What the Hell?, by a tired Kingdom Kid

Growing up a Kingdom Kid™, there are two Sunday services I remember more clearly than almost any others.

I was in grade 5, and the church was doing a series on heaven and hell. They started with hell. But before the preaching began, they made sure all the kids were sent off to their own classes. Because it was too scary. (Lol.)

The following week, they preached on heaven. And at the end of the service, everyone was invited to sign their names in a “Book of Life.” A fake one, obviously. I remember pictures of angels with halos and fluffy clouds. (Yikes. That’s a whole other blog.)

But the thing I remember most is what happened in between. Somewhere in that week, I stumbled across the Bible study notes on hell, a little brochure the adults had been given. It was red. It had pictures of fire on it. And I read the whole thing. Man, it was terrifying as hell. (See what I did there? Okay, I’ll see myself out.)

I was genuinely scared. For a long time. And that was the mild version. In the years since, I’ve seen hell used (not taught) in ways that make a red brochure look like a colouring book. Hell wasn’t something we learned about. It was something that was done to us.

It was just fear. And you learn so little about God from fear.

Hell, (we’re all gonna burn forever, just kidding), is one of those words that brings up a lot in people. For some of us, it was the threat that kept us in line as kids. For some of us, it’s the reason we’re still in church, and if we’re honest, the reason we’re scared to ask certain questions. For some of us, it’s the reason we left. And for some of us, it’s a fear that keeps us up at night because we lost someone, and we’ve been told they might be suffering forever at the hands of a God we were also told is loving.

So before we go anywhere, I want to say this clearly. I’m not here to tell you hell isn’t real. I think the Bible takes judgement very seriously, and so did Jesus. But I do think we’ve turned hell into something the Bible never meant it to be. And I think we’ve used it to do things Jesus explicitly warned against. So let’s start with what hell actually is (my take on it at least; after all, I’m just a bro).

When Jesus talks about hell, the word he uses most often is Gehenna. It’s a Hebrew name written in Greek letters: Ge-Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom. It’s not a mythical underworld. It’s an actual valley on the south-west side of Jerusalem. You can go and stand in it today. And it has a horrifying history.

About 600 years before Jesus, some of the kings of Judah, most infamously Manasseh, introduced the worship of a Canaanite god named Molech. And the worship of Molech involved child sacrifice. In the Valley of Hinnom, children were burned alive as offerings.

God’s response through the prophet Jeremiah is this: “They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind” (Jeremiah 7:31). Then, in Jeremiah 19, God says that the valley will be renamed the Valley of Slaughter. The leaders who lit those fires would one day fall there themselves.

So lets think for a bit. In that story, who lit the fires of Hinnom?

People did. People with a distorted view of God, of each other and of the world lit those fires and fed innocent people to them. And God’s judgement was to hand them over to the very fires they’d started. That’s hell. It’s God’s judgement and it’s a mess of our own making. Those two things were never separate.

When Jesus said “Gehenna,” that’s the story his listeners would have heard. Not a God-designed torture chamber underground. A real valley, where human evil had burned the innocent, and where God had promised that evil would not go unchecked.

(For the nerds, love you! You may have heard that Gehenna was Jerusalem’s burning rubbish dump. It’s a popular sermon illustration, but there’s no archaeological or ancient written evidence for it. It seems to go back to a rabbi writing around AD 1200. The real background is darker, and much more important.)

And yes, Jesus is using imagery here. But using metaphor doesn’t mean something isn’t real. If I say my wife’s (!) eyes shine like the sun (they do, by the way), that doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist (very glad she exists). It means the reality is so big that plain words won’t do it justice.

So if that’s the background, how did so many of us end up with a picture of hell as God’s personal torture chamber? Flames, screaming, and a God who keeps it running forever?

Honestly, a lot of it came later. Around AD 200, the church father Tertullian wrote about how much he was looking forward to Judgement Day, so he could watch the people who had persecuted Christians burning. He asks how he will “admire,” “laugh,” “rejoice” and “exult” at the sight of it. A thousand years later, Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians in church history, wrote that the saints in heaven would be allowed to see the sufferings of the damned “perfectly,” so that their own happiness would be “more delightful to them.”

Read that again. The joy of heaven, made sweeter by watching people suffer. Sound familiar?

And then there’s Dante’s Inferno, in the 1300s, with its nine circles of hell and its tailor-made punishments. Then the medieval painters, filling church walls with demons, pitchforks and people being roasted. So much of what we picture when we hear the word “hell” today comes from them, not from the Bible. (Quick one: the Bible never has Satan running hell. Jesus says the fire was “prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). He’s not the warden. He’s a prisoner.)

