Then What About Hell?
One of our biggest roadblocks to this healthier understanding of the cross and
resurrection is the prevailing notion of God the Father as Punisher in Chief, an
angry deity who consigns sinners to eternal torment and torture instead of as
the one who is life itself. This idea originates in some misinterpreted Scriptures,
largely in the Gospel by Matthew, who likes to end with threats, and also from a
phrase in the Apostles’ Creed that says Jesus “descended into hell”—so surely
there must be one. (He went there to liberate it and undo it, like he did the
temple, but few people read it that way.) Many of us were taught a vision of
God as Tormentor when we were small, impressionable children, and it got
deposited in the lowest part of our brain stems, like all traumatic injuries do. So
it is hard to talk about hell calmly or intelligently with most people who have
been Christians from childhood.
The language of “descent into hell” emerges from two very obscure passages
in the New Testament. In 1 Peter 3, we read that Jesus “went and made a
proclamation to the spirits in prison,” and Ephesians 4 speaks of him descending
“into the lower regions.” In both cases, the descriptions bear less resemblance to
Dante’s punitive “Inferno” than they do the broadly used ancient terms for the
“place of the dead,” like Hades, Sheol, Gehenna, “prison,” “among the shades,”
or even some notion of Limbo.
But Dante’s version became the dominant one, forming our Western mindmore than any other—even those described in the Bible itself.*9 Depictions of
hell became staples in church art, embellishing the entrances of most Gothic
cathedrals, and even providing the full backdrop of the Sistine Chapel. When
the message of a punishing God is so visible, dualistic, and frightening, how do
you ever undo it, no matter how consoling your sermons and liturgies might be?
Even worse, the many Evangelical songs about the wrath of God, along with
“fire and brimstone” sermons, often did nothing but reinforce fear of God over
trust in or love of God.
If you are frightened into God, it is never the true God that you meet. If you
are loved into God, you meet a God worthy of both Jesus and Christ. How you
get there is where you arrive.
In the Anglican as well as Eastern Orthodox traditions, the descent narrative