"Go To Hell!" – It May Be More Difficult Than it Sounds

Jen Hatmaker spent decades as one of evangelical Christianity's most trusted voices. Last week, the bestselling author announced that she no longer believed in something most Christians treat as non-negotiable: Hell. She called the decision "the best thing that ever happened to me." Her announcement reopens an older question: where did the idea of Hell actually come from, and does it hold up against the texts believers point to?

In a Substack essay titled "There You Are," Hatmaker described a childhood spent fearing a God who would condemn most of the world to endless torment. Setting that belief down, she wrote, rescued her faith rather than costing her one. She said she now experiences God as fundamentally loving rather than punitive. Critics have accused her of picking convenient scripture. Her response: the scholarship on Hell is far messier than most churches let on.

Does the Bible Actually Describe Hell?

You may be shocked to learn that if you crack open a Hebrew Bible you'll find that the word "Hell" never actually appears. In fact, the closest that the Old Testament ever gets is in speaking of a place called Sheol, a shadowy underworld where every person, righteous or wicked, ends up after death. It carries no fire, no judgment, and no distinction between saints and sinners. The idea of eternal, fiery punishment that most Christians picture today simply is not there in the earliest Hebrew texts.

In the New Testament, three other words sometimes get translated as "Hell", but even in these instances, the translations are shaky. Gehenna refers to a real ravine outside Jerusalem, once linked to child sacrifice and later used by prophets as a symbol of divine judgment against injustice. Hades, borrowed from Greek religion, described a holding place for the dead awaiting final judgment. And Tartarus, appearing just once in 2 Peter, also comes directly from Greek mythology, is said to be the place wherein rebellious gods are imprisoned.

Three different words, three different origins, one modern translation that doesn't seem to align with contemporary understanding.

So Where Did Our Modern Idea of Hell Come From?

It begs the question... where the hell did "Hell" come from? The vivid picture most people carry: bouncing flames, demons with pitchforks, and the eternal screaming of sinners, took shape much later. At some point, Jewish apocalyptic writers, including the authors of the Book of Enoch, began publishing texts in which the dead were sorted into separate chambers based on how they had lived. Historians trace much of this shift to Persian and Greek influence absorbed during centuries of foreign rule over Judea.

None of this reached readers as settled doctrine so much as cultural inheritance. Centuries later, it was Dante (in the Inferno section of his epic poem, The Divine Comedy) who gaveHell its different levels, punishments matched to specific sins, and vivid geography, and much of the imagery most churchgoers now assume came straight from scripture. It did not. As we've explored on this blog before, translation choices shape what a text seems to say long before any modern reader opens a Bible.

What Do the Major Religions Actually Teach About Hell?

Judaism offers no fixed doctrine of eternal damnation. Its rabbinic tradition speaks of Gehinnom, drawn from the same Hinnom valley as Gehenna, but mostly treats it as temporary purification lasting up to twelve months, not an eternal sentence. Islam takes the opposite stance: the Quran describes a place called Jahannam vividly and repeatedly as a real, literal fire, though scholars still debate whether every occupant stays forever or only those who die rejecting God outright.

Traditions built around karma and rebirth take a different approach. Hinduism and Buddhism both describe hell realms, called Naraka, but treat them as temporary consequences of past actions, not final destinations. Souls sent there serve a sentence proportional to their misdeeds, then continue the cycle of rebirth. Zoroastrianism holds a similar view: its version of Hell empties out when history ends and every soul is restored.

Two newer traditions push the idea further still. In Baha'i, Hell exists merely as a metaphor for distance from God rather than a physical place. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that only a small number of people, not the general population of sinners, ever face true eternal punishment.

Mainstream Christianity, it turns out, is unusually undecided among major religions on the Hell question.

How Did Hell Become Official Christian Doctrine?

The early church did not immediately settle on eternal torment as the only acceptable answer. Origen, a hugely influential third-century theologian, taught that God's mercy would eventually restore all sinners... even Satan himself, a position called apokatastasis. That door to redemption stayed open for centuries the year 553, when the Second Council of Constantinople met and formally condemned the idea, declaring that the punishment of the wicked has no end.

That is to say – and this may not come as a great shock – "Hell" (as we know it) was actually invented in a board room.

Augustine of Hippo did more than any single figure to cement that position in the West. Writing in his book City of God, he argued directly against Christians who hoped punishment might eventually stop, insisting that Hell's fire had to be as endless as Heaven's reward. His arguments became the default assumption running throughought medieval theology, shaping how ordinary believers, not just scholars, understood the afterlife.

That doctrine became fully official centuries later in 1215 when the Fourth Lateran Council decided that it would be formally taught that the wicked will receive perpetual punishment alongside the devil. Thomas Aquinas would give that teaching a rigorous philosophical foundation soon after. Notably, Martin Luther and the Reformation he sparked barely touched this idea: Protestants and Catholics split over nearly everything else, but both kept Hell as settled doctrine despite the stunning lack of textual underpinnings.

What Did Pope Francis Mean by an "Empty Hell"?

But, it turns out, the debate may not be over yet. Before his death, in a televised interview, Pope Francis famously (and controversially) offered his own view: "I like to think of Hell as empty; I hope it is."

He was careful to call it personal opinion, not official doctrine. But the idea echoes a serious current in Catholic theology known as "hopeful universalism," most associated with theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who argued Christians cannot know for certain that everyone is saved, but may reasonably hope so.

Von Balthasar's position is not full universalism, the belief that everyone will definitely be saved, which the Catholic Church still views as heretical. His argument was narrower: since no one can know the outcome of divine judgment in advance, hope itself remains theologically legitimate. It is a small distinction with real consequences for how a tradition speaks about mercy versus certainty.

Officially, the Catechism still describes Hell as a real possibility, a state of separation from God. What has shifted is emphasis: fewer sermons dwell on eternal torment, and more theologians treat the Bible's afterlife language as symbolic literature shaped by its era rather than a blueprint. Our own study of biblical literalism made a similar point: much of scripture reads as poetry and metaphor, not literal transcript.

Not everyone thinks this theological tug-of-war matters much either way. Christopher Hitchens, one of the most prominent atheist writers of his generation, argued that human decency does not come from religion at all, but exists before and apart from it. On that view, whether hell is full, empty, or nonexistent has little bearing on whether people choose to be good.

Hatmaker's announcement will keep making headlines, but the deeper question predates her by millennia and is far from answered: What is "Hell"? How much of that idea is reflected in the original texts, and how much is a product of fear, art, and translation? Do you believe in it? And if the concept was eventually erased from mainstream faith, what would that mean for human behavior?