And then in 1741, the American preacher Jonathan Edwards preached what might be the most famous hell sermon of all time, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In it, he told his congregation: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you.” People reportedly cried out and clung to the pews. (Oh brother…)

I’m not saying all these people had nothing good to say. Many of them had a great deal to say. But somewhere along the way, the church took a picture of God that would horrify us in any other context, and called it the gospel.

Think about it this way. If a human father kept his child in a burning room, forever, with no chance of ever getting out, we wouldn’t call that justice. We’d probably call the police. And yet so many of us were taught to worship a God like that, and to call it love. No wonder people are confused. No wonder people are terrified. And no wonder some of them have walked away.

Go back to Jeremiah 7:31. The valley of Gehenna was the place where God condemned people for burning human beings. He said burning people alive was something that never even “entered his mind.”

And we took that valley, the very place where God said, “I would never,” and turned it into a picture of God doing exactly that.

So who did Jesus actually warn? If you go through the Gospel of Matthew and look at every time Jesus uses the word Gehenna, a pattern starts to show up. And it’s not the pattern I grew up with.

The first time is in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says that anyone who looks at their brother or sister and calls them “fool” is “in danger of the fire of hell” (Matthew 5:22). He’s not talking about pagans. He’s talking about contempt inside the community of God’s people.

Then in Matthew 18, Jesus warns that anyone who causes “one of these little ones” to stumble would be better off with a millstone around their neck. And he follows it up with the fire of hell (Matthew 18:6–9). Again, he’s talking to his disciples about what they do to each other.

And then there’s Matthew 23. This is where Jesus is at his most fierce, and he’s speaking to the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, the most respected religious leaders of his day.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are” (Matthew 23:15). (Oof.)

And a few verses later: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?” (v. 33). (Double oof.)

Jesus has another image for judgement besides fire. Being thrown “outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And look who he says it about the first time. Outsiders will come “from the east and the west” and sit down at the feast with Abraham, “but the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside” (Matthew 8:11–12). The insiders. The ones who assumed they were safe. Do you see the pattern? (Reading. So very important.)

Jesus barely uses hell as a warning to “sinners.” He doesn’t wave it at tax collectors and prostitutes. He eats with them. When he brings out the language of Gehenna, he almost always aims it at religious people. And the hottest version of it is aimed at religious leaders.

Now think about how hell is usually used in church…

It’s aimed at the kid in the service. At the teenager with questions. At the person thinking of leaving. At the outsider who needs to be scared into the altar call. It almost always flows down, from the people with religious power to the people without it.

Which is the exact opposite of what Jesus did. It would be easy to make this about a few bad preachers. But I don’t think it is. I think the fear of hell is something whole religious systems have learned to run on.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that fear works. In 2012, two psychologists, Azim Shariff and Mijke Rhemtulla, looked at data from dozens of countries and found that, on average, nations where more people believed in hell tended to have lower crime rates. Belief in heaven on its own didn’t have the same effect. It’s only a correlation, and it doesn’t tell us what’s true about God. But it tells us something about why institutions keep reaching for hell. It keeps people in line.

The church has known this for a long time. In the 1500s, the church was selling indulgences, pieces of paper that promised to shorten the punishment of your loved ones after death, if you paid. There was even a jingle attributed to one of the men selling them, Johann Tetzel: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Fear of what happens after death had become a revenue stream. And it was one of the abuses Martin Luther was protesting when he nailed his 95 theses to a church door in 1517 and kicked off the Reformation.

We like to think we’re past that. But are we? Fear still fills the offering basket. “Will a man rob God?” becomes a threat that if you don’t tithe, you’re under a curse.

Fear still protects leaders. If questioning the pastor is “rebellion,” and rebellion puts your soul in danger, then nobody asks questions.

Fear still keeps people from leaving. “If you leave this church, you’re leaving God’s covering.”

Fear still keeps people quiet. When someone has been hurt by a leader, and they’ve been taught that speaking against God’s servant is dangerous for their soul, how many of them do you think will ever speak up?

And fear still gets handed to kids. It looks like a brochure full of fire landing in the hands of a ten-year-old.

That’s what I mean by systemic. The system doesn’t need a villain. I don’t think whoever printed that red brochure was trying to traumatise anybody. They probably sincerely believed they were helping. But when fear is how a system keeps its numbers, its money, its loyalty and its leaders safe, the system doesn’t need anyone to be evil. It just needs everyone to stay scared.

