Christians were teaching final, unending judgment in the second century, and several of the doctrine’s strongest early defenders were African. White slaveholders therefore did not invent hell to keep enslaved Africans afraid and obedient. They inherited a doctrine that was already ancient, and some of them misused it. Misusing a teaching is a different act from inventing it, and the accusation works only if those two acts are treated as one.
The charge still deserves a careful look. It is not built from nothing. It draws on something that happened, and the argument hides a step that most people never examine.
What does the charge actually claim?
Lisa Fields put the strongest form of the objection to Dr. Kenneth Reid directly. Some argue that the early church had no real concept of hell, that the idea grew up later, and that it was constructed to keep people, especially Africans, oppressed. Taken seriously, the argument has three steps.
- Enslavers preached hell to enslaved people to produce obedience.
- The doctrine served the interests of the powerful.
- So the doctrine was created for that purpose, or at least has no older Christian basis.
The first step is largely conceded by the people answering it. Fields says plainly that “Europeans that had Africans did push on that narrative to further oppress. So there is truth in that in a sense.” She adds that “some people manipulate the scriptures for their own gain.” Nobody in the conversation pretends the plantation pulpit was innocent.
The trouble sits between the second and third steps. To get from “this served the powerful” to “the powerful made this,” you need a premise that usually goes unspoken: a belief that benefits oppressors must have come from oppressors. Once that premise is stated aloud, it is easy to test.
The plainest test case comes from the same history. Enslavers also quoted the Bible’s commands about obedience, and those texts were written many centuries before any American plantation existed. Their misuse shows what the enslavers wanted. It does not move the date the texts were written. Fields raises a parallel elsewhere in the conversation, though for a different purpose: African Americans have received longer sentences for minor crimes, and people are advocating for a justice system that is fair. The comparison holds only in its structure, but the structure is the point. No one concludes that the idea of justice was invented to oppress Black people because a justice system has been applied unjustly. The complaint actually depends on a standard of fairness the system failed to meet. In each case, abuse tells us about the abuser. Origin is a question of history, and it has to be answered with history.
What does the early record show?
Reid answers with that history. In his account, the view of hell as conscious and unending “was in the early church just about from its inception.” He begins with what early Christians called the rule of faith, a summary of belief the whole church received before formal creeds were written. Reid describes the Apostles’ Creed as its shortened form.
He then points to two places where early writers spell that rule out. Irenaeus, whom Reid identifies as a second-century theologian, describes the rule in Against Heresies, book three, chapter four. There, Christ is the judge who sends into eternal fire those who distort the truth and despise the Father. Tertullian, writing in the third century, gives the last part of the rule in his Prescription Against Heretics, chapter thirteen, as the condemnation of the wicked to everlasting fire. Reid draws the conclusion: “we see that the rule of faith is already including hell as a part of normal Christian theology.”
He continues the line through the creed traditionally attached to Athanasius’s name. Reid dates its writing somewhere between the fifth and seventh centuries, and it says that those who have done evil will go into eternal fire. Then comes Augustine, who in The City of God argues for the eternal punishment of the wicked and answers objections that still circulate. Fields observes that several of the figures in this chain were Africans. Tertullian and Augustine both came from North Africa. On the question of who built the church’s teaching on judgment, the record points toward Africa and the ancient Mediterranean, not toward the plantations of the Americas.
The doctrine is also older than any of these writers. Reid argues that Jesus himself is the main source of the church’s teaching on hell. He cites Matthew 5 and Matthew 18, where Jesus warns of hell fire, and he gives special weight to the judgment scene in Matthew 25:31-46. That passage ends this way: “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46). Augustine’s argument, as Reid summarizes it, rests on the symmetry of that sentence. If the life is endless, the punishment set beside it is endless too. The KJV renders the same Greek adjective two ways in this verse, “everlasting” and “eternal,” which makes the parallel harder to see in English than it is in the original.
Reid is careful at the edges, and that care makes his case more credible. He grants that the Hebrew Scriptures say little about what happens after death. He also cautions against reading Isaiah 66:24, with its undying worm and unquenched fire, as a description of hell in the fully developed form the New Testament gives it. He treats it, along with Daniel 12:2, as a hint of future judgment that separates the righteous from the wicked: “some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). Whatever one concludes about those hints, the second-century evidence is enough to settle the narrow question. A doctrine Christians were already teaching then cannot have been invented by slaveholders of the modern era.
Where did the “control device” reading come from?
Reid’s account contains a further point that is easy to miss. When Fields asks how thinking about hell changed during the Enlightenment, he says that a rejection of authority, of biblical revelation and of the church meant that “the doctrine of hell became mythologized.” Hell came to be treated “as just myth or perhaps a way to encourage people to behave rightly.”
