus mean the hideous sadistic pictures painted by Dante and the medieval church?  Gnashing of teeth is used in the Old Testament not to picture torture, but as a symbol of mocking rage  (Psalm 112:10).  Jesus is telling us the unrighteous suffer immense sadness and grudging regret.

      The book of Revelation amplifies the picture of hell's destruction, introducing the “lake of the fire” into which Satan, the Beast (spirit of Empire) and the False Prophet (false religion) are thrown (Rev. 20:10) as are Death, Hades, and those whose names are not found written in the Lamb’s book of life (v.14).  The unholy trinity of Satan, Beast, and False Prophet are said to be tortured forever in the lake of the fire, but for Death and Hades and those not the elect, their dip in Fire Lake is called the Second Death. This seems to point quite clearly to an end of judgment.

       The Apostle Paul never uses Hades or Gahenna but speaks of “destruction.”  He writes in his earliest letter about the sudden and unexpected destruction upon the wicked when Christ returns (1 Thess 5:3, 2 Thess. 1:9).  In Romans 9:23 he discusses God’s patience with those destined for destruction under his wrath.

       As expected it's the teaching of Peter on "hell" that most captures the imagination of the Roman Church.  Contrary to the Apostle’s Creed, Jesus did not descend "into hell."  This rendering is based on another mistranslation and interpretation of 1 Peter 3:19-20.  

                 Christ suffered for our sins once for all time. He never sinned,
                  but he died for sinners to bring you safely home to God. 
                  He suffered physical death, but he was raised to life in the 
                  Spirit. So he went and preached to the spirits in Hell 
                 (literally, Tarturus)—those who disobeyed God long ago when 
                 God waited patiently while Noah was building his boat. 
                 Only eight people were saved from drowning in that terrible flood.

The Roman Church infers from this verse that while he was in the grave, Jesus proclaimed the Gospel to the Old Testament faithful, totally ignoring the clear New Testament teaching that Abraham was saved by his faith in Christ (Romans 4:3).  It is to preserve their doctrine of hell that the Roman Church teaches you are saved by religious works.  Peter uses a unique word for hell, Tarturus, often translated prison.  It was the Greek equivalent place name of Gehenna, a place of suffering for the dead. A better interpretation of this text  based on a better translation is that the Spirit of Jesus preached in the days of Noah through Noah to souls who are now in the place of sufferings. 

      The biggest problem with the Roman doctrine of hell is the translation by Jerome of the Greek into the Latin Vulgate of the time-related Greek words aion and aionian.  Jerome translated these as eternal or everlasting. His translation spoke of everlasting torment. Greek-speaking Jews of the first century used the word aion and its cognates in two ways depending on context.  In many newer translations of Scripture you will see the more literal and correct translation of the word as “age,” like our English word eon which is derived from it.  So when the New Testament speaks of eternal or everlasting destruction, the context is critical to understanding whether we are dealing with something bound to a specific eon or something that, like God, exists forever. This means one might translate "everlasting destruction" as "an age of destruction," indicating a definite period of time.

         Sincere students of the Bible may come to different conclusions, but here are my best efforts to make sense of Scripture and our newest insights in cosmology.  All humans will be resurrected, some to eternal life with God and some to everlasting destruction.   I've already written that those "in Christ" have been declared righteous by the Father, and have been nurtured by the Holy Spirit during their entire pilgrimage on earth. They are already regenerate and sanctified, meaning their eternal life had already begun before death.  In the same way a mother on crack gives birth to a sickly child, so the person who has rejected God and/or not received the nourishment of sanctification throughout his nephesh-psuche life comes into resurrected life less able to thrive.  As stated previously, I understand time and eternity as having to do with dimensions and speed.  I do not understand all the mechanisms about how these things work.  I have to speak in metaphors because our words are inadequate to describe these singularities, but I believe the unregenerate person upon death is not able to go as fast or as far into the future or to fully develop the dimensionalities required for a life with God in the re-created Heaven-earth.  The unrighteous literally fall short of heaven and end up together in a place much like the ancient understanding of Hades, a holding facility, described in the Scriptures as a “prison” (Psalm 142:7, Isaiah 24:22, Rev. 20:7).  There is no torture or punishment here.  Hades is a place for detention rather like a third world prison where you are brought and left without information, without rights, without comfort. It is the torture of apathy. Hades is a world unto itself, murky and featureless. But it's most important characteristic is that it is a place completely separated from God, his providence, or his mercy.  There is no moral law, only the the law of survival.  There are no more good moral people, because goodness is gone and morality is replaced by a preoccupation of getting the resources necessary for sustenance, protection, and superior place.   Resurrected non-believers build alliances to scheme ways to increase their power.  These gangs are led by exceptionally manipulative leaders.  Whoever were people's Godless heroes in life, run the gangs in Hades.  The rebellion that may have appeared only minor and inconsequential in their life on Earth is now amplified and intensified.  Nice people become boorish and insufferably selfish.   Hatred of God becomes obsessive and all-consuming. God does not use this “hell” to redeem people, but to reveal their true self-idolizing character.  That which made them merely self-righteous unbelievers in life develops to its full extent when all masks of propriety are stripped away.  It is a place of repeated false hope, betrayal, disappointment, revenge, and regret.