Now look at Matthew 23:15 again. Jesus describes religious leaders who go to enormous lengths to win converts. And then those converts end up “twice as much a child of hell” as the leaders who recruited them.

Think about what that means. Something about the way they were bringing people in was making those people worse. More fearful. More controlled. More like the leaders’ own hypocrisy.

I think a lot of us know what that looks like. It looks like the altar call that ends with, “If you died tonight, do you know where you’d go?”, where people come forward because they’re terrified, not because they’ve met Jesus. It looks like the doubt that gets shut down with, “Be careful, you’ll lose your salvation.”

And in some places it goes much further. In the US, some churches have run “Hell Houses,” evangelical haunted houses where teenagers walk through staged scenes of people being dragged into hell, before being ushered into a room to pray the prayer. Most of us haven’t seen anything that extreme. But most of us have seen smaller versions.

There’s a term for what this can do to people. The psychologist Marlene Winell coined the phrase “religious trauma syndrome” to describe the harm some people carry from fear-based religion. It isn’t a formal diagnosis in the psychiatric manuals, but that doesn’t make the harm any less real, and anyone who’s sat with people who have left church knows exactly what she’s describing. And fear of hell is near the centre of it for a lot of people.

Here’s what I think Jesus is saying. When we use hell to control people, we’re not protecting them from it. By Jesus’s own words, we’re making it. We’re the ones lighting the fires again, and handing people over to them.

I don’t think this is just a bad strategy. I think it’s bad theology. John puts it simply: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18).

And Paul says it’s “God’s kindness” that is “intended to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). Not his threats. His kindness.

Fear can only get you to the front of the church. It can never make you love the God you’re running from. At best, it produces people who are trying to stay out of trouble. At worst, it produces people who are terrified of God, and who learn to pass that terror on.

The philosopher Dallas Willard had a phrase for the kind of faith this produces. He called it the “gospel of sin management.” When the whole point of the gospel becomes “how not to go to hell,” you end up with people who are insured but not transformed. People who have made sure they’re covered, but who have never actually become apprentices of Jesus.

That was me, for a while. I signed my name in a fake book. I knew I didn’t want to go to the place in the red brochure. But I couldn’t have told you much about what God was actually like.

So what is hell, then? Faithful Christians have disagreed about the details of hell for a long time. Some hold to the traditional view of eternal, conscious punishment. Others have leaned towards the view that the wicked are ultimately destroyed rather than tormented forever. Others hope that God will finally restore everyone. These are serious positions, held by serious people who love Jesus and the Bible (though that first one… I digress).

I’m not going to settle that debate in a Substack post (sincere apologies). But I will say this. If your church treats one view of hell as a loyalty test, where asking the question is itself a sign you’re in danger, that’s not faithfulness. That’s control again.

What I am confident about is what the Bible keeps coming back to. Hell is real. It isn’t a place God built to torture people for fun. It’s what happens when humans choose themselves over love, again and again, until that choice becomes who they are. C.S. Lewis put it memorably: “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

It starts now. Jesus speaks of hell as something already at work. In the contempt we show each other, in the little ones we cause to stumble, in the converts we make “twice the child of hell.” It’s a path we can be on long before the end of the story.

And God’s judgement is his promise that he won’t let that path destroy his good world forever. That’s not a threat. For everyone who has ever been burned by human evil, it’s actually good news. God’s mission is to get the hell out of his world, and to get the hell out of us.

That’s what the cross is. Jesus doesn’t stand at a distance. He walks into the darkness himself. He takes the full weight of human evil, every fire we’ve ever lit, into his own body. And three days later, he walks out of the grave, so that the hell in us and around us doesn’t get the last word.

So if you’re carrying the fear you picked up as a kid in church, I want you to hear this. The God Jesus shows us isn’t trying to scare you home. He’s the father running down the road. He’s the shepherd going out to look for you. He’s the one who said that people who use fear to recruit followers are the ones in danger. Hell is real. But it was never meant to be a leash.

And the ten-year-old me, reading that brochure in the dark, the person who’s “fallen away,” the person whose life is plagued by bad decisions, the rebel in the back of the church, and the 16-year-old girl whose shorts are “immodest,” all deserve to hear about a God they can love, and not just a God they’re afraid of.

May God get the hell out of us. Out of our churches. Out of our pulpits. Out of the way we treat each other. May the ones who stayed because they were scared, and the ones who left for the same reason, find out that God was never trying to scare them home. May those who were hurt by people using his name be healed. And may those of us who did the hurting, whether we meant to or not, have the courage to own it. May his perfect love drive out our fear. May his kindness, not our threats, lead us home.