Baptists and Hell

Many Baptists are dismayed over a new book released this month by popular young preacher Rob Bell. Southern Baptist seminary presidents and theologians have condemned the book, as have other well-known Calvinist ministers. By denying that hell is a literal place of eternal torment, and daring to suggest that persons can be right with God without uttering the name of Jesus, Bell has been labeled a heretic by fundamentalist detractors who never appreciated his emergent church emphasis in the first place.

The rhetoric echoes that of the American antebellum and Civil War era, when biblical literalists insisted that slavery was biblical and that only liberals, heretics and infidels would deny God’s written will for the races.

Today, we know how that ended: when (in the minds of many white Baptists of the South) God’s southern Confederate kingdom lost the war and the evil North thwarted scriptural truth and God’s will for the races, biblical literalists quietly turned their attention elsewhere (namely, premillenial dispensationalism, biblical inerrancy, and an anti-science crusade).

Of course, the reality is that biblical literalists have always been selective in their application of literalism to scripture. Furthermore, if one presses even further back in Christian history, one discovers that biblical literalism became a popular method of scriptural interpretation only about five hundred years ago; prior to the Protestant Reformation, allegory was the dominant method of biblical interpretation.

Now, half a millennium into the era of biblical literalism and 150 years or so removed from the slavery fiasco, today’s (selective) literalists are taking their stand on the concept of a literal, eternal hell, labeling dissenters as heretics.

At first glance, drawing a line at the gates of hell may seem like a good defensive posture for fundamentalists. After all, the Bible repeatedly talks about “hell,” right?

Well, actually, no. To the contrary, the word “hell” is nowhere to be found in the ancient biblical texts, nor did the word exist in biblical times. “Hell” is an English term with eighth century Norse origins, and only began appearing in biblical translations around the sixteenth century (at about the same time that biblical literalism became popular, in fact). The English “hell,” some 500 years ago, was adopted and used in the place of four biblical words: sheol, hades, tartarus, and gehenna.

These four biblical words were used to describe: 1) the grave (the Hebrew word “sheol”); 2) the Greek underworld and the god of the underworld, Hades (“hades”) – early Christians used “hades” to translate the Hebrew “sheol”; 3) a yet deeper Greek mythological underworld and deity that existed beneath hades (“tartarus”); and 4) an earthly place where children were sacrificed by fire in a religious ritual and/or a continually burning garbage dump in the ground (“gehenna”).

Not until centuries after the penning of scripture did Christians begin to systematically develop a theology of the afterworld underground. St. Augustine in the fifth century claimed that no one knew where hades was, yet speculated it was beneath the earth’s surface. Even so, he primarily focused on hades as the state of being apart from God. In the sixth century, St. Gregory the Great expressed uncertainty, noting that some Christians believed hades was somewhere upon the earth, and others believed it was inside the earth.

Eventually, in medieval times a fully-developed concept of the netherworld of fiery torment emerged. Nonetheless, some Separatist and early Baptist writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries avoided using the word “hell” when referring to an afterlife apart from God, instead using the phrase “eternal condemnation” (or similar phraseology).

In short, that which is typically envisioned as “hell” by many Christians today owes more to Greek mythology and medieval authors (such as Dante) than the Bible itself.

Hence we come full circle to Rob Bell, one of many Christians over the past two or three centuries who have pointed out the fallacies of believing in a literal “hell” that is a netherworld of fire and brimstone in which the “unsaved” will be eternally punished. That many of today’s Southern Baptist theologians choose to place their faith in Greek mythological and medieval imagery is troubling. Rather than letting the Bible speak for itself, such rhetoric indicates a lack of biblical and historical knowledge on their part, or perhaps willful deception.

In an earlier era, hoisting slavery aloft as the mark of biblical orthodoxy proved disastrous for white Baptists of the American South. In the twenty-first century, loyalty to a Greek mythological and medieval-infused concept of a literal, eternal, brimstone and fire-laden “hell” signals that truth is optional, while leading modern Baptists further down the path of irrelevance.

Thus, while Baptists liberal to fundamentalist should examine the theological concept of “hell,” we must do so in a biblical and historical context. Otherwise, our debates have little theological substance and are detached from reality.