The question Christians are actually asking
When people ask what the Bible says about hell, they are rarely asking a purely academic question. Behind the words is often something more personal: is the God I believe in genuinely good? Is the picture of a God who tortures the damned for eternity compatible with the God Jesus revealed as Father? Does hell mean that countless human beings — people who never heard the gospel, people who struggled their whole lives, people I love — are suffering without hope of relief? These are serious questions and they deserve serious, honest answers from Scripture rather than either a brisk reassurance that hell isn't real or an equally brisk insistence that the traditional fire-and-brimstone image is non-negotiable.
One of the most important things to recognise before reading the biblical texts about hell is that the English word "hell" is used to translate several quite distinct Greek and Hebrew words — Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus — each with its own meaning and connotations. Many of the apparent contradictions in what people think the Bible teaches about hell dissolve when these words are distinguished. A careful reading shows that Scripture is less interested in providing a geography of the afterlife than in making a profound moral and spiritual claim: the way a person lives matters, both for this life and for whatever comes after it, and a life turned away from God leads somewhere very different from a life turned toward him.
Sheol — the Old Testament realm of the dead
In the Old Testament, the primary word for the realm of the dead is Sheol (שְׁאוֹל). It appears about sixty-five times in the Hebrew Bible, and older English translations — particularly the King James Version — often render it simply as "hell." This translation is misleading. Sheol in the Hebrew imagination is not a place of punishment for the wicked; it is the general destination of all the dead, righteous and unrighteous alike. The Psalmist descends toward Sheol in anguish and prays to be rescued from it (Psalm 88). Jacob fears he will go down to Sheol mourning his son Joseph (Genesis 37:35). Even the righteous dead — Samuel, for instance, whom the witch of Endor calls up at Saul's request — are described as coming up from Sheol (1 Samuel 28:15).
Sheol is shadowy, silent, cut off from the praise of God. "The dead do not praise the LORD, nor do any who go down into silence" (Psalm 115:17). It is not a place of torment in the Old Testament texts; it is simply the darkness of death, the absence of life's vitality and relationship with God. The idea of distinct destinies after death — reward for the righteous, specific punishment for the wicked — begins to emerge in the later prophets and becomes clearer in the inter-testamental period. Daniel 12:2 is the clearest Old Testament statement: "Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt." But the developed doctrine is largely a product of Jesus's own teaching, which uses far more vivid language and draws sharper contrasts than the Old Testament texts.
What Jesus said: Gehenna, Hades, and outer darkness
Jesus spoke about hell more than any other figure in the New Testament — a fact that surprises many people who think of him primarily as a teacher of love and compassion. He used three different images: Gehenna, Hades, and the metaphors of "outer darkness" and "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Understanding what each of these meant to his original audience changes how we read them. Gehenna (γέεννα) — the word most commonly translated as "hell" in Jesus's teaching — is not a mythological underworld but a literal place: the Valley of Hinnom (Ge-Hinnom) on the south side of Jerusalem. In the Old Testament this valley had been a site of the abhorrent practice of child sacrifice to the god Molech (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31). By Jesus's time it had become Jerusalem's rubbish dump, where fires burned continuously to consume the city's waste. It was a place of perpetual burning, of worm and decay, of the refuse of human society.
When Jesus said "it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire" (Matthew 18:8), he was evoking this vivid, concrete image — a life thrown onto the rubbish heap of existence rather than fulfilled in God's Kingdom. The Greek word translated "eternal" (αἰώνιος) means belonging to the age to come, carrying the weight of God's ultimate reality, rather than necessarily meaning endless duration in a chronological sense. Hades (ᾅδης) — the Greek word for the underworld, closer to the Hebrew Sheol — appears in a few of Jesus's sayings, most vividly in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), where Hades is a place of torment experienced after death. The "outer darkness" of Matthew's parables (Matthew 8:12, 22:13, 25:30) is a different image again: exclusion from the wedding feast, from the banquet of God's Kingdom, left outside in the darkness while the celebration continues within.
What all of these images share is not a geography or a temperature but a consistent spiritual meaning: the serious reality of a human life that reaches its end having turned away from God, from love, from the purpose for which it was created. Jesus is not providing a systematic eschatology. He is, with the urgency of a physician warning of serious illness, insisting that the direction of a person's life matters infinitely — that choices made in this life have consequences that reach beyond it.
The lake of fire and the final judgement in Revelation
The Book of Revelation introduces the most dramatic hell-language in all of Scripture: the "lake of fire" (Revelation 20:10, 14–15). After the final judgement, death and Hades themselves are thrown into the lake of fire, along with those "whose name was not found written in the book of life." Revelation also calls this "the second death." The image is arresting and has shaped much of Christian popular imagination about hell. It is important to read it in context: Revelation is an apocalyptic text, written in a highly symbolic genre, where numbers, creatures, cities, and events routinely carry figurative rather than literal meaning. The book opens by telling us that it communicates through signs (σημαίνω, Revelation 1:1) — that is, through symbolic signification. The "lake of fire" is no more meant to be taken as a literal geographical feature than the Beast with seven heads or the woman clothed with the sun.
What the lake of fire signifies is the finality and completeness of divine judgment — the ultimate undoing of everything that has been opposed to God, life, and love. When death and Hades themselves are thrown into it, the text is saying that in God's ultimate future, even the realm of death will be abolished. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4). The eschatological vision of Revelation is not primarily a vision of eternal torture but a vision of cosmic renewal — and the lake of fire is part of the picture of everything that is incompatible with that renewal being finally and completely dealt with.
