This guide asks what Scripture actually teaches about hell, and how a person can hold that teaching without flinching from it or using it as a weapon. Its main tool is one exercise: take the picture of hell you already carry, set it beside the biblical text, and see where they match and where they part. You can work through it alone in one or two sittings, or with a group over a single long session. Bring a Bible and something to write on.
The history of whether enslavers invented this doctrine is a separate question with its own answer. Here the subject is closer to home. Most of us absorbed an image of hell from sermons, films, cartoons, a frightened relative or a threat someone once made. We rarely check that image against the passages it claims to come from. Dr. Kenneth Reid, who teaches systematic and historical theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, notes in his conversation with Lisa Fields that “people will try to dismiss it, ignore it, or even redefine it in different ways.” He also says plainly that “it is not a topic that anyone would get any joy out of though.” Both observations matter for this study. Reading the text honestly means neither erasing it nor enjoying it.
Start with the picture you already have
Before opening a Bible, write down the image that comes to mind when you hear the word hell. Be specific. Where is it? Who is in charge there? Is it happening now or later? Who goes there, and why? Then write next to each detail where you think it came from. If you are honest, some answers will be “a movie,” “my grandmother’s warning” or “I don’t know.”
Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end. In a group, invite people to share one detail and its source if they wish, but do not require anyone to share. For some people this picture is tied to fear they carried as children, or to adults who used it to control them.
Read what the Old Testament does and does not say
Begin where the Bible begins on this subject, with how little it says at first. Reid observes that in the Old Testament the concept of hell is underdeveloped. Sheol, as he describes it, is basically the place of the dead, where both the righteous and the wicked go. There are hints of something more, and two passages carry most of the weight.
Read Isaiah 66:22-24 slowly. The KJV ends the book this way: “And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh” (Isaiah 66:24).
Notice the setting before the imagery. Verse 22 speaks of new heavens and a new earth, and verse 23 of all flesh coming to worship. This is a prophetic vision of the future, written in poetry. The fire and worm sit at the edge of a scene about restored worship. Reid is restrained here. He says, “I don’t think we should be so quick to say that they are talking about hell” in the fully developed form found in the New Testament. What the passage does show, in his reading, is a future separation of the righteous and the wicked, with fire attached to judgment. He adds that “fire is a symbol that is used in the Old Testament as well for judgment.”
Now read Daniel 12:1-3. Verse 2 reads: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). Again, observe what is there. A resurrection. Two outcomes. The words “everlasting” on both sides. Observe also what is missing: no description of a place, no mechanism, no torturers.
Observation prompt: Compare these two passages with the picture you wrote down. Which of your details appear in them? Which ones did you supply yourself?
Read Jesus in his own contexts
Reid argues that Jesus is most responsible for the church’s teaching on hell, and that a reader cannot keep his gentle words and discard his warnings. In his phrase, “You have to take the whole Jesus.” The exegetical habit that matters most here is simple: read each warning inside the paragraph around it, and ask who is hearing it.
Matthew 5:21-26
Jesus says that whoever calls his brother a fool “shall be in danger of hell fire” (Matthew 5:22). Read the verses that follow. The next instruction is to leave your gift at the altar and go be reconciled to your brother. The warning is spoken to people who think of themselves as religious, about how they treat one another. It aims at the listener’s own heart, and it pushes immediately toward repair.
Matthew 25:31-46
Read the whole scene. The nations are judged by what they did for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner. The passage closes: “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46). The KJV uses two English words, “everlasting” and “eternal,” but they translate one Greek adjective, and many modern translations use “eternal” in both places. Reid sees a symmetry here: if the righteous go to an eternal destiny, the wicked do too. Notice also who is surprised in this story. Both groups are. Those condemned had apparently assumed they were safe.
Luke 16:19-31
A rich man feasts daily while a poor man named Lazarus lies at his gate. After death their positions reverse. Look back at Luke 16:14 to see the audience: Pharisees who loved money and mocked Jesus’s teaching about it. Some readers set this story aside because it is a parable. Reid argues that its picture of torment is consistent with Jesus’s other teaching, so it should not be dismissed so quickly. Even readers who press the parable’s details less hard can see its target. The warning lands on the comfortable man who ignored suffering at his own door.
Observation prompt: In each of these three passages, write one line: Who is Jesus warning? What behavior is in view? Then ask whether any of the three hands one group a threat to use against another.
That last question is the heart of this guide. In these texts, Jesus’s warnings point at the hearer, very often at the powerful and the self-assured. Reid says Jesus “uses it as a motivating factor in order to get things right with God right now” so that people may avoid the judgment. A warning designed to turn the hearer around is a different thing from a threat designed to keep someone else in line. Lisa Fields acknowledges that “some people manipulate the scriptures for their own gain,” and that enslavers did push the doctrine to further oppress. Reading the passages in context shows why that use was a distortion. It took words Jesus aimed at the comfortable and turned them on the people at the gate.