                                 

     This cruel and apathetic world goes on and on until one day the gray skies are rolled back and the gloom is overwhelmed with a terrifying light.  The inhabitants of Hades are dumbstruck.  Eyes are not able to adjust to the excruciating brilliance.  People try to shield themselves from the light, but the shining pierces their body and causes them to scream in pain.  Some late arrivals at the periphery try to run away, but a force restrains them and begins to slowly and inexorably draw everyone to a Man who emanates the blinding light.  The horde of people moves like melting silver toward a bunghole.  The drone of agony and despair grows quiet the closer one gets to the Light Being.  They line up single file.  A Voice like a thunderous waterfall speaks to each person.  Like an audience with a King, each one stands transfixed and after a moment bends the knee, moves away, and another takes his place.  This is what the Scriptures refer to as the Great White Throne Judgment (Rev .20:11).

     From Hades each condemned being is taken to a dark, starless place at the center of which is a massive, spinning black hole.  Everything is dragged into this Abyss.  As matter collapses and burns at its edges, it looks like a lake of fire.  But this is the Pit into which the unholy Trinity will be cast and which will consume even time itself.  The destruction of this pit is eternal; that is, there is no coming back from it.  The unrighteous are destroyed forever by the “Second Death” (Rev. 20:14).  All these events occur prior to the revealing of the new heaven-Earth in the Eternal Now of God prepared for his Chosen in Christ.

     The question this side of death is can we know whether we are in Christ or not in Christ?  Does the Church control who enters Heaven or Hades-Gehenna-Tarturus?  Not even the Church knows the people God is preparing for Christ. In the early Church before Constantine, sacraments functioned to confirm the believer in his or her eternal life. Only those who had been rigorously examined by godly men could be baptized and partake of the Lord’s Supper. The rite didn’t save you. You were assured of your salvation hearing the Word of God and surrendering to the life of the Spirit by sincere confession of faith and death to self that baptism pointed to. It wasn't the physical, supernatural properties of the Eucharist that assured you, but self-examination and reconciliation  with God and neighbors. But all that changed under the Emperor Constantine (the spirit of the Beast) when the purpose of the Church changed from making disciples to making converts (the false Prophet).  Faith in God's Word no longer saved, but the rite of baptism.  The Eucharist devolved into magical thinking about bread and wine rather than about the presence of the Holy Spirit in the true body of Christ, the community of believers.  Many baptized but unrepentant people will be in Hades and many who have never heard the name of Jesus will be in Heaven-Earth.  This is not to deny the need for the Church or the Gospel, but rather a recognition of the sovereignty of God to have eternally known, effectually called, and faithfully preserved those who are his as well as to recognize that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” enters into the Kingdom (Mt. 7:21).  The benefit of hearing and believing the Gospel is that we may have the assurance of our salvation as promised by God in his Word, procured by the faithfulness of his Son, and lived out each day of our lives by the sanctifying body-building work of the Holy Spirit. 

     Therefore, if you are able to believe and trust in Christ, run to him every day.  If you are not able to believe and trust in Jesus, be taught.  If you have been taught, and you are still unpersuaded, then eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow you die.