bible and theology on Hell

So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good. . . . Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

I once heard a description of what meals are like in heaven. The saints are seated on either side of a four-foot-wide banquet table. The table is set with delicious foods on every plate. The only thin...

Christ descended into Hades so that you and I would not have to. Christ descended to Hades so that we might ascend to heaven. Christ entered the realm of death, the realm of the strong enemy, and came...

Do not fear death; the Savior’s death has brought freedom. He endured death and thus destroyed it. He descended into Hell and destroyed it. Even as Hell tasted his flesh he threw it into chaos. Al...

It was Easter Sunday and the pastor gathered the children at the front of the church to ask them about the meaning of Easter. The pastor was disappointed as he listened to the first response: “Easter ...

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a ...

It seems to me… that if it is possible … for human beings to choose to live more and more out of tune with the divine intention, to reflect the image of God less and less, there is nothing to stop the...

When [Abraham] Lincoln was running for the House of Representatives from Illinois, he was charged with being “a scoffer at religion,” wrote the historian William J. Wolf, because he belonged to no chu...

Take Dostoyevsky’s fantastical parable of the onion. A very wicked woman dies and is tossed into the lake of fire. Her guardian angel devises a plan to rescue her. Because she was so wicked, the angel...

In his play No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre gives his own vision of hell. Two women and a man, doomed to perdition, enter a room that seems to threaten no torment. But they are sentenced to remain together ...

In some popular conceptions of the afterlife, God’s love gets reduced to unconditional affirmation. But in truth, God’s love is always a holy love and his heaven is an entirely holy place. Heaven is f...

The word Gehenna is used by Jesus twelve times in the four Gospels. God’s first response to the belittlement of his name is this Greek word Gehenna, which we would translate “hell.” The interesting th...

First, Sheol in the Old Testament and Hades in the LXX and in Greco-Roman thought can be used to refer to both a general place for all the dead as well as a place of torment or consignment for the unr...

Dying man couldn't make up his mind which place to go to — both have their advantages, "heaven for climate, hell for company!" (for contrast)

A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of their ...

Hell is full of good intentions or desires.

All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened...

The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Hell is full of good meanings and wishings.

[Hell] is nowhere and has no characteristics, the fit dwelling for those who have chosen nothingness over reality.,

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.

Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.

It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to heaven.

A belligerent samurai . . . once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout—I can’t waste my time with the likes of ...

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

If you're going through hell, keep going.