New Testament scholar Dr. Esau McCaulley says the fire-and-darkness language of hell is imagery, not literal description, and that the deeper anchor is what he calls an eschatology of trust. But McCaulley is one voice in a wider conversation. Christians who take Scripture seriously land in at least three different places on what hell finally is, and the disagreement is not between people who believe the Bible and people who do not. It is between people reading the same texts and weighing them differently.
Here is the direct answer up front. Hell is real in every view Christians hold, and the debate is not whether God judges sin. The debate is about what that judgment finally looks like. The options are eternal conscious torment, the traditional view; annihilation, in which the final punishment is death rather than endless suffering; and some form of ultimate reconciliation, in which judgment itself becomes the road back to God. McCaulley’s contribution is not to settle that debate but to ask a harder question underneath it: can you trust the character of God revealed at the cross even when the specifics are beyond you?
Why Does the Bible Describe Hell Two Different Ways?
Start with the problem McCaulley raises first. The Bible calls hell a lake of fire in one passage and outer darkness in another. Both cannot be literal descriptions of the same place at the same time. Fire produces light; darkness, by definition, does not. McCaulley reads that tension as a signal, not a contradiction to paper over.
“I don’t believe that people are set on fire for eternity. The language of outer darkness and the language of fire are images in the Bible to depict a reality you want to avoid.”
— Dr. Esau McCaulley
He points out that most historic church confessions do not commit to a literal lake of fire, and no church has ever produced a definitive list of who ends up there. Much of the mental picture most people carry, McCaulley argues, owes more to Dante’s Inferno than to the biblical text. That matters, because if your objection to hell is actually an objection to a medieval poem, you have not yet engaged what Scripture says.
The obvious objection here is fair: if the language is imagery, does that mean hell is not real, just a metaphor for nothing in particular? McCaulley’s answer is no. The images point at something. He is doing what serious readers of Revelation do throughout the book: taking apocalyptic language seriously without taking it word-for-word literally. The Lamb with seven horns (Revelation 5:6) is not a barnyard animal either, and nobody thinks that weakens what it tells us about Christ’s authority.
Is the Debate Really About Whether Hell Exists?
No, and this is where the wider conversation matters. Dr. Preston Sprinkle, who served as general editor of a multi-views book on hell, frames it precisely: the disagreement among serious Christian scholars is about the nature of hell, not whether it exists.
— Dr. Preston Sprinkle
Sprinkle lays out three live options:
- Eternal conscious torment. The traditional view, held by most theologians for at least fifteen hundred years. It is built on texts like Matthew 25:46, where the same Greek word describes both eternal punishment and eternal life.
- Annihilation, or conditional immortality. This view holds that the final punishment is death itself. It leans on more than a hundred biblical passages that use the language of destruction rather than ongoing torment.
- Ultimate reconciliation. This view points to a scriptural pattern of restoration after judgment.
Sprinkle himself does not hold the third view, and he says plainly where he has landed:
— Dr. Preston Sprinkle
What is notable is what Sprinkle refuses to do. He does not call the people he disagrees with heretics, and he is clear that nobody serious is reasoning backward from what they wish were true. “Nobody’s just saying, well, I don’t like the idea of eternal torment, so I’m gonna believe this,” he says. Each camp is doing real exegesis. The honest task, in his words, is to “go [where] the text leads,” even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable.
If Hell Is About Free Will, Does That Let God Off the Hook?
McCaulley’s own framing leans toward a version that puts weight on human choice rather than on a courtroom sentence handed down arbitrarily. Rather than picturing God hurling people into flames against their will, he frames hell as God honoring a person’s settled decision to reject him. Drawing on Pope Benedict, he offers an angle that sounds almost backward at first.
“Benedict said your yes to God is always compromised by a thousand half beliefs, but it’s actually harder to say no to God than you might expect, because the God people reject often isn’t the God who actually exists.”
