170 HEAVEN and HELL §311
a. The hells as a whole, or hellish people en masse, are called the Devil and Satan: 694. People
who were devils in the world are devils after death: 968.
b. The church’s doctrine must be derived from the Word: 3464 , 5402 , 6832 [ 6822 ], 10763 , 10765
[ 10764 ]. Without doctrine, the Word is not understood: 9021 [ 9025 ], 9409 , 9424 , 9430 , 10324 ,
10431 , 10582. True doctrine is a lamp for people who read the Word: 10401 [ 10400 ]. Genuine doc-
trine must be provided by people who have enlightenment from the Lord: 2510 , 2516 , 2519 , 9424 ,
10105. People engaged in the literal meaning apart from any doctrine do not attain any under-
standing of divine truths: 9409 , 9410 , 10582 ; and are carried off into many errors: 10431. The
nature of the difference between people who teach and learn from the doctrine of the church
derived from the Word and people who do so solely from the Word’s literal meaning: 9025.the Devil, and the hell that is in front, where the people live who are called
evil spirits, is Satan.a We will describe later what each hell is like. [ 3 ] They
insisted that the reason the Christian world has adopted this kind of belief
about people in heaven and people in hell is that they have taken a few pas-
sages of the Word, understanding them only in their literal meaning, with
no enlightenment or instruction based on genuine doctrine from the
Word. Yet the literal meaning of the Word, without the light of genuine
doctrine, leads the mind astray in all directions, giving rise to ignorance,
heresy, and error.b312 This belief among church people is also the cause of their belief that
no one will arrive in heaven or hell before the time of the Last Judgment,
which they have come to believe will be a time when everything they can
see perishes and new things come into being, when souls will return into
their bodies and then begin once more to live as people because of this
reunion. This faith implies the other, about angels having been created
in the beginning, for it is not possible to believe that heaven and hell
come from the human race when you believe that no one is going to get
there until the end of the world.
[ 2 ] So to convince people that this is not the case, I have been allowed
to associate with angels and to talk with people in hell for several years
now, sometimes constantly from morning until evening, and so to learn
about heaven and about hell. The purpose of all this is that church peo-
ple should remain no longer in their mistaken beliefs about a resurrection
on Judgment Day and about the state of their souls in the meanwhile, or
about angels and the Devil. Because this faith is a mistaken one, it brings
darkness with it; and for people who think about such things on the basis
of their own intellect, it leads to doubt and eventually to denial. They are
actually saying in their hearts, “How can such a vast heaven and so many
stars be destroyed and disappear, along with the sun and the moon? How