Check the timing and the images
Many inherited pictures place hell in the present, already burning, perhaps run by the devil. Read Revelation 20:11-15. Verse 14 says: “And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death” (Revelation 20:14). This is apocalyptic writing, which uses symbolic imagery, so read it with that genre in mind. Fields draws out one implication: “it seems to suggest that hell right now is not on fire” in the sense people often imagine. Reid agrees that “I would agree in this formal sense, hell is eschatological,” meaning it belongs to the final judgment. He also holds that the wicked experience some torment after death before that judgment, so the question of what happens in between is not empty.
Then consider how to weigh fire, worms and darkness. Reid says that “while the images may be metaphorical, there is a real principle under there that those who do not know Christ are headed for a destiny away from God.” That sentence gives the reader a useful discipline. You can ask what an image means without using its symbolic character to dissolve the warning it carries.
Where faithful readers differ
Christians who affirm the authority of Scripture do not all read these texts the same way. Reid outlines three views. Eternal conscious torment holds that the wicked suffer consciously without end. Terminal punishment, or annihilationism, holds that the final death of the wicked means they cease to exist. Universalism holds that all people will eventually be reconciled to Christ. Reid himself holds the first and argues it is the most consistent reading across Jesus, Paul, Hebrews and Revelation. Conscious eternal judgment has been the historic majority view of the church. Faithful Christians still differ on the specifics, and this guide does not ask you to settle them.
Reid is also candid about where some popular arguments get their support. On the claim that sin against an infinite God deserves infinite punishment, he says that “this is a theological answer, it’s not spelled out in scripture,” though he thinks it has some grounding. Knowing which parts of your view come from a text and which come from reasoning about a text is part of reading honestly.
A practice: restate before you respond
Take Matthew 25:46 and Daniel 12:2. For each of the three views, write two or three sentences explaining how a thoughtful holder of that view reads those verses. Write it so that someone who holds the view would say you described it fairly. Then write one sentence on which reading you find most persuasive and what evidence would change your mind. In a group, assign each view to a different person, have them present it, and let the group test whether the restatement is fair before anyone argues against it. Facilitators should keep each view attached to its actual reasoning and resist the pull toward declaring a winner for the room.
Test your picture of God
For many people the real fear is not about a place. It is about God: that he is eager to punish, or that judgment proves he is cruel. Read Ezekiel 18:23: “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” The verse is a question with an obvious answer, and it comes within a chapter calling Israel to turn and live.
Reid addresses the worry from God’s character. He asks whether it would be loving to approve of sin or let wrongdoing go unpunished, and answers, “I think it’s more loving for God to deal with sin.” He adds that Jesus implies degrees of judgment: “So everybody does not get the same punishment,” and those with more knowledge face a stricter account. He also says that “hell highlights the overwhelming grace of God” because God sent his Son to bear the punishment so people may be safe from it. Paul says something close to this in Galatians 3:13: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.”
Fields adds a point about justice. She works in civil rights efforts and observes that “if you don’t believe in a judgment to come, then you kind of put all the burden on justice now.” For her, the wrongs done to her ancestors that no court will ever reach are not beyond God’s sight, and that hope is part of what keeps her working for justice in the present.
A word for facilitators: some people in your group may have lost someone who died without professing faith. Others may have lived for years with intense fear of hell that has not lifted. Do not press them to resolve anything aloud. If someone’s fear has become constant or overwhelming, encourage them to talk with a trusted pastor, and with a counselor as well. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- Looking back at the picture you drew at the start, which detail turned out to have the least support in the passages you read? Where do you think it came from?
- In Matthew 5, Matthew 25 and Luke 16, the warnings land on the hearer. How does reading them that way change what the doctrine asks of you?
- When have you seen hell used to control people? Using the passages in this guide, describe precisely what that use changed about the texts.
- Reid treats the images as possibly metaphorical but the reality as firm. What is the difference between interpreting an image and explaining it away?
- Which of the three views was hardest for you to restate fairly, and why?
- Does the hope of final judgment make you more passive about injustice now, or more active? What would change if it did the other?
Return to your page
Take out the picture you wrote at the start. Cross out every detail you could not find in the texts you read. Circle the details you did find. Then, beneath it, write a new description of hell using only what the passages actually say, keeping open the places where faithful readers differ. Compare the two versions. The question worth carrying from here is not only which view of hell is correct. It is whose hands the warning is in when you speak it, and whether you are hearing it first yourself.