— Dr. Esau McCaulley
In other words, the God most people reject is a caricature: a cosmic bully, an arbitrary judge, a distant landlord. Rejecting that God is, in a strange sense, not the same as rejecting the God who actually exists. McCaulley pairs this with C.S. Lewis’s image of hell as a diminishing rather than a torture chamber. To keep rejecting the God who made you is to slowly lose what makes you human.
“The weeping and gnashing of teeth is the slow loss of our humanity rooted in our rejection of God. It sounds soft, but what if hell is human regret at our final rejection of God?”
— Dr. Esau McCaulley
He admits to a small version of this in his own life: knowing he was wrong, knowing the way back was right there and walking further away anyway. Extend that trajectory forever, and you have one historic Christian description of separation from God.
The objection writes itself, though: does free will really survive an eternity of consequence? Sprinkle’s annihilationist camp would say the weight of that question is exactly why they read the destruction language as final death rather than endless ongoing rejection. The two views are not so much opposites as different answers to how seriously to take the same moral intuition, that infinite punishment for finite sin sits uneasily with a God whose character is love.
What Does the Doctrine of the Trinity Have to Do With Hell?
It might seem like a detour, but apologist Abdu Murray’s work on the Trinity clarifies what is at stake when Christians argue about judgment. Murray distinguishes between what God is, his nature, and who God is, his personhood. The point that matters here is that the triune God has loved within himself from eternity, before creation ever existed.
“God doesn’t lack relationship, he defines it.”
— Abdu Murray
Why does that matter for hell? Because every view of judgment, whether conscious torment, annihilation or reconciliation, has to answer to the same character: a God who did not need to create anyone to satisfy his own loneliness, and who went to the cross as one divine person paying a real price for another. Murray’s point that the Trinity makes the cross a real payment, not a symbolic gesture, is the same ground McCaulley stands on when he anchors his trust in what happened there rather than in speculation about who is in and who is out.
— Abdu Murray
So Where Does the Weight Land?
Three serious, Bible-believing positions exist, and this article will not pretend to resolve fifteen hundred years of careful argument in a few paragraphs. What can be said plainly is that every view affirms that hell is real and a place to avoid, every view affirms that God’s judgment is just, and every view wrestles with the same hard texts rather than dodging them. Where Christians can reasonably disagree, in good faith, is on the shape and duration of that judgment.
McCaulley’s deepest answer is not a diagram of the afterlife. It is a posture. He trusts the character of God revealed at the cross to handle judgment justly, rather than spending his energy trying to draw the lines himself.
“There are a million scenarios I can’t answer, but based on the cross, I trust God with that decision. A lot of our anxiety about judgment is that we want to be the ones who make the list.”
— Dr. Esau McCaulley
Quick Answers
Does Esau McCaulley believe hell exists? Yes. He affirms the reality of hell and the possibility of eternal loss. What he questions is a literal picture of people burning in fire forever; he reads the fire and darkness language as imagery for something real.
What are the three Christian views of hell? Eternal conscious torment, the traditional and most widely held view; annihilation, or conditional immortality, in which the final punishment is death; and ultimate reconciliation, in which judgment leads to eventual restoration. Serious scholars hold each one from the biblical text.
Is the debate about whether hell is real? No. Dr. Preston Sprinkle is clear that the disagreement is about the nature of hell, not its existence. Every camp affirms that judgment is real and something to be taken seriously.
How can a loving God send people to hell? One framing centers on free will: God can respect a person’s settled rejection of him, which becomes, in C.S. Lewis’s language, a slow loss of one’s own humanity. Other views frame the question differently, but all are anchored in the same conviction that God’s character, revealed at the cross, can be trusted.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Dr. Esau McCaulley’s answer comes from the Jude 3 Project’s Problematic Passages event at the Museum of the Bible, where scholars take on the hardest questions in Scripture. Dr. Preston Sprinkle’s fuller treatment is in the Jude 3 Project podcast episode “Let’s Talk About Hell,” hosted by Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or on the Jude 3 Project YouTube channel.
Dr. Esau McCaulley is an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and pastor of All Saints Anglican Church in Naperville. He is the author of Reading While Black and How Far to the Promised Land.