That second phrase deserves attention. The claim that hell is really a mechanism for managing behavior is not a neutral, outside observation about Christianity. On Reid’s telling, it is itself a product of a particular intellectual movement. When Fields asks whether the dismantling of hell was a white or German construct, Reid agrees that “we can make that implication,” because it was “the German theological approach that brought about the skepticism at first,” which then spread through Europe. He says that emphasis did not appear in the same way elsewhere in the world.
If Reid is right, the accusation contains an irony. Someone who rejects hell as a tool of European control may be using a lens that was ground in Europe.
Two limits apply here. First, Reid gives a theologian’s summary of the Enlightenment. He does not name particular thinkers or documents, so a reader who wants to verify the claim would need sources beyond this conversation. Second, Reid refuses to make the story too tidy. He notes that some Europeans who did not grant Africans full humanity still affirmed that hell exists. Belief in hell does not sort cleanly by race, and neither does disbelief. His larger observation is that “the system of Orthodox Christianity came up in a multicultural format.” The doctrine belongs to that shared inheritance.
The strongest objection: origin is not the whole story
A careful skeptic can grant everything above and still press. Fine, the doctrine is old. But a teaching that so easily serves masters is suspect for that reason alone. Perhaps its function matters more than its birth date.
This objection is better than the original charge, and it needs a real answer. Part of the answer is that the argument cuts both ways. An ancient origin shows that slaveholders did not invent hell. It does not show that hell is real. Whether the doctrine is true depends on how Scripture is read, and Reid treats it as an exegetical question for exactly that reason. He calls hell uncomfortable and frightening, yet insists “it is a part of biblical revelation.”
The other part of the answer concerns function. Does the doctrine, read on its own terms, actually serve masters? Consider the passage Reid leans on most. In Matthew 25, the nations are judged by how they treated the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner. A slaveholder who preached that text honestly would be preaching against himself. The doctrine served oppression only when its content was edited down to a threat aimed one way.
Reid adds a second point that works against the “control device” reading. Jesus, he says, implies that “there are degrees of punishment. So everybody does not get the same punishment.” Those with more knowledge face greater judgment. A doctrine that holds the informed and the powerful to a stricter account is a poor tool for protecting the informed and the powerful.
Does final judgment suppress justice or ground it?
The charge assumes that hell pacifies the oppressed. Fields argues the reverse. She works in justice efforts, including on the executive committee of her city’s NAACP. She points out that “if you don’t believe in a judgment to come, then you kind of put all the burden on justice now.”
Think through what that burden involves. Human justice has limited reach. Fields notes there is not enough manpower, the systems are not set up to favor Black people, and generations have passed. Courts cannot summon the dead. If there is no final judgment, then everyone who committed atrocities against her ancestors and died unpunished has escaped accountability for good. Fields calls that a discouraging factor, and she draws the conclusion: “if I don’t have hope in the justice to come, I really won’t be able to fight for the justice here.” Her hope is stated simply: “There has to be some kind of hope that God will make all things right.”
Reid makes the same point from the side of God’s character. One common objection holds that a loving God could not send anyone to hell. He answers that question with another: “If he approves of sin, or if he lets wrongdoing go unpunished, I’m not sure that is a loving thing.” He goes on: “I think it’s more loving for God to deal with sin.” He also locates love in the rescue. God, he says, sent his Son to bear the punishment so that people may be safe from it.
The usual worry is that belief in future judgment breeds passivity, a habit of leaving everything to God. The logic does not require that. Final judgment makes present wrongs no less wrong. It confirms that they are real wrongs, wrongs that will be answered. Fields describes holding both at once: she fights for justice now, and she says hope in the justice to come is part of what makes that fight possible for her.
What does this argument leave unsettled?
Showing that slaveholders did not invent hell does not settle what hell is. Reid sets out the main views held by Christians who affirm Scripture’s authority. Eternal conscious torment says the wicked suffer consciously without end. The annihilationist view, also called terminal punishment, says the final death of the wicked is extinction. Universalism says all people will eventually be reconciled to Christ. Reid holds the first view and argues that it is the most consistent reading across Jesus, Paul, Hebrews and Revelation. Historically it has been the majority Christian position. Faithful Christians still differ, and the historical argument here does not depend on choosing among those views. Both conscious torment and annihilation affirm a real final judgment, which is all that Fields’s justice argument requires.
Reid also distinguishes the images from what they point to. Even if hell’s language is metaphorical, he says, “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.”
He is candid about the limits of some familiar arguments. The idea that a sin against an infinite God deserves infinite punishment is, in his words, “a theological answer, it’s not spelled out in scripture.” He thinks it has some grounding, and he admits that by human standards alone he does not see how the scales balance. He rests his confidence on trust in God’s justice and in Scripture. A reader may find that persuasive or not. It is an honest account of where the argument’s support actually lies.
The invention charge, then, fails, and the harder questions survive it: what hell is, whether it is fair, and how to speak of it without cruelty. Those questions should be argued from the text. They cannot be dismissed by pointing to the people who abused it.