Hell in the Divine Principle — the spiritual world of suffering
The Divine Principle offers a distinctive perspective on what hell is and how it works that differs from both the popular fire-and-brimstone image and from some more liberal dismissals of the concept. In the Divine Principle's understanding, the spiritual world is not an external realm to which a soul is sent as a reward or punishment; it is, rather, a world that reflects and manifests the inner state of the person who inhabits it. The spiritual world is differentiated — not a single uniform destination — and a soul's position within it corresponds to the degree of love, maturity, and alignment with God's heart that the person attained during their earthly life.
Those who have lived centred on God — cultivating love, truth, and goodness, developing their spiritual nature in relationship with God and other people — dwell in an environment of light, joy, and love that corresponds to and expresses their inner state. Those who have lived centred on selfishness, who have used others, who have hardened themselves against love and truth, dwell in a spiritual environment that corresponds to that inner reality — an environment of suffering, isolation, and darkness. This is not because God has assigned them to punishment as a judge sentences a criminal; it is because the spiritual world simply is what it is — a world of resonance and reflection where like attracts like, where the inner reality manifests as the outer environment.
Crucially, the Divine Principle does not view this condition as permanently sealed. God's love does not cease at the moment of physical death. The prayers of those on earth, the witness of those in the spirit world who have moved closer to God, and the ongoing work of restoration all remain active. The Catholic tradition of praying for the dead, and the Jewish custom of Kaddish, reflect an intuition of this continuing relationship between the living and the departed that the Divine Principle takes seriously. This does not minimise the urgency of how we live our lives on earth — quite the opposite. But it does mean that the picture of a God who creates human beings, watches them fall, and then seals them in eternal torment is not the picture the Divine Principle offers. God suffers with those in the spiritual world of darkness and works ceaselessly for their liberation.
The purpose of hell: judgment, not cruelty
One of the deepest objections to the traditional doctrine of hell is not about the temperature but about the God it implies. If hell is eternal conscious torment and God is the one who sends people there, what kind of God is he? The objection is not frivolous — it is, in fact, a genuinely theological one. C.S. Lewis, who remained a robust defender of hell as a real possibility for human souls, was clear that God does not send anyone to hell: "the door of hell is locked on the inside." People choose it — choose a self-centred, God-rejecting orientation of their being — and God, who gave human beings genuine freedom, does not override that choice. The existence of hell, in this view, is not a sign of divine cruelty but of divine respect for human freedom: God does not force anyone to be in relationship with him.
The Divine Principle adds to this a further dimension: God's suffering over those who are separated from him is as real as any human parent's anguish over a lost child. The image of the father in the parable of the prodigal son — scanning the horizon daily, running toward his returning son, restoring him completely — is not a picture of a God satisfied with judgment. It is the picture of a God whose heart aches for the return of every lost child. Hell, understood this way, is not the ultimate goal of creation. It is the tragic consequence of freedom exercised against love, and God's response to it is not satisfaction but grief — and ceaseless, patient, redemptive work. For a broader exploration of how the spiritual world is understood after physical death, see our post on what happens when you die; and for the question of where evil and suffering originate, see our post on where evil came from.
Frequently asked questions
Is hell a place of literal fire?
The biblical language of fire is almost certainly symbolic. Fire in Scripture consistently represents purification, divine judgment, and the consuming presence of God, not a physical furnace. The Gehenna Jesus referenced was a literal rubbish dump outside Jerusalem used as a vivid image of spiritual destruction. The reality hell points to — separation from God and the anguish of a life lived contrary to one's created nature — is deeply serious even if the fire is figurative.
Does the Old Testament teach about hell?
The Old Testament uses the word Sheol to refer to the realm of the dead in general, not a place of punishment for the wicked specifically. All the dead — righteous and unrighteous — go to Sheol in the Old Testament. A developed doctrine of distinct destinations after death emerges more clearly in later Old Testament writings such as Daniel 12:2 and in the inter-testamental period, and reaches its fullest expression in Jesus's own teaching.
What did Jesus say about hell?
Jesus spoke more about hell than any other New Testament figure, primarily using the word Gehenna — a reference to the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, a site of ancient child sacrifice that had become Jerusalem's perpetually burning rubbish dump. He used it as a vivid image of the consequence of a life turned away from God. He also used Hades and spoke in parables of "outer darkness" and "weeping and gnashing of teeth," all pointing to the serious reality of spiritual separation from God.
How does the Divine Principle understand hell?
The Divine Principle understands the spiritual world as a reflection of one's inner state. Those who have lived selfishly dwell in a corresponding environment of suffering and darkness — not because God assigns them there as punishment, but because the spiritual world manifests what a person has become. Crucially, this condition is not viewed as permanently sealed: God's redemptive love continues, and change remains possible in the spirit world through prayer and the ongoing work of restoration.
Is hell permanent? Can anyone leave it?
Traditional Protestant theology holds that the state of the soul at death is final. The Divine Principle, drawing on the Catholic tradition of prayers for the dead and on a relational understanding of God's heart, holds that God's redemptive love does not cease at physical death and that change remains possible in the spirit world. Scripture's passage about Jesus preaching "to the spirits in prison" (1 Peter 3:19) has generated significant theological debate about what, if anything, happens after death — a question the church has never definitively resolved.